Professor Steven Smith:
Because it's a makeup class,
we'll do something a little
special.
We're going to show a clip from
a movie that I think is
particularly appropriate.
As we get into it,
I'll tell you why.
It's about a five-minute
segment from the film called
The Third Man.
Has anyone ever seen it?
Okay, maybe more than I thought.
Just to set up the scene,
for those of you have seen it
and more for those of you who
haven't,
this is a film that was made in
1948 called The Third Man
from a Graham Greene short
story.
It takes place in post World
War II Vienna.
And the clip we're going to see
is the most famous part of the
movie.
It takes place of a
conversation between two old
friends.
One of them,
played by Orson Welles,
is in a black market racket in
Vienna and is making a living
doing something very bad in the
black market.
In this scene,
he's trying to convince an old
school friend of his,
played by Joseph Cotten,
to join this thing.
I should say the Orson Welles
character has also faked his
death, so no one except his
immediate conspirators knows
he's still alive.
I should have said that.
He's faked his death and here
he has a scene with his old
school friend,
played by Joseph Cotten,
and he's trying to convince him
to come into his black market
racket.
So here comes The Third
Man.
Good scene.
It's good because I think it
conveys something of the flavor
of Machiavelli's thought in
Italy for 30 years under the
Borgias.
This is Machiavelli's time.
Blood shed and murder and
Leonardo da Vinci and the Renais
sance.
Under Switzerland for 500
years, peace and democracy.
What did it produce?
The cuckoo clock.
I'm going to talk about that in
a moment.
I want to begin by talking
about who was Machiavelli.
How do we read The
Prince?
Machiavelli was a Florentine.
To know that is to know
virtually everything you need to
know about him.
I'm exaggerating but I do so to
make a point.
Florence was a republic.
It was a city-state.
And Machiavelli spent a good
deal of his adult life in the
service of the republic.
Living in Florence,
the center of the Renaissance
at the height of the Renais
sance,
Machiavelli wished to do for
politics what his
contemporaries,
like Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo,
had done for art and sculpture.
In other words,
he hoped to revive in some way
the spirit of the ancients of
antiquity, but to modify it in
the lights of his own
experience.
As he puts it in the dedication
of his most famous book,
he writes that this book The
Prince "is a product of long
experience with modern things
and a continuous reading of the
ancient ones."
In Machiavelli,
we have what we have come to
call "modernity," given its
first and most powerful expres
sion.
But Machiavelli was not an
ordinary Florentine.
He grew up under the rule of
the Medici.
That is to say,
the first family of Florence,
and lived to see them deposed
by a Dominican friar by the name
of Savonarola.
Savonarola attempted to impose
a kind of theocracy in Florence,
a sort of Christian republic of
virtue.
But the Florentines,
being what they were,
rejected this idea and the rule
of Savonarola was short-lived.
In its place,
a republic was re-established
where Machiavelli occupied the
office of secretary to the
second chancery,
a kind of diplomatic post which
he held for 14 years from 1498
to 1512.
After the fall of the republic
and the return of the Medici to
princely rule there,
Machiavelli was exiled from the
city, from politics to a small
estate that he owned on the out
skirts of the city.
You can visit it today.
It was here,
from a place of political
exile, that he wrote his major
works--The Prince,
 the Discourses on
Livy, and The Art of
War. It was from here,
also, that he wrote voluminous
letters to friends seeking
knowledge about politics.
Machiavelli was a kind of
political junkie,
you could say,
in things happening in Italy
and else where.
In one of these letters,
a famous letter to his friend,
a man named Francesco Vettori,
he describes how he came to
write his most famous book.
I want to read a passage from
that letter.
It is also, I should say,
on the basis of this letter,
which is why I ask people from
time to time to remove their
caps in the class room,
from the House of Study.
This is the way Machiavelli
approached study.
"When evening comes,"--he
writes, "When evening comes,
I return to my house and go to
my study.
At the door,
I take off my clothes of the
day covered with muck and dirt
and I put on my regal and
courtly garments.
And decently reclothed,
I enter the ancient courts of
ancient men, where received by
them lovingly,
I feed on the food that alone
is mine and that I was born for.
There I am not ashamed to speak
with them and to ask them the
reasons for their actions and
they, in their humanity,
reply to me.
And for the space of four hours
every night, I feel no boredom.
I forget every pain.
I do not fear poverty and death
does not frighten me.
I deliver myself entirely unto
them.
And because Dante says that to
have understood without
retention does not make
knowledge,
I have noted what capital I
have made from their
conversations and have composed
a little work on principalities,
where I delve as deeply as I
can into reflections on this
subject, debating what a
principality is,
of what kinds they are,
how they are acquired,
how they are maintained,
and why they are lost.
So there, Machiavelli gives us
a sense of the seriousness with
which he approached his subject,
how he studied,
and what it was he came to
write.
Let me just say from the
beginning, The Prince is
a deceptive book.
What else would we expect from
the name of a man that has
become synonymous with
deception?
It is a work,
The Prince,
that everybody has heard of,
perhaps has some preconception
about.
I was checking the web
yesterday and I found a new book
about Machiavelli,
which none of these every fail
to surprise me.
This one is called The Suit:
a Machiavellian Guide to Men's
Fashion. Check it out.
Who knows?
Machiavelli's name is
everywhere.
It is applied to everything,
from corporate executives now
to men's fashion.
Everybody knows or thinks they
know what his work is about.
His name, again,
is synonymous with deception,
treachery, cunning,
deceit.
Just look at the cover of your
book.
Look at his face.
Look at his smile,
really more of a smirk.
He seems to be saying,
"I know something you don't
know."
The difficulty with reading
Machiavelli today is that we all
think we already know what he
knows and that is false.
Machiavelli was a revolutionary.
In the preface to his largest
book, the Discourses on
Livy, he compares himself to
Christopher Columbus for his
discovery of what he calls "new
modes and orders."
What Columbus had done for
geography, Machiavelli claims he
will do for politics.
That is to say,
discover an entirely new
continent, a new world,
so to speak,
the new world of Machiavelli.
Machiavelli's new world,
his new modes and orders,
will require,
clearly, a displacement of the
earlier one, of the previous
one.
And Machiavelli wrote,
of course, the dominant form of
political organization was the
empire or, to speak more
precisely, the Christian empire.
The Holy Roman Empire,
as it was known in the time of
Machiavelli, was the successor
to the ancient Roman state,
the older Roman Empire.
Both of these empires had
aspired to a kind of
universality.
And this universality was given
expression in Dante's famous
treatise, De Monarchia,
of monarchy,
that set out a model for a
universal Christian state,
based on the unity and oneness
of the human race under a
Christian ruler.
Machiavelli rejected this idea
of the empire and harked back,
instead, to the model of
republican Rome.
And there is much in his
writing that recalls the sort of
extraordinary virtues and
capacities of the citizens of
the ancient republican
city-state.
But you might say just as
Machiavelli broke with the
dominant model of Christian
universalism,
so too did he reject the
ancient model of the small,
autonomous republican state.
He makes this clear in a famous
passage at the beginning of
chapter 15 of The Prince.
And I just want to read that
passage, as well.
Here, Machiavelli says,
"I depart from the orders of
others.
I depart from their modes," he
says.
"But since it is my intent to
write something useful to
whoever understands it,
it has appeared to me more
fitting to go directly to the
effectual truth of things than
to the imagination of it.
And many have imagined," --one
thinks here of Plato,
perhaps, but also to
Christianity--"Many have
imagined republics and
principalities that have never
been seen or known to exist in
truth.
For it is far from how one
lives to how one should live.
That he who lets go of what is
done for what should be done
learns his ruin rather than his
preservation."
In other words,
no Platonic cities in speech.
No Augustinian cities of God.
We will only look,
he says, to the effectual truth
of things.
The effectual truth of the
matter, not the imagination of
it or the utopia of it.
That passage is often taken to
be, the beginning of chapter 15,
the essence of Machiavelli and
realism, a kind of
Realpolitik,
as it were.
His appeal from the "ought" to
the "is," to take one's bearings
again, from the effectual truth
of things.
This seems to be,
in many ways,
the essence of his teaching.
To be sure, Machiavelli focuses
on key aspects of political
reality which are often ignored
by thinkers like Plato and
Aristotle.
Murders, conspiracies,
coup d'état,
these are the kinds of
political phenomena he is
interested.
He seems to be more interested
in the evils that human beings
do than the goods to which they
aspire.
You might even say that
Machiavelli takes delight in
demonstrating,
much to our chagrin,
the space between our lofty
intentions and the actual
consequences of our deeds.
Yet, it would seem to me there
is more to Machiavelli than the
term "realism" connotes,
although that is certainly
important.
In this passage,
Machiavelli announces his
break, indeed his repudiation of
all those who have come before,
all those who have come before.
He both replaces and yet
reconfigures according to his
own lights, elements from both
the Christian empire and the
Roman republic,
to create a new form of
political organization
distinctly his own.
What we might call today the
modern state.
Machiavelli is the founder,
the discoverer,
the inventor of the modern
state.
This modern,
secular, sovereign state was
refined and developed in the
decades and centuries after
Machiavelli in the writing of
Hobbes,
of Locke, of Rousseau,
to say nothing of contemporary
twentieth-century writers from
both the right and the left--Max
Weber,
Karl Schmidt,
to a man, an Italian
philosopher named Antonio
Gramsci, who was the author of a
book interestingly called The
Modern Prince,
based on Machiavelli himself.
Machiavelli's state itself has
universalist ambitions,
in many ways,
much like its Christian and
Roman predecessors.
But this is a state,
he believes,
that has now been liberated or
emancipated from Christian and
classical conceptions of virtue.
The management of affairs is
left to those people who he
calls princes,
which in the Machiavellian
usage designates a new kind of
political founder or leader
endowed with a new species of
ambition,
love of glory,
and elements of prophetic
authority that we might call
charisma.
But just what was the nature of
the revolution contemplated by
our founder, Machiavelli,
the founder of modern political
science?
Consider, just for a moment,
the title and dedication of the
book.
The Prince appears,
on its surface,
to be a most conventional work.
It presents itself in the long
tradition of what has come to be
called the mirror of princes.
Books that give a kind of guide
to the dos and don'ts of
princely behavior.
Fair enough.
It seems to go back a long,
long time.
And the appearance of
conventionality is supported by
the opening words of the book in
his dedicatory letter.
The first words or first line
out of his mouth or the first
lines are "it is customary," he
says.
It is a work intended to
ingratiate himself to Lorenzo de
Medici, the man to whom the work
is dedicated,
a customary prince,
a traditional prince who has
just regained his power.
But look again.
Consider the structure of the
first three chapters.
"All states,
all dominions that have held
and do hold empire over man are
either republics or
principalities,"
he says in the opening sentence
of chapter 1.
Having distinguished two,
and only two,
kinds of regimes,
republics and principalities,
as the only ones worth
mentioning, he goes on to
distinguish two kinds of
principalities.
There are hereditary
principalities,
like those currently run by
Lorenzo, which acquire their
authority through tradition and
hereditary bloodlines.
Then he says there are new
princes and new principalities.
Machiavelli then asserts that
his book will deal only with
principalities,
leaving,
he says, the discussion of
republics for elsewhere,
what one assumes his
Discourses of Livy,
which he was already writing by
this time.
But then Machiavelli goes on to
tell the reader that the
exclusive subject of this book
will be the new prince.
In other words,
not Lorenzo at all,
but precisely princes who have
or will achieve their authority
through their own guile,
their own force,
or their own virtù,
to use the famous Machiavellian
term that I want to talk about
later.
The true, in other words,
recipient of this book must be
necessarily the potential
prince.
That is to say,
someone with sufficient
political audacity to create
their own authority,
who has not simply received it
from the past,
but to create their own
authority.
Maybe one could even say
Machiavelli's prince is,
in a way, the first truly
self-made man.
So what, then,
is the character of this new
prince and how does he differ
from more conventional modes of
political authority?
In one of the most famous
chapters of the book,
chapter 6, entitled,
"Of New Principalities that are
Acquired Through One's Own Arms
and Virtue,"
there is that word again,
virtù,
one's own arms and virtue,
Machiavelli discusses the
character of the modern prince,
the new prince.
"A prudent man," he writes,
"should always enter upon the
paths beaten by great men and
imitate those who have been most
excellent,
so that if his own virtue does
not reach that far,
it at least is in the odor of
it."
We at least come within,
you might say,
sniffing distance of their
greatness.
"One should do," he says,
"what archers do when
attempting to reach a distant
target,
namely, aim your bow high,
knowing that the force of
gravity will bring the arrow
down."
In other words,
set your sights high,
knowing you will probably fall
short.
"So who are the greatest
examples," he says,
"of princely rule that the
prudent man"--interesting choice
of words,
"the prudent man"--"should
imitate?"
And here, Machiavelli gives a
list of those heroic founders of
peoples and states--Moses,
Cyrus, Romulus,
Theseus, and so on.
"As one examines their actions
and lives," he writes,
"one does not see that they had
anything else from fortune than
the opportunity which gave them
the matter enabling them to
introduce any form they please.
Notice in that sentence,
he uses those Aristotelian
terms, "form" and "matter" that
we spoke about in relation to
the Aristotelian regime.
"They had nothing else from
fortune," he says,
again, "than the opportunity,"
the occasion,
that "gave them the matter
enabling them to introduce any
form they please."
In short, Machiavelli claims
these were founders who created,
in a way, ex nihilo,
out of nothing.
They only had the occasion in a
kind of formless matter upon
which they could adopt and
impose any form they took.
And they had,
of course, the strength of
mind, as well as the audacity
and cunning, to take advantage
of this situation.
Such opportunities,
he writes, such occasions,
made these men successful.
And their excellent virtue
enabled the opportunity to be
recognized.
Hence, their fatherlands were
ennobled by it and they became
prosperous.
They took advantage of their
opportunity, seized their
opportunity and imposed their
own form upon it.
And it is here that Machiavelli
introduces his famous
distinction between armed and
unarmed prophets.
"All the armed prophets," he
says, "conquered and the unarmed
were ruined."
This seems to be and is,
clearly, a kind of classic
statement of sheer Machiavellian
power politics.
"All politics grows out of the
barrel of a gun," as a famous
twentieth-century Machiavellian
once put it.
The armed prophets conquer,
the unarmed lose.
But there seems to be more to
it than this.
Machiavelli compares the prince
to a prophet.
Why does he use that language?
What is a prophet?
The most obvious answer is a
person to whom God speaks.
Machiavelli's armed prophets
may not be religious figures and
they are not necessarily
recipients of divine knowledge,
but they seem to be,
at least on his account,
people of exceptional personal
qualities that allow them to
bring laws,
to be law bringers,
lawgivers, shapers of
institutions and also reformers
of opinions that govern our
lives.
Machiavelli's armed prophet is
more than just a gangster,
like Orson Welles in that part.
He is a teacher and a kind of
educator as well.
You might even think in your
class, in your sections,
how or in what ways does
Machiavelli's armed prophet
differ in important ways both
from Plato's philosopher king,
as well as Aristotle's notion
of the megalopsychos as
the sort of magnanimous
statesman.
Although this kind of talk
about "armed prophets always
win" is characteristic of
Machiavelli, he likes this kind
of tough talk.
He clearly recognizes that
there are clear exceptions to
his rule about armed prophets.
Who comes to mind most vividly?
Who, in other words,
is not present in Machiavelli's
list of great prophets that one
should imitate?
Student: Jesus.
Professor Steven Smith:
Yes.
Most obvious,
perhaps, certainly to his
contemporaries,
Jesus, who triumphed through
words and teaching alone.
He had no troops.
He had no arms.
He established a religion,
first a sect,
you might say,
then a religion,
then eventually an empire,
the Holy Roman Empire,
that was established in the
name of that teaching.
Words may well be a powerful
weapon, as powerful as a gun.
Then you might say,
"What is Machiavelli himself?"
Who is Machiavelli but an
archetypal, unarmed prophet?
He has no troops.
He has no territory.
He controls no real estate.
He's been banished,
yet he is clearly attempting to
conquer, comparing himself to
Columbus,
to conquer in large part
through the transformation of
our understanding of good and
evil,
of virtue and vice.
In other words,
to make people obey you,
you must first make them
believe you.
Machiavelli's prophetic prince,
in other words,
must have some of the qualities
of a philosopher,
as well as a religious reformer
trying to reshape and remold
human opinion,
especially opinion over,
as we said, good and evil,
just and unjust.
What does this reformation,
so to speak,
or transformation consist of?
We might even call this
Machiavelli in the garden of
good and evil,
midnight in the garden of good
and evil for Machiavelli.
One point often attributed
about Machiavelli is that he
introduced a new kind of
immoralism into politics.
In that famous chapter,
chapter 15, he says he sets out
to teach the prince how not to
be good.
A striking formulation.
He will teach the prince how
not to be good.
And in perhaps the most
important book on Machiavelli
ever written,
the author of that book
declared Machiavelli to be a
teacher of evil.
You might want to think about
that.
A teacher of evil.
Is that what Machiavelli was?
Questions of good and bad,
virtue and vice,
appear on virtually every page
of The Prince.
He is not simply a teacher of
political pragmatism,
of how to adjust means to fit
the ends.
He seems to be offering nothing
short of a comprehensive
revolution, transformation.
If you want to use the
Nietzschean language,
"transvaluation" of our most
basic vocabulary about good and
evil.
Machiavelli doesn't reject the
idea of the good.
Rather, he redefines it.
He is continually speaking,
and in fact I would suggest on
virtually every page of the
book, he is continually speaking
the language of virtue.
His word "virtù," which a word
that retains the Latin word for
the word "man,"
vir, wir,
man, and virtù,
a word that is perhaps best
translated or,
by our word, "manliness."
What distinguishes
Machiavelli's use of this
language of virtù,
manliness,
is that he seeks to locate it
in certain extreme situations,
such as political foundings,
changes of regimes,
wars, both of domestic and
foreign kinds.
What distinguishes Machiavelli
from his predecessors,
in many ways,
is his attempt to take the
extraordinary situation,
the extreme situation,
again, the extremes of
political founding,
conspiracies,
wars, coups,
as the normal situation and
then makes morality fit that
extreme.
His examples are typically
drawn from situations of human
beings or polities in extremes
where the very survival or
independence of a society is at
stake.
In those situations,
you might say,
and only in those situations,
is it permissible to violate
the precepts of ordinary
morality.
In those situations one must
learn, as he says,
how not to be good,
to have to violate the
conventions and cannons of
ordinary morality.
Machiavelli takes his bearings
from these extreme states of
emergency and in his own way,
seeks to normalize them,
to present them as the normal
condition of politics.
Machiavelli's preference for
these extreme situations
expresses his belief that only
in moments of great crisis,
where the very existence of a
state is at risk,
does human nature truly reveal
itself.
We finally or fully understand
what people are only in the most
extreme situations.
The paradox that,
you might say,
runs throughout all of
Machiavelli's morality is that
the very possibility of virtue
grows out of and,
in fact, is even dependent upon
the context of chaos,
violence, and disorder that
always threatens the political
world.
Think of it.
Think of many of our great
political models or heroes.
What would the Duke of
Marlborough have been without
Louis XIV?
What would Washington have been
without George III?
What would Lincoln have been
without the slave interest?
What would Churchill have been
without Hitler?
In other words,
his point is that good is only
possible because of the prior
existence of bad.
Good is founded upon evil.
And even the greatest goods,
the founding and preservation
of cities, often require murder.
What was Romulus' murder of
Remus or Cain's murder of Abel,
but the kind of murder that
founded,
at the basis of the founding of
cities and civilizations?
One thinks, in a way,
of Welles' line in The Third
Man when he looks down from
above and says,
"If I gave you 20,000 pounds
for every dot that stopped
moving, would you really tell me
to keep my money?"
It requires,
for Machiavelli,
the founding of regimes
requires that kind of cold and
cruel calculation.
Of course, it's being used in
the movie just to support a
criminal enterprise,
not the founding of a city.
We might investigate that as
well.
But Machiavelli does not deny
that in ordinary terms,
in what we might call times of
normal politics,
the ordinary rules of justice
prevail.
He also shows,
however, that normal politics
is, itself, dependent upon
extraordinary politics,
periods of crisis,
anarchy, instability,
revolution, where the normal
rules of the game are suspended.
It is in these times,
you might say,
when individuals of
extraordinary virtue and
capacity,
prophetic qualities,
as he calls it in chapter 6,
are most likely to emerge.
While the Aristotelian
statesmen, just to make a
contrast for a moment,
is most likely to value
stability and the means
necessary to achieving it,
the Machiavellian prince seeks
war, because it is only,
again, in the most extreme
situations that one can prosper
and be prosperous.
Think about the lines again
from the movie.
"For 30 years under the
Borgias, violence,
murder, terror,
bloodshed.
But what did it produce?
Greatness of an unprecedented
type.
Stability, democracy,
brotherly love,
peace.
What does that produce?
Mediocrity, the cuckoo clock."
There might be a little more of
Nietzsche suggested in that,
than Machiavelli,
but I think the Machiavellian
overtones are very evident.
Consider just the following.
Every child,
every one of you,
every one of us was brought up
to know that one must never do
wrong, even if good consequences
are seen to follow.
It is never right to give bad
examples to others,
even if one expects good to
come from it.
Yet, Machiavelli breaks these
rules about not giving bad
examples.
Virtue is not associated with
the classical conceptions of
moderation, of justice,
of self-control over the
Christian virtues of faith,
hope, and charity.
Virtue means for him a kind of
manly self-assertion,
audacity, ruthlessness,
a reliance on one's own arms
and calculated use of cruelty to
achieve one's ends.
The model of Machiavellian
virtù is the Renaissance
statesman, in general,
Cesare Borgia.
It's very interesting that
Orson Welles made a movie,
not so often seen today,
about Cesare Borgia.
I want to leave you with
reading one passage from The
Prince, chapter 7,
in which Machiavelli
illustrates the kind of
virtù Cesare represented
and that he wants to recommend
for those who follow him.
"Once the duke," that's Cesare
himself--"Once the duke had
taken over the Romana,"
an area outside of Florence,
"he found it had been commanded
by impotent lords who had been
readier to despoil their
subjects than to correct them
and had given their subjects
matter for disunion,
not union.
So Cesare put there," he says
"Messer Ramiro d'Orco,
a cruel and ready man to whom
he gave the fullest power."
So Cesare set up as a
lieutenant of his to impose
order on this area and to whom
he delegated the fullest
responsibility.
"In short time," he goes on,
"Ramiro reduced it to peace and
unity with the very greatest
reputation for himself.
Then the duke judged that such
excessive authority was not
necessary, because he feared it
might become hateful and he set
up a sort of a civil court in
the middle of the province with
the most excellent president
where each city had its
advocate.
And because he knew that the
past rigors had generated some
hatred for Ramiro,
to purge the spirits of that
people and to gain them entirely
to himself, he wishes to show
that if any cruelty had been
committed,
this had not come from him,
from Cesare,
but from the harsh nature of
his minister.
And having seized this
opportunity," that language,
seized the occasion,
seized this opportunity,
"he had emplaced one morning in
the piazza in two pieces,
with a piece of wood and a
bloody knife beside him.
He had him cut in two.
The bloody knife and piece of
wood beside him.
"The ferocity of this
spectacle," Machiavelli
concludes, "left the people at
once satisfied and stupefied."
That, of course,
is Machiavelli's virtù,
princely virtue,
what you do to leave the people
satisfied and stupefied.
What we might call today shock
and awe.
Okay, next week we'll continue
this learned man.
 
