Coming now, at last, to the
composition that has earned Machiavelli his popular image of the unscrupulous
cynic, Il Principe does indeed raise the brows of the
euphemistically-fed double-speaking public by its raw shocking
straightforwardness, its audacity in telling the way it is.
Which great politician of
modernity has not learned from this passage in Chapter XVIII of Il
Principe, and has not profited from it in acquiring his greatness?---
"But
it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well and to be a great
feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so ready to obey the present
necessities, that the one who deceives will always find those who allow
themselves to be deceived… Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men… but
no man was ever more able to give assurances, or affirmed things with stronger
oaths, and no man observed them less; but he always succeeded in his deceptions
as he knew well this aspect of things. It is not necessary to have all these [virtues], but it is very necessary for a prince
to seem to have them."
And also in Chapter XVIII---
"As a
prince must be able to act just like a beast, he should learn from the fox and
the lion; because the lion does not defend himself against traps and the fox
does not defend himself against wolves. So one has to be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion
to frighten off wolves."
But teaching politicians how to
be statesmen by feigning and dissimulating like a fox and crushing wolves like
a lion is by no means all that Il Principe teaches. Here again is a
summary by Bertrand Russell:
He
begins by placing eminent men in an ethical hierarchy. The best, he says, are
the founders of religions; (the
underlining here and elsewhere is mine: observe his use of plural, which must
have been anathema to the Church of his time, which postulated the singular of
her true religion and the sacrilege of all others; it was a courageous feat on
Machiavelli’s part to talk well of all religions with which I am in full
agreement) then come the founders of monarchies
or republics; and then, literary men. These are good, but destroyers of religions,
subverters of republics or kingdoms, and enemies of virtue (!) or of letters (! --but where does this place Plato, who, as we know, was an
enemy of the belles lettres, from Homer on to his contemporaries?) are bad. Those who establish tyrannies are wicked,
including Julius Caesar; on the other hand, Brutus was good. (The contrast
between this view and Dante’s shows the effects of classical literature.) He
holds that religion should have a prominent place in the State not on the
ground of its truth but as a social cement; (on
this point of my strong agreement with Machiavelli see my closing comment
below) the Romans were right to pretend to
believe in auguries (in the nineteenth century,
Gaston Boissier, writing a whole book on Roman religion, notes the insincere,
often frivolous and openly manipulative attitude of the Romans to the religious
beliefs of their times, in which implicit irreverence they strikingly differed
from the Greeks, but, at the same time, they were nevertheless explicitly
strict about religious observances, for the reasons noted by Machiavelli), and to punish those who disregarded them. His criticisms
of the Church in his day (oh yes, there is a
place for this too, in the Il Principe!)
are two: that by its evil conduct it has undermined religious belief, and that
the temporal power of the Popes, with the policy which it inspires, prevents
the unification of Italy. These criticisms are expressed with a great vigor:
“The
nearer the people are to the Church of Rome, which is the head of our religion,
the less religious they are. (Compare this
with Nietzsche’s religious geography for an interesting discussion.
Perhaps, I should try to elaborate on this at a later time, which is, of
course, a note to myself.)
Her
ruin and chastisement is near at hand... We Italians owe to the Church of Rome,
and to her priests, our having become irreligious and bad; but we owe her a
still greater debt, and the one that shall be the cause of our ruin, namely,
that the Church has kept, and is still keeping, our country divided. (This remained true until 1870.)
Machiavelli’s view of the
necessity of religions (once again, take notice of the magnificent use
of plural!), roughly coincides with mine, expressed in numerous entries
scattered in various pertinent sections, which (along with several other
things, pointed out earlier in this entry) makes him, in my personal opinion,
one of the most interesting and noteworthy political philosophers who ever
lived.
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