The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

by James Burnham

At his request, Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip, came to Italy. On November 1, 1301, he entered Florence in great state, still nominally as arbitrator and pacifier. He quickly arranged a purge of the Bianchi. There was issued, on January 27, 1302, a decree of fines and two years’ banishment against Dante and a number of his colleagues. When this was disregarded, a sterner decree was published on March 10th, calling for the death by burning of Dante and fourteen others if they should fall into the hands of the Republic. They were forced thus into exile.

Since the Pope’s success against the Hohenstaufen, however, the Empire, under the guidance for the first time of the cautious and remarkable Hapsburg family, had curbed its ambitions and stayed at home. But the new star of the House of Luxemburg was rising. To it the embittered Ghibellines of Tuscany chained their hopes. In 1308, Henry of Luxemburg was elected Emperor as Henry VII. Dante, in a series of bombastic public letters, called upon his Roman sword to smite the wicked of the Church and the cities, and restore Italy to its imperial grandeur.

In those days, by an odd conjuncture, the Papacy with the Guelph faction was supporting the most progressive developments in society. It was the newly rising class of burghers in the cities that was just beginning to break the now withering hand of feudalism. The burghers were expanding trade and industry—already the splendid woolens finished in Florence, and the gold-pieces (“florins,” they

were called) which its citizens had resolved to protect against the hitherto universal practice of debasement, were becoming known throughout the western world. The merchants were reopening among men links of social communication that involved more of life than war and pillage. Nor was it merely trade and industry that were advancing: the new riches were being transformed into an art that was perhaps the most magnificent the world has known (Giotto himself was Dante’s contemporary), and were stimulating a renewed interest in the endless possibilities of a more truly human knowledge. Naturally, the great nobles looked with alarm. They and

their ways could have little place in this new world. The economic position of the nobles rested on the land, on an agriculture carried out by serfs and villeins tied to the soil. The burghers wanted men to work in the shops. The cities subordinated the countryside to themselves, exploiting it ruthlessly, it is true, to supply cheap food and raw materials. The nobles were trained only for war—war conducted as the personal combat of knights—and political intrigue. The burghers wanted less war, because it interfered with commercial prosperity; and,...

instead of by personal ...

1. There is a sharp divorce between what I have called the formal meaning, the formal aims and arguments, and the real meaning, the real aims and argument (if there is, as there is usually not, any real argument). 2. The formal aims and goals are for the most part or altogether either supernatural or metaphysical-transcendental—in both cases meaningless from the point of view of real actions in the real world of space and time and history; or, if they have some empirical meaning, are

impossible to achieve under the actual conditions of social life. In all three cases, the dependence of the whole structure of reasoning upon such goals makes it impossible for the writer (or speaker) to give a true descriptive account of the way men actually behave. A systematic distortion of the truth takes place. And, obviously, it cannot be shown how the goals might be reached, since, being unreal, they cannot be reached. 3. From a purely logical point of view, the arguments offered for the formal aims and goals may be valid or fallacious; but, except by accident, they are necessarily irrelevant to real political problems, since they are designed

to prove the ostensible points of the formal structure—points of religion or metaphysics, or the abstract desirability of some utopian ideal. 4. The formal meaning serves as an indirect expression of the real meaning—that is, of the concrete meaning of the political treatise taken in its real context, in its relation to the actualities of the social and historical situation in which it functions. But at the same time that it expresses, it also disguises the real meaning. We think we are debating universal peace, salvation, a unified world...

own citizens or submitted to the exploitation of a reactionary foreign monarch. We think, with the delegates at the Council of Nicea, that the discussion is concerned with the definition of God’s essence, when the real problem is whether the Mediterranean world is to be politically centralized under Rome, or divided. We believe we are disputing the merits of a balanced budget and a sound currency when the real conflict is deciding what group shall regulate the distribution of the currency. We imagine we are argu...

5. From this it follows that the real meaning, the real goal and aims, are left irresponsible. In Dante’s case the aims were also vicious and reactionary. This need not be the case, but, when this method is used, they are always irresponsible. Even if the real aims are such as to contribute to human welfare, no proof or evidence for this is offered. Proof and evidence, so far as they are present at all, remain at the formal level. The real aims are accepted, even if right, for the wrong reasons. The high-minded words of the formal meaning serve only to arouse passion and prejudice and sentimentality in favor of the disguised real aims.

This method, whose intellectual consequence is merely to

confuse and hide, can teach us nothing of the truth, can in no way help us to solve the problems of our political life. In the hands of the powerful and their spokesmen, however, used by demagogues or hypocrites or simply the self-deluded, this method is well designed, and the best, to deceive us, and to lead us by easy routes to the sacrifice of our own interests and dignity in the service of the mighty.

If an inquiry is to remain scientific, but nevertheless pursue other goals than those that are peculiar to science, there are certain requirements which the additional goals must meet. In the first place, they must be

non-transcendental—that is, they must be something formulated in terms of the actual world of space and time and history. Second, they must have at least a minimum probability of realization.

All of these goals are located in the actual world, they are all sufficiently specific to permit us to know what we are talking about (and, what is not unimportant, to tell whether or not they

are reached), and all would have at least a certain minimum chance of being achieved.

There is a further strict requirement by which science limits the function of goals or aims. The goals themselves

are not evidence; they cannot be allowed to distort facts or the correlations among facts. The goals express our wishes, hopes, or fears. They therefore prove nothing about the facts of the world.

In short, though our practical goals may dictate the direction that scientific activity takes, though they show us what we are trying to accomplish by the scientific investigation, what problem we are trying to solve; nevertheless, the logic of the scientific inquiry itself is not controlled by the practical aims but by science’s own aims, by the effort to describe facts and to correlate them.

Until the 15th century, the attempts of the kings to consolidate a firm governmental authority always met a strong and on the whole successful resistance from the lords. Moreover, the primitive economy, the lack of manufacture for the market, of money-exchange, of extensive foreign trade, of easy transportation and communication, meant the absence of a socio-economic basis for lasting large-scale political units. In the first stages of the breakup of feudalism, those who were aiming toward the national political system, which was later to win out, were working at

a disadvantage. They were ahead of their times, trying to erect too weighty a structure on an unfinished foundation.

The

state power of the cities, and their armed forces, were not now strong enough to police transportation routes, guard the sea lanes, put down brigandage and the vagaries of barons who did not realize that their world was ending. Uniform systems of taxation and stable, standardized money for large areas were now required. For all such tasks only the modern nation-state could adequately provide.

Machiavelli concluded that Italy could be unified only through a Prince, who would take the initiative in consolidating the country into a nation. Those who think sentimentally rather than scientifically about politics are sure to misunderstand this conclusion. Machiavelli did not reach it because he preferred a monarchy or absolutist government—we shall see later what his own preferences were. He reached it because he found that it was dictated by the evidence.

Almost all commentators on Machiavelli say that his principal innovation, and the essence of his method, was to “divorce politics from ethics.” Thereby he broke sharply with the Aristotelian tradition which had dominated medieval political thought. His method, they grant, freed politics to become more scientific and objective in its study of human behavior; but it was most dangerous because, through it, politics was released from “control” by ethical conceptions of what is right and good. We have already seen enough to realize that this opinion is confused. Machiavelli divorced politics from ethics only in

the same sense that every science must divorce itself from ethics. Scientific descriptions and theories must be based upon the facts, the evidence, not upon the supposed demands of some ethical system. If this is what is meant by the statement that Machiavelli divorced politics from ethics, if the statement sums up his refusal to pervert and distort political science by doctoring its results in order to bring them into line with “moral principles”—his own or any others—then the charge is certainly true.

Machiavelli divorced politics from a certain kind of ethics—namely, from a transcendental, otherworldly, and, it may be added, very rotten ethics. But he did so in order to bring politics and ethics more closely into line, and to locate both of them firmly in the real world of space and time and history, which is the only world about which we can know anything.

In Machiavelli, as in Leonardo and Copernicus, the nature of scientific method is not fully understood; many pre-scientific notions, held over from medieval and ancient metaphysics and theology, are

retained.

Almost all writers on historical subjects, Machiavelli among them, tended to accept Greek and Roman authors much more literally than we would, nowadays. There was a readier trust of picturesque dramatic episodes than our colder sense of fact permits us.

Positively, then, in the first place, we find that Machiavelli uses language in a cognitive, scientific manner. That is, except where he is frankly urging his readers to action, he uses words not in order to express his emotions or attitudes, but in such a way that their meaning can be tested, can be understood in terms of the real world. We always know what he is talking about. This, a requirement for all scientific discourse, is in political and social discussion an achievement of the very first rank.

Machiavelli understood politics as primarily the study of the struggles for power among men. By so marking its field, we are assured that there is being discussed something that exists, not something spun out of an idealist’s dreams, or

nightmares.

Third, Machiavelli assembles, and with some measure of system, a large number of facts: facts drawn from his reading in the historical works available to him, from what others, prominent in the politics of his own day, have told him, and from what he has himself observed during his own active political career.

Fourth, Machiavelli is always attempting to correlate sets of facts into generalizations or laws. He is interested not alone or primarily in the individual, unique political event, but in laws relating events.

He is always wondering whether something recorded in Livy or Thucydides, or observed in his own time, is an exception, a unique, peculiar action; or whether it may not be understood as an instance of a general pattern of political behavior.

For Government is nothing but keeping subjects in such a posture as that they may have no will, or power to offend you.

Finally, though this is not strictly part of the logic of scientific method, we feel everywhere in Machiavelli, in every line and chapter, an intense and dominant passion for the truth. Whatever other interests and goals he may have, to this all the rest are, if need be, subordinated. No prejudice, no weighty tradition, no authority, no emotional twist is enough to lead him to temper his inquiry into the truth, so far as he can discover it.

Formal meaning and real meaning are one. There is no hidden meaning, no undisclosed purpose. This is why, where Machiavelli is wrong, it is easy to correct him; and why he cannot deceive us.

1. Political life, according to Machiavelli, is never static, but in continual change. There is no way of avoiding this change. Any idea of a perfect state, or even of a reasonably good state, much short of perfection, that could last indefinitely, is an illusion.

2. The recurring pattern of change expresses the more or less permanent core of human nature as it functions politically. The instability of all governments and political forms follows in part from the limitless human appetite for power.

Fortune is all those causes of historical change that are beyond the deliberate, rational control of men.

He does not altogether exclude from history the influence of deliberate human control, but he reduces it to a strictly limited range.

This conception of Fortune fits in closely with the idea, which we have already noted, that the ruler-type of political man is one who knows how to accommodate to the times. Fortune cannot be overcome, but advantage may be taken of her.

Beyond such accommodation (“opportunism,” we might nowadays call it), men and states will make the most of fortune when they display virtù, when they are firm, bold, quick in decision, not irresolute, cowardly, and timid.

4. Machiavelli believes that religion is essential to the well-being of a state. In discussing religion, as in discussing human nature, Machiavelli confines himself to political function. He is not engaged in theological dispute, nor inquiring whether religion, or some particular religion, is

true or false, but trying to estimate the role that religious belief and ritual perform in politics. He is analyzing, we might say in a general sense, “myth,” and myth he finds to be politically indispensable.

Machiavelli thinks that the best kind of government is a republic, what he called a “commonwealth.” Not only does he prefer a republican government; other things being equal, he considers a republic stronger, more enduring, wiser and more flexible than any form of monarchy.

For any given group of people, “liberty,” as Machiavelli uses the