The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

by James Burnham

Mosca believes that the stratification of society into rulers and ruled is universal and permanent, a general form of political life. As such it would be absurd to call it good or bad; it is simply the way things are.

Mosca rejects the many theories which have tried to apply the Darwinian theory of evolution directly to social life. He finds, however, a social tendency that is indirectly analogous to the process of biological evolution:

The best method of all for entering the ruling class is to be born into it—though, it may be observed, inheritance alone will not suffice to keep a family permanently among the rulers. Like Machiavelli here also, Mosca attributes not a little to “fortune.” “A certain amount of work is almost always necessary to achieve success—work that corresponds to a real and actual service to society. But work always has to be reinforced to a certain extent by ‘ability,’ that is to say, by the art of winning recognition. And of course a little of what is commonly called ‘luck’ will not come amiss—those unforeseeable circumstances which help or seriously harm a man, especially at certain moments. One might add that in all places at all times the best luck, or the worst, is often to be born the child of one’s father and one’s mother.”

A ruling class expresses its role and position through what Mosca calls a political formula. This formula rationalizes and justifies its rule and the structure of the society over which it rules. The formula may be a “racial myth,” as in Germany under a Nazi regime or in this country in relation to the Negroes or the yellow races: rule is then explained as the natural prerogative of the superior race.

“And yet that does not mean that political formulas are mere quackeries aptly invented to trick the masses into obedience. Anyone who viewed them in that light would fall into grave error. The truth is that they answer a real need in man’s social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of a moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and real importance.” (P. 71.)

In any form of political organization, authority is either transmitted from above downward in the political or social scale [the autocratic principle], or from below upward [the liberal principle].” (P. 394.) Neither principle violates the general law that society is divided into a ruling minority and a majority that is ruled; the liberal principle does not mean, no matter how extended, that the masses in fact rule, but simply gives a particular form to the selection of leadership.

In the United States, as in most representative governments of the modern kind, both principles are actively at work. The greater part of the bureaucracy and much of the judiciary, especially the Federal judiciary, is an expression of the autocratic principle; the President himself, as well as the members of Congress, are selected according to the liberal mode.

Autocracy, moreover, seems to endow societies over which it operates with greater stability and longer life than does the liberal principle. When autocracy is functioning well, it can bring about the deliberate selection of the ablest leadership from all strata of society to perform the various tasks of the state. However, in compensation, autocracy seems unable to permit a free and full development of all social activities and forces—no

Mosca, like Machiavelli, does not stop with the descriptive analysis of political life. He states plainly his own preferences, his opinions about what types of government are best, what worst. Naturally, as is the case with all Machiavellians, his goal is not anything supernatural or utopian; to be the best, a government must be first of all possible. He does no dreaming about a “perfect state” or “absolute justice.”

Burke remarked more than a century ago that any political system that assumes the existence of superhuman or heroic virtues can result only in vice and corruption.”

It will further be noted that our view is contrary to the doctrine of Rousseau, that man is good by nature but that society makes him wicked and perverse. We believe that social organization provides for the reciprocal restraint of human individuals by one another and so makes them better, not by destroying their wicked instincts, but by accustoming them to controlling their wicked instincts.”

The mere formal structure of laws and constitutions, or of institutional arrangements, cannot guarantee juridical defense. Constitutions and laws, as we certainly should know by now, need have no relation to what happens—Hitler never repealed the Weimar Constitution, and Stalin ordered the adoption of “the most democratic constitution in the history of the world.”

From one point of view, the protective balance must be established between the autocratic and liberal principles, and between the aristocratic and democratic tendencies. Monopoly by the aristocratic tendency produces a closed and inflexible caste system, and fossilization; the extreme of democracy brings an unbridled anarchy under which the whole social order flies to pieces.

The idealists, utopians, and demagogues always tell us that justice and the good society will be achieved by the absolute triumph of their doctrine and their side. The facts show us that the absolute triumph of any side and any doctrine whatsoever can only mean tyranny.

Nevertheless, Mosca does not expect utopia or absolute justice. Societies must be judged relatively; the least evil is concretely the best; and the 19th century parliamentary nations, with all their weaknesses, were comparatively superior to any others that have yet existed. In their governmental structures, the autocratic principle, functioning through the bureaucracy, balanced the liberal principle, expressed in the parliaments.

To the extent that he rejects science, Sorel is certainly outside the Machiavellian tradition.

However, Sorel’s repudiation of scientific method is largely appearance. In reality, he attacks not science, but academic pseudo-science, which he calls the “little science,”

Moreover, Sorel shares fully what I have called the “anti-formalism” of the Machiavellians, their refusal to take at face value the words and beliefs and ideals of men.

Sorel spoke for the dissident revolutionary syndicalist wing of the labor movement. The syndicalists were opposed both to the state—not only to the existing state but to all states and governments—and to all political parties, including the professedly labor parties. They advocated the economic “self-organization” of the workers, in revolutionary syndicates (that is, unions),

Sorel insists that the entire revolutionary program must be expressed integrally as a single catastrophic myth: the myth, he maintains, of the “general strike.” The myth of the general strike is formulated in absolute terms: the entire body of workers, of proletarians, ceases work; society is divided into two irrevocably marked camps—the strikers on one side, and all the rest of society on the other; all production wholly ceases; the entire structure of the existing society, and all its institutions, collapse; the workers march back to begin production again, no longer as proletarians, but as free and un-ruled producers; a completely new era of history begins.

It is not the specific myth of the general strike, as treated by Sorel, that particularly concerns us, but rather the more general problem of the positive role of myth in political action. What kind of construction is such a political myth?

A myth, in contrast to hypotheses or utopias, is not either true or false. The facts can never prove it wrong.

“People who are living in this world of ‘myths,’ are secure from all refutation.… No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that the apprenticeship has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before …” (Pp. 35, 36.)

“The myth,” Sorel replies, “must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense.”

The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at the end of the first generation. The catastrophe did not come to pass, but the Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of Christ referred solely to this one point.

A great myth makes a social movement serious, formidable, and heroic. But this it would not do unless the myth inspired, and was in turn sustained by, violence. In his analysis of violence—the most notorious and attacked part of Sorel’s work—Sorel begins, as in the case of myth, with the narrowed problem of violence as related to the proletarian revolutionary movement.

Sorel does not take the ideas of humanitarianism and pacifism at face value. As in the case of any other ideas, he relates them to the historical environment in which they function. Their prominence does not mean that force has been eliminated from social relations: force is always a main factor regulating society. But, under advanced capitalism, much of the force is exercised as it were automatically and impersonally.

An open recognition of the necessity of violence can reverse the social degeneration. Violence, however, can serve this function, can be kept free from brutality and from mere vengeful force, only if it is linked to a great myth. Myth and violence, reciprocally acting on each other, produce not senseless cruelty and suffering, but sacrifice and heroism.

This seeming paradox, that the frank recognition of the function of violence in social conflicts may have as a consequence a reduction in the actual amount of violence, is a great mystery to all those whose approach to society is formalistic.

When someone writes a book on democracy, we are accustomed to share with him the assumption, as a rule not even mentioned, that democracy is both desirable and possible. The book will sing the praises of democracy. Its ostensible problem will often be “how to make democracy work”—because even the most ardent democrats, when they get down to the concrete, discover that it has not been and is not working quite as well as democratic theory would lead us to expect.

No Machiavellian, however, makes such an approach to social and political subjects. A Machiavellian does not assume, without examination, the desirability of democracy or peace or even of “justice” or any other ideal goal.

The central question, which Michels asks and answers, might be put as follows: In what ways is the realization of democracy affected by the tendencies inherent in social organization?

When Michels wrote, the Marxist critique of capitalism had for many decades been stressing the point that political democracy was necessarily incomplete so long as there was economic inequality.

The reasoning of the Marxists was correct so far as it went. They failed, however, to demonstrate that it is possible to eliminate economic inequality and to organize a classless society. The Machiavellians, agreeing with the negative critique of the Marxists, at the same time show that their goals, on the basis of the evidence from historical experience, are in fact impossible, that the suppression of the specifically capitalist form of differential property rights would not at all guarantee a classless social structure but would be followed by the consolidation of new kinds of property rights and a new class division.

It is these general laws or tendencies of organization that Michels sets out to discover, in particular those tendencies that bear upon the possibility of achieving democracy. In this task, Michels does not, of course, proceed by abstract demonstration from “first principles”; he makes no appeal to metaphysics or theology or the “eternal nature of things” or to what “must be.” Nor does he accept at face value what men say or think or believe they are doing or want to do. He follows, in short, not Dante’s method, but Machiavelli’s.

he considers it already proved by others, and indeed sufficiently obvious, that the modern capitalist-parliamentary state and the conservative political parties are not genuinely democratic. The spokesmen of both, no doubt, express themselves usually in terms of a democratic ideology—since such an ideology is the accepted form of modern political thinking; but this must be regarded as no more than what Michels calls an “ethical embellishment” of their social struggle.

For the liberals also, the masses pure and simple are no more than a necessary evil, whose only use is to help others to the attainment of ends to which they themselves are strangers.”

Even if we accept majority opinion as democratically valid for the entire group, it is at once plain that, in the case of large groups, strict or “direct” democracy is impossible for mechanical and technical reasons. A large group cannot itself directly decide about its own affairs because there is no place big enough to permit a large group to assemble for discussion and decision. Even if the group is sufficiently small to be contained within one place, the study of crowd psychology shows that the decisions voted by a large crowd seldom reflect the considered opinions of the constituent members of the crowd.

To sum up: All of these causes work alike, and inescapably, to create within the organization a leadership. The leadership, a minority and in a large organization always a relatively small minority, is distinguished from the mass of the organization. The organization is able to keep alive and to function only through its leaders.[*] Democratic theory is compelled to try to adapt itself to the fact of leadership.

Jean Jacques Rousseau may be considered as the founder of this aspect of the criticism of democracy. He defines popular government as ‘the exercise of the general will,’ and draws from this the logical inference, ‘it can never be alienated, and the sovereign, which is simply a collective being, can be represented only by itself.’ Consequently, ‘at the moment when a people sets up representatives, it is no longer free, it no longer exists.’ A mass which delegates its sovereignty, that is to say transfers its sovereignty to the hands of a few individuals, abdicates its sovereign functions. For the will of the people is not transferable, nor even the will of the single individual.” (Pp. 36-7. I have translated the quotations from Rousseau, which are left in French in the text.)

So long as the leaders have the necessary skill in the specialized task of guiding and controlling organizations, they may be criminals or saints, socialists or Republicans; depression or boom may come; wages may go up or down; strikes may be won or betrayed; but the administration rides through all. This very natural phenomenon is puzzling to those who reason formally. How, they wonder, can this convicted criminal, that grafter, this man who sold out his members to the bosses, or that one whose incompetence lost the chance to organize a whole new branch of the industry, be retained still in office?

The customary right to office makes possible an interesting device, frequent in many political organizations: the device of resignation. The leader, threatened with an adverse vote from a convention or a parliament (or, in a smaller group, an assembly of the entire membership), offers his resignation. The very heart, it would seem, of democracy! The leader no longer represents the group will, so he is ready to step aside as leader; and this is no doubt the way he puts it. But this is not the real meaning of the act. In truth, it is a powerful stroke whereby the leader forces his will upon the group. In the issue, the resignation is not accepted; it is the convention that gives up its opposition to the leader’s proposals, the parliament that votes “confidence.” Winston Churchill proved himself a master of this device, which is aided by the English system of a “responsible executive.”

Machiavelli was aware, also, of this natural sentiment of gratitude. In his zeal for the protection of liberty, he warned against it, and praised the Romans for not taking into account past services when they were judging a present fault.

Physical force is not unknown as a disciplinary weapon in organizations other than the state, but other punishments, such as fines and loss of rights or membership, can be equally effective from the point of view of protecting the leadership. In the case of trade unions, the loss of membership can be extremely serious, because it often means for the worker the loss of the right to make a living at his trade.

All those organizational facts that we have been reviewing unite to show that where a definite conflict arises between the leaders and the mass, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the leaders. Nevertheless, leaders are sometimes ousted. Does this violate the general principle of the supremacy of leadership? What exactly happens when leaders lose?

“When there is a struggle between the leaders and the masses, the former are always victorious if only they remain united.”

In the first place, if a division occurs among the leaders, one section or both is forced to seek help from the masses of the membership, and is able to organize their strength.

Second, new leaders may, and do, arise as it were “spontaneously” out of the masses. If the existing leadership is unable or unwilling to crush or assimilate these “outside” leaders, then it may be overthrown.

I wish here, however, to remark that Michels underestimates the indirect, if not direct, democratic significance of the “opposition.” If it is true that in the end there can be no more than the substitution of one set of leaders for another, nevertheless through the opposition leadership the pressure of the masses is brought indirectly to bear upon the leadership as a whole.

At a typical stage in this psychological metamorphosis, the leader identifies himself with the group—party or nation or whatever the group may be. “The bureaucrat identifies himself completely with the organization, confounding his own interests with its interests. All objective criticism of the party [or nation, if he is the leader of a nation] is taken by him as a personal affront. This is the cause of the obvious incapacity of all party leaders to take a serene and just view of hostile criticism.… If, on the other hand, the leader is attacked personally, his first care is to make it appear that the attack is directed against the party [or nation] as a whole.” (P. 228.)