The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

by James Burnham

We must remember that the cities had their period of chief influence and power against the background of a predominantly feudal, agricultural Europe.

Under feudalism there was no developed central state power. The sovereignty of the medieval kings, therefore, was largely fictional except as it held over their immediate feudal domain, or as it might suit the interests of their feudal peers to collaborate with them.

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.

It was in these stages that the city-states, such as those of northern Italy—as well as those, somewhat different in character, of the Lowlands and parts of Germany—had their great opportunity.

And these cities were concentrating on industry, trade, commerce, banking. They did not manufacture only for use, or wait for an annual or quarterly market-day for exchange. They manufactured for the general market, and they traded, in money as well as goods, every day.

Along with their economic and political prosperity went also their unequaled cultural expansion.

The cities, thus, had a head start. But the very factors that had brought their early advantage were, by the 16th century, when Machiavelli was writing, turning them toward ruin. As the new world began to take more definite form, these first children of the world were already old and socially decadent. They were rich, easy, luxurious, “have” powers, for all their small number of acres. They were ready to let others do their fighting for them, to rely, as Machiavelli a thousand times upbraids them, on money and treaties, not on the strength and virtue of their own citizens.

The city-states, which had once nursed the new economy, were now beginning to strangle it. The guild restrictions which had kept up the quality of Florentine woolens or Venetian glass or Genoese weapons were now, in order to maintain the traditional privileges of their members, preventing an influx of new workers and new capital. 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.

Italy, then, in Machiavelli’s day, faced a sharp, imperative choice, a choice that had already been pointed by the examples of Spain and especially of France and England. Italy could remain under the existing political structure. If so, if it continued in the old ways, it was sure to retrogress, to decline economically and culturally, to sink into the backyard of Europe. Or Italy could follow the example of France and England, unify itself, organize as a nation; and thereby continue in the front rank—be, perhaps, the chief state of the modern world.

This was the problem, and this problem Machiavelli, in its political aspects above all, fully understood. Machiavelli made his decision, explained it, advocated it. Unfortunately for Italy, his advice was not accepted.

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Machiavelli concluded that Italy could be unified only through a Prince, who would take the initiative in consolidating the country into a nation.

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.

All of the European nations were consolidated through a Prince—or, rather, a succession of Princes—and it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise.

The feudal lords did not want nation-states, which in the end were sure to bring the destruction of their power and privileges. The masses were too inarticulate, too ignorant, too weak, to function as a leading political force.

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The one great social group that required the national system was the new and spreading class of the burghers, the businessmen, the merchants, the early capitalists. This class, however, was too young, too untried, too unused to rule, to take on the job by itself.

It was Machiavelli’s own contemporary, Sir Thomas More, most successful lawyer in London, leading spokesman for the London merchants, who was the first commoner to become Chancellor of England. A younger contemporary and fellow-Florentine, Catherine, of the same Medici family to one of whose members The Prince is dedicated, daughter of a banker, became Queen and ruler of France.

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.

This very refusal, however, this allegiance to objective truth, is itself a moral ideal. Moreover, in another sense, Machiavelli undertook his studies of politics for the sake of very definite goals, one of which I have analyzed in this section.

These goals, like all goals, have an ethical content: indeed, ethics is simply the consideration of human behavior from the point of view of goals, standards, norms, and ideals. Machiavelli divorced politics from a certain kind of ethics—namely, from a transcendental, otherworldly, and, it may be added, very rotten ethics.

Machiavelli is as ethical a political writer as Dante. The difference is that Machiavelli’s ethics are much better.

Machiavelli’s method is the method of science applied to politics.

Naturally, Machiavelli’s conceptions often seem to us somewhat immature—we know so much more than Machiavelli knew. We must make our judgment in a proper historical perspective, remembering that he wrote more than four centuries ago. In those days, scientific method in our sense, deliberate, systematic, self-conscious, was only beginning.

In connection with Machiavelli’s own subject-matter there were special difficulties. The critical study of historical texts and source-materials had only just begun, and was confined chiefly to Biblical and Church texts that were at issue in the religious controversies.

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.

Second, Machiavelli delineates with sufficient clarity the field of politics. What are we talking about when we talk politics? Many, to judge by what they write, seem to think we are talking about man’s search for the ideally good society, or his mutual organization for the maximum social welfare, or his natural aspiration for peace and harmony, or something equally removed from the world as it is and has been. Machiavelli understood politics as primarily the study of the struggles for power among men.

If our interest is in man as he is on this earth, so far as we can learn from the facts of history and experience, we must conclude that he has no natural aspiration for peace or harmony, he does not form states in order to achieve an ideally good society, nor does he accept mutual organization to secure the maximum social welfare. But men, and groups of men, do, by various means, struggle among themselves for relative increases in power and privilege. In the course of these struggles and as part of them, governments are established and overthrown, laws passed and violated, wars fought and won and lost. A definition is arbitrary, true enough, but Machiavelli’s implied definition of the field of politics as the struggle for power is at least insurance against nonsense.

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.

But in writing about politics, the usual approach is that of Dante, starting not with observed facts, but with supposed general principles governing the nature of man, society, and the universe. Conclusions are reached by deductions from the...

If the facts show that a government is more securely based on the confidence and support of the people than on the building of fortresses, then that must answer the argument over the merits of fortresses, widely debated in Machiavelli’s time, even though many rulers doubtless preferred to believe otherwise. Florence, with plenty of money and little stomach for fighting, wanted to believe that it could maintain itself by hiring mercenary troops, but the facts, again, proved that only the citizenry in arms could really be trusted.

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 does not suppose that it will be possible for him to formulate, at that primitive stage of political science, universal laws covering the whole realm of politics. But he evidently thinks it possible to state approximate generalizations about many kinds of political event. 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.

This striving toward a more embracing political science is most evident in the Discourses on Livy, where he customarily links references to Roman and Greek history with references to Italian or European history comparatively close to his own times.

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.

If we remember the established attitudes of his times, their provincial narrowness, their lack of scholarship and research and a critical sense, this passion for truth is wonderfully revealed, I think, in the sane, controlled, and balanced preface to the Second Book of the Discourses on Livy:

In general summary of Machiavelli’s method, we may recall the distinction between formal and real meaning which I defined in analyzing De Monarchia. It is a characteristic of Machiavelli’s writing, as of all scientific discourse, that this distinction is inapplicable. 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.

There have been many critical discussions about Machiavelli’s supposed views on “human nature.” Some defend him, but he is usually charged with a libel upon mankind, with having a perverted, shocking, and detestable notion of what human beings are like. These discussions, however, are beside the point. Machiavelli has no views on human nature; or, at any rate, none is presented in his writings. Machiavelli is neither a psychologist nor a moral philosopher, but a political scientist. It is clear from a study of Machiavelli that what he is trying to analyze is not “man” but “political man,” in somewhat the same way that Adam Smith analyzed “economic man.”

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Of course Adam Smith realized that men, in the course of their many and so various activities, are motivated by many other aims than the search for profit. But he was not interested in human nature as a whole. Man’s nature was relevant to his studies only insofar as man functioned economically, in the market. Adam Smith was abstracting from human nature, and introducing the conception of an “economic agent,” which he believed, with some justice, would aid him in formulating the laws of economics.

Similarly with Machiavelli. He is interested in man in relation to political phenomena—that is, to the struggle for power; in man as he functions politically, not in man as he behaves toward his friends or family or God.

If he is wrong, he is wrong because of a false theory of politics, not because of a false idea of man.

Most people think that politics is ultimately a question of psychology, because, they argue, it is after all human beings who carry on political actions. This belief lies back of the common attempt to explain politics in terms of the character and motives of political leaders, or even of the “common man,” an attempt familiar not only from ordinary discussion but more prominently from the journalists’ books on politics that have plagued us during recent years. It is the basis, as well, of more pretentious studies which claim to explain politics in terms of some contemporary psychological system such as psychoanalysis or behaviorism.

As things are, the proper study of politics is quite plainly distinct from the study of psychology, and the laws of politics can in no way be deduced from the laws of psychology. To understand politics, we must get our evidence directly, from the record of political struggles themselves.

From studying the facts of politics, then, Machiavelli reached certain conclusions, not about man but about “political man.”

First, he implies everywhere a rather sharp distinction between two types of political man: a “ruler-type,” we might call one, and a “ruled-type,” the other. The first type would include not merely those who at any moment occupy leading positions in society, but those also who aspire to such positions or who might so aspire if opportunity offered; the second consists of those who neither lead nor are capable of becoming leaders. The second is the great majority. There is a certain arbitrariness in any such distinction as this, and obviously the exact line between the two groups is hazy. Nevertheless, it is clear that Machiavelli—and all those, moreover, who write in the tradition of Machiavelli—thinks that the distinction reflects a basic fact of political life, that active political struggle is confined for the most part to a small minority of men, that the majority is and remains, whatever else happens, the ruled.

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The outstanding characteristic of the majority is, then, its political passivity. Unless driven by the most extreme provocation on the part of the rulers or by rare and exceptional circumstance, the ruled are not interested in power. They want a small minimum of security, and a chance to live their own lives and manage their own small affairs.

“In the general,” Machiavelli finds, “men are ungrateful, inconstant, hypocritical, fearful of danger, and covetous of gain; whilst they receive any benefit by you, and the danger is at distance, they are absolutely yours, their Blood, their Estates, their Lives, and their Children (as I said before) are all at your Service, but when mischief is at hand, and you have present need of their help, they make no scruple to revolt.” (The Prince, Chap. 17.) “The people,” moody and changeable, “being deceived with a false imagination of good, do many times solicit their own ruin, and run the commonwealth upon infinite dangers and difficulties.” (Discourses, Book I, Chap. 53.)

At the same time, they have a great respect for firm authority. “There is nothing more certain to appease a popular tumult, and reduce the people to reason, than the interposition of some wise person of authority among them, as Vergil has told us with very good reason: ‘If in their tumults, a grave man appears, All’s whist, and nothing stirring but their ears.’ ” (Discourses, Book I, Chap. 54.)

‘That as nothing is more courageous than the multitude united, so nothing is more abject when they are separate and divided.’ ” (Discourses, Book I, Chap. 57.)

Nevertheless—and this observation applies to rulers and ruled alike—no man is perfectly good or bad. “Wise men

When Machiavelli concludes that no man is perfectly good or bad, he is not making a primarily moral judgment. He means, more generally, that all men make mistakes at least sometimes, that there are no super-men, that no man is always intelligent and judicious, that even the stupid have occasional moments of brilliance, that men are not always consistent, that they are variable and variously motivated.

The ruled majority, changeable, weak, short-sighted, selfish, is not at all, for Machiavelli, the black to the rulers’ white. Indeed, for him, the ruler-type is even less constant, less loyal, and on many occasions less intelligent.