The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

by James Burnham

I conclude, therefore, against the common opinion, that the people are no more light, ungrateful, nor changeable than Princes; but that both of them are equally faulty, and he that should go about to excuse the Prince would be in a very great error.…” (Discourses, Book I, Chap. 58.)

A Note on Machiavelli’s Terminology In understanding Machiavelli, there are confusions that may result from his use of certain words.

Second, the distinction between “ruler-type” and “ruled-type” is also independent: specifically, both types are to be found among the “people” as well as in other classes.

The ruler-type, then, is not distinguished by Machiavelli from the ruled by any moral standard, nor by intelligence or consistency, nor by any capacity to avoid mistakes. There are, however, certain common characteristics that mark the rulers and potential rulers, and divide them from the majority that is fated always to be ruled.

In the first place, the ruler-type has what Machiavelli calls virtù, what is so improperly translated as “virtue.” Virtù is a word, in Machiavelli’s language, that has no English equivalent. It includes in its meaning part of what we refer to as “ambition,” “drive,” “spirit” in the sense of Plato’s θυμός, the “will to power.”

“I have found it always true, that men do seldom or never advance themselves from a small beginning, to any great height, but by fraud, or by force (unless they come by it by donation, or right of inheritance). I do not think any instance is to be found where force alone brought any man to that grandeur, but fraud and artifice have done it many times,

The combination of force and fraud is picturesquely referred to in the famous passages of The Prince which describe the successful ruler as both Lion and Fox. “You must understand that there are two ways of contending, by Law, and by force: The first is proper to men; the second to beasts; but because many times the first is insufficient, recourse must be had to the second. It belongs, therefore, to a Prince to understand both, when to make use of the rational, and when of the brutal way; and this is recommended to Princes (though abstrusely) by ancient writers, who tell them how Achilles and several other Princes were committed to the education of Chiron, the Centaur, who was to keep them under his discipline, choosing them a Master, half man and half beast, for no other reason but to show how necessary it is for a Prince to be acquainted with both, for that one without the other will be of little duration. Seeing, therefore, it is of such importance to a Prince to take upon him the nature and disposition of a beast, of all the whole flock, he ought to imitate the Lion and the Fox; for the Lion is in danger of toils and snares, and the Fox of the Wolf: so that he must be a Fox to find out the snares, and a Lion to fright away the Wolves, but they who keep wholly to the Lion, have no true notion of themselves …” (The Prince, Chap.

Finally, political man of the ruler-type is skilled at adapting himself to the times.

Machiavelli does not have a systematically worked out theory of history. The many generalizations which he states are for the most part limited, dealing with some special phase of political action, and a list of them would be a summary of most of his writings.

few wider principles of great influence in the later development of Machiavellism. 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.

The process of change is repetitive, and roughly cyclical. That is to say, the pattern of change occurs again and again in history (so that, by studying the past, we learn also about the present and future); and this pattern comprises a more or less recognizable cycle. A good, flourishing, prosperous state becomes corrupt, evil, degenerate; from the corrupt, evil state again arises one that is strong and flouris...

“Governments in the variations which most commonly happen to them, do proceed from order to confusion, and that confusion afterwards turns to order again. For Nature having fixed no sublunary things, as soon as they arrive at their acme and perfection, being capable of no farther ascent, of necessity they decline. So, on the other side, when they are reduced to the lowest pitch of disorder, having no farther to descend, they recoil again to their former perfection: good Laws degenerating into bad customs, and bad customs engendering good Laws. For, virtue begets peace; peace begets idleness; idleness, mutiny; and mutiny, destruction: and then, vice versa; that ruin begets laws; those laws, virtue; and virtue begets honor and good success.” (History of Florence, Book V.)

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.

3. Machiavelli assigns a major function in political affairs to what he calls “Fortune.” Sometimes he seems almost to personify Fortune, and, in the manner that lingered on through the Middle Ages from ancient times, to write about her as a goddess. He discusses Fortune not merely in occasional references, but in a number of lengthy passages scattered throughout his works.

it becomes clear what Machiavelli means by “Fortune.” 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.

Fortune, I do resemble to a rapid and impetuous River, which when swelled, and enraged, overwhelms the Plains, subverts the Trees, and the Houses, forces away the Earth from one place, and carries it to another, everybody fears, everybody shuns, but nobody knows how to resist it; Yet though it be thus furious sometimes, it does not follow but when it is quiet and calm, men may by banks, and fences, and other provisions correct it in such manner, that when it swells again, it may be carried off by some Canal, or the violence thereof rendered less licentious and destructive. So it is with Fortune, which shows her power where there is no predisposed virtue to resist it, and turns all her force and impetuosity, where she knows there are no banks, no fences to restrain her …” (The Prince, Chap. 25.)

“Wherefore men are not so much to be blamed or commended for their adversity or prosperity; for it is frequently seen, some are hurried to ruin, and others advanced to great honor by the swing and impulse of their fate, wisdom availing little against the misfortunes of the one, and folly as little against the felicity of the other. When fortune designs any great matter, she makes choice of some man of such courage and parts, as is able to discern when she presents him with an occasion: and so on the other side, when she intends any great destruction, she has her Instruments ready to push on the wheel, and assist to her designs; and if there be any man capable of obstructing them in the least, she either rids him out of the way, or deprives him of all authority, and leaves him without any faculty to do good.” (Discourses, Book II, Chap. 29.)

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 ...

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.

Take away Religion, and take away the foundation of Government … Those Princes and Commonwealths who would keep their Governments entire and incorrupt, are above all things to have a care of Religion and its Ceremonies, and preserve them in due veneration.…” (Discourses, Book I, Chapter 11 and 12.)

5. We have already seen that Machiavelli’s chief immediate practical goal was the national unification of Italy. In the review of his descriptive conclusions about the nature of political activity, no reference has been made to any more general goals or ideals to which Machiavelli adhered. I return now to this problem of goal, in order to answer the question: What kind of government did Machiavelli think best? Machiavelli’s writings, taken in their entirety, leave no doubt about the answer. 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. This opinion is above all clarified by Machiavelli’s most important work, the Discourses on Livy, but it is at least implicit in everything that he wrote.

Nor does this preference for a republic contradict his conclusion that the leadership of a prince was required for the national unification of Italy. If a republic is the best form of government, it does not follow that a republic is possible at every moment and for all things. Machiavelli’s preferences are always disciplined by the truth. The truth here, as he correctly saw it, was that Italy could not then be unified except, in the initial stages at least, through a prince.

Independence, the first condition of liberty, can be secured in the last analysis only by the armed strength of the citizenry itself, never by mercenaries or allies or money; consequently arms are the first foundation of liberty. There is no lasting safeguard for liberty in anything but one’s own strength.

Internally, also, liberty rests on force—on the public force of the state, however, never on force exercised by private individuals or groups, which is invariably a direct threat to liberty. Guaranteed by force, then, internal liberty means government by law, with strict adherence to due legal process.

As protectors of liberty, Machiavelli has no confidence in individual men as such; driven by unlimited ambition, deceiving even themselves, they are always corrupted by power. But individuals can, to some extent at least and for a while...

Machiavelli is not so naïve as to imagine that the law can support itself. The law is founded upon force, but the force in turn will destroy the law unless it also is bridled; but force can be bridled only by opposing force. Sociologically, therefore, the foundation of liberty is a balancing of forces, what Machiavelli calls a “mixed” government. Since Machiavelli is neither a propagandist nor an apologist, since he is not the demagogue of any party or sect or group, he knows and says how hypocritical are the calls for a “unity” that is a mask for the suppression of all opposition, how fatally lying or wrong are all beliefs that liberty is the peculiar attribute of any single individual or group—prince or democrat, nobles or people or “multitude.” Only out of the continuing clash of opposing groups can liberty flow.

This balancing clash of opposed interests will the more surely preserve liberty when the state guards against too great inequality in privilege and wealth.

Liberty, then—not the rhetorical liberty of an impossible and misconceived utopia, but such concrete liberty as is, when they are fortunate, within the grasp of real men, with their real limitations—is the dominant ideal of Machiavelli, and his final norm of judgment. Tyranny is liberty’s opposite, and no man has been a clearer foe of tyranny. No man clearer, and few more eloquent. In the 14th century, the Florentine people, threatened by external danger and by internal dissension, decided to turn their government over to a foreigner, the Duke of Athens.

he fought in a field of much greater concern to mankind. He tried to tell us not about stars or atoms, but about ourselves and our own common life. If his detailed conclusions were sometimes wrong, his own method, as the method of science always does, provides the way to correct them. He would be the first to insist on changing any of his views that were refuted by the evidence.

We face here what can hardly be, after all these centuries, a mere accident of misunderstanding. There must be some substantial reason why Machiavelli is so consistently distorted.

It is true that he has taught tyrants, from almost his own days—Thomas Cromwell, for example, the lowborn Chancellor whom Henry VIII brought in to replace Thomas More when More refused to make his conscience a tool of his master’s interests, was said to have a copy of Machiavelli always in his pocket; and in our own time Mussolini wrote a college thesis on Machiavelli. But knowledge has a disturbing neutrality in this respect. We do not blame the research analyst who has solved the chemical mysteries of a poison because a murderer made use of his treatise, nor a student of the nature of alloys because a safe is cracked with the help of his formulas, nor chemists and physical scientists because bombs explode when they drop on Warsaw or Chungking. Perhaps we should do so; perhaps, as the story in Genesis almost suggests, all knowledge is evil. But the mere fact that the knowledge made explicit by Machiavelli has been put to bad uses, which is a potential fate of all knowledge, cannot explain why he is singled out for infamy.

It may be remarked that the harsh opinion of Machiavelli has been more widespread in England and the United States than in the nations of Continental Europe. This is no doubt natural, because the distinguishing quality of Anglo-Saxon politics has always been hypocrisy, and hypocrisy must always be at pains to shy away from the truth.

We are, I think, and not only from the fate of Machiavelli’s reputation, forced to conclude that men do not really want to know about themselves. When we allow ourselves to be taken in by reasoning after the manner of Dante, we find it easy to believe such remarks as Aristotle made at the beginning of his Metaphysics: “All men naturally desire knowledge”; and to imagine that it is self-evident that knowledge will always be welcomed. But if we examine not what follows from some abstract metaphysical principle but how men behave, some doubts arise.

If the political truths stated or approximated by Machiavelli were widely known by men, the success of tyranny and all the other forms of oppressive political rule would become much less likely. A deeper freedom would be possible in society than Machiavelli himself believed attainable. If men generally understood as much of the mechanism of rule and privilege as Machiavelli understood, they would no longer be deceived into accepting that rule and privilege, and they would know what steps to take to overcome them.

T? Learned from trump?

Therefore the powerful and their spokesmen—all the “official” thinkers, the lawyers and philosophers and preachers and demagogues and moralists and editors—must defame Machiavelli. Machiavelli says that rulers lie and break faith: this proves, they say, that he libels human nature. Machiavelli says that ambitious men struggle for power: he is apologizing for the opposition, the enemy, and trying to confuse you about us, who wish to lead you for your own good and welfare. Machiavelli says that you must keep strict watch over officials and subordinate them to the law: he is encouraging subversion and the loss of national unity. Machiavelli says that no man with power is to be trusted: you see that his aim is to smash all your faith and ideals.

With a far from accidental anticipation, much of the chief work of the modern Machiavellians was done in the period immediately preceding that war. Gaetano Mosca, it is true, had formulated many of his ideas as early as 1883, when he finished his first book, Teorica dei governi e governo parlamentare. However, his mature and finished thought is presented, with the war experiences close at hand, in the revised and expanded 1923 edition of Elementi di scienza politica, which is the basis of what has been translated into English as The Ruling Class.

Georges Sorel’s active career went on through the war, and ended with his death in 1922. Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto were writing their major books when the war began.

Machiavellism is concerned with politics, that is, with the struggle for power. It seems natural, therefore, that its first appearance as well as its revival should be correlated with social revolution. The revolutionary crisis makes men, or at least a certain number of men, discontent with what in normal times passes for political thought and science—namely, disguised apologies for the status quo or utopian dreams of the future; and compels them to face more frankly the real issues of power: some because they wish to understand more clearly the nature of the world of which they are a part, others because they wish also to discover whether and in what way they might be able to control that world in the furtherance of their own ideals.

Mosca, Michels, and Pareto, heirs—as all of us are who wish to be—of 400 years of scientific tradition, have an altogether clear understanding of scientific method. Machiavelli wrote at the beginnings of science; he was scientific, often, by instinct and impulse rather than design. Many of Machiavelli’s insights are only implicit in his writings—indeed, I have done him perhaps more than justice in making explicit much that was probably not fully so to himself. Machiavelli mixed together an art and a science of politics; his scientific conclusions are frequently the by-products of an attempt to lay down a rule for securing some particular kind of political result.

Gaetano Mosca, like all Machiavellians, rejects any monistic view of history—that is, any theory of history which holds that there is one single cause that accounts for everything that happens in society.

He rejects all of these theories, not because of any prejudice against monism, but for that simple and final reason that seems to have no attraction for monists: because these theories do not accord with the facts.

Changes in the mode of economic production must unquestionably be recognized as one of the chief factors entering into the historical process: the invention of new tools or machines, new ways of organizing work, new relationships of economic ownership, may have vast repercussions throughout the social order. Even racial differences may conceivably affect political and social organization. For that matter, still other circumstances can influence history—new types of armaments or ways of fighting, to take an important example, or shifts in religion and social beliefs.

Mosca himself holds what is sometimes called an “interdependence” theory of historical causation: the view that there are a number of important factors that determine historical change, that no one of these can be considered solely decisive, that they interact upon each other, with changes in one field affecting and in turn being affected by changes in others. He makes his critique of historical monism in order to break down abstract approaches to history, to do away with preconceptions of how things ought to be, and to force a concrete examination of the facts in each specific problem rather than an adjustment of the facts to fit the requirements of some schematic theory. Monistic theories of history, he believes, are a great obstacle to a recognition of the facts.

Yet we must not disguise the fact that in the social sciences in general the difficulties to be overcome are enormously greater. Not only does the greater complexity of psychological laws (or constant tendencies) that are common to all human groups make it harder to determine their operation, but it is easier to observe the things that go on about us than it is to observe the things we ourselves do. Man can much more easily study the phenomena of physics, chemistry or botany than he can his own instincts and his own passions.… But then, even granting that … individuals can attain scientific results, it is highly problematical whether they can succeed in using them to modify the political conduct of the great human societies.” (The Ruling Class, pp. 40-41.)

Machiavellians, in their investigations of political behavior, do not accept at face value what men say, think, believe, or write. Whether it is the speech or letter or book of an individual, or a public document such as a constitution or set of laws or a party platform, Machiavellians treat it as only one fact among the larger set of social facts, and interpret its meaning always in relation to these other facts. In some cases, examination shows that the words can be accepted just as they stand; more often, as we found with De Monarchia, a divorce between formal and real meaning is discovered, with the words distorting and disguising the real political behavior which they indirectly express.

This anti-formal approach leads Mosca to note as a primary and universal social fact the existence of two “political classes,” a ruling class—always a minority—and the ruled.

“Among the constant facts and tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye. In all societies—from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies—two classes of people appear—a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and viol...

The existence of a minority ruling class is, it must be stressed, a universal feature of all organized societies of which we have any record. It holds no matter what the social and political forms—whether the society is feudal or capitalist or slave or collectivist, monarchical or oligarchical or democratic, no matter what the constitutions and laws, no matter what the professions and beliefs. Mosca furthermore believes that we are fully entitled to conclude that this not only has been and is always the case, but that also it always will be. That it will be, follows, in the first place, from the univocal experience of the past: since, under all conditions, it has always been true of political organization, it must be presumed that it is a constant attribute of political life and will continue to hold for the future. However, the conclusion that there will always be a minority ruling class can be further demonstrated in another way.

By the theory of the ruling class Mosca is refuting two widespread errors which, though the opposite of each other, are oddly enough often both believed by the same person. The first, which comes up in discussions of tyranny and dictatorship and is familiar in today’s popular attacks on contemporary tyrants, is that society can be ruled by a single individual.