The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

by James Burnham

Though the myth is not a scientific theory and is therefore not required to conform to the facts, it is nevertheless not at all arbitrary. Not just any myth will do. A myth that serves to weld together a social group—nation, people, or class—must be capable of arousing their most profound sentiments and must at the same time direct energies toward the solution of the real problems which the group faces in its actual environment.

“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.” (Pp. 135-6.) If we should nevertheless put the question, it is plain that the ideal will in truth never be achieved or even approximated. This in no way detracts from the power of the myth, nor does it alter the fact that only these myths can inspire social groups to actions which, though they never gain the formal ideal, yet do bring about great social transformations.

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. Before declaring his allegiance, he makes sure that he understands what is being talked about, together with the probable consequences for social welfare and well-being.

Above all, no Machiavellian assumes without inquiry that the various goals are possible. A goal must be possible before there is any point in considering it desirable. It is not possible merely because it sounds pleasant or because men want it badly.

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.

“In an era of democracy, ethics constitute a weapon which everyone can employ. In the old regime, the members of the ruling class and those who desired to become rulers continually spoke of their own personal rights. Democracy adopts a more diplomatic, a more prudent course. It has rejected such claims as unethical. Today, all the factors of public life speak and struggle in the name of the people, of the community at large. The government and rebels against the government, kings and party-leaders, tyrants by the grace of God and usurpers, rabid idealists and calculating self-seekers, all are ‘the people,’ and all declare that in their actions they merely fulfil the will of the nation.”

Indeed, the basic theorists of modern democracy were themselves more than a little troubled by “representation.” The truth is that sovereignty, which is what—according to democratic principle—ought to be possessed by the mass, cannot be delegated. In making a decision, no one can represent the sovereign, because to be sovereign means to make one’s own decisions. The one thing that the sovereign cannot possibly delegate is its own sovereignty; that would be self-contradictory, and would simply mean that sovereignty has shifted hands.

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.”

In short, the leaders—not every individual leader, but the leadership as a group, and a group with at least a considerable measure of stability and permanence—are indispensable to every important organization. Their genuine indispensability is the strongest lever whereby the position of the leadership is consolidated, whereby the leaders control and are not controlled by the mass, whereby, therefore, democracy succumbs. The power of the leadership, organized as an informal sub-group independent of the mass of the membership, follows as a necessary consequence of its indispensability.

Or, as often in democratic and labor politics, persons with independent means take over the leadership. In any case, the leaders decide the more important questions of the day-by-day use of what funds there are: what and who shall be strengthened, what and who weakened, who put on the pay-roll and who taken off, who favored and who financially frowned on.

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.

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. In both of these cases, however, though the process may appear to take the form of a successful struggle of the masses against their leaders, and thus to prove the supremacy of the masses, in reality it consists only of the substitution of a new leadership for the old. Leadership remains in control; “self-government” is as distant as ever.

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. An opposition, whatever its theories, is compelled to rest to some extent on a democratic basis and to defend democratic practices. The existence of an opposition is the firmest and the only firm check on the autocratic tendencies of the leaders.

“He who has once attained to power will not readily be induced to return to the comparatively obscure position which he formerly occupied.… The consciousness of power always produces vanity, and undue belief in personal greatness.… In the leader, consciousness of his personal worth, and of the need which the mass feels for guidance, combine to induce in his mind a recognition of his own superiority (real or supposed), and awake, in addition, that spirit of command which exists in the germ in every man born of woman.

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.) Criticism of the group is personal libel against the leader; criticism of the leader is subversion and treason against the group.

The Bonapartist leader claims, with more than a show of justification, to be the most perfect embodiment of the will of the group, the people. Everything, therefore, is permitted to him, since he is merely the symbol of the group as a whole. The intermediary political organs—parliaments, for example—still continue; but they are now subordinate to the Bonapartist leader, for only he completely expresses the popular will; they are his agents, and only through him are they agents of the people.

All this is much more than mere pretense. Once granted the principle of representation, Bonapartism can be regarded as the logical culmination of democracy. More than this: to judge from the experience not only of our own times but from that of the Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the medieval city-states, Bonapartism is likewise the normal—though not perhaps the invariable—historical culmination of democracy.

Social life cannot dispense with organization. The mechanical, technical, psychological, and cultural conditions of organization require leadership, and guarantee that the leaders rather than the mass shall exercise control. The autocratic tendencies are neither arbitrary nor accidental nor temporary, but inherent in the nature of organization.

This, the general conclusion from Michels’ entire study, he sums up as the iron law of oligarchy, a law which, upon the basis of the evidence at our disposal, would seem to hold for all social movements and all forms of society. The law shows that the democratic ideal of self-government is impossible. Whatever social changes occur, whatever happens to economic relations, whether property is in private hands or socialized, organization will remain, and through organization an oligarchical rule will be perpetuated.

According to this view, the government, or, if the phrase be preferred, the state, cannot be anything other than the organization of a minority. It is the aim of this minority to impose upon the rest of society a ‘legal order,’ which is the outcome of the exigencies of dominion and of the exploitation of the mass of helots effected by the ruling minority, and can never be truly representative of the majority.

The majority is thus permanently incapable of self-government.… The majority of human beings, in a condition of eternal tutelage, are predestined by tragic necessity to submit to the dominion of a small minority, and must be content to constitute the pedestal of an oligarchy.”

Oligarchy will always remain; but it may be possible to put some limit and restraint on the absoluteness of oligarchy. This cannot be effectively done by a utopian and sentimental idealism concerning the possibilities of democracy.

Pareto not only shows that non-logical conduct is predominant; his crucial point is that the conduct which has a bearing on social and political structure, on what he calls the “social equilibrium,” is above all the arena of the non-logical. What happens to society, whether it progresses or decays, is free or despotic, happy or miserable, poor or prosperous, is only to the slightest degree influenced by the deliberate, rational purposes held by human beings.

First, we may at once observe that most of the goals incorporated in these public documents are too ambiguous to determine one line of conduct as against another. They are so vague, indeed, that whatever is actually done can be subsequently interpreted as consistent with the alleged goal. The Declarations call, often, for “freedom.” But “freedom,” by itself, is a term with no content whatsoever. There is no freedom “in general”—only freedom from certain things or for certain things, which always involves restrictions in other specific respects.

Or take “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the great goals, it was believed, of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and of the French Revolution. Anything, or nothing, can be meant by these terms. No two men are or can be equal in all things; all are equal in some. Michels reminds us that, after the Revolution, the three words appeared over the entrance of every French prison.

We discover, to begin with, that men who profess a certain goal are just about as likely to take actions contrary to it as in accordance with it. Nor can we generally attribute these contrary actions to duplicity; those who act contrary to the goal can continue at the same time believing sincerely in it, and not noting any contradiction.

Rational, deliberate, conscious belief does not, then, in general at any rate, determine what is going to happen to society; social man is not, as he has been defined for so many centuries, a primarily “rational animal.” When the reformers tell us that society can be improved by education, by increasing men’s knowledge, by projecting the correct program and then taking action to realize that program, they are wrong because men in society do not act that way. Their actions, their socially decisive actions, spring not from logical but from non-logical roots.

A desire to reform society seems to call for logical action—the deliberate adoption of suitable means to bring about the reforms. Therefore, those who wish above all for reform are likely in the end to minimize the influence of non-logical action.

An even greater obstacle to understanding derives from the fact that we have a powerful non-logical impulse to make our own and other human actions seem logical. We are unable to accept non-logical actions for what they are, so we conjure up a rational explanation for them.

Or again: we find that everywhere and at all times men believe in the objective reality and persistence of entities like gods or spirits or “the state” or “progress” or “justice” or “freedom” or “humanity” or “the proletariat” or “the law.” The names and special personalities of the entities change, sometimes rather quickly. So also do the theories that explain the entities—religions and philosophies and moralities.

The term, “residue,” then, means simply the stable, common element which we may discover in social actions, the nucleus which is “left over” (hence, perhaps, Pareto’s choice of the word “residue”) when the variable elements are stripped away.

We do not conform with the group and its customs because we have a theory that thereby our own life becomes more satisfactory; we begin with a tendency to conform, and only later do we invent or adopt a theory that this is “the best way of life.”

Pareto also holds this Class of Residues responsible for many of the feelings of social equality. Such feelings, he shows, are never what they seem to be, but are always in fact a drive toward extra privileges for the group that adheres to the doctrine of equality that may be in question. The post-Renaissance bourgeoisie, calling for “equality,” wanted in fact the transfer of the major social privileges from the feudal aristocrats to themselves; analogously today in the case of the working-class demands for equality.

The influence on people’s actions and on the course of events that derivations—theories, doctrines, reasoning—seem at times to have is always deceiving the surface observer. At most the derivations strengthen already existing residues—a truth well realized by skilled propagandists; for the rest, they operate only indirectly. The seeming influence of the derivation is in reality the influence of the residue which it expresses. It is for this reason that the “logical” refutation of theories used in politics never accomplishes anything so long as the residues remain intact.

It is the Machiavellians, perhaps more than any other school, who have paid closest attention to ideals. However, as I have already more than once stated, they do not take ideals and the theories accompanying them at face value. They insist on relating the ideals and theories to the whole complex of human behavior, and interpreting what men do, not merely by their words, but by their words related to the rest of their actions.

Recognizing that moral, social, and political doctrines have little or no genuinely scientific content, they do not try to evaluate them through a superficial examination of the words that appear in them, nor do they expect to understand and predict the course of social events by accepting the verbal nonsense that a Constitution or Platform or political speech may contain. Often they discover that the actual effects of a doctrine are completely at variance with the results that it claims to be able to accomplish—a discovery not without its practical importance, if we are interested in the welfare of society.

Tens of thousands of persons have given time and intelligence to arguments over these questions, and have devised nearly as many answers. After all this while, men have not reached any generally accepted conclusions, and there is no indication that we have advanced in these matters a single step beyond the reasonings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This fact, and the contrast it presents to the advances made in solving the problems of the physical sciences, are enough to show that the attempted answers to these questions are not scientifically credible theories, but non-logical expressions, that is to say, derivations.

Ordinarily, the philosophers, reformers, and social writers speak of “the community” or “the society”; but these are vague and distant abstractions. It is to be expected, and it is ordinarily the case, that any given proposal should be useful to some sub-groups of the community, and detrimental to others: a benefit to the rulers, a detriment to the ruled; good for the workers, but hurtful to employers.… The spokesmen for the various groups never, of course, put things in this distinct way. They make use of derivations, and always put a program, the consequences of which would be favorable to their own group, forward in the name of the community as a whole. From this habit not a little confusion results.

Nevertheless, though this is the truth, it would, generally speaking, be disadvantageous to society for this truth to be known. Almost always it is socially useful, it contributes to social welfare, to have people believe that their own individual happiness is bound up with acceptance of the community standards: or, as moral philosophers put it, that there is a direct correspondence between the welfare of the individual and the welfare of society.

Sometimes the truth aids society. But often a widespread knowledge of the truth may weaken or destroy sentiments, habits, attitudes upon which the integrity of social life, above all in times of crisis, may depend. False beliefs do sometimes produce evil social results; but they often, also, benefit the community. Again no general conclusion is possible. We must examine each concrete case, each specific truth and falsehood in its specific circumstances.

We are not, therefore, entitled to judge that it is invariably a “bad thing” that men believe derivations, ideologies, myths, formulas, these verbal constructions which from a scientific standpoint always contain a large measure of the false and the absurd. The myths are, in the first place, a necessary ingredient of social life. A society in which they would be eliminated in favor of exclusively scientific beliefs would have nothing in common with the human societies that have existed and do exist in the real world, and is a merely imaginary fantasy.

Society is not so simple as a problem in mathematics, which is fully solved once ignorance is overcome. Not only is it impossible that all men should know the scientific truth about society and act in accordance with this knowledge; it is far from clear that this would improve society even if it were possible.

If theologians have diminished in number among our educated people and lost much of their power, metaphysicists, properly so called, are still prospering and enjoying fame and influence, to say nothing of those metaphysicists who call themselves ‘positivists’ or under some other name are merrily overstepping the boundaries of the logico-experimental. Many scientists who are supremely great in the natural sciences, where they use logico-experimental principles exclusively or almost so, forget them entirely when they venture into the social sciences.

In some such way we shall be able to distinguish, at least roughly, the élite or better the élites in society from the mass. We shall quickly observe, moreover, that human beings are not distributed evenly over the scale. At the top there are very few, considerably more in the middle; but the overwhelming majority are grouped near the bottom. The élite is always a small minority.

The character of a society, Pareto holds, is above all the character of its élite; its accomplishments are the accomplishments of its élite; its history is properly understood as the history of its élite; successful predictions about its future are based upon evidence drawn from the study of the composition and structure of its élite.

Special principles of selection, different in different societies, affect the composition of the élite so that it no longer includes all those persons best fitted for social rule. Weaknesses set in; and, not compensated by a gradual day-by-day circulation, if they go far enough they are corrected sharply by social revolution: that is, by the sudden intrusion into the élite of large numbers of individuals hitherto prevented by the obstacles from finding their natural social level.

From these considerations it follows that a relatively free circulation of the élites—both up and down the social scale—is a requisite for a healthy and a strong society. Conversely, it follows that when in a society the élite becomes closed or nearly closed, that society is threatened either with internal revolution or with destruction from outside.

To put the matter simply: a given society will include a certain and relatively stable percentage of, for example, clever individuals; but an enormous difference to the society and its development will result from the extent to which these clever individuals are concentrated in its élite, or spread evenly throughout the entire population, or even concentrated in the non-élite.

Pareto cites ancient Athens as a typical example of a state with a heavy proportion of Class I residues in its élite, and an unusually large proportion even in the non-élite (where Class II residues almost always greatly predominate). From this distribution sprang many of the glories of Athens, as well as the extraordinarily rapid shifts in its fortunes. In every field, economic, political, and cultural, Athens welcomed the new, and was ready for any adventure.

Sparta, in extreme contrast, was a nation where Class II residues were wholly predominant both in the general population and in the élite. Innovation in Sparta was a crime; everything was regulated by ancient custom and religion and time-sanctified tradition. The individual counted for nothing, the group for all. Adventure was always to be distrusted. From these roots Sparta derived a tremendous power of endurance when faced with adversity. But she always stopped short of anything spectacular. She produced no philosophy, no liquid wealth, and little art. She never tried to establish a great empire.