Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) Italian born writer, philosopher, & politician is considered as one of the founding fathers of modern political thought. His bold ideas served him well as he wrote what was to become a very influential book called “The Prince.”
Machiavelli was a true Florentine and both his parents were members of the Florentine nobility. He came from a poor household but he managed to receive a first-rate humanist education and managed to secure office in the Florentine civil service (1498). One can argue him to be democratic, as he helped chase the Medici family out and also because of his political experience with the Republic of Florentine (1498 – 1512).
In 1512 Spain was defeated and the Medici family was brought back into power. Suspected of plotting against the regime, Machiavelli was imprisoned, tortured and finally exiled to a country house forever banished from participating in politics. It is in this country house where Machiavelli writes ‘The Prince’ and his famous Letter to Francesco Vettori (1513). This letter gives insight into the desperate conditions within which he wrote his first political treatise.
The Letter to Francesco Vettori (1513) shows Machiavelli’s belief in ‘fate.’ He writes, “For anyone who sacrifices his own convenience in order to make others happy is bound to inconvenience himself, but can’t be sure of receiving any thanks for it. And since fortune wants to control everything, she evidently wants to be left a free hand: meanwhile we should keep our council and not get in her way, and wait until she allows human beings to have a say in the course of events.” Being born into a poor family he understood that making others happy required a sacrifice and that an act of kindness would be thankless. Also, one can imagine that due to the lack of control over his own life, he had a belief in the workings of fate and blamed fate for what happened to him. “And put up with the hostility that fate has shown me. I am happy for fate to see to what depths I have sunk, for I want to know if she will be ashamed of herself for what she has done.”
Machiavelli writes about what principality is, how many types of principality there are, how one acquires them, how one holds on to them and how one looses them, all while living in a situation of poverty and fear of the governing regime. He claims the purpose of the book is to provide Prince Lorenzo with a guide on how to become a successful and powerful ruler. However, Machiavelli knows that Lorenzo is not the one to become a powerful prince. In turn his book becomes a general guide for someone who will one day become a powerful ruler.
He wrote The Prince not as how he’d like things to be, but as what he understood of how power actually worked. One can even say that he was one of the first intellectuals to truly understand the nature of power. Machiavelli penned down all the political observations of his time as real as he saw them, without any soft spots. Today, to be Machiavellian is a synonym for being cunning, deceptive, power hungry and treacherous with no morals. To me this is a classic case of killing the messenger, coming from his political experiences and his current socioeconomic condition in 1512, he has every right to loath and be weary of Principalities if the Medici kind. During his exile, the Medici family and other princely families were behaving in the most ruthless manner, and Machiavelli was on the receiving end of the ruthlessness. Thus, one can conclude that Machiavelli was not Machiavellian.
The Prince suggests that the only thing that should be considered important to a prince is obtaining and maintaining power. The people are viewed as an inert mass that has to be molded by the prince as the single desire of people is to acquire. A good prince should be able to efficiently use the knowledge of the people to his advantage.
The central theme of The Prince is that power is not only one of the many things that exist, but it is the only thing that exists. In chapter 15 he seems to suggest that god is nonexistent and that idealism and religious guidelines would ruin a man. It is in this chapter one can find one of the most important chapters of the book, it states:
“I thought it be sensible to go straight into a discussion of how things are in real life and not waste time with the discussion of an imaginary world. For many authors have constructed imaginary republics and principalities that have never existed in practice and never could; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover that he has been taught to destroy himself, not how to preserve himself. For anyone who wants to act the part of a good man in all circumstances will bring about his own ruin, for those he has to deal with will not all be good. So it is necessary for a ruler, if he wants to hold on to power, to learn how not to be good, and know when it is and when it is not necessary to use this knowledge.”
In the first part of the passage, Machiavelli disregards all idealistic republics and principalities that have been introduced by previous philosophers. He makes it clear that all imagined political structures could not exist in pragmatic life. To sum it up, he is implying that what has been said about principalities and republics before him cannot be achieved and is unrealistic theory.
Machiavelli suggests that there is such a distance between utopian life and pragmatic life that we should only regard the way things are and forget about how they ought to be. If the Prince strives to do things the way they ought to be done, then it will cause the Prince to lose power.
This passage clearly shows Machiavelli to be a realist. If a prince is to be successful in obtaining and keeping power, he must be virtuous but in a sense he must act in a way that will get him what he wants. If this is achieved, then the actions taken would be virtuous according to Machiavellian theory. It also clearly shows Machiavelli’s views on human nature. People are not good and are selfish in their desires, their greatest desire is to acquire and the Prince must use this knowledge to instill fear in the people to keep them loyal, as their greatest fear is losing what they have.
Machiavelli goes on to outline five important qualities that any great ruler must appear to possess in order to obtain and maintain political power. These include acting contrary to faith, charity, humanity, religion, and of course, to maintain his government above all else.
He also suggests that it is better for a ruler to be feared instead of being seen as kind. This is because people are selfish and ungrateful. So no matter how much the prince gives, they will always want more and there will come a time when the prince is unable to satisfy their wants; thus they will begin to hate him.
Before Machiavelli, philosophers believed that virtues and vices were each other’s opposites but they could coexist. As people are always striving for virtue but pulled towards vices. Machiavelli goes against this school of thought and suggests that virtue should be the actions taken which bring about the desired outcome. So if lying, stealing and treachery gets one what they want, then they are in fact virtues.
Throughout The Prince a new realistic and influential thought process is introduced. In chapter 15 we find the core of the book and the central theme of obtaining and maintaining power. Machiavelli paves the way for future philosophers of modern political science to build on his theory and develop it as the dynamic science of politics continues to change.
