The aesthetics of power: thoughts on Machiavelli
Even in today’s cynical age Niccolo Machiavelli’s disturbing treatise goes too far
It is quite possible to study political philosophy without reading most — or even many — of the great classics. The Prince by the Renaissance statesman Niccolo Machiavelli was one of my glaring omissions. I knew the essay through commentaries, but only when it was set as a book group choice was I obliged to read the original text.
In brief, it’s a complex work that provoked complex reaction. Some of it makes for dry reading, a treatise written by a courtier for nobles, a book from a remote age. But its cumulative impact is unsettling, Machiavelli’s deceptively powerful argument tempting the reader to give casual consent to the use of state-sanctioned deceit, repression and murder. Sometimes one can only think things through by writing. So, some thoughts:
‘The ruler who never stands idle’
Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1516 to court the favour of new patrons after he was exiled from his native Florence in the course of the ceaseless ebb and flow of Renaissance politics. He intended his little book to impress: to demonstrate a mastery of the art of statecraft cultivated during the years in which he served the city state as a senior ambassador. But by the mid-16th century it had already acquired the sulphurous reputation it still has today.
It was added to the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books as early as 1559, deemed a threat to the classical political ideal, adopted and transfigured by Christian theologians, that the state should be governed in accordance with the principles of virtue. In England Cardinal Reginald Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the book had been written by ‘Satan’s finger’, used by the court of Henry VIII to plot the English Church’s break with Rome. The figure of the ‘Machiavel’, the dark-robed schemer who advances by deceit and calculated violence soon became ubiquitous in Elizabethan drama.
But The Prince does not celebrate power for its own sake — at least, perhaps, not by design. When set beside Shakespeare’s great villains, all of whom possess a certain dark charisma but are undone by their ‘fatal flaw’, the distinctive qualities of Machiavelli’s ideal ruler come into focus. Gaius Marcius, whose military prowess earns him the honorary title of Coriolanus and takes him to the edge of power, is driven to abandon his city by the aristocratic pride that renders him unable to disguise his contempt for the ‘common cry of curs’, the multitude whose respect he must win. Macbeth, another great soldier, is never able to articulate quite why he wants power, his despotic rule haunted by the act of murder through which he seized the kingdom. Richard III exhibits ingenuity and cold intelligence in plotting his rise, but lacks the diplomacy and social graces necessary to reconcile his subjects to him.
Machiavelli’s Prince, however, blends all of the qualities necessary to both take and hold power, employing force, diplomacy and charm as required. His ideal ruler ‘never in peaceful times stands idle’, knowing that supremacy, once attained, must be maintained by ceaseless vigilance.
His first, never-ending task, is to maintain the state on a permanent war footing: ‘A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline’. He needs the personal charisma to recruit and cultivate an army prepared to give their lives for the sake of the strong and just rule he promises. He should diligently study military history, taking a great general of the past as his exemplar, ‘as it is said Alexander the Great imitated Achilles, Caesar Alexander, Scipio Cyrus.’ His leisure, too, should be dedicated to the constant imperative for military readiness. The Prince who hunts ‘learns something of the nature of localities, and gets to find out how the mountains rise, how the valleys open out, how the plains lie, and to understand the nature of rivers and marshes’: invaluable knowledge for imagining the course of future battles.
And he should guard against internal as well as external threats. Recognising that power ultimately resides with the people, the Prince must govern with strength and sensitivity. Machiavelli counsels his Prince ‘to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.’ Force is necessary to guarantee the state’s security, but that security should be for the sake of peace, the cultivation of a space in which the city’s subjects can prosper, commerce and culture flourishing within its garrisoned walls.
‘The lion and the fox’
But the threat must be there. In Machiavelli’s famous formulation, ‘it is much safer to be feared than loved’. The ruler must be prepared to act as ’the lion’ when the wiles of ‘the fox’ are insufficient. Like Achilles, nursed by the centaur Chiron, ‘it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man’. In the end loyalty is guaranteed by fear of punishment rather than gratitude for generosity. For Machiavelli ‘men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.’ The hard truth is that the leader capable of severity ‘will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only.’
Notoriously, the figure Machiavelli presents as the very model of his Prince was a man synonymous with cruelty even in his own cut-throat world. A son of Alexander VI, a Renaissance ‘Warrior Pope’, Cesare Borgia was admired — and feared — for pacifying and unifying the volatile Romagna, a swathe of northeastern Italy between Florence and Venice.
Borgia’s willingness to use violence without hesitation astonished even Machiavelli. On taking a new territory he consolidated his authority by ‘exterminating the families of those lords whom he had despoiled’. He cultivated alliances for the sole purpose of eliminating rival leaders, in one famous instance luring a delegation on the pretext of negotiations to a stronghold where they were killed as soon as the gates were closed behind them. When he suspected soldiers in his employ were ineffective but could not be trusted were he to let them go he simply had them executed. And he was prepared to dispatch over zealous lieutenants as well as those as who proved incompetent. The story of Ramiro d’Orco, as recounted in The Prince, is worth quoting at length:
When the duke occupied the Romagna he found it under the rule of weak masters, who rather plundered their subjects than ruled them, and gave them more cause for disunion than for union, so that the country was full of robbery, quarrels, and every kind of violence; and so, wishing to bring back peace and obedience to authority, he considered it necessary to give it a good governor. Thereupon he promoted Messer Ramiro d’Orco, a swift and cruel man, to whom he gave the fullest power. This man in a short time restored peace and unity with the greatest success. Afterwards the duke considered that it was not advisable to confer such excessive authority, for he had no doubt but that he would become odious, so he set up a court of judgment in the country, under a most excellent president, wherein all cities had their advocates. And because he knew that the past severity had caused some hatred against himself, so, to clear himself in the minds of the people, and gain them entirely to himself, he desired to show that, if any cruelty had been practised, it had not originated with him, but in the natural sternness of the minister. Under this pretence he took Ramiro, and one morning caused him to be executed and left on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side. The barbarity of this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed.’
But for Machiavelli Borgia was no mere warlord. His violence secured order more effectively than negotiation: ‘Cesare Borgia was considered cruel; notwithstanding, his cruelty reconciled the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty.’ His rare capacity for ruthlessness was accompanied by a facility for soft power. When his father died he exhibited considerable diplomatic skill in seeking to secure a sympathetic successor, courting influential families in Rome and turning the electoral college to his favour. Here, Machiavelli believes, was a ruler capable of uniting war-torn Italy had he not succumbed to an early death:
[H]e who considers it necessary to secure himself in his new principality, to win friends, to overcome either by force or fraud, to make himself beloved and feared by the people, to be followed and revered by the soldiers, to exterminate those who have power or reason to hurt him, to change the old order of things for new, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy a disloyal soldiery and to create new, to maintain friendship with kings and princes in such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend with caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this man.
With Machiavelli’s admiration for Borgia we plumb the dark depths of The Prince. For all his insistence that the ideal ruler should handle authority like a strung bow, holding force and graciousness in tension, one cannot but feel that here the writer has been seduced by the fascination of sheer power. For him, Borgia’s calculated ruthlessness has a brutal, pure logic: the gap between thought and action is closed with the inevitability of a mathematical deduction. Like Achilles, schooled by the centaur, Borgia kills without hesitation: intention and action flow seamlessly. Power exercised by Borgia, as with Homer’s hero, has an aesthetic quality. It is revealing that Machiavelli went so far as to dress for the part when writing:
Come evening, I walk home and go into my study. In the passage I take off my ordinary clothes, caked with mud and slime, and put on my formal palace gowns. Then when I’m properly dressed I take my place in the courts of the past where the ancients welcome me kindly and I eat my fill of the only food that is really mine and that I was born for.
It is this celebration of the daemonic dimension of power that disturbs and fascinates Machiavelli’s readers. He was writing during an age when the humanist values of the classical world were being rediscovered, when attention was shifting from the transcendent to the sphere of practical human interest. The belief that every sphere of life, including the administration of the state, could be governed according to a harmonious set of values was being questioned. The public realm, it seemed, must sometimes be managed according to moral imperatives unlike those that should be observed by the private individual.
But The Prince pushes beyond that to something stranger — a barely disguised relish for the glamour of unvarnished power. Even today, when we are so cynical about the possibilities and purpose of politics, The Prince seems to go too far, seems inappropriate as a manual for government. We can acknowledge, today, that statesmanship is always compromised by frequent need to resort to evasion, low cunning and force. But we don’t believe such power should be exercised for its own sake. We do not justify deceit, torture and summary execution whatever purpose it may serve.
And this, perhaps, is what makes The Prince worth reading today, more than half a millennium after it was written. Machiavelli makes us think hard about what power is for, and how it should be exercised. The exploits of his Renaissance rulers present us with a dark world from which we recoil. We want to hold on to at least something of the old ideal that power should serve an end beyond itself, and that it matters how it is employed. The Prince takes us to the edge of the abyss. But, for all the power his book, we still pull back.
