You Are A Machiavellian (Probably)

We have been trained to think of Machiavelli as the apologist for power politics. In fact, his passion for the ideal of liberty was so strong, it cost him his career and almost cost him his life. - Arthur Herman

You are a Machiavellian. Well, probably....

At the very least I am willing to bet you are far more sympathetic to Machiavelli's philosophy than you think you are.

And a good number of you are honest-to-goodness Machiavellians.

But Eric, that can't be true? Wasn't Machiavelli, like, evil? Didn't he say "the ends justify the means?" I don't believe that!

Yes, you do.

But even more importantly, you probably have next to no idea what Machiavelli ever actually argued for.

How many of us can really define what is meant by "the ends justify the means?" How many of us can explain anything else about Machiavelli beyond that silly quote?

Don't worry, it's not your fault.

Our schools today don't teach about esoteric Italian political thinkers, like Machiavelli. Because in the modern world of technology and AI, who cares about such irrelevant topics as... politics?

It's simply more important to cover what Elon Musk said to a dumb reporter in a lame interview. Our schools and media just don't have time to talk about political philosophy.

So that's where I come in, to give you a little insight into the hogwash baloney you've been eating most of your life. Today's main course — Machiavelli.

Let's dive in.

What Are We Eating?

As with anything, you can't know if you're a Machiavellian unless you know what it means to be a Machiavellian.

(This is also why you can't say you are NOT a Machiavellian if you don't know what he taught in the first place).

I know, for example, that I am not a chicken, because I know both what it means to be a human and what it means to be a chicken (and I am not that).

But if I don't know what it means to be a chicken, or a democrat, or a communist, or a woman, then how can I be sure I am not one?

So let's figure out what it means to be a Machiavellian. In order to do that, we begin with the master — Machiavelli.

The Appetizer — Florence In The 15th Century

I am not going to spend too much time covering the biographical details of Machiavelli's life (you all have Google), but it is important to know several things.

Machiavelli lived in Florence in the 15th century. This is important because after the Fall of the Roman Republic, Florence would be the only significant self-governing polity until The United States of America.

The Florentine people were obsessed with liberty, and one of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance (who ran the city for some time) once said of its inhabitants:

The Florentine People thought there could never be a life for them without liberty. -Leonardo Bruni

For a little over a century, Florence was one of the freest governments on Earth. Its people enjoyed spectacular wealth and prosperity during the republican period.

There was just one slight problem — the Medici family.

They continually sought control over the Florentine financial and political system. They dominated Florence for more than half a century.

The Medicis became a political ruling class — if you weren't in their pocket, you weren't likely to last long.

Their family was essentially a mob that ruled from the shadows and enriched their cronies at the expense of everyone else.

The Clintons — I mean the Medicis — were expelled from the city for a brief time in the late 1400s — but they came back with an army of angry Spaniards.

This is where Machiavelli comes in. For his whole life, he had lived in a Medici-ruled Florence. He was a trained classical humanist, and a life-long lover of liberty.

After the execution of Savonarola (that's another story), Niccolo Machiavelli rose to power in Florence before the return of the Medicis.

For years, Machiavelli was a leading figure in Florentine politics, always working to further liberty and civic rights to his citizens.

Hmm, not exactly what you would expect from the supposedly cynical author of The Prince.

In his book, The Cave and The Light, historian Arthur Herman describes this period of Machiavelli as vitally important to understanding his later works:

The writer is no armchair strategist. For fourteen years he loyally served the restored Florentine republic, traveling and negotiating with the leading political personalities of his day, including the pope, the kings of France and Spain, and the sinister Cesare Borgia.

This all comes to an end in a military battle with the Spaniards. Because Machiavelli was a classical humanist, he had believed what Aristotle taught about national defense.

In his Politics, Aristotle argued that free people form a better army than mercenaries, because free people have a greater desire to die for their homeland.

The image of the soldier farmer of Athens putting down his plowshare and picking up a spear in defense of his home has a romantic appeal to it.

There is an intuitive appeal as well — when you own something yourself, you are more likely to defend it vigorously than when it is owned by someone else.

Unfortunately, farmers and bankers don't typically fight as well as experienced and trained professional soldiers.

Machiavelli spent three years training an army of bankers and landowners. These citizen-soldiers almost immediately abandoned the battlefield when confronted with death.

Florence was captured, Machiavelli was banished, and the republican experiment effectively came to an end.

The Main Course — Machiavellianism Born

So now we can ask the question that Machiavelli would spend the rest of his life answering — what happened?

In his lifetime, he had seen both a truly republican model and a theocratic Church-led model fail miserably against corruption and power.

How was Machiavelli to understand this? Well, to get a sense of his answer, you have to read his work, Discourses.

Uh, Eric, I'm pretty sure you mean "The Prince." That's Machiavelli's big work. This guy....

Yes, it's true that most people use The Prince to understand Machiavelli's political philosophy, but unfortunately very few people read the Discourses.

You cannot interpret The Prince (a small personal letter written to a politician) without reading his earlier work Discourses (a large professional work of philosophy).

In Discourses, Machiavelli sought to combine Aristotle's formula of a Republic with the Latin thinker Polybius' idea of the inevitable "historical cycle of rise and decline."

As Herman succinctly put it, Machiavelli develops a paradox in the Discourses that would become crucial to his political philosophy:

For in writing the Discourses, Machiavelli discovered a basic paradox: When it comes to liberty, nothing fails like success.

In other words, the freer a society becomes, the weaker, more decadent, and immoral a society becomes.

This is an idea very familiar to most conservative philosophers, and it is the cornerstone of Machiavelli's philosophy.

When a republic built on principles of liberty necessarily expands its power, it will grow in riches and prosperity.

But in that process, Machiavelli argues, a free society loses the balance of power that made it great at the start.

A free society's "basic principles will be subverted, and it will soon be faced with ruin."

Herman again describes an idea that should be very comfortable for conservative readers, despite traditionally disliking its author:

[For Machiavelli] the habits of wealth and luxury undermine the important virtues necessary to sustain free institutions, including honor and service in arms — even the passion for freedom itself. Men become soft and effeminate, like the bakers and tinkers of Machiavelli's failed militia. People prefer the comfortable life to the stern sacrifices of their forefathers.

This is the core of Machiavellianism — that free societies are doomed by their own prosperity and successes.

The only solution to this fundamental problem? You need a good man to do bad things in order to save a society from collapse. You need The Prince.

Desert — You are a Machiavellian

Okay, the last piece of the puzzle is how so-called "power politics" fits in, and then you can see why you are likely a Machiavellian.

Well, and this may be a shock for some, Machiavelli wasn't a defender of power politics.

In fact, he was brutally tortured by the government of his time just because his name was so largely associated with the advocates of free government.

So, what did he advocate for exactly? What was “the prince” if not a power politician?

There is a fundamental element to Machiavelli's philosophy that virtually everyone misses — he believed in an objective Good.

Power politics is grounded in the belief that nothing ultimately matters, so you might as well accumulate as much power as possible with no regard for morality.

And if you have to slit a few throws or "suicide" a few pedophile billionaires along the way, then so be it. Power is the only end in itself.

Machiavelli never advocated such a philosophy. He begins his philosophy with assuming that there is a moral and objective Good that transcends time and human culture.

Remember, he was an avid reader of Plato and Aristotle. He believed that one's politics had to conform with morality — Goodness, Truth, and Beauty were ends in themselves, not power.

This is the meaning of "the ends justify the means." That is power is a means of bringing about an objectively Good end.

I always wonder what people could possibly think that quote means if they have no idea what they're talking about.

To say "the end" justifies "the means" is to say that the ultimate Good is the end of your action, and if you bring the ultimate Good about by some violation of law, you’re justified by the fact that you brought about the Good.

This is almost a tautology — if you bring about the Good, and you can only do this by violating some moral principle or law, then even though you committed an evil, you did something objectively good.

Machiavelli also assumed this had to be a last resort of a dying republic. Someone, who was objectively good, becomes a tyrant to save the republic from doom.

Most people, therefore, are Machiavellians for two reasons —

1. They believe there is an objective Good.

2. They are willing to violate moral principles that they normally hold in order to achieve things they believe are objectively good.

Most people are comfortable with killing Hitler as a baby in order to avoid the Holocaust. Most people are fine with seizing someone's private property if they need it to save a life, or prevent a crime.

Most conservatives are good with DeSantis or Trump assuming enormous governmental power in violation of traditional conservative principles in order to "drain the swamp."

Liberals and conservatives alike are Machiavellians, because we all believe there is some objective Good that society is aiming for, and most of us believe it is the role of the state to do what it can to get us to that Good.

Now, you can have all sorts of ethical debates —

Would you kill an innocent baby for the salvation of the whole world, Eric?? Huh? See, the ends don't justify the means!!

— and those debates have their purpose. But, Machiavelli was not an ethicist. He considered himself mostly a historian.

In history, you have to deal with people as they really are, not as you'd like them to be. The same is true of dealing with the world — the real world is typically not a place of ethical thought experiments.

Interestingly enough, it never actually is the case that you are given the chance to murder an innocent child for the salvation of the whole world.

(I also suspect most people would take that deal, despite what they may believe philosophically, especially if their own salvation were assured).

The evils that Machiavelli talks about are really a kind of political evil. He describes a Prince that is willing to violate the political freedoms of his people in order to crush the enemies of freedom.

What's more, he acknowledges that the actions taken by such a person are always evil. The ends justify the action he takes, but they do not somehow make the action good.

Thus, he is not making an argument for ethical consequentialism, despite most people's erroneous opinion to the contrary.

Conclusion

So there you have it, you're (probably) a Machiavellian.

Even if you do not agree with Machiavelli in principle (and there is good reason not to), it's likely that in practice you are far closer to Machiavelli than you think.

If he were alive and well today, I suspect Machiavelli would be one of the biggest threats to Trump's eminent GOP nomination.

Most conservatives do feel that our current political crisis is in need of a good man with a lot of power to correct.

At the very least, consider thinking of Machiavelli with a little more sympathy, and a little less indignation — he is one of history's great martyrs of liberty.

As always, thanks for reading!

Further Reading

The Cave and The Light: Plato Versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization by Arthur Herman

Discourses by Niccolo Machiavelli

Politics by Aristotle