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Machiavelli’s MoralsBy Hillay ZmoraThe “Prince of Darkness” on human virtue. Preview:
In all of Niccolò Machiavelli’s works, there is no passage more “Machiavellian” than the speech in the third book of his Florentine Histories by an anonymous leader of the popular revolt of 1378. The leader attempts to persuade his followers that after all the violence they have already committed—arson, looting, and the pillaging of churches—it would be a grave error to stop now. If they want their old evils to be forgiven, he tells them, they ought to commit new ones. “When many err,” he explains, “no one is punished, and though small faults are punished, great and grave ones are rewarded.” This is followed by a passage worth quoting at length:
This speech may not encapsulate the entirety of Machiavelli’s political thought, but it is vintage Machiavelli. In its tone and content, it is especially reminiscent of The Prince.2 Here, as in The Prince, Machiavelli argues that life presents instances in which an overriding danger and urgency dictate resolute, extreme, and even savage actions necessary for defense, survival, and the improvement of our lot. When such conditions arise, pangs of conscience or concessions to morality are self-defeating.
The view expressed in this speech claims the dignity of a general theory. The clearest example of this is the assertion that appears throughout Machiavelli’s writings to the effect that power and wealth can be achieved only by force or fraud, or both. This is presented in the speech as an axiom of political life: “God and nature” arranged it thus. One may, of course, decline to take part in the struggle for power and wealth, but one cannot escape the consequences of such a choice. The good and the meek may be assured that the strong will prey upon them, and the world will remain the same as before: Power-driven, restless, and remorseless.
Such convictions seem to lend weight to the popular belief according to which Machiavelli held a dualistic conception of politics and morality. To the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce, for example, Machiavelli’s originality lay in his discovery that politics is an autonomous enterprise divorced from ethics.3 Other scholars have disagreed with this. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, held that Machiavelli did not differentiate between politics and ethics, but rather between two different kinds of ethics.4 Nevertheless, his popular image as a cynical thinker is due to Machiavelli’s pronouncements concerning the relationship between politics and morality.5 Indeed, as early as 1532, the year it appeared in print, The Prince was referred to sarcastically as “the golden book of morality.”6
Time would only confirm Machiavelli’s status as the enemy of decent people. In Elizabethan drama he is regularly invoked to play the part of evil personified; Shakespeare refers to him as “the murderous Machiavel”;7 and in the nineteenth century, he appears as a protagonist in Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell Between Montesquieu and Machiavelli (which later gave inspiration to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), where he is made to maintain that politics and morality are poles apart.8
In contrast to this portrayal of Machiavelli, it is my intention here to show that he in fact believed morality to be a central component in political life. Machiavelli, it will be argued, understood morality and politics to be closely linked—but in a very subtle way that challenges, or even contravenes, common assumptions about their relationship. In Machiavelli’s view of the nature of man, it is a grave error to attempt to force politics to conform to the dictates of ethical theory; when politics strives to be moral, it achieves the destruction of the very conditions necessary for moral existence. In all that we do to regulate public life and provide for security and welfare in human society, it is immoral to be moral. Such is the irony of politics. The tragedy of politics, however, is that the alternative is no less dangerous. Little good can result when the art of politics forsakes morality entirely.
It is a terrible paradox, then, that the moral existence of a society can be secured only by political foundations whose creation requires the very means that undermine common morality: Force, cruelty, and deceit.
But this paradox is not the familiar claim about the need to employ evil means for good ends. For one thing, there is hardly any good as such in Machiavelli’s world, and his ends, certainly from a modern liberal perspective, are often as dirty as the means.9 For another, the business of laying solid political foundations on which moral existence can repose is not a one-time task. Given human nature, it involves unending maintenance, from which it follows that the threat to morality is as continuous as the threat to survival. In this predicament, man has no universal, foolproof rules of conduct to guide either his political deliberations or his moral choices. In this view, not only politics, but morality too is in a perpetual crisis, engulfed in uncertainty and constrained by necessity. And yet, although ours is not a good world, temporary islands of stability can be created in it, and reasonable levels of security and prosperity can be achieved—and these are the circumstances in which morality can thrive. In light of the nature of man and his world, even a partial success is a resounding one. And the fact that such success might contain within it the seeds of ultimate failure is no reason to despair. Hillay Zmora is a senior lecturer in history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a Contributing Editor of Azure. He is the editor of a new Hebrew translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince (Shalem Press and Dvir, 2003).
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