History 119, European Cultural History 1500-1815 - Summary

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Lecture #3 - Machiavelli - 42:17 (mp3)
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In the previous lecture,  Mosse gave an overview of the Renaissance and talked about the political pessimism that forced the creative instincts of the nation into artistic and literary channels. The return to the classics was meant to revive the virtues of man in an Italy where all virtue seemed lacking in the face of despots, mercenary armies, and a lust for power. Now, it was Niccolo Machiavelli who tried to build a bridge to moral regeneration through art, literature, and politics. The dates of Machivelli’s birth- and death (1469-1527) are important: He was an older contemporary of Luther.

Unlike Dante and other humanists, Machiavelli was an active statesman, who had occupied a leading political position until the Medici came to power and exiled him. In exile from a Florence ruled by despotism, he wrote his “Meditations” derived from the politics of Florence. What he wrote in his “Prince” and “Discourses” were the kind of things politicians were discussing at the time, but he gave them clarity and form: the doldrums of the times, fossilization of the social structure, despots, degeneration, decline of social mobility, etc. Machiavelli at the end saw the “Prince” as the only active person in Italy, and he tried to revive the civic spirit by stressing the importance of a citizen army; thus his interest in war and the art of war. (The Medici had come to power through the incursion of a foreign power, thus Machiavelli was interested in the art of war not for conquest, but for civic spirit). He wanted to revive political consciousness. Political consciousness was for him the essence of all  things. He oscillated between optimism and pessimism.

But Machiavelli became more than a man of his time. His name became a slogan in Europe, denoting a new attitude toward politics. It is this new attitude which forms the crux of his influence. What he emphasized and exulted from the beginning was the community, a new and meaningful community in a time of fragmentation and dictatorship. A new civic spirit was needed for a meaningful community. For Machiavelli, that community must be a political, as well as a cultural community. This insight led to his fundamental conclusion: Politics is separate from all other human activities, and political demands must be put above all other demands to lead to renewal. Why this emphasis on politics as separate and above all others? Machiavelli saw the community as a political society, a political body having its own laws of existence. This was totally new. But we must add: the well-being of any society (and it can only be well if politics dominate, in the sense of a participatory community) depends less on its institutions than on the kind of spirit standing behind it: this spirit must be a single-minded willpower giving to man a heightened sense on the common good which made him focus on the community itself. Thus, Machiavelli from the very beginning puts forth an ideal commonwealth as a unified body of men which acts with the strength and willpower necessary for political success.

 How can it come about? Machiavelli was pessimistic about the world he saw around him, a world dominated by change and struggle. The answer was “fortune.”  Not as we of the Christian world see it, where God either punishes or praises you according to your morality. Fortune for him was constant change, with which any politics will have to cope. In this sense he was a relativist: There was no best action, no single best form of government in such a world; what matters is the political spirit which leads to success, but this political spirit will have to be informed by relativism, for otherwise it will never be able to cope with the flux of fortune.

What can we say about the deeper level of Machiavelli’s ideas? His method is very important. For in taking the view of the “autonomy of politics” in a changing world, his method was to carry the Renaissance to a point of complete realism. But his realism was not immoral, as Christianity thought it was; he believed that like all other moral/ethical systems, the maxims of Christian morality must be judged by their consequences. If a maxim of Christian morality is politically harmful, it must be pointed out, lest it leads to political disaster. Within a Christian frame of reference, this was indeed revolutionary. For eternal values were now not eternal at all: They might have bad consequences. Morals in the Christian sense were relegated to the same plane as any other custom and institution. The main thing was to cope with fortune (change) through politics; otherwise there could be no good commonwealth. Contrast that with Martin Luther who said that if you deny God in one thing, you deny God in all things.

Central to Machiavelli’s view was a sense that Christianity had failed politically with the rise of the despots. Political failure was also a moral failure. The humanists tried to substitute the morality of Christ with the morality of Plato. Machiavelli came to see Christianity as something that could either be useful or on occasion had to be scrapped. In any case it was artificial for him, having no eternal value. The sins which ruined states were military and political sins, not moral ones. This does not mean that Machiavelli is without morality: what is important is the spirit behind politics, and this spirit is a form of morality. It is the morality of the Roman Republic, of civic participation. Through this, you get the well-ordered state so little in evidence during the Renaissance. It would bring out the basic capabilities and goodness of men. The greatest obstacle was Christianity to be sure, but above all, it was the passions of men. 

Here he does something commonplace, since even for the Greeks, passion was the obstacle. For Machiavelli, it was the passion for power and ruling exemplified by the despots. How do you overcome it? Machiavelli concluded that things were so bad that before we could have the well-ordered state, we must have the right kind of man: a man who has virtue. The man who has virtue is for Machiavelli he who is imbued with the spirit of politics and makes political success his main end, but political success measured within the framework of the good society.

To answer the question how this ideal could be brought about, Machiavelli wrote the “Prince”. This Prince should curb man’s passion for power, cut down despots, and rule by enlightened despotism to prepare for the “good” community. All his advice for the prince is political advice, to make him strong enough for political success to overcome the present degeneracy and prepare to for the reign of virtue. What is so shocking about it? His end was a classical, not a Christian end. God is in a way “fortune,” and ruled out of Machiavelli’s political scheme. This was highly shocking at the time. The second term was the autonomy of politics: there can be no intrinsically wrong action. To reach the ideal commonwealth, you can use any kind of action-as long as your passion for ruling is curbed. A phrase became associated with Machiavelli, coined by him: “Reason of State.” It becomes current in Europe from this time on, meaning that the state is the highest good, and eventually came to stand for any state. The second term was “Policy.”  It means originally that all sorts of actions can be taken in order to bring about the good commonwealth, the overcoming of fortune by virtue.  This word is the origin of the word “politician.”

With the reaction against Machiavelli, politics became a bad word. In 1621, an author in northern Europe used it along with epicureans, Sadducees, and libertines. The end of policy however was a moral one, a participatory republic. The means had to be drastic in Machiavelli’s Italy. The ruler-centeredness of “the Prince” was only a means. That too, people forgot later on. Cesare Borgia was Machiavelli’s hero, because he tried to unite Italy. This also gave Machiavelli a bad name. To understand him, we need to talk about two more things: how does he compare with other, more “normal” concepts of ruler ship, and, how did he get assimilated into Christianity itself? The advice to rulers by other humanists is the common Christian one: the ruler is responsible to God and had to behave like a good Christian. There was no “reason of state,” only Christian morality. The check on the ruler was a moral check, found in Christian morality. This provided the explanation for the barrenness of Queen Elizabeth in 16th -century England: her grandfather had sinned. This was the usual humanist way of dealing with the problem; it still assumes a Christian universe where sin is punished.

The central idea of Machiavelli was: How can a man who is good cope with an evil world? He must have the end goal in view: the commonwealth. He must cope through politics, as Mosse has defined it. For the Christian view, it is irrelevant and silly, because every man is tainted by sin, and the world is not evil because it was created and redeemed by God, who would deal with sin eventually. Throughout the 16th and 17th century, Machiavellianism was a swearword, but we notice a subtle change in what was considered allowable action, in Christian terms. At the beginning of the 16th century, one influential man said that the only thing wrong with Cesare Borgia is that he forgot the kingdom of God, a Christian commonwealth. For that end, more and more means are allowable. For example for Richelieu Machiavelli was justified by one passage n the bible: Abraham lied about his wife Sarah. Another passage that justified Machiavelli was Joshua’s Ambush on Jericho, approved of by God. In other passages, too, Machiavellism and Christian morality did not clash. Machiavelli was assimilated into Christianity by first, approving more and more means and simply saying the goal is wrong, and second by “casuistry” the use of passages from the bible. A third way of assimilating him was found in the sermons preached by the Pilgrim Fathers when leaving Holland: God’s revelation must to be followed; every opportunity that God puts in your way you must exploit. 

Machiavelli was the beginning of a conscious new politics, of a conscious acceptance of politics as a struggle for power in which almost all means are justified. This means of course an erosion of the moral checks of Christianity. It must be clear now that Machiavelli was from now on a factor in European thought, and also a climax of secularism. While all this was developing in Italy, a dialectical process was at work contemporaneously, like always in history: Luther in Germany, and a different kind of Rebirth in the North. Both would flow into the mainstream, but at first, the Renaissance was different in the North because it still maintained its medieval political structures and attitudes. It was an agrarian feudal civilization, not an urban one. While the Italian Renaissance wore its “Sunday dress”, the Northern one was much closer tied to popular fears. Luther was a “Man of the People”, closer to them than the humanists in Italy. Popular beliefs were vital to the Northern Renaissance.

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