Weekly Worker 662 Thursday March 1 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Roots of modern morality

Born into a wealthy family in Florence on May 3 1469, Niccolò Machiavelli was educated in the classical tradition of his class. Later he developed close relations with the ruling elites both in Italy and other parts of Europe. He gained a profound insight into statecraft: how rulers rule. After the Medici family regained power in Florence in 1512, Machiavelli retired from political life and took up the pen. Most famous of all his books was The prince (Il principe) which was published five years after his death in 1527. It caused outrage amongst church circles and brought ‘Machiavellian’ into the popular lexicon - a pejorative term for one who deceives and manipulates others for personal gain. Gerry Downing seeks to put the record straight

Niccolò Machiavelli’s The prince was addressed to Giuliano de’ Medici (1454-1478), in the first place, advising him how he should conduct himself in his striving to attain an ill defined but broadly accepted end: stability in order to both advance the common welfare of the citizens of his beloved state, Florence, and win glory for himself. To succeed Giuliano must understand the real world.

Machiavelli’s premise, indicated by the phrase, “among so many who are not virtuous”, assumes an evil human nature explicitly spelled out in The prince: “One can make this generalisation about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers; they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well they are yours … but when in danger they turn away”;¹  and later: “Men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you”, so you must get your retaliation in first and “you need not keep your word to them”.²  This accepts uncritically the church doctrine of the ‘fall of man’ and humanity’s sinful nature and puts Machiavelli on the wrong side of the later enlightenment debate - together with Thomas Hobbes, whose mantra was Homo homini lupus est.³ 

In 1512 the house of Medici overthrew the Florentine oligarchic republic set up by the monk, Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), and re-instituted a principality representing the interests of the landowning nobility and merchants. During the renaissance the rising city-states of northern Italy in particular had to forge a more realistic moral ethic than that of the church, because what made them wealthy was virtù - in the words of the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), “courage, vigour, fortitude in adversity, public achievement, order, discipline, happiness, strength, justice, above all assertion of one’s proper claims and the knowledge and power needed to secure their satisfaction”.⁴ 

These were the guiding moral ethics of the leaders the Greek polis and the Roman republic (slave-owning, but nonetheless often similarly oligarchic republics), whose virtù should be restored, Machiavelli believed. The church hypocritically preached “humility, kindness, faith in god, sanctity, christian love, unwavering truthfulness, compassion”, whilst being enormously corrupt and using the mass immolations of the inquisition to impose their rule.⁵  This was wholly inadequate for the rising maritime powers of northern Italy that needed free thinkers and men of independent enterprise who could carve out a new world and bring wealth from the opportunities opened up by the new trade routes to the east.

The new man - and the prince here is taken to represent the best of the leadership qualities that was needed in all enterprising citizens - must become half-man and half-beast and in the latter role he must “learn from the fox and the lion … one must be a fox in order to recognise traps and a lion to frighten off wolves”.⁶ 

Christian morality did orientate to the poor with a universal - but profoundly hypocritical - egalitarianism: after they were dead, but with some threatening implications for the here and now. In discussing the dilemma posed above, Berlin has the following to say: “One of the deepest assumptions of western political thought is the doctrine … that there exists some single principle which not only regulates the course of the sun and the stars, but ascribes proper behaviour to all animate creatures. Animals and all sub-rational beings follow it by instinct; higher beings attain to consciousness of it.”⁷ 

This is to conflate totally separate ‘principles’: the religious notion that god’s intentions determine the fate of man; and the natural law of the scientific method that was in gestation during the renaissance and fought against by the heroes of dualist reaction. The revolutionary essence of The prince implied that the evolution of society itself might be a law-driven, not a god-decreed, process.

Satisfied with this sleight of hand, Berlin then goes on to invert the revolutionary character of Machiavelli’s book: “This unifying monistic pattern is at the very heart of the traditional rationalism, religious and aesthetic, metaphysical and scientific, transcendental and naturalistic, that has been classic of western civilisation. It is the rock upon which western beliefs and lives have been founded, that Machiavelli seems in effect, to have split open.”⁸ 

This is profoundly incorrect. Dominant western philosophy is dualist: the church hails the fall of the world of antiquity as the triumph of the spirit over the flesh; it idealistically proposes an unbridgeable separation between thinkers and doers, between mind and matter, with god as the disembodied mind directing everything. Modern idealist thought merely elevates man’s intentions to a sort of partnership with god (implicitly even in the case of idealist atheists): eg, all history is intention-driven by great men. Modern dualist idealism is closely allied to the religious doctrine upon which dominant western thought is ultimately based.

There are therefore two fundamental philosophical world outlooks: empirical, pragmatic, experimental monism; and hypocritical, dogmatic, idealistic dualism. A dualist morality is explicitly hypocritical. Morality must be monist. There are not therefore two or even more moral standards, as Berlin proposes: the ancient world outlook of virtù now re-established by Machiavelli and the religious one of the church. There is but one moral integrity, which must apply to all human relations.

But surely this does not apply to princes and by implication to all politicians? Surely it is permissible for them to lie and dissimulate and even murder or launch wars on falsified evidence for the greater good of the people at large under the mantra of ‘reasons of state’? They certainly do this all the time. So was Machiavelli correct in his admiration of Cesare Borgia (c 1475-1507) and justified in condoning the murder of his hated but successful agent in the Romagna? Isaiah Berlin’s profoundly pessimistic, ‘end of history’ piece proposes that Machiavelli has refuted the notion that there is a “final solution of the question of how men might live” and the search for it is “not merely utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent”.⁹ 

Because Machiavelli addressed his book to a prince he implicitly abandoned the progressive republicanism of that age and embraced the elitism of semi-feudal dictatorship - hence the necessity for so much dissimulation and manipulation. The political skills of sending coded messages to those elites whom the political leader really represented and so ensure their loyalty whilst posing as the champions of others, or of all in later history, are here seen in their infancy.

However, we cannot countanance the evaluation of the book, a là Rousseau, to a closet republican lampoon of princes. Surely the apparent dual moral standards of The prince stem from the necessity of adressing the Medici prince to enhance his own political prospects, which necessitates accepting the narrowing of the seat of political power. Moral dualism in a republic would then be lessened because that seat would be broader, but it could only historically be overcome by extending it to the whole of humanity - a prospect then not concievable. Heaven on earth, or the new Jerusalem, was first proposed, contradictorally, by the repressive catholic dogmatist, Thomas More, in his book Utopia a few centuries later.

Machiavelli was certainly not the first, but he was the most important, early-modern character forcefully to point out the unbridgeable contradictions between the idealised world of religious dogma and the real world of murderous popes and bloodthirsty princes of all ilk fighting it out in the extremely fractious and frequently invaded city-states of renaissance Italy: “Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist.”¹⁰ 

Machiavelli addressed real situations and proposed solutions developed from his own historical studies and personal experiences, and had little regard for what god might have intended. That is, he attempted to apply the scientific method of theory, based on empirical observation, to social relations as a guide to practice - that is what scandalised the church. His is a consequentialist and not a deontological view of history, so a precursor of the 19th century utilitarians, Bentham and Mill. But his monism also led, via the pantheism of Spinoza and Hegel, to atheism and modern Marxist philosophy.

In refuting any ahistorical set of moral precepts in his 1936 pamphlet Their morals and ours, Leon Trotsky has this to say: “A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified … the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man … Dialectic materialism does not know dualism between means and end. The end flows naturally from the historical movement. Organically the means are subordinated to the end.”¹¹  The end here justified is communism.

We have questioned Machiavelli’s end: the wellbeing of the citizens and glory for the prince. Attempts to reconcile his The discourses with The prince via patriotism simply do not work. Surely his famous grovel to the house of Medici gives the game away: “… and at the present time it is impossible to see in what she [Italy] can place more hope than in your illustrious house, which, with its fortune and prowess, favoured by god and by the church, of which it is now the head, can lead Italy to her salvation”.¹²  The fate of the northern Italian renaissance - snuffed out by an alliance between reactionary popes and feudal-minded princes against progressive republicanism - similarly testifies historically against him.

However, the modern pejorative term ‘Machiavellian’ is historically incorrect, because it simply means ‘one who deceives and manipulates others for gain’ and implies any means can justify any end, either for personal advancement or political ‘reasons of state’. Machiavelli had a far better, rationally developed morality than that: “For if everything is considered carefully, it will be found that something which looks like virtue, if followed, would be [man’s] ruin; whilst something else, which looks like vice, yet followed brings him security and prosperity.”¹³ 

The high moral principles of the monk-ruler Savonarola led to his execution and political ruin for the republic because he did not understand this. The progressive side of The prince was the rejection of the hypocritical, idealised world of the religious dogma of the struggle between good and evil, dominant throughtout the dark ages - and still with us unfortunately - and the pragmatic orientation to the real world understood by experience and the study of ancient Greece and Rome.

Machiavelli was therefore somewhat hypocritical in his advice to princes. We might say that he was too conservatively realist in accepting the status quo despite his own political preferences. He believed strongly in ‘stability’: resistance was futile, as those who take up arms against their masters “are deceived because they see later by experience that they have done worse.¹⁴ 

Nevertheless, he established the separation between the religious and the secular in practice, if inadequately in theory (both had to be developed in later history). He was therefore an important precursor of modern liberalism, but, contradictorarily, both communism/anarchism (in monist philisophy) and fascism (in repressive ‘law and order’) could also logically claim his heritage.

However much we might disagree with his solutions to these problems, the method of posing them helped establish modern political science - as, for example, Sigmund Freud did with psycoanalysis. Differences thereafter, even if only amongst the foremost thinkers at the beginning, were then fought out within the paramaters established by The prince.

Notes

 1. N Machiavelli The prince London 2003, p54.

 2. Ibid p57.

 3. ‘Man is wolf to man’. Coined by Titus Maccius Plautus, a Roman comedy play writer around 200 BC, and later used by Hobbes in The Leviathan.

 4. I Berlin The originality of Machiavelli from The proper study of mankind London 1998, p288.

 5. Ibid p44. The Cathar heretics suffered mass autos da fe in the Languedoc when that civilisation was suppressed by the church and the northern French in the 13th century in what is known as the Albigensian Crusade.

 6. N Machiavelli op cit pp56-57.

 7. I Berlin op cit pp308-09.

 8. Ibid p309

 9. Ibid p322.

 10. N Machiavelli op cit p50.

 11. L Trotsky Their morals and ours: www.ucc.ie/acad/appsoc/tmp_store/mia/Library/archive/trotsky/works/1936/1936-mor.htm.

 12. N Machiavelli op cit p82.

 13. Ibid p51.

 14. Ibid p8.

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