The standard reading of “The Prince” views it as Machiavelli’s attempt to ingratiate himself to the returning Medicis by offering them what amounted to a book-length job application: a treatise filled with underhanded tactics for seizing and maintaining power.
“It is much safer to be feared than loved”; “people should either be caressed or crushed”; “the new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict,” and “must inflict them once and for all.” This is the Machiavellian Machiavelli: amoral, conniving and cruel, responding to whatever the situation demands...
“Machiavelli is the master of disillusioning,” Boucheron writes. “That’s why, all through history, he’s been a trusted ally in evil times.”... A resurgence of Machiavelli suggests something has gone awfully awry. “If we’re reading him today,” Boucheron writes, “it means we should be worried.”
February 12, 2020
"In 'Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear,' the French historian Patrick Boucheron joins an estimable list of scholars who have been trying to debunk the crude stereotype of Machiavelli as a fascist enabler and tyrant whisperer."
I'm reading a book review by Jennifer Szalai in the NYT.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
39 comments:
The excerpt doesn’t seem to support the headline. Anyway, I’m less worried about the resurgence of Machiavelli, who was about keeping power, than I am about Alinsky, who was about getting power.
As Tim said, not debunking anything. Alinsky is Machiavelli with glee. SWJs with superpowers would kill you in a heartbeat.
"The excerpt doesn’t seem to support the headline."
I know. I tried to find material that would provide that support. I went back and looked again. There's:
"But it has always been hard to square such a literal reading with the facts of Machiavelli’s life, and with the republican theories he developed in books like “Discourses.” Some critics have insisted that Machiavelli’s advice was so brutal and outlandish that the depraved ruler who actually dared to put his precepts into practice would make his people hate him and inevitably bring about his own ruin; this was “The Prince” as Trojan horse or poison pill, crafted by a former political prisoner intent on bringing down the Medici clan. Still others decided Machiavelli was a satirist, while Rousseau read “The Prince” as a warning: Machiavelli, by dissecting the mechanics of power, was telling people what they ought to fear."
But that doesn't say what Boucheron says, which is the material I put in the post.
Between the excerpts I put in the post, there's:
"” It’s not so much the content of “The Prince” as its approach, with its “theatrical energy” and “sure and rapid pace,” that offers a way to think about politics not as static and immutable but as stubbornly contingent. Cultivating republican institutions and the rule of law requires certain techniques; sheer political survival requires others."
I didn't get much out of that!
It should be noted that this book is "Illustrated. 159 pages. Other Press. $14.99." Maybe it doesn't deserve a review in the Times. I had a little trouble figuring out what the deal was with this book review. Maybe somebody thought it would work as an occasion to denounce Trump!
There are no comments allowed over there so that makes me think they know this piece is rather fishy.
"Maybe somebody thought it would work as an occasion to denounce Trump!"
Yes, it is. One need only focus on the subtitle - "The Art of..." and where does that lead to? Trump's art of the deal.
Subtitle? Whatever autocorrect...
It has been many decades since I read "The Prince." My impression was that it was a pragmatic guide to politics in a very brutal era.
"On Easter Sunday 1478, the Duomo was the site of the city's most infamous murder - Giuliano de'Medici was brutally stabbed to death in front of the congregation. Just 15 years later thousands of citizens gathered to hear the terrifying sermons of Savonarola, which Michelangelo claimed he could still hear ringing in his ears many years later."
http://www.pbs.org/empires/medici/florence/pup/santa_maria.html
Democrats should have read Ralph Waldo Emerson instead of Machiavelli or Alinsky: "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." Fail!
“underhanded tactics for seizing and maintaining power“
So it’s about the attempted coup by the Deep State, then?
Lefties complaining about power politics is the best.
I see the The Prince as an early development of the modern concept of sovereignty. The Prince is a human being, but the Prince isn't bound to normal human morality, because the office of the Prince has different responsibilities than the responsibilities of the subjects of the Prince.
Also, Machiavelli says that it is best for the Prince to be feared and loved, but that if the Prince must choose between them, better to be feared than to be loved. People miss that point.
“If we’re reading him today,” Boucheron writes, “it means we should be worried.”
Several people read Machiavelli at various times in the past. Inevitably, trouble ensued.
"It should be noted that this book is "Illustrated. 159 pages. Other Press. $14.99." Maybe it doesn't deserve a review in the Times. I had a little trouble figuring out what the deal was with this book review. Maybe somebody thought it would work as an occasion to denounce Trump!
There are no comments allowed over there so that makes me think they know this piece is rather fishy."
Any review announcing a non-cartoon reading of Machiavelli (or any "classic") as something new, is fishy. What's interesting here to me is that this approach is pretty insulting to readers, as it assumes an unfamiliarity on their part with anything but the crude, popular view, and no experience of the actual work.
Which may be perfectly true, making it a suitable vehicle for the fishy motives you suspect.
If we’re reading him today, that means people are finally waking up to the brutal reality.
We are being ruled by elites, not governed by peers.
Ann Althouse said...I tried to find material that would provide that support. I went back and looked again
Maybe it's just a grasp at relevance. "See? It's new! Not that tired old stuff everybody already knows. It's new! New, new, new!"
Machiavelli is about seduction. It's not against being a good leader.
It's about dealing with any political audience.
To continue my comment @7:11, I thought the first paragraph of the review was odd:
"The term “Orwellian” has always struck me as curiously Orwellian — a mild example of doublespeak that ties an author’s good name to the dystopia he so memorably depicted. (See also “Dickensian” and “Kafkaesque.”) Instead of referring to George Orwell’s crisp prose or moral clarity, “Orwellian” is like the doctor’s name that ends up anointing the terrible disease he discovered, forever yoked to the affliction he abhorred."
Huh? Is anybody confused about the concepts associated with these names? There may be names whose associations over time in the popular imagination become the opposite of what they should be, but the above suggests a pretty low level of knowledge and understanding for both the target readership and the writer.
And it isn't, really, odd or disturbing or any kind of food for thought that a doctor's name be associated with the disease he characterized. Does anybody wonder if he liked the disease, or partook of its loathsomeness? No, it's a vacuous observation trying to look clever.
Has anyone publicized Hillary's 92 page thesis, which includes her interview of Alinsky? Asking for a friend....
And I am feeling very optimistic about life, myself.
Woodward and Bernstein must be out of ideas...
Machiavelli is a political scientist. If all we read is Plato or Madison then we are left ignorant.
By modern standards, Machiavelli was a wimp. He recommended leaving a few beheaded bodies in the public square, but that's penny ante stuff. You need to murder entire populations to ensure absolute respect for your authority and pass needed reforms for social welfare. The Marxist-Leninists and their cousins, the Nazis, were a quantum jump ahead of Machiavelli. The policies of mass murder have nothing to do with Machiavelli. I think Lenin was the originator of such tactics in the modern world. Give credit where it's due......Lenin wrote sixty books. Some were required reading in the USSR. I don't worry about people choosing to read Machiavelli. I worry about people being mandated to read Lenin.
The Prince is more of a history with analysis. Audible has a nice translation. I was surprised at how short it was.
I found the book a bit dry, and lots of references to who’s who of Italy, that if I new who they were, would have helped my understanding / enjoyment of the book. Medici’s compared to others of the time, such as The Borgia family, seemed relatively nice.
"The Art of Worldly Wisdom" by the Jesuit Baltasar Gracian is way better than
"The Prince."
Machiavelli's message is that a leader's duty to the Republic should trump his concern for personal salvation. At the cusp of the Italian Renaissance, it represents a recovery of the classical notion of a Republic, a public space dedicated to the common life of citizens, not held in fief to Popes and Crusades (military or moral). In his other writings, he makes clear that he imagined that such a recovery would also rescue the Church from the corruption of spirituality inherent in its entanglement in worldly rulership.
In our time, the message should be understood as freeing politics from the new religious cult of Social Justice and Eco- warriors, who are the new Savronolas.
“If we’re reading him today,” Boucheron writes, “it means we should be worried.”
Oh, the predictability.
To sell a book of history, it has to have "a new relevance today."
And if it's bad, it MUST be pressed into service to combat whatever is threatening the left's march forward.
If you want a fun look at an attempt to put Machiavelli in his proper historical context, play Assassin's Creed II.
I remember folks on the Left mocking the boomlet of interest in Atlas Shrugged and other Ayn Rand titles during the Obama era.
I am most concerned by the Machiavelli Coloring Books being distributed in our grade schools to be joined shortly by Alinsky's "Rules For Counting Radicals Can Be Fun!!" math books.
I think that it is pretty well established by now that Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and George Handel were all more or less obsessed with Trump.
I read Machiavelli as a practical form of Zen Dudeism.
Machiavelli was no worse than many of the 'self-help' books written in the early 70's, like Winning Through Intimidation and the like.
Good point, Angle-Dyne. I always feel rather sorry for the Alzheimer family.
The review seems straightforward enough to me. Machiavelli's De Principatibus was horrifying to so many at its publication because he had given up any effort to make his prince act from Christian motives according to the principles of the Christian moral life, and thenceforward it became a standard tool in the hands of unprincipled politicians and tyrants as 'political science' became its own 'thing' ('government' being, in the Christian age, treated as a part of moral theology or philosophy): the presumption being that it represented Machiavelli's own approach to governing. But there is a long-standing counterhypothesis, given his other work, that he was doing something other than writing out a how to book (which both Boucheron and the reviewer point out). I don't see missing what you others seem to see missing, not that I'm going to buy an edited collection of NPR-like radio chats. M. Boucheron is a popularizing historian who is chained to the Left but pretends not to be.
"The Marxist-Leninists and their cousins, the Nazis, were a quantum jump ahead of Machiavelli."
I have been reading David Irving's Hitler's War;
http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Hitler/2001/HW_Web_dl.pdf
He makes it painfully clear that when you share a continent with Stalin, the question is not "Who whom?", but "Who first?".
Excellent book, and no, he is not a "holocaust denier", whatever Deborah Lipstadt may claim.
Robother is correct. The Prince is telling rulers that personal morality is a luxury most leaders of states cannot afford, The state leadership must be willing to do things which are forbidden to its citizens. Also, Christian theology cannot and should not govern states. The Eastern Roman Empire understood this. The Byzantine emperors were almost always chosen from the military, and they were usually ruthless men who got to wear the purple because they knew the Empire would survive only if its leaders were willing to undertake nasty, vicious acts. The Emperors in Constantinople were always superior to the Archbishops within their domain and they never acknowledged the Roman Pope’s authority. In western Europe, the Pope had much more power and yet, there were constant wars in Western Europe.
When I taught the Prince many years ago, I encouraged students to see it as a primer for the people because it demystified the concept of divine right and shown a harsh light on the realities of politics. It deconstructed all of the tactics of rulers so that the people understood the true nature of political reality. When Machiavelli said "It is better to appear good than to be good," he presaged the importance of symbolism in politics and taught his readers to search behind the spectacle to discover those receiving tangible benefits while the masses were being enthralled by misdirecting dramas.
The Prince is an early adumbration of secular--i.e. rational, realistic, and pragmatic--governance, as opposed to the backwardness, hypocritical religiousity, and general inefficiency of most contemporary regimes.
Machiavelli was the first to openly say that leaders must lie, cheat, steal, and worse, but that only rational realistic and pragmatic goals for the collective justify those behaviors.
Narr
Like Clausewitz, he's much more often criticized than read
Librivox page for Machiavelli:
https://librivox.org/author/885?primary_key=885&search_category=author&search_page=1&search_form=get_results
I thought of his books as interesting explanations. I'm also sure that those kind of players he is talking about do not need an instruction manual anyway, so I don't understand why Machiavelli gets so much flak.
Or maybe it's just because he is way too spot on and reality in all it's gory irks people.
Machiavelli was a liberal. He wanted a Republican form of government ruled by laws. However, when it came to foreign policy, the world operates without laws, and refusing to acknowledge that fact leads to ruin.
Post a Comment