Who Is The Prince?
A Simple Contribution to the Machiavelli Discussion Inaugurated by Michael Anton’s Call for Machiavelli-Guided “Spiritual Warfare” in Our Parlous Circumstances
Machiavelli is shocking, everybody sees & agrees on that. How shocking? To what purpose or purposes? On what grounds? At what costs & for what gains? These questions engage & divide his readers, even his acute readers.
I’m not one of them. I’m simple. Some of you may say, that’s not true. I appreciate the thought, but in this case it’s true. I’ll even demonstrate it. Here’s my reading of The Prince in a nutshell.
What’s the focus of a book entitled The Prince? I simple-mindedly answer: It’s “the prince, stupid.” Okay, I’ll go a bit further than that. It’s the prince as a human type, the prince as the peak of humanity, of self-aware humanity. He’s the embodiment of Machiavelli’s understanding of us & our real situation in the world.
So far, so plausible (perhaps). How to understand this figure, especially if Machiavelli is as subtle & tricky as the smart readers say? Again, I’m simple. I trace his portrait by following the broad lines of Machiavelli’s presentation of the prince who’s truly a prince. That means reading certain chapters of The Prince in a certain order, an order which on its face is odd (appearing to violate “logographic necessity”), but which turns out to be quite logical: Chapters 1, 6, 25, 15, & 18. Well, that’s certainly odd. What about the logical part? Here, I’ll provide a quick overview, to give some plausibility to my reading. Then I’ll follow up & dig in deeper in subsequent posts. My main concern is to add troubling Machiavellian anthropological content to the (already troubling) recommendation that we adopt Machiavellian strategic & tactics of warfare. Can the teaching regarding man & the teaching regarding war be so easily separated, especially by those who adopt the latter? Can Anton’s defense of “God & the Good” be really—truly, successfully—effected by “merely” tactically following the thinker who repudiated & sought to replace both?
Chapter One has a two-part title that we’ll consider next time: How Many Are the Kinds of Principalities & in What Modes They Are Acquired. The title effects or at least suggests a reorienting of the classical distinction between theory & practice. In a similar vein, the chapter ends with the word virtù. Unlike previous canonical understandings of virtue, Machiavellian virtù comes to sight as a means of acquisition. Hmmm … what would Aristotle say about this use or characterization of virtue? Thomas? Jesus? You get the idea: Machiavelli is taking old categories & reworking them. It’s new wine in old skins. The true prince will have to possess the new version, if he’s going to acquire a state.
In Chapter Six, Of New Principalities That Are Acquired through One's Own Arms & Virtù, Old Nick (I don’t like to show him too much respect) provides “the greatest examples” of virtuous princes. These were the men who rose from nothing to be Somebody. These four—Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus—“formed” scattered and/or demoralized masses into real peoples. Virtue forms human “material” into peoples, it gives them the “form” that makes them “a people.” (Social engineering finds its conceptual origins here.) As with “virtue,” now with “matter” & “form,” Aristotelian concepts are repurposed. Here again, they’re applied to the virtuous prince & his specific work. Previously, virtue helped him acquire a state; now, his distinctive “powers of mind” enable him to form a mass into a world-historical People.
His formative power is somewhat reminiscent of God’s vis-à-vis the tohu-bohu of Genesis 1. In fact, the only limit on the formative power of the prince that Machiavelli acknowledges in the sixth chapter is that the ascending prince needs to have Fortune smile on him & provide him with the opportunity to exercise his virtue. (Of course, an aspiring prince, say the second-in-line to a throne, may decide to help Fortune along & to hurry things up by murdering his elder brother, but that’s by-the-by.) The main point is that according to Machiavelli’s explicit utterance, even the greatest examples are dependent upon Fortune.
Chapter 25, How Much Fortune Can Do in Human Affairs, & in What Mode It May Be Opposed, however, tells us (after some hemming & hawing) that in the final analysis “Fortune is a woman” who likes “impetuous” men to bend her to their ambitions. Thus, the dependency & obstacle of Chapter 6 is waved away in Chapter 25.
Chapter 25 holds out this possibility on one condition: That the prince also be “flexible,” that he be able to change his “qualities” as the times or circumstances change. If you stay with your given quality or temperament, say, being impetuous, eventually you’ll be out of tune with the times, with ruinous results. So, the prince must be flexible, which means that he can’t be stuck with his natural or given “qualities.” Here’s a first inkling of the mastery of nature, only this time it bears upon human nature, one’s natural temperament.
Chapter 15, Of Those Things for Which Men & Especially Princes Are Praised or Blamed, tells us how far from one’s nature one must go. Indeed, it involves a complete reworking of the concept of nature as it was articulated by Aristotle & Thomas. It entails the emergence of a mysterious figure of the human one is inclined to call “the self.”
How a prince should conduct himself toward his subjects & friends? is the first sentence of the chapter. To answer it, Machiavelli sketches an argument. During its course, both subjects & friends are dropped & a new category of human beings, the wicked, rises to prominence. In fact, to decisive prominence. Given that the world is composed of those who aren’t good, of those who are indeed wicked, one can’t afford the luxury of thoroughgoing goodness, of virtue as traditionally taught or “professed.” That way lies ruin.
Ruin now becomes the summum malum, “preservation” the summum bonum, or at least its core.
Henceforth, everything is to revolve around keeping not just one’s state, but one’s life, intact. Preservation of life is the lodestar, & in this chapter Machiavelli shows what it entails to take the pair ruin-preservation as decisively structuring & guiding action. It involves a thoroughgoing deconstruction. It involves doing away with Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology & moral philosophy. Bye-bye, Aristotelian hylomorphism. Bye-bye, the classical notion of the order of the soul. Bye-bye, its perfecting in good habits—virtues!—& in a prudential assessment of the good in these circumstances.
In their place, important reorientations & reworkings take place. The mind of the true prince, the prince who knows “what’s what,” must constantly look upon the human world as the site of active malevolent agents, out to get him & his; he must interpret them & their initiatives in the light of the fundamental question: Does this contribute to my preservation or threaten my ruin? Perhaps more deeply, he must turn to himself & disown both his natural qualities & any aim of acquiring habits that would inhibit him from responding to threats. His liberation is rather thoroughgoing, abstracting himself from traditional wisdom about man & his good, therefore also from nature’s own endowments & intimations.
At this point, one has to ask, what’s left? A mind fixated on others as threats (& on Fortune’s vicissitudes), judged in the light of its possessor’s preservation or possible ruin, & an “interior life” (for want of a better term) that actively distrusts any given qualities or acquired habits that would give it stability. After those, what exactly is being preserved? What, for instance, does “life” mean in this context? What does “self-preservation” mean, both subjectively & objectively? That is, who (or what) is the subject & who (or what) the object of this fundamental Machiavellian operation? Given its mysterious character, “self’ seems an appropriate designation.
Chapter 18, In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes, further problematizes the issue. The prince who is truly a prince has three personae that he must be able to employ, if he is to preserve himself in the welter of circumstances & predictable assaults. Note that I said “able to employ,” not “be.” Just as in chapter 15 he was instructed that he must be able to enter into what the tradition called moral & spiritual “evil” if “necessity” requires it, in chapter 18 he must be able to display the face, & do the deeds, of beasts & man, but without allowing himself to be determined by any of them—the human included. Display “humanity” or “humaneness,” yes, but be them in any substantive sense? No. Once again, lurking beneath these projections is a mysterious je ne sais quoi.
We’re far from Michael Anton’s recommendation of Machiavellian strategies & tactics. But perhaps after this simple-minded reading, we have a heightened awareness of the importance of the question, whether one can adopt them without adopting the princely anthropology that originally undergirded them?