In the spring of 1513, a man sat in a small farmhouse outside Florence and wrote a short book about power that would get him condemned as the devil's secretary, inspire generations of tyrants and statesmen in equal measure, and never once go out of print in five centuries. Niccolò Machiavelli had recently been arrested, tortured on the strappado, and released without charge following the collapse of the Florentine Republic, for which he had served as a senior diplomat for fourteen years. He was ruined, exiled from the city he loved, and reduced to playing cards with local laborers in a roadside inn to pass the time. At night, he changed into his finest robes, entered his study, and wrote. The Prince, composed in a matter of months and dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici in a transparent bid for patronage that never materialized, was his attempt to think through, with unflinching clarity, how power actually worked as opposed to how moralists insisted it ought to work. Lorenzo ignored it. History did not. The book that Machiavelli wrote in disgrace, in exile, in a farmhouse, to get his old job back, became the founding document of modern political thought, and the man who wrote it has been misunderstood, vilified, and quietly consulted by the powerful ever since.
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) committed the unforgivable intellectual offense of telling the truth about politics at a moment when political philosophy was still largely in the business of describing how rulers ought to behave rather than how they actually did. The Prince and the Discourses on Livy together constitute one of the most radical intellectual interventions in the history of Western thought: a systematic attempt to ground the analysis of power in observed reality rather than moral aspiration, to treat statecraft as a discipline with its own logic and its own necessities that could not be wished away by appeals to virtue or divine sanction. The shock this produced in his contemporaries was genuine, and it has never fully dissipated. Five centuries of readers have been disturbed by Machiavelli for the same reason: he describes a world recognizable as the one we actually inhabit, and declines to pretend it is something more comfortable.
The persistent misreading of Machiavelli as a simple apologist for cruelty and cynicism is itself one of the more instructive phenomena in intellectual history. The man who advised princes to be lions and foxes, who wrote with apparent equanimity about the utility of well-used cruelty, was also a passionate republican who believed that civic liberty was the highest political good and that the health of a republic depended on the active virtue of its citizens. These positions are not as contradictory as they appear, but holding them together requires reading Machiavelli whole, in historical context and across the full range of his work, rather than cherry-picking the passages that confirm whatever one already wishes to believe about him. That more complete Machiavelli turns out to have considerably more to say about the political world we currently inhabit than the caricature ever could.
To recover that complete Machiavelli and to trace his living relevance to contemporary questions of statecraft and constitutional order, we turn to Philip Bobbitt, the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School, whose seminal work The Garments of Court and Palace represents one of the most serious and searching engagements with Machiavelli's political thought produced by any contemporary legal and political scholar. Bobbitt brings to Machiavelli both the historical depth to situate him properly in the Renaissance world that formed him and the jurisprudential sophistication to trace the precise ways in which his insights about statecraft and constitutional order continue to shape the modern system of nation-states and their evolving governance structures. In this interview, he reflects on what Machiavelli actually argued, why it has been so persistently misrepresented, and why a Florentine diplomat writing in exile five centuries ago remains, for anyone who wishes to understand how power works, essential and uncomfortable reading.
Charles Carlini: In addition to writing The Garments of Court and Palace, you are also a professor of law at Columbia Law School, a former White House staff member, and the author of such books as The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and The Course of History and Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution. As a student of modern political theory, how well do you believe Machiavelli’s ideas translate into the political landscape today?
Philip Bobbitt: I don’t think they “translate,” if you mean by that term that his geopolitical advice—which is the principal subject of my book—can be usefully transposed into one era. Machiavelli glimpsed the emergence of the modern State and urged its creation to replace the feudal order of his own day. We actually live in modern states.
CC: Why is it important to study him?
PB: There can be enormous satisfaction in the study of any great mind at work on significant problems. Also, Machiavelli’s mind is strikingly original, which makes the study all the more rewarding. Finally, the interplay between his ideas about the State and his personal history is a precedent for our own time and its challenges to its officials and scholars.
CC: Court and Palace is your most recent publication, delving into Machiavelli’s works and providing analysis of his theories. What first drew you to write this book?
PB: I had written about Machiavelli before—including in The Shield of Achilles—and had long wanted to undertake a more systematic study to see if my cursory conclusions stood up (some did, others did not.) For example, my notion of “a duty of consequentialism” can be fairly attributed to Machiavelli.
CC: Some historians have argued that Machiavelli was an influence on the American Founding Fathers, particularly on John Adams, who read and praised Machiavelli’s works. As the author of two books on Constitutional law, where do you fall on this debate? Did Machiavelli impact the development of the Constitution?
PB: Machiavelli most certainly did have an important impact on the Framers—the work of historian John Pocock documents this. But his most profound influence was simply the general conviction that a State could be purpose-built—made, not begotten.
CC: As you note in the introduction to Court and Palace, scholars have been arguing over Machiavelli’s intentions for years; at times, it can seem difficult to believe that the same man who wrote The Prince also wrote the Discourses on Livy. Is there any truth to the idea that some or all of Machiavelli’s treatises may have been satirical?
PB: No. I think his satires are confined to his letters, poems, and plays.
CC: Did he intend his works to come off as contradictory to each other?
PB: Certainly not. He changed his mind over the course of his life, but his mature views had pretty much crystallized by 1513-1516, the period of the composition of his great treatises, The Prince (on principalities) and The Discourses (on republics).
CC: As a scholar of law yourself, how do you view Machiavelli’s theories about government and rule?
PB: Generally speaking, I find Machiavelli quite prophetic on the macro issues of the evolution of the state and quite shrewd on the micro issue of human behavior and political tactics.
CC: Are there any areas in which you would disagree with Machiavelli, and if so, why?
PB: I’m not sure disagreement is the right word, but Machiavelli did not discuss and did not attempt to cope with totalitarianism or global terror networks, the grand challenges of the 20th and 21st centuries, respectively.
CC: A good deal of both Machiavelli’s writings and your own address the concept of war, specifically how it relates to the function of government. How did Machiavelli view the relationship between war and law?
PB: Machiavelli wrote that “good arms will result in good laws” and vice versa; that is related to, but a bit different from, my view that nothing fundamental happens in the domain of strategy or constitutional law without one having a fundamental and transformative effect on the other.
CC: Throughout history, Machiavelli has been depicted as a scheming figure of evil, far divorced from the actual man himself; after reading The Prince, many see Machiavelli as someone who prioritized politics over ethics. Is there any truth to this portrayal?
PB: Very little. Machiavelli argued for an ethics of politics—an ethical stance that imposed certain duties on political leaders that were different from their duties when they acted simply for themselves.
CC: How did Machiavelli reconcile his ethical views with his politics?
PB: His ethical and political views were symbiotic. Because he observed that the purpose of politics was to enhance the common good, he derived an ethical rule that put serving the common good ahead of other ethical goals for politicians; because he saw that ethics is played out in real life, by real people, and not simply confined to utopian seminars, he advocated the politics of ethical realism.
CC: Part of the circumstances surrounding the image of a “devilish” Machiavelli was the intense criticism and outright censorship he received from the Catholic Church. Many people believed Machiavelli was an atheist or a pagan, but you write that this was a “profound misunderstanding” and that Machiavelli’s arguments contain a “theological resonance.” What place was there for religion in Machiavelli’s princely State?
PB: Machiavelli accords an important role to religion in his neo-classical State, but it is a manipulative, rather cynical role. This should not be confused, however, with his personal theism about which his greatest biographer, Sebastian De Grazia, wrote so movingly in his Machiavelli in Hell.
CC: How did he view the Church of his era—as a force for public good, or a hindrance?
PB: Machiavelli thought the Church was a hindrance to the unity and vigor of Italy, and ecclesiastically, it was a thoroughly corrupt institution.
CC: For all his fame as a political theorist today, in his own lifetime, Machiavelli was better remembered for his fictional works—The Prince wasn’t even published until five years after his death. You note early in Court and Palace that his “uncomprehending contemporaries” failed to listen to his advice—why was this?
PB: They were mired in feudalism—and thought the feudal order would continue forever. The Medici and Machiavelli’s friends Guicciardini and Vettori, who counseled them, thought it a great triumph when they finally secured a dukedom for Florence, when, in fact, it was both a missed opportunity and ultimately a passport to insignificant servitude to the Empire.
CC: Was Machiavelli simply ahead of his time?
PB: Yes, astonishingly so. That, as much as anything else, accounted for his disappointments and frustrations.
CC: You write in your book that Machiavelli’s principal motivation in writing The Prince was to urge Italy’s leaders to establish a “new political order” emulating the Grecian city-states and the old Roman Republic. Why was Machiavelli attracted to these models?
PB: Machiavelli was a classicist and advocated a neo-classical model of the State that, he believed, would best secure the common good and conquer faction.
CC: Why did he believe feudalism was a doomed system?
PB: Feudalism exalted faction by fractionating any authority that might have been able to suppress it. In Italy, this resulted in sacrifices to the great states of France, the Empire, and Spain.
Recommended Reading
0 comments