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Volume 36:

The Prince (full text) by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Life of Sir Thomas More (full text) by William Roper

Utopia (full text) by Sir Thomas More

Despite all that experience has taught us, we tend to have more sympathy for Utopians than for Machiavellians, which I suppose is why the President has higher approval ratings than his Vice-President. In our political discourse, special scorn is reserved for those who seem more concerned with the means by which ends are achieved than with the ends themselves. But someone who thinks only about ends and is careless about the means -- someone who decides upon the most desirable outcome without considering whether it is likely or even possible -- is far more dangerous. All that said, what was most surprising to me, reading The Prince and Utopia for the first time, is how clearly Machiavelli keeps the true end of all his maneuvering in sight, and how frighteningly honest Thomas More is about the means necessary to create a Utopian state.

To begin with, here is the Machiavelli we all know so well:

Every one understands how praiseworthy it is in a Prince to keep faith, and to live uprightly and not craftily. Nevertheless, we see from what has taken place in our own days that Princes who have set little store by their word, but have known how to overreach men by their cunning, have accomplished great thing, and in the end got the better of those who trusted to honest dealing. Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast.

It isn't that he's immoral or even amoral: he recognizes the difference between good and bad, and he wishes it were possible for a prince to do the former all of the time. But facts are facts. He writes, You are to understand that a Prince, and most of all a new Prince, cannot observe all those rules of conduct in respect whereof men are accounted good, being often forced, in order to preserve his Princedom, to act in opposition to good faith, charity, humanity, and religion. It would seem that he works within a familiar loop: the primary use of power is to acquire more power. But that clause, most of all a new Prince, is vitally important. Machiavelli begins his work with a consideration of the various kinds of princedom, and of the ways in which they are acquired. First of all, he distinguishes between hereditary princedoms, in which the sovereignty is derived through an ancient line of ancestors, and new ones. Before long it is clear that the new kind are the ones that interest him. Because his rule is not established by convention, a new prince will always have a tenuous grip on his power. Machiavelli's most famously cynical advice stems from this reality.

It's not until the book's last chapter that we are let to understand the reason for this focus. This chapter is titled, with typical directness, An Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians. The plea that follows has little of the cold calculation typically associated with its author:

If, as I have said, it was necessary in order to display the valour of Moses that the children of Israel should be slaves in Egypt, and to know the greatness and courage of Cyrus that the Persians should be oppressed by the Medes, and to illustrate the excellence of Theseus that the Athenians should be scattered and divided, so at this hour, to prove the worth of some Italian hero, it was required that Italy should be brought to her present abject condition, to be more a slave than the Hebrew, more oppressed than the Persian, more disunited than the Athenian, without a head, without order, beaten, spoiled, torn in pieces, over-run and abandoned to destruction in every shape.

But though, heretofore, glimmerings may have been discerned in this man or that, whence it might be conjectured that he was ordained by God for her redemption, nevertheless it has afterwards been seen in the further course of his actions that Fortune has disowned him; so that our country, left almost without life, still waits to know who it is that is to heal her bruises, to put an end to the devastation and plunder of Lombardy, to the exactions and imposts of Naples and Tuscany, and to stanch those wounds of hers which long neglect has changed into running sores.

Machiavelli wrote in his Discourse on Livy about republicanism, which he championed over princedom as an ideal. But if this last chapter is to be believed, he wanted above all a homegrown rule within Italy. If this had to mean a princedom, then it had above all to be a stable and prudent one. Of course Machiavelli was not the last man to face the choice between the stabilty of tyrannies and more hopeful ideals.

Which brings us (sort of) to Thomas More. It is often said of Utopian societies that they work better in theory than in practice. Maybe so. But what is most striking about More's Utopia is how much of the ugliness is baked right into the theory. Here are just a few features of this faraway island:

Draconian limits on travel, government family planning, the forced euthanasia of those too sick to work: that's just the beginning. Most of the other gruesome features of a planned society are in there, too. The problem here, of course, is one of means. More is honest enough to know that some people aren't going to want to live in the society you have planned for them. They're going to want to travel alone, to have a bigger or a smaller family than the state intends, to continue to live after they're too sick to work. And so they'll have to be exhorted to do otherwise, for the greater good. The problem with Utopia isn't that it's impossible -- even if it were, I'd rather live in a Machiavellian princedom.

The Ninety-Five Theses (full text), Address to the Christian Nobility (full text), & Concerning Christian Liberty (full text) by Martin Luther

I've sometimes wondered how my Catholic education affected the way I was taught about the Reformation in school. At any rate, I don't think I had a good sense of just how corrupt the Church's hierarchy was until I read Cellini's Autobiography last month. Cellini was a Catholic who relied on the popes for patronage, and he doesn't for a moment pretend that the papacy is anything but a temporal power. It was illuminating to read Luther's Ninety-Five Theses while keeping in mind where all this indulgence money was going. On the other hand, reading his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, I saw the extent to which the Reformation, too, was about temporal power. Here, for example, is the very first of Luther's Articles of Reformation: Princes, nobles, and cities should promptly forbid their subjects to pay the annates to Rome. In these pages, at least, Luther emerges an another Machiavelli or More -- not contesting theological questions, but telling princes how to do their jobs.


--CRB, 8, 2007

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