My takeaway on Machiavelli's The Prince is that it is a diverse collection of ruling / governing practices he observed and recorded back in the 16th-century upon which he tries to extract lessons and learnings, similar to what we see nowadays with entrepreneurship success / failure stories analysis.
Machiavelli doesn't seem to actively promote wrongful behavior nor engage in morality evaluations, mostly keeping a neutral, objective perspective throughout his writings.
Nevertheless, his objectivism is commonly, and wrongfully, interpreted as malignity.
> Imagine that Jerry Seinfeld wrote a book about politics and governance strategy, and sent it to Hillary Clinton, because he wanted to get hired as an aide. Everyone is fascinated by this book, and it somehow becomes an important work in political science. Five hundred years later, Seinfeld is mostly forgotten, but people still call things "Seinfeldian".
The author of this piece lacks an understanding of how Machiavelli uses the term `virtu` (admittedly a common mistake). This failure to understand `virtu` is why countless political factions all the way up to the modern US Democratic party have failed their subjects and failed to protect their states -- they were unwilling to sacrifice the appearance of being good, of keeping their hands clean, for the things that really matter -- for example legislation on climate change, and the preservation of the US ability to respond to global pandemics to name only two. One of Machiavelli's key messages is that there are some things that are more important than playing by the spirit of the law. Those in the modern west who reject Machiavelli and this message doom themselves and their constituents to live in states cursed with bad rulers.
Compromise is antithetical to a two-party system. One could make the same arguments against the Republican party, using their hobby horses as examples.
Every gain for party A is a loss for party B, so you must ensure (with varying degrees of subtlety) that the other party's initiatives end in failure to help secure your victory in the next election. And once you're in power, you must destroy anything the other party created that would bring them praise, so that they can't point to it in the following election cycle.
Specifically, what course of action are you referring to that involves "the modern US Democratic party ... sacrific[ing] the appearance of being good"?
He's talking about the scene in The Dark Knight where Morgan Freeman tells Batman he doesn't want to be involved in getting his hands dirty with surveillance tech about to be deployed in stopping The Joker.
Freeman is the US Democratic Party, and Batman would be the FBI wanting to break into iPhones to catch killers at the expense of the law/privacy rights.
If you really want to understand Machiavelli then Ada Palmer's post's are excellent[1]. She studies "heterodoxy, heresy, freethought, censorship and information control, the recovery of classical thought after the Middle Ages, its impact on science, religion and atheism, and the history of the book and printing."
She puts Machiavelli into context, and points out that "the ends justify the means" was really an ethical argument putting for the first time the idea that the consequences of actions matter more than trying to justify actions by religion.
I discovered this via a HN comment and I can't recommend it enough.
Here's a quote:
1508. The Italian territories destabilized by the Borgias are ripe for conquest. Everyone in Europe wants to go to war with everyone else and Italy will be the biggest battlefield. Machaivelli’s job now is to figure out who to ally with, and who to bribe. If he can’t predict the sides there’s no way to know where Florence should commit its precious resources. How will it fall out? Will Tudor claims on the French throne drive England to ally with Spain against France? Or will French and Spanish rival claims to Southern Italy lead France to recruit England against the houses of Aragon and Habsburg? Will the Holy Roman Emperor try to seize Milan from the French? Will the Ottomans ally with France to seize and divide the Spanish holdings in the Mediterranean? Will the Swiss finally wake up and notice that they have all the best armies in Europe and could conquer whatever the heck they wanted if they tried? (Seriously, Machiavelli spends a lot of time worrying about this possibility.) All the ambassadors from the great kingdoms and empires meet, and Machiavelli spends frantic months exchanging letters with colleagues evaluating the psychology of every prince, what each has to gain, to lose, to prove. He comes up with several probable scenarios and begins preparations. At last a courier rushes in with the news. The day has come. The alliance has formed. It is: everyone joins forces to attack Venice.
O_O ????????
Conclusion: must invent Modern Political Science.
I am being only slightly facetious. The War of the League of Cambrai is the least comprehensible war I’ve ever studied. Everyone switches sides at least twice, and what begins with the pope calling on everyone to attack Venice ends with Venice defending the pope against everyone.
Unfortunately for M., the adjectival form of his name (Machiavellian) has come to mean something rather different from his actual ideas. His political philosophy would be best described as realpolitik.
Today, we often view the word realpolitik in a somewhat negative sense, because the underlying assumption is that a ruler should be 'good' first and effective second. This is a modern assumption.
What this article doesn't delve into is the idea of virtù itself, and specifically how (someone like Nietzsche) sees this value and the Renaissance in general as a return to pre-Christian, pre-Platonic ideals of excellence, ones that precede modern ideas of good and evil. It is an idea intimately tied up with aesthetic concerns of self-mastery, clarity, and the dispelling of Platonic (subsequently Christian) idealism. Machiavelli himself was quite interested in the ancients, so this is not surprising.
This excerpt from Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche) is maybe the best brief description of the idea. Sorry for the length, the part about Machiavelli specifically is in the third paragraph.
--
I am not indebted to the Greeks for anything like such strong impressions; and, to speak frankly, they cannot be to us what the Romans are. One cannot learn from the Greeks—their style is too strange, it is also too fluid, to be imperative or to have the effect of a classic. Who would ever have learnt writing from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it without the Romans!... Do not let anyone suggest Plato to me. In regard to Plato I am a thorough sceptic, and have never been able to agree to the admiration of Plato the artist, which is traditional among scholars. And after all, in this matter, the most refined judges of taste in antiquity are on my side. In my opinion Plato bundles all the forms of style pell-mell together, in this respect he is one[Pg 114] of the first decadents of style: he has something similar on his conscience to that which the Cynics had who invented the satura Menippea. For the Platonic dialogue—this revoltingly self-complacent and childish kind of dialectics—to exercise any charm over you, you must never have read any good French authors,—Fontenelle for instance. Plato is boring.
In reality my distrust of Plato is fundamental. I find him so very much astray from all the deepest instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral prejudices, so pre-existently Christian—the concept "good" is already the highest value with him,—that rather than use any other expression I would prefer to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the hard word "superior bunkum," or, if you would like it better, "idealism." Humanity has had to pay dearly for this Athenian having gone to school among the Egyptians (—or among the Jews in Egypt?...) In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that double-faced fascination called the "ideal," which made it possible for the more noble natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to tread the bridge which led to the "cross."
And what an amount of Plato is still to be found in the concept "church," and in the construction, the system and the practice of the church!—My recreation, my predilection, my cure, after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli's principe are most closely related to me owing to the absolute determination which they show of refusing to deceive themselves and of seeing reason in reality,—not in "rationality," and still less in "morality." There is no more radical cure than Thucydides for the lamentably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks which the "classically-cultured" stripling bears with him into life, as a reward for his public school training. His writings must be carefully studied line by line, and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly as what he actually says. There are few thinkers so rich in unuttered thoughts. In him the culture "of the Sophists"—that is to say, the culture of realism, receives its most perfect expression: this inestimable movement in the midst of the moral and idealistic knavery of the Socratic Schools which was then breaking out in all directions.
Greek philosophy is the decadence of the Greek instinct: Thucydides is the great summing up, the final manifestation of that strong, severe positivism which lay in the instincts of the ancient Hellene. After all, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently he takes refuge in the ideal: Thucydides is master of himself,—consequently he is able to master life.
It just occurred to me that Machiavelli could be grouped with Sun Tzu and Saul Alinsky - each one of them wrote an incredibly insightful and influential book on strategy or leadership.
Are there any other authors/books in this category?
To be honest for the western world most of that wisdom is holed up in old Greek and Roman histories. Most of the more strategically brilliant minds I know tended to be reading, among the standards already mentioned, military histories rather than specific strategy/tactics books. So, Tacitus, Xenophon, Thucydides, etc. Another one I really like and think is underrated (because it does have many flaws) is the Hagakure.
I could go on. For example, when thinking about the changing landscape of warfare and politics in a nuclear age, I think you can't find a better book than "The Shield of Achilles" by Phillip Bobbit (if you do let me know). With the latest shift in the military strategy space I suspect lots of Mahan and Corbett are being read right now. It is a mistake to too heavily rely on any of these though.
What I have learned over time is that one does not want to look for a "how to" book by a strategic master, or on any subject so esoteric, but rather to glean tidbits of information that over time open up into novel insights, sometimes only after multiple readings.
On the particular subject of Machiavelli, I think the biggest mistake is to focus on the man himself, instead of the greater power struggles of his day. For example the War of the League of Cambrai is one of the most interesting things in the history of Europe to me, and it's almost never talked about or taught.
“Judging by what I have seen and read that it is not impossible to bring [the military] back to ancient modes and give it some form of past virtue, I decided, so as not to pass these my idle times without doing anything, to write what I understand about the art of war for the satisfaction of those who are lovers of ancient actions” - Machiavelli
Machiavelli also wrote a "Discourses on Livy", which mixes politcal philosophy lessons with Roman historical examples.
I'd recommend Plato's "The Republic". "Mencius" (self-titled work by the Confucian philosopher) and maybe Confucius's "Analects" for political philosophy and leadership.
For warfare and strategy, other posters have already said Carl Von Clauswitz's "On War" which is pretty much the gold standard of modern military thought publications so I'm going to reiterate it as a must-read. In particular I would focus on Book I, Chapter 3: "The Genius For War". Slightly less well-known is Alfred T. Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History" but that's less about leadership and much more about strategy.
Cardinal Mazarin's "Breviarium Politicorum Secundum Rubricas Mazarinicas" (translated from Latin to French, by Umberto Eco, as the "Bréviaire des politiciens") would be such a book (note that whether it was actually written by Mazarin is a subject of debate).
However I do not know if it was translated in English.
I've recently read "The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom" [1] and I think it's definitely worth a read for anybody interested in Realpolitik and it's intellectual history. The author's own extrapolations are wonky at times, but the foundations are solid and food for thought.
I always thought the Prince reflected that the means should befit the prince (IE be apropriate to the governmening power if visible), and in general the more vicious the prince, the more visibly vicious it's possible to be without it be being effectively self-destructive. And that while the reverse is also true, IE a benevolent prince could reinforce itself with visible benevolence, the vicious is far easier and harder to get wrong.
For those of you who read "The Prince" and are looking for a little more context, I recommend Machiavelli's "The discourses".
It's been a while since I read it, but I found it to be an interesting romp through roman history through the lense of Machiavelli's sometimes cold, sometimes compassionate analysis.
What is this ridiculous trend of judging characters of the past by today's standards? According to the author Machiavelli highly original philosophy should be partially dismissed because he frequented prostitutes (male and female).
To be fair, the incident described where he cheats a prostitute for money and tries to pin it on his friend, would be considered just as immoral then as now. Perhaps even more so then, since he is damaging the honor of a friend.
And I don't see the article dismissing his philosophy due to this. It's a biography, so it is about his life as much as his philosophy.
> ridiculous trend of judging characters of the past by today's standards?
mental reduction, it prevents people from having to think that the context of civilization is ever changing, which makes judgments very complex. They prefer it single-variable.
I only skimmed the piece but didn't see anywhere the author says his philosophy should be dismissed because of this? It came over more as a warts and all type picture.
What is this ridiculous trend of making up past standards how it suits us? Why cant we admit past successful people ever did something wrong or immoral by whatever standard.
> he picked up a pretty lad and, after he has had his way in the darkness, explains that he has no money, but states that he is called Filippo Casavecchia—and if he calls at his shop tomorrow, the boy will get his money. A surprised Filippo, a buddy of Machiavelli’s, denies it was him,
The falsely accused friend would not think it is ok and nor did prostitute boy.
> and the boy threatens him with prosecution for sodomy.
Apparently, the act was illegal.
> Filippo asks if the boy would recognise the man’s voice? The boy says yes, so he is taken to a spot near the Porta Romana where Machiavelli regularly holds court. The boy creeps up behind the bench where the great man is telling an anecdote. He sees the boy and runs off.
If that was ok by past standards, why did he run?
"Past" is not universal excuse. Easy example is that I wont excuse Nazi leadership for just being men of their time. "It was in the past therefore it was ok" is ridiculous standard.
tcgv|5 years ago
Machiavelli doesn't seem to actively promote wrongful behavior nor engage in morality evaluations, mostly keeping a neutral, objective perspective throughout his writings.
Nevertheless, his objectivism is commonly, and wrongfully, interpreted as malignity.
klodolph|5 years ago
> Imagine that Jerry Seinfeld wrote a book about politics and governance strategy, and sent it to Hillary Clinton, because he wanted to get hired as an aide. Everyone is fascinated by this book, and it somehow becomes an important work in political science. Five hundred years later, Seinfeld is mostly forgotten, but people still call things "Seinfeldian".
That's Machiavelli.
hyperion2010|5 years ago
kstenerud|5 years ago
Every gain for party A is a loss for party B, so you must ensure (with varying degrees of subtlety) that the other party's initiatives end in failure to help secure your victory in the next election. And once you're in power, you must destroy anything the other party created that would bring them praise, so that they can't point to it in the following election cycle.
therealdrag0|5 years ago
marshray|5 years ago
econcon|5 years ago
chrischen|5 years ago
Freeman is the US Democratic Party, and Batman would be the FBI wanting to break into iPhones to catch killers at the expense of the law/privacy rights.
nl|5 years ago
She puts Machiavelli into context, and points out that "the ends justify the means" was really an ethical argument putting for the first time the idea that the consequences of actions matter more than trying to justify actions by religion.
I discovered this via a HN comment and I can't recommend it enough.
Here's a quote:
1508. The Italian territories destabilized by the Borgias are ripe for conquest. Everyone in Europe wants to go to war with everyone else and Italy will be the biggest battlefield. Machaivelli’s job now is to figure out who to ally with, and who to bribe. If he can’t predict the sides there’s no way to know where Florence should commit its precious resources. How will it fall out? Will Tudor claims on the French throne drive England to ally with Spain against France? Or will French and Spanish rival claims to Southern Italy lead France to recruit England against the houses of Aragon and Habsburg? Will the Holy Roman Emperor try to seize Milan from the French? Will the Ottomans ally with France to seize and divide the Spanish holdings in the Mediterranean? Will the Swiss finally wake up and notice that they have all the best armies in Europe and could conquer whatever the heck they wanted if they tried? (Seriously, Machiavelli spends a lot of time worrying about this possibility.) All the ambassadors from the great kingdoms and empires meet, and Machiavelli spends frantic months exchanging letters with colleagues evaluating the psychology of every prince, what each has to gain, to lose, to prove. He comes up with several probable scenarios and begins preparations. At last a courier rushes in with the news. The day has come. The alliance has formed. It is: everyone joins forces to attack Venice.
O_O ????????
Conclusion: must invent Modern Political Science.
I am being only slightly facetious. The War of the League of Cambrai is the least comprehensible war I’ve ever studied. Everyone switches sides at least twice, and what begins with the pope calling on everyone to attack Venice ends with Venice defending the pope against everyone.
[1] https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/
keiferski|5 years ago
Today, we often view the word realpolitik in a somewhat negative sense, because the underlying assumption is that a ruler should be 'good' first and effective second. This is a modern assumption.
What this article doesn't delve into is the idea of virtù itself, and specifically how (someone like Nietzsche) sees this value and the Renaissance in general as a return to pre-Christian, pre-Platonic ideals of excellence, ones that precede modern ideas of good and evil. It is an idea intimately tied up with aesthetic concerns of self-mastery, clarity, and the dispelling of Platonic (subsequently Christian) idealism. Machiavelli himself was quite interested in the ancients, so this is not surprising.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/#PoweVirtFort
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtù
This excerpt from Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche) is maybe the best brief description of the idea. Sorry for the length, the part about Machiavelli specifically is in the third paragraph.
--
I am not indebted to the Greeks for anything like such strong impressions; and, to speak frankly, they cannot be to us what the Romans are. One cannot learn from the Greeks—their style is too strange, it is also too fluid, to be imperative or to have the effect of a classic. Who would ever have learnt writing from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it without the Romans!... Do not let anyone suggest Plato to me. In regard to Plato I am a thorough sceptic, and have never been able to agree to the admiration of Plato the artist, which is traditional among scholars. And after all, in this matter, the most refined judges of taste in antiquity are on my side. In my opinion Plato bundles all the forms of style pell-mell together, in this respect he is one[Pg 114] of the first decadents of style: he has something similar on his conscience to that which the Cynics had who invented the satura Menippea. For the Platonic dialogue—this revoltingly self-complacent and childish kind of dialectics—to exercise any charm over you, you must never have read any good French authors,—Fontenelle for instance. Plato is boring.
In reality my distrust of Plato is fundamental. I find him so very much astray from all the deepest instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral prejudices, so pre-existently Christian—the concept "good" is already the highest value with him,—that rather than use any other expression I would prefer to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the hard word "superior bunkum," or, if you would like it better, "idealism." Humanity has had to pay dearly for this Athenian having gone to school among the Egyptians (—or among the Jews in Egypt?...) In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that double-faced fascination called the "ideal," which made it possible for the more noble natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to tread the bridge which led to the "cross."
And what an amount of Plato is still to be found in the concept "church," and in the construction, the system and the practice of the church!—My recreation, my predilection, my cure, after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli's principe are most closely related to me owing to the absolute determination which they show of refusing to deceive themselves and of seeing reason in reality,—not in "rationality," and still less in "morality." There is no more radical cure than Thucydides for the lamentably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks which the "classically-cultured" stripling bears with him into life, as a reward for his public school training. His writings must be carefully studied line by line, and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly as what he actually says. There are few thinkers so rich in unuttered thoughts. In him the culture "of the Sophists"—that is to say, the culture of realism, receives its most perfect expression: this inestimable movement in the midst of the moral and idealistic knavery of the Socratic Schools which was then breaking out in all directions.
Greek philosophy is the decadence of the Greek instinct: Thucydides is the great summing up, the final manifestation of that strong, severe positivism which lay in the instincts of the ancient Hellene. After all, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently he takes refuge in the ideal: Thucydides is master of himself,—consequently he is able to master life.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52263/52263-h/52263-h.htm#THI...
jerzyt|5 years ago
Are there any other authors/books in this category?
arminiusreturns|5 years ago
I could go on. For example, when thinking about the changing landscape of warfare and politics in a nuclear age, I think you can't find a better book than "The Shield of Achilles" by Phillip Bobbit (if you do let me know). With the latest shift in the military strategy space I suspect lots of Mahan and Corbett are being read right now. It is a mistake to too heavily rely on any of these though.
What I have learned over time is that one does not want to look for a "how to" book by a strategic master, or on any subject so esoteric, but rather to glean tidbits of information that over time open up into novel insights, sometimes only after multiple readings.
On the particular subject of Machiavelli, I think the biggest mistake is to focus on the man himself, instead of the greater power struggles of his day. For example the War of the League of Cambrai is one of the most interesting things in the history of Europe to me, and it's almost never talked about or taught.
“Judging by what I have seen and read that it is not impossible to bring [the military] back to ancient modes and give it some form of past virtue, I decided, so as not to pass these my idle times without doing anything, to write what I understand about the art of war for the satisfaction of those who are lovers of ancient actions” - Machiavelli
keiferski|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategemata
Scroll down for both Latin and English chapter links.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Frontinus...
Edit: someone else asked this question on HN awhile ago, and I just remembered that I have it bookmarked. Some excellent suggestions here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=456275
avoidboringppl|5 years ago
Perhaps Striking Thoughts (quotes by Bruce Lee) or The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, as well?
CapricornNoble|5 years ago
I'd recommend Plato's "The Republic". "Mencius" (self-titled work by the Confucian philosopher) and maybe Confucius's "Analects" for political philosophy and leadership.
For warfare and strategy, other posters have already said Carl Von Clauswitz's "On War" which is pretty much the gold standard of modern military thought publications so I'm going to reiterate it as a must-read. In particular I would focus on Book I, Chapter 3: "The Genius For War". Slightly less well-known is Alfred T. Mahan's "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History" but that's less about leadership and much more about strategy.
A very modern text on tactical leadership would be HJ Poole's "The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO's Contribution to Warfare" https://www.amazon.com/Last-Hundred-Yards-Contribution-Warfa...
MAMAMassakali|5 years ago
nestorD|5 years ago
However I do not know if it was translated in English.
twic|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lord_Shang
cmendel|5 years ago
danharaj|5 years ago
_0ffh|5 years ago
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1270379.The_Machiavellia...
Glyptodon|5 years ago
kyrieeschaton|5 years ago
https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/
cdiamand|5 years ago
It's been a while since I read it, but I found it to be an interesting romp through roman history through the lense of Machiavelli's sometimes cold, sometimes compassionate analysis.
KingOfCoders|5 years ago
cambalache|5 years ago
goto11|5 years ago
And I don't see the article dismissing his philosophy due to this. It's a biography, so it is about his life as much as his philosophy.
ekianjo|5 years ago
mental reduction, it prevents people from having to think that the context of civilization is ever changing, which makes judgments very complex. They prefer it single-variable.
sideshowb|5 years ago
watwut|5 years ago
> he picked up a pretty lad and, after he has had his way in the darkness, explains that he has no money, but states that he is called Filippo Casavecchia—and if he calls at his shop tomorrow, the boy will get his money. A surprised Filippo, a buddy of Machiavelli’s, denies it was him,
The falsely accused friend would not think it is ok and nor did prostitute boy.
> and the boy threatens him with prosecution for sodomy.
Apparently, the act was illegal.
> Filippo asks if the boy would recognise the man’s voice? The boy says yes, so he is taken to a spot near the Porta Romana where Machiavelli regularly holds court. The boy creeps up behind the bench where the great man is telling an anecdote. He sees the boy and runs off.
If that was ok by past standards, why did he run?
"Past" is not universal excuse. Easy example is that I wont excuse Nazi leadership for just being men of their time. "It was in the past therefore it was ok" is ridiculous standard.
known|5 years ago