From Shakespeare’s plays to modern TV dramas, the unscrupulous schemer for whom ends always justify the means has become a familiar character type love to hate. So familiar, in fact, that for centuries we’ve a single word to describe such characters: Machiavellian. But it possible that we’ve been using that word wrong this whole time?
The early 16th century statesman Niccoló Machiavelli wrote many works of history, philosophy, and drama. his lasting notoriety comes from a brief political essay known as The Prince, framed as advice to current and future monarchs. Machiavelli wasn’t the first to do this– in fact there was an entire tradition of works known as “mirrors for princes” back to antiquity. But unlike his predecessors, Machiavelli didn’t try to describe ideal government or exhort his audience to rule justly and virtuously. Instead, he focused on the question of power– how to acquire it, and how to keep it. And in the decades after it was published, Prince gained a diabolical reputation. During the European Wars of Religion, both Catholics and Protestants blamed Machiavelli for inspiring acts of violence and tyranny committed by their opponents. By the end of the century, Shakespeare was using “Machiavel” to denote an amoral opportunist, leading directly to our popular use “Machiavellian” as a synonym for manipulative villainy.
At first glance, The Prince’s reputation a manual for tyranny seems well-deserved. Throughout, Machiavelli appears entirely unconcerned with morality, except insofar as it’s helpful or harmful to maintaining power. For instance, princes are told to consider all the atrocities necessary to power, and to commit them in a single stroke to ensure future stability. Attacking neighboring territories and oppressing religious minorities are mentioned as ways of occupying the public. Regarding a prince’s personal behavior, Machiavelli advises keeping up the appearance of virtues such as honesty or generosity, but being to abandon them as soon as one’s interests are threatened. Most famously, he notes that for a ruler, “it is safer to be feared than loved.” The tract even ends with an to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the recently installed ruler of Florence, urging him to unite the city-states of Italy under his rule.
Many have justified Machiavelli as motivated by unsentimental and a desire for peace in an Italy torn by internal and external conflict. According to this view, Machiavelli was the to understand a difficult truth: the greater good of political stability is worth whatever unsavory tactics are needed to attain it. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin suggested that rather than being amoral, The Prince hearkens back to ancient Greek morality, placing glory of the state above the Christian ideal of individual salvation.
But what we know Machiavelli might not fit this picture. The author had served his native Florence for 14 years as a diplomat, staunchly defending its elected republican against would-be monarchs.
When the Medici family seized power, he not only lost his position, but was even tortured and banished. With this in mind, it’s possible to read the pamphlet he wrote from exile not as a of princely rule, but a scathing description of how it operates. Indeed, Enlightenment figures like Spinoza saw it as warning citizens of the various ways in which they can be subjugated by rulers.
In fact, both readings might be true. Machiavelli may have written a manual for tyrannical rulers, by sharing it, he also revealed the cards to those who be ruled. In doing so, he revolutionized political philosophy, laying foundations for Hobbes and future thinkers to study human affairs based on their concrete realities rather than preconceived ideals. Through his brutal and shocking honesty, Machiavelli sought to shatter popular delusions about what power entails. And as he wrote to a friend shortly before his death, he that people would “learn the way to Hell in order to flee from it.”