Professor Eidelberg has a world class mind and his analysis of Machiavelli’s The Prince in right on but more since he has shown how what Machiavelli wrote ties into Western Civilization and how combined with others thoughts that followed him have lead us to the place we now are  — witch is not good!

Machiavelli and the Decay of Western Civilization

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Machiavelli is the father of Modernity and Democracy and the creator of Secular Man par excellence. His deceptively simple book The Prince, so often trivialized, marks the Copernican revolution in politics.[1] In that sibylline work Machiavelli undertook the world-historical task of destroying nothing less than the two pillars of Western civilization, classical Greek philosophy and Christianity, whose ethics, whether derived from Nature or nature’s God, derogate from the complete autonomy of human will and desire.

The key to modernity will be found in Chapter 15 of The Prince.[2] There Machiavelli lists ten pairs of qualities for which men, especially rulers, are praised or blamed—qualities which a ruler, “if he wishes to maintain himself,” must be able to “use” and “not use” “according to necessity.” [3] Some rulers, he declares, “are held liberal, some miserly … [and/or] rapacious; some cruel, others full of pity; the one faithless, the other faithful; the one effeminate and pusillanimous, the other fierce and spirited; the one human, the other proud; the one lascivious, the other chaste; the one open, the other cunning; the one hard, the other easy; the one grave, the other light; the one religious, the other skeptical, and the like.”

Machiavelli elaborates in Chapter 18 of The Prince:

It is not necessary for a prince to have in fact all of the qualities written above, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them. I shall rather dare to say this: that having them and observing them always, they are harmful, but in appearing to have them, they are useful—so as to appear to be full of pity, faithful, human, open, religious, and to be so, but with one’s mind constructed in such a mode that when the need not to be arises, you can, and know how to, change to the contrary.[4]

A mind so “constructed” must be virtually devoid of all emotion, save the desire for power. To harbor emotions is to be susceptible to habits, and it is precisely habits that prevent a ruler from being a Machiavellian, which is to say, a perfect opportunist. To be a perfect opportunist, a ruler must change his “nature” with the times and circumstances, which means he must have no emotional predispositions (other than the desire to maintain and increase his power). This would be possible only if man is nothing more than a creature of habits—habits that can be conquered by men of the caliber of Machiavelli. (Long before Rousseau and twentieth-century behaviorists, Machiavelli let it be known that human nature—if man can be said to have a nature—is plastic or malleable.)

But if human nature is malleable, then it should be theoretically possible to shape the mentality of an age!

This is precisely what Machiavelli set out to do in The Prince and its companion work The Discourses. Notice that in his list of qualities that brings praise to rulers, Machiavelli excludes the four cardinal virtues of Greek political philosophy: wisdom, justice, moderation, and courage!   Moreover, religion (paired with skepticism) is placed last, inverting the Decalogue. Consistent therewith, the central and most significant pair of qualities is designated as “human” and “pride.” One would have expected “pride” (the Christian vice) to be paired with “humility” (the Christian virtue), but Machiavelli deliberately omits humility from the list of qualities for which men and princes are praised. Humility is the virtue of the weak, but also the facade of the “proud”—the priests who denigrate pagan virtu, i.e., manliness, while lording it over the people. Machiavelli replaces aristocratic monotheism with democratic “homotheism.”[5] To complete the process of man’s deification – the new World Oder – the creator of Secular Man simply eliminated every semblance or pretense of godliness, rendering man entirely “human.”   The seed of Humanism was thus planted in Chapter 15 of The Prince. In that seminal chapter Machiavelli advanced Christianity’s historic function, which was to destroy primitive idolatry on the one hand, while facilitating the secularization of mankind on the other.

With justice omitted from the qualities for which rulers are praised, a radically new political science appeared on the stage of world history, one that sanctifies the commonplace, not to say vulgarity, in the name of “realism.”[6] In opposition to classical political philosophy, modern political science takes its bearing not from how man should live, but from how men do live—from the is, not from the ought. Again Chapter 15: “… there is such a distance between how one lives and how one should live that he who lets go that which is done for that which ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation … Hence it is necessary for a prince, if he wishes to maintain himself, to learn to be able to be not good, and to use it and not use it according to necessity.”

This separation of morality from politics is the historical consequence of the Christian separation of church and state. Henceforth there are no moral limits as to what man may do. Man is at last fully autonomous. He stands, as Nietzsche was to say, “beyond good and evil.”

Furthermore, in direct opposition to the biblical tradition, which exalts truth and truthfulness the creator of Secular Man teaches would-be rulers to practice deceit and dissimulation constantly. “A prince ought to take great care … that he appears to be, when one sees and hears him, all pity, all faith, all integrity, all humanity, and all religion…. For men, universally, judge more by the eyes than by the hands … Everyone sees what you seem to be, but few touch what you are.”[7] We have here a politics keyed to the sense of touch, the most dynamic and erotic of the senses. For unlike sight and hearing—passive receptors of the written and spoken word—the sense of touch, especially in the hands, connects to the will—the will to power.

The greatest manifestation of the will to power is not the state but the founding of an entirely new “state.” To establish such a state a founder must create “new modes and orders”: he must make the “high” low and the “low” high.[8] To do this he must radically alter people’s inherited beliefs as to what is deserving of praise and blame. This will require not only great force but monumental fraud or deception. Hence the founder must possess virtu, greatness of mind and body. Extraordinary cunning and fierceness—even terror—are essential in the founding of an entirely new state. In no other way can the founder perpetuate his “new modes and orders.” Clearly, the “state”—Nietzsche will later say “philosophy”—is a construct of the mind and will of the “prince.”[9]

Since all new states originate in force, hence in revolutionary violence, their founders are, and by definition must be, “criminals.” Only after they have established new “orders” do they become “legitimate” and respectable. Accordingly, what is decisive in the study of politics is not laws or legal institutions but the dynamics of power, on which alone all laws are ultimately based. Indeed, laws are obligatory only insofar as they can be enforced; otherwise they are mere words having no “effectual truth”—like the best regimes in theory imagined by the philosophers of antiquity. In Chapter 12 of The Prince, Machiavelli writes: “The principal foundations which all states have, whether new, old, or mixed, are good laws and good arms. And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there needs must be good laws, I shall omit reasoning on laws and speak of arms.” Arms are the counterpart of the “effectual truth” mentioned in Chapter 15.   There is no such thing as just or unjust laws or just and unjust regimes.

This is precisely the doctrine of legal realism or positivism that identifies the just with the legal, a doctrine that dominates law schools in the democratic world and makes it easier for democracies to recognize and have truck with tyrannies. But to deny the distinction between just and unjust laws is to reject the concept of the “common good,” a concept which appears nowhere in The Prince.[10] Neither does the word “tyrant” (in a book that commends Hiero, Agathocles, Cesare Borgia and others of their ilk as “princes”).[11] The term “justice” appears only in Chapter 19 of The Prince. There ten Roman emperors are mentioned, only two of which die a natural death—the just and gentle Marcus Aurelius and the unjust and ferocious Septimius Severus. Which means that justice is irrelevant in the world of politics (as implied by its omission in Chapter 15). We have in Machiavelli the Deification of Egoism, the modern euphemism of which is Individualism.

Although Marcus Aurelius’ rule was just, whereas Severus’ rule was tyrannical, Machiavelli praises both as “virtuous.” Why? Because the ultimate criterion of “virtue,” as of praise and blame, is success (of which more in a moment). This silent denial of the classical distinction between kingship and tyranny is one of the cornerstones of contemporary political science (which propagates the moral equivalency one hears so much about nowadays). A political science that rejects the traditional distinction between kingship and tyranny can take no account of, in fact must deny, the distinction between the good man and the good citizen. The good citizen is of course the patriot who fights for his country and obeys its laws. His country, however, and therefore its laws, may be unjust—from the traditional point of view. But this means that the good citizen may be a bad man. From which it follows that contemporary political science denies the distinction between good men and bad men—which is why democratic journalists (and only democratic journalists) can publicly proclaim that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” These relativists (and their academic mentors) are examples of tamed or democratized Machiavellians.

This leveling of moral distinctions is rooted in a leveling of the distinction between man and beast. The successful ruler, says Machiavelli in Chapter 18 of The Prince, will combine, in varying proportions (depending on circumstances), the cunning of the fox and the fierceness of a lion.[12] And just as it would be absurd to condemn a lion for devouring a lamb, so it would be absurd to condemn a “prince” (by calling him a “tyrant”) for ravaging or subjugating a nation. As Machiavelli puts it in Chapter 3 of The Prince: “It is a thing truly very natural and ordinary to desire to acquire [note the deliberate redundancy]; and when men are able to do so do it, they are always praised or not blamed …” This precept follows an account of Louis XII of France who “was brought into Italy by the ambition of the Venetians … I do not want to blame the part taken by the King for wanting to begin gaining a foothold in Italy …” Machiavelli, the founder of a “value-free” political science, actually shows in Chapter 3 how to conquer his own country! The ultimate criterion of praise and blame is not right and wrong, but success and failure.

We must now ask, what is the world-historical goal of Secular Man? The answer to this question will be found in Chapter 25 of The Prince. There Machiavelli subtly equates God with chance (fortuna). He then identifies chance with “woman” and playfully proclaims that man’s task is to conquer her. What he means is this. “Woman” signifies nature, and man’s ultimate goal is to conquer nature, which will require the overcoming of traditional views of human nature. This is why the word “soul” (anima) never appears either in The Prince or The Discourses. We are given to understand, therefore, that man’s nature is plastic, is unbound by any moral laws or by “conscience” (another deliberately omitted word in The Prince).[13]   And so, just as the “Philosopher” replaced the Olympian pantheon with a new conception of Nature, so the “Prince” replaces Nature (and Nature’s God) with a new conception of Man. This requires elaboration.

The conquest of chance involves the overcoming of God and of all those who have traditionally diminished man by despising the merely “human.” The enemy is the “proud”: not only the priests, who denigrate the body, but the philosophers who exalt kingship and aristocracy. To conquer chance, therefore, one must lower the goals of human life. For the higher the goals of man the more he is exposed to chance and accident. Turn now to Secular Man, to diluted man,, an inevitable bi-product of the undiluted Promethean.

Lowering the goals of human life corresponds to leveling the distinction between man and beast on the one hand, and denying the existence of the soul on the other. Abolish the soul and human reason will have nothing to serve but the wants of the body or sensuality, and such external goods as wealth, power, and prestige. To deny the soul, therefore, is to deify, in effect, the “human, all-too-human”—what the priests referred to, pejoratively, as “human nature.”

Machiavelli’s deification of the merely “human” is the unembellished meaning of humanism; it is the true source of Individualism and Capitalism, of Socialism and Communism, of Fascism and Nazism.

The prerequisites for the Machiavellian conquest of nature can now be more fully appreciated. The first thing needed is a new science of politics, a politics that liberates man’s acquisitive instincts in opposition to classical moderation and Christian asceticism. However, the liberation of acquisitiveness necessitates a rejection of priests, nobles, and kings in favor of the people. Commentators tend to minimize if not overlook Machiavelli’s democratic “bias” (which is actually part of his world-historical project). Machiavelli’s political science had to be democratic if he was to create a new dispensation for mankind. In other words, he had to destroy classical political science, which is essentially aristocratic, if he was to create a democratic era.   Machiavelli is in fact the first philosopher to contend that democracy is the best regime.

In The Discourses he challenges all previous political philosophy by claiming that, “[A]s regards prudence and stability, I say that the people are more prudent and stable, and have better judgment than a prince. And in The Prince he boldly declares: “The end of the people is more honest than that of the great.[14]   Moreover, in overturning the Great Tradition, which praises agrarian as opposed to commercial societies as more conducive to virtue, Machiavelli praises commercial republics because such republics, like Rome, are more powerful, are more capable of dominion. Machiavelli’s political science therefore liberates acquisitiveness and prepares the ground for capitalism (and, for much more, as we shall see later). He is indeed the father of modernity.

The Prince must thus be understood as a conspiratorial as well as a Copernican work. (Incidentally, its longest chapter, like that of The Discourses, is on conspiracy.) Far from being a tract for the times (as some have foolishly believed), this masterpiece of cunning may be regarded as philosophically-armed propaganda addressed to thinkers who might be tempted to make common cause with the “people” and create a new dispensation for mankind. Needed were “collaborators” who would come after Machiavelli and bring to completion his world-historical project. And they were forthcoming. Before discussing his collaborators, allow me to amuse the reader by the following digression.

Continued in Part Two