On this day in 1469, the great political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli was born. I’ve been amazed over a very long time that a lot of people seem to be under the impression that he was some kind of bad guy like Vlad the Impaler. I’ve always found The Prince to be the work of a wise older man just explaining how the world works. We tend to think of the recent history of the British monarchy where power (such as it is) flows peacefully from father to son. But in Machiavelli’s time, a monarch was much more likely to be someone who stole the throne. It is the first important contribution to realpolitik.
There is most likely another side to The Prince. Machiavelli was an important government official in the Florentine republic up into his forties. Even though he had much success after that (most notably as a comedic playwright), he saw those earlier times as the best of his life. The Prince was likely intended as an implicit argument in favor of republicanism. So maybe it is all of us who are the cynical ones and to him it was obvious that he was lampooning the monarchy by showing the best case for the latter.
What Machiavelli brings to my mind is the duty of citizenship. Here in America, we mostly think our republic is something that we are entitled to. It simply is and we get the benefits of it. But that’s not true. It is something we constantly have to fight for. And if we don’t, it will devolve into an oligarchy, as it pretty much has. As Chris Hedges discussed in Death of the Liberal Class, it used to be that the upper classes (minus the rich) paid for their privilege by managing the state and not letting the oligarchs take over. But they have really fallen down on the job and now have almost no more power than the lower classes. Now our only hope is that all the citizens will bind together and use their democratic power, although even if that happened (doubtful), I’m not sure the oligarchs would allow it. Things haven’t changed much since Machiavelli was writing. He sees America today as clearly as he saw Medici Florence then.
Happy birthday Niccolo Machiavelli!
