Nope, not the Diamond Head song, and I’ve already covered
the popular musician. This is about the
famous book by Niccolo Machiavelli and published in the early sixteenth
century. It’s phrased as political
advice to a would-be prince on how to behave and remain among the living.
It’s actually not all that long. Consider it the equivalent of a long short
story. Moreover, the language is fairly
easy to understand. Remarkably, much
more so than Shakespeare, which is actually in English – what passes for
English, anyhow. This means the original
Italian must have been fairly casual and informal.
Some feel that it was actually meant as satire, not to be
taken seriously; others disagree. To me
the advice is sensible enough, and not that outrageous, that it could well be
useful.
What does he advise?
Use the tools that are available. Honesty?
Moral? Sure – the extent these
work. His premise is to default to a
fairly moral standard and only abandon such methods if necessary. Look at Carter vs. Reagan. Reagan wasn’t a dictator, he wasn’t a king,
and he wasn’t a tyrant. But no one
thinks of him as naïve or foolish. Carter,
his immediate predecessor, sometimes comes off as too good for his own
good. Recall “The Enemy Within”, the
ST/OS episode where Kirk is split into two, and the “good” Kirk proves
practically useless as a starship captain, leading the (recombined) Kirk and
Spock to conclude that even a basically good person needs a dark side to be
effective. No one thinks of Roddenberry
as being evil, yet Machiavelli’s advice is close to the Star Trek thesis.
Better to be feared than loved. Love is fickle. Fear that screwing with the wrong guy will
get you killed? Far more substantial. Note that being feared is NOT necessarily the
same as being hated. Getting rid of your
enemies ruthlessly gets them out of the way permanently. Would-be avengers are as likely to be
intimidated into inaction, or persuaded to go along, as to actually attempt to
take revenge. Dead rivals are in no
position to do anything.
Don’t use mercenaries.
They truly suck. Likewise with
auxiliaries.
Examples. He was
well acquainted with the infamous Borgia family, in particular the patriarch
Pope Alexander VI, and his son Cesare.
The Romans provide multiple examples to illustrate his lessons. Of course, contemporary Italian politics was
also a useful source of examples. At
this time Italy was fractured and disjointed, and the French were perpetually
meddling in Italian politics. It wasn’t
until 1861, thanks to Garibaldi, that Italy was finally unified. So no one in Machiavelli’s time was up to the
task of getting the country together after the Romans.
Modern Day Applicability.
Well, there’s nothing in here about winning elections. Presumably princes in the 1500s weren’t
being popularly elected. However, there
is some discussion of being thrown out or killed by mobs of unhappy subjects,
so some degree of public accountability is at issue even with a non-elected
sovereign.
He talks about killing off political rivals to gain or
secure power, yet none of our 44 Presidents has had to rely upon such methods
to gain office or remain there. Neither
have any UK Prime Ministers since Oliver Cromwell, or practically any other
democratically elected sovereign for the past few centuries. Not even the diabolical and ruthless Vladimir
Putin had to kill anyone to get where he is (or did he?). Recent dictators such
as Hitler and Stalin did resort to such methods, but we’re aware of their
nature. As such, this treatise is a
reminder that – cynical protestations to the contrary notwithstanding –
politics has changed substantially since the early 1500s.
