Was
Machiavelli Evil?
by Greg Nyquist
To this day,
the
controversy still has not been settled to everyone’s
satisfaction.
Machiavelli is still regarded with horror by certain intellectuals,
especially by those of an idealistic or self-righteous complexion. He
is regarded as a man destitute of conscience, morals, and religion; an
apologist for cruelty and tyranny; a glorifier of mendacity and
deception. The adjective Machiavellian is widely used as a synonym for
amoral cunning and ruthless power hunger. Woodrow Wilson, speaking of
Machiavelli’s most notorious work, The Prince, wrote: “It
recognizes no
morality but a sham morality meant for deceit, no honor even among
thieves and of a thievish sort, no force but physical force, no
intellectual power but cunning, no disgrace but failure, no crime but
stupidity.” The neo-conservative intellectual Irving Kristol
regarded
Machiavelli as the first political thinker to effectively separate
politics from religion, thus serving as an inspiration for the
“godless” totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth century.
George F.
Will has gone so far as to accuse of Machiavelli of defining man
“as a
lump of matter whose most politically relevant attribute is a form of
energy call ‘self-interestedness.’ This was not a portrait
of man
‘warts and all.’ It was all wart,” quips Will.
Are these censures of Machiavelli deserved? Was the Florentine diplomat
and founder of modern political science as evil and depraved as these
men would have him? Was Machiavelli really an impious, secular, perhaps
even “pagan” viper in the very bosom of Christendom, eager
to spread
the curse of irreligion to Western Civilization?
Those who have taken the trouble to become better acquainted with
Machiavelli’s life and work have come to a very different
conclusion.
In his private life, Machiavelli was a blameless and honorable man.
Although not a particularly devout believer, there is no evidence to
suggest that he did not consider himself a Christian. His letters are
sprinkled with such phrases as “May Christ watch over you”
or “God be
with you and watch over you.” When he was released from prison in
March
1513, he wrote: “I was about to lose my life, which God and my
innocence saved for me.” Later in 1513, he wrote: “I feel
all right in
body, but bad in everything else...and no hope remains to me but that
God may help me, and up to here he has in fact not abandoned me.”
Among
Machiavelli’s lesser known writings is the “Exhortation to
Penitence,”
a piece written for a religious occasion, in which Machiavelli writes
that “man is created only for the good and honor of God.”
Machiavelli’s reputation as a “secular” thinker comes
primarily from
one characteristic of his writings: his refusal to judge political
reality by the standard of theological idealizations. The political
writers of the Middle Ages used an overly idealistic religious
framework to interpret everything. Machiavelli who, as a congenital
realist, could not help noticing how far these religious idealisms
departed from the course of politics as it existed in the brutal world
of fact, decided to take a different approach, seeking instead to
explain political events realistically, as he found it recorded in
history and revealed in the experience of practicing statesmen. This
does not mean that Machiavelli discounted religion altogether. He
merely separated himself from the self-righteous hypocrisy of those who
tried to explain everything in terms of God’s will, as if all the
errors, crime, and disasters of men were somehow God’s fault.
Machiavelli’s own view of the role of God in human affairs is
stated
with admirable succinctness at the very end of The Prince. “The
rest
you must do for yourself,” he counsels the dedicatee of his book,
Lorenzo de’ Medici. “God does not wish to do everything, in
order not
to take from us our free will and that part of the glory which is
ours.” In other words, Machiavelli is arguing that the existence
of God
does not rule out self-initiative. This conviction, which is very
modern, resembles the view found in certain strains of Protestantism,
especially those identified by Max Weber with the Protestant Work
Ethic. It vaguely brings to mind (but should not be confused with) the
vulgar maxim “God helps those that help themselves.” We do
an injustice
to Machiavelli to try pigeonhole his thought into definite categories.
Machiavelli is not saying that God does nothing and man everything, or
man nothing and God everything. Machiavelli, unlike some ideologues, is
not an exclusively polar thinker who believes that everything can be
reduced to either/or. In Machiavelli’s world, things exist in
degrees.
It’s not all or nothing. Both man and God contribute to the
course of
history. How else are we to explain the wretchedness of life? Do we
really want to lay it all at the hands of God? Machiavelli, for all his
modernity, is no fatalist. He recognizes, as does anyone who has eyes
in his head and a mind capable of judging facts correctly, that men are
not complete arbiters of their faith. But they do make a definite
contribution to the world they live in. So why not make decisions based
on a correct estimate of actual conditions in the world, rather than on
mere idealizations based on wishful thinking?
It is suggested by the Irving Kristols of the intellectual world that
Machiavelli wished to establish a secular state. Again, this is an
error based on not paying close attention to what Machiavelli actually
wrote. Machiavelli lived in an era of horrendous corruption in the
Church. The papacy had fallen into the hands of common adventurers, who
brought ignominy upon the Christian religion and paved the way for the
Protestant Reformation. Machiavelli’s alleged
“secularism” is nothing
more than Italian anticlericalism: he despised the corrupt, proud, and
hypocritical clergy that brought ruin upon Renaissance Italy. Yet,
despite his disillusionment with the Catholic Church, Machiavelli did
not wish to dispose of the papacy. “[H]e does not challenge the
existence of the papacy (the office, as opposed to particular
incumbents), the priesthood, or the sacerdotal use of temporal
power,”
notes Sebastian de Grazia, one of Machiavelli’s most penetrating
expositors. “He discriminates good clerics from bad, good policy
from
bad. He acknowledges the advantage popes have of combining spiritual
and temporal resources. In moral education, he appreciates the singular
reach of the clergy and the means of ritual and example at its
disposal. He accepts Christianity as the true religion, but insists
that the restoring of its church calls for a God-fearing clergy,
blood-thirstier sacrificial rites, a foreign policy aimed at Italian
unity in the face of barbarians, and a return to the active and
patriotic principles of Christianity and to Christ as its head.” [Machiavelli
in Hell, 115]
Critical to Machiavelli’s thought is the central role he assigns
religion to society. Far from advocating a secular state, Machiavelli
makes it clear in The Discourses that he strongly believes in the
importance of religion. “Therefore the princes of a republic or
kingdom
must maintain the foundations of the religion they have; and having
done this, it will be an easy thing for them to keep their republic
religious, and, in consequence, good and unified.” And elsewhere:
“Those Princes and Commonwealths who would keep their Governments
entire and incorrupt, are above all things to have a care of Religion
and its Ceremonies, and preserve them in due veneration.”
Machiavelli’s central concern was always the welfare of his
country. “I
believe that the greatest good that one can do, and the most gratifying
to God, is that which one does for one’s country.”
Machiavelli, above
all, was a patriot. He wished to save Italy from the horrors of foreign
tyranny. This was his life’s work. In the end, he failed. Italy
became
subject to the Hapsburg dynasty, rulers of Spain and the Holy Roman
Empire. The Habsburgs effectively put an end to the Italian
Renaissance, instituting a long and ignominious foreign occupation upon
Europe’s most civilized population, even going so far as to
institute
the Spanish Inquisition in the land of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo.
The primary reason Machiavelli has been so often condemned for being
“evil” stems from his realism concerning human nature.
Machiavelli knew
that the political world had more than its fair share of ruthless and
unscrupulous men. If, under the sway of moral or religious idealism, we
fail to recognize this fact, we only put ourselves at the mercy of
evil. We should never simply assume that the good will win in the end
because it is good. If evil men use dirty tricks to obtain an advantage
over those whom they wish to oppress, then good men will have no other
choice but to resort to the same tricks if only to preserve their
freedom. To believe that honesty is the always the best policy in a
world full of knaves is not merely naive and foolish, it is,
Machiavelli would contend, irresponsible. If country A signs an arms
treaty with country B, only to find that country B is cheating, country
A would be irresponsible not to cheat in its stead. This, in essence,
is Machiavelli’s doctrine. It is the reason why so many idealists
regard him with horror. The idealist would like to believe that good
guys always finish first because they are good. Machiavelli challenges
this view. He suggested that, under certain circumstances, it is
necessary to lie and deceive in order to protect oneself against a much
greater evil. This doctrine is not, as it has been caricatured as, the
view that the ends justify the means. Machiavelli never made that
argument. Instead, it is a far more subtle argument: bad means may be
necessary if it prevents a worse end. Machiavelli, ever the realist,
knew that sometimes the only choice was between bad and worse. He did
not shrink from preferring the lesser evil.
There have been people all throughout history (nowadays they are called
liberals) who won’t accept the fact that occasionally bad things
have
to be done to prevent something worse from happening. Truman chose to
drop two atom bombs rather than lose half a million Americans in a
planned invasion of the Japanese mainland. Undoubtedly, using the atom
bomb was a very bad thing: thousands of women and children were
brutally killed. But sending a half a million young American men to
their deaths (and hundreds of thousands of Japanese as well) would have
been worse.
We are confronted with
such choices between bad and worse all the time.
But liberals prefer to close their eyes to such harsh realities. They
see America under attack from Islamic terrorists and their first
instinct is to complain that captured terrorists are being denied their
“rights” by American authorities. America, they argue,
must, above all,
do the “right” thing, regardless of how bad the
consequences may be. In
their eyes, “virtue” is more important than survival, even
though death
would mean the triumph of the worse evil imaginable. Machiavelli would
have regarded such a view as depraved. These people, he would argue,
are turning virtue against itself. Machiavelli would never countenance
such foolishness. This is the sum of his “evil.”
