The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
law; right and wrong had really nothing to do with the art of government. In furnishing what appeared a reasoned justification for such tenets, Machiavelli interpreted to itself the world of contemporary statecraft, and fixed upon politics the stamp of irremediable immorality—a result to which the rejection of medieval ideas need not necessarily have led.
Such are the general principles which lie at the root of all Machiavelli’s teaching, and which serve to universalise all the particular rules and maxims with which his books are crowded. They have, with hardly an exception, their roots in the ancient world, and in nearly every case it can be shown how they were transmitted to him, and how by him the old material was forged and moulded into new shapes. It remains to enquire how they were applied to the necessities of his own age and country. In 1513, Machiavelli was ruined and discredited, ready to despair of Fortune’s favour, and willing to accept even the humblest position which would enable him to be of use to himself and his city. Employment was slow in coming, and during enforced leisure he devoted himself to literature. The Prince and The Discourses were begun in 1513; The Art of War was published in 1521, and the eight books of The Florentine Histories were ready by 1525. All these works are closely related; in all the same principles are implied; no one of them is any more or less immoral than any of its fellows; they supplement each other, and by precept and example enforce the same conclusions. There is reason to believe that Machiavelli himself considered The Art of War the most important of his books, but his fame in later generations has rested almost wholly upon The Prince.
The contents of The Prince were little, if at all, affected by Machiavelli’s altered fortunes, though he hoped that if the book was read by the Medici, they might employ him in some official position, for which his past life qualified him. This did not prevent him from developing, without any reserve, the conclusions which his studies and experience had enabled him to mature. He was primarily concerned neither with his own interests nor with the Medici family, but with the problems presented by the condition of Italy in 1513. Ten years previously he had written the words: “Go forth from Tuscany, and consider all Italy.” His early writings, and in particular his diplomatic letters, are crowded with suggestions of the form which the conclusions would ultimately take. Slowly, through at least fourteen years, his mind had moved in one direction, and new ideas of a wide compass and a lofty range had taken shape and asserted their claims to recognition. He had been a Florentine of the Florentines, hating Pisa and exulting over Venice. By 1513 he was almost persuaded to become an Italian, to merge the local in the national. Yet, although enthusiastic and at times even visionary, he was under no permanent delusion; the hope of an ultimate unity for Italy could not under the circumstances assume for him any precise form; only as a far-distant aspiration, a pervasive thought, it formed the large background of his speculation. He knew that union was not possible then; but he held, in opposition to Guicciardini, that it was only through union that national prosperity becomes possible; “truly no country was ever united or prosperous, unless the whole of it passes beneath the sway of one commonwealth or one prince, as has happened in the cases of France and Spain.” When, however, the possibility of such a thing in his own day was suggested to him, he was, he said, ready to laugh; no progress could be made in the presence of a disruptive Papacy, worthless soldiers, and divided interests. But if autonomy and independence of foreign control could be secured, the question would at once enter upon a new stage. Machiavelli did not mistake the problem; but he could not forecast the issues of the nineteenth century.
The Prince, though not a complete novelty, became for many reasons a work of primary importance. Machiavelli was the earliest writer who consistently applied the inductive or experimental method to political science. What was new in method produced much that was new in results. The earlier manuals of statecraft rested upon assumptions transmitted through the medieval Church. In Dante’s time and long afterwards no man dared to discard the presuppositions of Christianity. Private judgment in politics, scarcely less than in theology, was disqualified, not because it might be incompetent, but as always ex hypothesi wrong, wherever authority is recognised. Abstract principles of justice, duty, morality, formed the foundation upon which the political theories of the Middle Ages had been constructed. The reasoning from final causes was almost universal. So long as these primary postulates were not revised, speculation trod and re-trod the same confined area. What Machiavelli did, was to shift the basis of political science and, consequently, to emancipate the State from ecclesiastical thraldom. Henceforward, the fictions of the Realists, which had controlled the forms of medieval thought in nearly all departments, were set aside; the standard was to be no philosophic summum bonum, nor was the sic volo of authority to silence enquiry or override argument. An appeal was to be made to history and reason; the publicist was to investigate, not to invent,—to record, not to anticipate,—the laws which appear to govern men’s actions. Machiavelli’s method of reasoning was a challenge to existing authority, and was believed to entail the disqualification, at least in politics, of the old revealed law of God, in favour either of a restored and revised form of natural law, or at any rate of some new law which man might elicit, independently of God, from the accumulated records of human activity. The Prince was the first great work in which the two authorities, the Divine and the human, were clearly seen in collision, and in which the venerable axioms of earlier generations were rejected as practically misleading, and theoretically unsound. The simplicity and directness of its trenchant appeal to common experience and to the average intelligence won for the book a recognition never accorded to Machiavelli’s other works.
In The Prince the discussion of the methods, by which a “new prince” might consolidate his power, developed into a contribution towards a new conception of the State. The book not only furnished a summary of the means by which, in the circumstances then existing, the redemption of Italy might be accomplished; but, inasmuch as the conditions of life repeat themselves and the recurrence of similar crises in the future was always possible, recommendations, primarily directed to the solution of an immediately pressing difficulty, were enlarged in scope, and came to have the intention of supplying in some measure and with perhaps some minor reservations a law of political action in all times. Beneath the special rules and maxims new principles were latent, and, though obscured occasionally by the form in which they are expressed, they can be disengaged without serious difficulty.
Machiavelli, though his sympathies were republican, knew that the times required the intervention of a despot. He had no hesitation in deciding the relative merits, in the abstract, of the democratic and the monarchical forms of government: “the rule of a people is better than that of a prince.” When the problem was, not how to establish a new government in the face of apparently overwhelming obstacles, but only how to carry on what was already well instituted, a republic would be found far more serviceable than a monarchy; “while a prince is superior to a people in instituting laws, in shaping civil society, in framing new statutes and ordinances, a people has the same superiority in preserving what is established.” It is doubtful whether Machiavelli ever contemplated the creation of an enduring monarchy in Italy; the continuance of an absolute power would, he believed, corrupt the State. He was on the whole sanguine as to the possibilities of popular rule; he thought it reasonable to compare the voice of the people to the voice of God, and held with Cicero that the masses, though ignorant, may come to understand the truth. But the drastic reform contemplated by him could not be achieved under republican institutions, which could only work satisfactorily among a people whose character was sound. Corruption had gone too far in Italy; “it is corrupt above all other countries.” Moreover “a people, into whom corruption has thoroughly entered, cannot live in freedom, I do not say for a short time, but for any time at all.” By “corruption” Machiavelli understood primarily the decay of private and civic morality, the growth of impiety and violence, of idleness and ignorance; the prevalence of spite, license, and ambition; the loss of peace and justice; the general contempt of religion. He meant also dishonesty, weakness, disunion. These things, he knew well, are the really decisive factors in national life. For the restoration of old ideals and the inauguration of a new golden age, he ex hypothesi looked to the State. And the State is plastic; it is as wax in the hands of the legislator; he can “stamp upon it any new form.”
The drift of such arguments is obvious. “It may be taken for a general rule that a republic or kingdom is never, or very rarely, well organised at its beginning, or fundamentally renovated by a reform of its old institutions, unless it is organised by one man....