ATTRACTED TO AND REPULSED BY MACHIAVELLI

The Prince is assigned reading in one of my classes this semester.  As the text is less than 100 pages, I was able to finish it in one sitting.  I found myself simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by Machiavelli.  He wrote The Prince in 1513 to the new ruler of Florence in hopes of getting his job back; after twenty years of public service, he had been accused of conspiracy, fired, and then tortured. 

 

His main message, which has become so famous that we know it by his name, was that leadership wasn't about virtue, as many of his contemporaries (like Thomas Aquinas) claimed in their own writings, but rather about doing what it took to stay in power.  Virtues like integrity and mercy were merely tools, then, useful at times and at other times inferior to deceit and brutality when it came to obtaining and retaining power.  Machiavelli is most entertaining to read when he coins such delicious phrases as "cruelty well-applied" and "know how to resort to evil when necessity demands it."

 

On the one hand, reading this riles me up.  Leaders who resort to emotional callousness and moral flexibility to achieve their ends are not leaders at all but brutes.  It's a short-sighted strategy anyway, for it is impossible to sustain (and even Machiavelli would acknowledge this).  Finally, I believe we are ultimately accountable to an Eternal and Almighty Judge, whose judgment on our despicable actions and attitudes is far more important than any worldly gains we might have obtained from them.

 

And yet I find a lot of truth in The Prince.  When he recommends colonization of newly acquired provinces over military occupation, lest "the whole population feel aggrieved by having the armed force quartered upon them," I can't help but think of the situation in Iraq.  When he says "any man who himself despires death can always inflict it upon others," my mind conjures up images of suicide bombers.  Even in his most dastardly lines of thinking, I understand where he is coming from: it's a cruel, cruel world, and if you don't play the right way, you'll get eaten alive.

 

My professor assigns this book not to commend it to us but to provoke us to respond.  So here is my first response.