Why does Machiavelli Seeing Lying, Cheating and Deceiving as Virtues - Book Report/Review Example

Why does Machiavelli seeing lying, cheating and deceiving as virtues Niccol di Bernardo dei Machiavelli Niccol di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (May 3,1469 - June 21, 1527) was an Italian diplomat, political philosopher, musician, poet, and playwright. He is a figure of the Italian Renaissance and a central figure of its political component, most widely known for his treatises on realist political theory (The Prince) on the one hand and republicanism (Discourses on Livy) on the other. These two written works-plus his History of Florence commissioned by the Medici family-were published posthumously in 1531.[1] After the ousting and execution of Savonarola, the Great Council elected Machiavelli as the second chancellor of the Republic of Florence in June of 1498. Machiavelli died in San Casciano, a few miles outside of Florence, in 1527. His resting place is unknown; however a cenotaph in his honor was placed at the Church of Santa Croce in Florence. The Latin sentence on the tomb means 'For such a great name, no line fits'. Central theme It has been a common view among political philosophers that there exists a special relationship between moral goodness and legitimate authority. Many authors believed that the use of political power was only rightful if it was exercised by a ruler whose personal moral character was strictly virtuous. In a sense, it was thought that rulers did well when they did good; they earned the right to be obeyed and respected inasmuch as they showed themselves to be virtuous and morally upright. It is precisely this moralistic view of authority that Machiavelli criticizes at length in his best-known treatise, The Prince. For Machiavelli, there is no moral basis on which to judge the difference between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. Rather, authority and power are essentially coequal: whoever has power has the right to command; but goodness does not ensure power and the good person has no more authority by virtue of being good. Thus, in direct opposition to a moralistic theory of politics, Machiavelli says that the only real concern of the political ruler is the acquisition and maintenance of power. In this sense, Machiavelli presents a trenchant criticism of the concept of authority by arguing that the notion of legitimate rights of rulership adds nothing to the actual possession of power. Machiavelli thus seeks to learn and teach the rules of political power. For Machiavelli, power characteristically defines political activity, and hence it is necessary for any successful ruler to know how power is to be used. Only by means of the proper application of power, Machiavelli believes, can individuals be brought to obey and will the ruler be able to maintain the state in safety and security. Machiavelli acknowledges that good laws and good arms constitute the dual foundations of a well-ordered political system. But he immediately adds that since coercion creates legality, he will concentrate his attention on force. In other words, the legitimacy of law rests entirely upon the threat of coercive force; authority is impossible for Machiavelli as a right apart from the power to enforce it. Consequently, Machiavelli is led to conclude that fear is always preferable to affection in subjects, just as violence and deception are superior to legality in effectively controlling them. Machiavelli observes that men are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit. Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes. For Machiavelli, people are compelled to obey purely in deference to the superior power of the state. If I think that I should not obey a particular law, what eventually leads me to submit to that law will be either a fear of the power of the state or the actual exercise of that power. It is power which in the final instance is necessary for the enforcement of conflicting views of what I ought to do; I can only choose not to obey if I possess the power to resist the demands of the state or if I am willing to accept the consequences of the state's superiority of coercive force. Machiavelli's argument in The Prince is designed to demonstrate that politics can only coherently be defined in terms of the supremacy of coercive power; authority as a right to command has no independent status. He substantiates this assertion by reference to the observable realities of political affairs and public life as well as by arguments revealing the self-interested nature of all human conduct. For Machiavelli it is meaningless and futile to speak of any claim to authority and the right to command which is detached from the possession of superior political power. The ruler who lives by his rights alone will surely wither and die by those same rights, because in the rough-and-tumble of political conflict those who prefer power to authority are more likely to succeed. Without exception the authority of states and their laws will never be acknowledged when they are not supported by a show of power which renders obedience inescapable. The methods for achieving obedience are varied, and depend heavily upon the foresight that the prince exercises. Virtue in the eyes of Machiavelli Machiavelli presents to his readers a vision of political rule purged of extraneous moralizing influences and fully aware of the foundations of politics in the effective exercise of power. The term that best captures Machiavelli's vision of the requirements of power politics is virt. While the Italian word would normally be translated into English as "virtue," and would ordinarily convey the conventional connotation of moral goodness, Machiavelli obviously means something very different when he refers to the virt of the prince. In particular, Machiavelli employs the concept of virt to refer to the range of personal qualities that the prince will find it necessary to acquire in order to "maintain his state" and to "achieve great things," the two standard markers of power for him. This makes it brutally clear there can be no equivalence between the conventional virtues and Machiavellian virt. Machiavelli expects princes of the highest virt to be capable, as the situation requires, of behaving in a completely evil fashion. For the circumstances of political rule are such that moral viciousness can never be excluded from the realm of possible actions in which the prince may have to engage. Machiavelli's sense of what it is to be a person of virt can thus be summarized by his recommendation that the prince above all else must acquire a "flexible disposition." That ruler is best suited for office, on Machiavelli's account, who is capable of varying her/his conduct from good to evil and back again "as fortune and circumstances dictate" (Machiavelli 1965, 66). It is not a coincidence that Machiavelli also uses the term virt in his book The Art of War in order to describe the strategic prowess of the general who adapts to different battlefield conditions as the situation dictates. Machiavelli sees politics to be a sort of a battlefield on a different scale. Hence, the prince just like the general needs to be in possession of virt, that is, to know which strategies and techniques are appropriate to what particular circumstances. Thus, virt winds up being closely connected to Machiavelli's notion of the power. The ruler of virt is bound to be competent in the application of power; to possess virt is indeed to have mastered all the rules connected with the effective application of power. Virt is to power politics what conventional virtue is to those thinkers who suppose that moral goodness is sufficient to be a legitimate ruler: it is the touchstone of political success. What is the conceptual link between virt and the effective exercise of power for Machiavelli The answer lies with another central Machiavellian concept, Fortuna (usually translated as "fortune"). Fortuna is the enemy of political order, the ultimate threat to the safety and security of the state. Machiavelli's use of the concept has been widely debated without a very satisfactory resolution. Suffice it to say that, as with virt, Fortuna is employed by him in a distinctive way. Where conventional representations treated Fortuna as a mostly benign, if fickle, goddess, who is the source of human goods as well as evils, Machiavelli's fortune is a malevolent and uncompromising fount of human misery, affliction, and disaster. While human Fortuna may be responsible for such success as human beings achieve, no man can act effectively when directly opposed by the goddess (Machiavelli 1965, 407-408). Machiavelli's most famous discussion of Fortuna occurs in Chapter 25 of The Prince, in which he proposes two analogies for understanding the human situation in the face of events. Initially, he asserts that fortune resembles "one of our destructive rivers which, when it is angry, turns the plains into lakes, throws down the trees and buildings, takes earth from one spot, puts it in another; everyone flees before the flood; everyone yields to its fury and nowhere can repel it." Yet the furor of a raging river does not mean that its depredations are beyond human control: before the rains come, it is possible to take precautions to divert the worst consequences of the natural elements. "The same things happen about Fortuna," Machiavelli observes, "She shows her power where virt and wisdom do not prepare to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dykes or embankments are ready to hold her" (Machiavelli 1965, 90). Fortuna may be resisted by human beings, but only in those circumstances where "virt and wisdom" have already prepared for her inevitable arrival. These basic building blocks of Machiavelli's thought have induced considerable controversy among his readers going back to the sixteenth century, when he was denounced as an apostle of the Devil, but also was read and applied sympathetically by authors (and politicians) enunciating the doctrine of "reason of state" (Viroli 1992). The main source of dispute concerned Machiavelli's attitude toward conventional moral and religious standards of human conduct, mainly in connection with The Prince. For many, his teaching adopts the stance of immoralism or, at least, amoralism. The most extreme versions of this reading find Machiavelli to be a "teacher of evil," in the famous words of Leo Strauss (1957, 9-10), on the grounds that he counsels leaders to avoid the common values of justice, mercy, temperance, wisdom, and love of their people in preference to the use of cruelty, violence, fear, and deception. A more moderate school of thought, associated with the name of Benedetto Croce (1925), views Machiavelli as simply a "realist" or a "pragmatist" advocating the suspension of commonplace ethics in matters of politics. Moral values have no place in the sorts of decisions that political leaders must make, and it is a category error of the gravest sort to think otherwise. Weaker still is the claim pioneered by Ernst Cassirer (1946) that Machiavelli simply adopts the stance of a scientist-a kind of "Galileo of politics"-in distinguishing between the "facts" of political life and the "values" of moral judgment. Thus, Machiavelli lays claim to the mantle of the founder of "modern" political science, in contrast with Aristotle's classical norm-laden vision of a political science of virtue. Perhaps the mildest version of the amoral hypothesis has been proposed by Quentin Skinner (1978), who claims that the ruler's commission of acts deemed vicious by convention is a "last best" option. Concentrating on the claim in The Prince that a head of state ought to do good if he can, but must be prepared to commit evil if he must (Machiavelli 1965, 58), Skinner argues that Machiavelli prefers conformity to moral virtue ceteris paribus. In direct contrast, some of Machiavelli's readers have found no taint of immoralism in his thought whatsoever. Jean-Jacques Rousseau long ago held that the real lesson of The Prince is to teach the people the truth about how princes behave and thus to expose, rather than celebrate, the immorality at the core of one-man rule. Various versions of this thesis have been disseminated more recently. Some scholars, such as Garrett Mattingly (1958), have pronounced Machiavelli the supreme satirist, pointing out the foibles of princes and their advisors. The fact that Machiavelli later wrote biting popular stage comedies is cited as evidence in support of his strong satirical bent. Thus, we should take nothing Machiavelli says about moral conduct at face value, but instead should understood his remarks as sharply humorous commentary on public affairs. Alternatively, Mary Deitz (1986) asserts that Machiavelli's agenda was driven by a desire to "trap" the prince by offering carefully crafted advice (such as arming the people) designed to undo the ruler if taken seriously and followed. A similar range of opinions exists in connection with Machiavelli's attitude toward religion in general, and Christianity in particular. Machiavelli was no friend of the institutionalized Christian Church as he knew it. The Discourses makes clear that conventional Christianity saps from human beings the vigor required for active civil life (Machiavelli 1965, 228-229, 330-331). And The Prince speaks with equal parts disdain and admiration about the contemporary condition of the Church and its Pope (Machiavelli 1965, 29, 44-46, 65, 91-91). Many scholars have taken such evidence to indicate that Machiavelli was himself profoundly anti-Christian, preferring the pagan civil religions of ancient societies such as Rome, which he regarded to be more suitable for a city endowed with virt (Sullivan 1996). Anthony Parel (1992) argues that Machiavelli's cosmos, governed by the movements of the stars and the balance of the humors, takes on an essentially pagan and pre-Christian cast. For others, Machiavelli may best be described as a man of conventional, if unenthusiastic, piety, prepared to bow to the externalities of worship but not deeply devoted in either soul or mind to the tenets of Christian faith. A few dissenting voices, most notably Sebastian de Grazia (1989), have attempted to rescue Machiavelli's reputation from those who view him as hostile or indifferent to Christianity. Grazia demonstrates how central biblical themes run throughout Machiavelli's writings, finding there a coherent conception of a divinely-centered and ordered cosmos in which other forces ("the heavens," "fortune," and the like) are subsumed under a divine will and plan. Cary Nederman (1999) extends and systematizes Grazia's insights by showing how such central Christian theological doctrines as grace and free will form important elements of Machiavelli's conceptual structure. Conclusion In Machiavelli's finality - what virt provides: the ability to respond to fortune at any time and in any way that is necessary. What makes Machiavelli a troubling yet stimulating thinker is that, in his attempt to draw different conclusions from the commonplace expectations of his audience, he still incorporated important features of precisely the conventions he was challenging. In spite of his repeated assertion of his own originality his careful attention to preexisting traditions meant that he was never fully able to escape his intellectual confines. A prince must be able to seize opportunities through skill in what Machiavelli calls a "lucky shrewdness." Machiavelli is so reluctant to give strict rules for the prince's behavior; what matters is not following the rules, but being willing to break them when necessary. He counsels the prince to resist caution, since the cautious man is often reluctant to deviate from the safe path, even when his fortune requires it. Better to act swiftly and suddenly, according to the moment. An example of a prince who acted in this way is Pope Julius II. Julius always succeeded in his endeavors because he always acted quickly and boldly. By making war when others were not ready either to assist him or to oppose him, Julius ended up extremely powerful. Had he waited until his friends and enemies were ready to fight, Machiavelli points out, Julius would have either lost his war, or else had to share his victory with allies. Machiavelli concludes, in one of the most often quoted passages of the book, that fortune is like a woman (the word fortuna, in Italian, is a feminine noun, so this makes a little more sense in the original); if you wish to master her, you must conquer her by force. Moreover, she is more "willing" to be conquered by forceful men of ability than by timid cowards (remember that the word virt means, literally, "manliness"). Machiavelli's aim in the Prince is to tell the new rulers how to remain in power once they have gained it. The best way is to rule well. If this is not possible, then Machiavelli presents a variety of strategems for remaining in power. It is these which have given us the adjective "Machiavellian. References: 1. Machiavelli, N., 1965, The Chief Works and Others, A. Gilbert (trans.), 3 vols., Durham: Duke University Press. 2. Machiavelli, N., 1988, The Prince, Q. Skinner and R. Price (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3. http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.18971/pub_detail.asp 4. Niccol Machiavelli, First published Tue 13 Sep, 2005, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/ 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli 6. A summary of Machiavelli, his life, and The Prince, Machiavelli and the context in which he wrote The Prince http://www.emachiavelli.com/Prince%20and%20Mach%20summary.htm 7. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/machaivelli.html 8. http://www.michiganlawreview.org/archive/104/6/Goldberg.pdf 9. http://mesharpe.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.aspreferrer=parent&backto=issue,4,5;journal,10,16;linkingpublicationresults,1:110915,1 10. http://links.jstor.org/sicisici=0014-1704%28198304%2993%3A3%3C451%3AUAV%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage 11. http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.18971/pub_detail.asp Read More