Machiavelli Was Right

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/machiavelli-was-right/354672/

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These fascinating new studies put Machiavelli back in his time but lose sight of the question of why his “amoral verve and flair” (Alan Ryan’s phrase) remain so enduringly provocative in our own time. Machiavelli was hardly the first theorist to maintain that politics is a ruthless business, requiring leaders to do things their private conscience might abhor. Everyone, it is safe to say, knows that politics is one of those realms of life where you put your soul at risk.

What’s distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn’t care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn’t worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call the problem of dirty hands.

The great Princeton philosopher Michael Walzer, borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre, describes the feeling of having dirty hands in politics as the guilty conscience that political actors must live with when they authorize acts that public necessity requires but private morality rejects. “Here is the moral politician,” Walzer says: “it is by his dirty hands that we know him.” Walzer thinks that we want our politicians to be suffering servants, lying awake at night, wrestling with the conflict between private morality and the public good.

Machiavelli simply didn’t believe that politicians should be bothered about their dirty hands. He didn’t believe they deserve praise for moral scruple or the pangs of conscience. He would have agreed with The Sopranos: sometimes you do what you have to do. But The Prince would hardly have survived this long if it was nothing more than an apologia for gangsters. With gangsters, gratuitous cruelty is often efficient, while in politics, Machiavelli clearly understood, it is worse than a crime. It is a mistake. Ragion di stato ought to discipline each politician’s descent into morally questionable realms. A leader guided by public necessity is less likely to be cruel and vicious than one guided by religious moralizing. Machiavelli’s ethics, it should be said, were scathingly indifferent to Christian principle, and for good reason. After all, someone who believes he has God on his side is capable of anything.

[JimboBillyBubbaBob]

1. Excellent point,

it always comes down to capability.

[2naSalit]

2. The point here is

well thought out but I take issue with the part where the author claims to know Machiavelli's beliefs and ethics. Think this is poorly presented because Niccolo Machiavelli was observing and presenting what he observed and was not stating his beliefs when describing these factors in governing. The man has been much maligned over centuries by those whose unethical manner of governing has been exposed by Machiavelli's observations... killing the messenger for exposing them, and they have been doing this for centuries.

[Laelth]

3. Not sure I agree that Machiavelli was "right" about everything.

But this part is spot on, and it's the cornerstone of a liberal mind-set:

In his book, Alan Ryan captures Machiavelli’s hold on the modern moral imagination when he says, “The staying power of The Prince comes from … its insistence on the need for a clear-sighted appreciation of how men really are as distinct from the moralizing claptrap about how they ought to be.”

This is why liberals are right 90% of the time and why conservatives are wrong 90% of the time. Liberalism demands that we see the world as it is and not as we wish it to be. How else can people design programs to improve the world absent a willingness to see the world as it is? Conservatives are fixated on designing policy for the world of their imagination (one that bears little resemblance to reality) to be effective at governing.

-Laelth

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4. +1