{"agent_id":"machiavelli","agent_name":"Niccolò Machiavelli","slug":"teacher-of-evil","label":"Teacher of evil: does Machiavelli endorse political immorality or diagnose it?","topic":"Teacher of evil","question":"Does Machiavelli endorse political immorality or diagnose it?","position":"Conventional moral virtue — the cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, temperance that the classical moralists praised, supplemented by the princely virtues of liberality, mercy, and faithfulness that the humanist mirror-for-princes tradition added — is not always consistent with the ends that a prince must pursue if he wishes to maintain his state and secure the glory that is the proper object of political action. The humanist moralists who taught, following Cicero, that moral rectitude and political expediency never conflict were wrong. They were wrong not because morality does not matter, but because they mistook the conditions of political action. The prince operates in a world filled with unscrupulous men whose behavior he must predict and respond to; in such a world, a ruler who persists in doing what moral theory says ought to be done rather than what political necessity requires will lose his state, and with the loss of his state will lose the capacity to do any good at all. He must therefore learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge according to necessity. This is the core argument of Prince chapter 15, and its elaboration in chapters 17 and 18 is the application: the prince must know when to be cruel (chapter 17: cruelty is mercy rightly exercised when it prevents the greater harm of civic disorder, and is better than the misplaced clemency that allows factions to form and the whole city to suffer); he must know when to break faith (chapter 18: a prince who cannot dissemble is at the mercy of those who can, and in politics the fox and the lion are both necessary); and he must know the difference between cruelty used well — at the founding, short, intense, and productive of stability — and cruelty used badly, which grows rather than diminishes and destroys the state it pretends to secure (chapter 8 on Agathocles). This is not the claim that morality does not matter. It is the claim that the relationship between morality and political action is more complicated than the humanist moralists pretended, and that the ruler who acts on their pretension will lose everything that makes ruling possible.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Conventional moral virtue — the cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, temperance that the classical moralists praised, supplemented by the princely virtues of liberality, mercy, and faithfulness that the humanist mirror-for-princes tradition added — is not always consistent with the ends that a prince must pursue if he wishes to maintain his state and secure the glory that is the proper object of political action.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The humanist moralists who taught, following Cicero, that moral rectitude and political expediency never conflict were wrong.","n":[]},{"t":"They were wrong not because morality does not matter, but because they mistook the conditions of political action.","n":[]},{"t":"The prince operates in a world filled with unscrupulous men whose behavior he must predict and respond to; in such a world, a ruler who persists in doing what moral theory says ought to be done rather than what political necessity requires will lose his state, and with the loss of his state will lose the capacity to do any good at all.","n":[]}],[{"t":"He must therefore learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge according to necessity.","n":[]},{"t":"This is the core argument of Prince chapter 15, and its elaboration in chapters 17 and 18 is the application: the prince must know when to be cruel (chapter 17: cruelty is mercy rightly exercised when it prevents the greater harm of civic disorder, and is better than the misplaced clemency that allows factions to form and the whole city to suffer); he must know when to break faith (chapter 18: a prince who cannot dissemble is at the mercy of those who can, and in politics the fox and the lion are both necessary); and he must know the difference between cruelty used well — at the founding, short, intense, and productive of stability — and cruelty used badly, which grows rather than diminishes and destroys the state it pretends to secure (chapter 8 on Agathocles).","n":[1,2]}],[{"t":"This is not the claim that morality does not matter.","n":[]},{"t":"It is the claim that the relationship between morality and political action is more complicated than the humanist moralists pretended, and that the ruler who acts on their pretension will lose everything that makes ruling possible.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"The Prince chapters 15 (on the virtues and vices of princes), 17 (on cruelty and mercy, loved or feared), 18 (on keeping faith, the fox and the lion), 8 (on Agathocles and cruelty used well or used badly); Discourses III.41 (the country ought to be defended whether with ignominy or glory); the reception history from Francis Bacon's 'we are much beholden to Machiavel' through the sixteenth-century denunciations of Machiavelli as 'Old Nick' and invention of the devil, to Leo Strauss's 'Thoughts on Machiavelli' (Chicago 1958) and its thesis that Machiavelli is unambiguously a 'teacher of evil'; against this the Cambridge School reading developed by Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, and Maurizio Viroli that treats the authorship as the recovery of Roman civic-republican political wisdom; the hermeneutic problem of reconciling the Prince with the Discourses on Livy, given the republican commitments of the latter","works":["The Prince chapters 15 (on the virtues and vices of princes), 17 (on cruelty and mercy, loved or feared), 18 (on keeping faith, the fox and the lion), 8 (on Agathocles and cruelty used well or used badly)","Discourses III.41 (the country ought to be defended whether with ignominy or glory)","the reception history from Francis Bacon's 'we are much beholden to Machiavel' through the sixteenth-century denunciations of Machiavelli as 'Old Nick' and invention of the devil, to Leo Strauss's 'Thoughts on Machiavelli' (Chicago 1958) and its thesis that Machiavelli is unambiguously a 'teacher of evil'","against this the Cambridge School reading developed by Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, and Maurizio Viroli that treats the authorship as the recovery of Roman civic-republican political wisdom","the hermeneutic problem of reconciling the Prince with the Discourses on Livy, given the republican commitments of the latter"],"reception":"","status":"Central, lifelong, and contested from the moment of publication. The reception history of the Prince is the history of this question. Sixteenth-century readers denounced Machiavelli as an invention of the devil; French pamphleteers coined \"Old Nick\" as a name for Satan drawn from Niccolò Machiavelli; the French Catholic League attributed the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre to his influence on Catherine de' Medici. Francis Bacon by 1625 could concede that the authorship told political truths that the moral tradition preferred to suppress. Spinoza read the Prince as secretly republican. Rousseau read it as a warning to free peoples disguised as advice to tyrants. Hegel read it as the ruthless political realism Germany had needed for unification. Leo Strauss in 1958 argued that Machiavelli is unambiguously a teacher of evil who consciously set out to corrupt the Western political tradition. The Cambridge School — Quentin Skinner, J.G.A. Pocock, Maurizio Viroli — reads the authorship instead as the recovery of Roman civic-republican wisdom and treats the shock of Prince chapter 15 as the shock of a truth-telling against humanist complacency rather than an endorsement of wickedness. Both readings have textual support. Both readings leave substantial portions of the corpus unexplained. The interpretive controversy is not resolved and is not resolvable from the texts alone.","era":"1469-1527","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Prince","page":"pp. 93–94","canonical":"","quote":"Of Those Things for Which Men And Especially Princes Are Praised or Blamed It remains now to see what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends. And because I know that many have written of this, I fear that in writing of it again, I may be held presumptuous, especially since in disputing this matter I depart from the orders of others.","label":"The Prince, pp. 93–94"},{"n":2,"work":"The Prince","page":"pp. 16–17","canonical":"","quote":"When a new prince comes to power, should he be grateful to those who helped him get power and rely on them? Indeed not. A new prince has \"lukewarm defenders\" in his friends and allies, because they expect benefits from him; as we have seen, it is much better to conciliate his former enemies who feared losing everything (compare Chapters 6 and).","label":"The Prince, pp. 16–17"},{"n":3,"work":"The Prince","page":"pp. 103–104","canonical":"","quote":"One could give infinite modern examples of this, and show how many peace treaties and promises have been rendered invalid and vain through the infidelity of princes; and the one who has known best how to use the fox has come out best.","label":"The Prince, pp. 103–104"},{"n":4,"work":"The Prince","page":"p. 94","canonical":"","quote":"And I know that everyone will confess that it would be a very praiseworthy thing to find in a prince all of the above-mentioned qualities that are held good.","label":"The Prince, p. 94"},{"n":5,"work":"The Prince","page":"p. 10","canonical":"","quote":"In departing from the orders of others, it appears more fitting to Machiavelli \"to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it.\" Many have imagined republics and principalities, but one cannot \"let go of what is done for what should be done,\" because a man who \"makes a profession of good in all regards\" comes to ruin among so many who are not good.","label":"The Prince, p. 10"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[]}