Niccolò Machiavelli and the Vicissitudes of Fortune
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Friday 03 May 2024 is the 555th anniversary of the birth of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (03 May 1469–21 June 1527), who was born in Florence on this date in 1469.
In a recent episode on Francesco Petrarca I discussed the question of Petrarch’s modernity in the fourteenth century. Machiavelli comes more than a century after Petrarch, and he could also be said to be among the first modern men. What makes a man modern? Edith Hamilton wrote this of Euripides:
“There is an order of mind which is perpetually modern. All those possessed of it are akin, no matter how great the lapse of time that separates them.”
And a bit further on:
“The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers. The established order is always wrong to them. But there is criticism and criticism. Cynical criticism is totally opposed to the temper of the modern mind.”
Many take Machiavelli to be both modern and cynical, which Hamilton seems to declare impossible; arguably, it was inevitable that, given Machiavelli’s amoral political analysis, he would be called a cynic, but one need not identify him as such. Machiavelli’s modernity is often remarked, but the modernity ascribed to Machiavelli can take different forms. For some it is his amoral approach to politics. This was something new history. Nietzsche had called himself the first immoralist in the nineteenth century, but Machiavelli has a better title to the claim of being the first immoralist.
During the Middle Ages it was the tradition to instruct rulers in conventional piety and virtue. Machiavelli was among the first to say the quiet part out loud — that rulers should appear to be pious and virtuous, but to actually be pious and virtuous is ruinous, so that the prince must learn not to be good. Machiavelli’s notorious book The Prince, with its advice for rulers not to be good, while radically new in some ways, in other ways was thoroughly traditional.
Machiavelli was offering moral advice to princes — unconventional moral advice certainly, but still moral advice — and in so doing, Machiavelli had produced his own entry in a familiar medieval genre — books that were called mirrors for princes or Speculum regnum. Machiavelli’s mirror for princes was, we could say, a modern mirror — a medieval genre transformed for the newly modern world, and nothing was the same again after Machiavelli’s kind of moral advice. It was this break with the presuppositions of traditional morality that made Machiavelli modern.
But Machiavelli could also dispense more traditional moral advice, as in the following from this Discourses on Livy:
“…great men are always the same in every fortune; and if it varies — now by exalting them, now by crushing them — they do not vary but always keep their spirit firm and joined with their mode of life so that one easily knows for each that fortune does not have power over them. Weak men govern themselves otherwise, because they grow vain and intoxicated in good fortune by attributing all the good they have to the virtue they have never known. Hence it arises that they become unendurable and hateful to all those whom they have around them. On that depends the sudden variation of fate; as they see it in the face, they fall suddenly into the other defect and become cowardly and abject. It arises from this that in adversities princes so made think more of fleeing than of defending themselves, as those who are unprepared for any defense because they have used good fortune badly.”
This is a shrewd and accurate moral observation. Notice that Machiavelli concludes this with the idea of weak men using fortune badly. Men may be strong or weak, courageous or cowardly, but they have the agency not exactly to control fortune, but to use it well or to use it badly. Machiavelli understands the world in terms of human agency. Man is in control of his own destiny, but this control is not absolute, and not without limits. This is a naturalistic and rationalistic conception of human destiny based on empirical observations, and it would be accurate to call this a modern point of view.
This moral modernity also reveals itself in Machiavelli’s philosophical approach to political life, which was naturalistic, empirical, and scientific. James Burnham in his book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, argued that Machiavelli was applying the methods of science to political thought:
“Machiavelli’s method is the method of science applied to politics… Machiavelli uses language in a cognitive, scientific manner. That is, except where he is frankly urging his readers to action, he uses words not in order to express his emotions or attitudes, but in such a way that their meaning can be tested, can be understood in terms of the real world. We always know what he is talking about. This, a requirement for all scientific discourse, is in political and social discussion an achievement of the very first rank.”
This scientific approach to political thought shows Machiavelli in a modern light. We could make the argument that Machiavelli’s amoral perspective on politics follows from his scientific conception of political thought. An objective and value-free political science would of necessity be amoral.
Burnham’s book has a section on Machiavelli’s conception of history, which discusses Machiavelli’s emphasis on the role of fortune in events. While this isn’t an exclusively medieval theme, the rota fortunae, or wheel of fortune, was one of the great symbols of the Middle Ages, making an appearance at the beginning of the Middle Ages in Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy:
“This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins. I delight to see the high come down and the low ascend. Mount up, if thou wilt, but only on condition that thou wilt not think it a hardship to come down when the rules of my game require it.”
Like Petrarch, then, Machiavelli is both modern and medieval. We could say, following Hans Blumenberg, that the Machiavellian moment is “one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs” — I also quoted this in my episode on Petrarch. However, Machiavelli’s conception of the role of fortune in human life and history is expressed in very different terms from that of the rota fortunae. In Chapter XXV of The Prince, titled “What Fortune Can Effect In Human Affairs, And How To Withstand Her,” Machiavelli says that fortune is a woman:
“…fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out. For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.”
Earlier in Chapter XXV Machiavelli says of fortune:
“I compare her to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet, though its nature be such, it does not follow therefore that men, when the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defenses and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained nor so dangerous. So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valour has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and defences have not been raised to constrain her.”
Machiavelli, then, implicitly evokes the ancient image of time as a river — a river that can rage out of control and sweep away everything in its path, but also a river than can be controlled when the appropriate measures are taken. If time is a river, history, too, is a river — or maybe history is the entire watershed of a river, floodplain and all, a canyon shaped by the continuous passage of time over the ages, carving its bed into the rock, leaving layers of sediment in the wake of a storm, and sometimes flowing quietly through the landscape that it shaped in its more violent moments. We see these features of history, like the features of a landscape, that seem permanent to us, but if we had seen each moment of time as it passed, we would know how it all came to be.
We could say that Machiavelli is an optimist, or, at the very least, he believes in the possibility of human agency. We are not merely at the mercy of natural forces. A raging river can sweep all before it, but human beings can make provision for the raging of a river, knowing that, sooner or later, there will be a storm or a flood.
Machiavelli himself witnessed some of the storms of history first hand, and I suspect that events such as these shaped his understanding of the world. In 1494, when Machiavelli was a young man, the French marched through Italy on their way to Naples for Charles VIII to intervene in the Neapolitan succession. France has always been the most centralized of the European powers, and throughout the Middle Ages it was the most populous country in Europe, making it the superpower of its time. As the massive French force marched through Tuscany they took several cities, although the ultimate goal of the expedition was Naples. Florence attempted to remain neutral, but this wasn’t good enough for Charles the VIII.
Machiavelli was all of twenty-five when the French marched into Florence, and he probably never forgot the experience. Piero de Medici, who came to be known as Piero the Unfortunate, capitulated to the French and was run out of Florence for doing so. An interesting footnote to history is that Piero the Unfortunate was assisted in his flight from Florence to Venice by the great French historian, Philippe de Commines, who was called “the first truly modern writer” by Sainte-Beuve — so yet another late medieval writer, like Petrarch and Machiavelli, who has been understood as a modern man.
Florence was wealthy and influential and a great center of arts and culture, but it could not defend itself against the French. The French disaster was followed by the rule of Savonarola, which was a further humiliation for the proud Florentines. Machiavelli’s The Prince ends with an exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians has he put it.
“…at the present time, in order to discover the virtue of an Italian spirit, it was necessary that Italy should be reduced to the extremity she is now in, that she should be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, overrun; and to have endured every kind of desolation.”
At the very end, Machiavelli closes the book with a quote from Petrarch:
Virtue will seize arms
Against frenzy, and the battle will be brief:
For ancient valour
Is not yet dead in Italian hearts.
James Burnham emphasizes that part of the rationality of Machiavelli’s thought lies not only in his scientific methodology, but also in his concrete, non-utopian goal, which was the liberation of Italy from foreign forces and its ultimate political unification — something that wouldn’t happen for hundreds of years after Machiavelli’s death.
The political milieu that Machiavelli experienced in his own time, and which inspire The Prince, has been mirrored many times in history. Several hundred years after Machiavelli’s time, Johann Gottlieb Fichte found himself in a situation parallel to that of Machiavelli: Fichte’s country was occupied and controlled by foreign forces. Germany at this time was not yet unified into a single German state, as indeed Italy was not unified in Machiavelli’s time and was still not yet unified in Fichte’s time.
Both for Fichte and for Machiavelli, it was the French who were the great theat. Napoleon’s forces swept across the Germans of the early nineteenth century as Charles VIII’s forces swept over the Italians at the end of the fifteenth century. Those who saw the capitulation and humiliation of their homeland were marked by the experience. Ficthe wrote an essay on Machiavelli, “On Machiavelli, as an Author, and Passages from His Writings” which has been translated by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner. This is among the first of the appreciations of Machiavelli that was not openly hostile. Fichte saw Machiavelli as a starting point for his own reflections:
“…Machiavelli has been dead for almost three centuries, and that in my additions I have proceeded in accordance with his principles and have only supplemented him as he himself would well have been able to do three centuries ago if he had occasionally been willing to dig still deeper into the matter, but mostly if he had not sought to limit himself so strictly to the nature of his fatherland at the time, and instead extended his considerations to the lands that he knew well and that had a more established civil constitution.”
Fichte’s essay on Machiavelli was read by none other than Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote a letter to Fichte about his essay on Machiavelli. Clausewitz wrote in this letter:
“I believe that, unlike Machiavelli, we should not cling to methods that were successful in the past, reviving them in one form or another, but rather seek to restore the true spirit of war. We should begin not with the form but with the spirit, and wait confidently for it to destroy the old forms and create better ones.”
Clausewitz’s criticism of Machiavelli is not that he is too radical, but that he is too traditional; Fichte also implies that Machiavelli was too traditional in the limitation of the scope of his inquiry.
Peter Paret, who is one of the great Clausewitz scholars of our time, wrote a paper titled “Machiavelli, Fichte, and Clausewitz in the Labyrinth of German Idealism,” in which he argues that Fichte and Clausewitz had very different conceptions of history. We could add to this that Machiavelli’s conception of history differs both from that of Fichte and Clausewitz, but that Machiavelli was relevant to both, despite their differences, shows the ongoing influence of Machiavelli in historical thought.
