Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction

Introduction

Machiavelli died nearly 500 years ago, but his name lives on as a byword for cunning, duplicity, and the exercise of bad faith in political affairs. ‘The murderous Machiavel’, as Shakespeare called him, has never ceased to be an object of hatred to moralists of all persuasions, conservatives and revolutionaries alike. Edmund Burke claimed to see ‘the odious maxims of a machiavellian policy’ underlying the ‘democratic tyranny’ of the French Revolution. Marx and Engels attacked the principles of machiavellianism with no less vehemence, while insisting that the true exponents of ‘machiavellian policy’ are those who attempt ‘to paralyse democratic energies’ at periods of revolutionary change. The point on which both sides agree is that the evils of machiavellianism constitute one of the most dangerous threats to the moral basis of political life.

So much notoriety has gathered around Machiavelli’s name that the charge of being a machiavellian still remains a serious accusation in political debate. When Henry Kissinger, for example, expounded his philosophy in a famous interview published in The New Republic in 1972, his interviewer remarked, after hearing him discuss his role as a presidential adviser, that ‘listening to you, one sometimes wonders not how much you have influenced the President of the United States but to what extent you have been influenced by Machiavelli’. The suggestion was one that Kissinger showed himself extremely anxious to repudiate. Was he a machiavellian?’ ‘No, not at all.’ Was he not influenced by Machiavelli to some degree?’ ‘To none whatever.’

What lies behind the sinister reputation Machiavelli has acquired? Is it really deserved? What views about politics and political morality does he actually put forward in his major works? These are the questions I hope to answer in the course of this book. I shall argue that, in order to understand Machiavelli’s doctrines, we need to begin by recovering the problems he evidently saw himself confronting in The Prince, the Discourses, and his other works of political thought. To attain this perspective, we need in turn to reconstruct the context in which these works were originally composed — the intellectual context of classical and Renaissance philosophy, as well as the political context of Italian city-state life at the start of the sixteenth century. Once we restore Machiavelli to the world in which his ideas were initially formed, we can begin to appreciate the extraordinary originality of his attack on the prevailing moral assumptions of his age. And once we grasp the implications of his own moral outlook, we can readily see why his name is still so often invoked whenever the issues of political power and leadership are discussed.