The End of Machiavellianism*

1 “Machiavelli's Prince and its forerunners. The Prince as a typical Book De Regimine Principum,” by Gilbert, Allan H., Duke University Press, 1938.—I think that Professor Gilbert is right in locating the Prince in the series of the classical treatises De Regimine Principum. Yet the Prince marks the end of this series, not only because of the political changes in society, but because its inspiration utterly reverses and corrupts the medieval notion of government. It is a typical book De Regimine Principum, but which typically puts the series of these books to death.

2 Math., xxiii 3.

3 Cf. Maritain, Raissa, Histoire d'Abraham ou la Sainteté dans l'état de nature. Nova et Vetera, No. 3, 1935.

4 “. . . . In these things lie the true originality of Machiavelli; all may be summed up in his conviction that government is an independent art m an imperfect world”. Gilbert, Allan H., op. cit., p. 235.

5 According to a very just remark by Friedrich Meinecke, the two concepts of fortune and necessity complete the trilogy of the leading ideas of Machiavelli: Virtii, fortune necessità. Cf. Meinecke, Friedrich, Die Idee der Staatsräson, München and Berlin, 1924, chapter I.

6 Some authors magnify the divergences between the Prince and the Discourses. In my opinion these divergences, which are real, relate above all to the literary genus of the two works, and remain quite secondary. The Discourses on the first ten Books of Titus Livius owed it to their own rhetorical and academic mood as well as to Roman antiquity to emphasize the republican spirit and some classical aspects of political virtue. In reality neither this virtue (in the sense of the Ancients) nor this spirit ever mattered to Machiavelli, and his own personal inspiration, his quite amoral art of using virtù to master fortune by means of occasion and necessity are as recognizable in the Discourses as in the Prince.

7 Max Lerner, Introduction, p. xxxvii.

8 “Hitler told me he had read and reread the Prince of the Great Florentine. To his mind, this book is indispensable to every political man. For a long time it did not leave Hitler's side. The reading of these unequalled pages, he said, was like a cleansing of the mind. It had disencumbered him from plenty of false ideas and prejudices. It is only after having read the Prince that Hitler understood what politics truly is.” Hermann Rauschning, Hitler ma dit, (The Voice of Destruction)

9 What Sir Noiman Angell said in Boston in April, 1941, is true for all contemporary democracies. “If we applied”, he said with great force, ”ten years ago resolutely the policy of aiding the victim of aggression to defend himself, we should not now be at war at all.

“It is a simple truth to say that because we in Britain were deaf to the cries rising from the homes of China smashed by the invader, we now have to witness the ruthless destruction by invaders of ancient English shrines.

“Because we would not listen to the cries of Chinese children massacred by the invader we have now, overnight, to listen to the cries of English children, victims of that same invader's ally.

“Because we were indifferent when Italian submarines sank the ships of republican Spain we must now listen to the cries of children from the torpedoed refugee ship going down in the tempest 600 miles from land.”

But the remote responsibilities thus alluded to by Sir Norman Angell go back much farther than ten years. Western civilization is now paying a bill prepared by the faults of all modern history.

10 Cf. The Political Ideas of Pascal, in Ransoming the Time (Scribner's, 1941).

* Delivered in an abbreviated form at the symposium on “The Place of Ethics in Social Science” held in connection with the 50th Anniversary celebration at the University of Chicago, Sept. 26th, 1941. Chairman: John U. Nef. The other speakers were President R. M. Hutchins, R. H. Tawney and C. H. Mcllwain.