Glimpse: Machiavellian Politics (for Partially Examined Life #14)

0:00 Mark: Hey folks, Mark Linsenmayer from the Partially Examined Life Philosophy podcast here. Does politics have to be Machiavellian to win? Do you need to be ruthless? Well, you would think that Niccolo Machiavelli would say yes. But to really understand his views, you have to read not only his famous manual on acquiring power, the Prince, but also his Discourses on Livy, which comment on republics, established states where the citizens interests are supposed to be represented and keeping those stable. So Machiavelli is going to distinguish between the ruthlessness that's required to gain power in a state in the first place and the new attitude you want to take to make a state last in the long term.

To take power, you want to show ostentatious strength, you want to get rid of your enemies, and it's better to be feared than to be loved. But to establish a legacy, the important thing is to support strong institutions, to have a well crafted system of laws that are applied consistently. Machiavelli recognized that each good kind of government is very similar to an awful kind. So a benevolent princedom could very easily become an tyranny. An aristocracy ruled by the best could very easily become an oligarchy. A democracy could very easily become anarchic mob rule.

In fact, he claims in Chapter 2 of Discourses on Livy that when you institute one of these types of governments, you're really instituting it only for a short time, because there's no remedy which can prevent it from degenerating into the opposite kind. So on the one hand, to gain power, you have to be audacious. You're going to have to seize control of circumstances, put your enemies down. But once this is done, the name of the game is stability. You don't want the populace worried about your crazy whims. You don't want to be vindictive in an ongoing way.

You want to be seen as a defender of law and order and tradition. And really, you want to change as little as possible, according to Machiavelli, because people generally don't like change. If you can run things pretty much exactly the way your predecessor did, you're in pretty good shape. And you want to give benefits to the people, but you want to do it slowly so that the flavor of them may last longer. But again, despite your efforts to institutionalize the state, at least over a generation is inevitably going to run out of control. Which would seem to me that you have to revive the old ruthless way of doing things to get power back.

Now, if you're going to try to look Through Machiavelli's eyes at the modern world, of course, you're going to see some points of application and also some immense differences. Machiavelli was very much aware of the power of things like religion and other customs to keep a society stable, to engender national pride. I mean, the real reason he wrote the Prince, as apparent in his final chapter, is that he wanted somebody to come and unify Italy, that the smaller states that were making it up were always fighting and not very well run, constantly being invaded by foreigners.

They were really just not nice places to live. In the modern era, we have much more advanced, what you might call technologies of culture, with the press and the Internet and national school system and just all kinds of bureaucracies and institutions and systems, public and private, that do serve to bring us together, even though, of course, we have our various tribal affiliations and these systems engage us in very different ways, some of them just influencing our ideas, some actually getting into our habits. Right. So it's not just our constitution, our federalist system, but a whole host of things that at least provide the appearance that our society is not about to collapse, that we're not going to have a war in the streets.

Machiavelli would very much approve of the outlets that people have to express themselves, that act as a release valve so that they don't have to turn to violence. And. And interestingly, this even goes for the rich and powerful. Most of us regret the undue influence that the top 1% or the top 1% of the 1% exerts in so many parts of our culture. But Machiavelli would point to the fact that they really do have, because they have so much money, quite a lot of de facto power, and if they don't have an outlet for exerting that, well, hell, they're just going to actually take over.

So we should be happy, according to Machiavelli, that our society has evolved in a very Darwinian sort of way, to be as resilient as it is, which would seem to mean, according to the original analysis I started with here, that politicians can stop being ruthless, that while ruthlessness was justified when saving us from absolute and utter chaos, now that we have a stable state and a remarkably stable society surrounding that state, we should be able to play within the rules when it comes to transfers of power. Now, of course, there are some forces that work against that stability, that serve as incentives for politicians to return to a place of ruthlessness.

There's, of course, universally that fundamental entropy that I referred to earlier, where no matter what kind of system you have set up, there's always going to be some kind of jackass that's going to come along to test the limits and try to become a tyrant, to inflame the mob into disregarding norms and using democracy irresponsibly. The powerful are not going to be satisfied just using the little release valve that's been provided for them, but are always going to be pushing more and more towards oligarchy. But again, that's what the structures are supposed to work against.

That's just part of the equilibrium of the system. A second factor is that these technologies of culture are double edged. Just like Machiavelli was looking for a unified Italy with an Italian spirit. Modern politicians want to define Americanness, whether as a melting pot, whether as an irreducibly diverse gumbo, as a well aged fine wine to be appreciated, whatever culinary kind of metaphor you want to use. We're all very aware that these different visions of what America is supposed to look like pull in different directions and that we have plenty of civic institutions like schools and mass media was 30 years ago the thing that would ensure to some degree that everybody in the country was looking at the same facts.

Well, we all know what the state of that is now. Also the fact that we have regular elections. That essentially means that all politicians are forever in the power acquisition mode, which according to Machiavelli is the ruthless one. Even lame duck office holders or lifetime appointments have pressures to support the legacy of their tribe. So we find ourselves in an interesting hybrid of the stable and unstable that calls forth the ruthlessness, but does seemingly keep it under a certain amount of control. In that, as uncivil as debate has been getting, we still don't have politicians in this country regularly being assassinated or throwing their opponents in jail.

So it seems like, on balance, maybe if you want to gain and keep power, you should be a little audacious regarding conventional morality, regarding fairness. But before you sign on as a Machiavellian politician thinking that ruthlessness is necessary to keep us from sliding into a very un American form of government, whatever your concept of Americanism might amount to, I want you to think a little bit about the ethical picture behind Machiavelli's recommendations. It's a picture you might better associate with Thomas Hobbes, where having a state means you have peace, and without a state you have utter chaos.

So that even talking about right or wrong in the state of nature becomes really meaningless. You can become as morally indignant as you like and people are just gonna kill you and take your stuff. A state becomes very precious in that kind of picture. So you need to be amoral when it comes to doing what you have to do to establish the state. So a full fledged morality for Hobbes or Machiavelli is really only possible after you've established a state and it's in fact dictated by the customs of the state. That doesn't mean the good is whatever the ruler happens to say it is.

Because clearly a whimsical ruler is not going to be a very good support for a stable state. But right and wrong become the fruit of a civilization rather than a foundation for that civilization. Now may well be that this is actually a pretty respectable, mature ethical view that right and wrong are not written into the fabric of the universe, but are the creation of societies, that moralities, like societies, go through a Darwinian contest, that through political acts we are creating values, we are contributing to a group sense of right and wrong, which will be as complicated as our society is diverse and is forever under construction.

But it's a very challenging ethical picture to articulate, to say why it doesn't dissolve into just social relativism to distinguish between the parts of morality that you need to have a stable state in the first place versus those that are more luxuries, the rules that we establish after a state is in place. So I just think if you're going to play political hardball, if you're going to support partisan gerrymandering, if you're going to manipulate the media, if you're going to push the boundaries of executive privilege, try to get past that pesky separation of powers, things like that, then you have an assignment to elaborate this kind of weird, simultaneously revolutionary, but also having its roots in Machiavellian Hobbes kind of ethics.

Right? If this is the way that we're trying to create a lasting and stable society, then we have to understand what we're doing. We have to have these things articulated. And if you can't do that, if you're not doing what you're doing to achieve your lasting vision of what America should look like, where that end justifies the means of your dirty tricks. If instead your motivation is, say, short term personal gain, achieving power for power's sake, or a deep seated narcissism, then you do not rightly get to be one of the dialectical forces that move society forward, but are instead an agent of entropy pulling towards system breakdown, which hopefully our robust culture and institutions will correct for in short order.

This has been a glimpse into philosophy. I hope you'll join me and my Partially Examined Life co hosts as we explore the thought of Machiavelli in Partially Examined Life, episode 14. Check it out at partiallyexaminedlife.com this has been Mark Linsenmayer. Thanks for listening and have a great day.