This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

The Prince
by Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

Memorable Line
“…whoever is responsible for another’s becoming powerful ruins himself, because this power is brought into being either by ingenuity or by force, and both of these are suspect to the one who has become powerful.”

The Skinny
Machiavelli, using examples from his period and the past, argues for the best methods for princes to gain or hold power. The book is written in a plain, straightforward style, but the opening letter from Machiavelli to “the Magnificent Lorenzo de Medici” reveals a different side to the author: one both more ornate and, to a modern reader, somewhat humorous in its flattery. Whether this is an intentional subtext inserted by puppet master to tweak potential puppet or simply something in the eye of this beholder, the contrast reveals that Machiavelli had specific stylistic objectives for The Prince.

Relevance? Argument?
In describing the downfall of Duke Valentino, Machiavelli writes, “And he himself told me”–and it is like a bolt out of the blue. The effect is in some ways as startling as Kinbote’s insertion of himself into the first page of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Suddenly, the physicality of the past rises up through the pages and what seemed safely remote takes on the muscular threat of an armored steed rearing up right in front of you. You understand that Machiavelli was there–witness to the acts of war and intrigue that included violent death and perhaps even more violent stress. What seems so bloodlessly related was, to some extent, a perspective won with blood.

I went into this re-reading of Machiavelli interested in how well the text worked for modern times, given how often it is cited by businesspeople as an important source of guidance for tactics and strategy. My interest came from a belief that the battlefield of the internet has changed in essential ways how we gain fame or fortune. For example, how would Machiavelli’s counsel on how to hold a city-state against siege by greater powers translate into advice for the users of new media? Do ideas about territoriality and acquisition of neighboring states apply to online communities? (The answer is: Machiavelli applied to the Iraq War and military strategy would have done our poor Seneca-less, Aurelius-less W a world of good, but I am not sure much of Machiavelli is that relevant to the cross-pollinating, ever-mutating world of the internet–primarily because the internet is not a board across which pieces can be moved, with non-mutable players, but instead part organism and part river.)

However, within a few pages these questions seemed much less interesting than a broader and more fundamental issue: Given the somewhat Draconian measures Machiavelli sometimes advocates, what does Machiavelli perceive as Evil? This question became more pressing to me with the casual revelation mentioned above: that in the midst of a clinical analysis of Duke Valentino’s situation we suddenly see that to some extent Machiavelli is not impartial at all. That in sections of the book he is clearly hiding great and partisan feelings for or against one side or another.

If a person is not impartial–admitting that utter impartiality is an impossible state to achieve–then it matters even more to the reader what the writer believes to be honorable and not honorable. Good and evil. That which when defined in the tracts of Kempis in The Inner Life fails to convince because of its broad generalities becomes the means to convince in the context of a single, specific person–in this case Machiavelli.

The answers lie in Machiavelli’s discussion of cruelty* in a section entitled “Those who come to power by crime”. He describes a series of rulers he finds unfit. Although a reader can infer that the way in which they seized power offends Machiavelli, their limitless uses of brutality seem to really get under his skin. “It cannot be called prowess to kill fellow citizens, to betray friends, to be treacherous, pitiless, irreligious,” he writes of Agathocles the Sicilian in a passage that itself betrays much emotion. Despite his successes, “One cannot attribute to fortune and prowess what was accomplished by him without the help of either.”

In the intensely interesting passage that follows, Machiavelli argues that Agathocles could not hold onto power because of the nature of his cruelty: “I believe that here it is a question of cruelty used well or badly. We can say that cruelty is used well (if it is permissible to talk in this way of what is evil) when it is employed once for all, and one’s safety depends on it, and then it is not persisted in but as far as possible turned to the good of one’s subjects.”

I read this as cruelty being a necessary evil under strictly regulated conditions to achieve a strategic goal–and that it must be acknowledged as an evil. Cruelty is ruinous and also barbaric if used randomly because such a tactic cannot support the strategic goal of maintaining power. But beyond this, Machiavelli acknowledges that cruelty is evil in a way I believe is sincere–just as he refers variously in other sections to “honor” and “honorable” ways of doing things. The directness of his discourse provides the honesty, just as W’s lack of directness with regard to torture and other barbarisms provides a different view of cruelty, and of evil. (The next section, “Cruelty and compassion…” also deals with this topic, but in the context of how compassion can be considered cruelty, and with the idea that cruelty, to paraphrase Nick Lowe, can be kind.**)

Maybe Machiavelli was fooling himself in thinking that he could set out honorable if tough-minded path for princes in a violent age. Maybe he was at best amoral, his personal allegiances at war with his attempts to see what he wrote about as a game with definite rules of conduct. But the Machiavelli I discovered in re-reading The Prince seems largely a realist, not a cynic, with a pragmatism tempered by a genuine sense of morality–even if the borders of that morality extended farther than most people find comfortable. I have no doubt Machiavelli’s views were appropriate for the times, although I am not convinced our times are any less savage.

* A topic, incidentally, at the core of most of Nabokov’s novels.
** For the first time, a 60-in-60 blog entry feels abridged, in that there are so many sections and so many ideas that I would have liked to discuss, but On Friendship awaits…

Conclusion
A Prince should not waterboard his citizens–because it is ultimately counterproductive to effective rule, but also because it is not honorable.

Question for Readers
Have you ever done something cruel for a greater good? What about for personal gain? And do you regret it now?

Next up, Montaigne’s On Friendship…