Discourses on Livy

Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio) is in many ways a different work from The Prince, although how different it actually is has been a matter of dispute. In the second chapter of The Prince Machiavelli himself makes a distinction between the books in terms of subject matter: while that book is about principalities, the Discourses is about republics. Nominally a commentary on Livy’s work on Roman history, theDiscourses has been read as a rather abstract book: the historical examples Machiavelli uses are meant to teach the reader more general, eternal truths about the political reality.

Machiavelli has a lot to say about how a republic should be managed. The book is divided into three books with different themes: first Machiavelli talks about the internal structure of the republic; after this he reasons about matters of warfare; finally he returns to the theme ofThe Prince, individual leadership.

According to the classical view of Plato and others, all constitutions tend to degenerate into worse ones. This is because of their essential weaknesses. Aristotle thought the problem could be solved by having a “mixed” constitution, and Machiavelli agrees with this conclusion, but for different reasons: in contrast to the classical philosophers, Machiavelli suggests that the main task of political institutions is to deal with contingency. In general Machiavelli has in mind a picture of a republic with a vibrant, free political culture, and in which dissent is not only tolerated but institutionally channeled to further the common good.

Machiavelli believes in military might in foreign policy. “Necessity” is an important concept for him, and he uses it to determine whether or not the republic should fight a war: necessary wars should be fought, others not, and the republic should always be prepared for a necessary war. A crucial point is that offensive wars can be necessary as well. Thus Machiavelli argues not just for having a strong army; he also advocates using it for imperial purposes. Again, Machiavelli relies heavily on the example of the Romans—even in technical matters, although military technology has surely made advances since the Roman Empire.

Republics too need strong leaders. In the third book of the DiscoursesMachiavelli explores the twofold role virtuous individuals play in political culture. First, they inspire and beget virtue in others, and citizen virtue as well as military virtue is vital in protecting the republic from internal as well as external dangers. Although Machiavelli has confidence in the multitude, individual leadership is necessary in some particular affairs. The second function of virtuous men is to prevent corruption. All peoples tend to become corrupt in time, and this is because they gradually lose their fear and respect for the law. Therefore a founding father figure is needed to perform “excessive and notable” executions to refresh people’s memories.

http://www.timoroso.com/philosophy/machiavelli/introduction

The Prince

The Prince (Il Principe) is Machiavelli’s most famous book. It is also one of the most famous works in the history of political philosophy, although it is perhaps not as philosophical as the Discourses.

The fame of the book rests on its objective and pragmatic approach, even to the point of cynicism, to political action. Machiavelli makes observations about the actual conduct of political leaders and looks at whether or not they achieve the results they set out to achieve. He then uses these considerations as a basis of practical recommendations, and these recommendations frequently go against common morality. Does the end, political stability, justify the means?

It is not obvious what Machiavelli wanted to achieve by writing The Prince. In the dedicatory letter he appears to be requesting a job working for the Medici government, but it has been noted that he undermines his own case by some of the advice he gives in the work (Chapter XXIII). Particularly the ending of the book has been interpreted by some to mean Machiavelli’s ideal was a unified Italy, and that he justifies his immoral advice with patriotic aims.

http://www.timoroso.com/philosophy/machiavelli/introduction

Machiavelli's Place in Western Thought

What is “modern” or “original” in Machiavelli's thought? What is Machiavelli's “place” in the history of Western ideas? The body of literature debating this question, especially in connection with The Prince and Discourses, has grown to truly staggering proportions. John Pocock (1975), for example, has traced the diffusion of Machiavelli's republican thought throughout the so-called Atlantic world and, specifically, into the ideas that guided the framers of the American constitution. Paul Rahe (1992) argues for a similar set of influences, but with an intellectual substance and significance different than Pocock. For Pocock, Machiavelli's republicanism is of a civic humanist variety whose roots are to be found in classical antiquity; for Rahe, Machiavelli's republicanism is entirely novel and modern. Likewise, cases have been made for Machiavelli's political morality, his conception of the state, his religious views, and many other features of his work as the distinctive basis for the originality of his contribution.
Yet few firm conclusions have emerged within scholarship. One plausible explanation for the inability to resolve these issues of "modernity" and "originality" is that Machiavelli was in a sense trapped between innovation and tradition, between via antiqua and via moderna (to adopt the usage of Janet Coleman 1995), in a way that generated internal conceptual tensions within his thought as a whole and even within individual texts. This historical ambiguity permits scholars to make equally convincing cases for contradictory claims about his fundamental stance without appearing to commit egregious violence to his doctrines. This point differs from the accusation made by certain scholars that Machiavelli was fundamentally “inconsistent” (see Skinner 1978). Rather, salient features of the distinctively Machiavellian approach to politics should be credited to an incongruity between historical circumstance and intellectual possibility. What makes Machiavelli a troubling yet stimulating thinker is that, in his attempt to draw different conclusions from the commonplace expectations of his audience, he still incorporated important features of precisely the conventions he was challenging. In spite of his repeated assertion of his own originality (for instance, Machiavelli 1965, 10, 57-58), his careful attention to preexisting traditions meant that he was never fully able to escape his intellectual confines. Thus, Machiavelli ought not really to be classified as either purely an "ancient" or a "modern," but instead deserves to be located in the interstices between the two.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/#4

Morality, Religion, and Politics about Machiavelli

These basic building blocks of Machiavelli's thought have induced considerable controversy among his readers going back to the sixteenth century, when he was denounced as an apostle of the Devil, but also was read and applied sympathetically by authors (and politicians) enunciating the doctrine of “reason of state” (Viroli 1992). The main source of dispute concerned Machiavelli's attitude toward conventional moral and religious standards of human conduct, mainly in connection with The Prince. For many, his teaching adopts the stance of immoralism or, at least, amoralism. The most extreme versions of this reading find Machiavelli to be a “teacher of evil,” in the famous words of Leo Strauss (1957, 9-10), on the grounds that he counsels leaders to avoid the common values of justice, mercy, temperance, wisdom, and love of their people in preference to the use of cruelty, violence, fear, and deception. A more moderate school of thought, associated with the name of Benedetto Croce (1925), views Machiavelli as simply a “realist” or a “pragmatist” advocating the suspension of commonplace ethics in matters of politics. Moral values have no place in the sorts of decisions that political leaders must make, and it is a category error of the gravest sort to think otherwise. Weaker still is the claim pioneered by Ernst Cassirer (1946) that Machiavelli simply adopts the stance of a scientist—a kind of “Galileo of politics”—in distinguishing between the “facts” of political life and the “values” of moral judgment. Thus, Machiavelli lays claim to the mantle of the founder of “modern” political science, in contrast with Aristotle's classical norm-laden vision of a political science of virtue. Perhaps the mildest version of the amoral hypothesis has been proposed by Quentin Skinner (1978), who claims that the ruler's commission of acts deemed vicious by convention is a “last best” option. Concentrating on the claim in The Prince that a head of state ought to do good if he can, but must be prepared to commit evil if he must (Machiavelli 1965, 58), Skinner argues that Machiavelli prefers conformity to moral virtue ceteris paribus.
In direct contrast, some of Machiavelli's readers have found no taint of immoralism in his thought whatsoever. Jean-Jacques Rousseau long ago held that the real lesson of The Prince is to teach the people the truth about how princes behave and thus to expose, rather than celebrate, the immorality at the core of one-man rule. Various versions of this thesis have been disseminated more recently. Some scholars, such as Garrett Mattingly (1958), have pronounced Machiavelli the supreme satirist, pointing out the foibles of princes and their advisors. The fact that Machiavelli later wrote biting popular stage comedies is cited as evidence in support of his strong satirical bent. Thus, we should take nothing Machiavelli says about moral conduct at face value, but instead should understood his remarks as sharply humorous commentary on public affairs. Alternatively, Mary Deitz (1986) asserts that Machiavelli's agenda was driven by a desire to “trap” the prince by offering carefully crafted advice (such as arming the people) designed to undo the ruler if taken seriously and followed.
A similar range of opinions exists in connection with Machiavelli's attitude toward religion in general, and Christianity in particular. Machiavelli was no friend of the institutionalized Christian Church as he knew it. The Discourses makes clear that conventional Christianity saps from human beings the vigor required for active civil life (Machiavelli 1965, 228-229, 330-331). And The Prince speaks with equal parts disdain and admiration about the contemporary condition of the Church and its Pope (Machiavelli 1965, 29, 44-46, 65, 91-91). Many scholars have taken such evidence to indicate that Machiavelli was himself profoundly anti-Christian, preferring the pagan civil religions of ancient societies such as Rome, which he regarded to be more suitable for a city endowed with virtù (Sullivan 1996). Anthony Parel (1992) argues that Machiavelli's cosmos, governed by the movements of the stars and the balance of the humors, takes on an essentially pagan and pre-Christian cast. For others, Machiavelli may best be described as a man of conventional, if unenthusiastic, piety, prepared to bow to the externalities of worship but not deeply devoted in either soul or mind to the tenets of Christian faith. A few dissenting voices, most notably Sebastian de Grazia (1989), have attempted to rescue Machiavelli's reputation from those who view him as hostile or indifferent to Christianity. Grazia demonstrates how central biblical themes run throughout Machiavelli's writings, finding there a coherent conception of a divinely-centered and ordered cosmos in which other forces (“the heavens,” “fortune,” and the like) are subsumed under a divine will and plan. Cary Nederman (1999) extends and systematizes Grazia's insights by showing how such central Christian theological doctrines as grace and free will form important elements of Machiavelli's conceptual structure.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/#4

Some random sentences from Machiavelli's thoughts.