Machiavelli Was Misunderstood

“Machiavelli no doubt would have been fascinated by Trump, but even more so by the circumstances that allowed him to be successful. And whatever he might have thought of Brexit or the president, the slogan ‘Florence First’ would have made sense to him.” https://t.co/3wdh9bnDPy

— curtmills (@CurtMills) October 11, 2020

Virtue Politics

HUP: Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy by James Hankins

Liberal democracy’s difficulties are always with us. But a reasonably just regime seems more prudent than claims for a non-partisan regime of truly virtuous rulers. https://t.co/9pStu0e77G

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) May 12, 2020

When James Hankins’ humanists promote virtue and humanist learning as solutions for tyranny they are being naïve. https://t.co/VCVTThNfyb

— Richard Reinsch (@Reinsch84) May 12, 2020

The Complicated Politics of Virtue by Mark Blitz

Mark Blitz is probably a Straussian. Still, it doesn't seem like the book is that helpful and one should probably read the primary sources themselves instead. As for a book detailing the influence these Renaissance thinkers had on actual statesmen... what book covers that?

Daniel McCarthy on James Burnham

American Machiavelli
James Burnham reveals how our oligarchy rules.

Right Focus, Wrong Target

If you want to protect the family, the foe is not the Enlightenment so much as the Modern State, which is jealous of its power and seeks to prevent families from gathering strength with other families.

Forget the Enlightenment—Focus on the Family

How the West Really Lost God
by Mary Eberstadt.
Templeton Press, 2013.
Hardcover, 268 pages, $21.

A. W. R. HAWKINS

In light of that, a review of Burnham: ‘Only Power Restrains Power’
James Burnham’s The Machiavellians at Seventy.
FRANCIS P. SEMPA

Appeals to justice, natural law, and so on are ineffectual in the face of a foe determined to hold power and exercise it as he sees fit. He may be sincere in his disagreement, but a sincere believer in political error who seeks to carry out his agenda is still a threat to the common good.

Dr. Fleming on Machiavelli

A comment on this post:

Machiavelli is a multi-faceted man, and I cannot say that I have studied him with the attention he deserves. I can offer a few conclusions I have formed. First, he is the first philosopher/thinker to have studied power as an essential aspect of what he called the state. In my view, this was not attempted in the classical and Medieval world, because the state in our sense of the word did not really exist except in embryo. Thucydides and Tacitus were as cynical as M in their evaluation of political conduct and motivation, but the apparatus of the state did not exist. M did not invent the state but he is the first to have seriously studied it. His disciples--Pareto, Mosca, Sorel, Burnham, Francis--have provided invaluable analysis.

Second, he was a Florentine patriot and an Italian, who wanted to restore the Florentine Republic or at least preserve Florentine independence and to keep the filthy barbarians--Germans and French--out of Italy. If this had to be done through the agency of a Borgia Pope and his "nephew," so be it, but his preference was always for a free republican government. He was no mere theorist. When The Florentines made their final great effort to restore the republic, with the guidance of Piero Soderini, Machiavelli was responsible for the militia--he alone, it seems, understood how dangerous mercenaries had become.

Third, he is one of the great masters of the Italian language, and his commentaries on Livy constitute the deepest reflections on the nature of liberty.

It is in this context that one has to read his extremely melancholy masterpiece, The Prince. I have a wonderful copy, by the way, published in the early 1990's. It is contains Napoleon's notes--he left his copy behind in his carriage at Jena, with an introduction by a neophyte politico named Silvio Berlusconi.

The Militia and the Constitution

Someone on FB posted this essay by by William S. Fields and David T. Hardy in conjunction with this piece by Lew Rockwell: Machiavelli and State Power. What is the remedy against a tyrant?

Machiavellian

Dr. Fleming elucidates:

By Machiavellian, I am referring specifically and only to a tradition of political analysis that studies how elite classes gain and hold power. Machiavellians may hold quite contrasting political views--Mosca was a rightist, while Sorel was a leftist agitator and Gramsci a Communist. One false dichotomy, often made by the Straussians and those infected with their lies, is between ancient political thought that was rooted in the virtues and the Machiavellians who are interested in power. In fact, it is the nature of the commonwealth that has changed and not the terms of political analysis. The state--a word first used either by NM or in his time--is something new in the world, a political corporation owned by an elite class. I do not say this is a bad thing, only that the Tuscan and other city-states were a new form of government. Therefore, I am not talking about a cynical pursuit of power but a realistic assessment of political motives and strategy.

Part 1C of Back to the Stone Age

Dr. Fleming's series on paleoconservatism.

2 The Machiavellian Approach. One of the greatest contributions to American conservative thought was James Burnham's book The Machiavellians. It had a profound influence on Burnhams's most important student, Samuel T. Francis. Machiavelli, particularly in his Commentaries on the Decades of Titus Livius, offered significant insights into the nature of power and the difficulty of acquiring or maintaining political liberty. This method of analysis was extended and deepened by Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, the German-turned-Italian Roberto Michels, and the French Syndicalist Georges Sore--among others, including Sam Francis and Burnham himself.

What the Machiavellians have taught us to see is the significance of elite classes. According to Michels' "Iron Law of Oligarchy," there is only one form of government, namely, oligarchy. A monarch depends on an aristocracy to carry out his will and support his authority, while so-called democracies cannot be governed in any practical sense either by the people as a whole or by their elected representatives, unless the representative body is fairly small, coherent, and empowered for decades, in which case it forms an oligarchy.

Machiavellians are not necessarily cynical power-seekers; on the contrary, they typically believe in republican government and cherish political liberty, but they refuse to be taken in by surface illusions or rhetoric about democracy, equality, and human rights. While on the surface, political debates may seem like conflicts between angels and demons or an argument between two sorts of idealists, the reality is generally more sordid. Advocates of women's rights may really want to make them sexual slaves or ill-paid laborers; champions of democracy and liberty may be scheming to acquire a totalitarian power that they will claim to be based on the will of the people.

When James Henry Hammond was defending slavery in the US Senate a northern opponent boasted that in the North they had eliminated slavery. "Yes," retorted Hammond, "the name but not the thing." Hammond was, obviously, defending an economic system on which he had grown very rich, but my point is not to defend or excuse slavery but to point to a reality that my friend Eugene Genovese so brilliantly revealed in books like Roll, Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made, and in his subsequent investigations into the mind of antebellum slave-holders. Genovese was, in those days, a Machiavellian Marxist who viewed both sets of arguments, for and against slavery, as so much ideological posturing to defend two sets of regional class interests, those of Southern slaveholders and those of Northern capitalists and industrialists.

Inevitably, those who have looked with jaundiced eyes at the reality of minority rights movements, as Sam Francis did, have been condemned as bigots. Perhaps some of them were or are, but that is hardly the point. What is most deeply offensive in palaeoconservative thought is not the failure to celebrate the empowerment of minorities but the refusal to admire the emperor's new clothes and the insistence that while leftist politicians may have changed the names, political power still rests on the pursuit of power and the exploitation of the weak. They have learned from the ancients, from Herodotus and Aristotle, that it is the mark of a tyrant to elevate the poor and the weak as part of their project of disempowering their only real rivals, people of high social status, ability, or integrity.

Contra the Straussians and Catholics influenced by them, Dr. Fleming has much respect for Machiavelli as a political thinker.

Also from Dr. Fleming today: Romney's Last Chance

More from Dr. Fleming on Machiavelli

Machiavelli: Discourses B

Naturally, the Greeks did not think of everything or eclipse all subsequent achievement. Vergil is as great in his way as Homer and Sophocles are in theirs, and there are even classicists who think that Shakespeare is fit to be named in the same sentence as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In political theory, perhaps the most important contributions have been made by Machiavelli and his disciples—a group that James Burnham discussed in one of his best books, The Machiavellians, perhaps the late Sam Francis’ favorite book about politics.

Machiavelli advanced human understanding in many ways, but three of his most significant advances are associated with the words state, power, and liberty. The Greeks had not talked much about the nature and functioning of what we call the state. Aristotle did write a great deal about the nature of the city and the commonwealth, but of the state—a permanent institutionalized government that operates independently and often against the interests of the people of the commonwealth—he appears to know very little, except insofar as he is describing tyranny. But a tyranny, even a popular tyranny, is an illegitimate exercise of power, while the state defines legitimacy. The reason for the Greek and Roman silence-a silence preserved by St. Thomas—seems evident to me: the state is the creation of the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. There are at least two lines of development: the development of centralized monarchies in England, France, and Spain, which is fairly well known, and the less familiar development of the city-states of Tuscany. To condense a great deal of complicated history as succinctly and simply as I can, the republics of Pisa and Florence were the creatures of corporations, of, on the one hand, craft and mercantile guilds, and, on the other, of protective associations formed by rich and powerful families, initially aristocratic but later including the wealthier businessmen. The state, then, is the supercorporation that expresses the power of its constituents. This is in sharp contrast with the Athenian polis or even the Roman Imperium, which were conceived of as institutions that served the interests of the citizens.

The state is an instrument of power, the power exercised by the corporate members over themselves and, what is more important perhaps, over non-members or junior members. Thus in a state, politics is the pursuit of state power to use in your own interest and the interest of your family and allies. This fact is sufficient to explain what seems to be Machiavelli’s obsession with power.

The ancients were very interested in political liberty, which they regarded as first, a commonwealth’s freedom from external control, such as the control threatened by the Persian invasion, and secondly, freedom from arbitrary and abusive government. This is basically Machiavelli’s understanding. For Florence to be free, she has to be free of foreign occupation, whether French, imperial, or papal, and freely governed by a broadly distributed elite class that does not too much abuse the lower orders. To maintain freedom, the political class (neither Aristotle nor Machiavelli were foolish enough to include the masses) had to exercise vigilance. It had to recruit and maintain a citizen army (mercenaries, as NM warned, were fickle and dangerous) and it had to be prudent in spending and taxing. Florence’s wars of imperial conquest led to excessive debt, taxation, and, ultimately, to the opportunity for the Medici to buy the state.

Thomas Fleming, Machiavelli: Discourses A and Machiavelli I: An Abbreviated and Highly Inaccurate Brief History of Florence