Machiavelli’s Lessons for America
David Lewis Schaefer, The American Mind
Advice from Old Nick on how to strengthen our republic.
While Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is commonly dismissed as a guidebook that teaches how purely self-interested rulers can attain or secure power through amoral means, such an interpretation is difficult to reconcile with a statement Machiavelli makes in his other major political work, the Discourses on Livy. There, he writes of his “natural desire to work” for the “common benefit”—not merely that of the rulers. And although the Discourses are explicitly devoted to the advancement of republicanism as distinguished from princely government, the modern philosopher most fully identified with the cause of democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, called The Prince “the book of republicans.” As Machiavelli explains in Chapter 15 of The Prince, his intent is “to write something useful to whoever understands it”—which means his advice is not solely, or perhaps primarily, for princes.
An attentive reading of The Prince will confirm not only Rousseau’s general claim, but the work’s relevance to understanding and remedying some of the major problems that confront the American republic today.
In the first paragraph of Chapter 3, Machiavelli identifies a fundamental problem rooted in human nature: the people’s natural utopianism, or their incapacity or unwillingness to accept the harsh facts of political life. In Chapter 2, he had maintained that unless a hereditary prince possesses “extraordinary vices” that make him hateful, a “reasonable” people should support him. Since they would be accustomed to his family’s rule, he would have less need to “offend” than a usurper would to maintain their obedience.
But at the start of Chapter 3, Machiavelli observes that contrary to this counsel of reason, the people are always disposed to “change their masters in the belief that they will fare better”—even though in this belief “they are deceived, because they see later by experience that they have done worse.” This is so because a prince who overthrows the existing order by violent means will find himself compelled to deal harshly with his subjects—even including his erstwhile supporters—in order to secure his power. But Machiavelli implies that the people never learn from this experience, since there are always aspects of being governed (no less under republics than principalities) such as paying taxes, enduring wars, or having freedoms restricted that the people will resent. Hence, they will continue to blame their problems on the folly or vice of whoever rules them at a given time, rather than seeing the prince as the product of the inherent necessities of political life.
This is by no means to say that Machiavelli is an archconservative who denies that any political changes can be for the better. But he points to the need for government to be founded explicitly on recognizing the harsh realities of political life, and making the people aware of these realities, lest they continue to be deceived by would-be rulers (republicans no less than monarchs) who take advantage of their gullibility. James Madison echoes this point in Federalist 51, where he explains why the Founders instituted a system of checks and balances in the Constitution, despite the claim of some Anti-Federalists that they amount to a needless complication, based on an unfairly low view of popular behavior.
Central to Machiavelli’s argument, and its contemporary relevance, is the distinction he draws between “nominal” virtue—that is, actions that appear on the surface to be good—and its “effectual” form, that is, those that are genuinely beneficial. After introducing this distinction at the end of Chapter 16, he illustrates it in the following chapter by distinguishing between the nominal “mercy” practiced by the people of Florence (then a republic) toward a city they ruled, Pistoia, and the nominal “cruelty” practiced by the notorious prince Cesare Borgia over the province of Romagna. In order “to escape a name for cruelty,” Machiavelli observes, the Florentines avoided cracking down harshly on the city’s factional disputes, crime, and riots, with the result that Pistoia was “destroyed.” Thus, their nominal mercy toward lawbreakers was really effectual cruelty. (The parallel to the de-policing movement of recent years in the United States is obvious.)
By contrast, the cruel tyrant Cesare Borgia (in Machiavelli’s highly fictionalized portrait) “restored the Romagna, united it, and reduced it to peace and to faith.” He did so, as Machiavelli explains in Chapter 7, by hiring Remirro d’Orco, a “cruel and efficient” governor, to terrify the populace into law-abidingness through meting out harsh punishments for criminals. In other words, Cesare’s nominal cruelty was really effectual mercy.
Given the people’s natural aversion to the appearance of cruelty, Cesare had to mitigate any resultant hatred by blaming d’Orco for the nominal cruelty in a manner that might be difficult to replicate. Machiavelli thus recommends establishing an independent judiciary in Chapter 19, as was done by an unnamed founder of the French kingdom, as a “third judge” to resolve disputes between the aristocrats and the multitude by “favor[ing] the lesser side” without the king himself being blamed. Here one finds another anticipation of The Federalist’s account of the Constitution, specifically that the independent federal judiciary as outlined in Federalist 78 is a potential arbiter between the legislative and executive branches, as well as between the federal and state governments.
In the chapter preceding his treatment of nominal versus effectual mercy, Machiavelli makes another important distinction—this time between nominal and effectual “liberality,” or generosity on a prince’s part. As Aristotle had already observed in the Nicomachean Ethics, liberality is the most beloved of all the moral virtues because of the benefits that the donor’s recipients derive from it.
Pretending, however, that a ruler should practice this virtue in its literal or nominal sense is another matter. Machiavelli observes that while “it would be good to be held liberal,” nonetheless a ruler who practices liberality may not only fail to be recognized for it, but will ultimately incur “the infamy of its contrary.” The reason is that for a prince to acquire “a name for liberality,” he must ultimately “consume all his resources” and “burden the people extraordinarily” with taxes of all sorts. That will cause his subjects to hate him, offending the many who will have to pay higher taxes while “the few” benefit from his largesse. But when the prince finally recognizes this problem “and wants to draw back” from it, he immediately “incurs the infamy” of being a miser.
Machiavelli recommends a “solution” to this problem: a prince who wants to procure a popular reputation for liberality while avoiding its downside should rely on foreign conquests to finance it, as was done by rulers like “Cyrus, Caesar, and Alexander.” In other words, the “effectual truth” of liberality turns out, as political theorist Clifford Orwin has pointed out, to be a kind of collective theft.
Machiavelli’s warning about the danger of government seeking a reputation for liberality has an obvious resonance in America today, beset by ever-growing deficits as the result of ever-growing government spending, especially in the form of the outrageously misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act.”
Indeed, during the current presidential campaign, both candidates have been competing to win votes through further costly government giveaways, ranging from the forgiveness of student loans and mortgage interest payments to subsidies for child care and home purchases and eliminating taxes on tips. While the Democratic candidate promises, unrealistically, to finance all her increased spending from taxes imposed only on people earning over $400,000 or on corporations, it is noteworthy that neither she nor her opponent mention America’s desperate need, in the face of growing threats from China, Iran, and Russia, for a substantial increase in the defense budget, another harsh reality that few voters are willing to face. Additionally, true reform of the country’s budget-busting entitlement programs remains an untouchable “third rail” of American politics, as President George W. Bush learned during his second term in office.
Even as the deficit increases due to the ever-growing gap between domestic spending and tax revenues, the real value of people’s earnings and savings continues to be taxed away, less visibly or “nominally,” but no less “effectually,” through inflation. But here it is relevant to consider the alternative that political philosophers inspired by Machiavelli—most notably, Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith—proposed as a way to enable people to enjoy a continually increasing standard of living that does not depend on either foreign conquest or endless government handouts: emancipate the economy from governmental restrictions on people’s opportunity to improve their standard of living by abolishing regulations of prices, wages, and interest rates, along with high tariffs, as well as eliminating unnecessary regulations that obstruct business startups and erect high barriers to entry for various professions (such as what some states have imposed on hair braiding and interior decorating). With the liberation of peaceful, honest labor and investment motivated by acquisitiveness that’s not cabined by undue legal restraint and moral and religious opprobrium or envy—in other words, free enterprise—politics is no longer a zero-sum game, as it would be if based on conquest.
As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has documented in the remarkable Bourgeois trilogy, the system of economic freedom indirectly encouraged by Machiavelli has engendered a monumental improvement in ordinary people’s standard of living in much of the world beginning in the early nineteenth century. Its benefits were made manifest more recently in the United States thanks to the economic booms that the country enjoyed under the tax reductions and reforms that Presidents Reagan and Trump enacted with the support of Congress.
Alas, there are growing signs of a retreat from the policies of economic freedom in both parties: advocacy of tariff increases, taxing non-realized assets as “capital gains,” and government guarantees of “fair” prices and prosecution of “price gougers”—the latter two particularly reminiscent of the policies that kept medieval Europe poor (with the exception of kings and aristocrats) and added to the oppressive power of governments. As has often been observed, in modern-day politics the extremes tend to meet—witness the growing agreement between “NatCons” like J.D. Vance and admirers of socialism like his Democratic counterpart Tim Walz as well as Bernie Sanders.
Machiavelli is the rarely-recognized originator of the revolution in political philosophy that brought about the modern liberal, commercial republic, as Harvey Mansfield argues in Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World. But the sometimes harsh lessons he taught—for example, reducing crime requires effective law enforcement rather than de-policing; preserving a nation’s freedom requires making military preparedness its top priority; excessive governmental “liberality” ultimately impoverishes a country (except for “the few” insiders); understanding that the “morality” of a policy goes beyond outward appearances (soaking the rich out of envy)—are ones that continually need to be relearned, since they sometimes go against people’s “instinctive” feelings, as well as the ambitions of demagogic leaders. The authors of the Constitution well understood these lessons, albeit through the medium of the Florentine’s more rhetorically restrained successors.
David Lewis Schaefer is Professor of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross
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