“Friendships that are acquired at a price and not with greatness and nobility of spirit are bought, but they are not owned; and when the time comes they cannot be spent.”
This month's work might be called a classic, though we would be better served by inventing an adjective in English that means "famous by means of being continually controversial." Such a word is sorely needed in our online age of furor--but perpetual indignation is by no means a new idea, for this book has been furrowing brows since it was published in 1532.
Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) lived in an age of change, amid a Europe that was slowly breaking all the old bonds of feudalism for the siren call of freedom in a modern nation-state. The humanists were once again diving into the delights of Latin and Greek classics, free of the dusty cloud of scholastic disputation. The Reformation was on the horizon. Columbus had just discovered new lands and peoples to the west. Artillery (and the gunpowder that made it roar) was sounding the death-knell of the armored knight and his towering castle. Merchants had more money than many blue-blooded and ancient kings. His native Italy was fractured into small city-states perpetually poking at one another under the covetous (and corrupt) eye of the Papacy in crumbling Rome, a city that had once ruled the continent. When all that had seemed certain for five slow centuries might crumble and fall, what was a leader--a politician as we would say--to do?
All Machiavelli really managed to do in his political career was tick off the wrong people and wind up in exile from his beloved Florence, never to hold political office again. But the fruit of his leisure was a little work call Il Principe that has thrilled--and horrified--readers ever since. In an age of ad fontes, Machiavelli claimed that Aristotle, Plato, and all the other creators of idyllic "cities in speech" were mistaken, and that his contemporaries erred in following them. For the real sources of statecraft were found in history, not philosophy--in Tacitus and Livy, not in Cicero and Plato. Rather than seeking "the good" a ruler should do whatever was necessary to become and stay strong--for only thus could he really protect and benefit himself and his people. And (if some more devious modern readings are correct) he specifically targeted the Roman Church and the pope as the ills the "Prince" should save his people from.
This is best read together with his Discourses on Livy which fills out and expands much of the brief material in The Prince. Together they are a thought-provoking pair, particularly in an age that has embraced their ethic wholesale. Did Old Nick really know what he was unleashing upon the continent?
