Virtù, Selfishness, and the Limits to Government
Jason Kuznicki on Mar 8th 2006
In this post, I discuss Machiavelli’s idea of civic virtue, contrasting it with subsequent classical liberal models holding that disparate self-interests are, paradoxically, the engine of social well-being. A vast gulf seems to separate the two notions. Yet where are the appropriate boundaries for self-interest as relates to government, or to the use of force, in a libertarian society? Machiavelli may have something to teach us yet.
I. Virtù and Selfishness. Machiavelli called it virtù: Successful polities, he argued, possessed a sense of public-mindedness that brought their citizens to do what was right for the state even when it contravened their private interests. Sometimes translated as civic virtue, public spirit, or just plain virtue, virtù was Machiavelli’s chief explanation for the success and failure of political enterprises from antiquity to the Renaissance. Societies possessing virtù would sacrifice their wealth, their comfort, and even their sons so that good government would continue. And paradoxically, through sacrifice they would usually prosper.
The trouble with virtù, however, was that it was almost intrinsically fleeting. Societies kept their virtù only so long as they resisted the temptation toward softness: While virtù brought strength, strength brought wealth. In turn, wealth brought luxury, vice, and effeminacy. In other words, virtù contained the seeds of its own destruction. For Machiavelli, history could be explained as an ongoing battle between virtù and decadence. (Yes, there’s a painfully obvious gender angle here. I may eventually discuss it in another post.)
Machiavelli shocked his contemporaries in part because his idea of virtù was audaciously pagan: It had little or nothing to do with Christian ideas of virtue, positing that perhaps the best interests of the Church did not always coincide with those of the state. Virtù may have had nothing to do with selfishness, but it had still less to do with Christian humility.
As Bernard Crick put it in his introduction to Machiavelli’s Discourses (the relevant portion of which can be read here):
‘Civic spirit’ is probably the best simple translation—if by ’spirit’ one means spirited action, like the arete of the early Greeks — as in Homer’s description of Achilles as being ‘a doer of deeds and a speaker of words’; and in Machiavelli’s relishing the significance of Achilles’ tutor having been a centaur, ‘half-beast and half-man’. Lastly, while he often uses the term in a hortatory way — people should recover their virtù‘ while there is time, or should not have let it idle away into ozio (indolence or corruption) — its force is as often empirical. Does a state have virtù among its inhabitants or not? Are there, in a word, citizens? If there are no or too few citizens, one is doomed to personal or princely rule; but if many, then a republic can flourish, and will prove — the by now familiar argument — the stronger form of state. Look around the modern world. It is a reasonably precise criterion. To give one dangerous example. Leave aside the rights and the wrongs of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Is it not obvious that the weakness, for all their numbers and arms, of the Arabs is related to the historical lack and the slow development of a class of citizens — men who combine individual initiative with collective discipline? And that much of the strength of Israel is related to its citizen culture?
(Two complete asides: My own edition adds the words “as well as to foreign subvention” before the final question mark, which dilutes the argument considerably. I would have left them off. Elsewhere, Crick also makes a howling error about the French Revolution, claiming that universal manhood suffrage was never imagined by the men of 1793; in reality, the French Constitution of 1793 made France the first European polity ever to adopt the measure. But aside from this error, I found Crick’s introduction to the Discourses to be one of the most stimulating pieces of writing I have encountered for many
weeks.)
In England, Machiavelli’s ideas would later animate many of what are now termed the classical republican thinkers, men like Algernon Sidney and John Milton. Cato’s Letters (excerpts here), from which the Cato Institute takes its name, are likewise typical of this strain of republican and proto-libertarian thought.
The classical republicans also exerted a strong influence on the founding of the American republic. When Benjamin Franklin famously declared that the Constitutional Convention had given America “a republic, if you can keep it,” the second half of his epigram was a clear reference to the civic virtue that our founders hoped would sustain the American experiment. Many of the Federalist Papers are also informed by an appreciation of how difficult it is to maintain a republic. While present-day Americans may think that liberal democracy is one of the easiest and most natural things in the world, our founders thought it could only be won — and maintained — through tremendous sacrifice.
Yet even in the late eighteenth century, an intellectual revolution was already underway, and classical republicanism was on the wane. Inspired by thinkers like Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith, those who prized human liberty increasingly declared that neither freedom nor progress demanded very much in the way of civic virtue or self-sacrifice for the good of the polity: Prosperity, good government, and even virtuous individual character might instead arise through the pursuit of fundamentally selfish goals. In his poem “The Fable of the Bees,” Mandeville wrote,
Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars
They were th’Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make ‘em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn’d a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.This was the State’s Craft, that maintain’d
The Whole, of which each Part complain’d:
This, as in Musick Harmony,
Made Jarrings in the Main agree;
Parties directly opposite
Assist each oth’r, as ’twere for Spight;
And Temp’rance with Sobriety
Serve Drunkenness and Gluttonny.The Root of evil Avarice,
That damn’d ill-natur’d baneful Vice,
Was Slave to Prodigality,
That Noble Sin; whilst Luxury.
Employ’d a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more.
Clearly we are far removed from Machiavelli’s understanding of how a republic endures; the intellectual revolution of which Mandeville was part turned on its head one of the key tenets of classical republicanism. Most subsequent classical liberals have idealized commerce and selfishness to almost the same degree that classical republicans vilified them. And while Franklin quipped of having given America a republic, if it could keep it, many of his other writings reveal him have had inordinate difficulties on the question of pride — which he knew from experience to be a great motivator. Here he discussed his famous list of practical virtues:
My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list giving an extensive meaning to the word.
I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it… When another asserted something that I thought an error, I deny’d myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appear’d or seem’d to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engag’d in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I propos’d my opinions procur’d them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevail’d with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.
The influence of Mandeville — a sometime friend of Franklin’s — is clear: The appearance of virtue may well be enough, and pride may well be the engine that drove all of Franklin’s legendary hard work. Franklin seems to demand of himself not Christian virtue, nor even virtù, but a crafty self-interest and a pleasant demeanor.
Especially in the twentieth century, something like Mandeville’s position won a decisive victory among libertarians: From Ayn Rand, who extolled the virtue of selfishness, to Friedrich Hayek, who argued that a wide array of helpful social systems arose through amoral and shortsighted transactions, to Robert Nozick, who even offered an invisible hand explanation for the state, civic virtue is nowhere to be found — except for those rare occasions where it is argued against. (It is easy to see how Rand, who fled the communists, and Hayek, who fled the Nazis, might have come to reject the notion of self-sacrifice for the good of a government, purely for personal reasons. Yet both participated in a trend that had begun well before them and would continue to the present.)
II. The Limits of Government To ensure the properly selfish life, Rand, Hayek, and many others demanded sharp limits on the power of government. Across many different lines of modern libertarian thought, government is conceived as an obstacle to self-fulfillment, understood either as man’s proper aim in life or as the creator of most of our other beneficial social attributes. More often than not, government gets in the way because it introduces inauthentic motives, distorts the proper relationships among individuals, and even tempts people toward a worship of the collective at the expense of the self. Broadly speaking, this is the libertarian account of fascism and communism, and it has always seemed to me one of the areas where libertarian political thought rang the truest.
We are to expand the realm of the individual, because — in Rand’s formulation — the individual, and not society, is the prime mover of the world, or because — in Hayek’s — we do not understand and cannot possibly understand the complex honeycomb that we all create through the pursuit of our own self-interests. In either case, the prescription is roughly the same.
How, though, are we to achieve our goal? A wide variety of tactics have been suggested, from Objectivism’s stress on rationality and proper cultural values as the foundation for a free society — all the way to the Rothbard Caucus’s proposal to dismantle all improper government programs immediately and without regard for consequence.
Each in its own way, the various strains of libertarianism are grappling with the problems of public choice, and, in his own way, Machiavelli acknowledged them too. As Wikipedia explains (I think fairly),
One of the basic claims that obtain from public choice theory is that good government policies in a democracy are an underprovided public good, because of the rational ignorance of the voters. Each voter is faced with an infinitesimally small probability that his vote will change the result of the elections, while gathering the relevant information necessary for a well-informed voting decision requires substantial time and effort. Therefore, the rational decision for each voter is to be generally ignorant of politics and perhaps even abstain from voting. Rational choice theorists claim that this explains the gross ignorance of most citizens in modern democracies as well as low voter turnout.
While the good government tends to be a pure public good for the mass of voters, there exists a plethora of various interest groups that have strong incentives for lobbying the government to implement specific inefficient policies that would benefit them at the expense of the general public. For example, lobbying by the sugar manufacturers might result in an inefficient subsidy for the production of sugar, either direct or by protectionist measures. The costs of such inefficient policy are dispersed over all citizens, and therefore unnoticeable to each individual. On the other hand, the benefits are shared by a very small special interest group, who has very strong incentives to perpetuate the policy by further lobbying. The vast majority of voters will be completely unaware of the whole affair due to the phenomenon of rational ignorance. Therefore, theorists expect that numerous special interests will be able to successfully lobby for various inefficient policies.
Inspired by the inaugural essay at Cato Unbound, James Buchanan’s “Three Amendments: Responsibility, Generality, and Natural Liberty,” Sandefur has argued that there is no possible way to write a constitution whose text escapes the fundamental problem of public choice in politics. He writes,
At Cato Unbound, Prof. James Buchanan… recommends amending the United States Constitution to say something like (in Hayek’s words) “Congress shall make no law authorizing government to take any discriminatory measures of coercion.” He’s open to other phrases, but the idea is to enshrine the principle of “generality, which has long been accepted as the central element in the rule of law.”
Buchanan believes that we can limit the public choice problem by establishing a constitutional limit on differential benefits, but, as Anthony de Jasay explains in his essay, On Treating Like Cases Alike, reprinted in Justice And Its Surroundings 170 (2002), there is a major problem with this: constitutional rules are subject to the same public choice pressures that influence statutes. As Jasay puts it, interest groups not only “choose legislation that maximizes their gains from politics,” they also “learn to choose a constitution that maximizes the scope for such legislation.”
…Requiring “generality” doesn’t answer the question, therefore, of what sort of laws are general and what are special, because it doesn’t explain what variables are to be considered relevant when determining whether one case is like another case. Those variables are potentially infinite, and many have a great deal of plausibility. But once we decide on some, then we have loaded the game and our “general” laws are no longer truly “general” in a meaningful sense.
…You see now why I once referred to this essay as “spooky.” It suggests that there is no possible solution to the fundamental problem of politics — no matter how philosophically savvy the people are!
Call it the Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem of limited government: No matter how we set the limits, there will always be people with the proper personal incentives to wish to circumvent them; no matter how we write the rules, there will always be ways of rendering these same rules moot. And if there aren’t any such ways, then people, in their infinite turpitude, will invent them. In a flash, we are back at Machiavelli, who demanded a certain public-spiritedness, a certain virtù, as a precondition for liberty. And I daresay that even in an anarcho-capitalist system, the same might well be required: Even granting for the sake of argument that all the rest of anarcho-capitalist theory is right, what, if not some quality or virtue of the people, would prevent an anarcho-capitalism from degenerating into a mere government?
[Crossposted at Liberty & Power.]
Filed in The Bookshelf
[...] Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty has interesting essay in which he ties Machiavelli’s virtù (civic spiritedness or civic virtue) and selfishness in with modern libertarian trends. It is a thought provoking post, so if you haven’t read it, go now (I’ll wait). But please come back, I’ve got a few remarks I think salient. Mr Kuznicki concludes: … the Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem of limited government: No matter how we set the limits, there will always be people with the proper personal incentives to wish to circumvent them; no matter how we write the rules, there will always be ways of rendering these same rules moot. And if there aren’t any such ways, then people, in their infinite turpitude, will invent them. In a flash, we are back at Machiavelli, who demaned a certain public-spiritedness, a certain virtù, as a precondition for liberty. And I daresay that even in an anarcho-capitalist system, the same might well be required: Even granting for the sake of argument that all the rest of anarcho-capitalist theory is right, what, if not some quality or virtue of the people, would prevent an anarcho-capitalism from degenerating into a mere government? [...]
I am attaching an excerpt from a review of Machiavelli scholarship by Lauro Martines that may interest your readerss. It appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.
THE PRINCE. By Niccolo Machiavelli. Translated and edited by Peter
Bondanella. 133pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, £3.99. - 0 19
280426 X
THE PRINCE. Translated and edited by William J. Connell. 206pp. St
Martin’s Press. Paperback, $13.95. - 0 312 14978 6
LIFE OF CASTRUCCIO CASTRACANI. Translated by Andrew Brown. 64pp.
Hesperus. Paperback, £6.99. - 1 84391 064 0
OPERE, III. Edited by Corrado Vivanti/ 1,280pp. Turin: Einaudi.
85euros. - 88 44 60084 6
PUBLISHING “THE PRINCE”. History, reading and the birth of political
criticism. By Jacob Soll. 202pp. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press. £26.50 (US $49.50). - 0 472 11473 5
MACHIAVELLI, O DELL’INCERTEZZA. By Giulio Ferroni. 153pp. Rome:
Donzelli. 12.80euros. - 88 7989 836 1
MACHIAVELLI. A man misunderstood. By Michael White. 304pp. Little,
Brown. £16.99. - 0 316 72476 9
Niccolo Machiavelli stepped on to the proscenium of history just
before 1500, in a moment of swingeing crisis for Italy and his native
Florence. Invading French armies had overturned Italian states. The
Sforza lords of Milan were about to be toppled. Uneasy Venice was
pursuing a policy of smash-and-grab. Rome and the Church were under
the rule of Pope Alexander VI, his baptismal name, Rodrigo Borgia,
already a signifier for brazen corruption. Florence, having ousted the
Medici in 1494, and agonizing over the loss of its most precious
colony, the seaport of Pisa, was struggling to survive as a republic.
Up and down the peninsula, from Naples to the Alps, rulers and ruling
classes sensed that they were gravely menaced.
The shock of events was registered in ideas, too. Italy’s writers and
thinkers breathed new life into the ancient idea of fortuna, a force
seen as capable of making or breaking states, peoples, cities and
individuals. The notion was a testament to the fact that the power to
rule their own lives had been snatched from the hands of Italians.
Politics and history suddenly struck them as unfolding under the sway
of irrational forces, and good men seemed to be in the greatest
danger. Machiavelli himself assigned enormous importance to the impact
of fortuna in the lives of people, not only in The Prince, but also in
his republican Discourses on Livy, in his verse and in his other
writings.
……
Machiavelli’s great contemporary, the Dominican friar Savonarola, once
threw out in a sermon to Florentines: “Do you want to make your son
bad? Make him a priest!”. And in the late 1480s, Lorenzo the
Magnificent, even as he was buying a cardinal’s hat for his
thirteen-year-old son, Giovanni, dismissed high clerical Rome as a
moral cesspool. No wonder, then, that the author of The Prince, like
many other fellow Florentines, looked upon the Church and religion
with a disenchanted eye.
Aside from the points touched on above, surprisingly little is known
about Machiavelli’s early life, until June 1498, when, at the age of
twenty-nine, he was appointed to the top salaried post in Florence’s
“second” chancery. Here, as chief of correspondence with the city’s
subject towns, he also became first secretary to the War Office Ten
(Dieci di balia), a powerful magistracy, charged with the conduct of
war and relations with other states. Providing him with a solid
income, these appointments - they were not regular honours of the
electoral sort - could only have come his way because of his literary
skills and informal ties with men in high government circles. Since
the city’s top secretarial posts had been customarily filled by men of
letters ever since the fourteenth century, it was altogether right
that the talented Machiavelli should land in the chancery.
Here he was to come into daily contact with the city’s leading
politicians; able men and shrewd, well connected, often well
travelled, some of them with double doctorates in civil and canon law,
and all tempered in the brutalities and niceties of the peninsula’s
crisis politics. The most capable of them had served as ambassadors to
Europe’s leading courts. So, for any man devoted to observing the ways
of princes and political elites, as Machiavelli was, here was a school
for the study of power politics. But he also interposed his love of
antiquity, of Roman history above all, and he distilled this learning
into his routine encounters with argument and debate at the summit of
Florentine government. We know that his flair for politics preceded
his appointment to the office of second chancellor for, having heard
some of the sermons of the fiery Savonarola, who was executed only
three weeks before Machiavelli took office, he produced a clever
political analysis of the friar’s pitch in one of the sermons. The
analysis, which shows the writer acting as a kind of spy, went out in
a private letter to a Florentine emissary in Rome.
For more than fourteen years then, from 1498 to 1512, Machiavelli
would be an intimate of power-wielders, writing reports and letters,
raising questions, watching intently and working (after 1502) as an
assistant to Florence’s head of state, the Gonfalonier of Justice,
Piero Soderini. Machiavelli was also the architect of a new citizen
milita, and would be sent on embassies to France, Germany, Rome and
other parts of Italy, where he met King Louis XII of France, the
Emperor Maximilian and the redoubtable Cesare Borgia.
But all this came to a dramatic halt in the autumn of 1512, when a
coup d’etat overturned the Florentine Republic and returned the Medici
to power. Tarnished by association with the republican regime,
Machiavelli was dismissed from office.
Then, falsely linked to a plot against the Medici, he was tortured,
imprisoned, pardoned and finally exiled, despite his apparent
innocence. Now, bereft of what he loved most and what he claimed to
live for, namely, front-line political action, he did the next best
thing. He began to write about politics. In 1513, working swiftly, he
produced the short work that was to give him immortal fame, The
Prince, and began his next remarkable meditation, the Discourses on
Livy.
Driven by a kind of demonic energy, The Prince is an astoundingly
protean work, because, in laying down the rules for taking and holding
the power of an absolute prince, it is at the same time demystifying
the process. In the course of teaching the would-be prince,
Machiavelli also, as it were, undoes his teaching by allowing his
lessons to go out to the enemies of the prince -republicans. Copies of
the manuscript began to circulate in about 1516. Consequently,
although he dedicated the work to Lorenzo de’ Medici the Younger, in
the hope thereby of seeming to shed his republican credentials, he was
able to suggest, years later, thanks to the book’s insidious
duplicity, that he had actually written The Prince as a disguised
primer for republicans. In fact, longing to return to government, he
composed it with a view to the reward of an office in the new Medici
regime.
If the book carried too immoral a message in the eyes of many
contemporaries, and for hundreds of years thereafter, this was because
of Machiavelli’s disabused determination to call a spade a spade. Time
and again, as a student of political conduct, he had seen that might
made right, that states pursued their most selfish interests, that
popes themselves turned with ease to the exercise of expedient
violence, that an alleged good cause could always be found to justify
any official recourse to brutality, and that ambition, wile,
ingratitude and greed most flourished in the arena of politics.
Accordingly, sweeping conventional morality aside, Machiavelli took
the bull by the horns and resolved to set forth the practical
precepts, as he saw them, that underpinned the mysteries of successful
power politics. His ground was praxis, not abstract theory spun out of
ideals.
Any translator of The Prince faces a formidable hurdle, not only
because of the work’s shifty and unconventional nature, but also
because Machiavelli was a superb writer who took his words and views
from a rich flux of activity, current politics, while also charging
them with his knowledge of Roman history and the ancient world. On top
of this, he allowed his literary imagination and keen sense of
narrative to flow into his way of conceiving politics and history.
This is to say that the book will always seduce ambitious translators.
Appropriately, therefore, the two translations under review are the
work of a literary scholar, Peter Bondanella, and a historian, William
J. Connell. The results, interestingly, are not truly comparable,
because while the one rightly seeks the cold elegance and readability
of the original, the other, Connell’s, is more strictly a historian’s
tool, with its literal, angular phrasing, and its correct insistence
on the value of Machiavelli’s words in the Italian context of the
early sixteenth century. Serious English readers will want both
translations.
The odd thing is, however, that although trying to read The Prince in
its historical context does throw light on the work, it will always be
read with more of an eye to the world of the reader, not to the Italy
of Machiavelli’s day. The reader’s context will prevail. This is Jacob
Soll’s point in his perceptive book, Publishing “The Prince”. Soll
stretches the sense of the word prince, so that it also takes in the
power of European kings, and looks at the ways in which early modern
scholars altered Machiavelli’s meanings and those of his alleged
master, Tacitus. They did this in the very process of translating,
annotating and commenting on them. In effect, editing tools perfected
under French absolutism, and best seen in the prolific commentator and
translator, Amelot de La Houssaye (1634-1706), were keys to the
emergence of critical political analysis. Already a slippery work, The
Prince was gradually turned into a text for an oblique battle against
prepotent authority.
Machiavelli’s verve and genius carried him into Florence’s highest
social circles and brightest enclaves. But since he was never to match
the wealth and lofty contacts to be found there, he glided over
invidious social differences, to find part of his voice in humour,
ironies, and self-deprecation, while always protecting and using his
intellectual guns. We might almost say that once he had been
discharged from office, literature alone - reading and writing
-nourished his sanity; and this included the cargoes of feeling and
thinking that went into many of his personal letters, as in his
fascinating correspondence with the Florentine aristocrat Francesco
Vettori, so brilliantly analysed by John Najemy in his book, Between
Friends: Discourses of power and desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori
letters of 1513-1515 (1993).
Political scientists and statesmen cherish The Prince, because of the
work’s supposed X-ray view of the anatomy of power. They do not always
realize that they are in the hands of one of the masters of Italian
prose and a thinker of extraordinary imagination. Often, just when
seeming most factual in a claim or observation, Machiavelli is riding
on a distortion or an outright fiction. He had no trouble embroidering
accounts and departing from facts, in order to drive home his lessons,
to maintain his lively polarities and to turn political realities into
leaner, more muscular matter. Politics was better grasped as action
seen in blacks and whites, and expressed in “either-or” phrasing, such
as in choosing between nobles or people, cruelty or mercy, love or
fear, and honesty or reason of state. Playing fast and loose with
historical evidence, despite his earnest commitment to the study of
history, is a tic that runs through Machiavelli’s major writings, not
only The Prince but also, for example, The Art of War, where his civic
patriotism overrides military common sense, and the Florentine
Histories, composed for a Medici lord in the 1520s.
Machiavelli’s Life of Castruccio Castracani, now in a superb
translation by Andrew Brown, reads like the objective biography of a
fourteenth-century warlord, but it is crammed with fictions and is
more nearly an outright literary exercise. What really counted for
Machiavelli was “the overall rhythm of the life of a potential prince,
and the mythical aura of an exemplum rather than factual accuracy”.
Volume Three of Einaudi’s Pleiade edition of the Opere contains all of
the Florentine’s literary works, including his verse, a celebrated
tale (Belfagor), three plays, the Florentine Histories, Castruccio
Castracani and some lesser writings. Its editor Corrado Vivanti’s
magisterial introduction underlines the importance of Machiavelli’s
early literary works, picks up his recurring themes, such as the dual
concept of fortuna versus virtu (human prowess), and emphasizes the
fact that he consistently linked politics and history. The lessons of
the past had a direct bearing on current political events. The
complete statesman, Machiavelli held, should also be a student of
history.
On this very point, as it happens, Machiavelli had a formidable
opponent in his Florentine friend the diplomat and historian Francesco
Guicciardini. To the claim that history has lessons to teach us,
Guicciardini replied that the events of past time are much too
particular and chancy for that. In his Considerations on Machiavelli’s
Discourses, he argues that when alleged historical recurrences or
seeming repetitions are carefully considered, they turn out to be
false or misleading.
The formative nature of Machiavelli’s early writings is also cast into
relief by Giulio Ferroni’s Machiavelli, o dell’ incertezza. Finding
that the Florentine thinker attributed major significance to the
elements of illusion, error and instability in the whole panoply of
human institutions, Ferroni rejects all efforts to turn him into a
“social” scientist. He lays stress on the forms of dialectic that gave
dynamism to Machiavelli’s vision, especially the contrapuntal play
between appearance and reality, fortuna and human prowess, and the war
of all against all, a view based on the claim that men are mostly
wicked - no strange assumption this, in a Christian world that
assigned sovereign importance to the idea of original sin.
In our time, the lure of Renaissance Florence seems to attract more
and more popular writers. The attractions are treacherous. Offhand, I
cannot think of a single popular biography or history dealing with an
Italian Renaissance subject, that is not steeped in errors, often of a
howling sort. Michael White’s Machiavelli: A man misunderstood, alas,
does not escape unscathed, beginning with his assertion that Florence
did not have a written constitution (in fact, that blueprint was fully
laid out in the city’s Statuta) and rising to the wild claim that the
charismatic Dominican, Savonarola, was for some years Florence’s “head
of state”. No way. Although Florentine governments occasionally
invited a native bishop or cardinal to carry out a short-term
diplomatic mission, no cleric in Florence ever held high or regular
public office. In Savonarola’s case, if anything, he was sometimes
manipulated by a clique of Florentine politicians.
Mandeville’s dates are 1670-1733, so I doubt he was a friend of Franklin. It is more likely Franklin was thinking of La Rouchefoucauld’s famous maxim that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue (quoted recently with apparent approval and without irony by culture warrior William Kristol). It is even more likely that Franklin was writing in the long vein of countless books since Castiglione’s Courtier (see Peter Burke’s The Fortunes of The Courtier) that discuss ideal deportment in society — or the art and theory of self-representation — exemplified in the eighteenth century by Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, where it is true (in contrast to earlier books on the topic) that seeming virtuous for the purpose of self advancement is starting to become conflated with being virtuous in order to “be the best one could be” (so to speak).
It should be noted that neither La Rouchfoucauld nor Machiavelli acted in their personal lives according to their cynical precepts. Machiavelli was a convinced republican who underwent torture and lived in poverty in the cause of his beliefs. La Rouchfoucauld, in particular, though he wrote as though he doubted the existence of friendship and other high ideals, was a himself consumate gentleman and a most loyal friend in personal relations. True advocacy of selfishnessness as a matter of deliberate policy seem to have been associated with nineteenth century utilitarianism, racist social darwinism, and militarist nationalism (a la Bismark).
Harold, the following comes from Franklin’s Autobiography:
It’s worth remembering that Franklin was quite elderly by the time he participated in the founding of the United States.
As to Machiavelli, I don’t think that I’m guilty here of caricaturing his position; after all, in this narrative at least, he’s the one calling for a kind of virtue — while the rest of “us” tend to disagree.
[...] The trouble is, “governing” is not an activity just like any other, and it may require virtues that lie outside those of enlightened self-interest (a theme I have discussed in the past). In the short term we’ll all have more time for ourselves if someone else does the job for us, but sooner or later, these people we’ve asked to govern are going to realize that no one is watching them. Most workers get lazy when this happens. Rulers get ambitious. [...]