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The End of Machiavellianism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Jacques Maritain
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Extract

My purpose is to consider Machiavellianism. Regarding Machiavelli himself, some preliminary observations seem necessary. Innumerable studies, some of them very good, have been dedicated to Machiavelli. Jean Bodin, in the XVIth Century, criticized The Prince in a profound and wise manner. Later on Frederick the Great of Prussia was to write a refutation of Machiavelli in order to exercise his own hypocrisy in a hyper-Machiavellian fashion, and to shelter cynicism in virtue. During the XIXth Century, the leaders of the bourgeoisie, for instance the French political writer Charles Benoist, were thoroughly, naïvely and stupidly fascinated by the clever Florentine.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , January 1942 , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1942

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References

1 “Machiavelli's Prince and its forerunners. The Prince as a typical Book De Regimine Principum,” by Gilbert, Allan H., Duke University Press, 1938Google Scholar.—I think that Professor Gilbert is right in locating the Prince in the series of the classical treatises De Regimine Principum. Yet the Prince marks the end of this series, not only because of the political changes in society, but because its inspiration utterly reverses and corrupts the medieval notion of government. It is a typical book De Regimine Principum, but which typically puts the series of these books to death.

2 Math., xxiii 3.

3 Cf. Maritain, Raissa, Histoire d'Abraham ou la Sainteté dans l'état de nature. Nova et Vetera, No. 3, 1935.Google Scholar

4 “. . . . In these things lie the true originality of Machiavelli; all may be summed up in his conviction that government is an independent art m an imperfect world”. Gilbert, Allan H., op. cit., p. 235Google Scholar.

5 According to a very just remark by Friedrich Meinecke, the two concepts of fortune and necessity complete the trilogy of the leading ideas of Machiavelli: Virtii, fortune necessità. Cf. Meinecke, Friedrich, Die Idee der Staatsräson, München and Berlin, 1924, chapter IGoogle Scholar.

6 Some authors magnify the divergences between the Prince and the Discourses. In my opinion these divergences, which are real, relate above all to the literary genus of the two works, and remain quite secondary. The Discourses on the first ten Books of Titus Livius owed it to their own rhetorical and academic mood as well as to Roman antiquity to emphasize the republican spirit and some classical aspects of political virtue. In reality neither this virtue (in the sense of the Ancients) nor this spirit ever mattered to Machiavelli, and his own personal inspiration, his quite amoral art of using virtù to master fortune by means of occasion and necessity are as recognizable in the Discourses as in the Prince.

7 Max Lerner, Introduction, p. xxxvii.

8 “Hitler told me he had read and reread the Prince of the Great Florentine. To his mind, this book is indispensable to every political man. For a long time it did not leave Hitler's side. The reading of these unequalled pages, he said, was like a cleansing of the mind. It had disencumbered him from plenty of false ideas and prejudices. It is only after having read the Prince that Hitler understood what politics truly is.” Hermann Rauschning, Hitler ma dit, (The Voice of Destruction)

9 What Sir Noiman Angell said in Boston in April, 1941, is true for all contemporary democracies. “If we applied”, he said with great force, ”ten years ago resolutely the policy of aiding the victim of aggression to defend himself, we should not now be at war at all.

“It is a simple truth to say that because we in Britain were deaf to the cries rising from the homes of China smashed by the invader, we now have to witness the ruthless destruction by invaders of ancient English shrines.

“Because we would not listen to the cries of Chinese children massacred by the invader we have now, overnight, to listen to the cries of English children, victims of that same invader's ally.

“Because we were indifferent when Italian submarines sank the ships of republican Spain we must now listen to the cries of children from the torpedoed refugee ship going down in the tempest 600 miles from land.”

But the remote responsibilities thus alluded to by Sir Norman Angell go back much farther than ten years. Western civilization is now paying a bill prepared by the faults of all modern history.

10 Cf. The Political Ideas of Pascal, in Ransoming the Time (Scribner's, 1941).Google Scholar