Machiavelli's Reputation in the Twentieth Century

            Niccolò Machiavelli was known during much his life as a part of the republican government in Florence until 1512.  At that time, the Medici family took over the city and ruled under a more monarchical system.  From that point until his death in 1527, Machiavelli was always just on the outside of Florentine politics.  He would occasionally get work from the Medici but his tasks were never as important as they had been under the republican government of the past.  As he was trying to find his way back into a major role in Florentine government, Machiavelli wrote The Prince, a manual of sorts that explained how a monarch should rule his state and why.  While Machiavelli had been a strong proponent of republican ideals in the past, in The Prince, his ideas are far from adhering to republicanism.  The book seems to promote the ideal monarch as a cold, heartless person whose only goal in life should be to retain power, regardless of who or what he destroys.  This includes killing enemies of the state, personal enemies of the Prince, and even, in some cases, friends or family.  While The Prince was not the first book of this kind, it was the first to suggest a government that rules with no regard for religion or morality.  Machiavelli did not particularly pay heed to religious law in the way he lived his life, but he also did not particularly care for the Catholic Church of the time because of the lack of morality demonstrated by the Pope's and other supposedly "religious men's" actions at the time.  There are other works that Machiavelli wrote both before and after The Prince that survive today, as well as letters he wrote to his friends that demonstrate a different set of ideals than those shown in The Prince, however it is The Prince that he is most known for.  His name is attached with its ideals and he has been linked with some of the more ignominious names of the twentieth century, such as Mussolini, Hitler, and Jean Pierre Boyer.  Anyone who is ruthless is considered 'Machiavellian' nowadays.  But some of Machiavelli's other books, The Discourses, The History of Florence, and some of his personal correspondences to friends and family indicate that Machiavelli held a different set of ideals.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Machiavelli's other writings have come to more prominent light.  Although many have questioned his motives behind writing the Prince in the past, only recently have his other works been more closely studied.  In particular, the letters he wrote to friends and family while he was writing The Prince and those he wrote before and after, which provide details into what he was thinking at the time.  Also, The Discourses is another book that talks about how to govern a state.  In that book, Machiavelli is far less ruthless than in The Prince.  He even goes so far as to say that monarchy is a bad form of government.  So, while the term 'Machiavellian' still holds the same meaning, Machiavelli's purposes in writing The Prince have become much more contested than in the first half of the century.  As a result, Machiavelli's reputation as a political thinker is improving and he is being compared to politicians who are somewhat more popular, such as the United States' founding fathers and Bill Clinton.  Instead of being known for ruthlessness, Machiavelli is now associated with politicians who are able to retain their power through adverse political conditions.  He is also referred to in mainstream popular culture now, also with a focus on his stress on retaining power, as opposed to his supposed requirement for a ruthless leader.  His republican ideals are becoming better known and the mind behind the majority of his writings is becoming better known rather than one that some people now think was written as a trick or simply as an act of desperation to get back into Florentine government.

The Prince, Machiavelli's most well known work, was written as a manual for monarchs to tell them how to rule their state.  It fit into a genre, started about 500 years before Machiavelli's life, called the "Mirror of Princes" genre.  Earlier books in this genre focused on Christianity and instructed rulers to adhere to the laws of Christianity and to help their subjects do the same.  Monarchs of that time generally adhered to that and few were autocratic.  Early in Machiavelli's life, Florence, his home, and many other Italian cities were ruled by a republican system of committee.  In 1512, the Medici family, a powerful Florentine banking family, took control over the city and formed a more autocratic regime.  In The Prince, Machiavelli took a very different route from earlier "Mirror of Princes" books.  The book, according to it's preface, was intended as a gift to Lorenzo de' Medici, the ruler of Florence at the time as a way for him to share his knowledge of politics with Lorenzo.  However, unlike previous books of this type, Machiavelli's book instructs the Prince to be incredibly autocratic, and focus chiefly on retaining his power regardless of what has to be done.  "The princes who have accomplished great deeds are those who have cared little for keeping their promises and who have known how to manipulate the minds of men by shrewdness; and in the end they have surpassed those who have laid their foundations upon honesty" (The Prince 133).  Although the book was not printed until 1532, seven years after Machiavelli died, it quickly stirred controversy as more and more people read it and became his most well known work.

However, before the Medici took over Florence in 1512, Machiavelli played an important role in the republican government of Florence.  He was also a proponent of the type of government he worked for and didn't think very highly of principalities.  "The principality easily becomes tyrannical" (The Discourses 177).  Many of his other works decry everything that The Prince glorifies.  As a result, his motives in writing The Prince have been disputed since the book was first published.  However all the debate has easily made the book Machiavelli's most well known over his other major political work, The Discourses, his military treatise, The Art of War, his historical work, The History of Florence, and his dramatic works, such as Mandragola although The Prince clearly demonstrates a different set of views than the other works.  The result has been that Machiavelli has had a reputation as a supporter of autocratic, ruthless governing for most of the years since his death in 1527.  By the start of the twentieth century, Machiavelli's reputation was still that of the supporter of the ruthless dictator.  He was discussed in the same breath as leaders such as Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, and Jean Pierre Boyer. 

All of these twentieth century leaders were known for their ruthlessness in their quest to gain and then hold on to power.  In 1928, it was documented that Mussolini actually saw himself as Machiavellian.  "He called Machiavelli's Prince 'the statesman's supreme guide.'  And [added] with exemplary frankness, 'I want to preserve a direct contact between Machiavelli's doctrine and my life . . . between his and my practice of government' . . . Machiavelli's name has come, rightly or wrongly to connote immoralism" (Stewart 845).  Mussolini's rule of Italy was a demonstration of many of The Prince's ideals, however, those ideals were not necessarily Machiavelli's ideals.  Mussolini did exhibit a strong feeling for Italian patriotism, which Machiavelli also does in the closing chapters of The Prince, however, the other aspects of his rule do not follow Machiavelli's other ideals as demonstrated in his other works and his letters.  Machiavelli was a believer in republics.  "While Machiavelli thought that a principality could play an important historical role under certain circumstances, still he clearly preferred government to operate under laws suitable to a republic" (Kocis 145).  "Those who read of the origin of the city of Rome, its lawgivers, and how it was organized will not be surprised that so much ability was preserved in that city for so many centuries, and afterward there developed from it the empire which that republic achieved" (The Discourses 171).  He did, however, have a strong aversion toward the religious establishment at the time and rarely followed church teachings.  "I have no fear that these friars will infect me with their hypocrisy" (Machiavelli 337).  However, overall, Mussolini used primarily the teachings in The Prince to form his ideals.  Like many others in the early twentieth century, Mussolini took Machiavelli's most famous work as his representative work when his other books refute the opinions held in the one.

Another infamous leader often paired with Machiavelli in ideals and image is Adolph Hitler, who was also an ally of Mussolini's during World War II.  Hitler was and still is infamous for his ruthless rule over Germany and a large part of Europe and many have made the obvious connections between him and the stereotypical Machiavelli.  "Machiavelli's works . . . taught Catherine de' Medici 'the daughter of the man to whom the book was dedicated' to massacre 'thousands of Protestants . . . for coolly calculated purposes of state' alone . . . 'what Adolph Hitler set out to do' almost four hundred years later" (Cochrane 116-117).  Once again, while Hitler was a strong proponent of nationalism, much like Machiavelli, his lack of morality was the main connection made between him and Machiavelli during the early twentieth century.  However Machiavelli's focus on maintaining power through whatever means necessary does not show up in his personal writings, except in one case.

"Cruelty, treachery, and impiety are effective in providing a new ruler with prestige in that region where human kindness, loyalty, and piety have long been common practice, just as human kindness, loyalty, and piety are effective where cruelty, treachery, and impiety reigned for a while; for just as bitter things irritate the taste and sweet things cloy it, so men become impatient with the good and complain about the bad" (Machiavelli135-136).

But, that letter was addressed to Giovan Battista Soderini, a member of one of the wealthiest families of Florence (the Medicis were among the others).  The Soderini family was part of the ruling body of Florence at the time, along with the Medicis and Machiavelli had just completed a difficult negotiation over a part of the treaty that ended a war between Florence and Pisa.  So, the Soderinis were impressed with Machiavelli's skills and his letter may have been another way for him to warm up to the ruling families.

Although he lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jean Pierre Boyer, a leader of Haiti, was also compared to Machiavelli in 1947.  He led the people of Haiti in a revolution over the French after Toussaint Louverture led the initial revolution, which the French tried to end by invading Haiti during Napoleon's reign.  After he preserved Haiti's independence, Boyer went about securing the independence of other island nations from the colonial powers that ruled them.  In 1822, he successfully eliminated the Spanish government from what is now the Dominican Republic.  "The whites dominated the Spanish Part.  Boyer had always feared them, and for his own safety, as well as for the satisfaction of his people, he had to check and break them.  The first means of attack was the confiscation of the estates" (Baur 318).  Boyer's actions were almost directly from what Machiavelli wrote in The Prince.  "Let a prince therefore act to seize and to maintain the state; his methods will always be judged honorable" (The Prince 135-136).  However, while Boyer's actions were very much from that one book, they were not in accordance with what Machiavelli wrote in some of his other works.

Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, Machiavelli was consistently equated with leaders known for their ability to maintain their power by doing whatever necessary.  Rarely were Machiavelli's other works taken into consideration as much as The Prince.  The result was that Machiavelli's reputation was, as it had primarily been since his death, based solely on the ideas he put forth in The Prince.  But by the 1960's, Machiavelli's reputation was changing.  His other books were becoming more and more well known as scholars dug further into the controversy of his intentions behind The Prince.  By 1961, many realized that they had made "generalizations about [Machiavelli] from little but . . . the Prince rather than from the Legations" (Cochrane 113-114) or any of his other works.  Since then, Machiavelli has been compared with somewhat more popular politicians, such as the United States' founding fathers and Bill Clinton for their ability and desire to hold on to power, and not so much for their ruthlessness.

"In 1975, a major book was published that pushed the intellectual origins of American republicanism back much earlier than the Enlightenment: J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment" (Howe 33).  According to Howe, the United States' republican ideals were traced back to Renaissance Europe, and specifically to Florence, Machiavelli's home (33).  "More recently, a small but significant book has described Machiavelli's commitment to democracy and democratic equality" (Kocis 17).  Both of these books cite works other than The Prince, including Machiavelli's personal letters, taking the entire scope of his work into consideration.  Machiavelli's republicanism began to overshadow the ruthless image he put forth in The Prince and his reputation as a political thinker slowly changed.  In 1991, Machiavelli was seen as a humanist, like Erasmus and other Renaissance thinkers. 

Changes in worldview, among other effects, reinvigorated the arts and reinforced the changes in knowledge that led to the emergence of modern empirical science.  In a symbiotic reinforcement of each other, changes in the social and cultural arenas augmented parallel alterations in perception, knowledge and science.  Machiavelli was instrumental in bringing these various strands together.  (Kocis 35)

By 1994 the current American President, Bill Clinton was being discussed with Machiavelli for his foreign policy actions.  "Machiavelli praised 'the Roman practice of creating a dictator in emergencies.'  Not only was the 'dictator very useful . . . when the Roman republic was threatened from without but also . . . in the increase of the empire.'  In contemporary international relations theory, the stance is analytical but the theory hardly changes" (Peterson 228-229).  Machiavelli's thoughts on dictators as being useful for emergencies were no longer seen as another method by which he supported autocratic ruthless monarchies, but simply as a necessary step to retain the government's power.  Clinton's foreign policy actions were seen as equal in their motivation to retain American power in international politics.

However, popular culture still focuses on Machiavelli's reputation from The Prince.  In Robert DeNiro's 1993 movie, A Bronx Tale, Chazz Palminteri's character, Sonny refers to Machiavelli in a scene in which he is trying to explain the life of a gangster to 'C,' a teenager who he has befriended.  Although he doesn't directly mention The Prince, he tells 'C' that it is better to be feared than loved, and that you should keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, both direct quotes from the book.  On the other hand, Sonny does not focus on being ruthless.  He says, "I treat my men good, but not too good" because otherwise they won't need him as a leader.  Again, Machiavelli is seen as someone whose focus was on retaining power, not on ruthlessness as had been assumed earlier.  But his other works have not been referenced in mainstream movies yet.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Machiavelli's reputation has undergone its most dramatic change since before his death.  In life, he was a proponent of republican ideals who wrote a book with questionable motives that refuted all his republican ideals.  After his death, because of it's incongruence with much of his other writing and because it strayed from other books of its type, that one book became his most well known because of the controversy it stirred.  At the start of the twentieth century, Machiavelli was still viewed by historians as the man behind The Prince.  He was compared with some of the more odious characters of the time as he had been in centuries past.  However, as researchers continued to look into his motives behind his most famous book, they found more and more that his other books did not agree with The Prince and then began to discover the letters he left behind that were addressed to his friends and family.  They soon discovered that Machiavelli was more than the man he put forward in The Prince and was in fact, due more credit than he was given.  Today, views of Machiavelli are much more favorable than they were in the past.  He is equated with great thinkers that came before him, such as Erasmus, and some who came after him, such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, as well as popular modern-day politicians, such as Bill Clinton.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

A Bronx Tale.  Dir.  Robert DeNiro.  With Robert DeNiro and Chazz Palminteri.  Savoy

Pictures, 1993.

 

Baur, John Edward.  "Mulatto Machiavelli: Jean Pierre Boyer and the Haiti of His Day."  The

Journal of Negro History 32.3 (July 1947): 307-353.

 

Cochrane, Eric W.  "Machiavelli: 1940-1960."  The Journal of Modern History 33.2 (June

1961): 113-136.

 

Howe, Daniel Walker.  "European Sources of Political Ideas in Jeffersonian America."

Reviews in American History 10.4 (December 1982): 28-44.

 

Kocis, Robert A.  Machiavelli Redeemed.  Bethlehem: Lehigh UP, 1998.

 

Machiavelli, Niccolò.  Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence.  Trans.

James B. Atkinson & David Sices.  DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 1996.

 

Machiavelli, Niccolò.  The Discourses from The Portable Machiavelli.  Ed. & Trans. Peter

Bondanella & Mark Musa.  New York: Penguin, 1979.

 

Machiavelli, Niccolò.  The Prince from The Portable Machiavelli.  Ed. & Trans. Peter

Bondanella & Mark Musa.  New York: Penguin, 1979.

 

Peterson, Paul E.  "The President's Dominance in Foreign Policy Making."  Political Science

Quarterly 109.2 (Summer, 1994): 215-234.