Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Leo Strauss: Thoughts on Machiavelli. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969.

In his Epistle Dedicatory to Lorenzo the Magnificent, he comes across as a plain-spoken man, a veritable Harry Truman of Renaissance Florence. No pomposity, no verbal ornamentation, here. Like many late-twentieth-century historians, he makes a point of writing ‘from below,’ looking up at the lofty Lorenzo. But in Chapter XXIII, he advises the prince to take counsel only from those asked for counsel. In offering evidently unsolicited counsel to Lorenzo, he implicitly questions Lorenzo’s virtù. Such anomalies compel a certain distrust of our author by his cautious reader. Machiavelli invites distrust, quite in contrast to (for example) priests, who are inclined to insist upon it. A prince might well turn on such a dangerously intelligent adviser (III. 16).

The Prince has fared variously at the hands of Fortuna, but has always survived her vicissitudes. The Catholic Church abominated it, placing it on the Index. Secular intellectuals have often praised its realism. Patriots and nationalists have thrilled to the republican patriotism of its final chapters, especially the peroration quoting Petrarch’s patria mia. Machiavelli does indeed speak ‘realistically’ of politics. As a plain-spoken man addressing a real-world prince, he prefers not to come off as a priest or a head-in-the-clouds philosopher, and he does not.

Why, then, bother to read the Prince? Realism and patriotism are nothing so exceptional. Telling a politician to grasp power and hold it, and to profess patriotism all the while, seems quite superfluous—rather like telling Madonna to call attention to herself. Reading The Prince at this late date only makes sense if Machiavelli is much more Machiavellian—more ambitious, and more deceptive—than he seems.

Gazing up from below may well be covetous gazing. Machiavelli immediately speaks of acquiring principalities. This political science guides thumoerotic desire. Machiavelli asks the same ‘regime question’ Plato and Aristotle ask—Who rules?—but with a very different intent: hostile takeover. “Truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the error and the blame” (III. 14-15). Socrates turns Glaucon’s thumoerotic soul from tyranny toward philosophy, or, more modestly, toward friendship with philosophers. Judaism liberates Glaucon by binding him with wise laws. Christianity’s truth makes him free by replacing the noetic beholding of the Good with active goodwill, agapic love infused into his soul by the Holy Spirit. Machiavelli does not want to convert Glaucon. Machiavelli lauds the tyrannical character of any young Glaucon who reads him. He wants Glaucon to remain tyrannical, but to be much more intelligently so. He offers Glaucon a ring of Gyges; Glaucon may or may not have the virtù to grasp and hold it.

Acquisition by means of the armaments of others is acquisition by grace of Fortuna. Acquisition by means of your own armaments is acquisition by virtù. Machiavelli tells us, in advance, why the Leninists murdered the Romanovs (Iv. 18), and why the Stalinists murdered Ukrainians (V. 20). So far, this is little more than straightforward ‘realism.’ But in Chapter VI things get more interesting. There Machiavelli tells us of men ‘from below’ who became princes by means of their own virtù: Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus. One must not speak of Moses as if he were a pagan, Machiavelli allows, but one can speak of pagans as if they were “no different from Moses” (VI. 23). One may be forgiven, perhaps, in taking this to be a distinction without a difference? The difference between the sacred and profane is nothing other than publicity.

There is more. Moses and his semblables introduced new “orders”—new regimes—in the world. Nothing is more difficult, doubtful, and dangerous than the attempt to introduce a new order. Nothing is more glorious than succeeding. New orders have hot enemies (those of the old, superseded order) and “lukewarm” friends (no yet fully attached to the new). Machiavelli repeats the word “lukewarm” three times. His readers who remember their New Testament (another new order) might see why: In Revelation 3:16 Jesus, speaking through John of Patmos to the church at Laodicaea, threatens to respond to the church members’ lukewarmness by spitting them out of his mouth. Jesus, the Founder of new modes and orders, knew the danger of lukewarm friends. But Jesus was an unarmed prophet. Unarmed prophets are easily ruined—burned at the stake, like Savanarola, or sometimes crucified. “Thus things must be ordered in such a mode that when [the people] no longer believe, one can make them believe by force” (VII. 26). “Make them believe by force”: a fascinating locution. Example: Hiero of Syracuse, the tyrant-interlocutor in Xenophon’s dialogue, who provides the virtuous example of having the recalcitrant “cut to pieces”—with, we later learn (XIII. 36) his own arms. (Immediately after this second ‘mention’ of Hiero, Machiavelli teaches another Bible lesson: his re-write of I Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath. In Machiavelli’s version a knife appears in David’s hand, replacing God, Who appears only in the Old Testament version.)

The way to ‘renew’ Christianity is to follow the example of Pope Alexander VI, who appears often in The Prince, never more tellingly than in Chapters VII and XI: Far be it from Machiavelli to speak of ecclesiastical principalities exalted and maintained by God; “nonetheless,” Alexander, proceeding via force and fraud, did a fine job. Machiavelli writes a new Old Testament, the Discourses, and a new New Testament, The Prince. He too is an unarmed prophet. He too will have armed followers. but his armed followers will not contradict the Founder’s spiritual teachings. Machiavelli will not be burned or crucified because his armed and unarmed followers will be hot, not lukewarm; they will have their tyrannical or thumotic passions liberated. That is how the Prince of War will conquer the Prince of Peace, along with the designedly impotent philosophers of antiquity, in their castles in the clouds.

“Thus, a prince should have not other object, nor any other thought, nor take anything else as his art but the art of war and its order and discipline; for that is the only art which is of concern to one who commands” (XIV 58). There are two kinds of virtù. there is the virtù of deeds, developed by military exercises, hardening the body, and not incidentally teaching the mind the lay of the land. There is the virtù of the mind: reading histories, especially the military histories of “excellent men” who won territory, states, and glory. Put aside your Plato, your Augustine. Read Xenophon on Cyrus, and learn “the effectual truth of the thing.” Effectual truth differs from conventional, or false, ‘truths’ by being, precisely effective. In addition, effectual truth is what you effect. What is called goodness is very often bad—bad for you, you who want to survive and conquer. What is called badness is very often good. Reputation is the key. Reputation is the way to be, Gyges-like, visible and invisible, as needed. What they will see is what you want them to see; what you are is what you alone will see—or, more precisely, feel.

Here is the radical teaching of the new morality for the new order. Do not be virtuous, in the conventional sense. What is more, do not be vicious, either. Use virtue and vice. Do not express a passion of the head or the head of a passion; use your passion. (Hence Benjamin Franklin’s advice, “Use venery”—a suggestion that sends the thumoerotic moralist D. H. Lawrence into a paroxysm of indignation). Draw back from being-according-to-morality. Be beyond good and evil. Do not be liberal (for example) or parsimonious; such effects should be used virtuously (XVI. 63). Spend liberally, with other peoples’ money, but not with your own peoples’ money, inasmuch as “men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony” (XVII. 67). Know how not to be the beast and the man, but how to use the beast and the man. What is more, use both the relevant beasts: the courageous lion and the wily fox. (This is an important lesson for the thumoerotic men Machiavelli advises, who are too ready to roar,, too impatient to think.) So teaches the teacher of princes, the centaur Chiron. The beast-man Chiron replaces the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth. He who uses but is not animated by the virtues and vices, the man and the beasts, “needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and the variations of things command him” (XVIII. 70)—a lesson from the chapter titled, “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes.” The prince should “change his nature with the times” (XXV.100), but, more impressively, he will also change exterior nature or fortune—beating her, striking her down. He stoops to conquer. Or, as Bacon teaches, he obeys nature to master nature, setting nature against herself, dividing (analyzing) and conquering.

Nothing is more necessary than to appear to have religion. By “necessary” Machiavelli again means useful, the effectually true. Most men judge by their eyes, not by their hands. What an instrument is the hand! It both knows and does, fusing theory and practice. The hand grasps. The hand caresses or annihilates, as (known) advantage dictates. Preach peace and faith; be hostile to both. Practice multiculturalism (XXI, 91), to your advantage. Let some men offer advice without fear, but not just any man. You make the decisions; once they are made, you execute them without wavering, audaciously mastering the woman, Fortuna. Machiavelli’s epistemology of touch is more than materialism, though it is that. It is more than anti-religious, though it is that, too. What the epistemology of touch lets you know is the effectual truth. The effectual truth is the truth of utility, the truth of him who is not anything or anyone but pure thumos, pure libido dominandi, pure will-to-power, beyond all ‘being.’ It is the truth of him who creates new modes and orders out of the chaos of malleable matter. It is the truth of the real god of this world.

The only book Machiavelli published in his lifetime was The Art of War. Central to its final chapter is a discussion of invisible writing. Invisible writing is thought, inasmuch as writing is thought made visible. The visible can be the deceptive. The whole of The Art of War is, in one sense, an essay on the art of writing as war, the art of seeming, of deception, of camouflage, the war of enacting secret thoughts. Machiavelli’s writing-war or polemic against the writing of writings, the Bible, won many followers. Generals in this spirited war against the spiritual warfare of the Church included Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, who systematized, in different ways, the Machiavellian project of nature-conquest. as for the moralizers of modernity, they come, in most instances, out of Rousseau, whose critiques of the bourgeoisie and the Enlighteners replicate the Machiavellian critique of Christians who fail to follow Alexander VI. Such men are neither here nor there, neither full-hearted citizens nor solitary philosophers. they soften or effeminize public life, leading cities to ruin. Later moderns, Hegel and Marx, seek to synthesize the Rousseauian opposites. Nietzsche tries to make Machiavellianism noble. (Ah, the Germans: They add that earnest Lutheranism to Machiavelli; Protestants generally have more trouble with the Florentine than Catholics do. Catholics often mix their devotion with a strong dose of cynicism toward the Church.) More recent thinkers strut forth, preening themselves on their radical or subversive character; at best, they rise to the rank of corporal in the army of the Florentine. (For an unsparing critique of ‘traditional family values’ whereby a woman of virtù asserts her ‘reproductive freedom,’ anticipating the soi-disant radicalism of latter-day feminists, consider the Countess of Forli in Discourses III. 6.)

Machiavelli greets all these efforts with a smile, often an ironic one. By telling men (and women) to aspire, to change constantly while remaining constant only in the will to power, Machiavelli ensures that his spirit will renew itself perpetually by the very struggle of one thinker against another, one would-be founder against existing modes and orders and indeed against other would-be founders. Machiavelli masters Fortuna by encouraging the tyrant in every Glaucon, in writing visible and invisible, by setting one Glaucon against another in an endless, self-renewing war. Then you may be sure that even those who would overthrow you are still playing your game by your rules, whether they are fellow-spiders or flies in the web, more entangled the more they struggle.

Really to rival Machiavelli, one would have to begin by observing (as someone once did) that Machiavelli allows his anger against God to become anger against the good, and in that a great political philosopher allowed himself to be unphilosophic.

Hilary Putnam: Reason, Truth and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Descartes’s Evil Genius reappears in Hilary Putnam’s Evil Scientist, who creates the world of the brains in a vat, beings who trust—but should not trust—their own ‘senses,’ which are in fact artificial creations of the Evil Scientist. Like Descartes, like Machiavelli, Putnam argues for a new epistemology and a new morality. He wants an epistemology that synthesizes ‘objective’ and ‘subjective,’ a morality that synthesizes ‘fact’ and ‘value.’ Can he do that, without merely rehabilitating Hegelian historicism? Or is that what he wants to do?

Or does he want to follow Plato? Without ‘synthesizing’ subjects and objects, the Platonic dialogue does bring them into coordination, although philosophers who fail to respect literary genre never see this. The dialogue is just that: someone make every argument to someone else. Two ‘subjects’ speak and listen to one another, about some ‘object’ or topic, and to some end or purpose. It is Descartes who veers from realism. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is every bit as dialogic as ‘Do you see, Glaucon…?’ Talking to yourself does not escape the ‘doubleness’ of thought. That fact forms the foundation of political philosophy.

Intentionality underlies representation, Putnam observes, rather Platonically. An isolated mental representation loses its intended meaning; show a tree to someone who’s never left the Sahara, and who knows what it might represent to him? “Thought words and mental pictures do not intrinsically represent what they are about” (5).

Hence the problem of brains in a vat. Descartes’s evil genius may have created the world in which we are nothing but brains in a vat, our minds ‘seeing’ artificial images fed in through artificial senses—rather like Plato’s prisoners in the Cave of opinion, but in a place much harder to get out of. Our sensually ‘self-evident’ data are false, but we have no way of knowing this. We can say all the things human beings say (at least if our brains are hooked with some device that enables us to vocalize), but they cannot refer to the things human beings refer to. To refer, a sentence or thought must have to do with the real world. A being comprehensively fooled has no effective intelligence in either the Platonic sense of noēsis or the Machiavellian sense of grasping.

If brains in a vat chorus, ‘We are brains in a vat,’ they’ve hit upon the truth randomly, like chimps typing Coriolanus. Putnam goes so far as to say that this randomly true statement is false, when said by the poor brains. He wants to avoid a God’s-Eye absolutism—which, unfortunately, his own audience, and indeed his creator-god evil scientist, cannot help but supply, and therefore to conceive of themselves similarly. The less dramatic way to proceed is the Socratic way: I begin with sense perceptions and opinion. I have various ways to test them; chief among these is the principle of non-contradiction, which is mentally and physically inescapable in certain ways. The results of my testing may eventually take me very far afield from opinion and even from sense perception: a theory of ideas, quantum physics. Those far-afield theories nonetheless play out in the world  of commonsense (sense perceptions + opinions), and can be corroborated sensually and ‘conceptually.’ (After hearing so much about the non-sensuality of modern physics, according to physicists who know a lot more math than I do, I am always entertained by their joy in announcing experiments that confirm empirically some theory worked out on paper, a century back.)

The claim that ‘concepts’ are “mental presentations” that do not “necessarily refer to external things” is, then, not entirely true. Concepts are mental presentations that necessarily refer to external things: the vat-brains’ ‘tree’ is the result of an external stimulus, provided by a real evil scientist, rather as the cave-dwellers image is the result of being shown an image by the opinion makers of the polis. Such mental presentations are false, a matter of some cunning artifice or convincing natural illusion, which are external though deceptive. Philosophers are wisdom-lovers who test whether the unassisted human mind can sift through commonsense impressions to determine if they are part of a larger whole or ‘nature.’

Putnam sensibly writes, “the whole problem we are investigating is how representations can enable us to refer to what is outside the mind” (27). Putnam rejects the neo-Machiavellian or Kantian claim that one should make a priori impositions on the world, call them “theoretical constraints,” and then test them. This “does not work!” he exclaims (32). You still need reference. ‘The cat is on the mat’ doesn’t mean ‘the cat is on the mat’ if by ‘cat’ I mean ‘cherries.’

Putnam also tries to dispose of a ‘Darwinian’ approach to epistemology—this one objectivist, not subjectivist. According to evolutionism, if our mental representations did not correspond to externals, we would perish. There is truth in this argument, Putnam concedes; there must be some correspondence between subject and object, lest objects smash into subjects with extreme prejudice. But this is not too helpful: A pigeon can make his way into New York as readily as I can, if not more so; yet, bird-brain though I may be, it’s clear to humans that humans do not perceive all the same aspects of reality that birds perceive. To this I only add: The correspondence I perceive must be disproved. What I think I see is what I get, as far as I know, until testing proves otherwise. Even a test-refutation may only bring out supplementary dimensions to what I see. Even a ‘paradigm shifting’ series of test (as a conservative Kuhnian conceives of them)—for example, as Einsteinian physics gives Newtonian physics a new frame, without refuting Newtonian physics altogether—confirms rather than disproves my provisional but strong trust in correspondence. (Putnam’s Kuhn, by contrast, is a thinker of “extreme relativism” [113].)

Putnam’s basic point looks sound. Believing and intending presuppose the ability to refer, but we need something more than naïve correspondence theory to know, or at least know more, about what it is we refer to. As for his dismissal of “metaphysical realism,” or “the externalist perspective” (49 ff.), it runs into a problem. First, if the world does not “consist of some fixed”—or why not changing?—”totality of mind-independent objects,” what was the world before minds of some sort came into it? Far from assuming a “God’s Eye point of view” (50), metaphysical realism accepts a world with or without minds. Further, while there may be no God’s Eye point of view “that we can know or usefully imagine” (emphasis added), this does not mean that the God’s Eye view cannot be theoretically valid. The problem with the God’s Eye view is the problem Gnostics propose: Maybe there are gods behind gods, each with his own Eye. But this problem disappears practically if you take the ‘conservative’ view that commonsense is valid until disproved. This does not mean that truth can be “independent of observers altogether if “truth” refers to an interaction of observer and observed. It does mean that there is reality independent of observers altogether—that, for example, the Milky Way would still exist whether or not there was anyone or anything to perceive it. “Truth”—so defined—and possibility are not coterminous. If the world does not send out ‘noetic rays,’ prove it, because that’s what common sense tacitly assumes. The mere raising of doubt proves or disproves nothing. The Cartesian command to doubt everything—insofar as it is not mad—really constitutes a philosopher’s critique of religious belief as a substitute for the workings of the unassisted human mind.

Putnam properly insists that his mixture of subjectivism and objectivism is no “facile relativism” (54)—leaving open whether or not it amount to some infacile relativism. Conceptual systems may be created, he says, but they are not created equal. He rather argues that commonsense “inputs” are “themselves to some extent shaped by our concepts” (54)—something that Socrates would hardly deny, having expended much effort to refine opinions or ‘concepts.’ As noted above, the modern ‘concept,’ stripped of epistemological Machiavellianism or creationism, looks very much like Platonic ‘opinion.’

To put it in Kantian terms, against Kantian theory, we do not know that we do not know the noumenal with respect to the whole. It is very likely, as Socrates says, that we know that we do not know the whole—but this is a Platonic point, not only a Kantian point. Neither Platonism nor Kantianism rules out mistakes. Indeed, Socrates became notorious for pointing them out. That this is a Platonic point, Putnam conspicuously fails to notice, supposing that Kant discovered the limitations off human knowledge. This may be because he speaks in Machiavellian/Kantian terms of grasping forms rather than in Socratic/Platonic terms of seeing them. (The further complication is: Did Socrates/Plato really believe the theory of the forms? But that’s another exegesis.)

Kant “suggested sublimating this ‘totalizing’ impulse [the God’s Eye point of view] in the project of trying to realize ‘the highest good in the world’ by reconciling the moral and empirical orders in a perfected system of social institutions and individual relationship” (74). True enough: and what a mistake! Moralizing Machiavelliansim remains all-too-Machiavellian, resulting in ‘the perpetual war fro perpetual peace’ when it does not result in some tyranny. Socrates sanely prefers to confine the “totalizing impulse” to precisely the realm where it can do the least harm: the city in speech, theory.

Putnam reasonably refutes logical positivism and epistemological relativism. The latter, he sees, is either a sophisticated form of the love of one’s own (120), or a not-so-sophisticated form of mental anarchism that cannot account for its own orderly, if mistaken, arguments. As for moral relativism founded upon Hume’s ‘fact/value’ dichotomy, Putnam wants eudaemonism-cum-Kantian-noumenalism, a position Kant conspicuously rejects. Putnam retains Kantian demi-historicism. Putnam does not give enough argument for me to tell if his deviation from the Kantian path is sustainable. Generally, what he says makes sense: ‘reasonable’ with respect to morality isn’t the same as ‘reasonable’ in math or science, as Socrates knows. Putnam needs some notion of prudence, but perhaps a vestigial Kantianism prevents him from developing one? He tends to reduce prudential reasoning to utilitarianism, very much as Kant tends to do. At the same time, Putnam wants a more flexible mode of reasoning than scientists will allow.

He is more concerned with showing the influence of conceptual frameworks on ‘values’ and ‘facts.’ “Today we tend to be too realistic about physics and too subjectivistic about ethics” (143); fair enough, but you need prudence to make such judgments, absent a God’s-Eye point of view. Otherwise, how can one speak ironically of physics as the One True Theory? Maybe it is only the wrong One True Theory. That is at least as possible as being a brain in a vat. To see the irreducibility of ethics to physics (145)—an Aristotelian point—one needs some common scale of comparison. As a result of this quandary, Putnam comes to a pluralist, tolerate-only-intolerance account of political philosophy (149), the inadequacy of which can be seen in the fact that citizens must not only tolerate but defend one another. ‘I tolerate you’ is too weak to serve alone as a bond of citizenship.

Putnam moves toward this realization in his seventh chapter, where he observes that “there are better grounds for criticizing cultural imperialism than the denial of objective values” (162), and that Plato and the medieval philosophers did not “conceive of experience as morally and politically neutral” (154-155). Modern rationalism/instrumentalism, coming out of Machiavelli’s radical instrumentalism, may or may not be majoritarian (as Putnam claims); it is only if the majority really is stronger than some elite. Still, the general critique of instrumentalism Putnam offers is sound. Instrumental rationalism does tend toward ‘might makes right,’ and, as that longtime ‘friend of the forms’ Michael Platt once wrote, it cannot tell us why it is reasonable to call the Tropiques “Tristes.” Scientific method “presupposes prior notions of rationality” (195); it does not exhaust them.

As Putnam concludes, the ‘fact/value’ dichotomy presupposes a mindless, an unteleological nature. But human beings are themselves part of nature. “The choice of a conceptual scheme is what cognitive rationality is all about” (212), but in order for the choice to be a choice—to be non-arbitrary—there must be some distinction between any existing conceptual scheme—’epistemological’ or ‘moral,’ insofar as those may be distinguished—and the act of choosing. That “presupposes our theory of the good,” including assumptions about human nature, society, and the universe (215). Socrates concurs.