Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Myra Bergman Ramos translation. New York: The Seabury Press, 1974 (1968).

 

Published in 1968, the annus mirabilis of ‘New Left’ politics, Pedagogy of the Oppressed appealed to the ideological trends of the 1960s university campuses in the West, trends conveniently but not misleadingly labeled as neo-Marxist. Neo-Marxists took the class-conflict theme of Marx and added several other ‘dialectical’ motifs: ‘Caucasians’ vs. ‘peoples of color’; men vs. women; adults vs. ‘youth’; ‘First World’ vs. ‘Third World’; colonialism vs. liberation. On American campuses, these several grievances paled beside the movement to end the war in Vietnam, but once President Nixon ended the draft and the anti-war movement dried up, these more enduring themes came into greater prominence. Meanwhile, in subsequent decades Freire’s pedagogy became the basis for what’s now called ‘action civics,’ whereby teachers encourage elementary and high school students to take up social and political ’causes’ as part of (and indeed central to) their civic education.

As a founding member of Brazil’s democratic-socialist Workers Party, Paulo Freire’s Marxism drew most heavily from the neo-Marxisms of his time and place. To the ‘Third World’ Marxism of Franz Fanon’s 1961 tract, The Wretched of the Earth —which argued that persons living in the impoverished Southern Hemisphere constituted a new, international proletariat, a body of oppressed persons who could be readied to overthrow the bourgeois capitalist imperialists of the North—and the Left-Christian Liberation Theology formulated by Marxisante demi-Christians in Latin America, Fanon added some Hegelian and Deweyan themes. So much so, in fact, that to this day more orthodox Marxists condemn him as a petty-bourgeois charlatan. But it is precisely his soft-focus eclecticism, partially concealing a much harder core, that still converts many of his readers first into disciples, then to advocates and practitioners of his “critical pedagogy.”

“Critical” is indeed the word that signals Marxism in the contemporary world. Freire begins by lauding conscienização or “critical consciousness.” In Marxism, proletarians take their first step toward liberating themselves from bourgeois domination by developing “class consciousness,” seeing themselves not so much as (for example) Brazilians, Christians, fathers and mothers, or any other social group but as workers—for Marx himself and the ‘Old Left’ animated by his ‘scientific socialism,’ factory workers more than agricultural workers, whom he deemed too backward to achieve the level of consciousness necessary to drive a revolution. Gathering around him the broader constituency of the New Left, Freire begins not with Marx but with Hegel, specifically, Hegel’s dialectical confrontation of master and slave. The slave wins his freedom by risking his life in resisting the master, “making it possible for men to enter the historical process as responsible subjects,” persons who know and act instead of ‘objects’ who are known and acted upon by their oppressors. Once liberation has been achieved, “subjectivity and objectivity…join in a dialectical unity” or synthesis “producing knowledge in solidarity with action, and vice versa.” This book, Freire writes, is “for radicals” who intend to remake education as part of “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed,” which is “to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.”

You see, we do this for the benefit of the oppressors as much as for the oppressed, as little as the oppressors may not now appreciate our efforts on their behalf. Even oppressors who wish to aid the oppressed, to reform regimes in ways that aim at ending poverty (for example) “cannot find in [their] power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves.” The apparently strong are actually weak. Fortunately, in Freire’s judgment, the weak are actually, or at least potentially strong. “Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.” Here is an excellent example of the Liberation-Theology line, which turns a Gospel prophecy—the last shall be first in the Kingdom of God, by the grace of God—into a very this-worldly prediction.

Freire doesn’t invoke the grace or the power of God in arguing for this claim. When oppressors attempt to aid the oppressed, they exercise only “false generosity” and “false charity.” Loveless and dehumanized themselves, they have none of the moral or intellectual resources to do what they profess to want to do.

Why would the oppressed behave any differently than the oppressors, were they to overthrow the oppressors? En route to revising the Marxist-Leninist stance, Freire admits it: they won’t. “During the initial phase of the struggle,” the oppressed “tend themselves to become oppressors” not because human beings of all classes love domination but because oppression has been “their model of humanity,” the only kind of behavior they have seen in the ruling classes. They want to end their oppression, but they fear freedom and the “authentic existence” that beckons them. Must the Marxist-Leninist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ always be so, well, dictatorial?

That is why the oppressed need a new kind of education, “a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed,” a pedagogy which “makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed,” an “instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization,” as in Hegel’s master-slave dichotomy and in Marx’s antinomy of bourgeois and proletarian. As in Hegel, “the oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with…when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualist gestures and risks an act of love.” Evidently recognizing that love does not figure prominently in the writings of Marx, Freire hastens to write, “What Marx criticized and scientifically destroyed was not subjectivity, but subjectivism and psychologism,” the latter being too individualistic for him. That doesn’t quite get us to acts of love, but Freire has his own strategy in mind.

The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukàcs had wanted members of the proletarian vanguard to “explain to the masses their own action.” Freire demurs. Such a monologue would mostly serve the egoism of the explainers. So, don’t explain; talk with the oppressed about their actions. That goes for Christian Leftists, too. Although some of them hold up Jesus as the standard of human conduct, Freire contends that “the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.” This will happen in two stages: first, “the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation”; this then “becomes a pedagogy of all men”—not only the oppressed—in “the process of permanent liberation.” This is the educational equivalent of Trotsky’s ‘permanent revolution.’ “In both stages, it is always through action in depth that the culture of domination is culturally confronted.” And what is “action in depth”? “This appears to be the fundamental aspect of Mao’s Cultural Revolution,” then ongoing, which, according to Freire, consists of consciousness-raising and “expulsion of the old order’s myths.” The violence of Mao’s Cultural Revolution rates no mention, perhaps because Freire offers an unusual definition of violence.

Violence arises in a situation characterized by a version of the master-slave dialectic, the situation of exploitation of one person or group by another. Or, somewhat more subtly, it hinders the “pursuit of self-affirmation of self-affirmation as a responsible person” by the exploited. Whether direct or indirect, violence “interferes with man’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human.” So far, Hegel. But unlike Hegel, a critic of the French Revolution, Freire supposes that “never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed,” only by “tyrants,” “those who cannot love because they only love themselves.” Where this leaves Mao, in whose thought love is no more conspicuous than it is in Marx, one can only guess, but Freire happily admits that “consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love.” After all, the oppressed only “desire to pursue the right to be human,” a right (it must be said, though assuredly not by Freire) that Mao and his colleagues pursued in a highly desultory manner. At any rate, Freire assures his reader that “the restraints imposed by the former oppressed on their oppressors, so the latter cannot resume their former position, do not constitute oppression,” as such “necessary restraints”—conveniently undefined— “cannot be compared” with acts of the “oppressive regime.” The problem here is not so much the principle—to overthrow a tyranny may well, although not necessarily, require rough treatment of the tyrant and his henchmen—but with Freire’s selection of political role models—here Mao, elsewhere Castro. That is, Freire numbers among the social democrats who find it difficult to identify any enemies to democracy on the Left.

He does see part of this problem, however, a problem that was staring Leftists in the face when he wrote his book and continues to stare at them, no longer so obviously, to this day. “The moment the new regime hardens into a dominating ‘bureaucracy’ the humanist dimension of the struggle is lost and it is no longer possible to speak of liberation.” Example then at hand: the Soviet Union. Mao’s ‘solution,’ the Cultural Revolution, proved savage in the short run, ineffective in the long run. Freire hopes to find a better solution to the dilemma of inegalitarian egalitarianism in education.

Christian love flows from trust in a loving God. Freirian love flows from trust in the people. The educator should enter into communion with the people, and that religious language is no accident. In a remarkable turn of phrase, Freire writes, “Conversion to the people requires a profound rebirth.” That is, the people take the place of Christ as the teacher seeks to be ‘born again.’

‘Born again’ socialism rules the agent of secularized ‘grace’ as much as that agent rules the converted. (In this it differs noticeably from Christianity.) It turns out that the teacher will be doing a lot of converting himself: “Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried out with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation.” “Critical” here means Marxist critique of the oppressors: “The oppressed must see examples of the vulnerability of the oppressor so that a contrary conviction”—notice again the religious language—can “begin to grow within them.” “Liberating” means the freeing of minds from the assumption that there is nothing the oppressed can do, a liberation achieved by that critique, which identifies chinks in the enemy armor. 

The reason Freire hopes that this form of pedagogy will not lead to terrorist excesses before, during or after the revolution, and why it can counter bureaucratic sclerosis in the decades of rule by the formerly oppressed, is precisely the technique of “dialogue.” Previous generations of Marxists had understood propaganda as monologic. The dictatorship of the proletariat emerged from a one-way form of ideological propagation whereby the vanguard of the proletariat, those most fully ‘conscious’ of the dialectical laws of history and of the current point to which those laws had brought world history, would tell the proles what they needed to think and what they needed to do. This too closely resembled one of the prime techniques of capitalism: advertising. But “conviction cannot be packaged and sold” like a commercial product; it cannot be brought about with a passive, capitalistic “banking concept of education.” Marxist-Leninist socialism stays too close to some of the elements of the capitalism from which it emerged. As a result, the would-be liberators of the oppressed become oppressors themselves, albeit in the name of ‘the people.’ Many socialists of earlier generations had understood some of that, recognizing that socialism bore the “birth marks” of capitalism, which socialists confidently expected to see their societies outgrow. The problem was that the birth marks had in fact been birth defects, perpetuating class inequalities in a new form. Dialogue between activists and the poor, each ‘converting’ the other, is Freire’s answer to that dilemma. “The revolutionary’s role is to liberate, and be liberated, by the people—not to win them over.”

And so, teaching today consists of a subject (the teacher) instructing an object (the student). This violates the Hegelian and Marxist insistence that the subject-object dichotomy distorts the dialectic, whether it is dialectic in logic or dialectic in practice, in society and politics. Hegel and Marx want to resolve the contradictions that cause the dialectic by ‘synthesizing’ the contradictory elements into a new ‘whole.’ Merchants clashed with feudal lords, defeating them but appropriating some of their ways of ruling, most especially their military prowess; the proletariat clashes with the bourgeoisie and in its future triumph will appropriate some of bourgeois techniques of ruling (e.g., accounting). Freire hopes that by introducing dialogue between activists and the oppressed he can make the dialectical clash humane, first of all by the “rehumanization” of the oppressed, taking their intentions and desires seriously—as it were, working with those intentions and desires, not simply prating against them. Today, “education is suffering from narration sickness,” which not only makes teachers into preachers handing down the gospel of Marx but too often falls into lecturing on such general principles or abstractions as ‘commodification’ and all the various ‘isms’ one is told to venerate or to abominate, depending upon whose ‘class interests’ they allegedly serve. “Words are emptied of their concreteness,” thereby losing their “transforming power” as the listeners’ eyes glaze over. Students “memorize mechanically” as if they were not human beings but mere ‘containers,’ objects “like the slave in the Hegelian dialectic.” Too much of that, and the oppressed will not only risk his life in fighting to make his oppressor recognize his humanity but turn into an oppressor himself. Oddly but perhaps tellingly, although Freire emphasizes dialogue and concrete language, his book is monologuish and full of abstract language and argumentation.

“Apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, men cannot be fully human.” Inquiry, yes, and understandably so, given the rational capacity of human nature. “Praxis” is the question. Socratic irony suggests that the discoveries resulting from human thought readily be transferred practice. Accordingly, Socrates’ ‘praxis’ is the philosophic life itself, engaging in dialectics of word, of logos, with interlocutors, many of them fellow citizens of Athens. And even that eventually got him into difficulties. The Marxian Freire denies that intellectual discoveries cannot fully be transferred into practice, although he does prudently recognize that they cannot be so transferred immediately. His notion of permanent revolution, which implies a continual and practically transformative dialogue amongst the people while they rule themselves, will (he hopes) avoid both tyrannic oppression and bureaucratic sclerosis.

Thus, ‘critique’ will be constant, along with a sort of ‘creation.’ “Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention”; with “critical consciousness,” students can become “transformers of the world.” Indeed, since “men are fulfilled only to the extent that they create their world…with their transforming labor,” those accustomed to hard labor can, with “unity and organization,” “change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can re-create the world and make it more human,” despite their oppressors’ attempt to keep them divided and conquered. Since, as Hegel, Marx, and indeed their fellow historicist, John Dewey, all claim, “reality is really a process,” education cannot educate unless it reconceives itself as a process that lines up with the larger process of ‘History,’ that grand dialectical synthesizer of contradictions in theory and in practice, that comprehensive and constantly ‘laboring’ force by which human beings can make themselves into world-creators and rulers.

What are these student critics learning to criticize (or as one says, ‘critiquing’) more acutely with their heightened consciousness (or as one says, ‘wokeness’)? Oppressors rest confidently, even complacently, on their ability to “fit” the oppressed into “the world the oppressors have created,” largely by inducing them never to question its hierarchies. They churn out myths, as for example “the myth that rebellion is a sin against God,” or “the myth that the oppressive order is a ‘free society,'” or (horror of horrors) the insidious ways in which they “inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.” Supposedly ‘populist’ leaders (he may be thinking of Peron) are really “amphibians” who go back and forth, pretending to defend the people but keeping close ties with their capitalist oppressors. Oppressors may reform the world they have created, appease grievances, but they never willingly transform it, revolutionize it, fundamentally change the regime itself. Because it refuses to acknowledge that reality is an ever-changing process, oppression is “necrophiliac,” death-loving, because it takes a “mechanistic, static, spatialized view of consciousness,” ignoring the flowing, dialectical, temporal character of the consciousness of those it rules. This causes suffering because it cuts people off from their real nature as ‘historical’ beings. “Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men upon their world in order to transform it.” Only with those who act with a “consciousness intent upon the world” will liberate themselves from the oppressors. And the “essence of consciousness” itself is intentionality; that is, as Marx urged, the point isn’t to understand the world, as previous philosophers had tried to do, but to change it. This puts considerable premium not on knowledge as understanding reality—even if reality is reconceived as ever-changing, ‘Heraclitean’ not ‘Platonic’—but on the will of the student, now determined to fuse theory and practice in order to revolutionize what he sees in front of him. No wonder that orthodox Marxists dislike Freire: He doesn’t believe that ‘History’ will end; as with Trotsky, the revolution will be permanent, although unlike Trotsky, it need not be driven by state-sponsored terrorism.

Rather than violent force, revolutionary education, “through dialogue,” causes the categories of “teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher [to] cease to exist.” “A new term emerges: teacher-student and student-teachers,” persons “jointly responsible for a process in which all will grow”—that last word invoking Dewey’s central theme. Knowledge is no longer (mis)understood as property. This can occur when “the teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own.” That is, logos replaces doxa. This amounts to a “problem-posing education,” again as with Dewey, instead of a “banking education.” That is, instead of depositing knowledge in the vault of each student’s mind, the teacher will identify a problem the students have, then work with them to solve it. This now is called ‘activist pedagogy.’ 

Whether it will really work out this way, and even whether Freire expects it to work out this way, remain open questions for now. His underlying point here is ontological. Without consciousness, he claims, there would be no ‘world’ at all because there would be no one to say, ‘This is a world.’ “The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness,” the world of historicism, itself a form of human godlikeness without the God of the Bible. There is no ‘being’ in the Platonic or Biblical sense, only ‘becoming’—the happy becoming of the optimist, a becoming that is “revolutionary,” “prophetic,” and “hopeful” because guided by “men as historical beings” who know themselves as such and (evidently) know which way to move the course of events in a good direction, away from oppression and toward liberation. “Critical thinking” is “historical thinking.” Such thinking, including self-reflection, distinguishes man from animals, which “live in an overwhelming present,” unaware of taking risks, incapable of making commitments of transforming themselves for better or for worse. Human consciousness implies “a dialectical relationship between the determination of limits and [men’s] own freedom.”

It is true, Freire concedes, that the word is “the essence of dialogue.” However, “there is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis.” If word “is deprived of its dimension of action,” if it does not advance us in time in some practical way, then “reflection suffers automatically as well,” descending into mere wordplay or verbalism, “an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform.” This comports with the elevated status of the will in Freire’s pedagogy. In Platonic terms, words that denounce belong more to the realm of thumos or spiritedness, not so much to the realm of logos or reason. He does, nonetheless, understand that action without reflection is mere activism, which “mak[es] dialogue impossible” by coercing human beings, treating them as objects. “Only men are praxis,” capable of combining knowledge and creation to produce material goods, social institutions, ideas and concepts.

“Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world,” since “no one can say a true word alone…nor can he say it for another.” In today’s jargon, this means that truth is ‘socially constructed,’ a point that might well be contested. Be that as it may, in order for social dialogue in Freire’s sense to proceed, the oppressed must reclaim the right to speak. They must also learn to speak in the right way, as polemical argument isn’t true dialogue but an attempt to impose truth on another—true enough, although belied by the earlier praise of denunciation. In this latter, unpolemical sense, dialogue requires “profound love for the world and for men”—the replacement of God in the Christian command with “world” well noted—and revolution founded upon such dialogue is “an act of love.”  “The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love,” Freire writes, now paraphrasing Che Guevara. 

Moving away from this quasi-theological language, Freire faithfully adopts the historicist concept of various historical epochs, each constituted by complex dialectical interactions among ideas, hopes, values, and material conditions. In each epoch, “generative themes” develop, defended by some and attacked by others. Those whose self-interest a given theme serves will defend it. “I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be domination—which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved by those dominated by “the method of conscientizaçāo,” whereby those who investigate “the people’s thinking” and the people…act as co-investigators.” Freire thus attempt to democratize Marx’s ‘science.’ It aims at changing people’s minds voluntarily, by which Freire hopes to preclude dictatorship by the oppressed after they overthrow their oppressors.

By contrast, “the investigator who, in the name of scientific objectivity, transforms the organic into something inorganic, what is becoming into what is, life into death, is a man who fears change,” seeing in it “not a sign of life, but a sign of death and decay,” thereby “betray[ing] his own character as a killer of life.” This presupposes, all too optimistically, that change cannot be deadly. 

At any rate, the change Freire has in mind enables men to “emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled.” His “problem-posing method” begins with a task to be done, not a subject to be known; in this pedagogy, ‘knowledge’ comes out of the dialogue-praxis undertaken to solve the “problem,” itself identified in dialogue with the oppressed, as defined by—whom? Freire never gets around to specifying that, but it is well worth specifying, inasmuch as claims of oppression, of victimhood, abound, easily asserted by manipulative minds.

Or perhaps we do know who defines ‘the oppressed.’ It is the investigator-revolutionaries who determine “the area in which they will work,” acquiring “a preliminary acquaintance with the area through secondary sources.” They then will observe, listen, discuss, all in order to discover “the structure of [the people’s] thought.” The next step will be to discuss these findings among themselves along with a small number of volunteers from the area, identifying “contradictions” between what the people want and what they experience.

This begins to sound suspiciously like a somewhat more sophisticated form of standard Marxist practice. The next step will be to develop oral, written, and/or pictorial “codifications” of recognizable situations familiar to the people,” supposedly threading the needle between “overly explicit” (i.e., propagandistic) and “overly enigmatic” representations of those situations. These “codifications” (for example, a picture of a drunken worker weaving his way home) must relate objectively to “the makeup of the whole” social system in which the people find themselves while relating only to their “felt needs.” It is noteworthy that the revolutionaries take charge of selecting among the many possible “codifications.” [1] Once the participants review the materials, they will be ready to engage in “correcting” their habitual opinions and perceptions.” After “several days” of such “dialogue, the people can suggest themes,” having gotten the hang of what’s going on. The result? “Individuals who were submerged in reality, merely feeling their needs, emerge from reality and perceive the causes of their needs.” Quite obviously, this also enables the revolutionaries to ‘get into the heads’ of the people, both in terms of learning what they actually feel and in terms of influencing those feelings. That drunken worker now sobers up, seeing that his urge to drink as caused by his capitalist oppressor. Men thus “come to feel like masters of their thinking.” But are they?

In fact, “the leaders do bear responsibility for coordination—and at times, direction—but leaders who deny praxis”—which Freire defines by citing Lenin’s demand for fusing theory and action—to “the oppressed thereby invalidate their own praxis.” That is, Freire revises Lenin’s famous notion of the proletarian vanguard—primarily in terms of how it’s presented. Once the vanguard-leader-teachers nudge them in the direction of Marxian analysis and action, the oppressed will have “a fundamental role”—a fundamental role—thanks to their “increasingly critical awareness”—Marxist class consciousness—of “their role as Subjects of the transformation.” Although Freire claims that they will thereby avoid the temptation to oppress, once in power, his citation of Castro as an example of such a leader gives the game away. While describing the revolutionary leaders as engaging in a “humble, loving, and courageous encounter with the people,” he, very much like Castro, Lenin, Mao, and his other heroes, insists that “this dialogical encounter cannot take place between antagonists.” In Freire’s Liberation-Theology Christianity, loving one’s enemies evaporates in the heat of class conflict, despite his earlier protestations that in liberating themselves the oppressed act not only for their own good but for that of their oppressors. [2]

Freire instead calls for a “scientific, revolutionary humanism,” one that stresses “intersubjectivity” and “interaction” with the oppressed, inasmuch as “revolutionary leaders cannot think without the people, nor for the people, but only with the people.” If they don’t, “they become devitalized” and will end as the people’s new oppressors. Education and revolutionary activity must proceed simultaneously, beginning with the pedagogy but quickly moving to a synthesis, lest a stratified “counter-revolutionary bureaucracy”—product of a “counter-revolution…carried out by revolutionaries who become reactionary”—re-subordinate the people. What Freire calls “cultural invasion,” a means by which oppressors “impose their own view of the world” while “assuming the role of a helping friend,” can as readily be undertaken by ex-revolutionary bureaucrats as by reformist elements within the bourgeoisie. Castro and his comrades, however, shine forth as “an eminently dialogical leadership group,” gradually drawing the people away from the oppressor by “objectify[ing] him” while “never enter[ing] into contradiction with the people,” never getting too far ahead their state of consciousness. Freire evidently never listened to any of Fidel’s eight-hour monologues, delivered once securely in power. Or maybe he calculates that his readers won’t know about them.

Dialogue bespeaks Martin Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ relationship, Freire hastens to assure us. Still, in cultivating that relationship, revolutionaries “must not be naive” about the people. To be sure, one may have confidence in their “potentialities.” But “always mistrust the ambiguity of oppressed men, mistrust the oppressor ‘housed‘ in the latter” in the form of the myths the oppressors have insinuated into their minds. The people’s “natural fear of freedom may lead them to denounce the revolutionary leaders instead!” as no less an authority than Che Guevara warned. Communion with the people brings cooperation from the people, the fusion of revolutionaries with the people.

With the new regime of socialism established, bureaucracy threatens. At the same time, to be a regime there must be some sort of organization. What will that be? Freire holds out the possibility that it can grow out of the unity of the people with the revolutionary teachers. The dialogue that preceded the revolution will continue after it. The new regime’s authoritative institutions will provide space for the “intersubjective” relationship of leaders and the people. “Organization is…a highly educational process in which leaders and people together experience true authority and freedom, which they then seek to establish in society by transforming the reality which mediates them.” You know—it will all be like Cuba under Fidel.

 

Notes

1. Another example: the teacher-leader-revolutionaries will endorse a particular demand of the people—for example, a salary increase—while at the same time “pos[ing] as a problem a real, concrete historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension,” namely that oppressive capitalist system that denies them the salary they want.
2. For a discussion if Liberation Theology, see Will Morrisey: A Political Approach to Pacifism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), pp. 288-306.

Miles J. Unger: Machiavelli: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.

Heinrich Meier: “The Renewal of Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion: On the Intention of Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli.” In Political Philosophy and Revealed Religion. Robert Berman translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

 

In February 1513, Florentine authorities arrested Niccolò Machiavelli for plotting to overthrow the new oligarchic Medici regime which, after overthrowing the republic, had dismissed him from his position as Second Chancellor. He survived torture while remaining an atheist. And so his enemies subjected him to a fate worse than death, exile to the countryside, where “few people were as ill suited” as Machiavelli, no Epicurean amenable to a “quiet life” cultivating his garden. As is well known, Machiavelli wrote The Prince as an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Medici. “I love my city more than my own soul,” he averred, and Unger goes along with that, saying that Machiavelli’s patriotism burned brighter than his loyalty to republicanism. As is also well known, “while The Prince failed in its immediate objective to restore him to the good graces of the lords of the city, it has secured him a permanent place in the history of ideas.”

Born in 1469 to a middle-class family in the minor nobility, his father a respected citizen, an attorney esteemed as a man of learning, Machiavelli grew up in a condition of “insecure respectability,” sufficiently distant from the Florentine grandees to give him a sense of being an outsider, on the margins of the ruling class. The family had shared in the prosperity of the city, which “was becoming a center of trade, manufacturing, and finance,” but the young and ambitious man needed a career, choosing the civil service, a vantage point that “provided vital insight into the cruel economy of power.”

His ancestors were Guelphs, partisans of the pope, not Ghibellines, partisans of the Holy Roman Emperor. By this time, the Guelphs had triumphed, but “the crumbs of the victory had barely been cleared when they themselves split into rival factions—the Blacks and the Whites—who now went about slaughtering each other with equal gusto.” In this struggle, Machiavelli’s family joined the Blacks, who won, while not-yet-eminent Dante Alighieri “had the bad luck to belong to the Whites.” In the event, The Divine Comedy was the best revenge. For his part, looking back on that time in his Florentine Histories, Machiavelli found such violent factionalism to have been a tonic not a curse. Florence had become greater because of them, and in The Prince he would reverse the teaching of the Bible, saying that there is greater life in cities animated by hatred than those whose rulers attempt to govern by love. In such struggles, men of virtù could rise up and replace complacent ancestral lords. His father chronically in debt, preferring such activities of amateur scholarship as the compilation of an index to Livy, to the son “would fall the honor and the burden of carrying on the family name.”

“One way the Medici consoled their compatriots for the loss of any real say in their own government was by keeping the city prosperous and splendid.” Wealth and architectural grandeur left Machiavelli unimpressed, but the future philosopher did take interest in the intellectual eminences who gathered “at the home of Florence’s leading citizen, Lorenzo de’ Medici.” These men included Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. “Educated Florentines like Machiavelli found their moral bearings not by emulating the lives of the saints but by studying the deeds and adopting the attitudes of the ancient Greeks and Romans,” in liberal studies “worthy of a free man,” as the scholar Pier Paolo Vergerio wrote. If Florentines no longer really practice civil liberty, they could still think about it. For now, safely ensconced in the civil service, Machiavelli could seek to rise socially and politically through literary achievement. He was handicapped, however, by “his prickly personality” and spent rather too much of his time frequenting brothels and taverns, before and after his marriage. 

Such a place may well attract religious reformers. In 1498, Machiavelli, now in his late twenties, witnessed a fire and brimstone sermon by the Dominican monk, Girolamo Savonarola. “One would be hard pressed to find two men who embodied such divergent and mutually uncomprehending philosophies,” Unger writes; more, one might say that Savonarola was no philosopher at all but a pious rhetorician of the first rank. In his sermons, Savonarola made bold to excoriate Pope Alexander VI, who did indeed deserve rebuke on Christian terms. The dispute between these men re-factionalized not only Florence by all of Italy, which “descended into chaos” and “put an end to the golden age of the Italian Renaissance.” Crucially, it left Italy open to conquest by the French king, Charles VIII, who swept aside the small Italian city-states, one by one. A few years before Machiavelli heard Savonarola’s sermon, Charles had been unwisely invited to intervene in Italian politics by Ludovico Sforza, the king of Naples, who supposed that Charles would end the internecine wars; he did, but not to the advantage of Naples or any other Italian city. 

By then, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s haughty, cruel, and incompetent son ruled Florence. Treating with Charles, he sacrificed the Florentine claim to Pisa in exchange for a continuance of himself in power. Enraged Florentines, who had long considered the city a prize they deserved to rule, drove out the Medici. Charles then occupied the city, and Savonarola greeted him warmly as the answer to one of his prophesies, which predicted the coming of a second Cyrus who would purge Italy of its sins. But Charles, too, soon retreated in the face of the Florentines’ rage. After his departure, that rage once again turned inward, with the ottimati or optimates, the oligarchs, fighting the populari or populists. Savonarola now “jump[ed], body and soul, into the political arena,” on the side of the populari, declaring their cause to be in accordance with “the will of God.” Be that as it may have been, his side won and formed a republican regime (modeled on that of Venice) ruled by the Great Council, a body “open to a wide spectrum of Florentine citizens,” eventually some 3,500 strong, including shopkeepers and artisans. Like Venice, the regime was no democratic republic, but it was a broader-based oligarchy than its predecessor. This was the regime Machiavelli joined, serving his entire career in the civil service under a regime which numbered a fervent Catholic preacher as its most eloquent founder. Machiavelli benefited from the republic but found it ill-designed, unable to last because it “did not satisfy all the parties among its citizens.” No regime in that city-state could survive if it “did not take into account the Florentines’ natural love of liberty.” 

Charles VIII assuaged his disappointment by going on to take Rome, Vatican City, and Naples. But these conquests only served to unite Italians against him in the Holy League, nominally under the rule of Pope Alexander VI. “The only major Italian power that refused to join this sacred cause was Florence, which, under the leadership of Savonarola, had its own ideas where righteousness lay”—hardly with the Pope. Florentines still wanted to reacquire Pisa, which the Pope and his allies were loath to do. In the Battle of Fornovo, “one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on Italian soil,” neither the French forces nor those of the League won a conclusive victory, but Charles’s troops suffered such attrition that he had no choice but to quit Italy, “the land that not many months before had seemed so ripe for the picking.” Now, Savonarola and his Florentines became the objects of the Pope’s rage. The dissident preacher organized not troops but a “bonfire of the vanities,” a city-wide destruction of luxury items intended to appease the God who seemed to him angry at the Florentine sins. Excommunicated by the Church, Savonarola was exposed as having been quite as sinful as his compatriots. As Machiavelli would later remark, “unarmed prophets” do not fare well against those who are armed, whether they claim the gift of prophecy or not.

A Franciscan priest challenged the Dominican Savanarola to a trial by fire, having long resented Dominican preeminence in the city. Prudently, neither man undertook the trial himself, preferring to hire substitutes. Rains came, forcing the postponement of the blessed event, but by now the people were out of patience with their erstwhile champion. Angry mobs attacked Savonarola’s “most prominent supporters,” and the people wrested Savonarola himself from the high altar of his church where he had gone to pray; they tortured and hanged him, burning his body for good measure. A few months later, Machiavelli was elevated to serve as Second Chancellor of the Republic.

This was a paid office; such offices were called the utili. The higher offices, the oneri, were reserved for gentlemen who needed no salaries. Machiavelli got the job in part because he was known to be a critic of Savonarola. As Second Chancellor, he managed the republic’s correspondence, heading an office of fifteen notaries and secretaries, “learned men of modest means who had the skill and command of both Latin and the vernacular to convert the often-garbled instructions of their superiors into comprehensible documents crafted in a fine, legible hand.” The republic also sent Machiavelli on occasional diplomatic missions, one involving an unsuccessful negotiation with the Countess of Forli, the lady who makes a memorable appearance in The Prince as its sole example of a woman of virtù.

Louis XII now occupied the French throne. “More able and less impulsive than his predecessor,” “less prone to chase half-baked dreams of glory,” Louis nonetheless “had no intention of abandoning what he believed were France’s legitimate claims in Italy.” The secular head of the Holy League, Ludovico Sforza of Milan, had alienated the other members with his schemes to boost himself over them. Pope Alexander, who attended no less to the winds of political change than to the Holy Spirit, “reversed his previous antipathy toward the French, concluding he could more easily advance his family’s fortunes”—he was a Medici—by “allying himself with that kingdom.” This left Ludovico isolated, then defeated by the invading French. But that expedition, too, was “doomed from the outset.” France and its ally, Florence, had different war aims, Florence wanting Pisa but France caring only for acquiring Naples. (“The truth was that Florence needed France more than France needed the militarily insignificant republic.”) On their way to Naples, greedy and undisciplined French troops wasted too much time extorting money and provisions from the towns along the way. By the time they did reach the place the Florentines coveted, “the puny city of Pisa” had organized themselves sufficiently to hold them off. This failure “revealed the weakness” of both France and Florence; “with Italy fast becoming the proving ground for the armies of Europe, such an opening could not remain long without someone walking through it.”

That man was Cesare Borgia, son of reprobate Pope Alexander VI and himself a cardinal in the Church hierarchy. After clearing a principal rival, his brother, out of the way by murdering him, he won the promise of a dukedom from the French king. When Milan fell to the French, leaving the Countess of Forli without her protector, Cesare threw her in prison. The alarmed Florentines sent Machiavelli as part of a two-man team to negotiate a treaty with France, hoping to secure the city’s continued independence against conquest by this formidable new prince. In the negotiations, Machiavelli argued that France was allowing the Papacy to grow to great in the person of the ambitious cardinal. More persuasively still, he offered a bribe, and the king reined in Cesare. “After more than thirty directionless years,” Machiavelli “had found his calling.” In exchange for continued monetary support from the wealthy republic, Louis would protect Florence from the Borgias. Cesare would continue his conquests, albeit at a slower pace, and himself extracted money from Florence, whose rulers believed in hedging their bets.

Machiavelli’s “calling” entailed much more than diplomacy and public correspondence, as Unger recognizes. He sharpened his observations of politics, too. The courts of Europe “were not places for the faint of heart or the easily deceived,” as “Latin orations modeled on Cicero delivered by ambassadors dressed in cloth of gold and sparkling with pearls” formed a “culture of flattery and obfuscation” disguising “brazen self-interest and naked aggression.” With such teachers, Machiavelli continued his education.

By the autumn of 1502, Italian military leaders met to plot Cesare’s overthrow. Many were the Cardinal-prince’s own captains, fearful for their own lives under the rule of their mercurial commander. Distrusting both sides, Machiavelli temporized. His experience in Italy and elsewhere taught him to understand political history “not as the unfolding of impersonal forces,” as Hegel and Marx would do, some three centuries later, but as the rivalries of persons. “Politics as the clash of personalities was an approach that came naturally to someone raised in a city where everyone knew everyone else and where one’s political views were shaped by patronage and family rivalries.” In his own political maneuverings, however, Machiavelli “was the least Machiavellian of men,” having little of the deceptive fox about him,” to say nothing of the powerful lion. His “excessive candor” consistently held back his advancement to any greater office. 

Upon the death of Alexander VI, Giuliano della Rovere took the papal mitre under the name of Julius II. Cesare, ill and inexplicably trusting of his enemies’ diplomatic guarantees, was reduced to “peevish rantings” which Machiavelli found “so distasteful that [he] wanted to flee his presence.” He soon met a still greater man, however: Leonardo da Vinci, who had apprenticed in Florence but removed to Milan after being accused of sodomy. “Both men make a virtue of marginality,” Unger remarks, each “a new kind of man,” one “free to discover new ways of looking at the world” beyond the sight of “men whose only claim to superiority was an accident of birth.” Even as Machiavelli would later advise princes to master Fortuna, so Leonardo worked to master “the forces of nature,” seeking “to harness wind, water, and even sunlight to serve the purposes of mankind.” Machiavelli returned to Florence but did not forget Leonardo. In 1503, returning to Florence after the controversy died down, Leonardo proposed to defeat Pisa and win it back for his city by diverting the Arno River, which would cut off the city’s lifeline to the outside. Initially, the Council rejected the plan as unrealistic, but Machiavelli and his ally Gonfaloniere Piero Solderini, saw promise in it and eventually persuaded the others. In the event, the workers botched the job and the rulers turned against Machiavelli and Solderini. 

But the Council soon had more serious worries. At the end of 1503, the French army that protected the city lost a battle to a Spanish army under the command of Gonzalvo de Cordoba. The Florentines panicked. Fortunately for them, the Spanish had insufficient troops to venture any farther than Naples and agreed to a three-year truce. Impatient with his city’s military weakness, which made it dependent upon foreign protectors and an admirer of Switzerland’s citizen-soldiers, Machiavelli began to push for a strengthened army, to be composed not of mercenaries but of citizen conscripts. Not only would this “require a reversal of almost two centuries of military policy,” it “would involve a radical shift in the way the citizens viewed their obligations to the state.” Hitherto a commercial people, Florentines “had long since forgotten the discipline of war.” With their “low sense of civic duty…they would howl at any attempt to drag them from their comfortable homes to drill on the parade ground” in preparation to “endanger[ing] life and limb on the field of battle.” For their part, the aristocrats feared arming the populace. Machiavelli eventually was permitted to put together a militia recruited from the neighboring peasantry, not the city-dwellers. The Council appointed Machiavelli himself as chancellor of the body that governed these troops. 

In the summer of 1509, Florence finally conquered Pisa, partly on the strength of its newly formed militia. Machiavelli rode with the troops as they entered the city in triumph. “He had succeeded where others far better versed in the military arts had failed.” He carefully saw to it that his troops “maintained the discipline that would help reconcile” the Pisans to their new, lowered, status. He assured the Pisans that Florence planned to be clement; “most adjusted to the new state of affairs.” Over time, however, having been neither caressed nor annihilated, the Pisans began to plot their revenge. And Machiavelli’s fellow Florentines, after the first glow of his success had worn off, began to feel what Unger calls “a peculiarity of human nature,” ingratitude. 

Florentine and Pisa themselves formed part of Italy’s ever-diminishing geopolitical significance. The Mediterranean itself, where Italians had plied their trade for centuries, had begun to lose economic and military importance as Portugal and Spain built armadas venturing out onto the Atlantic Ocean. Even the Mediterranean saw a new naval rival, the Ottoman Turks. Spain and France had become “the two greatest powers on the Italian peninsula,” and the new pope’s attempts to rule it only “seemed likely to unsettle further an already unsettled situation.” France attempted to foment a schism in the Church to weaken Julius, intending to hold a rival Church council in Pisa. Since that city was now under Florentine control, this would have proved embarrassing to the Florentines, who dispatched Machiavelli to the French court. Louis didn’t care, “demanding that the government of Florence offer safe passage” to the handful of cardinals (all of them French) who had the stomach for schism. The pope placed Florence under interdict and ignored the feeble schismatics.

“Soft power’ having failed, Louis returned to planning a military invasion, which began in the winter of 1512. The French won the Battle of Ravenna that spring but lost their general. Julius had his own problems, as his Holy League army consisted mostly of Swiss and Spanish soldiers, no less foreign to Italy than the French invaders. Still, he succeeded in driving away the French.

Machiavelli still faulted the Church. It could not unify Italy, even if it could prevent anyone else from unifying it. He predicted another war between France and the pope. Meanwhile, his enemies in Florence sharpened their knives. 

The crisis came in the form of an alliance between the pope, who wanted to remove the annoying republican regime in Florence, and the Medici brothers, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and his younger brother, Giuliano, who wanted to return their family to power there. “This was the direct thrust at Florence that Machiavelli and his colleagues had long feared and had strained every fiber to avoid,” now forced to match their militia troops against “a professional army bent on their destruction.” The war went well for Florence at first, as the Florentines defeated Spanish troops under the command of the enemy. But Soderini foolishly rejected the Spanish offer to withdraw in exchange for a trivial payment. The Spanish won the next battle, and the Council forced Soderini to resign. The Medici took the city, called a mass meeting of the citizens who, “surrounded by armed men who made the consequences of dissent immediately apparent,” bowed to their conquerors’ intention of putting an end to the republican regime. Machiavelli allowed himself to entertain the hope that he might remain untouched; “there may [have been] an element of wishful thinking here,” Unger drily remarks.

Unger explains Machiavelli’s vain attempts to ingratiate himself to the Medici as an obtuse overestimation of “people’s capacity to listen to unpleasant truths, which tended to get him into trouble with his colleagues and contributed to his posthumous reputation as the world’s greatest scoundrel.” In fact, Unger claims, he was quite the opposite, a man who made naïve and tactless attempts to instruct the Florentines, assuming that “any opinion honestly given would be welcomed in the spirit in which it was offered,” to paraphrase the epistle dedicatory to The Prince. In this, it is more likely that Unger is the naïve one. As he makes clear, Machiavelli got in trouble with the Medici because he opposed them politically. The spirit with which The Prince is offered is very much open to interpretation; the phrase may have a certain irony loaded into it.

The Medici removed Machiavelli from office in November 1512, as part of a general purge of populani partisans. After his arrest on suspicion of participating in an assassination plot against Giuliano de’ Medici, he seems to have been nearly as tortured by the sound of prayers offered by persons outside the prison than he was by the physical ordeals he underwent. While jailed, he wrote sonnets which courted no sympathy and expressed no love or hate, instead “depicting their author as a hapless wretch, a figure of fun rather than pity.” He was released in March 1513 and sent into exile.

Somewhat astonishingly, but in keeping with his portrait of Machiavelli-the-Naïf, Unger asserts that “few works of political philosophy are more sincere than The Prince.” By this, he means that Machiavelli “treat[s] people not as children of God but as independent adults, forced to make choices without guidance from an all-seeing Father and to suffer the consequences of their mistakes,” as he had done. But of course Machiavelli’s atheism, while it can be deduced from his arguments, does not lie on the surface of his writing. He writes sentences that appear to respect God. This being so, sincerity isn’t exactly the word to describe his book.

As for the philosophers, Machiavelli judged that they had “ignor[ed] the actual conduct of real men and women” in favor of moralizing, offering pictures of imaginary republics, not real ones. Both Aristotle and Christian Aristotelians like Aquinas and Erasmus “predicate their philosophy on the assumption, so deeply held as to remain largely unexamined, that the universe is essentially rational; that it promotes virtue and punishes wickedness; that society yearns to achieve a more perfect union, no matter how far short it falls in practice.” For Machiavelli, by contrast, the world is “governed by caprice,” the caprice of “the trickster goddess” Fortuna. “The very notion of a fixed morality is preposterous in a lawless world,” and the way forward is to “master capricious fortune.” “We would be far better served if instead of building models of perfection we concentrated our efforts on cobbling together a serviceable government for the moment recognizing we must adapt our solutions to evolving circumstances.” Unger relates this teaching to the life Machiavelli experienced in Florence, the commercial republic characterized by economic ups and downs, “boom and bust.” Here, the problem isn’t so much a misunderstanding of Machiavelli as a misunderstanding of Aristotle, who equally insists on adapting conduct to circumstances. What Aristotle would want to know is how one defines “serviceable.” That is Machiavelli’s real departure from ‘the ancients.’

Unger therefore rightly asks, “What exactly are those ends toward which Machiavelli’s famously unpleasant means are pointing us?” But he evades the question, claiming that The Prince, “like all how-to manuals,” “assumes the ends are self-evident and sets them aside in order to concentrate on demonstrating the best way of achieving them.” Unger somehow divines that Machiavelli regards “right and wrong” to be “determined not in the individual conscience but in society, whose ultimate expression is the state and whose preservation, in peace and security, is necessary to human happiness” because it serves as “the vital bulwark against the forces of chaos,” of Fortuna. Once again, however, Aristotle wants to know what happiness is. If men are beasts, or at best centaurian half-men, half-beasts, their happiness cannot be happiness as understood by Aristotle. Might it not rather be pleasure, whether the libidinous pleasures of the brothel or the pleasures aimed at by the libido dominandi? That is, Machiavelli despises Epicureanism not because it is a materialism aimed at pleasure but because it is insufficiently political, just as its stern critic, Christianity, is held to be. (In this, Machiavelli anticipates Hobbes, whose doctrine has been described as political Epicureanism.) At any rate, what Unger admires as “brutal frankness” may be more rationally disputable than he supposes, and may even be a sort of temptation, not so frank at all, another instance of Machiavelli’s praise of “the strategic uses of cruelty and deceit.” 

And where does this leave Machiavelli’s supposed patriotism? “He was above all an ardent patriot.” In what sense? In averring that he loved his country more than his soul, what weight does that have for a man who denied the existence of the soul as understood either by previous philosophers or Christians? If “experience is his guide and expedience his god,” then why would he, or his prince, not throw his country to the wolves, if he judged that to be expedient? 

Unger rightly contrasts Machiavelli with another exiled public figure and political philosopher, Cicero. Cicero prized his banishment because it “allow[ed] him the serenity to turn his mind to timeless truths.” Not so, Machiavelli, who “thought the life of the mind poor compensation for what he had lost,” and rejected the traditional esteem for leisure as necessary “to the cultivation of the public spirit.” He did whatever he could think to do to persuade his enemies to bring him back into government. Even his life in the countryside seemed to him not a platform for leisure but for squabbling with the cheating locals over cards—petty competitions that mirrored the great competitions of lo stato. In this, Unger regards Machiavelli not as a philosopher in the traditional sense at all, not a man who has thought his way out of the ‘cave’ that represents conventional opinion but as “a true child of Florence, product of a merchant culture that valued work and carried in its collective consciousness a memory of the battles required to free itself from the grasp of the feudal aristocracy,” a product specifically “of the Florentine professional class, that pool of educated men dependent on their wealthier patrons for their livelihood.” Not for them, or for him, “a life of pampered indolence.” In Machiavelli, Unger senses “the bourgeois’s fragile vanity, where servility wars with pride and feelings of shame at his neediness are alleviated by a healthy sense of his own abilities.” For all his acknowledgment of Machiavelli’s sharp departures from his religious and philosophic predecessors, Unger finally (mis)understands him in historicist and indeed largely Marxist terms, a man of his time, place, and social class.

This notwithstanding, in “the fullest account of his political philosophy,” the Discourses, Machiavelli turns out not to have been quite so sincere as he seemed to Unger in The Prince. “Machiavelli was not the first to recognize that it was impossible for a politician to live according to the precepts set down by Jesus and his disciples, but he was the first to openly endorse appearing to live by one set of standards while secretly adopting another.” In openly endorsing prevarication, does Machiavelli not raise the question of how open his openness really is? In any event, he urges “nothing less than a revolution of values to complete the revolution of taste,” the Renaissance love of all things ‘ancient’ and therefore pagan, which had “already occurred.” That is, he intended to extend his contemporaries’ love of ancient art and thought to politics and religion as the ancients really practiced it—not as thought by Plato or Aristotle but as practiced by world-conquering Alexander. But what if Machiavelli intends rather not to raise up the ancients at the expense of the ‘moderns’ or Christians, but to offer a third, different way of life? “Much of the tension and many of the apparent contradictions in both The Discourses and The Prince stem from this clash between the Christian faith in which he was raised, and which provided a conventional moral frame that not even he could escape”—in what sense?—and “the pagan virtues of strength, boldness, and civic-mindedness he admired,” the “unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, dissonance between morality and utility.” Unger himself involves himself in an irresolvable dissonance. Earlier, he had openly and frankly acknowledged Machiavelli’s atheism, but now he maintains that “while future generations, reading between the lines, have detected in his writings the suggestion that God is indeed dead, Machiavelli himself never went so far”; “he was probably not an atheist.” “Metaphysics simply did not interest him, and he may well have retained some vestige of belief simply because he lacked the passion required to demolish it.” Or simply the caution that steered him away from writing like Voltaire?

“Machiavelli is concerned with the practical effects of an idea rather than its abstract or metaphysical qualities.” Very well, then, how does he judge whether a practical effect is good? Can the good be reduced to the desirable, and if so, how? If “the man who uses violence to spoil things, not the man who uses violence to mend them, that is blameworthy,” then why is mending preferable to spoilage? If the republic of virtue, as understood by Plato and Aristotle, must give way to the republic of “interest,” if virtue must give way to virtù defined as prowess in the pursuit of utility in pursuit of individual and political interest, why is ‘must’ really ‘must’? And if necessity is all there is, simply, then how can a prince even partially master Fortuna? Or does Fortuna (to borrow a later philosopher’s formula) force one to be free? Unger now defines Machiavelli’s conception of the course of events as “a Sisyphean exercise in futility,” with “temporary improvement” possible but no permanent human, let alone divine, salvation on the horizon. But such a Sisyphean exercise isn’t really futile, if it causes men to cultivate virtù, generation after generation, strengthening not-so-invisible human hands. To what end, though, if not the satisfaction of the libido dominandi? 

By 1516, now securely in control of Florence, the ottimati allowed Machiavelli to return to Florence, limiting him to activities within literary circles while keeping him well away from any governmental office. He “reinvented himself” as a playwright, his productions staged by friends for audiences of friends, not in public theaters. That La Mandragola eventually was performed for the pope opens a window into the soul of Leo, who remained more a child of the Medici than a child of God. By the time of his death at the age of forty-five, he “had worn out his welcome and his body through dissipated living” and by “devoting his energies to aggrandizing his family rather than bolstering the moral reputation of the Church or the prosperity of his native city,” leaving the Church vulnerable to Martin Luther’s contemporary thundering and the later subordination of Florence and indeed of all Italy to a foreign ruler, which Leo didn’t live to see.

In yet another of Fortuna’s whimsies, after Leo’s successor died, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, a friend of Machiavelli, was elected to the papacy in 1521, reigning under the name Clement VII. He granted Machiavelli and audience a few years later, on which holy occasion he received a copy of The Prince.

In a way, one wishes the story had ended there. But it turned out that Clement was no more a Machiavellian prince than a genuinely Christian prelate. The Holy Roman Empire had by now defeated France, leaving Italy open to conquest. Machiavelli recommended that the Papal States form a militia, ready themselves to do battle with their own arms. But the key state of Romagna, governed by Machiavelli’s intellectual rival, Guido Guicciardini, balked at the proposal, which Guicciardini deemed impractical; in an ironic twist, he had judged Machiavelli to be a man lacking in political and military realism. Clement vacillated and Machiavelli returned to his farm, expecting the worst. It came, delayed slightly by another war between the Empire and France, now allied with Venice, Florence, Milan, and the papacy. Clement even named Machiavelli secretary of a commission charged with supervising refurbishing the walls around Florence. But all to no real effect, as the imperial troops sacked Rome and captured Leon in the spring of 1527, leaving Machiavelli “an emissary to an army that was now leaderless from a government that no longer existed.” “For someone as politically astute as Machiavelli, it is remarkable how often he seemed to back the losing side,” and puzzlement Unger explains by describing “Machiavelli’s misfortune” as devotion to the state “in an age when the state was dysfunctional,” still vulnerable to Fortuna’s moods. But more tellingly, Unger quotes one of Machiavelli’s contemporaries, who wrote that the people hated Machiavelli “because of The Prince; the rich thought his Prince was a document written to teach the duke how to take away all their property, from the poor all their liberty; the piagnoni [the pious] regarded him as a heretic; the good thought him sinful; the wicked thought him more wicked or more capable than themselves—so they all hated him.” Machiavelli himself teaches that although it is better to be feared than loved, one must avoid being hated. One can avoid that by dissimulating, but Machiavelli, without being sincere, nonetheless made his acts of dissimulation too flimsy to cover his intentions. He died in June 1527 from complications of an emetic he’d given himself, an end which suggests the limits of self-reliance.

Later that year, Emperor Charles V released Clement from captivity. The two men now had a formidable common enemy—no longer France but Henry VIII of England, who intended to divorce Charles’s aunt, Catherine of Aragon, to marry English Anne Boleyn. Since only the pope could grant the divorce, “the Emperor had a powerful incentive to mend fences with Clement.” Henry went ahead and broke from the Church, establishing his own Anglican Church in its stead and acquiring the bride he wanted. As for Florence, it had briefly restored the republican regime under French protection, but now that France was forced to retreat, the Medici returned with the blessings of the Medici pope and his ally, the Emperor, who ensured that the city henceforth would be “little more than a feudal vassal of the Holy Roman Empire.” 

Could Machiavelli then be said to have lost? Only if one takes him for a true Florentine and/or Italian patriot. Charles V and Henry VIII, winners of this latest round, strike one simply as bigger fish swallowing the now-little Italians. In Prince-ly principle, could Machiavelli really object? He was more than merely a product of his class, his city, his nation. His teachings, if mistaken, did at least transcend their time and place, and were intended to do so. Henry VIII’s England became an exemplar of a moderated form of Machiavellianism, seen in the writings of Locke, along with those of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who taught that “selfishness is the strongest bias of men,” but preferred to confine the art of acquisition primarily to the art of commerce, not the art of war. The English brought this sensibility to North America, where the Founders “rehabilitated Machiavelli as a humane philosopher who laid the foundations of the modern state by recognizing that political institutions could be built only on interest rather than virtue.” This ignores the clearly stated purpose of those institutions, however, seen in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the lives not only of a man like Benjamin Franklin but of George Washington, whose Farewell Address repudiates Machiavellianism in morals and whose life partook more of Ciceronian Stoicism than Machiavelli’s less-than-realistic realism.

Unger writes as a historian. As such, he provides excellent information concerning Machiavelli’s milieu and the actions he took in it. He is less impressive as a reader of Machiavelli. For an appreciation of Machiavelli as a philosopher, one must turn elsewhere—first of all to careful study of his books.

One such study, Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli, has itself found a commentator in Heinrich Meier, who devotes a substantial chapter to an inquiry into Strauss’s intention. “The only book in which Strauss chooses a title that refers to his own activity,” the Thoughts amounts to “a theological-political treatise” which engages the confrontation between philosophy and revealed religion “in the most detailed way.” 

Socrates famously brought philosophy down from the heavens, engaging his fellow-citizens of Athens in dialectical conversations rather than attempting to understand nature as a whole directly, as the earlier, stargazing ‘natural philosophers’ had done. Aristotle called this “political philosophy.” Strauss sees in Machiavelli a philosopher, a claim never explicitly stated before by any philosopher. In his Thoughts, then, Strauss addresses two problems: “the problem of Socrates” and “the problem of Machiavelli.” Why did they insist on philosophizing as it were through the lens of politics? 

On the surface, Strauss criticizes Machiavelli as the founder of modern philosophy, which Strauss seems to consider inferior to the philosophy of ‘the ancients.’ Strauss thus comes across as a traditionalist. But Meier identifies three “innovations” Strauss proposed: “Strauss is the first philosopher to give a coherent presentation of the art of careful writing, which consists of an exoteric teaching and an esoteric (let us call it a) suggestion; “no philosopher before Strauss stressed with similar emphasis that philosophy has to be conceived as a way of life”; and this “concept of the philosophic life stands in the closest connection with the concept of political philosophy,” a concept “Strauss makes into the veritable guiding concept of his oeuvre.” “The highest subject of political philosophy is the philosophic life”; political philosophy both defends and rationally justifies philosophy, “consequently answering the question, Why philosophy?” In the Thoughts, Strauss relates Machiavelli’s writings to these themes. Can he show that Machiavelli addresses them? And if he does, how does he address them?

Meier’s chapter consists of three numbered sections, in addition to a preface and an epilogue. Although many scholars (see Unger, above) have argued that Machiavelli’s core teaching occurs in The Prince and still more have assigned that status to the Discourses on Livy, Strauss was “the first to offer the argument that Machiavelli asserted in the dedicatory letters of both books that each of them contains everything the author knows.” This “reduces the Florentine to a political partisan or to an ideologue,” a reduction that “blocks access to the philosopher Machiavelli,” who, unlike Machiavelli the citizen, could stand outside the political parties, and outside Florence itself, scrutinizing them.

Strauss distinguishes between Machiavelli’s teaching, Machiavelli’s enterprise, and Machiavelli’s thought. Machiavelli’s enterprise, according to Strauss, consisted of “a new political founding, of the discovery and implementation of new modes and orders, of a thoroughgoing change of the world,” by “a new kind of philosopher,” a “philosopher-warrior, philosopher prince, philosopher-craftsman,” whom Machiavelli understands himself to be the first but does not want to be the last. To perpetuate his philosophic ‘institution,’ Machiavelli “relies on propaganda as the decisive weapon in the struggle against the power of Christianity and has for its true goal the establishment of stable order on a solid foundation grounded in sober knowledge.” He does this (as Unger sees) by making his enterprise seem to be “ruled by the absolute primacy of practice,” making philosophy into an instrument “for the purpose of the transformation of human living conditions” conforming to “the absolute will to rule.”

Strauss presents Machiavelli’s enterprise in two ways, “the one striking, the other subtle.” Strikingly, Strauss “makes clear the revolutionary character of Machiavelli’s enterprise as it was never before made clear”; subtly, Strauss “situates Machiavelli within the fundamental continuity that links him to philosophers before and after him.” Machiavelli was a revolutionary political philosopher, but he remained a political philosopher. That is, Strauss’s teaching on Machiavelli, influential among many of his readers, points to Machiavelli as the new Prince, the modern Moses, the Anti-Christ, the founder of the Enlightenment. Machiavelli blasphemes, thereby compelling his reader to think blasphemous thoughts, tempting them. Even and especially by concealing some of his teaching, making them less than explicit, Machiavelli draws the reader into completing the teaching, entangling them still further. Like Socrates, he can be accused of corrupting the young. 

The subtle Machiavellian thought Strauss thinks concerns “his conception of the good life or the life according to nature as one of alternation between gravity and levity”—the life of “the most excellent man,” the philosopher, perhaps the only kind of “prince” who by his knowledge reaches what Strauss calls “full satisfaction and immunity to the power of chance,” or, as Meier puts it, “a self-sufficiency grounded in knowledge and serenity in harmony with the philosophic tradition.” Shakespeare, too, alternates between gravity and levity, between tragedy and history in some plays, comedy in others, indeed putting comic elements into his tragedies and histories and serious thoughts into his comedies. Strauss associates gravity with knowledge of the truth, the philosopher’s thought, and levity with the way the philosopher communicates that truth, the philosopher’s teaching. The “true addressee” of the political philosopher’s writing will be able to link the levity with the gravity, seeing the gravity in the levity of the mode of communication. That is, the communication is serious, its mode not. Strauss compares the combination or unity of knowledge and its communication to a horseback rider, the “combination of man and horse,” a horse that may seem as comical as Mr. Ed. (Although the comedy of Mr. Ed consisted of the reversal of roles, as the man was clueless, the horse wise.) By inducing “the true philosopher of the future” to “think through the task of his enterprise as a whole,” Machiavelli “ranks among the great renewers of philosophy,” along with Farabi and Plato, whose writings exhibit the ‘twofoldedness’ of irony, both in imitation of the master ironist, Socrates. But what does it mean that Machiavelli presents his figure of wisdom not as a man riding a horse but as a centaur, a creature half-human, half-bestial? For starters, one might answer, the centaurs were warriors, like Machiavelli’s philosopher-princes, themselves new forms of Socrates’ ironically presented philosopher-kings. But that is only for starters, as Meier shows.

“At the center of interest of Thoughts on Machiavelli stands the confrontation with revealed religion,” a circumstance that has two dimensions: “the historical answer to the altered political situation that the role of revealed religion created” and “the philosophical answer to the challenge implied by the claim to truth of revealed religion.” Revealed religions challenge the truth claims of philosophy by commanding “faith in an omnipotent God as creator of the world, ruler and judge of human beings.” Strauss understands Machiavelli to regard the claim to truth of revealed religion as “all-important,” “an expression,” Meier notes, “that Strauss does not employ very often.” This associates Machiavelli with Socrates, who also defended the philosophic life against the claims of religion, albeit not a revealed religion like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Machiavelli’s response to the two dimensions of the confrontation consists of two responses. In The Prince, he describes the prince as a “founder,” “the bringer of new modes and orders.” He lists Moses as an example, along with Solon and Lycurgus. In the Discourses, by contrast, he discusses not ‘the one’ but ‘the many’—the people “as the maintainer of established modes and orders, or the repository of morality and religion.” The Bible’s truth claim, its account of why the people come to be the repository of morality and religion, rests on “the phenomenon known as the conscience,” which takes the place of the philosopher’s effort to perceive truth noetically through reasoning. Founders of Biblical religion convince the people of the truth of their prophetic speech by appealing to the conscience of each person. “The demands of morality,” registered by the conscience, “presuppose the truth of religion, without whose main concept and center they lose their obligatory character.” How does Machiavelli, as a philosopher, respond to these demands, which include both moral and even what we now call ‘epistemological’ claims?

In chapter IV of the Thoughts, Strauss begins with the historical circumstance Machiavelli faced. Strauss writes that for Machiavelli “the moderns are primarily the Christians.” As is well known, Machiavelli charges that Christianity has weakened the world by directing their hearts and minds toward Heaven, away from ‘the world,” along with the flesh and the Devil. Machiavelli regards Christians as thereby “unarmed” against its enemies in the world. Strauss understands Machiavelli as contending, “Where men are not soldiers this is due to the fault of the prince.” The prince in question is the Prince of Peace, adjuring His followers to make spiritual warfare against principalities and powers and disastrously neglecting the discipline of physical warfare. The Founder of Christianity commends “humility, abjectness and contempt for things human.” This “consecrat[es] humility and weakness.” Strauss contrasts this with the religion of the ancients, which commended “greatness of mind, strength of the body and all other things which are apt to make men very strong” as the highest good. The gods of the Athenians may have misled the minds of the citizens, but at least they did not weaken, and evidently strengthened, their hearts for battle in this world. “It is not a historical decline in itself, but rather the central place of Christian humilitas…that blocks access to classical magnamitas.” That “good arms,” physical and moral strength in this world, “are the one thing needful” is “the anti-Biblical truth par excellence.”

Thus, the discussion moves from Machiavelli’s historical circumstance to “the decisive level, when his statements and determinations are applied to philosophy and the life of the philosopher.” In that life, depending upon your own arms means “insight grounded on the free use of one’s own reason,” in contrast with “a life that wants to understand itself on the basis of the obedience of faith.” The philosopher will not live his life “bound in advance to any obedience.” To the religious man, this is pride; to the philosopher it is self-sufficiency.

Politically, revealed religion has a similar effect, namely, the rule of priests instead of self-government. “The criticism of the rule of priests, who trace their authority to the highest authority of revealed religion, unites Machiavelli with all political philosophers who come after him.” (Not quite all. There is Richard Hooker.) This criticism also unites him with “all political philosophers who came before him,” most notably Plato, whose proposed “rule of philosophers is meant to replace the Egyptian rule of priests.” (Perhaps not quite all, depending upon how one understands Thomas Aquinas.)

The problem with Machiavelli’s predecessors, in Machiavelli’s view, was that it not only failed to prevent the triumph of Christianity, much to the detriment of the philosophic life, but “without intending to, contributed to it” by giving Christians “the knowledge and education to carry out its mission in all heavenly directions, the arms and the instruments to rule for the next millennia.” In this, philosophy failed to transcend the ancient cave but merely supplemented the arts and sciences of their fellow ‘ancients,’ turned by Christians to their own use with the “pious cruelty” of devotees of the jealous God of the Bible. For Machiavelli, God is a tyrant who “makes thoughts, which cannot be commanded, into a sin, which makes disobedience, which thinking is, into a crime,” thereby criminalizing the philosophic life. Such an assertion of authority will require arms commanded by priests to enforce it and (since it makes free thought “a crime against the holy God,” equally commands an eternity in Hell for those who question.

Strauss argues that the idea of original sin is self-contradictory and therefore very much open to question, because “a punishment for sin which compels men to sin still more…does not appear to be wise.” (A Christian might reply that it is very wise indeed, if the punishment prepares men to depend not on themselves but on God.) An unwise God is hard to have faith in. By contrast, “Natural Theology” asks the question, “What is a God?”—denoting “an endeavor of reflection and criticism.” Meier takes care to distinguish Natural Theology from Natural Religion, sometime called ‘the religion of the philosophers,’ which provides a teaching or doctrine to non-philosophers, supplying their “need for belief with what reason can give it.” Natural Theology, however, “has its raison d’être in the self-understanding of the philosophers,” that is, lovers of wisdom. As such, philosophers are “not shaken by the whims of fortune”; “thanks to their knowledge of the world, their knowledge of nature, their insight into necessity, they lead their life in an even temper, without hope and without fear o trembling” (as per Kierkegaard). Such men mix gravity with levity, regarding (in Strauss’s words) humanity or generosity, the willingness to share their thoughts with qualified young persons, as “the virtue opposite to pride or arrogance, not humility.”

Strauss next proceeds to the particular doctrines or teachings of Christianity. The philosopher needs to prepare himself for the kinds of objections religious men will make to his way of life. He begins with the doctrine of conscience because it connects so intimately with the human mind. Will conscience command you to desist from the philosophic life, “counsel[ing] against philosophy as a persistent repetition of the Fall”? Why, if man is compelled to sin, if he has a ‘sin nature,’ should he have a bad conscience in sinning, Strauss asks. This suggests that the promptings of conscience have the same status for a philosopher as conventional opinions have in Plato’s Republic.

The second religious doctrine Strauss addresses is the providential God, the God Who affects not so much our mind but our actions. This discussion, occurring in the twenty-sixth paragraph of chapter IV of The Prince, “not only brings together Machiavelli and Aristotle but also has the God of the Bible encounter the God of the philosophers”; Meier suggests that this “can be considered with reason as the culmination of Thoughts on Machiavelli.” The problem here is that “there is no evidence supporting the Biblical teaching,” only the assertions of the Bible itself. The Bible speaks truth, unqualifiedly, if it truly is the Word of God. But to assert that it is the Word of God is to assume what needs proving. In moral terms, the requirement that we obey God’s Word requires humility. What will replace humility if, as Machiavelli does, one questions the existence of God? Machiavelli proposes humanity or generosity, but Strauss demurs. Humanity as a principle raises man above humility while failing to point “man beyond himself.” [1] Not humanity but magnanimity is the virtue that beckons the man of moral virtue beyond himself. The portrait of the magnanimous or great-souled man can inspire a morally serious man beyond the cardinal virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and prudence, towards a sort of master virtue which combines all of these virtues in one soul. Here, Strauss argues, Aristotle is superior.

How about the philosopher, the man preeminently ruled by reason, whose moral virtues come to him not through a teaching but by his own rational powers? It, too, looks ‘up,’ this time at the wisdom the philosopher loves. Aristotle’s supreme god, the Unmoved Mover, issues no commands; it attracts, beckons us beyond ourselves by distilling in its being the most difficult-to-achieve result of reasoning, self-knowledge. This “teaching about God”—and notice it is a teaching, not the thought of the philosopher—does “not conceal philosophy but rather points to the philosophic life.” Such a teaching partakes of a significant strength of religion by being “capable of being handed down to serve the philosopher as a medium of self-reflection, and self-criticism.” What began as a critique of providence, of God’s effect on action, has circled back to a consideration of the human soul and the mind within that soul.

The first pair of Biblical doctrines, conscience and providence, refer to human thought and human action, respectively. The third Biblical doctrine, the immortality of the soul, returns from the actions of man to the inner man—this time, with emphasis on the soul, not only the mind. Presented as the basis for hope in Heaven and fear of Hell, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul supports the notion of a tyrannical God, enemy of philosophy. The fourth doctrine, creatio ex nihilo, points to another action, even vaster than providence. Meier says nothing much about it, leaving it to the reader to suspect that the philosopher suspects it of self-contradiction, doubting that anything can be made to come into being out of nothing. Aristotle’s God, it will be recalled, is an unmoved mover of a cosmos that already existed, a nature that has always been.

For all the differences between Machiavelli and Aristotle, then, “in the innermost core of Machiavelli’s thought we encounter Aristotle,” namely, the philosophic life. Contra the Epicureans, both men insisted that philosophy must be political, and especially in the sense of ‘politic’ or prudent. Seeing the challenge to philosophy sharpened by the advent of revealed religion as distinguished from paganism, Machiavelli seeks to regulate that religion, to “transform transpolitical religion into a civil or religion, or to constrain revealed religions by a Natural Religion,” by the laws of nature and of nature’s God. “The intention to help establish the primacy of politics over religion Machiavelli has in common with his successors and his most important predecessors.”

One might add that there is a sense in which “transpolitical” religions—religions which reach beyond the political limits, the borders of political communities, universal religions—nonetheless feature the central characteristic of politics. Each religion commands a particular regime—a ruler, God; a form or set of ruling offices, the Church or the Ummah; a way of life (‘My way, commands the God of the Bible, not the way of the Amorites, the Jebusites, the Philistines, the Sabaeans); and a purpose, a telos—the salvation of souls. Similarly, the philosophic life consists of a regime, despite its transcendence of the idols of any particular political ‘cave.’ In this sense, political philosophy confronts religion in a way that is politic but more fully political than it seems at first sight.

Having identified the initial object of philosophic thought, the need not simply to ‘philosophize’ about nature but to take account of the “political or human things,” at least partly in order to defend the philosophic life itself, and having then, centrally, shown “the rational justification of the philosophic life, Strauss moves in the third part of his book to the consideration of all of these matters “as the locus of the philosopher’s self-knowledge,” the philosopher’s imitatio Dei, the closest he will get to pure thought thinking itself.

Socrates’ political philosophy included a public defense of philosophy; the Platonic dialogue featuring that defense is indeed title The Apologia of Socrates. Strauss summarizes that defense, which consisted of praising the philosophic life as exhibiting “the highest virtue,” a life pleasing to the gods and worthy of reverence among citizens. Machiavelli did much the opposite, seeking “to protect the philosophic life by concealing it as much as possible”—so much so, that few people recognize Machiavelli as a philosopher at all. Insofar as political philosophy surfaced as public philosophy, Machiavelli justified it as socially and politically useful, advice to princes and peoples. With Socrates, Meier writes, the “essentially private” task of philosophy “comes to be a public power”; Machiavelli objects that this has had the unintended consequence of “undermin[ing] political communities” because political communities make only particular claims to rule, claims to rule within their own territorial boundaries, whereas philosophy makes “a universal claim” based on its inquiries into nature, first of all human nature. This finally left philosophers nearly defenseless against the competing universalist claims of revealed religion, as it retreated to monasteries and “assimilated by the teachers of the church to the Christian vita contemplativa,” a move that can and sometimes did confuse philosophy with piety. But Christian life, with its universalist claims and its denigration of the ways of the world, itself suffered from the same political weakness philosophy now suffered.

Considering this new circumstance, Machiavelli concludes that since philosophers are few and the faithful are many, philosophers now need to come out of the cloister, as it were, clarify their understanding of their task and become political again, this time by adopting the strategy of concealing their thoughts and promoting their actions on grounds the many will understand, namely, service to themselves, utility. This “reestablishment of politics” as apparently in control of philosophy “succeeds only at the price of an obfuscation of philosophy.” By writing in a guarded manner about philosophy, even as he writes openly and even a sort of impious cruelty about politics, Machiavelli deliberately diverts the attention of his readers from the philosophic life. “With the exception of philosophic natures,” who won’t be distracted but will figure him out with only the slightest hints from the new prince of philosophic princes.

As for Strauss, his own “enterprise of renewal…takes into account the effects and consequences of both traditions,” the Socratic and the Machiavellian. Like Socrates, he “moves the philosophic life into the center,” giving “the philosopher a new visibility by making the concept once more into a concept of distinction and by helping to provide it with concrete clarify through exemplary confrontation,” seen in his writings on Socrates as presented by Plato and Xenophon and on Machiavelli. Strauss shows that philosophers need “awareness of the repercussions that every public presentation has on philosophy”; it might be added that, as a refugee from Nazi Germany and a witness (thankfully from afar) of Soviet Russia under Lenin and Stalin, Strauss had occasion to think about such repercussions. A philosopher who achieves this awareness, it might be added, will gain in the self-knowledge that he seeks as a high good.

More specifically, Strauss employs a “double strategy” in response to this “double tradition” of political philosophy. He contrasts ‘ancient’ or classical political philosophy with modern, Machiavellian political philosophy, very much to the advantage of the classics. He also examines Machiavelli’s political philosophy with great, indeed book-length, care, “bring[ing] to light what he has in common with the philosophers of the Middle Ages and antiquity,” namely, the philosophic life itself. Philosophy stood in need of renewal, given the threats posed to it by modern tyrannies and its academic institutionalization in liberal regimes, which tends to petrify philosophizing into a set of techniques.

“For the philosopher, everything depends” upon the fact that “there is no mean between the obedience and disobedience of thought.” If thought is held to obedience to received doctrine, it can no longer philosophize. In Strauss’s time, certain philosophic teachings, especially those that derive from the claim that ‘History’ encompasses and determines all thought—a sort of ‘totalitarianism’ that lends itself to the characteristic political tyranny of Strauss’s time—must be opposed by a political philosophy that is genuinely political, not tyrannical, a political philosophy that leaves philosophers free to pursue their way of life, so long as they practice some degree of prudence in living that life, some consideration of the dangers of philosophizing in an unphilosophic ‘city.’

“The command of prudence has for [men of the highest excellence] compulsory power.” They aim at the wisest goal “possible under the prevailing circumstances,” correctly judging “what necessity allows in the best case and demands in the given case.” This requires knowledge of both necessities—insight “into the necessity that underlies all knowing” and “insight into one’s own nature.” Contra advocates of divine and natural law, and contra Kantianism, “there is no Pure Ought or Universal Law.” This virtue is “a gift of nature” which differentiates “great men” from ordinary ones. “The particular nature of a man, far from being determined by his choice or free will, determines this man, his choice or his ‘free will.'” Such a man may be honorable/moral or wise/philosophic, but the wise man is the more excellent, since honor-lovers depend to some extent on the opinions of others, as seen in the young Abraham Lincoln, whose announcement that he was running for public office described him as one who desired the esteem of his fellow citizens. But the virtue of the honorable man, the “republican virtue,” mixes with “collective self-interest.” The common good may very well not include the good of the uncommon. The “glorious patriot Cato,” the republican honor-lover, may be less favorable to the philosophic life than the emperor Marcus Aurelius, “a prince who might have understanding, greatness of mind, strength of will at his disposal.” The Roman Empire, where the monarch tended to “matters of state,” while poets like Ovid but also, in a different way, philosophers tended to intensely private “matters of love,” “corresponds to the difference between gravity and levity, mentioned earlier. In the circumstance given him in the modern world, the Machiavellian political philosopher unites these, knowing that there is nothing more ‘in common’ than the truth philosophers seek in private.

The great man’s given nature may be modified by habituation, but not fundamentally changed. The greatness, the wisdom of founders derives from this natural gift. One is reminded of Nietzsche, who writes that deep down in every person lies a core of fatum. He is what he is, ineluctably.

In response to his own inner necessity and the outer necessities imposed by circumstances, the Machiavellian political philosopher does to the few, now the priests, what would-be monarchs in Rome did to the few, the patricians, in the older times: win over the minds and hearts of the people. This “democratic turn of philosophic politics” hides the essentially ‘aristocratic’ character of the philosopher, denying at least outwardly “the radical distinction between philosophers and nonphilosophers.” In taking over the function of serving the people, the philosophers assume the role that priests had taken, in this case by saving bodies if not souls by their scientific inventions.

What if those inventions, instruments of the conquest of nature, in turn threaten humanity’s survival? Eventually, some ‘telluric disaster,’ some worldwide catastrophe occurs, wiping out technological advances and forcing the survivors to begin anew. It is not inconceivable that such a disaster could be a result of technology itself, since a thoroughgoing conquest of nature, a denaturing of nature, might not go well.

“Strauss takes account of a threefold movement: The ascent from an opinion about the world to the inner necessity of philosophy; the renewal of a traditional teaching by recourse to the genuine philosophic activity that precedes every teaching; and, uniting all three movements in one, the turn from the historical experiences that separate the philosophers to the fundamental experiences they have in common: the liberating force of knowledge, the eros of thought, the deepening of reflection, the happiness of understanding.” The philosophic life “according to their nature finds its eloquent expression in the art of writing,” and art that leads “kindred spirits to the philosophic life.” This contrasts with the life of the Sophists, who “believed or tended to believe in the omnipotence of speech.” With this allusion of the doctrine of John the Apostle, Meier concludes his book.

Unger’s biography provides impressive detail regarding the nonphilosophic element of Machiavelli’s life. On the real character of that life, Meier is the better one to consult.

 

Note

1. Machiavelli substitutes Fortuna for divine providence. He urges the Prince to master Fortuna, or chance, which is what he thinks providence really is. This project, the distinctively Machiavellian project later made the foundation of modern science as the conquest of nature, propounded by Bacon, a project that has proceeded relentlessly to our own time, makes humanity an end in itself, assumes that man fundamentally has nothing to aspire to, beyond the satisfaction of his own desires for security and comfort, for which reasoning now serves as an instrument.