Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Republished with permission.
What responsibility has Machiavelli for modernity? Mansfield intends to show those readers who firmly intend to follow the argument. A firm intention to follow Mansfield’s argument requires what might be called ‘active’ reading; the reader must “find a point for a story, or a cap for a point” (13), rather than passively waiting for Mansfield to spell things out. In this Mansfield almost follow’s Machiavelli’s own technique: “he will not reveal his intention, but will leave it to be uncovered by the potential princes whom he addresses according to their competence” (28). Mansfield is somewhat more ‘open’ than Machiavelli, but a measured interpretive openness can be its own defense; few readers will follow a daring and complex interpretation. Mansfield writes of Machiavelli, “boldness hides his boldness, for men are not ready to believe that a bold man who seems bold is bolder than he seems” (12)—even, one might add, if this boldness is exhibited by a commentator.
Mansfield presents a textual commentary on Machiavelli’s own commentary on Livy’s book. Following the many turns of Machiavelli’s argument as it proceeds—parts marching, parts stalking—from chapter to chapter, he shows how what seems a defense of republican liberty in fact excuses tyranny, what seems to commend patriotism in fact merely uses it. “Since [Machiavelli’s] fortune is broader than Italy’s, indeed ‘all fortune,’ ‘all forces’ are his” (94). Or: “Quoting the Bible once, and in that quotation rendering God’s motive as the motive of a human king, is Machiavelli’s striking way of saying that the new prince must imitate God rather than obey Him” (99). Thus we see a blasphemous interpretation of the imitatio Christi commended by theologians. “Machiavelli not only sends out captains of his own, but also he himself is a captain sent out by the preceding prince,” the Prince of Darkness (107); thirteen is the number Machiavelli associates with himself. “Machiavelli is determined to laugh at everything,” Mansfield notes near the beginning of the book (10).
At the same time, the universalist and providential character of Christianity attacks the far less optimistic view of human life seen in the classics. Machiavelli adopts—and adapts—the universalism and ‘progressivism’ of Christian while denying the religious insistence on transcendence. “One may suggest… that Machiavelli learned these new remedies from Christianity, which after all, with its own methods but in a way contrary to its own intention, will irreversibly change the world” (125). With Christianity, Machiavelli teaches that nature as we know it can be conquered; he will attempt to begin doing so, of course, without the assistance of the Christian God, the agent of the new Heaven and new Earth of the future. Mansfield notes that the Italian word for “election” means “creation,” a fact that can be manipulated one way or another by one who writes in Italian (132); “the founder of a city is the same thing as the founder of a religion” (69). (After all, who ‘elected’ Machiavelli for this task, if not Machiavelli?) Generally speaking, “creation” itself is said by Machiavelli to be an affair of malleability, and “religion can be used because it can be interpreted” for “partisan use” (75). Founders use the feelings of security and insecurity in the people to establish new “orders”; “modes” are the actual working of “orders,” and the continued manipulation of popular feelings maintains the new order (88). “A fearful citizen is better for a free city than a grateful one” (106). For Machiavelli, fear of the ruler(s) is the beginning of political wisdom, insofar as the people can be said to have political wisdom. By such modes, a ruler or rulers may end the cycle of regimes described by Polybius, and follow Machiavelli as he “reveal[s] the possibility of an enormous progress in human affairs” (125). As for the few, the gentleman class, kill them and make new ones subservient to your new order. The new order will thus attach the young to itself.
Book II of the Discourses shows that “Machiavelli, who initiated the modern enterprise of expanding man’s control over nature, was farsighted enough to seek a remedy for its success” (202), which might ‘get old,’ ossify, become weak and vulnerable. In the course of this seeking, Machiavelli discards an older political science: “Machiavelli does not use an equivalent for ‘regime’ (politeia), the notion which is at the heart of classical political science. His ‘modes and orders’ lead the domestic politics of republics and principalities to test the limits of human empire” (207), even as (one might add) universalizing Christianity tested the limits of divine empire. Before conquering his enemies—the religions and the classical philosophers—Machiavelli divides them, setting them against each other, reversing the strategy of Thomism which animated the Roman Catholic Church of his time. The radical character of the conquest he intends may be seen in this passage, outlining nothing less than a new epistemology: Machiavelli “thought it necessary to drop the assumptions that nature or God takes account of human choice, and that some conformity exists between human speech (which is the mode of articulating choice) and nature or God as intelligible by speech. Choosing must come to choice, with firm spirit and sudden execution; then words must be accommodated to the deed” (232).
Mansfield’s account of the central chapters of the central book of the Discourses is therefore aptly titled, “The Modern Army.” Mansfield draws attention to the discovery that the word “soul” never appears in the Discourses or, for that matter, The Prince. The ‘lost’ soul is replaced by the human body and the calculating, willful human mind. One might go so far as to say that Machiavelli replaces the body of Christ with the bodies and minds which comprise the modern army, no organization of Christian soldiers. The central argument of the central section of the central chapter of the central Book of the Discourses concerns the limited risks taken by the captain of the forces opposing Christianity. Some pages later, Machiavelli takes the “old man,” the vetus homo of Christian tradition, who is ‘of the earth, earthy,’ and uses him for a new purpose. Or, taking a different figure, one can say that Machiavelli builds a new, better kind of fortress: “a book so devised that it gathers ‘sons’ in friendly and enemy countries yet without making them so dependent on an authoritative text that they cannot fend for themselves or learn from experience” (271). Because Fortune has “no end or design beyond showing its power” (287), devotees of Machiavelli’s book can choose unhesitatingly to conquer Fortune, without consulting or supplicating Fortune. (Again centrally, a “Monsignore di Fois,” which means “faith,” is reported to have been killed by steel, not fire, let alone Hell-fire [241]). To impose human force upon nonhuman force is the new meaning of ‘humanity.’ Belief in the progress that requires a constant spiritedness guards against its own success by refusing to rest satisfied with present circumstances, whatever they are. This too shows the reason Machiavelli requires a sort of perpetual youthfulness, both in regard to youth’s spiritedness and its malleability.
Empire aims at collapsing the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ domestic and foreign. In Book III Machiavelli more thoroughly considers the relation between domestic and foreign policy. This “disarmed captain with a spiritual army… transcends the distinction between foreign and domestic affairs because he is not devoted to any one ‘public’ or state” (298). The ‘spirituality’ of this army is in fact not spiritual but spirited; Machiavelli’s philosopher-prince is more princely than philosophic, as least in the Socratic sense of the word (308). The Machiavellian philosopher’s true homeland is this world, not the world of speech or ideas (311, see also 355). This follows from Machiavelli’s epistemology, which might be described as less noetic than ‘techni-cal,’ employing speech not dialectically but artfully, conspiratorially (318, 348). Part of the Machiavellians’ conspiracy consists of the management of popular fear, “ordering accidents to maintain their rule” (302, see also 317), thereby renewing the sense of insecurity that caused the people to turn to the founder of the new order in the first place. Without a “standard of natural right by which to improve or instruct existing morality, [Machiavelli’s] politics is more rather than less dependent on convention” (324); it makes new conventions instead of freeing men from conventions. Unlike the classical political philosophers, Machiavelli depends upon the political success of his students. He thus takes a decisive step, perhaps the decisive step, toward historicism. He attempts to have others take this step: “Machiavelli causes men to think sinful thoughts, each according to his capacity. To cause men to sin in thought or intention is to put them under threat of God’s punishment, and thus impel them to face that punishment or join Machiavelli’s conspiracy” (331). No matter: morality or conscience is only a “confusion of the brain” (334). Where there is no guilt there can be no felt need for forgiveness. Machiavelli ‘forgets’ Christian grace in a chapter Mansfield compares to “a long drink of poison” (341). This might be contrasted to a Christian sacrament.
“Machiavelli has substituted a necessity that can be managed to unite the few and the many—ambition—for a necessity that divides prudent men from peoples—religion” (357). This again comports with ‘progress’ and betrays the tendency toward an egalitarianism that Machiavelli himself despises. But Machiavellian egalitarianism comes with a distinct qualification, namely, it is equality under Machiavelli and his captains. Machiavelli would replace the worship of Jesus with the worship, however unwitting, of Machiavelli. (“Moderation means staying out of sight; it does not mean taking moderate actions” [414]). Machiavelli-worship is what Mansfield has in mind when he writes that Machiavelli “interprets Christianity naturally” (387), inasmuch as Machiavelli’s nature is a far cry from that of Thomas Aquinas or Richard Hooker. Although most commentators claim that the Discourses replaces The Prince‘s regime of the one with a virtuous republic, Mansfield suggests that “Machiavelli’s republicanism suits him as far as it goes, since he cannot display his kingly arm” (396-397). Whereas in the good regimes of “classical political science, nature and law share the presupposition of a good beginning, law in imitation of nature,” Machiavelli “believes that men’s natures can be modified by education in ‘nations’ containing ‘families’ of men educated in the human qualities: those unchanging qualities of individuals can be coordinated through renewed legislation [renewed, as mentioned, by the orchestration of fear] to perfect men in multitudes, thus to perfect men without changing human nature” (435). In this, Machiavelli takes a step toward historicism without taking a step into it.
An obvious criticism of Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders would be that Mansfield is too much in sight, too ingeniously over-interpreting the spirited Florentine. Mansfield responds with a challenge: “Anyone who thinks it possible to exercise his ingenuity with a consistent interpretation of an inconsistent text, and not be caught, should demonstrate that he can do it” (11). It might be added that anyone who produces a self-consistent, new interpretation of an inconsistent text has thereby ‘revolutionized’ that text. Those who would deny the accuracy of Mansfield’s scholarship—and before him, the scholarship of Leo Strauss in Thoughts on Machiavelli, which Mansfield praises—must then credit the perhaps even more discomfiting presence of original thought. So far, such critics have neither “caught” nor credited Strauss or Mansfield.
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