The Prince Read Free Page A

the same information. But aside from one or two token regrets that the world is not a nicer place, Machiavelli does not do this. It wasn’t his project. Rather he takes it for granted that we already know that life, particularly political life, is routinely, and sometimes unspeakably, cruel, and that once established in a position of power a ruler may have no choice but to kill or be killed.
    This is where the words ‘of necessity’, ‘must’ and ‘have to’ become so ominous. For The Prince is most convincing and most scandalous not in its famous general statements - that the end justifies the means, that men must be pampered or crushed, that the only sure way of keeping a conquered territory is to devastate it utterly, and so on - but in the many historical examples of barbarous behaviour that Machiavelli puts before us, without any hand-wringing, as things that were bound to happen : the Venetians find that their mercenary leader Carmagnola is not putting much effort into his fighting any more, but they are afraid that if they dismiss him he will walk off with the territory he previously captured for them: ‘at which point the only safe thing to do was to kill him.’ Hiero of Syracuse, when given command of his country’s army, finds that they are all mercenaries and ‘realiz ing that they could neither make use of them, nor let them go, he had them all cut to pieces.’
    The climax of this approach comes with Machiavelli’s presentation of the ruthless Cesare Borgia as a model for any man determined to win a state for himself (as if such a project were not essentially dissimilar from building a house or starting a business). Having tamed and unified the Romagna with the help of his cruel minister Remirro de Orco, Machiavelli tells us, Borgia decided to deflect people’s hatred away from himself by putting the blame for all atrocities on his minister and then doing away with him: so ‘he had de Orco beheaded and his corpse put on display one morning in the piazza in Cesena with a wooden block and a bloody knife beside. The ferocity of the spectacle left people both gratified and shocked.’
    It’s hard not to feel, as we read the chapters on Borgia, that this is the point where Machiavelli’s book ceases to be the learned, but fairly tame, On Principalities and is transformed into the extraordinary and disturbing work that would eventually be called The Prince . In short, Machiavelli’s attention has shifted from a methodical analysis of different political systems to a gripping and personally engaged account of the psychology of the leader who has placed himself beyond the constrictions of Christian ethics and lives in a delirium of pure power. For a diplomat like Machiavelli, who had spent his life among the powerful but never really held the knife by the handle, a state employee so scrupulously honest that when investigated for embezzlement he ended up being reimbursed monies that were due to him, it was all too easy to fall into a state of envy and almost longing when contemplating the awesome Borgia who had no qualms about taking anything that came his way and never dreamed of being honest to anyone.
    At a deep level, then, the scandal of The Prince is intimately tied up with the scandal of all writers of fiction and history who in the quiet of their studies take vicarious enjoyment in the ruthlessness of the characters they describe - but with this difference: Machiavelli systematizes such behaviour and appears to recommend it, if only to those few who are committed to winning and holding political power. The author’s description, in a letter to a friend, of his state of mind when writing the book makes it clear what a relief it was, during these months immediately following his dismissal, imprisonment and torture, to imagine himself back in the world of politics and, if only on paper, on a par with history’s great heroes.
    Come