The Prince Read Free Page B

evening, I walk home and go into my study. In the passage I take off my ordinary clothes, caked with mud and slime, and put on my formal palace gowns. Then when I’m properly dressed I take my place in the courts of the past where the ancients welcome me kindly and I eat my fill of the only food that is really mine and that I was born for. I’m quite at ease talking to them and asking them why they did the things they did, and they are generous with their answers. So for four hours at a time I feel no pain, I forget all my worries, I’m not afraid of poverty and death doesn’t frighten me. I put myself entirely in their minds.
    In so far as The Prince remains a persuasive account of how political power is won and lost it is so because it eventually focuses on the mind, or, to be more precise, on the interaction of individual and collective psychologies, the latter fairly predictable, the former infinitely varied, the two together dangerously volatile. The book is not a careful elaboration of a rigid, predetermined vision. More and more, as Machiavelli rapidly assesses different kinds of states and forms of government, different contexts, different men and their successes and failures, he runs up against two factors that defy codification: the role of luck and the mystery of personality. By the end of the book he is beyond the stage of offering heroes and success stories as models, aware that if there is one circumstance that a man cannot easily change it is his own character: even had he wanted to, Soderini could not have modelled himself on Borgia, nor vice versa.
    In particular Machiavelli is fascinated by the way certain personality traits can mesh positively or negatively with certain sets of historical circumstances. A man can be successful in one situation then fail miserably in another; a policy that works well in one moment is a disaster the next. Rather than one ideal ruler, then, different men are required for different situations. The only key to permanent political success would be always to adapt one’s deepest instincts to new events, but, as Machiavelli ruefully observes, that would effectively mean the end of ‘luck’ and the end of history.
    Machiavelli’s own mind was deeply divided during the writing of The Prince and it is the resulting tension that accounts for much of the book’s fascination and ambiguity. On the one hand, as a form of private therapy, he was disinterestedly pursuing the truth about power and politics: to establish how states really were won and lost would give him an illusion of control and bolster his self-esteem. At the same time, and perhaps less consciously, he was vicariously enjoying, in the stories of Borgia and others, the sort of dramatic political achievements that had always been denied to him. In this regard it’s interesting to see how rapidly he glosses over Borgia’s abject fall from power, his arrest, imprisonment and death, almost as if the author were in denial about his hero’s ultimate fallibility.
    Therapeutic as this might have been, however, at another level The Prince was clearly written for publication and meant as a public performance. Machiavelli loves to show off his intelligence, his range of reference, his clever reasoning. Even here, though, his intentions were divided and perhaps contradictory. At his most passionate and focused he was involved in a debate with all the great historians and philosophers of the past and determined to show his contemporaries that his own mind was as sharp as the best. But in a more practical mood Machiavelli was planning to use the book as a passport to get himself back into a job: so evident and compelling, he hoped, would his analytical skills appear, that the ruler to whom he formally gave and dedicated the book would necessarily want to employ him; hence the flattering tone of the opening dedication and the addition of The Prince ’s final patriotic pages proposing that