.jpg)
By RITA KOGANZON
Niccolò Machiavelli, the 16th-century Florentine political advisor and
philosopher, has been credited with founding the modern "realist"
school of international relations, the modern conception of the state, and even
modernity itself. What he is most famous for, however, is founding a new
approach to politics that emphasizes deception and effectiveness over virtue
and morality. In his best-known work, The Prince, he advises the
politically ambitious to eschew genuine virtue for the mere appearance of it
and to accept that the aims of a true leader justify his means, whatever they
may be. "For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards
must come to ruin among so many who are not good," he writes. "Hence
it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be
able not to be good."
This Machiavellian
willingness to be "altogether wicked" is difficult to square with
some of what we in the modern world he helped create have made of Machiavelli.
Perhaps most peculiar, and most telling, of all is the steady stream of
self-help and advice manuals for everyday living that claim to have been
inspired by him. There is What Would Machiavelli Do? The Ends Justify the Meanness, one of a number
of Machiavellian guides for business success. There is also The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men's Style; The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women; A Child's Machiavelli; a slew of
(largely self-published) Machiavellian tracts on picking up women; and, most
recently, Machiavelli for Moms.
These books find
their model primarily in The Prince, a work claiming to dispense
advice for princes — not office pushovers, frumpy dressers, playground wimps,
and dateless sad sacks. Machiavelli does venture some advice for mothers in the Discourses on Livy, in which he
applauds Caterina Sforza's parenting, though it is hard to imagine that today's
self-help gurus would share his admiration for her. After conspirators trying
to take the city of Forlì kill Sforza's husband and capture her and her young
children, she promises to betray the fortress to the conspirators if they
release her, and she leaves her children with them as collateral. Machiavelli
writes, "As soon as she was inside, she reproved them from the walls for
the death of her husband....And to show that she did not care for her children,
she showed them her genital parts, saying that she still had the mode for
making more of them." That is Machiavelli for moms,
though this story is not mentioned in the recent parenting guide. How then has
Machiavelli, proponent of every kind of deceit, been domesticated, becoming a
modern American sartorial consultant, business guru, and family therapist?
The process has
been gradual, spanning several centuries — it began, in fact, with the first
great American Machiavellian, Benjamin Franklin. Machiavelli's value for
European geopolitical strategy was recognized almost immediately, but it was
Franklin who realized that, although Machiavelli had largely been understood as
an advisor to the rulers of great states, he was in fact a philosopher for
losers. He wrote books about power and the men who had succeeded or failed to
seize it, but men who are busy seizing and holding power rarely have time to
read books. We are most receptive to Machiavelli when we are young and lowly,
or when we have been brought low by some setback, and, in both cases,
Machiavelli instructs the weak. But Franklin recognized, too, that Machiavelli
speaks to the ambitious among the weak, those who are not
satisfied to remain low, and this made him useful to Franklin in particular and
to Americans in general.
Machiavelli still
has much to teach the lowly and ambitious, but some of the more recent attempts
to apply his insights to American life today have missed the point. In order to
benefit from the useful lessons Machiavelli can teach us about succeeding in
America, we need to identify exactly what those lessons really are. To do so,
we would do well to re-examine Benjamin Franklin's approach to employing
Machiavellian methods to get ahead in America.
FRANKLIN'S CIVIC
MACHIAVELLIANISM
The American
situation as Benjamin Franklin saw it in the 18th century was particularly ripe
for Machiavellian losers. The period was marked by relative social equality, an
observation Tocqueville would echo a half-century later. As Franklin wrote in
an advertisement to potential immigrants in 1782, "The Truth is, that
though there are in that Country few People so miserable as the Poor of Europe,
there are also very few that in Europe would be called rich: it is rather a
general happy Mediocrity that prevails." This happy mediocrity prevailed
in part because of the availability of land, but also because members of the
English aristocracy were disinclined to leave their estates and move to the
American colonies, leaving the new world to be populated by lower gentry, small
farmers, and tradesmen. The relative absence of aristocratic hierarchy in turn
meant that ambitious but poor men like Franklin might rise by their own wits.
Here, however, another central feature of the American situation stood in their
way: Colonial Protestants looked down on worldly ambition, deeming it sinful to
grasp after wealth and position, though to actually possess either or both was
a mark of God's grace.
Read more at:
No comments:
Post a Comment