Dear Mr. President,
I am deeply honored to have been asked for my advice
as you assume the awesome burdens of your new offiice.
I can offer several rules of thumb,
which I believe time and experience has proven sound.
Act boldly in the beginning.
The public has a short attention span
and it will make them forget
the accomplishments of your predecessor
and impress them with your vigor.
Make your first priority the protection of your power.
Without it you are useless.
Appear steadfast but be flexible.
Remember, some of God's greatest gifts are broken campaign promises.
A playful paraphrase of words written in the year 1513
by a cashiered civil servant in Florence, Italy.
What he actually wrote
became one of the most hotly debated, deeply disturbing and important books
of western civilization.
To some it was a veritable guidebook for tyrants and totalitarians.
Mussolini loved it.
Marxists recognized a fellow revolutionary.
To others it paved the way for ethnic and religious toleration,
individual rights, and modern democracies.
But, fairly or unfairly,
it has caused his name, Machiavelli,
to ring through the centuries as a synonym for evil.
"The Prince"
"Great Books"
"The Real World"
I compare fortune to one of those violent rivers
which when they are enraged flood the plains,
tear down trees and buildings.
Everyone flees before them. Everybody yields to their impetus.
There is no possibility of resistance.
Yet although such is their nature,
one may still take precautions when they are flowing quietly,
building dams and dikes to control them in flood time.
So it is with fortune.
Rivers are not to be trusted neither are men.
But both can often be controlled,
given intelligence and power
and the willingness to get your hands dirty.
Machiavelli is the first political thinker of the Christian era
who systematically analyzed the requirements of power and survival
The Prince is a book about power.
Political power in a time of city-states or principalities
ruled by men called princes.
It amounts to twenty-six short chapters of analysis
and opinion that range from the classification of government
to advice on selecting staff.
It was written to shock and re-educate its reader
and it still manages to do so.
To challenge the political pieties of its day
and explain to princes and prince wannabes how the game is really played
It tells the prince that before anything else,
he must know how to fight.
He must learn to be ruthless and cruel,
to lie, break his word and be ready to violate both morals
and religious principles when needed.
Though it also stresses the need to appear compassionate,
moral, and devout.
Some say Machiavelli invented modern politics
and when we read The Prince we can see today's headlines.
I think in many ways it is a great book...
...because it is a mirror for Machiavelli's own time
and because it does continue to disturb, provoke
and make us think anew and see in what way it does
relate to our own time
and we keep asking questions of it.
It was Machiavelli who said, "Get real," in Italian of course.
Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which
have never in truth existed.
The gap between how one should live and how one does live is so wide
that the man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done,
is on the way to self-destruction.
Machiavelli's focus on what is actually done is in tune
with his times.
Copernicus is studying the heavens
and Leonardo is dissecting cadavers.
Both trying to learn how God actually did it,
to learn not from theory but direct observation.
Just as Leonardo was interested in anatomizing the world of nature,
so Machiavelli in a sense was interested in anatomizing
the world of politics and the world of history.
But dissections and autopsies are never pretty.
One of the uglier discoveries attributed to Machiavelli
is the idea that the end justifies the means.
Now he didn't put it quite that way.
In the actions of all men and especially of princes
where there is no court of appeal, one judges by the result.
Machiavelli is very clear that the end is what counts.
He says this in a number of places
and it seems to us a very tough argument.
There are some situations in which the more the survival is threatened,
the narrower the margin of choice becomes unless you say
you would rather have your society destroyed
than to pursue uh, marginal means.
"If you permit this evil what good is the good of your life?"
What would you do to prevent this from happening to your people?
What would you not do?
Would you lie?
Violate treaties? Assassinate people?
Just where would you draw the line?
Anywhere?
On the other hand,
if you were winning a war and your enemy is all but finished,
how far would you go to minimize your own casualties?
"A-bombs Hiroshima, Nagasaki-August 6-9, 1945
Over 200,000 Japanese civilians killed and injured."
Machiavelli was acquainted with the moral ambiguities of power.
A city the size of Atlanta, Georgia.
He was a realist.
Machiavelli pursued what some scholars have called amoral realism.
First of all what he was trying to do was create something
that didn't exist up to that point,
uh, the nation-state, in this case Italy.
But what we need to ask ourselves is whether we really
are in desperate straits,
whether we really are up against the hard laws of necessity
that Machiavelli is describing.
I think much of the time we assume we are and are not.
Like politicians today,
Machiavelli justifies harsh or deceitful means as necessary
to the common good.
But his focus is on the presence or absence of power.
What is it?
How do you get it?
How do you keep it?
Good questions in any age, but stark and immediate in Machiavelli's.
When I came to this interview I left my home in Vermont
as an isolated individual, drove a car to Boston,
took an airplane to New York,
came to this interview without people around me. I was safe.
In the Middle Ages,
human beings were not able to move from one place to another
without having other people around them who could protect them.
Florence, fabulous window on the past.
Down these same streets walked the monks, soldiers,
and merchant princes of Machiavelli's time.
As well as artists whose names and work are today as famous as his.
We are now in the age of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Columbus, and Copernicus,
of England's Henry VIII,
and of Germany's Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
It is a turbulent time of conflict and contradiction.
New ideas and new technologies are rocking Europe
like a great earthquake.
The medieval system is collapsing
and the idea that man is master of his fate
is just beginning to take root.
It is the Renaissance, the April of western civilization,
and the concept of government as a purely human invention
is one of its flowers.
But April is a cruel month.
Giuliano de' Medici, murdered in the Great Cathedral
by a rival family, de Pasi.
It was a plot blessed by the sitting Pope to overthrow the de facto rule of
de Medici in Florence.
Such were the times.
Politics was a family matter.
Medici retribution was swift and brutal.
Several conspirators, including an archbishop,
were slaughtered where they were caught
and their bodies hung from the windows of city hall.
The last one sketched as it hung by Leonardo da Vinci.
Religion too seemed often a kind of family affair.
Princes of the church had concubines.
Popes had children.
Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia,
brother and sister and lovers,
also had wealth and power thanks to their sire, Pope Alexander VI,
who gives the term godfather a whole other meaning.
Italy was an anarchy of city-states.
Popes and other princes in constantly shifting alliances.
Murders in the cathedral and orgies in the Vatican
were the debris of a crumbling medieval order.
This was the world of Niccolo Machiavelli.
The separation of politics and religion was to become for him
a major theme.
Getting religion out of politics was an idea with legs.
Its mirror image would appear in America, whose founding fathers
were trying to get politics
out of religion.
They would write it into their Constitution as the separation
of church and state.
We have not seen the end of controversies ignited by that idea
and it does have a dark side.
That separation, between ethics and politics,
the belief that the good prince is not necessarily the good man,
that appearance matters more than reality,
that deception can be practiced,
that it is better to be feared than loved,
all those famous conclusions of The Prince
are ones that have eternally struck people as the most diffiicult and,
and indeed painful question about politics.
And they don't want to confront it. They don't want to believe that
someone thought those things.
Was the man who did think those things a Christian,
a pagan, an atheist?
Machiavelli was a Sunday Christian.
He did not dispute the essential dogmas of the Catholic faith.
He simply put them to one side when he came to think
and talk about politics at all.
If Machiavelli's prince seems to have a lot of moral leeway,
the price for that is fairly steep.
He must love his country more than his soul.
He must be prepared to go to hell for it.
To kill a man is still to kill a man.
And a prince has to, has to be, has to be ready to do it.
He has to be ready to go to hell.
Being in charge, being a ruler,
being, being a prince is intrinsically a tragic job
and without redemption and uh, without justification.
Machiavelli found it possible to live with contradictory views
and therefore not to see himself as he came very quickly
to be seen as anti-Christian
or anything of the kind.
Some think I should teach men the way to heaven.
But I would rather teach them the way to hell
so they'll know how to go around it.
"Lessons in Power"
The Medici were exiled in 1494,
when Charles VIII of France rode unopposed into Florence on his way
to other conquests.
Niccolo Machiavelli was twenty-seven.
The city,
long a republic in name, became again a republic in fact.
Its first leader was a fiery,
puritanical but very popular monk named Savonarola,
who denounced the corruption of the church
and was responsible for two of histories more notable bonfires.
On one, Savonarola burned books and artworks.
On the other, the church burned Savonarola.
The spot is marked today in front of city hall
where a few weeks later
Niccolo went to work for the republican government
of Piero Soderini.
Machiavelli worked for the committee that was in charge of defense
and foreign affairs...
He took care of the needs of the military
and he went on special missions to foreign courts.
And then he was, he was all throughout uh, Italy met many uh,
lords and rulers
Cesare Borgia.
Borgia is a legend in his own time of ruthlessness and depravity.
In one instance Borgia invites his enemies to peace talks
and has them all killed.
That was the uh, main uh, impression that he got from uh,
from uh, uh Borgia.
This cold blood and this capacity of uh, using violence let's say well
that is for a very lucid political uh, goal.
Eh, not just a display of power but in a very functional uh,
functional uh, way.
When he returns from these missions,
a doting but impatient staff confronts him with a mountain of
domestic details and problems.
But Niccolo has weightier things on his mind.
He is a visionary.
An Italian patriot convinced that only a single,
forceful leader can unify Italy.
And he knows that independence will require a citizen army.
Machiavelli believed that the mercenary armies that
characterized the military system of Renaissance Italy,
and indeed of much of Europe,
were a terrible mistake.
That the Romans had used civic militias, that every state
should use its own citizens,
that only in this way
could you get the commitment and ethos of
civilians to express themselves
in the defense of the state and that that would have very good results
in terms of the internal laws, institutions
and, and ethos of the state as well.
Machiavelli sells the idea
and in a war with neighboring Pisa
his citizen soldiers perform moderately well.
But in 1512 they meet hardened Spanish troops at a town named Prado.
The Spanish mercenaries panic Machiavelli's militia
and a ghastly slaughter follows.
In the wake of this route, the Medici returned to end
the Soderini republic
and with it Machiavelli's political career.
In Niccolo's view,
the feckless Soderini could have squashed the Medici return
had he been suffiiciently ruthless.
Leadership requires more than plans and policies.
In order to maintain his state,
a prince is often forced to act in defiance of good faith, of charity,
of kindness, of religion.
He should not deviate from what is good if that is possible.
But he should know how to do evil if that is necessary.
The notion that necessity
could justify behavior which was not otherwise virtuous or moral,
was actually accepted by almost all of the ancient thinkers.
Lincoln's critics in his day
thought he was dictator, thought he was a tyrant
uh, thought he was undemocratic uh,
thought in spite of all the folksy backwoods charm,
that he, he was an egomaniac and was operating unconstitutionally
much of the time.
In the case of, for example, the suspension of habeas corpus,
he probably was.
Um, and, and this is uh, perhaps a great example of Machiavellian
leadership in a democracy.
There is physics of politics and sooner or later every leader
discovers for himself
the laws of relativity and uncertainty,
also known as the law of unintended consequences.
Taking everything into account,
he would find that some of the things that appear to be virtues
will if he practices them, ruin him.
And some of the things that appear to be vices will bring him
security and prosperity.
The reinstalled Medici have discovered a plot to overthrow them
and they have a list of people the plotters hope to recruit.
The seventh name on the list is Niccolo Machiavelli.
The plotters never got to Machiavelli.
It doesn't matter.
He's a suspect and the Medici don't need much excuse to
throw him into prison.
It is a prayer chanted by priests for those about to die.
This chanting is for the list makers.
Prison here has two functions, execution and interrogation.
Interrogation means torture, quite legal
and quite ingenious.
What awaits Niccolo is the strappado,
hands tied behind the back,
hoisted by the wrists and dropped part way.
If the drop is far enough,
it will tear the shoulders out of their sockets.
Niccolo's drop is obviously less severe,
but it is torture,
and he learns well the uses of pain.
The bond of love is one that men break
when it is to their advantage to do so
But fear is strengthened by a dread of punishment which never abandons you.
For Niccolo, the experience of the past few months has not been
conducive to a romantic view of life.
But it has been instructive.
"The Book"
In the spring of 1513,
Giovanni de' Medici becomes Pope Leo X
and Machiavelli is released in the general amnesty,
but with restrictions.
He is restricted to the region around Florence.
Barred from the city hall, banned from politics.
He moves to the family's property a few miles out of the city.
There he is free in his own kind of hell.
An addict cut off from his source.
Only someone who's been there can know the pain.
Gary Hart was the prince presumptive of the democratic party
before fortune and his own indiscretion cut him off.
In many ways hell is being, possessing a talent which one cannot use.
And this was Machiavelli's hell.
And a profound one for him because he understood
how talented he was and how visionary he was.
And I think it must have been desperately hard for him,
as it would be for example for a politician today
who had both the talent
and, here's the crucial element,
a monolithic dependence on the addiction of participation.
Um, speaking only for myself,
I tried desperately and with some success,
not to become so dependent on politics or on the adrenaline of participation
that I couldn't do without it.
In a letter to a friend,
Niccolo describes the narrow confines of his current life.
Supervising work on his property
and killing time with the locals in the local inn.
With these I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cards.
And these games bring on a thousand disputes with countless insults
and usually we are fighting over a penny.
So involved in these trifles, I keep my brain from growing moldy.
The personal Machiavelli seems entirely human.
He is compassionate, witty, and profane, even sometimes obscene.
He is married,
but he is attracted to other women and they to him.
Machiavelli was a great guy.
He was friendly, affable, loyal to his friends.
He loved to go out drinking.
He loved women.
He loved good conversation.
Just an ordinary nice guy.
Well, ordinary may not be the best word.
But certainly Machiavelli seems anything but Machiavellian.
He is personable. He is also a very talented guy.
He wrote the best, the best, comedy of our literature,
in 1518.
And OK, there's a comedy with a bitter and even a somber uh, undertones
but it's a lively uh, uh play. Wonderful.
From the coming evening, I return to my house and enter my study.
And at the door I take off the day's clothing covered with mud
and dust and put on garments regal and courtly.
And re-clothed appropriately,
I enter the ancient courts of ancient men where
received by them with affection
I feed on that food which is mine and which I was born for.
Niccolo begins to work on what he calls The Discourses
on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy.
It is a book of commentaries on the work of that Roman historian
and makes a strong case for a republican form of government.
Then all of a sudden, he decides to try to get back
into the government himself.
And writes in furious time, in three months time, The Prince.
He interrupts the writing of the discourses to take off this time
to write The Prince.
Because he's anxious to get back into politics, into, into government life.
Are there two Machiavelli's here?
One writing a book on the republican form of government
and the other almost simultaneously writing advice for tyrants.
I look at Machiavelli's Prince as a work on statesmanship
and the discourses as a uh, statement of desirable objectives.
And so I don't find the two incompatible with each other.
Politics was his consuming interest
and if he could have made the world the way he wanted it to be,
he would have preferred a republic.
But he could live with both republics and with principalities
and his point was that you begin from where you are
and that you judge any form of government by its outcome
rather than simply by its form.
All of the states, all of the dominions,
under whose authority men have lived in the past and live now
are either republics or principalities
Principalities...
So begins the most famous job application in history.
It joins Niccolo's passion for a united Italy
with the fact of Medici rule.
It urges the reigning Medici to take on a new role as nation founder.
Niccolo offers a blueprint for a new kind of leader.
So, who is this ideal prince?
What are his qualities?
Roughly that combination of strength of character,
intelligence, courage, skill, and luck
which astronauts call the right stuff plus a touch of ruthlessness.
Machiavelli stressed two sets of attributes for the prince.
One um, was very colorful.
He used the image of the, of the fox and the lion.
The prince must have the ability of the fox to find the snare
and the courage of the lion to drive off the wolves.
At certain particular moments, which he calls the founding
or re-founding of a regime,
you will need a leader with exceptional intelligence.
With the intelligence of a Lincoln, the intelligence of a Washington,
or the intelligence of a Bonaparte.
Machiavelli's breakthrough is that he gives us the persona,
the personality of the political realist.
He gives us the, the inner discipline of the strategist.
And this is a discipline that involves a great deal of self-control
such that uh one cannot revel in conquest,
uh, one cannot strike out impulsively,
uh, one has to be constantly scrutinizing one's own motives,
one must constantly uh, tend to others carefully even civilly
uh, lest uh, you give away your own hand,
uh, and while you're trying to discern the uh, their own missteps
or their own deceptions.
And so what we get someone who's not quite a Christian knight,
but is nonetheless often very well-behaved.
He also gives us the political actor.
The prince may or may not keep his word,
may or may not be humane,
devout, a man's man,
a family man, depending on the circumstances,
but he must appear to be all of those things.
Men in general judge by their eyes rather than by their hands
because everyone is in a position to watch.
Few are in a position to come in close touch with you.
Everyone sees what you appear to be.
Few experience what you really are.
And so there is a larger sense in which the prince is playing a role
which is to appear to be the things he knows he must not necessarily be.
And to appear to act on principle
when what he's acting on is calculation
or what the modern world would refer to as long-term strategy,
because in a certain way Machiavelli invented the very notion of
the long-term strategy.
Stay focused. Talk about things that matter to people, you know?
It's the economy, stupid. OK?
So, as we always say, you know, speed kills.
And, and we will die in this debate if we're not there first
with our answers.
Bush was on the defense...
But perhaps most important, Machiavelli's prince
is a political artist.
He sees the prince as somebody who takes matter as though it
were marble and imposes a form on it
as though that person were a sculptor.
Form out of stone.
Order out of chaos.
Civilization from savagery.
Michelangelo and Machiavelli's prince have much in common.
Trouble is, raw material for the prince is human flesh and blood.
For that, the prince must learn how and when to be cruel
and he must have studied war.
"Deja vu"
The main foundations of every state are good laws and good arms.
And because you cannot have good laws without good arms,
and where there are good arms good laws inevitably follow,
I shall not discuss laws but give my attention to arms.
The sentence is one of the most marvelous puzzles
in all of Machiavelli.
You need good arms.
Good arms are the arms of a citizen army, not a mercenary army.
How do you get the citizens to serve in the army?
They have to think that the society meets their own private self interest.
So you need to have a republic in order to have a citizen army.
You need to have good laws to have a republic.
You are bound to meet misfortune if you are unarmed
because, among other reasons, people despise yo0u and this is one of
the infamies a prince should be on his guard against.
There is simply no comparison between a man who is armed
and one who is not.
Well he's right on the money there.
Machiavelli, I think, is most useful in my judgment uh,
when you're thinking about international relations rather than
the government within a state or city.
International relations are different from internal matters for one reason,
because there is no law between nations.
In reality there, you really do have a jungle out there.
And that's different from states where you do have a law which
has legitimacy and which uh, monopolizes force in the hands
of the government.
Uh, the world out there isn't like that
and we, we in the world today, in the West, in the United States,
we hate that idea.
It makes us very unhappy and very uncomfortable
and we refuse to believe it much of the time.
And so, this is where Machiavelli is most valuable in reminding us of those
gross realities which haven't changed.
You've got to have that power.
No government should ever imagine that it can always adopt a safe course.
This is the way things are.
Whenever one tries to escape one danger, one runs into another.
Prudence consists in being able to assess the nature of
a particular threat and in accepting the lesser evil.
Making careful judgments.
That's prudence, as uh Machiavelli says,
and that's what we hire our government for.
So, in the end Machiavelli also says that you shouldn't be over cautious,
you shouldn't be too prudent in that sense.
You're gonna have to take action.
It's easy to think of a very immediate example of that
in the case of Bosnia
where Bush, I, whom I think had the best chance of dealing with
the problem and settling it,
had from the beginning been willing to look at the reality which is that
we are not free to allow that sort of violence, that sort of uh, um,
what's the word I want to, eh the breaking of international
order uh, to happen in the middle of Europe.
And I think we had a lot more leverage on our NATO allies in Europe
than we were, for whatever reason, we were willing to exercise.
And there was probably a failure of leadership on our part.
There's no law of nature that says the United States has to be
involved in every crisis.
At the time we made the final decision we probably had no alternative.
But on the road to the final decision
we certainly did not apply Machiavelli's maxims.
We never asked ourselves, what is our objective here?
What is our interest here? What are the means available?
What is the best thing that can happen?
What is the worst thing that can happen?
Has an American president ever applied that kind of analysis
before committing the nation to some foreign involvement?
I think Roosevelt did it in his own mind
before he went into World War II.
Roosevelt had the capability of doing it.
Nixon uh, had a great capacity for that.
Henry Kissinger has been called the American Machiavelli by admirers
as well as critics.
That would make Richard Nixon his prince.
Especially talented in foreign policy, often brilliant, incisive,
but secretive and suspicious.
Richard could have profited from Niccolo's advice on
at least one score.
A prince must watch that he does not become afraid of his own shadow.
His behavior must be tempered by humanity and prudence
so that excessive distrust does not make him unbearable.
For more than a century
Americans enjoyed the advantage of isolation amid rich natural resources.
They were the exception among nations.
Immune from Europe's Machiavellian virus, the politics of survival.
Is that immunity gone now?
We cannot afford the pure American exceptional approach indefinitely.
Doesn't mean that every end justifies every, every means.
But it means that the purity that we have tended to with some of our
uh, academics and some of our leaders
have insisted on, will be much more diffiicult.
We destabilize governments, we try to assassinate foreign leaders,
uh we did some things, I think again particularly in ah,
singling out the Nixon administration,
that were a violation of our principles, our ideals.
I think we're suffering for that today.
In the first one hundred days we will bring to the vote...
While Machiavelli's real expertise seems to be foreign policy,
some of his advice on domestic affairs also has resonance.
At least for modern day conservatives.
A man should not be afraid of improving his possessions lest
they be taken away from him.
Or another, deterred by high taxes, from starting a new business.
But, above all, a prince must avoid taking the property of others
because men sooner forget the death of their father
than the loss of their inheritance.
Seventh, requiring three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase.
On the other hand, his ideal prince does bear a resemblance to Lenin.
Kill the old prince and his family,
create new titles and powers,
and give them to new men.
He should make the poor rich and the rich poor as David did
when he became king.
Machiavelli's advice seems so often to cut two or more ways.
It is little wonder there is a score of differing interpretations of
The Prince.
Take, for instance, the bit about fear and love.
It is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.
But you must avoid being hated.
Fear is useful.
Hatred is counterproductive.
Most corporate executives would agree with that.
Strict adherence to Christian virtue is just out of place.
And so the question he raises is part of the distinction
uh, that he brings to the modern study of politics.
The answer he gives is also particularly distinctive.
It's an answer that ruthlessly discriminates between politics
and everything else,
that asserts the autonomy of the political
and the manner in which all other human values can be reduced to
the struggle for power and the provision
or maintenance of order.
"Machiavelli in Hell"
A copy of The Prince is finally
presented to a Medici who gave no indication he ever read it.
It would never be published in Machiavelli's lifetime
and when he died, he went to hell, sort of.
The demonization of Machiavelli began very shortly
after Machiavelli's death
and that came at a time when the crisis of the contesting
religions was really kicking into full gear in the 1530's and 40's
and both sides saw a demon in Machiavelli.
Poor Niccolo.
Not only is he now a demon, but the Medici plague him even in hell
His ideas are said to have inspired the massacre of fifty thousand
French Protestants in 1572
while Catherine De Medici was queen of France.
And Protestant England makes Niccolo its prime villain.
There is the idea that everything that is base
and Italian and Southern and Catholic is somehow Machiavellian.
It is at that time, the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare that
this association with evilness becomes uh, apparent.
They talk about lago as being Machiavellian.
They talk about Richard III as being Machiavellian.
Then there's a kind of rehabilitation
that takes place in the era of classical republicanism, including,
including some of the classical republicanism of England,
when people began to look at Machiavelli the republican.
The state of Machiavelli's soul is a good deal less important to us
than the nature of his legacy.
The uses to which his ideas have been put.
In the 20th Century, has seen him on the one hand as a precursor of
autocratic or even totalitarian views of government,
and on the other as a good republican
and a fine social scientist who helps us to understand how things work
Washington, Napoleon, Churchill, Lenin, intellectual children of
the same father.
How Machiavellian.
Now history can't tell us where Niccolo's soul ended up.
But we do know that he believed in keeping up appearances,
and that his mortal remains were put in the Cathedral of Santa Croce,
among other honored Florentines.
We also know that his influence is far from dead.
"Judgment Day"
Machiavelli and The Prince seem very much in vogue today.
For instance, a columnist for U.S. News and World Report
used them to critique a president.
And that same president
quoted them to the Washington Post to support his policies.
It must be considered that there is nothing more diffiicult to carry out
nor more doubtful of success nor dangerous to handle
than to initiate a new order of things.
For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit
from the old order.
And only lukewarm defenders and those who...
So Machiavelli freelances now as a White House advisor.
There's more than metaphor here.
If Machiavelli invented politics as we know them,
politics as we know them have given us back some latter day Machiavellis.
Advisors, strategists, political realists,
maybe not above a dirty trick or two.
But only in the name of good clean winning.
And if Machiavelli seems to work for two very different systems,
so can these guys.
Niccolo is doing well today.
While his former estate turns out a fine Chianti wine in his name,
he has joined Attila the Hun in the ranks of
big name corporate advisors
and he has interests in a couple of games on the market.
Which more or less use his precepts.
One of them gets the history of it wrong.
And it has a golden rule that might have come from The Prince...
"He who has the gold makes the rules."
...if Machiavelli had thought of it.
Maybe all this is Niccolo's purgatory.
Judgment of his legacy is still in dispute.
And even his staunchest defenders will admit he had some, well, flaws.
He sometimes got the history wrong too.
He raided history, I think, to produce the examples
as he understood them
to make the points that he wanted rather than seeking to first discover
what really happened.
He was a, let's put it this way,
he was not a producer of history, he was a consumer.
I think that his assessment of human nature is one where anyone
would agree that human nature is imperfect.
But for Machiavelli it's more than imperfect.
It is never guided by a good motive and that I think is
in fact less realistic.
Like many realists, he thought that reality
was self-evident
and uh, in fact reality is the hardest thing to assess.
Machiavelli lived when new ideas and technologies were changing forever
the realities of power
and the notions of government.
So do we.
And his advice to analyze carefully the requirement for success
without losing the courage to act
seems painfully relevant today.
The other thing that is left is to under, is that he leaves us,
is to understand and once you,
you have to put that analogy in the service of some idea
which he did in the discourses,
where he described his idea of republican uh, government.
And I think The Prince must be that in conjunction with the discourses.
Because they are two sides what was to him the same coin.
And that was an important insight.
There are certain books which are suffiiciently complicated
that they have a message for different people in different times
because somehow they've touched uh,
an aspect of fundamental human experience.
Plato's Republic is one example of that,
Rousseau's Social Contract or Locke.
Machiavelli's Prince is a book like that.
It deals with an aspect of human life in a very profound way.
The central aspect being the role of leaders
and why leaders are necessary in any complicated human community.
Gary Hart has written the book
which he says Machiavelli might have been written
had he been an idealist.
Hart sees important similarities between Niccolo's time and ours.
I believe we are living on the hinge of history,
on the cusp of history.
And it's, it happens no more frequently than every hundred years,
sometimes every five hundred years,
and we are so in the middle of this symbolically new century,
new millennium,
really new economic age, information versus industry or machines,
and a new, a new order in the world
uh, to pla... replace the old cold war order.
And what is important is that this country find a new prince,
find a patriot who can help us define what the next era is.
Some readers of The Prince smell brimstone in its pages.
Others find it more like ammonia,
repugnant but profoundly clarifying.
In truth, much of what Machiavelli wrote
merely described how things actually were done in his time.
The second sense in which I think Machiavelli
is to be disagreed with is in the fundamental conclusion
that he reached about the possibility of divorcing political
matters from ethical considerations.
I don't think it can be done, in fact.
Quite apart from whether it ought to be done.
Yet few with any experience today would deny that much of what he wrote
seems merely the common sense of politics.
There's another sense in which we say Machiavelli is giving us
the common sense of politics
and we ought to be more suspicious of this usage.
Uh, there all we're saying is that what he says is common sense
because we're already imitating him.
So, Mr. President,
having described how things really work in this perilous world,
let me close with a few additional words of caution.
Choose the most brilliant advisors.
Tell them to speak to you candidly and then be wary of their advice.
When decision time comes, keep your own counsel
and never ever forget that you are in show business.
That leadership is nine-tenths acting a role.
Never step out of it in public.
Don't, for God's sake, carry your own bags.
Welcome to the top of the heap and lots of luck.
Your humble and admiring servant, Niccolo Machiavelli.
P.S., don't look to heaven for your reward.