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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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You're brought a brother, crystal pond,
something like a mumble, got your legs like some of the flower,
but my poison burning fire and I'm alive.
I'd like to say to those of you who've written in recently and made it known
that you can't wait for our weekly shows to resume.
Well, let me just remind everyone that we haven't exactly been slouching this fall.
We've managed to post five new shows in the past eight weeks
with today's show that will make six.
Not bad considering our various other commitments in the past few months.
Speaking of today's show, I don't have a guess with me in the studio.
It's just me and producer Christy Wampold in here, and I'm torn between two options.
Either, I could share with you some thoughts about Mikey Eveli's vision of reality in the prints,
or I could share some thoughts about Wallace Stevens and the idea of nature.
Which one would you prefer?
You, of course, being the entitled opinions brigade.
You blew it, Robert. Now you have to do both.
I do?
You can't tease people like that.
I can't.
Not on entitled opinions.
I guess you're right.
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So how are we going to do Mikey Eveli and Stevens, Christy?
It's finals. The recording studios for you all week.
We get one show done today, and the other on Wednesday or Thursday.
Which one do you think I should start with?
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And why is that?
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I have to take a deep breath for this one.
Okay, let me begin with a simple question.
Why? Five centuries later are we still reading this book called The Prince,
It's a very simple question, but there's no simple answer.
If I were introducing Mikey Eveli to students in a polycycourse,
I would begin by emphasizing Mikey Eveli's importance in the history of political thought.
I would begin by pointing out that before Mikey Eveli,
politics was strictly bonded with ethics, in theory, if not in practice.
According to an ancient tradition that goes back to Aristotle,
politics is a sub-branch of ethics.
Ethics being defined as the moral behavior of individuals
and politics being defined by Aristotle
and subsequent traditions as the morality of individuals
in social groups or organized communities.
Now as far as I can tell, the importance of Mikey Eveli is commonly thought
to consist in the fact that he was a first theorist
to very decisively divorce politics from ethics
and hence to give a certain autonomy to the study of politics.
In short, he was the first person to conceive of the possibility of what we today
know as the discipline of political science,
which is a discipline unto itself, objective in character,
and independent from other social and human sciences,
or so, the political sciences believe.
Now it's true that Mikey Eveli wrote the prints to serve as a handbook for rulers.
And in fact, he claims throughout the work that he's not interested in talking about ideal republics
or imaginary utopias as many of his predecessors had done.
So I have a quote here from chapter 15 of the prints.
"It is my intention," writes Mikey Eveli,
"to write something useful for whoever understands it
and to pursue the effectual truth of politics rather than its imagined one."
For many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen
or known to exist in reality, for there is such a gap between how one lives
and how one should live, that he, who neglects what is being done
for what should be done, will learn his destruction rather than his preservation.
I can spend the rest of this show just quoting from the prints leaving everything uncommon.
But there you have a prime example of what we call "Meky Eveli's political realism,"
his intention to speak only of the effectual truth of politics,
"Veditah efittivah," I think is the Italian,
so that his treatise could be of some pragmatic use in the practice of governing.
But here is where things start to get complicated, and here is of course where entitled opinions starts to get going.
Those of you who listen regularly to this show know that our objective is not to transmit information
or even to disseminate knowledge.
It's rather to think about what is thought provoking, and there is hardly anything in a work
as great as the prints that is not thought provoking.
How so?
Well, let's take a step back.
One of the ironies surrounding Meky Eveli is that there has never been anything resembling a Meky Eveli in school of thought.
For all their so-called realism, his political theories have not, as far as I know,
led to any grand social or political movements,
nor has he sponsored any revolutions, nor has he inspired any new constitutions.
In the history of European or world politics, he is not nearly as important as someone like Rousseau, for example,
who in many ways laid the ideological basis for the French Revolution,
to say nothing of someone like Marx whose theories led to concrete social and political transformations
in many 20th century societies.
He is not even as important as obscure names that most people have never heard of, like Grodzius or Pufendorf,
who were theorists of natural law and whose treatises are still crucial in our thinking today
about things such as international law, the United Nations, and the Geneva Convention.
The irony of Meky Eveli is that he wanted to look at politics from a strictly pragmatic and practical point of view,
yet the prince was not even read by the person to whom it was dedicated Lorenzo de Medej.
If the truth be told, this strange little treatise, for which Meky Eveli is famous,
or infamous, never aided, not, at least in any systematic way,
it never aided anyone in the actual business of governing.
The most one can say about the prince in this regard is that Kissinger and Nixon preferred it as their bedtime reading.
Whether they were good or bad readers of Meky Eveli is a question we'll put on hold for the moment.
So again, the question, why are we still reading this treatise five centuries later,
and why devote a show to it from the catacombs of KZSU?
Now, the answer I think has to do with the fact that this book is what we call a classic.
It's enduring value in my view lies not so much in its political theories as, in the way it discloses,
or articulates in classical fashion, a particular way of looking at the world.
The prince shows us what the world looks like when looked at from a strictly demoralized perspective.
I think that's what the fascination and also the scandal of the prince is all about.
And so we ask ourselves, for example, what does human nature look like when looked at from a demoralized or hard-nosed, realist point of view?
We get an unambivalent answer to that question in chapter 17 of the prince.
In the passage I'm about to cite, Meky Eveli is addressing a typically Meky Evelian question.
Namely, is it better for a prince to be feared or to be loved?
And he states the following, quote,
"But since it is difficult for a ruler to be both feared and loved,
it is much safer to be feared than loved if one of the two must be lacking.
For this can generally be said of men that they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers,
avoiders of danger, greedy for profit, and as long as you serve their welfare,
they are entirely yours offering you their blood, possessions, life and children.
When the occasion to do so is not in sight.
But, when you are faced with it, they turn against you.
And that prince who lays his foundations on their promises alone,
finding himself stripped of other preparations falls to ruin.
For men are less concerned with hurting someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared,
because love is held by a link of obligation which,
"Since men are wretched creatures is broken every time their own interests are at stake.
But fear is held by a dread of punishment which will never leave you."
End quote.
In some, human beings are wretched creatures governed only by the law of their own self-interest.
It is better for a prince to be feared than love because love is fickle, while fear is constant.
I bring up this passage because it highlights by way of a specific example,
the main dichotomy that traverses this treatise, namely the dichotomy between what Machiavelli calls "vietu" and "fotuna",
virtue and fortune.
The prince is a sustained attempt to define in the most realistic terms possible the sort of virtue which a prince must possess,
if he wants to succeed in achieving his objectives.
Now, there is a slight problem here.
The word "vietu" occurs according to my calculation 59 times in the prince.
If you look at the Norton Critical Edition of the prince which we typically use in classrooms, at least around here,
you'll notice that the translator refuses to translate the Italian word "vietu" with any consistent English equivalent.
In fact, depending on the context, vietu is translated either as virtue, strength, valor, character,
ability, capability, talent, vigor, ingenuity, shrewdness, competence, effort, skill, courage, power, prowess, energy, bravery, and so forth.
So for those of you who read the prince in English, you may not fully appreciate the extent to which Machiavelli's political theory is wholly determined by his notion of an enduring antagonism,
between virtue and fortune.
It's in fact impossible to translate with one English word the Italian "vietu," but it's important that we come to terms with what Machiavelli means by it because it has everything to do with his attempt to divorce politics from both morality and religion.
He knew full well that he was taking a traditional word, a very traditional and Christian word "vietu," and was evacuating it of all its religious and moral connotations.
In effect, he wanted to bring the word back to its pre-Christian Roman meaning.
The result is a concept that we have no choice but to translate with a number of English terms.
Let me give you some more terms which I think would encompass the meaning of "vietu" in the prince.
I think probably the best word we have in English would be "engineuity."
The prince's supreme quality should be ingenuity or efficacy, another good word.
He should be efficacious.
Another good word for it is "force sight," believe it or not, because if you look at the concept of virtue in the prince, you'll find that the most virtuous
prince is the one who has the most amount of foresight, namely the one who can predict or anticipate for true occurrences within his state.
Now some people have translated "vietu" as I'm quoting "the human will in action."
The famous Renaissance historian Jacob Burkhardt translated it as "a union of force and ability."
Sometimes it's translated as prudence.
Maybe most of all, the word "manliness" would characterize the real essence of virtue.
"Manliness."
Especially since the word "vietu" has a Latin root "viet" which means "man."
Machiavelli recansives virtue by relating it to a kind of virility.
He definitely plays on this etymology that links the word "virtue to virility" in chapter 25, for example.
He makes a famous comparison of fortune to a woman who more readily submits to an impetuous or virile man rather than a cautious man.
I can't resist the quote.
I am certainly convinced of this, that it is better for a prince to be impetuous than cautious because fortune is a woman, and it is necessary if one wishes to subjugate her to beat her and fight with her.
And when we see that she allows herself to be dominated more by these men than by those who make cold and timid advances, and then being a woman, she is always the young man's friend because young men are less cautious, more reckless, and with greater audacity commander.
Don't look at me that way, Christy.
So, the great antagonist of "viet" to which Machiavelli is at pains to redefine and secular terms in this treatise, the great antagonist of "viet" to is "fortunate" which we should understand as temporal instability, the flux and contingency of temporal events.
In fact, love, as opposed to fear, falls under the rubric of fortune because love is fortuitous.
You cannot rely on it, it is not stable, it is treacherously shifty, it will always change its rhetoric.
Therefore, it is obviously better for a prince to be feared than love, since fear is a constant emotion which will remain true to itself no matter how much circumstances may shift.
Let me quote another famous passage of the prince again from chapter 25, which speaks about the relation between fortune and virtue.
It is entitled, "This chapter, how much fortune can do in human affairs and how to contend with it."
Quote, "I hold that it could be true that fortune is the arbiter of half of our actions, but that she still leaves the other half or close to it to be governed by us."
And she resembles one of those violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, tear down trees and buildings, lift up the earth from one side and deposit it on the other.
I have to open a parentheses here, "Bakevelli was in Florence during one of the great floods of the Arno River, and when he saw what nature was capable of doing, I think that it is a subtext for what he's saying here in this passage."
Let me go on.
But this does not mean that men, when times are quiet, cannot take precautions with floodgates and embankments so that when the rivers swell up again, either they would move along through a canal or their rush would not be so unchecked and harmful, the same happens with fortune who displays her force where there is no prepared resource to resistor."
Now, in the remainder of the show today, I'd like to focus on one of Machiavelli's prime examples of what a virtuous prince should be and what sort of models of imitation he should propose for himself.
Examples are everything in the prince, by the way.
Every time Machiavelli sets forth a theoretical premise about politics, he will always give examples and almost invariably he will give examples from two different historical eras and tiquity on the one hand
and contemporary political history on the other.
As if to suggest that history is nothing but an archive of examples, either to be imitated or to be avoided.
And hence that history is governed by a set of stable laws and that we should study history for precisely its great exemplarities.
But in fact, until the 19th century history was studied primarily as a storehouse of examples, usually moral examples.
It's only in the 20th century that history presumed to become a so-called scientific discipline divorce from moralization, whether that's the case or not.
It's not quite clear.
For Machiavelli history is a storehouse of examples, but not of moral examples, rather examples of efficacious and inefficacious political leadership.
The example I'd like to focus on is that of Chis-e-de-bor-ja.
Borja was a contemporary of Machiavelli's. I don't want to spend too much time on the biography of this fascinating figure.
Suffice it to say that Borja was the natural or illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, who helped Borja put together an army with which Borja was able to conquer the region of Romagna in Central Italy and who then had ambitions to conquer all of Italy and to unify it under his command.
Now in chapter 7 of the Prince Machiavelli discusses a pretty great length, the political career of Borja, and proposes him to the reader as the very paragon of political virtue.
He's the very embodiment of the ingenuity, efficacy, manliness, foresight, the human will in action, valor, strength, shrewdness and so forth, which Machiavelli defines as his concept of political virtue.
I'd like to read a paragraph from the text in which Machiavelli gives an example of Chis-e-de-bor-ja's virtuosity.
The episode occurs after Borja has conquered with the help of his father and by strategizing with the French king Louis XII, the region of Romagna in Central Italy.
And now that he's conquered Romagna, his task is to set that state in some kind of order and to gain the obedience if not the loyalty of the people of Romagna.
How does a prince who has just conquered a state gain the obedience or loyalty of his subjects if those subjects are characterized by a human nature governed by fickleness, greed, fear and the law of self-interest?
Well, this is how Borja went about it.
"Chis-e-de-bor-ja, having taken Romagna as he did and having found it ruled by powerless noblemen who had been quicker to despoiled their subjects than to govern them and gave them cause to disunite rather than to unite so that the province was completely full of rapine, factions and all other kinds of dissension,
Borja decided it was necessary in order to bring peace and obedience of the law to give them the right kind of government.
Therefore, he placed there, Maser Remiro de Orco, a cruel and efficient man and put him in full charge.
This man in a short time made the province peaceful and united and in so doing made a great reputation for himself.
Later, Borja decided that such excessive authority was no longer necessary for he feared that it might become "oddious" to the people.
And in the middle of the province he established a civil court with a very prominent president in which every city was represented by its own lawyer and since he knew that the severities of the past, the severities committed by De Orco,
since he knew that those severities had brought about a certain amount of hate in order to purge the minds of those people and win them over completely, he planned to demonstrate that if cruelty of any kind had come about, it did not stem from him but rather from the bitter nature of his minister.
And having found the occasion to do this, he had the minister placed one morning in Chisena on the Piazza in two pieces with a block of wood and a bloodstained knife alongside him.
The atrocity of such a spectacle left those people at one and the same time satisfied and stupefied.
So these fat is stupid.
What's brilliant about this action for Machiavelli is the way Borja manages not only to exercise power but also to control and manipulate the signs of power.
The great insights of the prince is that to be an effective ruler you must learn how to orchestrate the semiotics of power so as to place yourself in a position where you don't actually have to use power in order to achieve your aims.
When we look at this meserre meero de Orco, we find that he's a very cruel and efficient man. He is really the alter ego of Borja himself.
But look at the way Borja manipulates the whole rhetoric of justice in this case.
After he's decided that the time has come to get rid of de Orco, he sets up a tribunal in the region invites representatives from all the cities to engage in what amounts to a sham trial.
Because the outcome of the trial has been decided in advance yet nevertheless the appearance of deu procedure is maintained.
And then the body of this cruel and efficient minister is placed in the piazza cut into with a block of wood and the bloodstain knife in a kind of spectacle.
Machiavelli actually uses that word spectacle.
That on the one hand leaves the people satisfied because iniquities, cruelties and injustices were indeed committed against the people by the minister.
But on the other hand it also leaves them stupefied in the sense that this spectacle of punishment reminds everyone of an awesome power operating behind the scenes.
Borja's way of dealing with his minister is a prime example of what Machiavelli praises as political virtue.
Because in this instance Borja demonstrates a knowledge of the inner essence of the people or of what the people need and expect in a ruler.
Borja knows that he must establish a relationship between himself and the people in which the prince rules the people, but at the same time he must also convince them that he is in fact their guardian.
If we look at the symbolism of the minister's punishment, we find that the spectacle is brilliantly staged.
It's almost as if Borja is declaring in a sort of ritualistic language that here one of my ministers, one of my delegates, one of my representatives, has done violence to the body politic, the wholeness of this body politic in which the ruler and people exist in a kind of organic harmony in the world.
With the ruler as the head and the people the body. And since this minister has intervened and created a discord between the ruler and the people, therefore he will have his just punishment that is to say he will be cut in half because that is what he did to our state he divided it.
In fact, if you read Machiavelli's letters about this incident because Machiavelli was a diplomat at the time and he was actually present in Chazena when Remiro de Orco's body was placed in the Piazza, in those letters Machiavelli suggests that Borja was even engaging in literary illusions in this spectacle of punishment.
I told you I had to take a deep breath for this show. So here goes, in Kanto 28 of Dante Zimferno, the so-called "soars of discord" are punished. These are people who divided father from son, king from people, husband from wife. They are punished in hell by dismemberment.
Bertrand de Borre, one of the pro-Monsal poets who had been a soar of discord, he's walking around in Dante's hell holding his head in one hand because his head has been severed from his body.
That was Dante's way of symbolizing what he called the "ledger del Contrápasso" or the law of counter-suffering, which is the moral law of hell.
Namely, if you created discord while you were alive, then your punishment is going to be symbolically equivalent to your sin.
Machiavelli suspected that Borja had this Kanto in mind when he had his minister dismembered.
In any case, Remiro de Orco's being halved and his body being left in two pieces in the Piazza for everyone to see, this was Borja's appeal to a popular imagination.
This spectacle created satisfaction on the one hand because it said "I, Borja, and punishing the minister for his excesses" but on the other hand it also reinforced fear of the ruler.
Because you could argue that satisfaction is what wins in the love of the people, but the stoop affection is what guarantees him the fear, which as we saw is the more important of the two.
As Michel Foucault wrote in what may be his very best book, "Discipline and Punish," quoting Foucault, "punishment is intended to provide a spectacle not of measure and moderation but of excess.
There must be in this liturgy of punishment an emphatic affirmation of power and its intrinsic superiority."
Borja seems to have known this and Machiavelli certainly seems to approve of it.
Now the example of Chezette Aborges is significant for another reason.
Remember, Machiavelli says, "I would not know of any better precept to give a new prince than the example of his action."
And yet, and yet. If you read chapter 7 of the Prince Carefully, you'll find that Borja was ultimately defeated by the great antagonist of virtue, namely Fortune.
For all his strength and valor and talent and human will in action, Borja was overcome by the power of circumstances and events, and this was for a very simple reason.
For all his foresight, Borja was not able to foresee that a crucial moment in his campaign to conquer all of Italy, his father, Pope Alexander VI, would die prematurely.
Oh, he knew that his father could die at any moment, and he had even made contingency plans for that eventuality, but he could not predict that precisely at the moment his father would die, he too would fall sick and be on the verge of the power of the man.
But if at the time of Alexander's death he had been in good health, everything would have been easy for him.
And on the day that Julius II was made pope, he himself said to me, "He, Borja, told me Machiavelli because Machiavelli knew Borja and had followed his campaigns, he told me himself that he had thought of what might take place when his father died, and he had found a solution for everything."
Except he never thought that when his father was at the point of death, he too would be about to die.
This is what Machiavelli elsewhere calls Borja's "this excessive malignancy of fortune, malignitada de la fortuna."
So think about it.
This story, or this example with all his ironies, raises a question that in my view goes to the very heart of the prince, and its exasperated attempts to detach politics from morality.
When I read that passage of the prince, I can't help but think of one of the great critics of Machiavelli, namely Shakespeare, and a number of listeners have written in over the past few years wondering why he was
We haven't done a show on Shakespeare yet. We have one in the works, we have probably two or three in the works, but we're biting our time.
But nevertheless, let me say a word here about Shakespeare as a great critic of Machiavelli.
Shakespeare, as you know, his plays are filled with famous Machiavellian villains, Lady Macbeth, Yago Edmond, and so forth.
Think of King Lear, for example.
There are a number of characters in that play who have an explicitly Machiavelli and cynicism about politics, who believe that politics is nothing but efficacy, the will to power, naked ambition, pragmatism devoid of all ethical considerations.
One such character is Edmond, the illegitimate son of Gloucester, others are Lear's two daughters, Reagan and Gonneral, and the other is, of course, Cornwall, Reagan's husband.
He can't help but think of that scene in King Lear when Reagan and Cornwall blind Gloucester, they gouge out his eyes and a servant.
A servant of Cornwall, who was standing by, cannot bear, morally cannot bear, the sight of this atrocity.
So he draws his sword and challenges his own master Cornwall in the name of natural justice.
They engage in a sword fight and Cornwall gets wounded by the servant before Reagan stabs the servant from behind and kills him.
And Cornwall, who was on the verge, like Borja, of realizing his naked political ambitions through all means necessary, however vicious.
This same Cornwall declares, "I bleed a pace, Reagan, untimely comes this hurt."
That line has always struck me as the encapsulation of what Shakespeare envisioned as the tragedy of power once this divorce from ethics.
That there's this element of the unpredictable, that there's something about the wound that comes untimely, that no matter how much you try to control the outcome of events and prepare yourself for their fluctuating contingencies, there's always something that comes untimely and it seems to be associated with death.
For all his virtuosity, there seems to be a blind spot at the heart of Chiset Abor just foresight.
For the one thing he cannot foresee or bring under his control or manipulate this is political rhetoric and strategizing his death.
It comes unexpectedly, it comes at him blindly, it comes at him from quarters invisible to the all-seeing, paranoid eye of political ambition with its visions of grandeur.
It leaps out at him from the shadows as the last trick or trump card of a fortune he thought he had mastered.
In that sense, I think that a number of Shakespeare's plays, King Lear McBeth and so forth are allegorical commentaries on a certain Machiavellian nihilism that they're probing these plays to not only the corruption of power,
but the ultimate failure of power in its naked secular form to achieve and stabilize its own ambition.
It is one thing for power to be corrupt, it's another for power to fall victim to its own impotence despite all its corruption.
In any case, one is left wondering at the prodigious irony of Machiavellis treatise which proposes as the supreme exemplar of vir-tou, the one protagonist in contemporary Italian politics who was most beaten down and overcome by the forces of fortune.
Borgia's life ended ignominiously and prematurely in poverty with scurvy. He died a few years after his father's death at the age of 32 in a street brawl in Spain,
Borgia was a loser. No doubt about that.
Who knows, maybe Machiavellis approved of his ultimate ambition, a restoration of order and the unification of Italy.
In fact, there's no doubt that Machiavellis approved of that ambition.
But it could also have been the magnitude of Borgia's failure that Machiavelli admired. It's difficult to know.
Be that as it may, it's as if Machiavellis treatise is saying almost against its own doctrine that this vision of the world, this sort of radical political realism,
where any means are justified if they serve the securement and consolidation of power is doomed, never really to flourish.
It's like Cornwall, some fatality of fortune will always win out over the shrewd, efficacious strategies of this sort of vir-tou.
What I'm suggesting and what I'm putting forward, I guess, as my own interpretation of the prince, is that this treatise was doomed from the beginning to the same sorry failure as Borgia's political career.
By that I mean it's not by chance that the unredeemed realism of the prince has not had any direct, concrete effect on political history.
If its ambition was to be a handbook by which rulers could advance their own agendas, if its ambition was to instruct a prince who could one day unify Italy and throw out the foreigners, if its ambition was to found a school of political theory or promote some kind of transformation in the history of nation-states, or even if its ambition was much more modest, namely to ingratiate its author with the Medici rulers of Florence.
Then we have no choice but to conclude that as a political treatise the prince was an abortion, it failed to achieve its ends.
The abortive fate of the prince makes you wonder why some of the great utopian texts of our traditions have had much more effect on reality itself, like the Republic of Plato, for example, or who so is peculiar form of utopianism, which was so important for the French Republic.
It's a very important for the French Revolution.
Christianity itself, its imagination of another world, a world beyond the so-called real world, completely transformed the real politics of Europe.
Or Karl Marx for that matter.
It's not the realism or scientific objectivity of the Marxian analysis.
It's not his critique of capitalism's unsustainable systemic contradictions.
It's more Marx's utopian projection of a future communist state which inspired socialist movements and led to political revolutions throughout the world.
What I'm trying to suggest is that realism itself is doomed to a kind of fecklessness in the world of reality.
While the real power, the real virtuous power, seems to be aligned with the faculty which Machiavelli held most in contempt, namely the imagination.
It's the human imagination that in the long run proves itself the truly efficacious and revolutionary force, even and especially when it comes to the history of nations and empires.
You cannot get reality to bend to your will, you can only seduce it into transfiguration.
And the fact remains that reality cannot be seduced by realism, only by what I would call transrealism.
If I may use a word that denotes more than fantasy and more than utopianism or intuitionism or religious supernaturalism.
Transrealism here refers to something that neither resists nor escapes reality, but calls on reality to transcend itself and to turn its prose into poetry.
In the interpretation I'm proposing here, the prince emerges as a tragic text.
It's about the ultimate failure of a demoralized or amoral view to stand up to the challenges of fortune.
At the very least it's an ironic text in the sense that it wants to say one thing, but in saying that thing it in fact shows another.
It wants to say that a shrewd and efficacious exercise of power can lead the prince to wherever he wants to go, can lead him even to the unification of Italy.
But what in fact shows is that there is a malignancy at the heart of fortune which will eventually thwart the plans and ambitions of even the most exemplary prince of virtue.
Now, it's my interpretation of the prince the final word on this book, of course not, by no means.
In fact, I'm sure many of you listening to this show right now have serious reservations or questions about my claims.
Certainly many different interpretations of the prince have been offered over the centuries.
Some have argued, for example, that the chapter on Borja must be read as Machiavelli speaking tongue in cheek to an audience for whom Borja was nothing more than a pathetic man whose political career was a colossal disgrace.
In other words, that no one would have taken Machiavelli's praise of Borja seriously.
I'm not sure I could agree with that.
Nevertheless, according to this interpretation, Borja is not a tragic but rather a clownish figure in the text.
The prince it argues is actually a bitter and sarcastic text written by a disillusioned Republican who indirectly wanted to expose the bankruptcy of non-Republican forms of government.
And that Borja's failures dramatize this bankruptcy.
I will mention in passing another interpretation of the prince here, a pretty famous one in fact proposed by the Italian Antonio Gramsci.
He was a political theorist and founder of the Italian Communist Party who wrote a book called The Modern Prince in the 20th century,
in which he argued that the Communist Party should embrace Machiavelli's demoralization of political means since such means will be ultimately justified by the noble and they serve, namely the establishment of a communist state.
And here I have to say, parenthetically, that I believe that one of the great failures of political communism, or communism in its actual historical and political instantiations, was its Machiavellianism, that it believed that the end justifies the means.
And by the way, I have won several bets over the years with people who were so sure that in the prince you find that line, the end justifies the means, even political scientists sometimes.
If you scour Machiavelli's text, he actually never says the end justifies the means, he comes very close to intimating or saying something like that, but that phrase, the end justifies the means, is a kind of extrapolation from the prince.
In this case, the fact that a lot of communist states did believe that a noble end justified any sort of means or as Stalin put it, if you want to make an omelette, you have to break eggs.
I think one has to look there for the way in which a lot of the experiments in communist politics in the 20th century ended up very much along the same lines as both just political career.
Be that as it may.
I think that actually has a very interesting interpretation of Machiavelli.
According to Gramsci, Machiavelli was not only a great patriot, but he was also a progressive populist whose allegiance was with the people and not their rulers.
In fact, there's a lot of evidence for this claim.
Gramsci makes the compelling point that the prince contains no novel or valuable information for those who actually wield power since they already know whatever Machiavelli has to say about it.
In Gramsci's reading, the prince is a revolutionary text because it's effect, if not its intention, is to dispel the illusions which common people may have had about the nature of politics.
So, the only ones who had anything to learn from such a scandalous treatise were the ordinary disenfranchised citizens of Italy who believe naively that rulers were the guardians of the good.
Hence, the prince, for Gramsci, is a revelation to the people about the scandal and corruption of power, hence it was a call to overthrow their morally bankrupt rulers.
I could mention several other interpretations of the prince, but my purpose today is not to give you that kind of survey.
It's rather to answer the question of why we are still reading this 500-year-old treatise in the 21st century in a place and time that have next to nothing in common with Machiavelli's.
As I've already indicated, I believe we read it because it's a classic and a classic is a work that doesn't age that is new every time it's read or reread.
If I may borrow a definition from the Italian writer, Italo Calvino, a classic is a book that never finishes saying what it has to say.
Some books are exhausted after their first reading, some after their second or third reading. A classic is quite literally inexhaustible. It lends itself to ever new readings, none of which can claim to finality since there really is no end to what a classic has to say.
In my view, it's because the prince contains its own principle of contradiction within itself that it has become a classic.
It does not speak a single, but a double, if not triple language. It shows more than it says, and it says more than it knows. That is a legacy of the classics.
To be sure, the prince shows us what the world looks like when looked at from a strictly amoral perspective, but that's not what makes it an inexhaustible work.
What makes it inexhaustible is the fact that, in showing us this world, it also shows us how this way of looking at the world is doomed to an inevitable sterility or failure or fecklessness.
In other words, in its attempt to push the agenda of realism, it in fact redeems the imperative of transrealism.
This, in itself, makes it a transreal work, hence a work that is endlessly open and rereadable.
And that would do it for me.
Wait, Robert, you have about ten more minutes, and I have a couple of questions for you about my gabec.
Shoot away.
Well, I'm wondering about the relevance of my gabec lead today. You talk specifically about the prince, but how is the prince relevant today?
It's a very difficult question because the fact that Kissinger and Nixon prefer to, as their bedtime reading, doesn't indicate to me that it had any huge importance.
It might have translated into a certain kind of political decisions that those two people made.
But either most politics operates according to Machiavellian principles, naturally as it were, and therefore it doesn't need Machiavellian theorize about how it works.
Or, there's not much in this treatise that can translate into a kind of political forum.
I'm told that Machiavellian is huge among Goliath, for example, for some reason I can't quite figure out.
But that, for me, already confirms the fact that if one has to go all the way to Mongolia to find that Machiavellian has had some kind of importance.
It's where the political class there then it kind of confirms my notion that he hasn't had that kind of direct effect on political reality that he was hoping to have when he wrote the book.
I'm also wondering about the Machiavellian pessimism or realism.
I guess you have to tell me which you think it is.
Pessimism or realism of the founding fathers of the United States.
Very interesting. Oh, yeah.
Well, first thing realism and pessimism, I think Machiavellian was a pessimist when it came to human nature.
Although he didn't have the Christian pessimism about kind of legacy of original sin, but it sounds like almost exactly the same thing.
Fickleness, greed, sloth, all those kind of vices, you can find them all in Dante's Inferno.
Machiavellian was not particularly Christian, however he did believe that human nature was intrinsically wretched.
He uses that word.
I think here the founding fathers, certainly the ones who put together the frame the Constitution, had read their Machiavellian,
and they shared with Machiavellian a very dim view of human nature about how prone to vices and corruption it is.
And therefore, they conceived of the role of government not to transform human nature and making it good, but having checks and balances in order to keep the intrinsic wretchedness of human nature in some kind of check and transform vices into virtues through the proper system of government.
Now, is that why America became a great and mighty and powerful nation?
In part, we have an excellent system of government you could say.
But if we live in an era which can be characterized as the triumph of Americanism, I think that what America represents in the world imagination, or at least until relatively recently,
was not America's hard-nosed realism and it's kind of pursuit of its own law of national self-interest.
This really pisses people off mostly about America.
It's the ugly American side, the law of self-interest and the capitalism and its whole greed, its kind of over greedy, overreaching.
But what has seduced the world to the idea of America, I think is American idealism, which has had a huge effect in not only the world imagination, but also in transforming the politics of nations around the world.
So this is another way where I think something like idealism is far more efficacious than realism when it comes to politics.
Well, thanks, Robert. It looks like we're out of time.
So, let's leave you with a song here that I can't even tell you the title of, because it was given to us from one of our colleagues in comparative literature,
Noem Pines. Hope you enjoy it. Bye-bye, Christy. Bye, Robert.
[Music]
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