Machiavelli saw that Christianity had made Italy weak, servile, and prey to criminal men. His answer: ground politics in “what is”, not imagined republics—and dare great men to act on it. The consequences founded the modern world. Duncan Umphrey joins us to discuss Machiavelli’s virtue.
Transcript
Intro (00:00)
Wolf: So, the matter of Machiavelli. I’m joined today by Duncan Umphrey, a fellow student, and a reader of Machiavelli. So we’re going to discuss how this guy’s work is relevant to us. So yeah, Duncan, you’ve been reading this stuff a lot recently, really going over it. Let’s start with an overview of where Machiavelli sits in the history of philosophy, in particular the kind of philosophy that we’re interested in, and why he’s worth reading.
If I can just begin with my own very flimsy understanding of it, the interesting threads in philosophy are the ones where we’re breaking out of ideological control structures, the philosopher as ideological sovereign, the philosopher outside of the city, and morally and metaphysically outside the city in some sense. And we’ve discussed Thucydides and the Socratics through that lens. We’ve alluded to a little bit of Nietzsche through that lens. Nietzsche is an obvious example of this. Machiavelli sits somewhere in between as someone who’s kind of reviving this, I don’t know, let’s say anti-moralistic thread in philosophy in the Renaissance effectively.
Yeah, so that’s how I would place it, but I wonder, what do you find interesting about this? How do you place Machiavelli? Why Machiavelli?
Duncan: Yeah, I think, well, first off, there’s just the fact of the Renaissance, and that you have Machiavelli reading this book here, not read enough, Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. By really bringing classical history into serious consideration, I think that’s the first step where you have Machiavelli breaking out of this very medievalist Christianity.
Wolf: Right. So this is kind of in the context of maybe scholasticism, where the way ideas were done in the early modern period or late Middle Ages was you’re just kind of reading the classics, repeating the classics—kind of elaborating on the classics. It’s not the sort of thing that came later, which is much more critical, much more attempting to go beyond it. Is that what you’re saying?
Duncan: I’d say—
Wolf: That Machiavelli is some of the first breaking out of that tendency, or how would you put it?
Duncan: Yes, but I think in a way it’s more radical. I think Christianity, and Machiavelli is nothing if not a critic and a thinker of Christianity. For him, it’s this very, this totalizing way of life. You have Hooker in England talking about in jurisprudence, but it holds for everything, the great chain of being. There’s this kind of ontological unity to the universe, to human life, to ethics, and to politics—where everything is related to this most real being, who is the Christian God.
Christianity made the world weak (03:52)
Duncan: And I think you could almost see Machiavelli as writing outside of and against this totalitarian framework. There are places where he really does compare Christianity to a tyrant. And when he talks about the Church, he’s very concerned because also, you think about the Renaissance, this is an extremely dark time for Italy politically. You have the unification under the Romans, and even before the Romans, he says Italy was a series of free states. The Romans took these states over, and there was this period of flourishing under the Romans.
And then this is also, you see in Petrarch especially, part of the DNA of the Renaissance is this knowledge, this grief that they’ve gone from the heights of Roman civilization to this fragmented, subservient place where you have all these small feuding cities. Very few are free republics. Most are these petty principalities. And then you have the Church, which is steering everything from either behind the scenes or explicitly. Like in this period—you have Machiavelli is with Pope Julius II.
When he’s raising armies, he’s going around to these different city-states. He’s asserting control. You also have the Spanish, the French, they’re going into Italy, and you have all of these massacres. There’s theft. There’s a lack of order.
There’s all this destruction and this lack of sovereignty in Italy. And this is why at the end of “The Prince,” the famous 26th chapter is this exhortation to free Italy from the barbarians. So I think what Machiavelli is looking at, he’s saying, like, “Okay, we have this awful situation politically—which is fractally bad down to the public order of the stability of human life. It’s very bad.” And then we have the knowledge that there were these times under the Romans when you had the possibility of political self-realization, of sovereignty, of strength, of virtue.
And then he’s thinking about, okay, how can we address these issues that we have? And it’s that question, I think, that drives him into this very fundamental philosophical conflict with the Catholic Church and leads him to seeking these very, you could say very Machiavellian, but they’re just—these unprecedented almost bizarre, shocking solutions—to the political crisis.
Wolf: Well, let’s go into just how bizarre and shocking those are. You were telling the story previously of a lot of his message is basically just kill the pope, right? Or let’s just install someone crazy and ambitious as the pope.
Duncan: That’s the hook. Yeah.
Wolf: Tell me more about that.
What is he actually saying there? What does he actually say?
Duncan: Mm-hmm. Yes. Well, so this leads back to the fundamental background, which is this disunification—of Italy, and he does say consistently throughout “The Prince,” throughout the “Discourses” that if Italy is to succeed, it has to be unified. And part of this is actually something that Straussians, and obviously Strauss is in the background of all of this, he’s—really a thinker who first... Well, of our modern academic disciplines, he’s a thinker who first really saw Machiavelli as a true philosopher, which he absolutely is.
And I think that’s the first thing you have to understand. He’s a philosopher. He’s not a sociologist. He’s not just a political thinker. He has this incredible theory of politics, of sociology, but he’s a philosopher in the strong sense of the word.
So, in the preface to Book One of the “Discourses,” he has this phrase he uses that he is... Let me pull this up.
That he is going to install new modes and orders. Now, Mansfield has this whole book on this, but I think this is where you can almost see it’s easy to think, okay, a philosopher is saying we have to install new modes, new orders, new ways of life, new ways of thought. And I think this is where you have to counterpose, okay, first you have this philosophical idea that Machiavelli sees himself as a founder. And then to really grasp what that means, you have to get to these places where he makes these exhortations, like I was saying earlier, killing the pope. So this is actually, this is all—
Wolf: Yeah. Why don’t—
Duncan: refer to this exact episode.
Wolf: No, let’s hear the actual episode.
The man who should have killed the Pope (09:14)
Duncan: Mm-hmm. So Machiavelli is unhappy with... Actually, first small detour. We go into the bit where he talks really explicitly about Christianity because I think this is necessary to get a flavor of what he’s trying to do—in this kill the pope episode. So this is “Discourses” Book Two, Chapter Two.
And so he’s actually talking, so the title of the discourse is, “What Peoples the Romans Had to Combat, and That They Obstinately Defended Their Freedom.” So he goes through this list of all the peoples in Italy. You have the Samnites obviously, you have Veii, the Veientes, and then just this implicit contrast between the peoples in Italy in that time—who were militarily superb. The Romans obviously had an incredible military organization, even just their thumos, their virtue, themselves. They were strong people.
But they were strong people amongst strong people. Whereas militarily, Italy of Machiavelli’s day was just God-awful. If you had to do anything, it was only by pulling in the French or the Spanish or Swiss mercenaries. Just abjectly horrible. So then he’s addressing this question, and he says, “Thinking, then, whence it can arise that in those ancient times peoples were more lovers of freedom than in these, I believe it arises from the same cause that makes men less strong now, which I believe is the difference between our education and the ancient, founded on the difference between our religion and the ancient. For our religion, having shown the truth and the true way,” quoting John, “makes us esteem less the honor of the world, whereas the Gentiles, esteeming it very much and having placed the highest good in it, were more ferocious in their actions.”
I think this is really the key, and he goes on to say—
Wolf: Right. Basically, a worldly religion about this world versus an otherworldly religion about some other world.
Duncan: Exactly. And this is really the deep Machiavelli, as I was saying before I started rolling, is this Machiavelli that wants to ground human life in the immanent, in human life itself, as opposed to any kind of transcendent ideal. And this is where this really famous chapter in “The Prince,” where he talks about how men used to ground politics on imagined republics and imagined principalities, attacking Aristotle and Plato and—Augustine in “The City of God.” And here he’s saying that we need to go back to human life as it is. And the implicit, he can’t really say in as many words without getting his message totally dismissed because this is still 16th century the implication is without God, just men.
And so just to finish off on this, Discourses 2.2 says at the end of this, this treatment of Christianity says, “This mode of life thus seems to have rendered the world weak and given it prey to criminal men who can manage it securely, seeing that the collectivity of men, so as to go to paradise, think more of enduring their beatings than of avenging them.” As if he’s saying, we’re glorifying humble and contemplative men—glorifying humility, abjectness, and contempt of all things human. And because of this, you have this awful situation where men are prey to these tyrants and just leaders who have no concern for the common good or even no concern for the fundamental ordering of human life.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Well, this is starting to sound a lot like our own time, right? We also have become very moralistic and very weak.
You get these just systematic abuses. The whole system starts to look kind of fraudulent—starts to seem like it does not care at all about these fundamental matters of how to organize a strong country or something. And so this maybe is part of why Machiavelli’s interesting—maybe is because he’s addressing a situation that has some parallels with our own. And this is why—all of these philosophers are interesting, is because there’s always some element of parallelism with our own time. But, yeah, I want to hear the Julius example in particular—where he’s traveling around with Julius—the Pope.
Duncan: And I think this is very relevant to modern times. And I want to preface this by saying, to the camera, none of this is an incitement to violence against the state or anyone else.
Wolf: Oh, come on. Shut up.
Duncan: But I think, yeah, so Machiavelli has all these exhortations to freedom, to well-ordered political life, to correcting all these wrongs that are plaguing Italy and just—shitifying everything. And then, so you have this very interesting episode, Book 1, Chapter 27 of the Discourses on Livy—titled, “Very Rarely Do Men Know How to Be Altogether Wicked or Altogether Good.” So this is an episode, I believe in 1506. So Pope Julius II is, they call him the Warrior Pope. He’s defeated Cesare Borgia—and these Borgia machinations, and he’s playing the French and the Spanish and Swiss off against each other and trying to reconsolidate the hold of the Church in terms of temporal power or their real force in the real world.
So he’s going around and overthrowing all of these tyrants and these princes who have been set up by the Borgias—in counterweight to the papacy. So he brings his army and all of the cardinals with him to Bologna. Near Bologna, there’s this small city called Perugia, ruled by this guy, it’s a very fun Italian name, Giovan Paolo Baglioni. He’s the tyrant of Perugia. Now, Baglioni, he seized power in the city just in a very classical tyranny.
He’s a cruel guy. He’s rapacious. He kills a bunch of his relatives to seize power, and then he marries his sister—just for shits. So Machiavelli’s setting the stage where this guy is altogether evil. And he’s afraid of nothing.
But when Julius II comes to Perugia, and Julius, he’s a real warrior. He’s pope, but he’s a man, just intense personal charisma. And Machiavelli notes he’s notable for his fury. So with one single guard, Julius II goes into the city of Perugia and demands that Baglioni come out and face justice, which means he’ll be tortured to death by the Church. And Baglioni, he has this whole army encamped within the city.
He’s ready to defend Perugia, but he’s so overawed by Julius II that he gives himself up and comes out and gets killed. And so Machiavelli, because he’s a diplomat for the Florentine Republic at this point, he is there with the cardinals—observing for Florence what’s going on. And so Machiavelli, this of course, you have to refer to the footnotes that Mansfield puts in. So the people in the know will know that Machiavelli was here with Julius. And then in the Discourses that Machiavelli says, “The rashness of the pope and the cowardice of Giovan Paolo were noted by the prudent men who were with the pope, and they were unable to guess whence it came that he did not, to his perpetual fame, crush his enemy at a stroke and enrich himself with booty, since with the pope were all the cardinals with all their delights.”
And you think about just all of the gold and the riches—that were with the army of the cardinals because if you kill Julius in Perugia, then the army outside has no leader. You can go out, you can smash it. You can kill all the cardinals. Basically what Machiavelli is saying, you can take out the Catholic Church in a single stroke—right here on this day. And then, so Machiavelli’s wondering, “Nor could one believe that he had abstained either through goodness or through conscience that held him back, for into the breast of the villainous man who had taken his sister for himself, who had killed all these people,” yada, yada, yada, yada.
And then Machiavelli says, “It was concluded that it arose from men’s not knowing how to be honorably wicked or perfectly good. And when malice has greatness in itself or is generous in some part, they do not know how to enter into it.” I think this is the really key thing because Machiavelli is saying, and people talk about Machiavelli as a teacher of evil. And what’s up with all of these exhortations to do all these horrible things? He talks about he endorses killing people.
He says, Romulus, great, they killed Remus. He’s talking about Brutus killing his sons, all of this violence and cruelty and breaking faith, and what is it for? And here you get it, that evil in the service of greatness, that’s one of the key elements that unlocks Machiavelli.
Wolf: So this is kind of the precursor of the Nietzschean “Beyond good and evil,” right?
Duncan: Exactly. Exactly. He’s saying that there is a virtue that is beyond good and evil, where you can impose an order onto the world that will result in the common good and intertwined with common good is your own glory. So Machiavelli goes on to say, “Giovan Paolo, who did not mind being incestuous and a public parricide, did not know how, or to say better, did not dare when he had just the opportunity for it, to engage in an enterprise in which everyone would have admired his spirit, and that would have left an eternal memory of himself as being the first who had demonstrated to the prelates how little is to be esteemed whoever lives and reigns as they do. And he would have done a thing whose greatness would have surpassed all infamy, every danger that could have proceeded from it.”
The effectual truth of the thing (20:31)
Duncan: And I think this is what Machiavelli is trying to instill in the reader and why it’s almost, it’s—
Wolf: Yeah. So he’s trying to pull off some kind of moral revolution here. The way I—
Duncan: A moral revolution
Wolf: the way I’ve heard it put is that he’s, in The Prince and in Discourses on Livy, he’s trying to provide some other ground other than church piety—for what is right, and because he wants to see a new order that—has the strength of old Rome and doesn’t have the weakness of Italy at that time. And so he’s turning to this kind of naturalistic explanation. He’s saying, “Okay, let’s look at men as they are without any trace of moralism.” “We’re not going to idealize this. It’s just even when it’s evil, that’s how men are.”
It’s like sometimes you just have to kill all your enemies. The prince has to be feared. It’s this kind of nihilistic approach, but I don’t think that his actual endpoint was nihilism.
Duncan: Absolutely not.
Wolf: It’s just that he wasn’t able to challenge the church directly in terms of saying, I have this alternate moral framework. Maybe he didn’t—even have it, but he did try to challenge it as first of all saying, “No, look, there’s something ridiculous about this—and we’re going to attack all of the pieties on naturalistic grounds or in the service of greatness or something,” which is still a little bit undefined. Even greatness—it’s like, okay, we sort of know what that means, but greatness really comes down to setting up some new particular order, not—just being an arson. And not just killing the Pope, but the idea here being replacing the church, replacing the moralistic piety in Italy with something else. And, yeah, so you’ve been reading a lot about this.
I’m curious what you can make of what his project actually was in that way.
How much did he have of inklings of where he was actually trying to go with this, or how much was it just kind of a moral prison break?
Duncan: Yeah. Well, I think that’s the interesting question because you have a few bits, like I was thinking the clearest ones that really shocked me when I was reading Discourses for the first time is he has this bit, Book 1, Chapter 10 of the Discourses, “As much as the founders of a republic and a kingdom are praiseworthy, so much are those of a tyranny worthy of reproach.” So he’s very clear that he’s not an antinomian, just anti-moralist strictly. He has an agenda, and I think thinking through what that agenda is is much trickier. But I think a good starting point is seeing something very similar to Nietzsche’s biologism or vitalism.
And you can have this difference between what is healthy and what is sick, and I think that is fundamentally his view of what Catholicism and Christianity as a whole has done to the West and to Europe and to Italy, is that it has made it sick. It has made it unable to form political entities capable of sustaining themselves and sustaining internal order. And I think this is—it is almost like you can write all of this back into organic terms. Like an organism is, to be in good order, it has to maintain a certain amount of strength to not be always collapsing in on itself.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Well, the counterpoint to all this would be places like Spain or France were quite strong, right? Spain at this time is kind of finishing up the Reconquista—getting ready to go conquer the Americas. France is in part of its high age, right? Its golden age.
And they were Christian, very much Christian. They’re very much even Catholic, part of the Catholic—Church. But they’re able to cultivate this strength and order—that was lacking in Italy. So how much, is this just Machiavelli kind of overreading the particular historical circumstances of Italy? Or was it that France and Spain were maybe further from the Pope?
Or, how would he account for that? Or how does one account for the way in which, obviously historically, there’s been many very strong—and bold Christian states?
Duncan: Yes. Well, I think here it’s interesting because Machiavelli’s doing a few different things in his writings. I think there’s a philosophical program and a concrete political program. And the concrete political program does have to do with the unification of Italy—and in the slightly more esoteric terms you can read into “The Prince” and the “Discourses,” the refounding of a state like the Roman Republic—to administer the province of Italy. And so on that you could say, okay, this is comparable to France and Spain.
They’re both unif—Spain not at this point, but decently, these are large unified states. But then there’s the philosophy, which is almost a different beast. And this is where Harvey Mansfield and the Straussians, they make a great deal of Machiavelli’s saying in chapter 15 of “The Prince,” “Since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined Republics and Principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth. For it is so far from how one lives to how one ought to live, that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.”
Wolf: This is where he’s appealing to that naturalism, where he’s saying—we’re not thinking about ideals, we’re not thinking about utopias. We’re thinking about how does man actually live? What actually is—going on in the world.
Duncan: So there’s almost, I’d say how I think of it is that’s the core of Machiavelli’s philosophy, is how do you refound all of human life on the basis of what is rather than what is imagined to be?
Wolf: Yeah. And this is sort of one way that I have put even the nature of the project of philosophy—right? Is like we’re subjecting all these moralistic and superstitious myths to skepticism—and thinking beyond that, and thinking in natural terms against that. I’m thinking about what is. But then the question arises, that has always historically been this corrosive and destructive process, right?
And there’s sort of good reason—that the philosophers are often being executed.
Is there through that tunnel, the philosopher has a faith—that somehow through that sort of darkness of antinomian nihilism—as some would put it, there’s on the other side an actual order that can stand up to scrutiny—and no longer needs to lie, no longer needs to be moralistic, no longer needs to weaken man, no longer needs—to distort nature. It can just be as it is sort of unapologetically and without fear of skepticism. And that’s kind of this ideal of philosophy, right? Is like a state in which philosophy is possible. In other words, where this philosophical impulse can be totally unleashed.
But we’ve never seen that. But it seems that Machiavelli’s also in this tradition of trying to seek after that.
Duncan: Yes. I think it’s very strange thinking about the problem of nihilism with Machiavelli, because I almost wonder if the issue of nihilism is something that is so relevant to us moderns because we have been inculcated so closely with this kind of Christianity. Because you think about what is modern secular ethics? What does it mean to be a Westerner? I think it is in many ways to have a philosophy of life that is a kind of secularized Christianity.
Whereas I think Machiavelli, he almost doesn’t need to go—
Wolf: It’s a very different kind of secularism from what Machiavelli’s doing. Our secularism still remains incredibly moralistic. It very much wrapped up in myths and superstitions about the nature of man, about equality, about human rights, about all these manner of things. And so it’s secular in the sense that it’s about this world, but it’s still somehow, what it’s actually done is it’s dressed up a bunch of moral mythology—in the language of this world, which is a little bit different from what Machiavelli’s doing—which is, or maybe it’s not so different, but it’s in kind, but it’s very different in direction. What Machiavelli’s trying to do is he’s attacking this established moral order of the church through the lens of secularism—understood in a certain way.
But maybe he does have some kind of other moral mythology that he’s trying to operate for.
Duncan: Mm-hmm. I think this is, yes, modern secularism is not really secular in anything other than the grossest sense. It’s just secularized Christianity—which is really—
Wolf: Well, it really just means it’s not directly and explicitly about the nature of God or about the divinity of Jesus Christ, right? Or it doesn’t make overt metaphysical claims about divinities as such. That’s about the sense in which it’s secular.
Duncan: Yeah. But then, you have so much baggage around human dignity and human rights that I think for Machiavelli, he almost might think, “Yeah, this might as well just be overt religion.” Whereas what he’s drawing on is, I think partly it’s the example of the classical world, which was, in many ways, was very religious, but also had a much greater respect for nature. You think about the classical conception of Thucydides—was very immanent, very tied to the world. And I think Machiavelli, what he’s doing is he’s radicalizing this.
He’s saying, “Look, human beings, we are ourselves naturally existing things, and it’s obvious. You can see when a polity is ordered well. You can see when it’s healthy. You can see when it’s sick. And human beings are such that we have these certain desires, on the top, among the few, people want to rule, they want glory. Among the many, he has many passages in ‘The Prince’ and the ‘Discourses’ where he just says, the great mass of people, they just want security—and they want to be left alone.”
And so I think for him, nihilism seems, I think he’d say that that is a bad frame, that nihilism is feeling the lack of something transcendent when you never really needed something transcendent to begin with. That if you instead just begin with human life as it is, as it really exists in life, that that’s all you need to get to a philosophy of life.
Every state is founded by fanatics (33:49)
Wolf: Well, that’s interesting. I think that’s actually inadequate. Because if you look historically, there’s been many states founded in many different ways, and they’re always founded by some bunch of fanatics, right? They’re not founded by a bunch of people who just want to grill. They’re not founded by people who just can see what healthy states look like and kind of follow the implications of that.
That’s often part of the motivation, but they take it further. Even your classic sort of pragmatist, like Lee Kuan Yew—he’s in some sense a fanatic. He’s willing to impose this order. He’s very much dedicated to it. They’re willing to kill.
They’re willing to go to all manner of lengths. They’re not just kind of trying to preserve security and prosperity, even though that’s part of what they’re doing—is establishing security and prosperity. But they’re driven by some dream beyond that. And especially when you get into states where there’s multiple people that are driving it, right? In the case of Lee Kuan Yew, it’s like, okay, it’s Lee Kuan Yew and some of his buddies, and who knows exactly how they think in private.
But there isn’t as much of a public idealism, let’s say—as say, the ideological states of the 20th century, fascism, Nazism, communism—or currently in the news, we have the Iranian Republic, right? Very much ruled by fanatics. And it’s in some sense these Enlightenment fanatics who founded the United States. It seems to be always the fanatics who have the upper hand in history, people who have some extreme mythology driving them. And so this raises the question, is it actually possible to found a state or political order or moral order just on these apprehensions of nature?
The answer that would come to me from looking at these examples is no, it’s not possible with just that, because there’s not enough specificity, right? It’s like you always need something more specific than that, and you need something that people are willing to fight and die for, and kill for, right? To be able to found real order.
You need something extra. Whether that be a mythology or something. It probably is some kind of mythology, whether it be a bunch of lies or something else, right? And the dream, I guess, of philosophy as I kind of reconstitute it in light of this is, okay, we have nature, we have our apprehension of nature, we have our apprehension of what’s healthy and so on, but there must be some additional thing. There must be some additional claim we’re making or additional bet where are we at least honest about that?
Right? Because you can be very dishonest about it. I think this is part of the criticism that Machiavelli and many others have made about our various religious systems, is that they’re often dishonest about something. Like Nietzsche comes and he diagnoses Christianity as having a particular kind of moral dishonesty about what it’s actually doing.
And certainly, there’s all these ways that it distorted questions of nature, distorted questions of how the world actually worked. But can you do it without that? Can you do it by simply making a bet on some—particular order? This is something that I’m fascinated by. So yeah, I’m not satisfied by the idea that Machiavelli would be just trying to get us back to just this natural apprehension of moral order, but I think there must be something motivating him that goes beyond that.
Or I think if his ideas were to work, they would have to go there.
Duncan: Yeah. Well, I think that it’s a very interesting question. I think Machiavelli is not unaware of this. He talks about how Numa, the second king of Rome, one of the things he did, he introduced religion to Rome. And he was saying by introducing religion, he ordered the populace, and he ordered the arms.
So you had this ideological superstructure that allowed pretty effective organization of the Roman state, yet people are more willing to die for something when they’re dying for a pietistic reason. And Machiavelli, I think he sees himself in many ways as a founder of a religion, but I think he’s very resistant to the idea of having a dream upon which one is basing a political order. But there’s also different levels. So I think at the highest level, Machiavelli is introducing a religion. He’s introducing the religion of the effectual truth, which this is something the Straussians, of course, they really emphasize this.
That in a way, we live in regimes which are, to a certain degree, Machiavellian. You look at the balance of power, this idea of realist politics. There is a straight line from Machiavelli to Montesquieu to the Founding Fathers—of this is all a certain conception of political ordering that works to a certain degree. And even or more than the politics, you look at Bacon. Bacon’s a reader of Machiavelli.
He sees Machiavelli talking about the effectual truth, about nature, about dominating nature, of using this knowledge and these stratagems to get one up on natural world. That is where the scientific method comes from. Even Descartes in the discourse on the method, Locke to a certain degree, Hobbes, absolutely. These people are all appropriating Machiavelli. So yes, there’s a meta level in the background.
He has founded this regime, which is modernity—which has good aspects and bad aspects. Then on a particular level, look, we’re saying there are issues with modernity. There are these pathologies that are in need of correction by some sort of new regime, new set of modes and orders.
Wolf: Well, to contextualize that a little bit. There’s a couple problems here. One is just the, let’s say, the inadequacy of a secular worldview—first of all. Which is to say the problem that we were discussing earlier, which is that just nature is not enough. You need some particular thing that says, okay, there’s nature, which is the set of possibilities and the set of actualities—and then there’s going beyond that to some particular thing.
We are going to worship these gods. We are going to do things in these ways. We’re going to constitute our state around this mode of being. And that inherently has to involve some level of mental binding or something. There has to be some additional thing beyond—secularism.
So that’s the first problem. The second problem is, it’s not necessarily a problem with modernity as such, that modernity got something wrong. It’s more like the states that we actually got in modernity have run out of their relevance. Right? Maybe they worked for a while.
Maybe their ideals were good for a while. They were these bets on a certain kind of universalizing reason and democracy and the kind of institutions and all these things that we built the modern world on. But they now seem to have reached their limit, where they’re now substantially threatened, largely by their own internal moralism. Their own internal commitments even to some of those ideals in a non-strategic way. They’re threatened mostly by their own taboos now.
And I think this is something that naturally happens in any order you have at the end of its life, it’s threatened primarily by its own constitution. Right? And because that’s what holds it back from adapting to the new realities that it has created around itself. And so in that sense, okay, we need to sort of overthrow and instantiate this new thing. And there’s a version of Machiavelli’s project which is a version of this, right?
Which is maybe Christianity at one point had some value. I’m not sure he would say that. I think, especially at his time, it’s like, okay, well, Christianity was the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages, and now we’re starting to question it. Things are starting—maybe it’s possible to have something good—come out of that. And so from his perspective, maybe not, but certainly he’s seeing that the moral order of his time is held back by its own commitments.
Or the political order is held back by its own moral commitments. And, yeah. So I’d contextualize any kind of Machiavellian criticism of modernity in that way, that there’s modernity did in fact work. It was—very strong. But if there’s something wrong with it now, it’s because it’s reached the end of its life.
Its ideas of, and even its self-understanding, has become cancerous in some way.
Duncan: Yes.
And it’s interesting to think here about there are issues with the historical, sorry, if you think about in the Hegelian way of speaking, with history as such. But there are also issues with concrete regimes, and Machiavelli’s very aware of this tendency for regimes to degenerate and to lose their kind of internal motive force. And I think for this, though, his very concrete set of recommendations which are to bring a republic or a principality, I think more for republics because ultimately his project is for free societies versus societies that have a certain degree of internal tumult, a certain degree of internal vitality. But those have the potential to degenerate, and those need to be brought back to their founding. And I think here, there’s this idea of an ideological, motive force for political action, right?
Like you have—with the Iranians, with the communists, with the Nazis even. I think there’s a degree to which the Americans had an ideology of freedom, but it’s very, I think they were maybe among the less ideological. But here—I think we might strategically want to make a bet on a certain ideological or philosophical structure. I think that’s not the business that Machiavelli is in. He puts his faith in human action, almost this very radical idea of human freedom, which is why he has this bit.
This is actually a very interesting—
Wolf: He seems to very much emphasize the agency of these particular kind of princes or semi-tyrants, right? He’s not saying, “Oh, we should do a certain thing,” or, “Here’s an ideology for us.” It’s, maybe this guy, in particular, should have killed the pope or—even less normatively like, “Isn’t it interesting that there’s something wrong with us that this guy didn’t see the obvious opportunity,” right? We were joking earlier, I think, about just kill the pope, bro, but that’s not even necessarily what he’s saying. He’s pointing at some lack of conviction—in the potential great men themselves.
And I think maybe is he putting his faith in that, in the agency of particular men as opposed—to these higher ideals? Is that what you’re getting at? What he’s getting at?
Duncan: I think he sees himself as a founder of this new total philosophy of life based around nature, the domination of nature, and this effectual truth. And then this is why I think it’s so important that he’s writing in this bit in The Prince, Chapter 15, that he’s writing to whomever understands it. He’s writing to specific people who are in these positions. This is why so much of it is like this very political advice structurally, like how do you make war? How do you secure a state?
And so this is why I think, so Discourses 1.9, the title is, “That it is necessary to be alone if one wishes to order a republic anew, or reform it altogether outside its ancient orders.” So I think for him, it’s not the crafting of some ideological superstructure, though he’s trying to craft an ideology that—
Wolf: He’s trying to inspire the great men who are going to be the lawgivers.
Duncan: Exactly. He wants to give this opportunity to individual men, and I think that is the key here is why it’s so hard, I think it’s very hard to appropriate Machiavelli as a movement or a school.
Wolf: It’s not really, there’s not a Machiavellian movement or a Machiavellian state or anything. I think it’s similarly even with Nietzsche, right? Like Nietzsche maybe is even closer to having an ideology than Machiavelli, but likewise, there isn’t really such a thing as a Nietzschean community. Right. That’s kind of a nonsensical thing, or at least we’ve not seen that, right?
It’s much more Nietzsche is inspiring these, or attempting to inspire these men who are going to go beyond, who are going to build—that new thing, and to overcome the particular errors, I guess, that he’s diagnosing, and so on.
Duncan: Yes. So I think that is, if there’s a degree to which Machiavelli is talking to us, he’s saying there are some people who have concrete opportunities to fix these concrete evils in the current situation, and that it is our job to take the responsibility for this. And this is, I think, actually a very interesting thing you’re saying.
Wolf: Well, it’s like, it comes back to that Julius example. Just take the actual opportunity, right? Like cross the Rubicon, when you are faced with that circumstance.
Duncan: Yes. So you look at his view of Christianity, one of the big things he appreciates about its force as a technology of control is that it promises these rewards to people for that if you do this in life, you will achieve paradise. And that is an incredibly powerful proposition. I think there’s various ways, there are various ideologies that make promises on existential or concrete levels to human beings. And part of Machiavelli’s, his political anthropology, his philosophical anthropology, is he sees that human beings in a very...
He has a very Hobbesian view in that he’s looking at what do human beings concretely want? And human beings want security, they want liberty, they want to live a good life in a well-ordered polity. And for the few, for the great human beings, which there are in any states, one thing that they want above all else is glory. So he uses—
Wolf: Oh, he’s sort of frustrated that they don’t seem to want it enough.
The cult of glory (51:37)
Duncan: Yes. He says he wants to spur these people and to, at once, I think there’s almost, in the Platonic sense, there’s an erotic element—to Machiavelli, where he’s trying to have... It’s almost like, I think when you read that episode about Perugia or all these various incitements, it’s almost like he’s trying to initiate you into this kind of cult of glory. This longing for this everlasting fame that he promises will accrue to you if you either order or reorder your state along these lines, which are in line with nature and conducive towards flourishing.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, this reminds me of a Palladium article that we did, actually—some years ago, by [inaudible], exploring the ways that the great men throughout history are very much kind of contemporaries of each other. Because what they do is they study each other, and they study this maybe, I don’t know, this cult of greatness, or there’s almost a tradition of greatness—that is maintained alongside what everyone else is doing. And so you get things like Cortés, when in a moment of difficulty in Mexico, talking to his men about the comparison between what they’re doing and what Caesar did, or what Alexander did, or what Achilles did. And that’s who they’re comparing themselves to, right?
And so this is maybe another example of that, is a philosopher trying to say, “Hey guys, compare yourselves to the greats.” And this comes back to, I think, another—thing you’ve emphasized in this, which is Machiavelli’s assertion that the world has not changed—since Roman times. Can we dig that one up?
Duncan: Yeah. I was just thinking, I was just finding... This is in the preface to the first book, and I think this is the core of this aspect of the book, which is this exhortation. So he says, “Considering, thus, how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times, letting pass infinite other examples, a fragment of an ancient statue has been bought at a high price because someone wants to have it near oneself, to honor his house with it, and to have it imitated by those who delight in that art. And how the latter then strive with all industry to represent it in all their works. And seeing, on the other hand, that the most virtuous work the histories show us, which have been done by ancient kingdoms republics, by kings, captains, citizens, legislators,” et cetera.
“Indeed, they are so much shunned by everyone at every least thing that no sign of that ancient virtue remains with us, since they are rather admired than imitated.” So here is, I think this is the key. And this is almost, it’s so relevant today, that you can go look at an ancient book or an, the example he uses, an ancient statue—and say, “That is incredible.” And you can admire these ancient histories.
Wolf: Yeah. I know, well, people do this all the time on Twitter, right? All the statue avatar people, right? Posting pictures of these classical statues. But it does feel empty, right?
And this is what he’s saying is—there’s an emptiness to it because you’re just admiring but not imitating. You’re not actually living that way. You’re not breaking out of the prison somehow, you’re just decorating your prison.
Duncan: Exactly. Yeah. And I think on the point of the prison here, he mentions, it’s so funny, sort of offhand he says this weakness arises not so much from the weakness in which the present religion has led the world, or from the evil that an ambitious idleness, which is such a great phrase, ambizioso ozio, has done to so many Christian provinces and cities. He says that these people judge that imitation is not only difficult, but impossible, as if heaven, sun, elements, and men had varied in motion or their empower from what they were in antiquity.
Wolf: Right. And this same sense of impossibility seems to be around today. Everyone feels like it’s impossible to take action, it’s impossible to somehow change our political circumstances or change the order that we live under—even though it’s so dysfunctional. It’s impossible to achieve even the glories that we were achieving 50 years ago, right? But the world has not changed.
It’s only—
Duncan: Which is blasphemous to say
Wolf: it’s only something... Well, it’s blasphemous for him to say because he’s specifically referring to the incarnation. But I think for us, the world has not changed since 50 years ago, and but it’s—
Duncan: That’s correct
Wolf: but somehow our political capabilities have changed. Or maybe it’s 100 years ago, depending—on where you draw the line. But there’s something... Somehow it’s the moral aspect of man, or the political or—what he idealizes that has gone wrong.
Duncan: Yeah. Absolutely. Just coming back, this chapter I mentioned, that it is necessary to be alone if one wishes to order republic anew or reform it altogether outside its ancient orders. And this has this episode I was telling you before we were rolling about Agis, the king of Sparta, and I think this is very relevant for our current kind of paralysis—and the way in which we find it almost... It’s so hard mentally to break out of this prison.
Tells a story, which is, I believe, from Plutarch, about this king of Sparta who sees that the state is in decline. Sparta was ordered by the laws of Lycurgus, which were enormously successful. People forget it, but Sparta maintained its state for almost 1,000 years with its constitution. But so Agis sees that there has been this degeneration from the ancient orders, and he believes that it is necessary to refound the state on the lines of this ancient virtue in order to recover that vitality. So then he goes to the political system, and he talks with the ephors and these councils, and immediately they see, “Holy shit, this guy wants to totally reform the state. We got to kill him.”
So the ephors, I think they torture him, and then they strangle him in a dungeon. And then Leonidas, who’s the other king, Sparta has this—dual kingship. He’s like, “Wow, this is so great. We’ve gotten rid of this attempt at totally reforming the state. It’s going to result in a tyranny. We’re done with that.”
He takes over the state and kills a bunch of Agis’ relatives. But his son, Cleomenes—he takes the kingship when Leonidas dies, and this is very interesting. So Machiavelli says he found the records and writings of Agis in which his mind and intention were seen. And so this is a very, like I was saying, it’s an almost erotic transmission, like an esoteric initiation. So Cleomenes, he reads these writings of Agis, he sees the mind of Agis, and he understands this necessity to reorder the state, to regain this vitality that has been lost—and is somehow broken out of the acculturation that he’s gone through in this sort of degraded state that’s ruled by the ephors and the gerontocracy.
So then what does Cleomenes do? He does not make the mistakes of Agis. He slaughters all of the ephors, kills all of his opponents, and goes on this decade-long tear where he almost achieves hegemony over all of Greece. But because of the intervention of the Macedonians, Machiavelli says, he’s eventually defeated. But again, like he says with Baglioni, he was saying that this was an incredible attempt to do this kind of refounding for glory, for honor, for the common good of the state.
So I think that is how we should think of Machiavelli writing to us. He is our Agis, and he is trying to teach us to implant that kind of mind and intention—such that we can learn how to reform and revitalize our states.
Wolf: Yeah. So it’s somehow, it’s this message to the young prince. The young prince—of our time. Who is he, actually? But Machiavelli’s message to him is actually go and commune with the greats.
First of all, that this is possible, that you do have to kind of detach yourself from the moral order of the time. Focus on what is, focus on what could be by nature. And to have this boldness of action, to actually be—willing to do it.
Duncan: He has this word, which is, throughout all of his works, virtù which comes from the Latin—
Wolf: Yeah, virtue
Duncan: virtus. It’s virtue, but virtue in English has these very—
Wolf: It’s picked up a lot of connotations
Duncan: schoolmarm connotations. But really it’s from vir, man, it’s manliness. Mansfield writes this whole book on manliness, in that there is a sense in which Machiavelli sees both the pragmatics and the ends, the goals of political life as having to do with recovering this manliness and this vitality. And yeah, so to the young prince, he’s saying, “Just jailbreak yourself. Get out.”
Jailbreak yourself (1:01:48)
Wolf: Yeah, jailbreak yourself. This is the message of philosophy—that I’ve been emphasizing in my readings—and with a bunch of the rest of you. We are engaged in self-jailbreak. This is what philosophy is for. We’re breaking out of the mind prison.
We’re coming to a fresh understanding of reality, of our circumstances, and so on. Trying to create that cognitive sovereignty. I see it very much as a collective activity. It’s something that you can’t really do alone. But Machiavelli’s emphasizing that you need to do it alone.
I think other people in history have done it alone. So it’s not totally alien that it could be done that way. But I think this whole concept of The Students, it’s like, okay, well, what if we actually read these things? What if we actually did that reading ourselves? And formed our own worldview independent of the lies of the age, independent of the moral commitments of the age or the—political commitments of the age, and addressed ourselves directly to what is possible and what is natural now.
It feels like this incredibly rich vein of possible improvements.
Duncan: Yes. And I think you don’t have to take the most radical Machiavellian political instructions as your goals. We do not have to go—
Wolf: You don’t have to kill the Pope
Duncan: exactly bomb Brussels or whatever and eliminate the UN. But I think what is so vitally important in this project of jailbreaking, I think you’re right that Machiavelli sees these compelling reasons for political actors to be self-sovereign. But on the level of philosophy, this can be a collective endeavor to free ourselves collectively. And I think what we can grasp from these radical examples is that the horizon that opens up when you have freed yourself from these conventions of the state and of morality includes the most radical possible actions. And these include destroying a state or refounding it, founding a religion, destroying a religion, saving a state.
But also he has this episode where he talks about, I believe it’s Cesare Borgia, how praiseworthy it was for him to take over this state. I want to believe it’s one of the small cities in the Romagna. And he sets this lieutenant to impose order, this Count d’Orsso. And this guy terrorizes the city, wipes out all the bad elements, and then Cesare Borgia is like, “Okay, he’s done his job. Now I don’t want to be hated on behalf of this guy, so I’m going to chop him in two and leave him in the piazza.”
And Machiavelli writes, “This stupefied and satisfied the populace ever after there was peace for the period that Borgia was in charge of the city.” And I think it’s meant to shock you. It’s all part of this jailbreaking project to—make you see, “Look, you don’t have to do this, but this is what we’re talking about. These are the limits of human action. Don’t confine yourself to this small sphere of political life because then you’re just going to get defeated. You’re getting outmaneuvered. You’re not thinking big enough.”
Wolf: You’re still on the plantation. You’re still in the cage.
Duncan: You’re still on the plantation.
Wolf: Yeah, and this is this essential message in history of there are occasionally at times huge gains, strategic gains, huge possibilities opened up by just thinking a different way. Just being able to break out of the strictures. And whether we live in one of those times is unclear. We kind of have to do it to find out. But it does seem like we see these things around us, that everything does feel very locked down.
And to be able to act as a group, I think the group thing is especially important—maybe just now in history, maybe just in our circumstance. But to be able to act as a group outside of the order that has defined all the ways that you’re able to act as a group. Your friendships are supposed to be in a certain pattern, your sexual relationships are supposed to be in a certain pattern. Your business relationships, your political relationships, your religious relationships, they all have these prescribed forms, and they’re broken up in this way that it means that none of them really is able to have any power. And this key thing that’s maybe missing from our world is this idea of Männerbund.
Which is this term we found on German Wikipedia back in the day that has been somewhat popularized since then. But the idea that basically the men among themselves studying or adventuring or engaging after chasing after open-ended adventure and glory—forming a new and totalizing kind of relationship that is the foundation of the state and society. And that seems like this thing that’s actually missing today. And if we can break ourselves out of the mindset that that’s not something you can do, and then go and actually do that, that seems rich. It seems rich.
Duncan: Absolutely. And I think this is why it’s so important to absorb what Machiavelli’s saying about glory, about nature. Because he’s saying that to do this, it’s in many ways a leap of faith. But this is what’s necessary if you are going to have a functional society, is you have to be willing to break away from this degenerated system. And I think, yeah, that requires a certain amount of moral courage, but it also requires knowledge and vitality, and I think those are all very interlinked.
I think philosophizing—for Machiavelli, and really just in general, you should be able to see that this is something that requires boldness, that requires we are to think outside of the bounds of what is permissible under a certain political system.
Wolf: Well, and it’s this combination of those two things, right? So you need both courage and wisdom.
I often come back to the mythological angles on these things. It’s not an accident that Athena was most associated with philosophy—and is the goddess of courage and wisdom, right? Always the goddess who sponsors heroes, right? To go do these great things in service of their societies. And it’s that courage and wisdom, because without wisdom, courage is just foolhardiness, right?
Wisdom is where you know you actually know enough. You know what’s important. And this is why you need to study these things, and why you need to actually do the reading, so to speak. As we say, you need to do the reading because otherwise you’re going to go off half-cocked in some way that doesn’t help you. But you also need this courage and even physical courage—especially physical courage, to be able to go and apply it, right?
Because these people, there’s a lot of podcasts in the world today, right? And there’s a lot of people talking around these things. Commentary. It’s all commentary, right? And none of it leads anywhere because it’s just commentary, right?
There’s no action. There’s no, “Okay, and then we’re going to go organize this. Well, then we’re going to go and actually take some action in the world.” It doesn’t have to be the usual sorts of stupidity that people come up with when they think, “Let’s take action,” right? But building institutions—making bold steps of trying to open up the Overton window in some more official capacity, trying to actually take some political action, getting involved civically or whatever, and actually pushing the envelope, actually taking those bold actions—as Machiavelli counsels.
That requires a lot of courage. It’s not something that’s just within the established order of things—that no one’s going to criticize, right? Yeah, so it’s that combination of things, of both courage and wisdom. And we’ve been emphasizing a lot the wisdom angle here, I think—with this video series and with these conversations that we’ve been having with reading the books, doing the reading. But this is a good exhortation, I think, also to focus on that other element, and I think we should continue this conversation in what that looks like, but maybe let’s do that another time.
I think this has been a fun and very interesting exploration of the meaning of Machiavelli for us. Reasons to read Machiavelli. I’ve read The Prince. I’m now much more interested in reading Discourses on Livy because I’ve actually read a bunch of Livy as well—and it’s like, okay, well, what does Machiavelli have to say about these various episodes that I’ve read about? It all seems very relevant to us.
And so yeah. So thank you, Duncan, for coming on the show and—
Duncan: Thank you for having me on, Wolf.
Wolf: This has been a good discussion. All right. Until next time.