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In the 15th Century, Europe would see changes that would usher in an era of great strides

in virtually every area of life and a family that would control much of it for the next 3 centuries.

The Medici family; a Tuscan dynasty of the largest bank in Europe during the 15th century,

controlled popes, politics, and the city of Florence, the modern day capital city of the Italian

Tuscany region for a time. However, for a short while (1498 - 1512) Florentines threw out the

powerful Medici family and installed a republic, it would be under this short republican period

that a certain Niccolo Machiavelli; playwright, novelist, diplomat, and political philosopher,

would take these years and formulate principle texts on republican theory and political science.

However, these texts, most notably; The Prince, Discourses, and The Art of War, would not be

written until after the Medici family would reclaim Florence and continue to shape events from

from the shadows. Most known for The Prince: a guide for the governance of a newly acquired

state, the name Machiavelli conjures up images of conspiracies, brutal criminals, and the

despotic trends of the 20th century.

While it is true that many despots like Stalin and Mussolini make allusions to

Machiavelli and some of histories most ruthless and notable kings like Henry VIII and Charles I

claim influence from him, brilliant thinkers such as: John Adams and Francis Bacon have cited

his influence and he can be seen as a foundation to the ideas of John Locke and Jean-Jacques

Rousseau. Much like the Medici family, Machiavelli’s political offerings shaped many events

and thinkers from behind the scenes.

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Machiavelli: republican or villain?

Machiavelli’s reputation is a historically large topic that many thinkers far and wide, but

he must be defined first as a man who favored a republican government, was pessimistic about

the natural goodness of human nature: “Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle,

hypocritical, and greedy of gain” (Machiavelli, 2003) and departs with searching for a perfect

form of society and government. However, he does not stop searching for an ideal state of

governance and its his preponderance with the application of power instead of the nature of

power that sets him apart from his contemporaries of the day. He advocates a balance of power

approach to statehood, favoring adaptation and a republic. Moreover, he sees the uncertain nature

of humans in relation to power and authority as an institution that required a certain mobility that

a moral center limited. That mobility was marked by behavior that was not obscured by any

sense of right and wrong, rather ones own longevity, popularity, and wellbeing of the state

became the rubric of action.

While it is true that Machiavelli disavowed any relation between politics and morality,

the term amoral could portray a misconception about him that could be misleading. He simply

mistrusted the effects of morality in leadership. an institution so intoxicating, it could blind one

to ruthless attempts at subterfuge from enemies or ambitions one would be too blinded by the

light of morality to see. In this distrust he settles on a realism that accepts humans as suspicious

but still seeks out a plan to guide them while not being overthrown by them when faced with

certain choices only a leader would be faced with. Morality is replaced with efficiency as the

instrument of measurement, but Machiavelli does not displace morality because of personal
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disgust or pain. Actions made in leadership require a certain flexibility so he believed, in order to

effect the best overall outcome. The public tier does not have to make many decisions that

affect life and death or soaring wealth and crushing poverty, but the leader is faced with these

issues everyday and the experience itself alienates one from the public’s sense of conventional

morality. However, the leader must make decisions where an evil act may prevent the overthrow

of one’s state, this would cause disruption and anarchy in the state, so a general care of the state’s

citizen is an act of moral duty that allows for efficiency to be used as the ruler of action.

Machiavelli advocated republican ideals for governance and found many sympathetic

thinkers in the enlightenment era thinkers of Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. Compare his “When

neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content”(Machiavelli,

2003) with Locke’s “Where there is no property there is no injustice”(Locke, 2009). Both see a

continuous state of balancing as a sensible way to govern a state. However, Machiavelli goes

further and gives a chronology of the lifespan of a republic: from monarch to tyranny, from

autocracy to oligarchy, and from democracy to anarchy, these are the inevitable degenerations of

these states of government in a republic. Moreover, it was the shared existence of these 3 entities

( monarch, aristocracy, popular) that would preserve and make a perfect republic. With the

reputation of brutality and ruthlessness, it should shock the reader to know that he was so

passionate about a system of government that maximized the safety, prosperity, and satisfaction

of its citizens, but it is necessary to see him with more substance than the most common

associations. The remarkable thing about him is that his pessimism about the natural state of
humans did not make himself a pessimistic philosopher, but rather called him to dig into ancient

realist sensibilities and modernize them to suit the political needs of his time.

The opposition to Machiavelli:

The question that begs to be answered is; what did Machiavelli write that made him so

notorious? Many notable scholars have had contention with him, but the main culprit is from The

Prince, chapter 18: “Concerning the Way in Which Princes Should Keep Faith”, a chapter that

deals advice about deceiving others through fained piety. This chapter undoubtedly helped it to

be one of the first books on the Roman Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books. Many

Christian thinkers that had a marked interest in keeping the church’s authority could not

politically condone a text that advocated heresy and spiritual treason and this was Machiavelli’s

notorious mistake, now he is still associated with brutal abuse of power. However, there seems to

be an intangible urge to make him out to be an almost monstrous individual who promoted a

vicious form of autocratic despotism for the blind pursuit of power. Much of western civilization

has been guilty of the aforementioned assumption, but when one truly reads any of his political

texts; it is clear that the real Machiavelli is a passionate thinker who displayed humor, wit, and

blunt insights.

Brutal honesty and sardonic humor

Much like the cynics of ancient Greece, his pen’s adherence to brutal honesty thunders a

sound too intense or ugly for the more gentile platonic thinkers to accept. Moreover, it is the

obvious commitment to a successful state that gives a clue about where his ethical considerations

where located. Machiavelli’s conscious has been misplaced and the location is not in a standard
location. His commitment to giving advice about running a state smoothly and peaceful relations

with the citizens shows the dimension that hat has been hidden to some people, his ethical

decision had been made to protect the state and once that decision was made ethics no longer has

to be the measurement of actions in governance. In his comedy La Madragola, he displays

humans being driven by their own desires and ambition; a dynamic view of humans that would

sympathized with Adam Smith and Ayn Rand later in history. His play is a tight and complex

satire that takes place in a 24 hour period and displays perfect insights into the laissez-faire

attitude of a capitalist economy. The characters all are driven by their base ambitions and desires

while being flung by fortune’s favor or disfavor. This concept of fortune is crucial to

Machiavelli’s portrayal of human nature, it is fortune that makes a good or evil person not human

nature.

Despot or capitalist architect?

Machiavelli’s reputation for being the mascot and mentor of despotic organizations is

largely due to both the 20th century’s genocidal tyrants and a logical misstep in examination.

The 20th century has tinted the perceptions of many of its children when dealing with

Machiavelli, many see him as a tutor to monsters, gangsters, and dark leaders instead of one the

architect of political science and modern thinking. This tint hides much of the achievements of

him and cloys the palette when digesting his logic.

 One must first assume that man is a political creature, the next step is then to examine his

pessimistic view of human nature. This view is relative to the first assumption; man, not as a

social entity, but as an individual is fickle, greedy, and troublesome. Once, man comes together

in a society ( which is in human nature to do so ), his ambitions and desires are then balanced by

the collective of other individuals (compare this to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”) and fortune.

A leader is subjected to a greater margin of flexibility, but they are balanced by the republic at

every corner. The idea is to be checked by external forces rather than internal forces as an

efficient way to maintain a balance. So, humans are so social that their individual nature can only

be balanced by political means as a force that binds them together; to Machiavelli, this was

humanity. However, that does not suggest that because people are nasty creatures, tyrants should

treat them unethically. This assumption has the 20th century to blame, many of its monsters have

used Machiavelli as a justified tutor to their horrific policies and actions.

Why are we in denial?

First and foremost, he was a republican thinker and this is the relative position one must

take with his ethical considerations: the ideal ( the republic) is more important than the

individual, but the individual is what must be preserved by the republic, in one word: balance.

Tyrants that wantonly quote Machiavelli heartily refute republics in their sincerest forms because

it forces the centralized power to dissipate. This is a perspective very difficult to communicate in

the present age. The post-modern age has bred a certain distrust of Machiavelli, but this instinct

is quite dangerous and frankly, naive and irresponsible. Machiavelli would agree that if
civilization stops the ebb and flow of balance, then real despots will emerge and brutally urge the

people towards greater suffering.

So, why are the people of developed countries so repulsed by Machiavelli’s insights into

the nature of power and politics? In many ways the present age resembles the renaissance’s

humanist positivity and in many ways that would be a definitive reason to feel nauseated by the

brutal honesty about some of the uglier sides of human nature.

However, it is his experiences with the powerful Medici family that gave him the insights he

attempted to share with the world. It should be noted that they would rule the renaissance

through subterfuge and deception. The humanist philosophy was just simply to blinded by the

acclaim of the human soul that they didn’t see the mechanizations of the human political animal.

To conclude, Machiavelli found that by upholding the republic and its principles, a leader is

ethical by proxy because they will be balanced by external factors that have more efficacy than

internal forces or cultural morality. His insights and advice will be a staple of many thinkers to

examine for many years to come. In fact, his insights have become the threshold of social,

political, or ethical (human nature and goodness) that most if not all thinkers cross in search of

any original idea.