Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli | by | The New York Review of Books 12/14/21, 07:32

Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli

March 7, 2013 issue

In 2013, The New York Review of Books celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. During the course of the year we will
reprint excerpts from some other notable pieces published in the Review over the last five decades.

Between 1965 and 2009 The New York Review published over thirty articles and letters by the historian of
ideas and political philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The following is an extract from “The Question of
Machiavelli,” which appeared in the November 4, 1971 issue. It can be read in full at
nybooks.test/50/Machiavelli.

The Question of Machiavelli

Isaiah Berlin

…What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for
tearing o! hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men
profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when
they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same
ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as
the existentialists call it, or of “false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which
their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the blu! not just of o"cial morality—
the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western
philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values. His
own withers are unwrung. He has made his choice. He seems wholly unworried by,
indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional Western morality….

Machiavelli’s cardinal achievement is his uncovering of an insoluble dilemma, the

planting of a permanent question mark in the path of posterity. It stems from his de
facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other,
that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational
arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances, as a result of abnormality
or accident or error—the clash of Antigone and Creon or in the story of Tristan—but
(this was surely new) as part of the normal human situation.

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Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli | by | The New York Review of Books 12/14/21, 07:32

For those who look on such collisions as rare, exceptional, and disastrous, the choice to
be made is necessarily an agonizing experience for which, as a rational being, one
cannot prepare (since no rules apply). But for Machiavelli, at least in The Prince, The
Discourses, Mandragola, there is no agony. One chooses as one chooses because one
knows what one wants, and is ready to pay the price. One chooses classical civilization
rather than the Theban desert, Rome and not Jerusalem, whatever the priests may say,
because such is one’s nature, and—he is no existentialist or romantic individualist
avant la parole—because it is that of men in general, at all times, everywhere. If others
prefer solitude or martyrdom, he shrugs his shoulders. Such men are not for him. He
has nothing to say to them, nothing to argue with them about. All that matters to him
and those who agree with him is that such men be not allowed to meddle with politics
or education or any of the cardinal factors in human life; their outlook unfits them for
such tasks.

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