History of European Ideas

ISSN: 0191-6599 (Print) 1873-541X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20

Machiavelli against Method: Paul Feyerabend's

Anti-Rationalism and Machiavellian Political
‘Science’

Megan K. Dyer & Cary J. Nederman

To cite this article: Megan K. Dyer & Cary J. Nederman (2016) Machiavelli against Method: Paul
Feyerabend's Anti-Rationalism and Machiavellian Political ‘Science’, History of European Ideas,
42:3, 430-445, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2015.1118335

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2015.1118335

Published online: 18 Jan 2016.

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 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS, 2016
VOL. 42, NO. 3, 430–445
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2015.1118335

Machiavelli against Method: Paul Feyerabend’s Anti-Rationalism

and Machiavellian Political ‘Science’
Megan K. Dyer and Cary J. Nederman
Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Contemporary scholars seeking to advance the study of political Machiavelli; Feyerabend;
phenomena identify their inquiry as a ‘science’ that attains success philosophy of science; social
through rigorous method. Thus the ‘methodological anarchism’ of Paul science; methodological
pluralism; method;
Feyerabend’s philosophy of science might seem an inauspicious place to
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rationalism; anti-rationalism
find a fruitful disciplinary vision. Nonetheless, it echoes a longstanding
conception of the ‘science’ of politics articulated by Niccolò Machiavelli.
Looking to Feyerabend, we propose to surmount the impasse between
Machiavelli’s account of politics and the demands of modern science
and recover his contribution to the scientific study of politics. In doing
so, Machiavelli illustrates the potential of a Feyerabendian political science.

Contents

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 430

2. Feyerabendian anti-rationalism ............................................................................................................. 433
3. Machiavellian political ‘science’ ............................................................................................................ 437
4. From Feyerabend to Machiavelli .......................................................................................................... 443
5. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 444

1. Introduction
Perhaps no issue has generated more heated controversy among readers and scholars of Niccolò
Machiavelli than his relation to modern science and, especially, to political science. A long-standing
line of interpretation held Machiavelli to be the founder (or at least a progenitor) of political science,
primarily on the basis of his supposedly empirical and method-driven approach to inquiry. One Ita-
lian scholar of an earlier generation traced the lineage of this doctrine in these terms:
From our Giuseppe Ferrari to Dunning, from Höffing to Windelband, from Burckhardt to Dilthey, from
Treitschke to Pareto, … historians of philosophy and of political doctrine, and essayists on these sciences,
are all in agreement that Machiavelli was the renovator of modern political science and … that Machiavelli
was the ‘Galileo of politics.’1

Another author, in a book entitled Machiavelli the Scientist, proclaimed that Machiavelli adopted ‘an
essentially scientific approach’ to the study of politics, that is, he sought to accumulate ‘a body of
theoretical knowledge acquired through systematic investigation, logical reasoning and

CONTACT Cary J. Nederman cary-j-nederman@tamu.edu

1
Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli, trans. Gioconda Savini (New York, 1967), 7; italics added.
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 431

methodological procedure’.2 Such bold claims may be found throughout the literature on Machia-
velli—both academic and popular—until around the middle of the twentieth century. Thereafter,
a remarkable shift in interpretation occurred. No longer was Machiavelli the father of political
science. Rather, as Leo Strauss declared in Thoughts on Machiavelli, ‘[t]o speak of him as a scientist
is … misleading … The scientific student of society is unwilling or unable to pass “value judgments”,
but Machiavelli’s works abound with ‘value judgments’. His study of society is normative’.3 From a
very different perspective, the historian Garrett Mattingly, a contemporary of Strauss’s, bemoaned
the school of interpretation according to which ‘Machiavelli became the passionless, objective scientist,
the perfect mirror and analyst of his time. … The notion that this little book [the Prince] was meant as a
serious, scientific treatise on government contradicts everything we know about Machiavelli’s life,
about his writings, and about the history of the time.’4 Dimensions of Machiavelli’s thought that
had previously been labelled ‘scientific’, according to Mattingly, ought rather to be considered purely
satirical in character. No respectable scholar today would ever insist upon a ‘scientific’ reading of
Machiavelli’s thought. As one recent book on Machiavelli observes: ‘The “scientific” interpretation
of Machiavelli … has become so unfashionable that it has virtually disappeared from the secondary lit-
erature.’5 Another commentator confidently remarks that ‘although there are those … claiming that
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Machiavelli was the founder of political science, it is now generally agreed that he was not a systematic,
analytic political thinker. … The fact that Machiavelli bases his conclusions on observation and experi-
ence is not sufficient to describe him as a political scientist. His methodology was not systematic or
intellectually coherent enough to be afforded such a title … ’6 While scholars continue to posit a bewil-
dering array of interpretations of Machiavelli’s writings, the tide has turned definitively against the
once orthodox attribution of the status of a scientist to him.
The historiographical twists and turns through which Machiavelli scholarship was so decisively
transformed are so complex that to explore even the bare details of this process would doubtless
require a study of substantial length and breadth. By no means is it our intention in the present
article to commence such a project. Rather, we propose to investigate a somewhat different, although
not entirely unrelated, dilemma, namely, the question of what is meant by ‘science’ when scholars
from vastly different perspectives debate whether or not Machiavelli was the founder of ‘modern pol-
itical science’. Maurizio Viroli has identified four common characteristics of ‘science’ that have been
attributed (either singularly or multiply) to Machiavelli’s thought: (1) he was an empiricist; (2) he
embraced the model (often associated with Hobbes) of studying politics in a purely deductive, nomo-
logical manner; (3) he adapted the Galilean method of inquiry, entailing experimentation, expla-
nation and generalisation; (4) he refused to ascribe to political phenomena either theological or
moral causes or sources.7 Viroli’s summary seems to capture the main elements of science found
in both pro- and anti-science readings of Machiavelli. In our view, the proponents on either side
in this debate, to the extent that they all embrace (or at least take for granted) one or more of the
forms of scientific inquiry articulated by Viroli, share a somewhat naïve, and certainly unsophisti-
cated and superficial, conception of the nature of science. In particular, Machiavelli scholars up to
the present day appear to be woefully unaware of the far more subtle studies of the scientific endea-
vour advanced by historians and philosophers of science during the last half century or so. These
more recent conceptions of science, associated with authors such as Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos
and Larry Lauden, concentrate on the practice of scientists, rather than on some abstract prin-
ciple(s) of how scientific investigation is assumed by non-scientists to proceed.8 In other words,

2
Leonardo Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist (Berkeley, 1945), 22.
3
Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago, 1958), 11.
4
Garrett Mattingly, ‘Machiavelli’s Prince: Political Science or Political Satire?’, The American Scholar 27 (1958), 483–4.
5
Joseph V. Femia, Machiavelli Revisited (Cardiff, 2004), 45.
6
Maureen Ramsay, ‘Machiavelli’s Political Philosophy in The Prince’, in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays,
edited by Martin Coyle (Manchester, 1995), 174–5.
7
Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1998), 1–2.
8
See Edwin Hung, Philosophy of Science Complete: A Text on Traditional Problems and Schools of Thought, 2nd ed. (Boston, 2013),
347–428.
 432 M. K. DYER AND C. J. NEDERMAN

many contemporary students of science reject the notion that it depends upon a prescriptive set of
methodological precepts, in favour of the view that the concrete activities of scientists and/or their
communities alone define the scientific enterprise.
The failure of Machiavelli scholars to keep current with these developments in the philosophy and
history of science has important consequences for the understanding of his thought. We propose that
Machiavelli may indeed be counted as a political ‘scientist’ if we invoke an alternative and fundamen-
tally non-method-driven conception of science. In particular, we argue that Machiavelli’s approach
to the character and conduct of politics directly parallels the work of Paul Feyerabend, one of the
most prominent, albeit controversial, recent proponents of the practice-based school of philosophers
and historians of science. For Feyerabend, the habit of equating rational, method-driven inquiry with
science simply does not withstand scrutiny. Science lacks clear demarcations, rational standards of
progress and self-contained criteria by which to judge discoveries. Any internally coherent scientific
method cannot be progressive, in the sense of a unilateral accumulation of knowledge. Thus, con-
centration on method-driven inquiry utterly fails to grasp how the greatest achievements within
the history of science were achieved. Feyerabend’s alternative approach to science, articulated
most (in)famously in his book Against Method, favours a position he labels ‘theoretical anarchism’.9
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In contrast to the self-understanding predominant among contemporary political ‘scientists’,

Feyerabend’s account of the practice of science maps rather precisely onto Machiavelli’s rhetorical
and non-nomological conception of politics, despite the fact that the latter are sometimes cited as
sufficient reason to reject the very idea of a Machiavellian political ‘science’.10 Feyerabend is seldom
mentioned by political scientists as a potentially fruitful source for their self-understanding.11 On
our account, however, Feyerabend’s methodological anarchism, which rejects the sovereignty of
scientific reason and acknowledges the contingency of discovery in the pursuit of a scientific
agenda, affords some worthwhile lessons about Machiavelli’s relationship to contemporary political
science.
Our thesis, then, may be summarised as follows: the confluences we shall identify between some
of Feyerabend’s and Machiavelli’s key ideas surmount an impasse—namely, the tension between the
Machiavellian vision of politics and the demands of modern science—in order to recover the Flor-
entine’s contribution to the scientific study of politics. Indeed, we claim that Feyerabend perhaps
deserves the label of ‘methodological Machiavellian’ more than ‘methodological anarchist’.12 In
order to sustain this assertion, we will first provide an overview of principal features of Feyerabend’s
notion of science; we shall then survey some salient dimensions of Machiavellian political thought
with attention to Feyerabendian parallels; finally we will attempt a more thorough demonstration
of how Feyerabend’s concept of science finds expression in key elements of Machiavelli’s under-
standing of the workings of politics. We conclude that Machiavelli might well be characterised as
engaging in a science of politics, albeit not the kind that comports well with the philosophies of
science to which current political scientists themselves subscribe in articulating the foundations of

9
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 3rd ed. (London, 1993), 9. For quotations from Feyerabend, italics are in the original unless other-
wise noted. Although a fourth edition was published in 2010 with a new introduction by Ian Hacking, it is simply a republication
of the third edition with slightly different pagination.
10
Viroli, Machiavelli, 73–97; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (London, 1981), 88–108.
11
Quentin Skinner, ‘Introduction: The Return of Grand Theory’, The Return of Grand Theory in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1995),
12, dismisses Feyerabend with the remark that he adopts ‘a form of conceptual relativism so strong as to seem almost self-defeat-
ing’. John Gunnell, Philosophy, Science and Political Inquiry (Morristown, NJ, 1975), 207–21 assimilates Feyerabend’s position
entirely to Kuhn’s without evidence and only cites Feyerabend a single time. Terence Ball, ‘Introduction’, in Idioms of Inquiry:
Critique and Renewal in Political Science, edited by Terence Ball (Albany, 1987), 2 and Ruth Lane, ‘Positivism, Scientific Realism
and Political Science: Recent Developments in the Philosophy of Science’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 8 (1996), 362 both
posit that Feyerabend’s thought affected recent political science, without presenting any examples or citations to support
this view.
12
The only author of whom we are aware who even attempts to defend a similar claim—albeit without any knowledge of Feyer-
abend—is Mark B. Brown, Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (Cambridge, MA, 2009), who remarks
(41–2) that there are ‘affinities between certain elements of Machiavelli’s thought and modern science, but they have little to do
with standard notions of scientific method’.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 433

their discipline.13 Note that we are claiming neither that Machiavelli ‘anticipated’ Feyerabend nor
that the former ‘influenced’ the latter. Our project instead constitutes a historically grounded attempt
to reframe a central problem of Machiavelli interpretation with reference to an underappreciated
approach to scientific inquiry.

2. Feyerabendian anti-rationalism
Among contemporary philosophers of science, Feyerabend’s assault on scientific reason’s presumed
singularity (most notoriously in Against Method) and thus its privileged position within society
(Science in a Free Society) provoked an immediate and rather vehement response.14 His position
has been seen, although perhaps unfairly, as endangering the scientific enterprise itself.15 Yet Feyer-
abend repeatedly differentiates between the familiar ideal of science (understood as the application of
rigorous method) and how science actually works. Using case studies derived from the history of
science, he examines how scientific discoveries have unfolded in practice and finds the unruliness
of investigation to be superior both descriptively and normatively to the standard view of modern
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science. Feyerabend characterises the conventional rationalistic view, the one accepted by laymen
and practitioners alike, as having got most things—about discovery, about reason, and about the
nature of science itself—quite wrong, the consequence being the general impoverishment of scientific
thinking. The resulting illiteracy, moreover, does no favours for those interested in seeing the expan-
sion of scientific knowledge. With this concern for the health of scientific thinking in mind, Feyer-
abend turns to the actual practices employed by scientists as a way in which to examine the
particularities of successful science.
An important reason why one can only know science through its practice comes from Feyerabend’s
particular understanding of human language. Language acquires layers of meaning that develop
through the customary use of a certain vocabulary. Contrary to the idea that ‘a clear and distinct under-
standing of new ideas precedes, and should precede, their formation and their institutional
expression’, a practice must first exist before it finds the words with which to articulate itself properly.16
Language itself is tied to practice, and implicit statements of value entwine themselves with the
vocabulary such practices employ. The changing language of science has therefore developed along-
side of, and is inseparable from, the particularities of the scientific enterprise in particular times and
places. From these precepts, Feyerabend concludes that instead of constituting a universal logic and
discourse of scientific inquiry, reason does not yield a neutral observation language. Nor can it sub-
stantiate a unique claim to legitimacy. Scientific reason is simply one way among many in which
human beings articulate values and frame the world through linguistic meaning. The seeming ease,
and even apparent naturalness, with which people take to so-called rational arguments testifies only
to the dominance of reason as a merely conventional framework for judging conflict between compet-
ing ways of seeing the world. ‘How easy it is,’ declares Feyerabend, ‘to lead people by the nose in a
rational way.’17
13
See, for instance, Kim Quaile Hill, ‘Myths about the Physical Sciences and Their Implications for Teaching Political Science’, PS:
Political Science & Politics 37 (July 2004), 467–71; Jon R. Bond, ‘The Scientification of the Study of Politics: Some Observations
on the Behavioral Evolution in Political Science’, Journal of Politics 69 (2007), 897–907; Thomas C. Walker, ‘The Perils of Paradigm
Mentalities: Revisiting Kuhn, Lakatos, and Popper’, Perspectives on Politics 8 (June 2010), 433–51; Kim Quaile Hill, ‘In Search of
General Theory’, Journal of Politics 74 (2012), 917–39.
14
Notable examples include Joseph Agassi, ‘Review of Against Method’, Philosophia 6 (1976), 165–77; Ernest Gellner, ‘Beyond Truth
and Falsity’, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science 26 (1975), 331–42; J. Curthoys and W. Suchting, ‘Feyerabend’s Discourse
against Method: A Marxist Critique’, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 20 (1977), 243–371; Geoffrey Hellman,
‘Against Bad Method’, Metaphilosophy 10 (1979), 190–202; John Worrall, ‘Against Too Much Method’, Erkenntnis 13 (1978),
279–95. Feyerabend’s replies to critics are collected in Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London, 1978).
15
We do not attempt a thoroughgoing investigation of Feyerabend’s philosophy of science and its merits (or lack thereof) vis à vis
its alternatives. That would require another, and extremely lengthy, discussion. As such, this paper engages only in passing with
debates in the philosophy of science.
16
Feyerabend, Against Method, 17.
17
Ibid., 23.
 434 M. K. DYER AND C. J. NEDERMAN

The realities of scientific practice, rather than abstracted accounts of methodological procedures,
provide a more useful guide for a scientist who wants to increase knowledge. Instead of looking to or
creating new textbook representations of science to guide discovery, Feyerabend would have scien-
tists look to history: ‘What we must do is to replace the beautiful but useless formal castles in the air
by a detailed study of primary sources in the history of science.’18 Moreover, understanding how
science really works requires not familiarity with theories but active participation. Such ‘partici-
pation’, Feyerabend insists, ‘is possible only for a ruthless opportunist who is not tied to any particu-
lar philosophy and who adopts whatever procedure seems to fit the occasion.’19 Those who educate
themselves about science on the basis of the details of its history realise that no comprehensive theory
guides the process of discovery. Vehement that he himself offers no such theoretical framework or
methodology, Feyerabend remarks that the examples he uses ‘are not details that can and should be
omitted once the “real account” is given—they are the real account’.20 Feyerabend’s approach to
understanding science through its practice instructs through example and perhaps a bit of inspi-
ration. In the end, however, it cannot (and has no intention to) substitute a comprehensive theory
of scientific practice for the prudence and creativity needed to make sense of scientific history and
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diverse ideas and to turn these into successful science. Feyerabend only offers guidelines and asserts
that, ‘if a collection of rules of thumb is called a “theory”, well, then of course I have a “theory”—but
it differs considerably from the antiseptic dream castles of Kant and Hegel and from Carnap’s and
Popper’s dog huts.’21 As science is not a singular endeavour but a collection of practices that exist
currently or have existed at some time in the past, such diversity cannot be consolidated under a
pallid, universal theory that would serve to explain and guide science at all times and in all places.
The diversity and abundance evidenced in actual scientific practice lead Feyerabend to his most
famous statements about the nature of science. Scientific progress, rather than being guided by
reason, is characteristically irrational, and science, rather than embodying the ideal of rational
inquiry, constitutes an ‘essentially anarchic enterprise’.22 Only when ripped from its context and
abstracted beyond usefulness does anything resembling a universal scientific method emerge:
It is clear, then, that the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality, rests on too naive a view of
man and his social surroundings. To those who look at the rich material provided by history, and who are not
intent on impoverishing it in order to please their lower instincts, their craving for intellectual security in the
form of clarity, precision, ‘objectivity,’ ‘truth,’ it will become clear that there is only one principle that can be
defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle: anything goes.23

While Feyerabend grants that ‘it is thus possible to create a tradition that is held together by strict
rules,’ he maintains it is not desirable to support that tradition ‘to the exclusion of everything
else’.24 While scientific reason remains the principal tradition that would assert such exclusivity,
Feyerabend maintains that its conversion into a universal standard has been a tortured one and
not free of tricks. Along the way, the transformation has required scientists to forego the implicit
assumptions that inhere in reason as ‘logic’ of inquiry.
As a method that ignores or even denies its own historicity and contingency, scientific reason
obscures the fact that it is itself a tradition, albeit a very powerful, even sometimes quite successful
tradition, claiming to provide objective, tradition-independent demands. What makes reason see-
mingly unique is that behind formal method, one forgets the ‘complex and hardly understood prop-
erties’ that assure the appearance of simplicity, elegance and coherence.25 Though never referenced,
covert assumptions and hidden understandings permeate ‘objective’ rational inquiry. Here,

18
Paul Feyerabend, Knowledge, Science and Relativism: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, ed. John Preston (Cambridge, 1999), 137.
19
Feyerabend, Against Method, 10.
20
Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (London, 1987), 284.
21
Ibid., 283.
22
Feyerabend, Against Method, 9.
23
Ibid., 18–19.
24
Ibid., 11.
25
Ibid., 224.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 435

Feyerabend stresses that the promoters of universal reason profit from the difference between what
scientific reason seems to be and what it actually is. The ‘polemical sting’ of the opposition between
reason and practice elevates reason to denote ‘lasting measures of excellence’, while practice remains
only a human product, ‘imperfect and changing’.26 The dominance of the rational method is primar-
ily due to its rhetorical force and its ubiquity in the current language through which scientific inquiry
is conducted. To the extent that reason is itself a tradition, however, it enjoys no special standing to
arbitrate between traditions. Feyerabend’s characterisation of scientific rationality as simply another
research tradition expands what may be brought to the table in uncovering scientific knowledge
while divesting that particular tradition of its special authority to guide science.
Feyerabend thus rejects rational inquiry as the overarching scientific principle that extends
human knowledge and leads to progress in the sciences. Any particular standard of reason is not
universal but, rather, is embedded in the scientific practice of the time. He states, on the one
hand, that ideas that are now said to be in accord with reason ‘survived because prejudice, passion,
conceit, errors, sheer pigheadedness, in short because all the elements that characterise the context of
discovery, opposed the dictates of reason and because these irrational elements were permitted to have
their way’.27 On the other hand, practices once deemed rational, which were supported by the very
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way in which people understood the world, faded in importance because the supposedly solid
reasoning of that time was overruled.
The success or failure of a theory’s acceptance is therefore a matter of the ability of an individual
to persuade others to accept the theory and begin practising within its modes, regardless of how well
it satisfies approved standards. In the effort to gain acceptance, advocates of different traditions have
resorted to multiple tactics. Depending on the tradition, a particular way of gaining followers may
appear ‘acceptable, laughable, rational, foolish’ or might even be ‘pushed aside as “mere propaganda”’
not worthy of serious consideration.28 Feyerabend’s linguistic premises preclude the possibility of uni-
versal discursive standards that could comprehensively guide choice. He declares that ‘argument is pro-
paganda for one observer, the essence of human discourse for another’. 29 Rhetoric, in the sense of
manipulating people to embrace a new set of practices by any means necessary, supplies a primary
inducement to scientific change.30 Even reason is not exempted from this account: ‘From the very
beginning the salesman of a universal truth cheated people into admissions instead of clearly arguing
for their philosophy.’31 As for so-called rational discourse, ‘they praised argument—they constantly
violated its principles.’32 Such violations, Feyerabend declares, are common among practising scien-
tists, and furthermore, even the now-dominant standard of scientific reason could not have originally
prevailed in a ‘rational’ manner. While scientists may laud method as the foundation of their discipline,
it becomes apparent that such rules are ‘are never obeyed by anyone’33 in practice.
Feyerabend emphasises that inquiry is constrained by the conventions of dominant scientific
practice. As a result, stable meanings are achieved by implicit agreement among people who,
using language in a certain way, practise science under the dominant theory. These terms and mean-
ings consequently favour the status quo and defend it from challengers. Linguistic habit accords a
special place to scientific discourses that are already established: ‘It contributes to the preservation
of the old and familiar not because of any inherent advantage but because it is old and familiar.’34

26
Ibid., 218.
27
Ibid., 116.
28
Ibid., 226.
29
Ibid., 226.
30
The defense of rhetoric as central to science is so prominent a feature of Feyerabend’s work that the first edition of Against
Method contains a playful index entry, inserted by a student of Imre Lakatos charged with compiling the index, which reads
‘rhetoric 1–309’. The pages in question correspond to the entire text of the book with the exception of the index itself. See
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London, 1975), 337.
31
Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason, 100.
32
Ibid., 100.
33
Feyerabend, Knowledge, Science and Relativism, 137.
34
Feyerabend, Against Method, 25.
 436 M. K. DYER AND C. J. NEDERMAN

As a consequence, the first accepted scientific theory has advantages over later ones that are compel-
ling but not, strictly speaking, rational. Under rational purview, new theories start out at a consider-
able disadvantage compared to those theories already established. These have already found
expression through the work of many practitioners, and the habits associated with the old theory
permeate the world of the scientist. By contrast, an idea or theory that supplies some new model
or innovation must first articulate itself in terms that are not its own, and it cannot do so with
the elegance that comes from being echoed in the terms themselves. New ideas are forced ‘to express
themselves in terms that presuppose what they contest [and thus] seem to raise quibbles, or to mis-
use words’.35 They falter because a direct comparison uses the language already developed to support
the current ‘good reason’. Rather than putting challenger and challenged on equal ground, the use of
rational standards to judge a new theory against an established one reinforces the advantage of
the latter. The problem as articulated by Feyerabend is thus two-fold: the comprehensiveness of
the habits, language and best practices of scientists both reinforces established theories and, at the
same time, trammels new ones.
Consequently, as a universal method governing scientific progress, reason serves as a conserva-
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tive, regressive force. Feyerabend regards reason as insufficient for and ultimately harmful to fruitful
inquiry because it cannot examine its own premises and is thus self-justifying. He insists that ‘all
methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits’.36 A method that has at times been suc-
cessfully applied to problems and contributed to the growth of knowledge nonetheless has the poten-
tial to be disadvantageous and anti-progressive in the face of different problems. Adhering to a single
method—even one tried and true—fails to offer the adaptability necessary to sustain successful
science. There are times when the dogged application of a single preferred method, even if that is
how one is ‘supposed to’ proceed, will lead to failure. All methodologies have their limits, and
‘given any rule, however “fundamental” or “rational”, there are always circumstances when it is advi-
sable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite.’37 In particular instances in which science
can be said to have been successful, one can make claims that certain ‘features’ or approaches have
led to ‘concrete developments’, but
not every discovery can be accounted for in the same manner and procedures that paid off in the past may
create havoc when imposed in the future. Successful research does not obey general standards; it relies now
on one trick, now on another, and the moves that advance it are not always known to the movers.38

There are circumstances in which certain practices are suitable, yet others in which these same prac-
tices, which had previously served well, will not do. Feyerabend offers the recommendation that
scientists, if they wish to be successful, should collect and deploy such ‘tricks’ as circumstances
necessitate. Having a diversity of tactics at one’s disposal makes it more likely that one of these
will be appropriate to a given situation.
Building on this insight, Feyerabend claims that science must accept and introduce other views
into its practice so that multiple ways of approaching a problem are available. Practising scientists
who not only want to understand better what they do and the theories they use, but who are also
interested in greater empirical content, will consequently embrace a pluralistic methodology. The
scientist most admired by Feyerabend displays an unwillingness to be cowed by method and rejects
‘universal standards’ as well as ‘rigid traditions’.39 In his assessment of the factors surrounding scien-
tific success, Feyerabend values boldness—even to the point of suspension of accepted rules and stan-
dards—and the willingness to introduce innovation rather than to work via a single, existing
methodology. Reason is, of course, one of a plurality of legitimate modes used by scientists in
their practice, but the scientist who will be the most successful is ‘multilingual’ and fluent in multiple

35
Ibid., 30.
36
Ibid., 23.
37
Ibid., 14, 23.
38
Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason, 281.
39
Feyerabend, Against Method, 12.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 437

‘cosmologies’, to use Feyerabend’s own term. Such a scientist is comfortable with flux and excels
because he is adaptable in his attitude towards discovery in a way that matches, as closely as possible,
the ‘irrational’ operation of scientific progress as seen in the historical record.
In sum, by revealing the rational standard as one of many traditions of inquiry used in successful
science, Feyerabend attempts to rehabilitate practice and shore up scientific thinking. Accordingly,
science is what scientists actually do and is not based on a universal, authoritative standard. Reason is
not the essence of scientific inquiry. A scientist who wants to be successful will use any tradition—
rhetorical sleight of hand, empiricism, divine nature, logic, authority—at his disposal to contribute
to scientific progress. Feyerabend thus locates a ‘scientific cosmology’ alongside others in the joint
attempt not only to ‘discover the secrets of nature and of man’, but also to ‘increase liberty’ and to
‘lead a full and rewarding life’.40 On this point, he acknowledges the formidability of stepping back
in order to regard one’s ‘native’ tradition in the context of a much broader human enterprise. How-
ever, while it might be understandably difficult ‘to see one’s own most cherished ideas in perspec-
tive, as parts of a changing and, perhaps, absurd tradition’, Feyerabend’s concern is that modern
science actively fosters and encourages the inability to view scientific activity with such perspec-
tive.41 He finds it unconscionable that this would be the attitude ‘proper to those engaged in
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the study and the improvement of man, society, [and] knowledge’.42 In placing the scientific world-
view on equal ground with other traditions, Feyerabend’s philosophy of science legitimises and
admits a place for human concerns in science. By turning to practice, it attempts to construct a
vision of science more ‘humanitarian’ (to use his own phrase) than any single, fixed philosophical
ideal.43
To extrapolate from our summary of Feyerabend’s position, we posit that the following inter-
related theses are central to his account of so-called methodological anarchism:

(1) The only way in which to understand science properly is through the study of its practice.
(2) There is no discernable ‘rational’ pattern to scientific change and thus no self-evident universal
standard for assessing science or its progress.
(3) Conventional ‘rational’ science is constrained by habit and convention.
(4) Adopting a pluralism of practices is the best way for science to be conducted.

As we endeavour to demonstrate below, each of these theses finds a direct corollary in Machia-
velli’s overarching conception of politics and political inquiry.

3. Machiavellian political ‘science’

Having examined these contours of Feyerabend’s account of science, a knowledgeable reader might
already see how some are suggestive of certain familiar features of Machiavelli’s political thought.
Both Machiavelli and Feyerabend share an insistence on studying practice—as well as reserving a
few choice words for those who write about ‘republics and principalities that have never been
seen or known to exist in reality’ 44 (Machiavelli) or for those who build ‘antiseptic dream castles’45
(Feyerabend). Machiavelli in particular has been described by his admirers as well as his detractors as
espousing an approach to the study of politics that is empirical and pragmatic to the point of blood-
lessness, if not sheer ruthlessness.46 Regardless of whether this characterises the whole of his thought,
his emphasis on how successful governance ‘really works’—what he terms ‘effectual truth’—is
40
Ibid., 12.
41
Ibid., 218.
42
Ibid., 218.
43
Ibid., 3–4.
44
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, ed. and trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham, NC, 1965), 57.
45
Feyerabend, Against Method, 283.
46
A useful overview is provided by Femia, Machiavelli Revisited, 6–11.
 438 M. K. DYER AND C. J. NEDERMAN

certainly a noteworthy hallmark of his most renowned treatise, the Prince. His purpose in that work,
as he says in its fifteenth chapter, is ‘to write something that will be useful’,47 which leads him to
concern myself with the truth of the matter as facts show it rather than with any fanciful notion. … For there is
such a difference between how men live and how they ought to live that he who abandons what is done for what
ought to be done learns his destruction than his preservation.48

The stark antithesis between ideal conduct and effectual truth leads Machiavelli to insist throughout
the Prince that worthwhile political knowledge arises primarily from the study—through careful
historical inquiry as well as precise dissection of current events—of those techniques that actual
rulers have employed to obtain and maintain a hold on power. By contrast, to become enthralled
to ideals or normative standards of conduct distracts the investigator from identifying how rulers
actually succeed (and fail) in governing their states. Thus, both Feyerabend’s science and Machia-
velli’s political science claim to take the side of reality, in the sense that they realise how living up to
ideals of action is not only unhelpful, but can lead to one’s detriment or even downfall. Moreover,
it is never enough simply to contemplate the enterprise in which one is engaged. In maintaining a
focus on practice, Machiavelli’s ideal ruler exhibits an approach to knowledge reminiscent of Feyer-
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abend’s successful scientist. While the Feyerabendian is quick to apply insights amassed from var-
ious traditions to the practice of science, Machiavelli praises the behaviour of leaders who gather
insight from diversities of geography, human character and action. Indeed, the way in which
Machiavelli claims one can learn from history and apply its lessons resonates with the rules of
thumb that Feyerabend suggests scientists should glean from the history of science. In Machiavelli’s
view, no single historical example can provide a certain guide of how best to proceed. But by exam-
ining the qualities and actions of successful as well as failed rulers, one can receive guidance—
though not precise directions—concerning problems similar to those one might face in the present
or future.
The general maxim to uncover what has actually led to political success and failure directs
Machiavelli to a fine-grained analysis of the idealised qualities of princes in relation to the pragmatics
of power. Just as Feyerabend admits that scientists benefit from the appearance of adhering to a uni-
versal method, while actually doing nothing of the sort, so Machiavelli focuses on the relationship
between ‘good’, consistent moral character and successful rule. In particular, he seeks to demonstrate
that effective governance depends upon a complex calculation of the interaction between appearance
and reality, viz., the commonplace expectations concerning the moral characteristics of governors
versus the necessities imposed upon them that may require alternative casts of mind and courses
of conduct. Fundamentally, the problem is that there are ‘some qualities that look like virtues, yet
—if the prince practices them—they will lead to his destruction, and other qualities that look like
vices, yet—if he practices them—they will bring him safety and well-being.’49 Since the primary
aim of a ruler is a sustained hold on power, regardless of the costs, anyone who is more concerned
with burnishing his image than with retaining his position sets himself up for ultimate failure.
Machiavelli illustrates this basic point with reference to a standard set of virtues and vices—gener-
osity and parsimony, compassion and cruelty, truthfulness and mendacity, love-worthiness and
hate-inducement—that were part and parcel of the idealised advice commonly offered to heads of
state in medieval and Renaissance ‘mirror of princes’ books.50 In such works, the ruler is counselled
always to adopt the high moral ground with the assurance that this will produce the desired outcome.
For Machiavelli, however, this disregards the harsh realities of politics: ‘any man who under all con-
ditions insists on making it his business to be good will surely be destroyed among so many who are

47
Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, 57.
48
Ibid., 57–8.
49
Ibid., 59.
50
As Machiavelli illustrates in chapters 16 and 17 of the Prince. Still extremely useful for Machiavelli’s relationship with the mirror
literature is Allan Gilbert, Machiavelli’s Prince and Its Forerunners (Durham, NC, 1939). More recently, see Quentin Skinner, The
Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), I.113–28.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 439

not good’.51 Actual circumstances rather than universal principles must be the politician’s guide in
determining what feints and tricks—playing with appearances in deed and word—are demanded in
order to achieve a successful conclusion to his pursuits.
While Machiavelli is perhaps most explicit in the Prince about the centrality of concentrating on
practical results, and thus the need to examine closely what has succeeded and does succeed in reality,
his pragmatic stance runs throughout the range of his writings in more or less muted form. The Dis-
courses on Livy certainly concentrates on the techniques (some of which overlap with the Prince) that
ensure the ability of republics to persist and thus that republican leaders must adopt for the sake of the
state. Indeed, the issue of ‘effectual truth’ reflects an abiding concern with how and why regimes suc-
ceed and fail that may be traced back to the days before Machiavelli fell from power as a minister in the
Florentine government. In a 1506 letter commonly known as the Ghiribizzi (meaning ‘Fantasies’ or
‘Speculations’), Machiavelli already expressed preoccupation with comprehending the vicissitudes
of the exercise of power. The basic quandary stems from the sheer unpredictability of political success
or failure. On the one hand, different routes to the same goal may prove equally effective; there is no
single universal set of rules that assures the outcomes that one desires. On the other hand, Machiavelli
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notes that calculation and deliberation often lead to ruin; the best-laid plans often do not hit their
mark. He observes: ‘Sometimes the way of doing things that was praised when it led to conquest is vili-
fied when it leads to defeat, and sometimes when defeat comes after long prosperity … But the reason
why different actions are sometimes useful and sometimes equally detrimental I do not know—yet I
should very much like to.’52 It is this dilemma, one might contend, that drove Machiavelli’s later inqui-
ries into the realities of politics: he sought to make sense out of the very confusing world that he had
experienced in such a way that he might offer practical analysis and advice.
Ultimately, the problem stems from the unpredictability, indeed inscrutability, of political change
itself, which Machiavelli explains by reference to the power of Fortuna, the goddess who governs
earthly events.53 Machiavelli’s account of the operation of fortune reverberates with Feyerabend’s
idea of the irrational and even erratic nature of scientific change in relation to unforeseeable circum-
stances. The role of fortune in human affairs and its seeming indomitability is a quandary Machia-
velli returns to time and time again throughout his works. Fortune is beyond the capacity of any man
to employ reason to grasp. As Machiavelli states in the Discourses: ‘If we observe carefully how
human affairs go on, many times we see that things come up and events take place against which
the Heavens do not wish any provision to be made … Men are able to assist Fortune, but not to
thwart her. They can weave her designs but cannot destroy them.’54 Recognition of the impact of
the goddess is echoed elsewhere in the Discourses: ‘To achieve something good is difficult unless For-
tune, aiding you, with her power overcomes’ the obstacles set for human beings.55 The Prince is rife
with similar remarks. From the dedicatory epistle onwards, fortune is cited as the cause of the ‘great-
ness’ or the ‘malice’ that people experience.56 Machiavelli concludes the famous Chapter 25 of the
Prince (‘Fortune’s Power in Human Affairs and How She Can Be Forestalled’) with the declaration
that ‘men are successful when they are in close harmony with Fortune, and when they are out of
harmony, they are unsuccessful.’57 Human beings are victims of fortune: ‘Fortune is fickle, control-
ling men and keeping them under her yoke.’58
Machiavelli’s most extensive meditation on the operations of fortune may be found in his poem
‘Tercets on Fortune’, which may have been composed around the same time as the Ghiribizzi. Fortuna

51
Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, 58.
52
James B. Atkinson and David Sices, eds., Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence (DeKalb, 2004), 135.
53
For extensive discussions of the theme of Fortuna in Machiavelli’s thought, see Thomas Flanagan, ‘The Concept of Fortune in
Machiavelli’, in The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, edited by Anthony Parel (Toronto, 1972); Hanna Pitkin,
Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley, 1984), 139–69.
54
Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, 406, 408.
55
Ibid., 512.
56
Ibid., 11.
57
Ibid., 92.
58
Atkinson and Sices, eds., Machiavelli and His Friends, 135.
 440 M. K. DYER AND C. J. NEDERMAN

is fully personified in the ‘Tercets’, as in Machiavelli’s more famous writings: she is an ‘unstable
goddess and fickle deity’ who ‘times events as suits her; she raises us up, she puts us down without
pity, without law or right’.59 Machiavelli lists the great kingdoms and empires that have been made
and unmade by Fortuna, and he laments her dominance even over men who possessed exceptional
intellectual and physical endowments. Neither individuals nor societies are exempt from submission
to fortune: ‘Not a thing in the world is eternal; Fortune wills it so and makes herself splendid by it, so
that her power may be more clearly seen.’60 Of course, Machiavelli avers, men do themselves no good
by ascribing to her only the bad that happens to them, when in fact she is the source of good as well as
evil events. Fortuna is ‘omnipotent’.61 The many wheels contained in her heavenly palace spin out
riches, health and power as well as poverty, illness and servitude. The ability of fortune to achieve
these effects is traced to the congruity or incongruity between personality and the whims of the
goddess:
That man most luckily forms his plan, among all the persons in Fortune’s palace, who chooses a wheel befitting
her wish, / since the inclinations that make you act, so far as they conform with her doings, are the causes of
your good and your ill.
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Yet you cannot therefore trust yourself to her nor hope to escape her hard bite, her hard blows, violent and
cruel, / because while you are whirled about by the rim of a wheel that for the moment is lucky and good,
she is wont to reverse its course in midcircle.62

Thus, Machiavelli implies that one ought to despair finding some single all-encompassing tactic for
conquering Fortuna and inducing her always to accede to one’s wishes. Her fickle ways are indiscern-
ible to mortal men, for even as fortune is omnipotent, human beings lack the incapacity of remaining
in her favour. This forms one of the most prominent themes across the entirety of Machiavelli’s body
of writings.
The structure of the resulting problem is quite similar to the one we saw in Feyerabend’s account
of science: the tendency towards fixedness alongside a pressing need for adaptability and flexibility.
The chief reason for the dominance of fortune in human lives, and especially political affairs, in turn
stems from the constancy of our own personal traits, according to Machiavelli. Simply put, we do not
vary our behaviour as the times require. This is so because human action arises out of a set of per-
sonal characteristics that are firmly rooted and relatively insusceptible to variation or erasure.
Machiavelli believes that individual action has a constant and predictable pattern: how one behaves
reflects the sort of psychological attributes that one has been granted or has acquired. Machiavelli did
not use a single term to denote ‘character’. Rather, he alternated without apparent distinction
between words such as natura and qualità to describe the personal traits which lie behind and
guide human action. His work proceeds from the premise that human beings have deeply rooted
psychological traits that require them to act in a consistent and invariant fashion. As he remarks
in another poem, ‘The Ass’, ‘the mind of man, ever intent on what is natural to it, grants no protec-
tion against either habit or nature.’63 Machiavelli regards people to be essentially creatures of pat-
terned action. This comes out clearly in his descriptions of various rulers from the past. In
Chapter 19 of the Prince, which traces the careers of a number of Roman emperors, Machiavelli
repeatedly refers to the qualities of particular rulers: some of them governed on the basis of ‘mod-
erate’ and ‘humane’ policies, while others were ‘cruel and rapacious’.64 What they all shared in his
account (the Roman Emperor Severus excepted) was a constancy of conduct, indicative of a fixed
character. The fact that personal characteristics are usually invariant Machiavelli explains in one
of two ways: ‘Either our natural inclinations are too strong to permit us to change, or, because having

59
Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, 746.
60
Ibid., 748.
61
Ibid., 745.
62
Ibid., 747.
63
Ibid., 725.
64
Ibid., 70–6.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 441

always fared well by acting in a certain way, we do not think it a good idea to change our methods.’65
These factors are taken by Machiavelli as strong psychological barriers to variation in human con-
duct. The guiding hand of character is so firm as to regulate action according to a clearly charted
course.
This principle of character is in turn invoked by Machiavelli as the basis for his explanation of the
ultimate success and failure of rulers. It is precisely this dilemma that animates much of his inquiry
throughout the body of his writings. In Chapter 25 of the Prince, he comments: ‘I would observe that
one sees a ruler flourishing today and ruined tomorrow, without his having changed at all in nature
or quality.’66 Machiavelli accounts for this phenomenon with reference to the constancy of character.
The problem, he says, arises in the relationship between circumstances and character. When a ruler’s
character corresponds to his circumstances, he will succeed in maintaining his state and earning
glory for himself. Should conditions change, however, he is bound to fall from his position precisely
because his character no longer suits the times. Insofar as no one can be expected to deviate from that
course of action which appears most ‘natural’ to him, Machiavelli must conclude that rulers are
entirely subject to fortune to the extent that they possess invariant and permanent traits of character.
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Machiavelli posits essentially the same dilemma in the case of republican leaders as in the case of
the heads of principalities. In the first book of the Discourses, he states succinctly that ‘men are born,
live, and die, always, with one and the same nature.’67 The third book returns to the problems posed
by the intractability of character in relation to changes of fortune. He adduces the general prop-
osition that the fortune of men ‘depends upon whether their behavior is in conformity with the
times’; a person ‘is likely to make fewer mistakes and to prosper in his fortune when circumstances
accord with his conduct, as I have said, and one always proceeds as the force of nature compels
one’.68 Thus, Machiavelli restates his fundamental psychological premise that the character which
governs human behaviour must match the situation in which the individual finds himself. In this
connection, he mentions the very painful example of his own political benefactor and friend
Piero Soderini, whose ultimate failure is explained as a result of his ‘good-natured and patient’ char-
acter: ‘So long as circumstances suited the way in which he carried on, both he and his country pros-
pered. But when afterwards there came a time which required him to drop his patience and humility,
he could not bring himself to do it, so that both he and his country were ruined.’69 In the Discourses
as in his other writings, the regulating effect of character on behaviour has a dual foundation:
First, it is impossible to go against what nature inclines us to. Second, having gotten on well by adopting a cer-
tain line of conduct, it is impossible to persuade men that they can get on well by acting otherwise. It thus comes
about that a man’s fortune changes, for she changes his circumstances but he does not change his ways.70

Nature and experience combine to create a fixed and unwavering character impervious to the vicis-
situdes of life. Like the easy rule of habit and convention in Feyerabend’s account of science, men’s
inclinations stem from natures which are relatively fixed and constant, so they are often unwilling or
simply unable to make the changes required to enjoy success when different methods are required.
The disjuncture between human psychology and the workings of Fortuna assures that fortune will
dominate human affairs. Regardless of circumstance, individuals can be expected to follow a consist-
ent path in their actions. If they are lucky, their character will suit the times and they will succeed;
otherwise, their failure is assured. Just as Feyerabend asserts that adherence to the habits engendered
by a single fixed tradition is inherently conservative, so Machiavelli posits that the stability of human
dispositions assures that men will eventual fall prey to Fortuna.

65
Ibid., 91.
66
Ibid., 90.
67
Ibid., 226.
68
Ibid., 452.
69
Ibid., 453.
70
Ibid., 453.
 442 M. K. DYER AND C. J. NEDERMAN

This is not a counsel of despair, however, any more than is Feyerabend’s conception of how a
tradition such as reason can entrap scientific inquiry. Rather, in Machiavelli’s view, if men could dis-
pense with a rigid set of character traits, if they could develop a flexibility of conduct, they would be
able to conquer their conditions and to live as masters of their own fate. This is remarkably similar to
the description of Feyerabend’s preferred scientist who succeeds and even excels at expanding
knowledge under conditions of open pluralism and continuous flux. Machiavelli employs the
term virtù to refer to the range of personal qualities that a ruler will find it necessary to acquire
in order to ‘maintain his state’ and to ‘achieve great things’, the two standard markers of the success-
ful exercise of power for him. Accordingly, there can be no equivalence between the conventional
virtues and Machiavellian virtù. Machiavelli expects princes of full virtù to be capable, as the situ-
ation requires, of behaving in a completely evil fashion. The circumstances of political activity are
such that conduct otherwise considered to be morally vicious can never be excluded from the
realm of possible actions in which the prince may have to engage. Machiavelli illustrates his point
with reference to various rulers who depended upon violence, treachery and dissimulation in
order to acquire and hold their states, most notably (and infamously) Cesare Borgia. This is in
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large measure the source of Machiavelli’s reputation for ruthlessness. But it is in fact the practice
of successful rulers that Machiavelli merely reports, just as it is simply the practice of effective scien-
tists that Feyerabend recounts. To blame either thinker for stating what he observes is on par with
shooting the messenger.
According to Machiavelli, the prince who possesses virtù must above all else display a ‘flexible
disposition’.71 That person is best suited for office, on Machiavelli’s account, who is capable of vary-
ing his conduct from good to evil and back again ‘as fortune and circumstances dictate’.72 The
Machiavellian practitioner of politics requires, in effect, the sort of pluralism that Feyerabend
ascribes to successful scientific inquiry. Machiavelli envisions in the ‘Tercets on Fortune’ that should
the workings of fortune be ‘understood and fixed in his mind, a man who could leap from wheel to
wheel would always be happy and fortunate’.73 In a similar vein, Machiavelli uses the term virtù in
his book The Art of War in order to describe the strategic prowess of the general who adapts to differ-
ent battlefield conditions as the situation dictates.74 Machiavelli regards politics to be a battlefield on
a different scale. Hence, the prince, no less than the field commander, needs to exercise virtù, that is,
to know which strategies and techniques are appropriate to what particular circumstances. Virtù
denotes the diverse ensemble of personal qualities and traits that provide the touchstone of political
success.
Machiavelli repeatedly defends the view that the only truly safe means of acquiring a state is
through the exercise of one’s virtù, rather than by means of fortune, since rulers who depend
upon chance circumstance to maintain themselves are invariably frustrated in achieving their
goal. ‘He who depends least on Fortuna sustains himself longest,’ Machiavelli asserts, ‘Those who
… become princes simply through Fortuna may become so with little effort, but with much effort
sustain themselves.’75 At the same time, he realises that fortune is the source of all opportunities
to govern; no one can achieve rulership if he is opposed by fortune. But the examples of princes
held in highest esteem by Machiavelli are drawn from among those who ‘had from Fortuna nothing
more than opportunity, which gave them matter into which they could introduce whatever form they
chose; and without opportunity, their strength of will would have been wasted, and without such
strength the opportunity would have been useless.’76 This, then, seems to form the essence of

71
See Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I.138; Maurizio Viroli, How to Read Machiavelli (London, 2008), 21–2;
Miguel Vatter, Machiavelli’s The Prince (London, 2013), 107–11; and, especially, Corrado Vivanti, Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual
Biography, trans. Simon MacMichael (Princeton, 2013), xi, xv–xvii, 20, 38–9.
72
Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, 66.
73
Ibid., 747.
74
This point is emphasised by Neal Wood, ‘Machiavelli’s Concept of Virtù Reconsidered’, Political Studies 15 (June 1967), 159–72 and
Russell Price, ‘The Senses of Virtù in Machiavelli’, European Studies Review 3 (1973), 315–45.
75
Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, 25, 27.
76
Ibid., 25.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 443

virtù: knowing when one is well situated to act and grasping the opportunity. Virtù provides the abil-
ity to respond to fortune at any time and in any way that is necessary. The flexible student of history
and cosmology who Feyerabend claims would be the most successful scientist has educated himself
in such a way that it would not be far-flung to suggest that he too possesses virtù. This researcher is
successful because he is not beholden to consistency and convention and has the ability to see oppor-
tunity, act upon it, and generate bold new ideas.

4. From Feyerabend to Machiavelli

We claim that key elements of Feyerabend’s conception of science have heretofore unexplored
counterparts in Machiavelli’s approach to the analysis of politics. Feyerabend’s insistence that one
must study what scientists actually do, in particular at times of scientific change, echoes the Machia-
vellian emphasis on the close investigation of actual political practice. Feyerabend’s assertion that no
rational process or pattern can be found to account for the development of scientific knowledge res-
onates with Machiavelli’s conception of the irrational operation of fortune. Feyerabend’s contention
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that method-driven scientific practice at any given time is inherently conservative because of the
habitual cast of scientists’ minds seems consonant with the basic precepts of Machiavellian psychol-
ogy. Finally, Feyerabend’s advocacy of unconstrained pluralism in the conduct of science coincides
with Machiavelli’s proposal that only the ruler’s possession of a flexible disposition might defeat the
workings of Fortuna. On all of these dimensions, it is not implausible to view Feyerabend as the
methodological heir to Machiavelli, even if unwittingly. Our point, however, is not to engage in
an exercise in hunting intellectual paternity. Rather, we propose that reading Machiavelli through
the lens of Feyerabend permits us to recuperate Machiavelli as a legitimate contributor to the
truly ‘scientific’ study of politics, where science is understood in terms of a fundamentally practical,
irrational, habitual and pluralistic exercise, rather than as constrained by a ‘logic of discovery’ or by
community-bound standards of inquiry (along the lines of Popper and Kuhn).
Making sense of Machiavellian political science, furthermore, offers intriguing, although disrup-
tive, suggestions for the discipline. In political science, we might say that the insistence on rigorous
method corresponds to conventional moral virtue; theory-driven approaches are praised and ad hoc
inquiry scorned. In the same way that the mirror of princes genre tied commonplace conceptions of
a fixed and virtuous character to successful rule77, the naïve understanding of science, on Feyera-
bend’s account, preaches to its practitioners that the dogged adherence to a single standard of inves-
tigation alone assures the growth of knowledge as well as professional success. Feyerabend’s claim
that scientists exalt method even as they ignore or transgress its principles in practice brings to
mind Machiavelli’s advice regarding those traits that are generally exalted yet must sometimes be
overlooked in order to maintain power. Machiavellian virtù demands the flexibility that best guar-
antees the ruler that he will be able to achieve success or ‘great things’, even as he must make every
effort to appear to possess the conventional virtues. This seems to apply to Feyerabend’s science
almost as well as it does to Machiavelli’s vision of politics. As an enterprise that attempts to uncover
‘the secrets of nature’ and to expand human knowledge, even the spirit of conquest—ever prominent
in Machiavelli—can be said to make an appearance in this account of science.78 For Feyerabend, the
great advances in science commonly require the scientist to be ‘trickster’, even a con artist, as the
example he offers of Galileo demonstrates. Yet Galileo is lauded even today for his accomplishments
in moving forward scientific knowledge. As a figure both heroic and, from a strictly methodological
77
See Cary J. Nederman, ‘Machiavelli and Moral Character: Principality, Republic and the Psychology of Virtù’, History of Political
Thought 21 (2000), 351–55.
78
In one instance, Feyerabend even seems to invoke the somewhat infamous comparison Machiavelli makes in Chapter 25 of the
Prince, in which Fortuna, being a woman, is more likely to be mastered by audacity and force rather than by cold calculation. An
(almost surely unintentional) echo of this can be found in Feyerabend’s claim, made prior to the publication of Against Method,
that a pluralistic methodology, with multiple cosmologies at the ready, changes science from a ‘stern and demanding mistress’ to
a ‘yielding courtesan’. See Paul Feyerabend, Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, (Cambridge, 1981), 161.
 444 M. K. DYER AND C. J. NEDERMAN

point of view, despicable, Galileo’s approach to inquiry resembles in not insignificant ways the path
to Gloria—that is, fame, praise and honour—that Machiavelli ascribes to the successful ruler.
Applying a Feyerbendian conception of science to the science of politics (and seeing Machiavelli
as a practitioner thereof) does not necessarily signal the end of objectivity, the death of rigour, and
the granting of licence to all scholarly vice. After all, we are looking to Machiavelli to learn about the
realities, the effectual truth, of politics. In light of his arguments concerning the subtle interplay of
virtue, vice and their appearances in public affairs, we are directed to consider political science in
terms of the rhetorical devices (some might say tricks) that its practitioners employ under the
guise of ‘real’ science in order to persuade others of the discipline’s legitimacy as the sole means
of comprehending its subject matter. In turn, the assimilation of Machiavellian to Feyerabendian
science points us away from the self-conception among political scientists that they are engaged
in an orderly gathering of facts and theories according to which each new development builds
upon its predecessor(s) and stimulates the growth of new knowledge. Feyerabend constantly reminds
us that science is a public and very human affair, and so, too, it seems, is political science. And even
Machiavelli grants that there exists conduct not worthy of the name of virtù, conduct which is sha-
meful and incompatible with glory.79
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5. Conclusion
Machiavelli understood very well that success in politics entails inherently unruly and disruptive
activity, and hence that political analysis must mirror this reality. In this sense, a Machiavellian pol-
itical science claims no strong predictive power; the forces of fortune are too great for any version of
science, conceived in terms of laws or universal norms, to tame. As Alasdair MacIntyre insists, it was
‘Machiavelli’s belief that, given the best possible stock of generalisations, we may on the day be
defeated by an unpredicted and unpredictable counter-example—and yet still see no way to improve
upon our generalisations.’80 Recent history has repeatedly borne out such a conclusion—consider the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of political Islamicism, the mass uprisings in the Middle East. Of
course, accepting this perspective would lead to a chastened, inclusive and tolerant practice (or
rather, practices) of political science, since no theory could (or should) be entirely ruled out. Such
a political science is fundamentally antithetical to the bolder assertions of naturalism defended by
so many disciplinary advocates today. A blending of Feyerabendian and Machiavellian perspectives
represents a fundamental challenge to the dominant self-understanding of political science (at least
as found in the English-speaking world, especially in North America).
Doubtless there will be many who judge the proposal for a reconstructed political science based
on the convergence between leading Machiavellian and Feyerabendian themes to be shocking or
untenable. What is left of the rigour, the objectivity, the rationality that represent the highest aspira-
tions of scientific inquiry? The answer, simply put, is that these supposed features of science (whether
in the study of physical nature or of human behaviour) never existed to begin with; they were merely
chimeras employed by scientists in order to persuade themselves and others of the uniqueness
(Feyerabend might say, the inhumanity) of their enterprise. When we study the on-the-ground
way in which science actually proceeds, as Feyerabend proposes, we discover that it is as much a
form of human activity, with all of the psychological and rhetorical baggage that involves, as any
other practice. It is science as a whole, not just ‘political’ or ‘social’ science, which must be removed
from a pedestal and examined with close scrutiny. This is the most powerful lesson offered by Feyer-
abend’s vision of what it means to engage in science. Science is neither exceptional nor isolated from
human affairs, and any demarcation is only ever a formalistic enterprise. Furthermore, to impose
standards that attempt to create or enforce such isolation only interferes with fruitful scientific
inquiry. So it is that political science can continue to count itself a science, but one now reconfigured
79
Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, 36.
80
MacIntyre, After Virtue, 93.
 HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS 445

along the lines of other sciences, as conceived by Feyerabend. Machiavelli assists us in this enterprise
by showing us concretely what such a political science might look like. We are certain that many
mainstream political scientists will not be happy with this outcome, but they should at least acknowl-
edge the potential consequences of a Feyerabendian perspective on the character of the larger scien-
tific project. Under the terms set by both Feyerabend and Machiavelli, political science must, like
other sciences, come to see itself as a human endeavour.

Acknowledgements
Versions of this article have been presented at Tufts University in 2011; the Midwest Political Science Association in
2012; and Duke University in 2013. The authors acknowledge the audience members and fellow participants in these
venues for their challenging and substantive questions and suggestions, which have sharpened the focus of our argu-
ment. Likewise, we wish to acknowledge the constructive comments made by the external reviewers for History of
European Ideas. Dede Bright stepped in at the last moment with some greatly appreciated editorial assistance.
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