Lecture: Political Science II

Day: Wednesday, 18/03/2020

Continuing Machiavelli….

Machiavelli’s Political Theory

 Two requirement for social cohesion and moral regeneration are:

1. Stable Political Authority
2. Order

To ensure that a state requires unified polity, a republican and free government committed to the
liberty of its people.

 Machiavelli understood the realities of politics: lust for power, admiration of success,
carefreeness of the means/methods to achieve power, rejection of medieval bonds,
conviction that national unity means national strength and pragmatism.

Despite his admittance to the above realities he essentially remained an idealist; who
understood the importance of liberty, dangers of tyranny. Prince presents a realist to us where
as the focus of ‘discourses’ is liberty and republicanism.

 Human Nature: The individual is wicked, selfish, egoistic, fundamentally weak,

ungrateful, exhibitionist and artificial.
 Lacking honesty and justice man was ready to act in a manner detrimental to his
community. It was only under compulsion or for his own personal gain that a man
would act well.
 Man lived a chaotic life with limitless desires and limited resources.
 Like Aristotle, Machiavelli believed man to be a political animal. He recognized
the legitimacy of the conflict of interest in men which can redefine their political
association.
 According to Machiavelli a stable unified political authority could satisfy a man’s
need to be admired, respected and remembered and ensure the prevalence of the
civic virtue.
 Views on Morality and Religion: His views on morality and religion distinguished
Machiavelli from his predecessors.
 He made a scathing attack on the Church and the Italian clergy for keeping the
country divided and have forgotten their moral duty.
  Machiavelli was not anti-religion. His attitude towards religion was utilitarian.
Religion was necessary not only for a man’s social life but also for the health of
the state as it wielded great influence on the political life.
 As an indispensable part of the civic life, Princes could utilize it as an effective
political tool in their power struggles but with extreme caution.
 Religion was good only if it produced order and peace to usher fortune and
success. Religion was a social force without ant spiritual connotations.
 Religion appeased a man’s selfishness through its doctrine of reward and
punishment, therefore, it could be used to usher a better state
 Morality: For Machiavelli end was important and means could be moral or
immoral.
 Machiavelli separated the private and public spheres of morality. For him, state
had a morality of its own and private individuals at times had to display the
highest moral standards.
 In politics fair was foul and foul was fair depending upon circumstances and
situation. No general rule was valid, for everything became the matter of political
expediency.
 A Prince has to be compassionate, honest, humane and loyal while always being
ready to use force, fraud, deception and treachery.
 He was aware that civilization and a good society meant high moral standards but
he was realistic enough to accept that a society’s moral fabric was made or
destroyed by its people. Immorality applied to specific situations.
 Machiavelli separated religion from the politics and set a tone for the
secularization of thought and life.

Theory of State (Nature of Machiavelli’s state in The Prince and Discourses)

 State is a secular entity having nothing to do with the Church. It was morally isolated
with no obligation to anything outside itself.
 State was necessary as it existed to fulfill a human being’s desire for security and order,
for the protection of his possessions.
 A well-ordered state needed a strong government at centre, an integrated public authority
recognized by all and a citizen army.
 Good laws, religion and citizen army are the pillars of a strong state. It was the duty of
the ruler to create, maintain and efficient, loyal and disciplined citizen army to ward of
the potential outside threats.
 Citizen Army: 17-40 age group, well trained in arms and military skills, and
psychologically prepared to go to war if necessary. A citizen unwilling to fight for his
state lacked civic virtue.
 He cautioned the Prince to use the mercenaries as they could not be relied upon and they
could exhaust the treasury.
 Machiavelli was against hereditary monarchy and feudal nobility and established church
and clergy as they were the enemies of a stable state. The aristocracy ganged and looted
common people. These could be restrained with all powerful non- hereditary monarch.
 Machiavelli’s ideal state was a republic where rich didn’t buy the offices of political
importance and where nobles didn’t loot the commoners by recycling power among
themselves.
 He was against the use of force for private reasons.
 Machiavelli’s classification of the forms of government is rather unsystematic. The
treatment of government in his two major works is significantly different; rather
inconsistent and contradictory to each other. The 'Prince7 deals with monarchies or
absolute governments, while in the ‘discourses’ he showed his admiration for expanded
Roman Republic. There was nothing in Machiavelli's account of the absolute monarchy
corresponding to his obviously sincere enthusiasm for the liberty and self-government of
Roman Republic.
 In both forms his emphasis is on the cardinal principle of the preservation of the state as
distinct from its founding, depends upon the excellence of its law, for this is the source of
all civic virtues of its citizens. Even in a monarchy the prime condition or stable
government is that it should be regulated by law. Thus, Machiavelli insisted upon the
need for legal remedies against official abuses in order to prevent illegal violence.

Note: Sources for this lecture are IGNOU notes and Mukherjee and Ramaswami’s book
page no. 143-164.