The Prince is a treatise on political power – how to claim it, how to keep it, how to defeat one’s enemies. It is also a book written to please a prince. Its tone is one of servility, for it was written to an actual Prince to curry favor and to secure some scrap of power and a living for Machiavelli. It is a book about how a sovereign can achieve and sustain power and an examination of the levers of power and how to operate them. It is not a moral examination of how best to wield power for the common good.
A definition of power operates within the context of how this question is to be answered: what is the nature of political life? Machiavelli asserts that “Life is routinely and sometimes unspeakably cruel and … a ruler may have no choice but to kill or be killed.”
I began reading The Prince when I had almost finished reading Eckart Frahm’s Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire. A prominent king, Esarhaddon, once boasted “Before me cities. Behind me, ruins.” The use of terror to claim territory and power is old as cities and nation states. History certainly seems to support Machiavelli’s assertion.
The first empire was a theocracy. It began the patterns we associate with most empires – it was ruled by a king, it kept slaves, it used war as a means to extend its economic and political influence. It used diplomacy with the threat of unspeakable brutality that would follow if an independent state would not submit. The king kept a harem. Women were little more than chattel. Good Assyrian Kings were “strong and ruthless.” The definition of good in this context is one who stays in power by whatever means are necessary and therefore ensures the stability of his State.
The ‘good’ kings were almost universally megalomaniacs. One wanted this to memorialize him: “I am king, I am lord, I am praiseworthy, I am exalted, I am important, I am magnificent, I am foremost, I am a hero, I am a warrior, I am a lion, and I am a man.”
Does that sound at all familiar? Can you not think of half a dozen current world leaders and political figures who have said something similar?
Or this as well – there are many steles that show proskynesis, the act of prostrating oneself in a solemn gesture of respect. A submissive prince once came to Nineveh to “kiss the feet of my royal majesty and sweep the ground with [my] beard.”
That too sounds familiar. Again, can you not think of a slew of names who have made themselves sycophants to the worst human beings just so they can be near the exercise of power?
Machiavelli demands that we see the exercise of political and national power as a Darwinian struggle for survival for the leader and for his or her polity. He argues that such is the way of the world.
In succeeding Posts, I will address his arguments.
