The Prince - 2 - Taking Power, Earning Power, and Being Wicked
Part 2 (Chapters 5 - 8)
Quote
... a wise man should always enter those paths trodden by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if one's own virtue does not match theirs, at least it will have the smell of it.
Notes
🔥 Where a city is accustomed to its own laws or to living in freedom, the only real way to hold on to them is to destroy them. Machiavelli writes, "because such a city always has a refuge in any rebellion in the name of liberty and its ancient institutions, neither of which is ever forgotten ... The memory of ancient liberty does not and cannot allow them to rest." Though he says it might work if the prince can go and live there in person.
🔥 When taking a new city, a lot depends of the quality, or virtue, of the new prince. You can't only rely on Fortune.
🔥 Machiavelli mentions Moses, from the Bible, as being a great leader of a new principality. Moses, he says, must be admired for the "grace that made him worthy of speaking with God."
🔥 Fortune offers great leaders the opportunity, and their strength allows them to capitalize on hit. A prince needs both luck and skill.
🔥 There is nothing more difficult than trying to introduce a new political order. You will always have lots of enemies in this, basically all the people who profited from the old system. Also, "people are fickle." It may be easy to make them believe something at first, but it's hard to keep them believing it over the long term. You will eventually need to use force to hold the new order in place.
🔥 A prince who gets his power by luck or having it given to them by someone else (both of these fall under the category of Fortune) is vulnerable, since he hasn't developed any skills to really earn the power that he has. Things that grow too rapidly, Machiavelli says, can't develop any roots. He cites as an example all the Greek leaders who were given power by Darius back in the days of the Persian Wars in Greece. They didn't get their by their own merit, only by being willing to bend the knee to Darius.
🔥 He tells a story (which he admits is somewhat of a tangent but still important to include) about a Duke who works at maintaining his power after having won it by force. Machiavelli says "this matter is worth noting and being imitated by others." The Duke takes over this region and it's in chaos, "full of thefts, quarrels, and every kind of insolence." He decides the region needs a strong, authoritative government to bring order back, so he gives authority to a man who he knows is "cruel and unscrupulous." This man brings order, but the Duke realizes he's also breeding hatred with all his cruelty. So the Duke goes in and has the man killed — literally cuts him in half — so the people will think that he, the Duke, saved them from that cruel and brutal leader. "The ferocity of the spectacle left them satisfied and stupefied at the same time."
🔥 In cases where you do get power through someone else, you need to lay your own foundation. That means getting a loyal army and winning people over to you.
🔥 Next he discusses people who gain power through wickedness. His first example is Agathocles who became king of Syracuse. He rose up through the ranks in the army (Machiavelli says he "lived a wicked life at every stage of his career"). After earning some authority this way, he calls together a meeting with all the leaders and makes it seem like he wants to discuss matters of the state. Then he has his army kill everyone there so that he can take all the power. Machiavelli acknowledges Agathocles's skill in acquiring power for himself, but he also says that "it cannot be called virtue to kill one's fellow citizens, to betray allies, to be without faith, without piety, without religion. By these means one can acquire power, but not glory."
🔥 Another issue with taking power this way is that your own citizens might come after you. "This depends on whether cruelty be badly or well used," Machiavelli says. If you strike quickly and then use what you did for the benefit of your subjects, that's using cruelty well. But if you keep being more cruel and wicked throughout your rule, that's using cruelty badly. "Those who follow the first method can remedy their standing," he says, "both with God and with men."
Thoughts
Some hints here that Machiavelli isn't totally without morals. He says that people who are purely wicked can't earn glory. And he discusses the idea of a prince remedying their standing with God. So maybe he's drawing his moral line a lot lower than most people would, but he is drawing it somewhere.
Also, it's odd with the story about the Duke who appoints a cruel leader to govern a region and then kills him so that he (the Prince) can look good and earn the people's favour — is that not a kind of betrayal of an ally? How come that kind of deception is to be admired whereas the example of Agathocles is wickedness (though he also admires some of the skill of it). A little bit hard to read what's okay and what's not, according to Machiavelli.
Lastly, I also found it interesting the way he recognizes the power that liberty has with people, how it rallies people to it and how they never forget it. He sees it as a powerful force, maybe like a force of nature, but ultimately it's just a factor that makes taking power more difficult. The fact that liberty has so much power doesn't spur any questions about whether or not that says something about liberty being a natural or positive characteristic of a state. It's just something that, for a prince, is in the way of their taking power.