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Not Just the Tudors
Machiavelli
00:46:26
Who was Machiavelli - a name synonymous with cunning, deceit and a lack of morality?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors Ad free To get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:28]
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- [01:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Niccolo Machiavelli lived in an age of uncertainty. He was nine years old when a foiled plot against the Medici saw some 80 conspirators executed, its central figures hanged from the Palazzo della Signoria and left for weeks as a warning. He bore witness to the rising power of Lorenzo de Medici and his excommunication. Before his exile saw the end of Medici rule and the restoration of of the Republic of Florence, Machiavelli attended at least one sermon by the fanatical Savonarola before the preacher's calls for radical reform saw him executed for heresy. As a politician and diplomat, Machiavelli held the positions of secretary of the second chancery and secretary of the 10 of war, and visited the courts of Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Louis xii, King of France. He observed the infamous Cesare Borgia during his military campaigns and creating a Florentine citizen army before he too Lost everything in exile, Machiavelli reinvented himself once more as a writer and historian with the work for which he is best now remembered, the Prince. My guest today is Dr. Erika Benner, political philosopher and historian. She teaches at LSE Ideas in London, the Hirty School for Governance in Berlin, and for programs in China and Sweden. She's written extensively on Machiavelli's life and work, including Machiavelli's Prince, A New Reading and Machiavelli's Ethics. Her landmark biography, Be like the Fox. Machiavelli's lifelong quest for freedom is a dazzlingly sharp reflection on Renaissance politics and the eternal allure of absolute power. Her new book, Adventures in Democracy, the Turbulent World of People Power, has recently been released, and I'm delighted that she's joining me today to talk about Machiavelli. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors. Dr. Benner, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:54]
Dr. Erika Benner
Thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be here.
- [03:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I can't really believe that we've managed to go this long without talking about Machiavelli. His ideas were so important and have remained so important for so long. But perhaps let's start at the beginning with some biography. He's born in the same year as Lorenzo the magnificent rose to power, 1469. How important do you think the social and political background of Medici Florence was to both his upbringing and his later outlook?
- [04:26]
Dr. Erika Benner
I think it's huge. I used to read Machiavelli as a political philosopher without knowing anything about the history. I used to teach it in that way, as I think many professors have to do, because he's part of a course on Plato to NATO. But until I actually read more about the Medici background, I didn't really understand how important it was for him in framing all of his basic concepts and especially big question of what form of government is the best form of government, which is the big question overarching everything from Machiavelli. The Medici were a princely family, you know, as he characterizes them today. They were extremely wealthy, and they came to power not through sort of, you know, constitutional approval or any sort of election. They kind of came to power by virtue of their money and their connections without any formal endorsement until much, much later in Machiavelli's life, and he was grappling the question of is this a good thing, or would it be better for Florence to have its traditional form of government, which was a republic, where, you know, many, many men in the city participated as citizens.
- [05:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And if we're trying to situate Machiavelli's life in this context, how possible is it to accurately reconstruct the narrative of his life? What kind of evidence do we have?
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Dr. Erika Benner
It's very, very hard to be clear about what his motives were in thinking the way that he did or saying what he said in his writings. What we do have are letters. We've got his own correspondence with a lot of friends and with people he was working with in the government before the Medici came back into power after a period of exile. We have one diary of his father, which doesn't say much about politics at all directly, but we can pick up a few clues from it about the father's situation. And one very striking feature of the family situation was that Machiavelli's father and Machiavelli himself were prescribed from full citizenship. Neither of them was allowed to. They had a very marginal role in the government. Machiavelli was allowed to be a civil servant, but he was not allowed to stand for magistracies. And his father was even more marginalized. We don't know exactly why that was. The evidence we do have is that there was probably some sort of tax deficit, that somebody in the family hadn't paid their taxes. And the Makhivadi, his dad couldn't afford to pay for them either. But there was also a connection that Machiavelli alludes to in one of his writings, the Florentine histories of family opposition before Machiavelli was born to the Medici's power. And this he does discuss in his Florentine histories. Apart from that, lots of little shreds and patches that we've got to try to kind of work out for ourselves. So for a historian, like a hardcore historian, who wants hard evidence for everything, it is really, really tricky to sort of say with any confidence this is what was going on.
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And one of the things that's often said about Machiavelli is that he's a humanist. What does it mean when we say this in this context?
- [07:43]
Dr. Erika Benner
Well, the humanist movement, of course, was partly reacting against the overbearing intellectual, cultural and social power of the Catholic Church, the rediscovery of ancient texts that were not very well known or not known at all. After the fall of Byzantium came into Europe, lots of ancient Western texts came into Byzantium, and especially Greek texts that were not known before. The Greek texts, of course, were pagan, they weren't Christian, and a lot of them tended to put human beings very much at the center of ethical questions and political questions, much more than the Catholic Church had. So Machiavelli was part of this movement, intellectual movement, that was, on the one hand, trying to put human beings much more at the center of politics, of moral questions, instead of thinking all the time, what would the Church or God say about this? But also at the same time, reacting against the Church in all sorts of very subtle ways, because it was hard to be directly critical of the Church. So one thing that. One among the many things that people disagree about in reading Machiavelli's text, the one thing that most people do agree with is that he is subtly and sometimes very cheekily critical of the Catholic Church.
- [08:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Let's have a think together about his life as a diplomat and a politician. So you've mentioned this question about whether it was necessary for Florence to return to being a republic. And indeed it did in 1494, after almost 60 years of Medici control. And it leaves behind a kind of power vacuum and fuels the radical reformist movement led by Savonarola. Can we start by thinking about Machiavelli's view of Savonarola? What did he make of this fanatical preacher?
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Dr. Erika Benner
He found him fascinating. We have some letters that Machiavelli wrote. Some of the earliest correspondence we have from him to some friends refers to Savonarola. And he's fascinated by his rhetoric. He sees it as very much what we might call populist rhetoric today. Savonarola is. He's got this rhetoric of criticizing the corrupt elites, the corrupt government elites, criticizing the corrupt church authorities and saying, we need to have a massive, massive reform. What we would call a very, very puritanical set of reforms is what Stavonarola was after. And Machiavelli was, on the one hand, horrified by his puritanism, because Machiavelli was a fun loving guy. All of his letters attest to this. He did not like people telling him what he could eat, drink, or who he should love. But he was fascinated by the rhetoric. He thought the rhetoric that Saponarilla used to criticize the elites was. Was powerful. It was appealing to him in a lot of ways. But he ultimately thought he was bad for the republic. Machia, at this point, we do have a new, very fragile republic, as you say, after Medici had been an almost tyrannical power. Machiavelli describes it at some point as a tyrannical power before they fell. And Machiavelli is enjoying the freedom immensely. And he does not want to see his new republic going in a direction, you know, from a secular tyranny of one princely family to a religious tyranny exercised, even if it is by a critic of the Catholic Church in Rome. He wants something more free, more republican. And that's the constitution of this post Medici. Florence was very, very strongly republican. It had a lot of safeguards to try to check the returning power of any sort of princely individual family. And Machiavelli shared that. Savonarola had this kind of appeal to a lot of people.
- [11:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How did Machiavelli's own political career develop?
- [11:22]
Dr. Erika Benner
Well, we don't know every detail. It seems that he had a lot of friends in the humanist educated circles who are more upper caste than he was. He was not what we would call someone of the patrician background. He was from the well educated and highly regarded middle class kind of background. But he did have friends in high places. Florence was a small town and probably through some of these contacts, he was allowed to take a position as a minor civil servant. And he went from there very, very quickly to quite powerful or influential positions because he. He was full of ideas. I mean, he went in as a sort of minor diplomat who was sent out on very small missions to other Italian city states to try to persuade this or that ruler of Emilia Romagna or somewhere else in Rome to, you know, Florence's interests. But from there, he started concocting this idea of a civil militia, civilian militia, which was a traditional institution that Florentines had had two or 300 years earlier, of citizens who were trained to defend their city instead of foreign Mercen mercenaries. By the time Machiavelli's born, Florence's defenses were almost entirely mercenary. And so he wants to restore the civilian militia. He had some amazing and very clear ideas about how he wanted to do it and badgered his superiors all the time. Can you please kind of try to get this on the agenda and fight for it? And this became something that attracted a lot of people quite high up in the Florentine government, because they thought that if you want to kind of keep the Medici out, it wasn't just a question of external defenses keeping the French out, it was a question of keeping the Medici out, because they had been sent into exile and were not allowed to come back into Florence. And creating a civilian militia was a way of kind of training, educating ordinary men, farmers and others in the city to kind of have a sense of patriotic duty that gave them a sense of their own importance in the city, which is a republic, not a principality. It was a way of trying to create the sense of you actually have a stake as citizens of the Republic. You're not just here to serve us, you're taking part in a militia that is also about you and your city, and in that sense, give them a kind of stake in keeping a republican form of government instead of welcoming some sort of new future principality.
- [13:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So can we draw some parallels between the establishment of that citizen militia and the strengthening of the Republic and Machiavelli's own personal advantage or personal advancement? Does he use the militia to his advantage?
- [14:08]
Dr. Erika Benner
I don't think he does. I mean, he did, I don't think the motive for it. From everything one reads at the time, and there's a lot of correspondence that he wrote also it's between friends, but also with senior colleagues. But also what he writes afterwards, we can see that this is a passion for him. This is something that when he says, you know, I love my city more than my soul, which is a very famous Republican Machiavelli quote, as opposed to all the kind of nasty, tyrannical ones, this really comes through in everything he says about the civilian militia. He passionately wants to find an institution that can bring in men of Florentine who live in the area of Florence but are not full citizens because they don't have enough money or because they're farmers and not actually living within the bounds of the city. He really wants to create some way to bring them in because he thinks that is the key to a strong republic. It's not just institutions that are staffed by political elites and wealthier citizens. It's also something that you've got training, you've got men who are going to go in there and work together and take time off their work and be committed to this kind of sense of we are the core of our city's security. And he writes about this in the Prince as well. In chapter 12 of the Prince, he writes about the civilian militia in a very kind of powerful way that says the point of the civilian militia isn't just to keep out the foreigners, it's also to build a sense of dignity among lower class citizens. And. And he also says, of course, in. In both his laws, the laws he proposes about the militia and in the Prince, that they should be paid to do this. It's paid work. It's work that gives them sort of a sense of recognition in the city. They go out in public and they display their training and do their shows in the. In the marketplace, and everyone is impressed with them. So it's a really Important thing, friend. Does he use it? No. But it's true that his boss at the time, Soderini, who had. By the time Machiavelli pushes this through, he'd become. Sorrini had become the gonfalonier of Florence, which was a top leadership position. And the Florentines had allowed him to have this for life, which was very controversial issue in the Republic. He and Machiavelli became very close. And because Machiavelli successfully, with Soderini's help, managed to push through the civilian militia, a lot of Soderini's opponents saw Machiavelli as a big troublemaker and focused a lot of their ire on this young upstart who wasn't even one of their class. They also saw, of course, the civilian militia as potentially threatening to any sort of patrician dominance in the city, because if you do kind of have an armed citizenship of the lower orders, they might use it against the upper orders itself some point. And this was a very big concern that caused all sorts of political problems for Machiavelli.
- [17:03]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Can we talk a bit about what he learned as a diplomat? I'm aware that he observed Cesare Borgia on his military campaign. So he's seeing all that intelligence, all that cruelty, all that ruthlessness, and his downfall ultimately. What can we learn about their interactions.
- [17:22]
Dr. Erika Benner
That we can we. We got some fantastic sources because Machiavelli was serving Florence as an official, sort of lower level diplomat, slash intelligence gatherer at the court of Cesare Borgia for quite a long time. And he wrote down his impressions. He was sending back correspondence, diplomatic correspondence, to Florence on a regular basis. Now, it isn't always easy to interpret because some of it, of course, had to be written in a highly diplomatic, if not coded way. And writing in a slightly coded way or sometimes very directly coded way was part and parcel of the diplomatic activities of the time. But Machiavelli loved to write. He was very cheeky. We see from his earlier writings as well, that he always liked to play word games and liked to sort of tease and yeah, that is, he writes about Cesare Borgia are very playful. They already use concepts that come up in the prince later on, like, oh, he's the most fortunate prince I've ever seen. He's the most fortunate young man. And we read that now, not knowing the context, and we think that must be high praise. That must be. He's saying, God, this guy's lucky. You know, the gods pay for him. But for Machiavelli, saying, somebody is a prince of Fortune is saying something very specific. It's saying he gets things so easily, they come falling into his lap, but he doesn't know how to hold them. Or if he does, he's got to develop that skill. Fortune can guarantee that you get stuff quickly. It doesn't guarantee that you can maintain your power. And he never says in those letters, cesare is a virtuous prince. And if you go back and read your prince, you'll see that Cesare is the star of the chapter seven on the Princes of Fortune. He is not the star of the chapter on the Princes of Virtue. And he was, of course, the son of the pope. He got everything handed to him on a platter. Son of the pope who got lots of money through his dad to create military. He got a state handed to him, the territories handed to him because of his father, the pope. And Machiavelli notes all this and says, wow, how impressive his achievements are. But the question he's always asking in his correspondence, as well as in the prince later on, which builds on it, is, did all that stuff getting handed to this young man help him to create and build a solid state, or was all the luck that he had in acquiring these foundations of a new state actually something that weakened his ability to kind of hold it? Was he a bit spoiled?
- [19:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Is there perhaps a quality there? I was thinking of a sort of 1530s contemporary, Thomas Wyatt, who writes of the slipperton of court's estates. Is there something there about the, you know, fortune's wheel, basically? So you may have risen high on it, but then you may well fall.
- [20:17]
Dr. Erika Benner
Absolutely. And Machiavelli, as you mentioned in the introduction, Machiavelli was a writer, a literary writer, and that wasn't just after he ended up being thrown out of political power. Some of his earliest writings were poems. They were sort of poems about. And one is called Di Fortuna, and it talks about. It's really interesting. It was written in 1508 or 1509. So this is after Cesare Borgia and his father, Pope Alexander, had kind of fallen. They'd risen amazingly, and then they collapsed, for all their apparent glory and glamour and power. And Machiavelli says in this poem, if you look at Di Fortuna, if you look at what fortune does, and. And you look at the history of Fortuna, you see Caesar and Alexander rising and falling. Well, of course, in Italian, Caesar is Cesare and Alessandro is Alexander. That's Cesare and his father. And he does say that fortune is something you cannot rely on. We think of Machiavelli often now, as the guy who said, oh, fortune, you've got to learn how to play fortune like a woman, you've got to learn how to beat her, and then you can get what you want. But actually it's not that clear cut, because what he's saying most of the time about fortune is you've got to learn not to rely too much on it. If you happen to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth or a father who's a pope and has lots of money and friends in high places, you might be able to turn that to interest, sort of a solid, steady power base. But how you do that requires lots of political lessons that are much harder to learn than any than Cesare ever learned, is what he. What that's what you see in the correspondence reading the Prince, it's more ambiguous because everything Machiavelli writes in the Prince is ambiguous.
- [22:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So how not to treat fortune, how not indeed to treat a woman. But also during this time, he's, as a diplomat going to the court of Maximilian I, he's observing the French court of Louis xii. Do we have a sense that those experiences also were adding to his understanding of power and its instability? I mean, continuing this theme?
- [22:31]
Dr. Erika Benner
Yes. I mean, he's constantly obsessed when he's out there working as a, you know, working very hard as a diplomat and an intelligence gatherer. He's also, you know, quite fascinated by the big emperors and the big kings, Louis, Louis XII and Maximilian. And he wants to see what these big states are able to do vis a vis the small states and small city states like Florence and the other Italian city states. And instead of being in awe of the big power, he's always sort of trying to see what are the weak points and how are they trying to kind of enlarge themselves. He's very interested in how states start off being quite modest, centered on one ruler, one sort of territory, and then sort of expand. And he is really interested in the question what modes of expansion, as he calls them in the Discourses, can actually help you maintain what you gain. So his key distinction, this is something I don't think many modern readers are that clear about. He's really interested in this key difference between acquiring and maintaining power. First chapter of the Prince, very short. He says there are two ways to acquire and maintain power. Fortune and bet you fortune is better. If you want to acquire power, fortune hands you something, you fly high really fast. But how are you going to maintain it? Is that easy? Can I give you a few rules of thumb that are going to teach you how to do that. If you read really carefully all the way through and also his letters from these courts of the great Kings, you see that he's saying no. It's actually really, really hard work to maintain power and it requires all sorts of skills that cannot be summed up in a simple word like be ruthless. Better to be feared and loved at all. You've got to read him really carefully, read his examples as he tried to observe these individual rulers and gain much subtler lessons from what they did.
- [24:44]
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- [25:14]
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- [25:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, I wanted to come back and do a little bit more work together on the Prince in just a second, but just one more bit of sort of factual biography, which of course is his banishment. So with the dissolution of the Florence, the Florentine Republic in 1512 leads to his banishment. What, what had led to the dissolution.
- [26:15]
Dr. Erika Benner
Itself, the dissolution of the Florentine Republic? Well, there had always, from the beginning of the 1494 Republic, there had been instability. There had been friends and relatives of the Medici who wanted them back or who were very, very closely connected with their now defunct and unpopular regime. The contestation never really ended. So this is a short lived Republic. It lasted 18 years and all the way through its history it was unstable because there were different families fighting for power. The Medici were also there in Rome, getting more and more powerful within the Catholic Church. And one of the Medici scions became Pope Leo I. And Pope Leo, Pope Leo X, he was the first Medici to become the Pope and indeed the first Florentine to become Pope. So this is a big, big thing. So they were getting all this power outside Florence and trying to use it inside Florence at the same Time. So there was never know a battle between the Medici supporters and the others never really stopped. So when the. When the republic finally collapsed, when it collapsed, Machiavelli, at the time of its collapse, was very close to the. The leader, Soderini. He was singled out among all the different people who were serving the Florentine government in some capacity to be kicked out of his post. And he and his assistant by the only two people who were formerly kicked out in Zipos. And some months after that he was a note was found that had his name on it among the names of other people who were said to have been making a conspiracy against the returned Medici. This resulted in Machiavelli being pulled into prison, tortured. He writes about this in a little poem. And he was expecting to be executed actually at this point, because several other people who were charged had been executed. But then Pope Leo was declared pope, the Medici was declared Pope and he offered a general amnesty to all political prisoners. So Machiavelli got lucky that time. He was released from prison, but he was not allowed to go back into government activity and went into exile. And some months later we hear about him having written a little book on principalities, which he writes that in a very famous letter to his friend Francesco Torri in December 1513.
- [28:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So how much is the prince, therefore the product of a man who's lost everything?
- [28:52]
Dr. Erika Benner
I don't believe that he thought he had lost everything. What he says at the very in the introduction, the dedication to the prince, he says, I'm writing this. He dedicates it to Lorenzo de Medici the younger, a young prince from the Medici family, who at that time had very little power at all. But he dedicates it to him, says, I'm writing this to you. You are way up there, you have everything, you have power. You are a prince. I'm just a man of the people. I'm based. But one thing, I do have knowledge. And he doesn't say, you don't know anything. But it's very, very cheekily suggestive that I have knowledge, I know a lot. And he's very confident about what he knows. And if you read everything that Machiavelli had written before he wrote the prince, then you realize how much confidence he had about all the things he knew. Not just because he'd experienced so much and observed so many different types of rule, but also because he'd been built, he'd been using his brain in a very individual and analytical way to try to understand how different forms of power can support long standing states or actually, even when it appears to be very secure for a while, produce long term weakness. This is what he's really interested in. He's not only interested in telling princes how to get power, he's always interested in saying, first of all, you need a good kind of rule, because otherwise it's not going to last that long, or if it does, it's just going to make everybody miserable, as the Roman Empire did in the long run. And he says that very clearly. But you know that you need much more than that. So I don't think he thought he had lost everything. He'd lost political, he'd lost his political post. But he kept trying with his friends. He's still well connected. Lawrence is tiny, as I said, everyone knows everyone else. And he's got friends still in very high places who are depressed, as he is by the Medici return, but they're still friends with the Medici. So he doesn't stop trying. That's one of his maxims, never give up hope, personal or political. Keep trying. And I think he's, in a way, throws himself into this new role of, I'm going to do it with my pen if I can't do it out there in the political fields.
- [31:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So given he's got this dedication to a member of the Medici family, what light does that throw on the fact that we're often told that the prince puts forth this case for acceptable tyranny? The end justifies the means. What should we make of that?
- [31:21]
Dr. Erika Benner
Well, that's what I used to think when I first used to teach Machiavelli. But as somebody who hadn't had time or energy to go and explore the history behind the text and let alone understand most of the examples that he brings up in the text. Because I think the prince nowadays, it's really hard for us to read, unless you're really a specialist historian of the period, and I'm not. I started off reading it as a political philosopher and I didn't know who Cesare Borgia was. I had no idea who is Pope Alexander, you know, his father and you know, all the other people he mentions, what was their significance? And when you don't know the examples, you can't really try to see what Machiavelli is doing with those infamous quotes. He's got these infamous quotes and you read it. The experience of reading the prince nowadays is you pick it up for most people and you skim it and then something strikes you. Better to be feared than loved. He doesn't actually say the ends justify the means, but he says things that go in that direction. He seems to be praising deception, especially in the person of Pope Alexander Joseph Borgia's father. And you just think, okay, this is amazing. This guy is so different from anybody else. He's saying something outrageous. And we've all heard the reputation of Machiavelli, the Machiavellian, and we assume that that must be the core of what he's saying. So what I think, you know, what's very hard to do is go and say, what's the context for these quotations? Why is he saying this? Very often he's throwing out something outrageous and then giving you an example of somebody who behaved in this outrageous way. If you explore those examples and what he says about those people elsewhere, often in the Discourses, which is his other famous work, rather than the Prince, he often says very different things about the same characters. Or you'll see from his diplomatic, you know, text that he was sending back report from the diplomatic field that he's very, very critical of, say, Ferdinand of Aragon, who he seems to praise to the skies in chapter 21 of the prints. So it is really hard work to read the Prince judiciously and to not be tempted and pulled in by these, you know, fantastic, sexy, Machiavellian quotes and think, that must be the core. Now, I'm going to interpret what he says about these examples that I'm not so familiar with in the light of that quote, taking them very literally. The other thing to remember is Machiavelli. He is a comic writer. He's got a famous letter later in his life where he describes himself as a historical writer, comic writer and tragic writer, historian. He wrote a history of Florence later in life. Tragic. He sees the whole history of Florence as quite tragic. But comic writers, much more obvious because he wrote comedies. He wrote comedies both in his exile period, but also the first writing we've heard, we've got any mention of. But Is Lost was a comedy, a very, very cheeky comedy, probably about Savonarola making fun of the church. But his relative, who was supposed to look after his. His estate, hid this piece because he didn't want the church to get hold of it and. And, you know, bound everything that Machiavelli wrote, which they did anyway. But it's just to say he was playful in the. In the Prince. Once you get to know Machiavelli a little bit more through other writings, you start to see that he's funny, and you start taking every single thing he says as if it's some dark, utterance of some dark, tyrannical advisor.
- [35:04]
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Dr. Erika Benner
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- [36:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, this is how it is read at the time, one of his most staunch detractors, Cardinal Reginald Paul, recognized that the Prince was not in fact an instruction manual. Are you suggesting that it is possible, perhaps even useful, to read the Prince as a piece of irony?
- [36:35]
Dr. Erika Benner
I absolutely do suggest this. I don't. But I think it's a little more complex. And I'm not the first person to say this. Let me first contextualize, because it sounds today like such an outrageous thing to say, that it's really important to recognize, as you've pointed out, that early readers, most of Machiavelli's early readers recognize that this was some kind of irony in the prince. Not every single point is ironic, but there's a lot of irony there. And either you had detractors like Cardinal Paul, who was, you know, he was a high up, a cardinal. He was in the Catholic Church. Machiavelli is critical of the Catholic Church. He's got a whole chapter on ecclesiastical principalities in the Prince. You can read it today and not realize it's ironic, but I think that's really hard. It's so cheeky. It's such a cheeky chapter. And anyone picking that up in his own time would have realized that this person who's saying these amazing states, they don't need humans to run them, they just run all by themselves, you know, and they never do wrong. Whatever they do, they bounce back. It's very, very cheeky stuff. He was a Catholic, he was a monarchist. And the princes also got all sorts of very subtle critiques of any sort of monarchical rule and very, very subtle recommendations for, you know, republican forms of rule as well. One of the most passionate chapters in the Prince is Chapter 5 on Freedom of republics. And after he has a very kind of cold start in the first few chapters and seems to be just analyzing things very dispassionately, and you think, okay, this is. An analyst comes to chapter five, he said at the beginning of the Prince, I'm not going to talk about republics, I'm only going to talk about principalities. But suddenly, chapter five, he bursts into song and starts talking about republics and says that they are freedom fighting entities, that people who live in republics don't tolerate anybody trying to put them down without a huge, huge fight. And it's dramatically. It's an amazing piece of drama. Remembering again that Machiavelli is a dramatist. The Prince isn't the cold treatise. It's full of drama. A lot of that drama is satirical, but a lot of it is also kind of passionate or very subtle defense of the form of government that he grew up trying to defend until he was chucked out of power, and probably that his family was in favor of defending before that as well.
- [39:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So what does it say then that to be Machiavellian has come to mean a willingness to be ruthless, to be cunning in the pursuit of personal goals? The legacy doesn't seem at all fair.
- [39:14]
Dr. Erika Benner
No, I mean, it doesn't. And I think now, you know, 500 and, you know, years after the Prince, we're sort of stuck with the label Machiavellian to the point where even I don't mind, you know, I'm all right with people describing this or that contemporary politician or historical figure as Machiavellian. We know as long as we know well, we don't necessarily have to know it. I know in my own. I believe that it means he described that sort of behavior. I think, you know, lots of his early readers also thought that that's what he's doing. He's describing a kind of behavior that seems to be an attractive and forcible way of getting power, but actually doesn't help you to hold it and brings a lot of tyranny and other things in its way. Here's another point that I think is really interesting about the Prince that I was quite late to realize. He never uses the word tyrant ever in the Prince or tyranny, not once. Now, everybody and everybody and their grandmother who wrote about politics in the ancient medieval world or, you know, up until his time, they all talked about tyranny and Tyrann Machiavelli very pointedly does not use that word or any cognates. But in all his other writings, including the much longer Discourses written around the same time, there's no, we don't know the exact gap between princes and Discourses, but there's so much material that's absolutely identical or similar that likely, I think he was sort of writing them all at the same time. There we have the standard classic tyrant's tyranny. And he's very, very damning about tyrants and tyranny. Tyranny means, for Machiavelli, in the Discourses and everywhere else, what it means for all the classical authors. It's an excessive, illegal, you know, form of rule that is no longer government and that stands outside the rule of law and usually produces absolutely terrible effects in the long term, even if in the short term it produces a certain semblance of stability. He's absolutely clear about that. He also. Also another interesting point related to that. The Medici did not want to be called princes. The Medici claimed all the time that we are just very citizens, we're the leading citizens, we're not princes. Now, if you called yourself a princet in those days, it recalls the Roman early Roman Empire, of course, where a princess was what the new supposed defenders of the ancient Roman Republic like Augustus were calling themselves. But in fact they were tyrants in the eyes of their critics, like Cicero. Machiavelli is calling in the prince. Hello, prince. He's addressing the prince to a prince and he talks about princes all the time. This is cheeky. And if we don't realize this or we try to write it off as well, I guess one plausible explanation seems to be, oh, he's trying to legitimate this idea of the prince or the tyrant. He's trying to sort of whitewash all the negative press that princes and tyrants have had in the humanist era and of course, in ancient times. That's the usual explanation of why he doesn't do that. I beg to differ because in all his adjacent writings around the same time, he's using the classic terminology and putting the same values to it.
- [42:35]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So if we were then to define Machiavelli's own ethics, how would we do that? Where would you end up?
- [42:42]
Dr. Erika Benner
Well, I would say that he's the classical humanist. I started off working on Machiavelli thinking there's something going on here that's very, very similar to a lot of ancient Greek texts that I'd been reading as well, which is again built on by the Romans. There's no big gap between the ancient Greek and the ancient Roman texts, as some people claim. They're very continuous. But I think his priority is freedom, self determination. But Liberta is very important for him in a political sense. And he thinks that human beings thrive most when they are able to shape their own destiny collectively and individually. In order to do both of those things collectively and individually, you need to have a good political framework. And that's where freedom has to be shared between different people. So freedom isn't just me doing whatever I want, whether I'm a powerful prince or just an ordinary guy. It's having a political framework that allows power to be shared on a relatively equal basis, where everybody's power is limited and everyone's freedom is limited. But that way you can have a kind of shared form of freedom that allows human beings to enjoy all sorts of progress, to develop, you know, wealth and a good life for people and sustain polities. This is the key thing for him. His key question is, I want to sustain polities. I want to, you know, he studies in the discourses the example of Rome, because he's so interested in why did this polity as a Republic last for 450 years, which is a long time for any form of government that wasn't an absolute tyranny to. To last. And, and I think that's the basis of his ethics is self determination and self legislation. He thinks that people, they protect their state best when they're taking part in doing it. And that's why the civil militia was so important to him as well.
- [44:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
This has been a fascinating conversation and your work overturns so much of what has been written and said about Machiavelli. This is an object lesson, is it not, in the importance of situating texts of political philosophy or literature in their historical context and also against the other writings of any particular author.
- [45:02]
Dr. Erika Benner
I think it's an object lesson in that, in taking the context seriously. But again, there's context and there's context. That's the problem. And it's so easy to think about the kinds of context that would make more sense in our own times than in the past. And one of the most common readings of Machiavelli now comes from 19th century Germany, really, which was. He came to be read by people like Fichte and Hegel and then later Tritschke as somebody whose main concern was to create a nation state in Italy, something like a nation state to defend Italy and then later Germany against all these much bigger empires and powers. And that became, I think, the dominant reading of Machiavelli and his context. They think, oh, Italy had similar situation being so fragmented as Germany did during the Napoleonic wars. So Machiavelli is kind of, you know, prophetically saying this is what you need to do to unite. But Machiavelli's situation was very different and I don't think he was thinking of a big nation state at all. The context, kind of more detailed context that we need to know, it's hard to get. But Machiavelli does give us this wonderful, beautiful set of resources, namely his letters, his amazingly funny letters. I would recommend to readers, go and get his, you know, a big book of his correspondence and plunge in and you'll get some really good laughs. Read some of his plays. You know, he's got comic plays that are absolutely brutal and try to, you know, think of Machiavelli as somebody with a sense of humor instead of this dark, you know, tyrant, tyrannical kind of supporting prince. Just, you know, he's, he's a funny, light hearted, but also very serious person. And that's really, I think once we can read him that way and think about politics today and how much everyone's getting so dark and gloomy about looming tyranny. But you also see people trying to kind of say, lighten up, make even if there is the worst is about to hit you and we're going to suddenly get a cloud of tyranny over us in some modern republic, try to sort of think of faithful ways to undermine power. Machiavelli was brilliant at undermining the powerful by, with jokes, by basically just, you know, making fun of them, exposing them. I think that's part of what he's doing in the Prince too. It's not just a, it's not a cold satire, stepping back and making fun. He's also engaging with the Medici and teasing a bit and getting people to say, let's not be afraid of these people, analyze them, let's see how they're operating. Let's say in a funny way. We see what you're doing, don't panic, just know more. That's what he's doing.
- [47:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I think, well, that is so instructive. And I think it reminds us that it is so easy to miss the humor in history that jokes from 500 years ago kind of fall flat. Because jokes are always about context and actually that if we really want to try and get close to the minds and lives of people in the past, we've got to get all that sense of context so that we can understand what it is that they find funny.
- [48:26]
Dr. Erika Benner
Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Machiavelli would be sort of cheering on every word you just said. It's so funny.
- [48:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, Dr. Erica Benner, thank you so much for giving us this completely refreshing new way of looking at Machiavelli. And those who want to know more can pick up a copy of three books that you have written on him to find out more about his life, his ethics, and the prince itself. Thank you so much for your time.
- [48:54]
Dr. Erika Benner
Thank you. That was fun.
- [48:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit and also to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. If you enjoyed this episode, do go back and have a listen to some of our other episodes about the big names of the Renaissance like Michelangelo, Lorenzo de Medici, Marguerite de Navarre and Erasmus. The links are in the show Notes for this episode. We're always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetudorsistoryhip.com Remember, you can also listen to all of these podcasts podcasts on YouTube, and you can watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhip.com subscribe it is well worth it. And if you'd be so good as to follow Not Just the Tudors wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
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Dr. Erika Benner
Easy.
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