The Prince (Criticism)

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of literature and creative writing at College of Lake County, Illinois. In the following essay, he questions whether The Prince can be considered useful for the modern student.

Is it prudish of me to focus on the obvious antisocial element that most people notice first when they read The Prince? Is it naive to reject the version of reality that he was selling? Each time I read this book, I think of what a good movie it would make, filled as it is with tough, cynical lines giving those who hold high office advice that would be more appropriate in jail: that only suckers play by the rules. I wonder about our motives as a society, about what we hope to gain when we read this.

Like most good novels, its attraction to us is mixed — it can teach us something about the world, but it is also (and this is a facet too frequently ignored) a fine piece of entertainment. We shouldn't confuse the two and value it for what it is not. The Prince calls itself a primer for novice politicians, and it is full of iron-clad truths, but it does not really offer much advice that can be applied to life in any practical way.

We should have no problem admitting that we enjoy reading Machiavelli: we like the serious, efficient tone of his cutthroat attitude, even while pretending that we don't. It has been nearly five hundred years The Prince was written, and still we read it, analyze it, discuss it and assign it in schools. Ninety percent of books written are not in print five years after their initial publication, let alone fifty years or a hundred. There must be some reason for his popularity.

I think that there is an aspect of entertainment to be drawn from an idea like "cruelties badly or well used," that our culture is constantly trying to think up ways to fill that mysterious category of "cruelties well used" at the same time that it wants to tell us that cruelty has no place in the civilized world.

This ideal prince belongs to a long history of imaginary characters who make their own laws. Increasingly, as the world has gotten more crowded and laws more restrictive, we dream up do-gooders who transgress the conventional morality in their search for some higher good. There have always been, and always will be, the Zorros and Billy Jacks and Dirty Harrys and Buffy the Vampire Slayers, using bad means for good ends, and Machiavelli's ideal ruler falls right in with them.

The book explains that the prince must use cruelty sometimes, or else his subjects will quit their support of him and leave the government defenseless against anarchy and eventual overthrow by persons who would not use their cruelty so well. Our culture is brimming with antiheroes who are forced to step over to the dark side and engage in immoral behavior in order to preserve morality.

Their appeal may stem from a sense that the prevailing social order is absurd. It may come from an inherent sadism that, in a desire to watch somebody take advantage of somebody else, twists the rules of what is acceptable to make such bullying just. The important thing is that this rogue element is and always has been entertaining, a crowd-pleaser, and this is the category where I think The Prince belongs.

It is more problematic to consider The Prince an educational experience. It was written as a handbook — its only stated goal is to advise anyone who might come into control of a Renaissance city-state on how to maintain order. Compassion has no place except as a tool for keeping the people's support. Yet most of us are not princes, and we do not live in principalities. We have a right to wonder what this book has to offer beyond its entertainment value.

The book would be well worth serious attention if only because it has the educational value that any five-hundred-year-old artifact has. Curious Americans go to Colonial Williams burg and wonder what the seventeenth century must have been like; they visit Civil War battlefields that saw action less than a hundred and fifty years ago. The works of Shakespeare (almost a century after Machiavelli) are important to us today because of the writer's artistry, but a common person's diary from the same time is also important for telling us who we are and where we come from.

Simply, the value of The Prince becomes one of those unsolvable chicken-and-egg questions about which came first: is the book valuable because it is so old, or have we kept it around to reach this old age because it is so valuable? Either way, we all have to agree that there's something useful there.

Unlike the common person's diary, which might or might not provide a few interesting bits of information here and there, The Prince appeared at a transitional point in world history — when the past meets the future. The book can serve as a portal between our world and medieval society. We can generalize by saying that the world Machiavelli was rebelling against was one ruled by religious assumptions that supported political systems that had been handed down intact for centuries.

Just as Renaissance artists made their marks by cutting through tradition and organizing their works according to their own innate sense of rationality, so too Machiavelli and Renaissance political scientists evaluated ideas based on their effectiveness. Unlike most progressives who have no patience for quaint, old-fashioned ideas, he treated such ideas as threats to the security of the principality.

When studying history, it is always enlightening to look at the examples that connect two different eras, and shows one way of life at the moment it evolves into the next. The Prince represents a moment of political transition, and for that, it is worth the modern reader's attention.

The advice the book offers, though, is hardly any more useful to us today than a medieval broadsword would be. No one can deny that his rules work, but why should we be impressed with that? There has never been any mystery about winning a fight by being the first one to throw the rules aside and resort to eye gouging and punching below the belt: it is the problem of playing within the rules that makes winning difficult. Manners go stale right out of the box. When the rules are ridiculous (which happens much less than they seem), then it is easy to agree with the suggestion that we crumple them up and start again.

Yet The Prince doesn't simply suggest that we give up obscure niceties like helping old women across streets: it tells political leaders they should lie to their subjects, and then lie about why they lied when they are caught; it tells them they should lure others into positions of trust, and then kill them; it tells them to hide behind others when their crimes are found; and to start wars even when there is no reason to, just for the sake of keeping the troops sharp.

Scholars since the Renaissance have been scandalized by The Prince — and for good reason. Machiavelli's rules do not make sense, and would only lead to disastrous policy. They rip out any hope that social order could be based on cooperation and replace it with sham cooperation. Do politicians need to be trained to act in their own self-interest? A power-mad, would-be dictator would look to Machiavelli to justify his or her actions, but ruthlessness flourishes enough without teaching it in schools.

If life is a jammed freeway, Machiavelli is the one who tells certain self-important people that they deserve to pull of onto the shoulder of the road and drive past everyone else. That sort of advice wasn't even good for society when there actually were royal personages around.

Yet we still endure generations of historians who praise Machiavelli for telling it like it is, for having the guts to stand up against a society that tries to suppress his frankness, as if from fear. They treat him like the lone honest voice in the wilderness.

By necessity, this stance requires one to look at the advocates of honesty and peace as dreamers, as pie-in-the-sky idealists. There really is no reason to think that believing a "hit them before they hit you" attitude is any more "realistic" than cooperation, although the less aggressive approach would, with no other evidence, be the sort of thing people would like to imagine.

There's no reason to equate backstabbing with reality. Idealizing treachery does not do anyone good except the treacherous, and the point of having a society is to minimize — if not eliminate — treachery. Lying and killing are not good for the general public, no matter how much Machiavelli dresses them up as the lesser evils when stood beside anarchy and social unrest.

If lying and killing are not for the public good, then it seems strange we would treat these guidelines as pearls of wisdom dropped at our feet. We wouldn't accept bank robbery or drug running as "effective" methods of raising money, although they can be — Machiavelli's recommendations to the prince are irrelevant when they are applied within a moral system, and they are blandly obvious in a place where morality is left out of the equation.

We have enough trouble getting politicians to do the things they say they will — who needs them reading books that tell them that honesty is irrelevant? If Machiavelli is "telling a truth that nobody else dared to tell" (a courageous line that graces the posters advertising movies about those antiheroes mentioned before), we might want to think about why no one has told it before.

A recent news article about the leader of a nationwide crime gang that made billions of dollars in drugs and extortion each year describes him as "smart and manipulative, a reader of Machiavelli who tried to project a positive image through food giveaways to the poor." This is the sort of "prince" who might use Machiavelli's advice, although it seems more likely that he already knew which opponents to kill, which underlings to threaten, before he had the time in prison to catch up on his reading.

It's more likely that he bought a copy of The Prince once and left it around unread, and the mag-azine writer picked up on it as a neat way to contrast the thuggishness of gang members with a methodical political education. It is no contrast.

The Prince can feed our imaginations about people claiming rights over and above those granted to ordinary people, and it can teach us history, but its advice has always been more ornamental than useful.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• A seminal philosophical work on the nature of politics, Politics was written by the Greek philosopher Aristotle after 335 B.C.
• Machiavelli's view of the world is applied to the modern political scene in Michael A. Ledeen's Machiavelli On Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules are as Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago (1999).
• Giorgio Vasari was a painter during the Renaissance. First published in 1550, his book Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Artists reminisces about his acquaintances with many of the key artists who lived in Florence during Machiavelli's time, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Brunnelleschi.
• Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss historian whose writings changed the way historians looked at the past, ushered in a new perspective on the Renaissance period. His 1860 book A History of Italy in the Renaissance is a groundbreaking work that introduces readers to Machiavelli, the Medici family, and many other key figures of the time.