NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, oil on canvas by Santi di Tito; in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.
Is it better to be loved, or feared?
“The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other; but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.”
“Love and fear can hardly exist together… men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.”
“It is much safer to be feared than loved because …love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”
“Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.”
“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.”
The quotes are from Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, written about 1513 A.D. in Italy. His role model for this political treatise was the conqueror Duke Cesare Borgia, illegitimate son of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia who later became Pope Alexander VI after his (Rodrigo’s) uncle Pope Calixtus III. “Borgia embodied the mix of sacred and earthly claims to power that marked Renaissance Italy. Appointed a cardinal at 18 years old by his father, Cesare’s true vocation after six years was waging war and acquiring wealth. A brutal, ruthless, but often brilliant soldier, he had one obsessive aim: to carve out a state for himself and his clan in central Italy. His unstoppable success was under the formidable protection of his elderly papal father and the entrenched Borgia dynasty (National Geographic Magazine, Oct. 23, 2020).
“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception,” Machiavelli wrote in The Prince.
“A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.”
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
Some scholars see Machiavelli’s Borgia as the precursor of state crimes in the 20th century. Others, including Macaulay and Lord Acton (who said, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”) have historicized Machiavelli’s Borgia, explaining the admiration for such violence as an effect of the general criminality and corruption of the time (Machiavelli’s Virtue, Harvey C. Mansfield, Chicago: 1996).
“Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires,” Machiavelli says in The Prince.
“The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all.”
“It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.”
“The end justifies the means” is a paraphrase of Niccolò Machiavelli. It means that if a goal is morally important enough, any method of getting it is acceptable. In Machiavelli’s words: “Let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.”
“Men in general judge more by the sense of sight than by the sense of touch, because everyone can see but few can test by feeling. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few know what you really are; and those few do not dare take a stand against the general opinion.”
“Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.”
Many think Machiavelli’s The Prince is a satire. The Oxford Dictionary defines “satire” as a genre of literature that uses humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Machiavelli indeed shows the daggered irony of how cunningly deceptive, manipulative, and ruthless the princes of middle Europe were, in his time, and how these despots got away with it — to be bad and yet accepted by the people. British philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell once said, it is “a handbook for gangsters.”
To celebrate the book’s 500th anniversary, the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences history department discussed why Machiavelli’s masterwork continues to resonate. “Some say he wanted to empower tyrants; others say he listed their crimes the better to expose them. Readers across the ages have found support for all kinds of causes: monarchists, defenders of republics, cynics, idealists, religious zealots, religious skeptics. Whatever its intent, one thing is clear. The book follows its declared purpose fearlessly and without hesitation: to show rulers how to survive in the world as it is and not as it should be” (bu.edu, Feb. 6, 2013).
Machiavelli himself was a “survivor.” He from whose name comes the pejorative “Machiavellian” qualifier, quite cunningly maneuvered himself in critical government posts (foreign service) through the changes among the powers-that-be in the turmoil of the 16th century flux of the Renaissance. He has been given the honorific title of “father of political science” by some admiring political analysts.
Machiavelli wrote The Prince just after he was forced to leave Florence as a political exile. Dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the book is Machiavelli’s advice to the current ruler of Florence on how to stay in power. It was also his effort, though unsuccessful, to gain an advisory post in the Medici government. Yet The Prince was not even read by the person to whom it was dedicated, Lorenzo de Medici (insights.som.yale.edu).
“The advice espoused in The Prince led his name to become shorthand for cunning, manipulation, and self-serving behavior— one of the few eponymous adjectives to strongly convey an abstract idea. His open appeal to guile and his subversion of Christian norms were regarded as so abhorrent that, in 1559, the work would be listed in the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books” (natgeo.com, Oct. 23, 2020).
But Machiavelli’s ideas on how to acquire power and glory as a leader had a profound impact on political leaders throughout the modern west, helped by the new technology of the printing press.
Leaders as diverse as Oliver Cromwell, Frederick the Great, Louis XIV, Napoleon I, Otto von Bismarck, and John F. Kennedy read, contemplated, and debated Machiavelli’s ideas. “The most one can say about The Prince in this regard is that Kissinger and Nixon preferred it as their bedtime reading” (penguinrandomhouse.com). Napoleon I of France wrote extensive comments to The Prince. After his defeat at Waterloo, these comments were found in the emperor’s coach and taken by the Prussian military. According to their biographies, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini wrote a discourse on The Prince and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin read The Prince and annotated his own copy.
Does Machiavelli, therefore, share some blame for the violence and brutality that has wracked the globe since he first wrote? No. “People don’t need The Prince to be inspired to commit every atrocity it names and more,” the forum at BU for the book’s 500th year anniversary concluded. “The impact of the book has instead been to force countless readers over the past 500 years to confront, in the starkest terms possible, the most important questions about politics and morality.”
And time must be looping, as in an automatic replay video, livestreaming strong-man rules in countries big and small, young and old.
“In order to get a secure hold on new territories,” the book advises, “one need merely eliminate the surviving members of the family of their previous rulers.”
It is terrifying how “the end justifies the means” is the backdrop of the to-the-death fight between Russia and Ukraine for territory. Ukraine claims that Russian casualties since February 2022 were 386,230, staggeringly high, but broadly corresponding with estimates from the US military and intelligence officials that Russia has suffered 315,000 dead and injured troops in the full-scale invasion. If accurate, this means Russian casualties are equivalent to almost 90% of the total personnel it had when the conflict began in February 2022. A New York Times report in August cited US officials who estimated the Ukrainian death toll at close to 70,000, with another 100,000 to 120,000 wounded. “Ukraine’s goal is not liberation of the territory. Ukraine’s goal is the elimination of the military threat from Russia, and the liberation of territory would be only a sequence of the main goal,” Ukrainian officials said (Newsweek, Feb. 1, 2024).
“Whoever conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself,” Machiavelli says in The Prince.
More than the liberation of territory for the sake of the people, the goal of the leader is to keep his power. The great leader, Machiavelli says, must be able “to conquer by force or fraud, to make himself beloved and feared by the people.”
And in our own little country, we live in fear at not knowing the truth, not knowing where we are being led to.
Machiavelli says princes are obligated to lie in certain circumstances. He also states that “while it is unnecessary for the prince to have positive qualities, such as honesty, trustworthiness, sympathy, compassion, or be religious, it is essential for the prince to be viewed so by the public” (ipl.org).
And we, the “vulgar” masses, must bow to the fathers and sons/daughters of warring political dynasties like in Machiavelli’s time.
“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar,” Machiavelli taunts us all.
Amelia H. C. Ylagan is a doctor of Business Administration from the University of the Philippines.