Machiavelli reads the classics

Harvey Mansfield’s translation of The Prince includes Machiavelli’s letter to Florence’s ambassador to Rome, Francesco Vettori. Mansfield notes that the letter “has been called the most celebrated in all Italian literature” (107). In it, he describes a typical day and how he finally has a chance to read and the end of it:

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them. And because Dante says that to have understood without retaining does not make knowledge, I have noted what capital I have made from their conversation and have composed a little work De Principatibus [On Principalities], where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject, debating what a principality is, of what kinds they are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost. And if you have ever been pleased by any of my whimsies, this one should not displease you; and to a prince, and especially a new prince, it should be welcome. So I am addressing it to his Magnificence, Guiliano. Filippo Casavecchia has seen it; he can give you an account in part both of the thing itself and of the discussions I had with him, although I am all the time fattening and polishing it. (109, 110)

The work is, of course, The Prince. Mansfield notes that Machiavelli’s reference to Dante is from Paradiso, V, 41-42.

I first read or heard of this letter in grad school, and it was good to encounter it again.

The Hundred Years’ War

The Hundred Years’ War 1337–1453 by Anne Curry

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Curry does well in sketching out the events of the war in brief, but it is told in a rather dry fashion. More background on medieval warfare would have helped. The most useful part of the book was the explanation of how the war affected civilians, who were purposely targeted by both sides. They were often the target of cavalry raids or of routiers, unemployed soldiers who supported themselves by pillage. I also learned that French troops raided southern England quite a bit: for example, Southampton was devastated by a raid in 1338 that occurred during Mass (interesting tidbit: the soldiers took the town seal and over 95% of the wine). These raids and high taxes levied by the monarchies contributed to uprisings during the war.

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Power for its own sake

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve read this before in other translations, and I enjoyed Mansfield’s this time. As has been said many times before, Machiavelli’s ideal prince is one whose virtu (usually translated virtue) allows him to triumph over internal and external enemies. For him, virtu is manly, strong, and ruthless when necessary, allowing the prince to accomplish his supreme goal of keeping and expanding his power. His insistence that moral principles are only good in politics as far as they are useful is still a striking feature of his argument.

3 stars: enjoyable for its analysis of the messy world of politics and Mansfield’s presentation, bad for its advice untethered from ultimate right and wrong

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Europe before the First World War

Philip Jenkins wrote a short column for Real Clear Religion that gives some examples of the foreboding that haunted modern European culture before the outbreak of the war. Here’s an example:

Painter Wassily Kandinsky was no less fascinated by angels and imminent judgment. In 1912, Kandinsky edited the legendary manifesto Der Blaue Reiter, which cultural historians regard as an epochal movement in European Modernism. But we lose the religious significance of the name when we use too literal a translation of the school’s German name, calling it the “Blue Rider.” It actually refers to a Blue Horseman, and the movement was born as a protest against a gallery’s decision to reject Kandinsky’s painting of the Last Judgment. That cosmic finale lay at the heart of European Modernism. In 1910, painter Natalia Goncharova created her stunning image of the archangel Michael, the leader of the heavenly hosts in Revelation’s final battles.

Tools for tyrants

Discourse on Political Economy/The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had never read The Social Contract, but I knew the one-minute summary of it and knew the effect that it had on the radical French revolutionaries like Robespierre who carried out the Terror. It was good to see his whole argument.

Christopher Betts’ edition also includes Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy, a contribution to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia. It was good to read this first and get an understanding of earlier development of his thought, including the early development of his famous idea of “the general will”:

The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it, and which is the source of laws, is, for all members of the state and in relation to it and them, the rule of what is just or unjust; a truth which (I mention in passing) shows how little sense there is in the way so many writers have treated as theft the Spartan children’s compulsory acquisition of their frugal meals by stealth, as if anything ordained by law could not be lawful. (7)

I found Rousseau’s concept of society and government fascinating but troubling. I had always thought that he believed that people gave up all of their rights to government, but instead he argued that people gave up all individual rights to society in order to gain the increased freedom of being in society. For Rousseau, the social body formed by a contract between individuals is all-important, and everything else (including government and religion) serves the interest of that body. The government (whatever form it takes) is the executive branch, while the whole body of the citizens passes the laws.

From my admittedly elementary knowledge of Rousseau, I believe that he would have been horrified at the uses to which his ideas were put by the Jacobins during the Terror in France. For starters, he idealizes the city-state, not the large nation-state, kingdom, or empire. He writes in The Social Contract that the people who give their lawmaking power to representatives have given up their sovereignty. Also, he almost certainly would have seen that the “particular will” of the radical revolutionaries was dominating the general will of the French people.

But Rousseau leaves a lot of tools lying around for potential tyrants. The supremacy of society’s rights over any individual rights, his concept of the general will, the figure of “the legislator” who guides the people into understanding their best interests when setting up a constitution, and his confidence that the majority of the people will ultimately come to the right decision (unless society is already sick) are (and have been) potent intellectual weapons in the hands of bad governments.

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An intellectual history (that needs more context) written for a wide audience

The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West by Mark Lilla

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Stillborn God was a fascinating read. Lilla traces Western thought from the early modern period to the 1930s, identifying two broad schools of thought. The first begins with Thomas Hobbes and his argument that religion is completely subjective and therefore cannot be used as a basis for politics. Lilla sees in this the modern Anglo-American separation of church and state and the secular basis for political thought and policy. While Hobbes himself was an absolutist, others like Locke made a case for a more liberal and secular order.

On the other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that religion stemmed from what was good in man, even if it was still subjective. From here, Lilla narrates the intellectual history of this idea, incorporating Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and the liberal German theologians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The “stillborn God” of liberal theology, he argues, could not help but disappoint and produce new arguments for messianic movements like communism and Nazism.

Lilla is a clear partisan of secular politics, but also recognizes the fragility of modern liberalism: it cannot speak to ultimate things. Still, he believes, it must be guarded because of the terrible possibilities that lie outside it, whether they be the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries or the bloodbaths of the 20th century. A condensed form of his argument can be found in this article.

Lilla tells his story well, but there are some weaknesses. First, he accepts the usual simplistic religion leads to violence narrative, which William Cavanaugh dealt with very well in The Myth of Religious Violence. Cavanaugh’s work shows another weakness of Lilla’s argument. The wars of the 1500s and 1600s did not happen just because of disagreements about theology. The centralized European state, and the resistance that it provoked among local interests, was more of a driver of these wars than theological disagreements. Lilla refers to the development of the modern state only a couple of times in the book, and more context would have better grounded his analysis of the intellectual history of the time.

James K.A. Smith points out these weaknesses better than I do, and since I read his review before I read the book I imagine that he primed me to look for them.

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Rousseau and Hobbes

A passage in The Social Contract is quite resonant with Patrick Deneen’s interpretation of Hobbes. Deneen writes that Hobbes hoped to free the individual by reducing the power of other institutions. Here is Rousseau:

The second relationship [after political law, the constitution of the state] is that between the members of the state themselves, or between them and the whole body, and this relationship should be, in the first case, as slight as possible, and in the second as close as possible; in order that each citizen should be perfectly independent of all the others, and extremely dependent on the state; and this is always achieved by the same means, since only the strength of the community can create freedom for its members. (Book II, Ch. xii, p. 89 of Christopher Betts’ translation)

Rousseau vs. Locke: Rousseau on property (part 3) and the individual’s right to life

Twice before, I have posted about Rousseau’s views on property (here and here). In The Social Contract, Rousseau states that property is made secure in society. “The right of the first occupant,” he writes, “is more real than the right of the strongest, but it does not become a true right until the right of property has been established” (Book I Ch. ix, p. 60 of Christopher Betts’ translation). This establishment happens in “the civil state,” which is created by the voluntary social contract among individuals. In the civil state, an individual becomes a member of a community, a unified “public person” that has a “general will” to which all of its members are subject. For Rousseau, this means that each person is obeying himself, since he is bound to others in the social body (Book I, Ch. vi, pp. 54-56). Strictly speaking, he is not saying that the government is all-powerful, since there is a difference between the community of people, which is sovereign, and the government, which is set up to do the community’s will. I don’t think that this distinction has ever held up among Rousseau’s philosophical descendants.

But the civil state, unlike in Locke’s understanding (where the government protects “life, liberty, and property”), does not create an absolute right to property. It is limited to what the individual needs, and this need is determined by the community. There’s a parallel with his rejection of the absolute individual right to life as well. Christopher Betts notes that Rousseau argues against Locke’s argument that people cannot give their lives to a sovereign since they don’t have the right to dispose of their own lives (see James Rogers’ exploration, where he notes that “Locke argues that life is an inalienable right precisely because God owns us and, therefore, we do not own ourselves”). For Rousseau, on the other hand:

The purpose of a social treaty is the preservation of the contracting parties. He who wills an end wills the means to that end: and the means in this case necessarily involves some risk, and even some loss. He who wills that his life may be preserved at the expense of others must also, when necessary give his life for their sake. But the citizen ceases to be judge of occasions on which the law requires him to risk danger; and when the ruler has said: ‘It is in the state’s interest that you should die’, he must die, because it is only on this condition that that he has hitherto lived in safety, his life being no longer only a benefit due to nature, but a conditional gift of the state. (p. 71)

As you can see, there are massive possibilities for abuse opened up by this logic, even if Rousseau was not trying to create something like the French Republic or the Soviet Union.

Hat tip for Locke article: Rick Hogaboam

Rousseau and Aristotle: society makes people fully human

Yesterday, we started to discuss Rousseau’s The Social Contract in my modern Western Civ classes. In the ancient-medieval-early modern course, I assigned some excerpts from Plato and Aristotle. There was an interesting overlap between Aristotle’s and Rousseau’s conception of the relationship between the individual and the state.

Here is Aristotle (in the excerpt The Politics that I assigned) on the origins of the city-state:

Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.

Further, the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that. But things are              defined by their working and power; and we ought not to say that they are the same when they no longer have their proper quality, but only that they have the same name. The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A              social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with arms, meant to be used by intelligence and virtue, which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society. . . .

Rousseau (Christopher Betts’ translation for Oxford World’s Classics, Book I, Ch. viii, p. 59):

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, replacing instinct by justice in his behavior, and conferring on his actions the moral quality that they had lacked before. It is only now, as the voice of duty succeeds to physical impulse and right to appetite, that man, who had previously thought of nothing but himself is compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before he attends to his inclinations. Although, in the civil state, he deprives himself of a number of advantages which he has by nature, the others that he acquires are so great, so greatly are his faculties exercised and improved, his ideas amplified, his feelings ennobled, and his entire soul raised so much higher, that if the abuses that occur in his new condition did not frequently reduce him to a state lower than the one he has just left, he ought constantly to bless the happy moment when he was taken from it for ever, and which made of him, not a limited and stupid animal, but an intelligent being and a man.

Rousseau thinks that people are social because of circumstances rather than nature, but it’s interesting that they express the effects of society in a similar way. Rousseau must have read Aristotle, although I don’t know the extent of the latter’s influence on the former.

The Reformation period and state power

William Cavanaugh’s provocative book The Myth of Religious Violence has a chapter entirely on the Wars of Religion, a period that is critical to the myth that he is trying to debunk: that religion inherently leads to violence, while the modern state saved us by privatizing it. He lists many cases during the wars of the 1500s and 1600s where fighting did not follow confessional lines but instead featured Protestants fighting Protestants and Catholics fighting Catholics. He argues that the modern state was instead a key cause of the religious wars because of the effort of rulers to subject local and regional power centers to their rule. These tensions, in addition to doctrinal issues, fueled the resistance of nobles to the French kings and Holy Roman Emperors. Cavanaugh doesn’t mean to say that people never kill for religious reasons, but rather that the common narrative that necessarily connects religion and violence is not well-founded in fact. He argues that in early modern Europe, religion and politics were not two separable things.

Here are some lecture notes for my class tomorrow on Cavanaugh’s explanation of the confessionalization thesis and the “sacralization” of the monarchy and state:

• Confessionalization thesis: mostly relates to Germany
  • Reformation allowed for states to be constructed upon confessional lines: Calvinism in Prussia, Catholicism in Bavaria
  • Church-state fusion as bureaucracies promote uniformity in faith and practice resulting in good subjects
    • Standard confessions and liturgy, morality “enforced by frequent visitations of local churches by officials of church and state” (170)
    • In Protestant countries rulers could claim to be heads of the church (functional leadership of the church in Catholic countries)
  • Displacement of traditional religious practices and local institutions by official state forms (like “Baroque Catholicism” vs. “peasant communalism of mountain villages” in Salzburg)
  • Example of Osnabrück region in Holy Roman Empire (171)
    • 1624 visit by bishop’s general vicar: 73 parish priests: 19-20 Lutheran, 13-14 Catholic, rest unclear
    • Alternating occupying armies during the Thirty Years’ War meant that the religion shifted back and forth, leading to a lack of concern about identification and people of different “tendencies” worshipping together
• One can even argue that
  • the Edict of Nantes fits here, as it was meant to be only a temporary measure and provide for the eventual conversion of the Huguenots
  • and the English Civil War does too, as the Prayer Book controversy in Scotland was an attempt to standardize religion, and the English king was the head of the church
• “Sacralization” of the monarchy and state
  • 1400s: Charles VIII entered Rouen to the titles of “Lamb of God, saviour, head of the mystical body of France, guardian of the book with seven seals, fountain of life-giving grace to a dry people, and deified bringer of peace” (174)
  • 1500s: French king as a priestly and even godlike figure, leading of course to Louis XIV
  • Both French kings and Elizabeth I of England borrowed symbols from the feast of Corpus Christi; other kings and emperors used divine symbols
  • France: use of language about church to describe country: body, caritas, martyrdom