After never quite grasping the epithet Machiavellian, reading The Prince directly with historical distance created shockwaves within me: has anything really changed since the sixteenth century Italy, are we doomed to reproducing the dynamics of power at the expense of the planet and all its inhabitants? Machiavelli offers logical arguments for the sustainable administration of principalities (as opposed to republics): “what all prudent princes ought to do, who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones” (27). He fancies himself a keen observer of human nature, from the highest examples of nobility to the faceless majorities that principalities encompass. While democratically-elected republics conform our current understanding of political spectacles, Machiavelli’s views on the ethics of statesmanship and the art of war can still inform our ways of interpreting the roles and actions of contemporary political actors.
While elaborating a robust ensemble of international affairs and public relations, princes are presented as actors in front of an audience, on the world’s stage, manipulating affects, bending the map to their will, the literal embodiment of the dialectics of power. Contemporary politicians and Machiavellian princes, using Schechner’s terms, are still urged to make their constituents and subjects believe their hegemonic discourses on domestic as well as international issues; with the world spiraling towards the right and fascism, we are made to acquiesce to their belief systems, to take part in their secretive negotiations by offering our bodies to their whims and ambitions.
While reading Machiavelli, certain personality traits—which we would hold as detestable in acquaintances—are ideal for the administration of state powers: facetiousness, fickleness, ruthlessness, compassion only when necessary, cruelty as a medicine liberally administered. He offers examples of “great men” who have ruled principalities in the past and critically examines their labor, their pitfalls, for signs of laudable statesmanship or insufferable weaknesses (and every shade of tyranny or liberalness in between). Also, by juxtaposing the will of the people to the will of the nobility, Machiavelli still operates within a system of politics in which a statesperson must negotiate between differing interests, between dangers from within and from without, dangers from the past, the present, and the future, by recognizing that the influence of the affluent minority is just as challenging and important to manipulate as that of the majority, though less righteous than the latter.
Then I ask: how can Machiavelli sermon about righteousness, when he is talking about the ethics of power, if his Machiavellian princes can be called ethical at all? When inconstancy and opportunism are political ideals, how can there be morals, how can there be a constant ethical framework upon whose foundation a people and a principality can achieve democratic freedom like we aspire to have in our contemporaneity? When power is its own dialectic, its own desire of itself, ad infinitum, where can the limit of morals be placed?
If anything we can learn from Machiavelli, is that his text needs to be read with historical distance, with utmost care, and more consciousness than those political actors today that see in the Machiavelli prince “a great man”, a model to uphold. Spectators caught in the maelstrom of political spectacles should heed Kolbert’s warning of being trapped into believing what we want to believe, to feel truths subjectively and not observe them factually, when we know, through Machiavelli and elsewhere, that contemporary politicians (not unlike Machiavellian princes) are always making belief, moving chips not in our favor but in the stead of maintaining power, first and foremost.