THE TWO-FACED SHORT SHRIFT

HOW NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI BECAME A SYMBOL FOR DUPLICITY

Niccolò Machiavelli had a weakness for superstition and his writing challenged readers then and now, Robert Fulford writes. period for English Catholics: Henry VIII was breaking away from the Vatican. Pole hoped to bring the church together but failed. He later became the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury.

He had heard about The Prince, the book published after Machiavelli’s death in 1527. It horrified him. “I had scarcely begun to read the book,” he wrote, “when I recognized the finger of Satan.” Machiavelli advised princes that in governing it was better to be feared than loved. He advocated lies and violence and suggested that the most devious prince would be the most successful.

Pole learned that Machiavelli had been a successful civil servant and diplomat for the city of Florence over 15 years. But a new Medici administration turned against him, fired him and imprisoned him. He was accused of plotting to overthrow the government and tortured in an attempt to prove his disloyalty.

Pole took Machiavelli literally but others argued that The Prince was mainly ironic. He was ridiculing princes, especially his enemies among the Medicis.

Since the author wasn’t around to explain his book, much of the world saw it the way Pole did: as devilinspired poison. Negative opinions of Machiavelli played a large role in the fury of propaganda created by arguments over the Reformation. And when the Reformation ceased to be a religious battle and turned into another phase in history, the bitter response to The Prince and its author was still retrenched, to be projected into the future. And it still governs how many of us think about him.

On the other hand, Machiavelli’s admirers, reading his Discourses and Florentine Histories, saw him as a humane thinker a “eulogist of democracy” defending the rule of law against corrupt popes and tyrants. He praised great figures like Pope Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia for their evil. It was a way of demonstrating how far princes would go to hold power.

Erica Benner, the author of Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World, argues that “he seemed to want to get under his readers’ skin: to irritate them, tease them, make them think and think again about the examples he set before them.” Authors like Rousseau and Diderot in the Enlightenment found his emphasis on secular government and undogmatic policies fresh and worthy of study.

The Quotable Machiavelli feels like one of many attempts since the 16th century to rebuild his stature, though perhaps its purpose is simply pleasure. It’s absorbing to pick your way through his ideas, absorbing his highly sophisticated view of Renaissance politics.

Sometimes he seems to look ahead as far as the age of deficit spending. He informs us that a prince knows that “The spending of other people’s substance will not diminish but rather increase his reputation.” To this moment governments, including those in Canada, win popularity by “giving” the public back some of its money, in a preposterous spirit of mock generosity.

His remarks are more revealing when they prove him a man of his times. He had a weakness for superstition. “The occurrence of important events in any city or country is generally preceded by signs and portents and by men who predict them,” he wrote. “The air is peopled with spirits, who by their superior intelligence foresee future events, and out of pity for mankind warn them by such signs, so that they may prepare against the coming evils.” This was true, he insisted. He happened to know that 16th-century portents were always followed by remarkable events. He also believed the movement of stars and planets determined the actions of humans.

He held the common belief of the era that the people of nations could be collectively described. “The French are more eager for money than for blood,” he said “and are liberal only in fine speeches.” In 1513 he described several leaders and related them to the people they governed: “A haughty, timorous king of France ... a rich, impetuous, and gloryhungry king of England; the brutish, victorious, and insolent Swiss; and we Italians, poverty-stricken, ambitious and cowardly.”

Ironic or not, Machiavelli wrote with wide-ranging and fearless extravagance, challenging readers then and now.