Get yer minds outta the gutter, I’m referring to Niccolo Machiavelli
I’m not sure whether this belongs in MPSIMS or Cafe Society, since it’s mundane stuff I feel the need to share, but also literary, so mods, feel free to move it as you see fit.
So I just finished a paper on Machiavelli’s The Prince as a political performance for a Political Theory class I’m taking, and it’s been really interesting writing it. I’d read The Prince before the class, but in a different, less literal translation which apparently glossed over some of the more controversial/confusing things he says about the nature of virtue and the duties of a prince. My argument centres around his points on the violent nature of establishing a new principality and his drastic clash with the christian/medieval thinkers in terms of what constitutes virture, interpreted as meaning that Machiavelli is trying to establish a new “religion” with him at the helm (a theory extolled by our prof, so I feel a little less out on a limb).
And as so often when comtemplating “intelligent” subject-matter, I found myself wondering what you Dopers would have to say on Machiavelli. Do you believe his teaching to be immoral, rejecting any notion of the goodness in people, or is he the consummate, first realist, divorcing the concept of politics from morality so as to make it more effective?
I’ve tried to read that book but I just can’t seem to keep in it. Although I do recall that the chapters on 'How to take over another territority, seemed to make a lot of sense.
There’s this mega controversial philosopher named Leo Strauss–the guy blamed (perhaps unjustly–but that’s another story) for the neocon politicos.
Strauss thought that many authors had double secret hidden messages in their books, and his chief example was The Prince.
What’s a nice humanist who was once imprisoned and tortured for his own political activity doing writing a book on the top ten ways to oppress humanists? Hmmm? Strauss thought that the whole book was deadpan sarcastic “look what happens when you take ends over means to its logical conclusion.”
Most people I’ve talked to tend to think Machiavelli was simply looking after his own ass, and thus writing a book to please those with the most power, so they’ll look after him… which is a philosophy in its own right I suppose.
The end result is a very selfish philosophy cloaked in haughty words… if anything it’s far more honest than those who gain power via religion, since it explicitly acknowledges the drive for power, and attempts to overtly bend that drive towards gaining more of it. As far as actually being a successful or even particularly well thought out plan? Maybe not.
I think I agree… He wrote The Prince while exiled from Florence, and it seems the most logical to me to assume he was simply trying to impress Lorenzo de Medici so he’d be brought back as an advisor. But, then again, overinterpretation is part and parcel of academia, is it not? :rolleyes:
I took a whole course on Machiavelli in college, and the instructor - who’d researched and written on ol’ Niccolo extensively - believed that The Prince was essentially a deadpan political satire. Italian Renaissance politics t’wasn’t beanbag.
