The Key Texts of Political Philosophy by Thomas L. Pangle & Timothy W. Burns & Thomas L. Pangle & Timothy W. Burns

Author:Thomas L. Pangle & Timothy W. Burns & Thomas L. Pangle & Timothy W. Burns [Pangle and Burns]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

Humanity’s Power over Its Fate

The Prince ends with a three-chapter, fourth and final, section that addresses the question of how Machiavelli’s teaching may be applied here and now to his native land. In chapter 24, Machiavelli berates his contemporaries, exhorting them to stop “accusing fortune” as the source of their political disasters, and to start recognizing their own “indolence” as the cause – to rely on themselves and their virtue. But this prompts the profound question that Machiavelli addresses in the central chapter of this section, chapter 25: How much are human affairs capable of coming under human control, and how much must they remain under the sway of fate or fortune?

The chapter title sounds a note of defiant “opposition to Fortune.” But Machiavelli opens by acknowledging, and at first apparently accepting, the outlook of “many” who hold “that worldly things are so governed by fortune and by God, that men cannot correct them with their prudence.” These words evoke or remind of the biblical outlook of guilt-ridden and humble acceptance (“God’s will be done”). By the end of his first sentence, however, Machiavelli has dropped God and changed fortune to “chance” (sorte). He thus tacitly prompts the question: May it not be that there is no discernible intelligence behind the forces that environ and frighten us?

But Machiavelli returns to speaking of fortune, and, sounding a bit like an ancient Roman, personifies her as a female goddess, Fortuna. “In order that our free will [libero arbitrio] not be eliminated,” he judges that it might be that Fortuna “leaves half, or close to it, of our actions for us to govern.” Machiavelli shows by example how easy it is to begin to think of fate or destiny as a divine personality whom we must worship and hold in respect or awe, but that personality need not be like the biblical God. Machiavelli playfully sketches here the outline of a religious outlook that would give more encouragement to human virtue and independence. But Machiavelli immediately adds a twist: The world we live in is such that the divinity behind it is to be conceived to be very dangerous to humanity; he likens the goddess “to one of these violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and the buildings, lift earth from this part, drop in another; each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus without being able to hinder them in any regard.” But is this last kind of fearfully helpless human reaction necessarily justified? Machiavelli insists that it is not. Even as dikes can drastically reduce the power of floods and tame rivers, so virtue, when it is present, tames Fortuna’s sway over humanity’s political destinies. In other words, what men are tempted to conceive of as an alien, divine, superior power that puts their fate beyond their control is nothing but the way life becomes (chaotic and disastrous) when men lack virtue. Machiavelli suddenly advances the belief, the amazingly hopeful belief, that human virtue can conquer chance and destiny.

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