World of Our Making by Onuf Nicholas Greenwood

Author:Onuf, Nicholas Greenwood.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-135-87547-3
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

VIRTUES, RIGHTS, MANNERS

The quotation of Pocock which launches this chapter occurs in an essay entitled “Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought” (1981: 353–368, 1985: 37–50). Much of what I have to say about the presumption of anarchy in international relations is adapted from this essay and indeed is contained, in a remarkably compressed form, in its title. Relocating Pocock’s “model for historians of political thought” to the province of international thought allows me to propose a rendition of anarchy’s career over several centuries. This rendition is consistent with my presumption that political society, however much or little centralized, and not possessive individualism, however enriched, explains the complexities of international relations.

The words “virtues,” “rights,” and “manners” synopsize three distinctive traditions of thinking about political society before the rise of the state in anything resembling its current form. Virtue is the particular concern of Machiavelli and is integral to his conception of the vivere civile— not just “a way of life given over to civic concerns …,” but “a broadly based civic constitution” (Pocock 1975: 56–57; see further pp. 49–80, Pitkin 1984: 80–105). By no means does virtue and its expression in the vivere civile preempt individualism, although in Machiavelli it is a passionate rather more than possessive individualism. To repeat Machiavelli’s own, often quoted words, “human appetites are insatiable, for by nature we are so constituted that there is nothing that we cannot long for …”3 (1950a: 355). For Machiavelli, virtue regulates conduct driven by our longings.

Machiavelli’s commentators show little agreement on how to render the term “virtù,” in part because Machiavelli used it constantly, but not consistently, for leaders, ordinary people, even institutions (Wolin 1960: 228–232, Pitkin 1984: 81–96). In The Prince alone, Mark Musa counted fifty-nine occurrences of the term, which he translated by using twelve different English words (Musa 1964: x-xv).4 In a general way, “virtù” relates to “glory”; its antithesis is “corruption,” (“virtue gone decadent”) (Martines 1980: 311). More specifically the term applies to the conduct of warriors, whether to emphasize valor and manliness (Hulliung 1983: 27–30) or training and discipline (Pocock 1975: 201–202). I note that in Leslie J. Walker’s translation of The Discourses (Machiavelli 1950a) “virtù ” is “valor” in some martial contexts (e.g., p. 311), “efficiency” in others (e.g., p. 530; see also Walker’s Introduction, pp. 99–100). Elsewhere in Machiavelli’s work we see the same pattern (Pitkin 1984: 104, 85).

It is a mistake to think we must choose between valor and discipline, as if they are mutually exclusive categories, or that Machiavelli, by not choosing between them, exhibited the characteristic penchant of his time for dualities held in tension (compare Martines 1980: 310–317). For Machiavelli, valor and discipline are the complementary traits which soldiers of the Roman republic abundantly displayed. Understandably Machiavelli made much of valor as an ingredient of republican greatness, but he never assumed that valor is simply a natural talent. While “it is no doubt true” that nature makes men (men, specifically) “ardent,” “it does not

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.