Machiavelli by Patrick Boucheron & Willard Wood

Author:Patrick Boucheron & Willard Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

Then what’s to be done? Why, what engineers do, Leonardo da Vinci and the rest. He has seen them at work, Machiavelli, he has accompanied them onto the construction sites where they altered the course of the Arno. He has seen them divert channels, build embankments, empondments, outlets, releases — in a word, he has watched them govern, which is to act upon adverse events. But it takes a certain virtù to do so, a political virtue that is also a form of practical reason, a virtue that Machiavelli despairs of ever teaching the princes of his era.

The last three chapters of The Prince strike a note of urgent and painful exhortation. The time is past for Machiavelli to alternate reassuringly, as Plutarch did in his Lives, between examples from the history of ancient Rome and contemporary experience of the world. Like a river overflowing its banks, Machiavelli’s anxiety about present times carries everything in its path — including, apparently, his republican convictions. In the end, he appeals to the unalloyed power of a modern prince to deliver Italy from “the stench of this barbarian dominion.”

“Stench,” and “barbarians”; those are the terms Machiavelli uses to speak of the French in the last chapter of The Prince, abandoning any ironic distance and showing a previously undisclosed patriotic strain. Italia mia, he quotes from Petrarch, and we realize that this poetic glorification of Italy is, as it were, the expression of a wounded identity, showing that Machiavelli would willingly consent to the use of force and authoritarian power.

With this, we are certainly entering a dangerous zone, perhaps justified by the state of emergency in which Machiavelli wrote. He justifies the use of force and authority, and he incites their use at the same time — in the manner of those societies that become violent for lack of anything better to do. Machiavelli is unquestionably desperate to get back in the game, to seduce Fortune, for this river is also a woman whom one must know how to win over. Writing, writing, always writing — when will he finally be loved?

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