Machiavelli

State Distinction

1. Hereditary from new

2. wholly new from annexed to long-ruled state

3. former republics to former principalities

4. states won with arms of other from those won with one’s own arm

The lesson: a state's form and origin determine much of its stability — yet the ruler's skill and choices can still change outcomes.

He explains how wholly new states are founded, how formerly free cities should be treated, and why ecclesiastical principalities are a special case, sustained by religion rather than arms.

Hereditary principalities

• Hereditary principalities hold little interest, since long habits of obedience give the incumbent a natural advantage over rivals.

Mixed (newly conquered) principalities

Conquest is easy, subjects often despise their rulers and welcome change. but soon they found out the new ruler is not much better as the costs of coquest falls on them. they start to rebel.

solution? get rid of deposed rulers partisans. either go live there personally or install your own adminstartion there. (romn style colonies). less costs and blodshed than an occupying army

• The underlying maxim is that men must be either won over or crushed, because they can avenge slight injuries but not catastrophic ones — so any injury done must be such that no revenge is possible.

Despotisms versus free peoples

• States accustomed to centralized despotism are easy to hold, whereas peoples used to liberty are hard -above all republics, which have greater vitality, more hatred, and never forget their lost freedom.

• For a conquered free state he gives three options: live there, utterly destroy the old institutions, or leave them intact and rule with the least possible irritation;

Ecclesiastical principalities

• Ecclesiastical principalities are uniquely secure because they are sustained by ancient religious institutions regardless of how their rulers behave;

2 Part Two (chs. 12–14): military power

Arms as the foundation of the state

• This section is crucial, since for Machiavelli arms are the true foundation of every state.

• He sharply contrasts mercenary troops (dangerous and disloyal), auxiliaries borrowed from another power (equally unreliable), and one's own citizen army (the only sure foundation of strength).

War as the prince's vocation

• A prince must study war even in peacetime, because neglecting military matters is the quickest road to ruin.

• War must indeed be the prince's sole professional concern; the only worthwhile recreation is hunting, valuable for learning to read the lay of the land, and humane letters matter only for the genuine historical knowledge they provide.

The conduct and quality of the ruler: A new political ethics

• This is the core of his reflection, and where he breaks most clearly from traditional morality.

• The second half of the book is in effect a parodic, ironic reworking of the traditional "mirror of princes," judging the conventional virtues by their political usefulness rather than their goodness.

• A prince, he says, cannot always be good: he must learn how not to be good and use that knowledge when necessity demands.

• In this way he sets out a new political ethics grounded not in abstract ideals but in effectiveness and the preservation of power.

What virtù means

• Virtù here is not Christian virtue but whatever qualities make for political success, which is in turn bound up with the pursuit of glory; The Prince concerns the virtù of one man, the Discourses that of a whole people.

Character judged by results

• A prince is blamed only for shortcomings that bring about the ruin of the state, so he should not fuss over his personal character except where it leads him astray in matters of policy.

• He advises cultivating the appearance of virtue even when circumstances require otherwise, and warns against flatterers, urging the prince to keep honest counselors

Feared rather than loved; the fox and the lion

• Examining whether it is better to be loved or feared, he concludes fear is safer if one must choose — though hatred must be avoided at all costs.

• Where a people must possess real honesty and loyalty to act together, the prince must be ready to change his colours at a moment's notice and, when necessary, to deceive and destroy his rivals;

• The most notorious moment is chapter 18, "How Rulers Should Keep Their Promises," where Machiavelli turns Cicero on his head: a ruler must act like a beast, being a fox to recognise traps and a lion to frighten off wolves, and should keep faith only as long as it serves his ends.

The rewards of success

• The reward of a successful republic is freedom — a peaceful civil life, a vivere civile — while the prince's reward is power and, ultimately, glory.

• Sheldon Wolin's phrase "an economy of violence" captures the idea that the able prince reduces the random, pointless cruelty people would otherwise suffer, though needless cruelty, as with the tyrant Agathocles, remains unforgivable.

Virtù versus reliance on fortune

• Machiavelli argues that Italian princes lost their states by relying too heavily on fortune and too little on their own arms and virtù.

• He draws a sustained contrast between rulers who rely on their own capacity (virtù) and those who depend on luck or on others; the former are far less exposed when fortune turns against them.

• His founding heroes — Moses, Theseus, Cyrus, and Romulus — succeeded because they were "armed prophets," whereas unarmed ones fail, the deeper point is that force creates acceptance, and the habit of obedience hardens into the belief that one ought to obey.

How much fortune governs

• Fortune governs roughly half of human affairs; the other half is left to us, and the bold and adaptable can master her.

• He likens fortune to a river: left unchecked it floods and destroys, but with foresight and effort it can be contained and channeled.

• The river image carries the moral that men are idle about taking precautions while things go well; and since success depends on whether one's temperament suits the times, and we cannot change our character, the bold and impetuous prosper when the moment rewards boldness, hence the notorious flourish that fortune is a woman who favours the impetuous and the young.

The book closes with a passionate call to arms,

The overall arc

• Taken whole, The Prince moves from external structures to inner qualities — from what can be classified and analyzed to what must be acted upon.

• Machiavelli begins with the forms of states, proceeds to the instruments of power (the army), then to the personal conduct of rulers, and ends with what lies partly beyond human control (fortune).

It is a discourse teaching not only how to govern but how to confront necessity, adapt to circumstance, and seize opportunities in a world of conflict and uncertainty.

Machiavelli’s Political philosophy

A secular, conflictual politics

•He secularizes history: events are explained not by divine providence but by fortune, human agency, and necessity.

•Necessity means that after power grows, decline inevitably follows.

•Institutions are fragile and relative, always exposed to internal and external conflict.

•Political life is defined by struggle — against foreign enemies and within society itself, as in the class conflict between the great and the people.

View of human nature

•His view of human nature is correspondingly grim and close to a secular version of original sin — men are by nature bad and will do all the evil they can — so they must be held in check by good laws, and where law has broken down, by any means available

Three breaks with Humanists

Machiavelli rejects the humanist focus on educating rulers through mirrors of princes, arguing that political order depends on institutions, laws, and punishment rather than moral virtue.

He helped give "the state" its modern abstract meaning, transforming stato from "condition" into a political entity.

He also simplifies government into two forms—republics and principalities—and judges regimes by their stability and effectiveness rather than by moral distinctions such as monarchy versus tyranny.

The Discourses on Livy

This larger vision appears in the Discourses on Livy, often regarded as his greatest work, where he comments on the first ten books of Livy's history of Rome to trace a vast narrative of growth, decline, and regeneration.

The work is divided into three books: the first sets out the principles for creating and sustaining a successful republic, the second treats Rome's expansion, and the third the importance of great leaders in the life of the republic.

The model throughout is Polybius, and the purpose differs from The Prince: the focus here is the creation of a self-sustaining constitutional order in a republic rather than the conduct of a single ruler.

Growth through conflict

• For Machiavelli, Rome's growth came not from harmony — as Christian and classical thought suggested — but from conflict

• Rome stayed free and strong precisely because these struggles forced the creation of institutions that balanced power.

• Conflict, when regulated by law, is not destructive but productive.

• Rome is thus a model of an open republic, where more citizens meant more soldiers and greater strength.

• it violates the rule that a body politic, like a body, must be born healthy: it rebuilt its own constitution by trial and error — expelling its kings, and later, when the plebeians seceded, forcing the ruling elite to open public office to the lower classes.

Turmoil as good for liberty

This claim that a degree of tumult is good for liberty is offered as a deliberate novelty, against the entire Christian and utopian emphasis on harmony; it shocked his contemporaries, who thought endorsing uproar in the Italy of the 1500s was like pouring oil on a fire, though it was later echoed by Burke and others

Decline is inevitable and comes from within

• Like Polybius, and like Hume after him, Machiavelli holds that all the works of man are destined to decay: success is ultimately self-defeating, and corruption always attends the achievement of great things — states, like strong and weak men alike, die in the end.

• Yet he insists to the last that when the survival of one's country is at stake, no consideration of justice or cruelty, honour or shame, should stand in the way of saving it, and that half-measures always lead to ruin while boldness achieves what caution cannot.

• Decline, however, is inevitable: every republic drifts toward corruption.

• Machiavelli stresses internal decay. Corruption sets in when elites abandon civic virtue and moderation.

• The great aspire to dominate and oppress; the people only want to avoid oppression and keep their freedom.

• As a republic grows prosperous, citizens turn inward toward their own wealth, the martial virtues decline, mercenaries are hired in place of citizen-soldiers, and the very rich look for ways to turn wealth into power and subvert the state.

4.3 Regeneration and Machiavelli's republicanism

• Regeneration is possible by restoring civic virtue and institutions.

• he opposes not monarchy as such but tyranny.

• Men are rightly praised for founding republics or kingdoms, but the establishment of an enduring tyranny is indefensible; dictatorial methods are acceptable in an emergency, as the Romans used them — which is the moral of his defence of Romulus's killing of Remus: do whatever it takes to get a political order running, but the lasting tyrant is the enemy of his people and rightly destroyed.

• Only an autocrat can found or refound a state: there must be a founding moment when the new order is laid down, after which the violent, improvised acts of the founder must give way to the regular election of leaders under law.

• The emphasis falls on what he calls ordini — something close to the fundamental constitutional laws, as distinct from mere decrees, a distinction Rousseau would later echo — and the founding heroes Moses, Romulus, and Theseus recur from The Prince.

• A strong prince can be the very figure who restores and renews a republic.

• So The Prince and the Discourses are not opposed but complementary — one centered on the extraordinary ruler, the other on the ordinary life of republican institutions — and they rest on the same principles of statecraft and the same view of human nature, with examples such as Cesare Borgia and Julius II recurring across both.

Religion

Religion, hardly touched in The Prince, is prominent here: the Romans are praised for treating it seriously as social cement — a support for public morality, courage in battle, and solidarity across generations — while treating its metaphysics lightly, manipulating the auguries as needed but executing anyone who insulted them.

Christianity, being otherworldly and preaching that one turn the other cheek, is ill-suited to this civic function and takes men's minds off their political and military duties.

•His animus, however, is directed at the papacy rather than at Christianity: a Church that is both corrupt as a religious institution and inept as a political one has ruined Italy and invited foreign powers in — the kind of claim that earned his works a place on the Index.

Proposals of the prince as a performative text

The two pillars proposed

• He proposed a new principality on two pillars: a popular militia to replace unreliable foreign troops, and an alliance of the prince with the people against the nobility, whose ambitions undermined civil life.

• The two were interconnected — the citizen army was the institutional expression of a politics siding with the people.

• He also sought to "romanize" Florentine institutions, imitating the strength of the ancient republic.