Notes about Sexuality and Religion

interview by Johnathan Bi.

We see one of the issues that he has with Christianity is that it makes men effeminate. What is the issue he has with effeminacy?

Effeminacy just means you haven’t the power to use force to get your way. And so there’s something womanly about Christianity.

Transcript

0. Introduction
Modernity: Start with Machiavelli, not with Descartes. Those people are derivative from Machiavelli. Machiavelli had two criticisms of Christianity: the first is that it’s too cruel, and the second is that it’s too weak. The prince becomes both conqueror like Caesar and prophet like Christ. Machiavelli is the father of modern science. Machiavelli had a high opinion of Muhammad and Islam. The Turks? Yes, they were stronger than Christians in his time.

The woman is almost like the prophet where they conquer you unarmed — and that’s also the power of Christ, that he conquers the world unarmed. You were very good, I must say; perhaps the most challenging questioner I’ve had in an interview of this kind.

We underestimate just how important Machiavelli is. At best, we consider Machiavelli to be just a clever political commentator; and at worst, we consider him to be an immoral schemer that can be easily dismissed. My guest, Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield, has spent his entire career trying to show that Machiavelli is so much more — that he is the very founder of modernity. In fact, he is responsible for establishing the very world you and I live in.

Machiavelli, according to Mansfield, is not just the founder of modern ethics and politics, but the true father of modern science itself. In Mansfield’s estimation, Machiavelli’s chief rivals are no less than Plato and Jesus. Machiavelli is the Antichrist, and we are his heirs. Machiavelli started a silent revolution, one that was purposefully hidden. In the next two hours, then, Professor Mansfield will reveal to us all its secrets. I want to spend this interview understanding what it means for Machiavelli to be a founder of modernity.

1. Machiavelli’s Chief Enemy: Christianity
But before we talk about what he founded, let’s talk about what he was against, beginning with Christianity. In your books, you called Christianity Machiavelli’s chief enemy. Why is that?

Christianity tries to make you better than you can be. Christianity tells you that your honor — this is the way Machiavelli would say it — lies in the next world, in heaven, as opposed to this world. And what Machiavelli tried to do was to create what we normally today call “the world” out of this world. The world has no reference to another world. That’s modernity, and I think that’s what Machiavelli got started.

If you go to Europe now, you look around and you see so many churches and so many cathedrals with very few in it. Imagine yourself entering full churches, full cathedrals; that would give you a little sense of the power of the church in Machiavelli’s time. So it was his chief enemy, though perhaps the classical tradition standing behind Christianity was the predecessor?

Yes, and also the source of the power of the chief enemy. I see.

So let me give you a quote from the Discourses:

“Although the world appears to be made effeminate and heaven disarmed, it arises without doubt more from the cowardice of the men who have interpreted our religion according to idleness and not according to virtue. For if they considered how it permits us the exaltation and defense of the fatherland, they would see that it — Christianity — wishes us to love and honor it and to prepare ourselves to be such that we can defend it. These educations and false interpretations thus bring it about that not as many republics are seen in the world as we seen in antiquity, nor as a consequence is as much love of freedom seen in peoples as was then.”

This quote at least makes it sound like Christianity itself is not the enemy, but only the bastardized interpretation of the time. But your reading is that the Christianity itself is the main issue.

Yes. The interpretation that Christianity makes is the interpretation, you could say, of the classical tradition. It changes it, makes it more effectual, points it in your direction. Plato spoke of the Idea of the Good; Machiavelli says Christianity changed the Idea of the Good into the Idea of God. God is a personification of good. God is how most ordinary people understand good. If you say something is good, people immediately want to know: “How do I get it?” They don’t want to know so much: “What is it?” That’s what the philosopher wants to know. But Machiavelli says God is the person who will get it for you; He’s the personification of the Good.

So that is a way in which Christianity itself is an interpretation of the Good. In general, one can say that Christianity’s interpretations come about from itself — it interprets itself.

Might there not be a more this-worldly, vigorous, and even militaristic form of Christianity — whether it’s the Christianity of Constantine, the Christianity of the Crusades, or the later conquistadors — that Machiavelli could be a fan of?

Yes, there is for sure. Machiavelli had two criticisms of Christianity: the first is that it’s too cruel, and the second is that it’s too weak. So, it is cruel to human beings because it asks them to do more than they can do — more than they have the natural power to do. But it’s too weak because it can’t quite put this across to nations. The church itself is militant, but not military. It can get you to believe in the things that you ought to believe according to it, but it can’t get you to move in that direction. So, it doesn’t have soldiers of this world; it has soldiers or priests of the next world. Therefore, it has to depend on armies in this world, and that makes it weak.

So it’s strong enough to prevent Italy from uniting, but not strong enough to unite it itself, right? So it is the cause of the disunion of Italy. And by the way, when Machiavelli says “Italy,” he sometimes means the world — all of all countries. Italy stands for the world.

So if Christianity in its core was more like Islam, where it’s more inherently militaristic, Machiavelli would have…?

It’s more militant, I would say, rather than militaristic, because Christ conquered through the word, not through arms, and the church doesn’t carry arms. So that distinguishes Christianity from Islam. Muhammad was a conqueror as well as a prophet, right? And he would be more in favor of the conqueror-plus-prophet combination, it sounds like, because it’s cruel still, but it’s no longer weak in the way you describe Christianity to be.

That’s right, yeah. So the prince needs to be a prophet as well. The normal, non-philosophic prince — somebody like Trump or even Biden — is not a prophet. He confronts the world as it is, and it is as it is because it believes what it believes. So in order really to conquer the world, he has to make it over so that it will obey him. And that means that he needs to be a prophet, a rival to Christ himself, who won the world through prophecy.

Right. We see one of the issues that he has with Christianity is that it makes men effeminate. What is the issue he has with effeminacy?

Effeminacy just means you haven’t the power to use force to get your way. And so there’s something womanly about Christianity. I see.

Women, however, are not without power. So they can attract you and use their beauty and their wiles to make you do what they want. So he — so women have a certain place in his thinking. Right? In some sense, if we go back to what you said about the conqueror versus the prophet, the woman is almost like the prophet where they conquer you unarmed, so to speak, right? And so — and that’s also the power of Christ: that he conquers the world unarmed. He attracts you, right? He attracts you with promises.

I see. But part of the attraction is to God, who was also the Father, and therefore jealous and strong in that way. Yeah, he does use the Christian Trinity, reinterpreted, to show that there’s a strong side and an attractive side to his prophesying as well as to Christianity’s.

So, just to be clear here, Machiavelli would be content — not like the modern project that wants to rid itself of religion completely — you think he would be content if he was able to reform Christianity to become more this-worldly?

Yes, that’s one possibility. I don’t know which attracted him more: the idea of simple atheism with no religion at all — that might be for people like him — but for most people, most people are too weak for that, and the weak need religion. They somehow sense that they are weak and they need the strength of some higher power. So they call upon this higher power and get them to do things.

When you described his issues with Christianity, but also how he thought Christianity conquered Rome — that Rome became too big and decadent, that there was always this slave morality in essentially — it reminds me a lot of Nietzsche and Genealogy of Morality. How do you think these two anti-Christian authors — how is their relationship with Christianity different?

Good question. In Nietzsche, I think there is a stronger rejection of the weakness, of the softness, of Christianity. He associates Christianity with democracy. With Machiavelli, there’s a greater interest in how Christianity won the world. So I would say he’s more impressed with the strength of Christianity, right? The strength of the weak. That’s also a theme in Nietzsche, you could say. Yes, the ascetic ideal — strength used to make yourself weak, strength used against itself, against yourself. I don’t think Machiavelli is attracted by that sort of aestheticism; I believe he’s more rational. Prudence tells you to make use of this Christian weakness. And you don’t need to have your mind conquered by an internal version of religion, which turns out to be the will to power.

So that’s — I don’t know, I think you could find the idea of slave morality in Machiavelli as well as in Nietzsche. The two are similar in an interesting way. You’re right.

2. Machiavelli’s First Enemy: The Classical Tradition
I see. You mentioned how, even though Christianity is the chief enemy, the prior enemy is the classical tradition. It’s very interesting then that in the beginning of the Discourses, Machiavelli seems to want to rescue the classical tradition — the prior enemy — in order to tame the chief enemy. Right? So there is a deeper admiration of the classical tradition from Machiavelli. Tell us about that.

Yes. Right at the beginning of the Discourses, Machiavelli discusses what made Rome strong and free, and it was not the harmony of the Roman Republic, but the disharmony — the conflicts between the nobles and the plebs. What makes you stronger is having a strong enemy to oppose, rather than to have somebody who agrees with you. The strength of Rome came from its dislike, its internal dislike, and this is what impressed him — or what he wants to impress you with when he begins.

So he wants to make Rome strong, and only gradually does he begin to introduce the idea of Rome’s weakness. Rome’s weakness was that it gave in to Christianity; it wasn’t strong enough to defeat the weak. So when Machiavelli looks at things most generally, he thinks that the ancients were strong and the moderns were weak. But somehow, the strong ancients — Rome — lost out to the weaker Christians. So you have to see and understand how that happened. And that’s what he does.

The disagreement among the Romans gave rise to the possibility that some figure could appeal to the plebs, to the people, as against the nobles or the Senate, which was the chief motivating force of the Roman Republic. So a man who could imitate Caesar, but defeat Caesar — because Caesar couldn’t rule the world above the next world — could spread this word to a universe of plebeians, enabling them to believe their way into power, you might say.

I see. And so what he wants to rescue from the classical tradition, it sounds like, is certainly not the philosophers, right? It’s certainly not Plato, Aristotle, the Idea of the Good, the forms, or this other realm. It’s more like classical political action, like the actual lives of a Caesar or the great consuls before him. Is that fair? It’s the actions rather than the ideas that are to be rescued from classical antiquity.

Yes. And therefore the idea of the Prince, as opposed to the republican idea of the Many — that the people who are weak could find greater strength in one person than in the few aristocrats or nobles who appeal to their courage. Better to appeal to their sense of their weakness and to make them look for a higher power than human power, and to find honor in obeying and worshipping that higher power.

Yeah, so that the prince becomes both conqueror like Caesar and prophet like Christ. The two brought together, right? Which again makes me think that Muhammad is almost like the ideal archetype in some sense, right? Both prophet and conqueror.

Yes. Machiavelli had a high opinion of Muhammad and Islam, the Turks. Yeah, they were stronger than Christians in his time and posed a threat to the West.

I see. What is the issue that Machiavelli has with the gentlemanly, the aristocratic, and the noble class?

In the first place, he looks into their real motivation, which is their own power. They — the Few — are the ministers of the Few. He likes to say they’re interested in their power and in their wealth, and not at all interested in the well-being of the people. They get in the way of the Prince; they are rivals to the Prince.

That’s in a way a good thing because a republic is based on a rivalry among the Few. But a republic gives the power of a prince — especially the Roman Republic — to one person for a time, and then it opens up the field to rivals to supplant that person. So you get a constant supply of fresh energy; that’s what a republic does. Whereas a principality consists of a republic where one prince has succeeded in doing away with his rivals, his barons.

So those barons compete with one another, and the prince wants to overcome that competition. He wants to become uno solo — “one alone” — as the aim of the prince and an aim that you could say is the human goal itself: to be alone. And to do this, he uses the people as his ally. And so Machiavelli’s political science anticipates the history of, say, modern politics, which consists in the growth of a monarchy based on an alliance with the people against the nobles.

Right. So one issue you pointed out of the nobles is that they care for their own interests and not of the country at large — the common good. But the Prince is also after his own interests in chasing glory, and it’s only an unintended consequence, or maybe intended consequence, that he happens to benefit the republic or to benefit the country. So I’m not seeing a difference there. Could you really draw out: what is the issue? Is it because the nobles are a stagnant force that don’t allow any innovation or…? Yeah, tell me about that.

They divide the power of the country. They divide the Prince’s power. They try to make provincial duchies or provinces — as in France — and prevent a unification of the whole. And they attract vassals and people who depend on them.

But isn’t that a good thing — to further separate and splinter a country so that there’s more rivalry, in Machiavelli’s view?

The rivalry is good, but the result of rivalry — which is “one alone” — is even better. So the rivalry is the way to the Prince, and both of them show that what human beings want is to be on top. And that’s — I think that’s the most general truth. Later on, this was called the “state of nature” in modern political science. Right?

And the uno solo role is not only good for the individual, being his deepest desire, it’s also good for the state because he can act as an executive very effectively. He can do extraordinary actions — that’s the idea — whereas if you just have a stalemate between rival houses, kind of nothing gets done and you just get weakened.

Yes, that’s a stalemate. If they get together in the Senate, then it can work. But that getting together in the Roman Republic was a coming apart and the destruction of the republic — and the rivalries in the parties in the late republic. So things move according to Machiavelli. Yeah, politics is not stability. In order to be stable, you have to move ahead; you have to keep on acquiring.

I see. And a country splintered by the aristocracy or oligarchs doesn’t have the same kind of ability to move ahead as a uno solo dictator prince at the helm.

No. Unless one of the dukes becomes the king. I see. But there’s always the movement toward greater acquisition.

3. Necessity Over Goodness
I see. So we talked about what he was against: the classical and the Christian tradition. And now I want to introduce this idea of “necessity” — because both the classical and the Christian tradition are professions of goodness, of morality, of the good life, and Machiavelli replaces that with the profession of necessity. So tell us about that idea.

Yes. For people who want to be good, you have to profess it because you have to explain it to yourself. If you’re good, how are you going to prevent other people who are not good from taking advantage of you? If you’re good, well, you come to ruin among so many who are not good.

So you need to work out some explanation why these people who are not good won’t be able to take advantage of you. And that is a version or a vision of a good society — a good politics whereby doing good will result in your receiving good. People will be grateful, and this requires reference to a higher power. So it leads to the notion of religion and especially the Christian religion that will relieve you of your sins, and remind you of the power of God and of God’s providence.

So that’s a profession of good, and Machiavelli wants to replace this by a profession — or a reference — to necessity as the basis of human action. People are good only when they are required to be. So that’s an obvious truth that one sees every day. People have their necessities — things which they require — and how are they going to get them only if they can make other people respect their necessity.

So if you’re a prince, you need to have obedient people in your country. And you get them by showing them that you are necessary to them. And that means that you have to teach them the power of necessity. Necessity is stronger than goodness, or necessity is the same thing as goodness. To be good is to be necessary to yourself. And people have their own personal necessity.

Someone who’s weak has the necessity to believe in a profession of good. Right? Wishful thinking. Yeah. Wishful thinking and religious thinking. So in this way, you probably cannot construct an atheist society to get people to follow you. You need to make them think that you are so strong and they are so weak that they have no alternative at first.

It looks to be a simplification of good, because who knows what good is? And there are many different kinds of good. But necessity seems to be just one thing: necessity here and now, urgent. It’s what forces you to move rather than sit. And yet, you have to think ahead. When you think ahead, you anticipate your necessity. To anticipate a necessity is not quite to feel it in the same way as being moved by it urgently. So there’s long-run necessities — that’s what prudence addresses — versus short-run necessities. That’s when you react. Immediate fear. Someone points a gun at you and that creates a situation you have to respect. But it isn’t enough; you can’t hold a gun permanently.

I want to elaborate on the last point about anticipation, because when I first read “necessity,” I thought: “Just make sure I can survive today; no one’s pointing a gun to my head.” But it turns out necessity is all-encompassing. Okay. So let me read to you from your book, Machiavelli’s Virtue:

“Aristotle says that to practice the virtues one must have a certain surplus of property so that one’s necessities are not always foremost in one’s mind, but the acquisitions of property must be limited by the requirements of virtue both in manner and amount. Aristotle says this. Machiavelli, however, allows that tendency of acquisition to go as far as it can. One can never know how much equipment one may need. What primitive men must do to scratch an existence from nature, civilized men must do to keep ahead of their rivals. Necessity means the necessity to acquire. So men cognizant of necessity must devote themselves to acquisition.”

The temporal scale, right? The fact that there’s future necessity and the fact that there’s competition means that it’s all necessity all the way down. Is that a fair interpretation?

That is. I think that — think of billionaires today. Those people have much more than they need. Billionaires want to become the highest, most powerful billionaire; that’s the honor they point toward. So they don’t stop acquiring. You would think that they’ve well passed the natural limit of acquisition — all your needs are satisfied. But no, the greatest need you have is to acquire more and more, which is more and more honor or more and more glory.

I see. So the necessity encompasses not just the survival of the body or physical safety — as in Hobbes — but also societal standing.

Yes. People often use the term “survival.” Science uses it; Darwinian evolutionary science uses the word survival as if there were a limit. But for most people, they have really an Aristotelian or, you could say, a classical sense of survival. They mean really not just survival plain, but survival as they are. So that there is a kind of formal aspect to survival, and that’s a limited survival as opposed to an unlimited survival based on acquisition. So acquisition does go beyond survival to glory, to the point that for Machiavelli, glory is just part of necessity. There are some people who aren’t satisfied with what satisfies most people, and those people pursue glory.

I see. When I hear this almost-recommendation for infinite acquisition, and I think about the counter-examples, I tend to think about my grandma who was born before the Chinese Civil War. Because she was thinking about necessity the whole time — she was one of two children out of a litter of ten that survived, lived through the Cultural Revolution — she’s still in “necessity mode.” When we go to McDonald’s together, she still collects ketchup packets. Okay? But she, of course, has gathered her entire life; she’s quite well-off now.

But if you look at that, to me that’s a quite a good counter-example to what Machiavelli is saying. And maybe the billionaire case would arouse similar suspicions, which is: surely now’s the time for you to actually live not just a necessary life, but a good life. What would Machiavelli say to that?

This transcript continues the exploration of Machiavelli’s philosophy, specifically focusing on the “good life” as an inquisitive life and the role of the “vulgar” in bestowing glory.

4. The Inquisitive Life and Glory
She’s looking forward to a future need of ketchup. Exactly. Right. Your grandma — that’s a little bit of the spirit of the Prince, right? I think that is how he would interpret it.

But that is meant to be a critique, right? I’m pulling that up as… No, it’s meant to say that a certain thrift is all you need. And maybe at a certain point in one’s life, one looks down on such small acquisitions as extra packets of ketchup. But that’s still a little bit of the princely spirit that Machiavelli might appreciate.

So, does he have a conception of what a good life is other than just getting as much material resources and glory as humanly possible?

Yeah. I don’t think that there is anything higher than the highest glory. There is a conception of the good life: the good life is the inquisitive life, carried on as far as it can go to the point where you are uno solo. Uno solo is the good life, and yet it’s a life of continuing acquisition.

That word “acquisition,” by the way, is interesting. It’s a word which Machiavelli uses in the sense of conquer. Acquistare — he uses this economic term, to acquire goods, inquisitively, to mean something political and military. So it’s — you could say it’s already there in that word — an overcoming of the distinction between what you need and what you want to acquire. I see; as an economic term, it satisfies both politics and military.

However, it sounds like there’s actually two things that make up necessity. One is bodily necessity, like mere survival — and that’s what I thought about necessity; that’s what most people think about necessity when they first hear it. But there also seems to be a necessary desire, at least in some people, to get as much glory as humanly possible. And that’s the second set of goods that constitute the good life.

But these two, of course, are in conflict, right? Martyrs, for example, give up the former and they receive the latter. University professors, compared to billionaires, might not have material wealth but have a surplus — some of them at least — of glory and recognition. Does Machiavelli think about which is primary of these two?

Which is primary is the glory that he has of being a philosopher. The glory — not the material but the… That’s right. The understanding. But the understanding leads him to appreciate the material and to appreciate the need for action as opposed to contemplation. His contemplation tells him that contemplation is insufficient or not powerful enough in a human mind. You always want to make the result of your thinking or contemplating more powerful — make you more powerful than otherwise. So he’s unlike Plato’s philosopher, who doesn’t want to rule — that’s in Plato’s Republic, being dragged down sometimes. Yeah, that’s a bother; it’s something you don’t like. For Machiavelli, the philosopher finds it necessary to rule.

But hold on. If of the two goods — material good and recognitive good — if recognition is the superior good as you’re describing it is, then you know who has more glory nowadays? Is it Plato or is it Pericles? It’s Plato, right? And so in that world, suddenly being this absentee, otherworldly philosopher seems like the superior strategy.

Well, that’s the same thing as in Machiavelli — that the glory of the philosopher, even though it ends in the glory of the prince, is nonetheless higher and more powerful. He’s still in charge of us as the creator of the modern world. He’s there; he’s still the prince, whether we recognize him or not. That is less important.

In fact, it’s necessary to our way of thinking — we who are acquiring — that we not recognize how powerful Machiavelli is over us. So, Machiavelli creates a kind of oblivion following him. He makes people less concerned with the power of philosophy because philosophy tells them that power is all they should have. And yet the difference between the power of the philosopher and of the non-philosopher remains. There’s a great difference between Machiavelli himself and the princes that he advises. He speaks in The Prince of the problem of a minister who is more intelligent than the prince he advises, and that’s he himself — he’s more intelligent than we are. And so he has greater glory, but he allows us to seek glory for ourselves, understanding therefore that princely glory is higher than a mere professor — even a professor of necessity like Machiavelli.

But that’s the fraudulent part, because it’s actually the professorial glory that’s higher. But he tricks us into thinking the princely glory is higher. We can’t serve him if it’s obvious that we serve him. So he gives you a way of thinking which tells you that philosophy is less powerful than princes — that people who acquire in political life, or today billionaires, are stronger, more inquisitive, more glorious than the people who show them that this is necessary to themselves.

5. The Fraudulent Glory of the Prince
Right. So, just so I get this straight: his actual view is that at the end of the day, the good life bottoms out to glory. And whether you get that if you’re Jesus and you don’t own anything, if you’re a Plato and you’re an aristocrat but you’re not in this acquisition mode, or you’re a billionaire — it’s just about the glory.

Now, given that the philosopher’s glory and the prophet’s glory clearly extends further in time than the billionaire’s glory or the prince’s glory, but he’s tricking the billionaires and the princes into thinking that their glory is actually greater — if one is a true reader of Machiavelli, one can see that material necessity and material acquisition are actually secondary to glory. And therefore the true reader of Machiavelli should probably imitate Machiavelli and start a new religion rather than follow his guidance and start acquiring material. Is that fair?

Something like that. Yeah. So, Machiavelli is different from “Machiavellian.” We use the word “Machiavellian” as a pejorative remark — “Well, that’s Machiavellian.” I think he knew that he would be understood in this way: that people retain a notion of the good and distinguish it from what he thinks, and call what he thinks by a name that they mean to convey ill or evil. But it doesn’t bother him because he knows we are weaker. Therefore, that’s why we need “the good” — it’s our necessity. And maybe a good deal of this weakness extends to people who don’t think they are weak, or are not normally considered weak, like politicians and statesmen and others.

6. Contemplation and the Ancient Courts
What do you think about this claim that glory and being first amongst men — uno solo — is the end-all, be-all of the good life? That seems like a very childish view. I mean, one can think of many tyrants who are uno solo where it’s obvious to me I wouldn’t want to switch lives with them. And on the converse, there are many people who are not like that who I think live great lives. Do you think that’s a plausible claim?

You could say it’s refuted by Machiavelli himself, who in his famous letter describes how he reads the ancient authors. I actually prepared that; may I read it for our audience now? Because it’s lovely.

“When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door, I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me — I deliver myself entirely to them.”

So everything — acquisition — out the door. I deliver myself entirely to that. Yeah. So this is refuted, right, by his own life — that there is a contemplative life beyond glory.

But he also says “the food that is mine alone,” and there’s the solo again. Even in contemplation he is uno — maybe it’s sufficient to be alone together with Plato and Aristotle, and especially Xenophon, Machiavelli’s favorite classical thinker.

So you’re right. There is some kind of contradiction there, though. At the end, he comes to the “good.” It’s good to follow necessity. Doesn’t that mean it’s good to follow good? Yeah, that’s what I was going to say — which is the way he justifies necessity is things like, well, necessity leads to effeminate men, and effeminate men lead to ruin and chaos. But there he’s also giving a new standard of good, right? Namely that ruin and chaos are not good and therefore stability is good. So it seems like he still needs at the very least a new standard of good to justify why necessity should supplant goodness, right?

Yes. And isn’t that necessary to necessity? One can play “necessary” and “good” back and forth; it’s like tennis, right? I see all these different issues, I think. And no, at the end, I’m not a Machiavellian.

7. Acquisition vs. Self-Interest
I see. There seems to be another potential issue with acquisition. So let me read you a quote from the Discourses. This is him teaching us how to build lasting republics:

“…to settle it in a strong place of such power that nobody would believe he could crush it at once. On the other hand, it would not be so great as to be formidable to its neighbors, and so it could enjoy its state at length. For war is made on a republic for two causes: one, to become master of it; the other, for fear lest it seize you.”

The issue here that this quote provides with this acquisition mode we’ve been talking about is that sometimes acquisition can invite ruin. And to use the billionaire example, you know, maybe if you’re starting to be a trillionaire, the SEC is going to start investigating you and the press is going to start going after you. Now, if you’re just a single-digit low-deca billionaire, that’s totally fine. So acquisition seems to go against your own interest even on Machiavelli’s standard of your own survival.

That looks forward to, you might say, the degeneration of Machiavelli’s notion of acquisition into Adam Smith’s notion of self-interest. That it’s in your interest not to be acquisitive to the point that you acquire enemies. I think Machiavelli would say that’s an illusion. Or a delusion. Your self-interest will not lead you to be peaceable, as later economists or economical people want to think. It implies a kind of small or limited mind that you see your self-interest in satisfaction rather than in honor. Self-interest is meant to be a substitute for honor, but it can’t. I think Machiavelli has a better understanding of honor than do the liberal philosophers who followed him.

Those liberal philosophers — like Hobbes and Locke and Adam Smith and Hume — were afraid of the evil-doing that Machiavelli endorsed. They thought that would lead to too much violence and war and suffering. So they tried to reintroduce a kind of morality that would limit acquisition, right? But it’s still in the Machiavellian frame. It’s still individualistic, acquisitive, material. It is. They are Machiavellians, and they thought to correct him — and one wonders whether they did so successfully.

So how is Machiavelli’s inquisitive drive different from the bourgeois inquisitive drive?

Machiavelli’s is political. The acquisition is the acquisition of power over human beings, especially other human beings. The bourgeois wants more wealth, right? And the recognition that goes with wealth. So the desire for wealth is meant to be a limit on the desire for political power. If you live under capitalism, which honors wealth, that will induce a number of power-seeking individuals to become wealthy instead of becoming princely. And this will calm down the politics of Machiavellianism and make the turbulent souls — to use Locke’s phrase — “industrious and rational.”

Right. So the liberal philosophers’ hope is that if we turn acquisition away from politics — which is more zero-sum — and direct it to economics — which can be positive-sum — that would lessen the hostilities among men. That’s right. But in a way that Machiavelli wouldn’t have liked. Because Machiavelli wants the hostility to exist for virtue. For virtù. Right. That’s right. I see.

Yes. So capitalism costs Machiavelli’s virtue. Its attraction.

8. Altruism and Modern Individualism
We talked about how the Machiavellian individual is after acquisition of political power and the material resources that feed into that, ultimately for the service of glory. Does he care about anyone other than outside of himself, or are all the seemingly altruistic actions he does actually a consequence of the glory?

Maybe glory needs relaxation occasionally. Maybe gravity needs levity. Maybe male human beings need females. So — but it’s not so much an attraction as a recreation. I’m guessing acquisition takes over from Eros. And I think in Machiavelli, you see that in his comedy Mandragola, where Eros is manipulated and made fun of — shown to be a source of weakness rather than strength.

I wonder if we’re finding another contradiction between his ideas and how he actually lived life. So the first contradiction we found was regarding how he didn’t claim in his theory that there were contemplative ideals, and yet in these letters he clearly has that kind of disposition. Here, he’s claiming that altruism is, you know, at best it’s recreation; it’s not the key part of human psychology. And yet he opens up the Discourses by saying he intends it to “benefit mankind.” And so maybe he’s a bit more public-spirited and altruistic than he himself lets on.

Yeah. Altruistic as opposed to erotic. He wants to bring benefit to every individual — to each ciascuno. That means “each person,” right? As an individual. Which means not as a society or as a group. You don’t get your pleasure from bonding with other individuals. So that — you could say that’s an important statement of modern individualism: that each thinks of each, above all, and therefore is most attracted by a benefit to each.

It also tells you that he’s not just interested in Florentines or Italians, but in all human beings, right? But the “all” is an all of individuals and not of associations, nations, or fundamentally…

But even just the fact that he said that, “I want to benefit each” — I mean, that must come from some kind of… okay, it’s not acquisition, it’s clearly not glory because he expects, as you said, to not be recognized. So that desire to use his writing to effect the change that will benefit each — is that a kind of altruism that he himself might not even want to admit?

A humanity. Yeah. Humanity. A kind of humanity that he said the classical authors had when they answered his questions. The virtue of humanity consists in doing good to human beings. Yeah, exactly. By showing them that they must live according to necessity. He wants to do us good. Yeah, exactly. But that’s his understanding of good, which is not “good” or a “necessity.”

Let me read you one of my favorite quotes from your newest book, On the Effectual Truth:

“Honor comes not from fools, but from those qualified to bestow it, who are as much impressed with noble losers as winners. Machiavelli does not write tragedies. The desire for glory is the selfish pursuit of approval from a grateful country, rewarding conquest or some other difficult, risky accomplishment. It connects evil deeds done for self-aggrandizement to good results for the people. The vulgar — the people whom the prince must impress — they set the standard of success. In this sense, Machiavelli is fundamentally democratic.”

What I found so striking about your reading there is — I studied with Axel Honneth and Fred Neuhouser, recognition theory — and one of the key lessons you learn is you want to desire the recognition of the Few, of the worthy. Right? This is Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Why does the master not enjoy the recognition of the slave? Because he doesn’t have the kind of requisite authority to recognize another master.

Machiavelli here is suggesting the exact opposite. You don’t want to be recognized by the other wise men and philosophers, because they would recognize an honorable loser. You want to impress the vulgar, because their standards are more this-worldly and more about just material success. Is that roughly right?

Yes. Vulgar people are vulgar. So you have to be vulgar in a certain way to impress them. Vulgarity. Here is this difference between Machiavelli and Plato and Aristotle. You could say they both appeal to the senses, but to different senses. Machiavelli appeals to touch; Plato and Aristotle appeal to see. What you touch is more vulgar, more true, than what you see.

What you see can mislead you, because you see visions. You see what the late American President George H.W. Bush called “the vision thing” — a beautiful phrase he had — as something which misleads most people. But when you get close and touch, then truth comes to you. Truth is palpable, not so much visible. The vulgar know because they touch. That’s in The Prince.

I see. For Plato and Aristotle, beauty — which is visible — is a kind of distraction from what is better than visible but is invisible: the invisible Good. That’s, of course, especially in Plato.

4. Machiavelli’s Virtue
So we talked about necessity and his attempt to turn the world from operating on goodness to necessity. How does the word “virtue” change given that?

Well, virtue is no longer virtue of the soul. It’s a kind of extension of the body, of the strength of the body, and producing energy. And energy is a quality of the soul which comes out of the body. The need to acquire to satisfy the body’s needs makes what is soulful or spiritual into something more vulgar, more sensational — visible in the sense of sensational — more impressive than virtue, which by itself can be quiet.

Also, it unites all the eleven Aristotelian moral virtues into one virtue — not intellectual virtue as for Aristotle, but the virtue of acquisition that goes with acquisition. And that’s his virtue.

But glory doesn’t seem to be something of the body, but more closely to something of the soul.

It’s the glory of one’s soul understood as one’s own, an embodied soul. Not just an embodied soul, but a soul which is body — which is an extension of the body and which is not a lifting above the body. I see. So it’s not the glory of the martyr; it’s the glory of understanding the whole.

Here again we approach the similarity of Machiavelli to the ancients as opposed to his departure. There is an understanding of the whole in Machiavelli; it’s just that the whole is different. Famously, of course, in The Prince, one point of virtue is to overcome fortune, right? Let me give you a quote from your book:

“Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, had been forced to admit against his wish that happiness is in need of good fortune. Virtue is the core of happiness for Aristotle, but not the whole of it. A virtuous man in misery can only keep his dignity, not be happy. Machiavelli’s virtue seeks a true this-worldly ethics, not in need of a blessing. The blessing always comes from others. So depending on fortune’s blessing is depending on others.”

I always read The Prince, especially what he says about Cesare Borgia — who is this extremely virtuous person but undone by things that he couldn’t possibly have controlled — as a concession by Machiavelli similar to Aristotle, namely that virtue can only go so far, that it can never fully tame fortune. Is that right?

Cesare Borgia is a nasty type of prince. But if you were to imagine Cesare Borgia as a spiritual prince, then you would see that he fell short of what was needed because he depended on his father, Alexander VI. One could get into the more secret parts of Machiavelli from this particular example. I think that Machiavelli uses worldly examples sometimes to illustrate unworldly examples, and that the relation between Cesare Borgia and Alexander VI could be understood as the relation between Christ and God, God the Father. Namely, that Christ is dependent for his power on the Father or on the other world, and that he never thought that his father would die at the same time he was…

I see. So the claim is that virtue can overpower fortune; you just need to be virtuous enough. Is that fair?

Yes. And yet, that virtue needs worldly force as well. Virtue is higher than worldly force, but it needs worldly force. This is what Christ couldn’t appreciate. He won his principality of Christian believers — what St. Augustine called the City of God — through conversion and through suffering, but he couldn’t command armies. In order to become powerful, he had to be adopted by Constantine. That is, he had to become official and political; but to become political necessarily divided his power from the power of Constantine.

This led to the great Christian division between church and state that so distinguishes the Christian religion from other religions. These two sets of princes need each other but don’t appreciate each other and necessarily combat one another. I think that’s what he’s referring to in this rather occult way. When he speaks of Cesare Borgia, it’s important that he says, “There’s no one I want to imitate more than Cesare Borgia.” That puzzles scholars.

Imitatio Christi.

Yes. I think that’s an illustration of the fact that the Antichrist, which is Machiavelli, needs to imitate Christ. Machiavelli said that an unarmed prophet always loses, and he refers to Savonarola as a loser — which indeed he was. But Savonarola is a loser to the Pope, who had him burned to death in front of Machiavelli in Florence. It’s amazing that Machiavelli says that almost in the presence of the unarmed prophet who did win: Christ.

Yeah, but in a way to make you think, I think, that you could be armed with the arms of heaven if you use them — or can use them — as worldly arms.

5. Machiavelli’s Political Revolution
Part of your claim about Machiavelli being the founder of modernity is that he introduces certain notions in politics that we just take as a given: party government, the modern executive, indirect government, the primacy of foreign affairs. Tell us about the political revolution that Machiavelli is responsible for.

Machiavelli, I think, began the notion of executive power, which is that you can disguise your power if you present it as executing the will of someone who is above you and therefore not yours. “It’s not my doing. You understand, Congress passed the law, right?” Say God made the law, or “the people voted me in.” All these references to higher powers in which you appear as a mere executive in the sense of a “carrier out.”

But “execute” also has this other sense. Since it sometimes happens that when you pass a law or make a decree, people don’t obey when you merely say “please,” you have to enforce your will. And so the executive then may need to execute people. There’s this double sense, in English and in Italian, of “to carry out” and also “to kill” — because to carry out, it may be necessary to kill. A sensational execution that everybody sees and is dramatic makes people walk ever so more softly and cautiously afterwards. It’s an addition to your strength that you can appear to be weak.

Government, when it’s most effective, is not something that’s direct — which is “I order you to do this” — but it’s indirect, in that I am merely passing on somebody else’s higher authority that requires you to do this. The most obvious example of it is confession in Christianity. The priest doesn’t tell you on his own authority what you should do to repent; God does. He, however, has a special connection with God. You are required to believe that he represents God.

That is the model that Machiavelli offers to modern constitutional government. “It doesn’t come from me. It comes from you because you elected me. I merely represent you.” Representation comes out first in Thomas Hobbes, but the idea of it is found in Machiavelli’s indirect government. This is one way in which Machiavelli differs from the classics. For the classics, the most powerful person is the most visibly powerful person. If you want to find out what characterizes a society, you should say, “Take me to your leader.” Machiavelli says no; what’s hidden in government is more powerful than what is visible or obvious.

Hidden power works behind the scenes. This leads to the notion of conspiracy. All power is conspiratorial. What is obvious to you is what has been presented to you as obvious. The hidden power is behind, and it manipulates or manages. Today we have schools of management — the Yale School of Management — that’s a word for a Machiavellian manager. To manage something is different from ordering something directly. It’s the true power behind the scenes controlling the visible executive.

The longest chapter in both The Prince and the Discourses is the chapter on conspiracy. Chapter 19 of The Prince and Chapter 6 in Book 3 of the Discourses — there you get many examples of conspiracy. This is another way in which Machiavelli is the Antichrist imitating Christ: he imitates the structure of the confession or the structure of Jesus and the Father. He sees that it’s so powerful because of these structures and he’s trying to transplant this into the political realm.

Another thing you mentioned was the primacy of foreign relationships — foreign policy over domestic policy. And the really interesting point you mentioned is that this is a way to talk about necessity instead of goodness, because foreign policy is competitive. “If we don’t build these nukes, the Soviet Union will.” It’s a way to inject more necessity into political decision-making.

Yes, domestic policy is really a form of foreign policy because you mustn’t understand your compatriots as friends fundamentally, but as possible enemies. Your relationship to your own people is an alliance — a kind of foreign policy relationship rather than domestic as we would understand it, where there is fellowship or sociability. Politics is more foreign than domestic. The rule of foreign policy should be the rule of domestic policy rather than the reverse. It’s a big mistake to treat other nations as if they were your friends.

It sounds like it’s even a mistake to treat your own nation as your friend.

That’s right. The difference between friends and enemies is really a difference of whom you ally with. All alliances are temporary, and this is true of domestic relations too. The very existence of the party system is also another Machiavellian innovation. In the classical world, everyone considered a party to be a “faction.” All party was faction; none of it was respectable or based on principle. Therefore, a republic had to be harmonious. Machiavelli says that’s not so. Princes and peoples have different principles; you can’t harmonize them. You can fool them. Fraud is necessary. Fraud goes with conspiracy. The necessity to fraud is the necessity to conspire. You have to make people believe what isn’t.

How do you think Machiavelli would respond to modern times and the existence of nuclear bombs, where war today could be catastrophic? Does necessity today force us to stray away from the preference for war?

It forces us to speak that way. Whether it forces us to behave that way, we have yet to see. If you look at the present conflict between Russia and the Ukraine, the Russians threaten Ukraine with nuclear weapons, but they haven’t used them. Maybe the fact that several nations have them keeps them from being used by one. How long that can last — how long fortune will smile — is a definite question.

6. The Possibility of Withdrawal
When you read Machiavelli, one impulse is to withdraw from politics. But here you argue it’s impossible. Let me give you another quote from your book:

“Many live under the delusion, of course, that it is possible to live privately in society without involvement in politics. But they do not understand the basis of their security is the accomplishment of a prince who must always look out for himself and cannot therefore be trusted to take care of them should a conflict arise between the two goals. Relying on others is the same as relying on a profession of good, and it brings ruin. Society is radically politicized, leaving no refuge for those who would rather not be involved.”

The claim here is if you try to leave society as an Epicurean would, that is a kind of political action and you are dependent on people not interfering in your tranquil little paradise. But surely there are degrees of involvement?

No, I think he would say no. This is Machiavelli’s refutation of Epicureanism. Epicureanism says “live unnoticed.” Machiavelli says you can’t do that. People will recognize your power, your intelligence, your value. It’s impossible for you to disguise it. You’ll want to express it in some way which will attract attention and suspicion and fear. Even Jane Austen — well, people will suspect her intelligence and love it or hate it. Then you take a risk when you’re noticed, but it’s a necessary risk to win glory.

For the normal person who won’t get noticed, surely they can choose to either go into the Trump administration or buy a farm in Nebraska and raise some chickens?

Yes, maybe for those who want to give up and submit themselves to fortune — have a happy marriage and not try for anything grander. Will fortune smile on you or not? Really, his advice or his admonition against withdrawal is to the extremely talented and ambitious. The extremely talented and ambitious have that love of glory in their nature. It isn’t something that they can deny.

I’m thinking of Machiavelli himself, who did go into political exile and dialed down his political involvement while finding expression through writing The Prince. Or someone like Cicero — he found expression of his greatness in a less political domain.

In both cases, it seems that the intellectual life brought more renown and more glory. Another modern example is Churchill, who wrote books, especially when he wasn’t in power; but I think he preferred being in power to writing books. I’m not so sure that that was the case with Machiavelli or even Cicero. But you get more political power by writing or by being a philosopher than by being a prince.

7. Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth
I think we’re finally ready to investigate your central claim that Machiavelli is the founder of modernity. Can you give us an elaboration of what you mean by that?

“The Effectual Truth.” That’s the title of my book and it’s also a phrase from Machiavelli’s Chapter 15 of The Prince. He says that you mustn’t go to the imagination of a thing, but to the verità effettuale — the effectual truth of it. That one phrase seems to have been invented by Machiavelli. He calls attention to his invention by using it strangely, astonishingly, just this once in all his writings.

A thing is what its effect or outcome or result is. The example I like to use is love. If I say “I love you,” that really means “I want something from you.” My wife says, “I’m tired of that example.” But it’s reminders like that which make me love her.

How does that apply to a philosopher? Machiavelli invents the effectual truth. The effectual truth of Machiavelli was a world which believes in the effectual truth — and that is a world which he took upon himself to begin, but he couldn’t accomplish. He takes the first step, and the first step is to undermine and subvert the authority of Christianity, his chief enemy. He does that by criticizing the heart of it: the principle that you find honor in salvation in the next world rather than in success in this world.

A century later, Francis Bacon refers to this. A century later, Bacon brings in the first foundation of modern science. Modern science one can see as a form of effectual truth. Modern science depends on causes that have effects. Aristotle had four causes: the efficient cause, the material cause, the formal cause, and the final cause. Modern science uses just one of those: the efficient cause.

Efficiency and material causes go together, just as formal and final causes go together. This comes out of Machiavelli’s effectual truth. He doesn’t speak of “this world,” but he says “the world.” The world is the world of worldly necessities. The principle of necessity is the principle that characterizes and infuses the world. It’s what makes modern science confine itself to the world. I think Bacon saw very well that he was following Machiavelli’s lead even as he himself claimed to be the founder of the science of the modern world.

Modernity is rational control. It’s the attempt to change our way of life from a reliance on prejudice, tradition, and superstition to a reliance on reason — or in Machiavelli’s term, “prudence.” But he does say it is good to reason about everything. When you reason about everything according to him, you produce rational control. Modernity is the rebellion of reason against rational control.

8. The Father of Modern Science
The effectual truth is not only the key to understanding Machiavelli as the founder of modernity, but also as a philosopher. A lot of people don’t conceive of him as a philosopher, but he’s making a key epistemic point about the ontology of truth: that the validity of truth is simply its effect. And that’s what all of modern science is grounded on.

Machiavelli is very greatly underestimated. He’s much more of a philosopher than anybody thinks. Philosophy departments should start with Machiavelli, not with Descartes or Hume. Those people are derivative from Machiavelli.

A key distinction we moderns make is between “fact” and “value.” You even trace this into Machiavelli’s distinction between “deeds” and “professions.”

Fact is something that we take for granted, but that comes from Machiavelli. He is responsible for the discovery of “fact.” According to the Greeks, there is no word for fact. Knowledge was knowledge of what is permanent or eternal. Now we believe that knowledge is knowledge of facts — things that come and go. Fact comes out of facere just as “effect” does. The effectual truth can also be called the “factual truth.” A fact is something which gets in the way of your will. What impresses you or stops you.

Another way in which Machiavelli is the father of modern science — I’ll give you a quote:

“Nature must be interrogated or, to speak plainly, tortured. The real facts of science, like the real truth known to a prisoner, will come out under extreme pressure that removes the subject from its deceitful comfort zone to a laboratory or a torture chamber.”

When we apply Machiavelli’s political intuitions around examining the extreme situation and the efficacy of torture and spectacle into the natural world — that’s how you use science to reveal nature’s secrets.

Yes, the word is “experiment,” and that’s the word that Bacon used. You take a thing out of its comfortable context and place it where it’s itself, by itself. The “state of nature” tells you what a human being is like. A vacuum tells you what gravity is like. Fact as a result leads from ordinary facts to real facts which are experimental and therefore scientific.

In Machiavelli, there’s a distinction between “ordinary” and “extraordinary.” Extraordinary is what defines ordinary. It’s the extreme situation that defines the normal situation. Extraordinary reveals the true essence of the ordinary. In science, putting materials under extreme stress tells you a lot more about the world we live in. The experiment always looks for the extreme case; the extreme case is the definer.

9. Machiavelli and Tocqueville
Machiavelli’s emphasis on the individual and on acquisition inspired the classical liberal tradition. You describe Tocqueville as wanting the same thing as Machiavelli — to inject a kind of great spirit back into modernity — but believing that it was Machiavelli’s very materialism as it degenerates through liberalism that is the cause of bourgeois self-satisfaction and petty-mindedness. If Machiavelli were here today, would he be proud of the thing that he founded?

He might rethink his principles. What Tocqueville suggested also can be found in Rousseau: that what is spiritual is more important than what is material. That means that what is the “intentional truth” is more important than the “effectual truth.” America, as seen in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, is a consequence of its spirituality. Spirituality has more power than the material. That’s why we remember the philosophers of spirituality among the ancients. What humanity clings to is its ideas.

So you think that Machiavelli succeeded in a sense by making the effectual truth the dominant form of truth, but failed in the sense that he thought the effectual truth would add a kind of vitality to modernity that it ultimately did not?

Yes. The effectual truth still has to be measured by an ineffectual truth so you can see what is success. Is it in fact good to think that necessity is good?

10. Progressivism
This is how widespread you think Machiavelli’s influence is — that even “progressivism” you read as in some sense engendered by Machiavelli: namely his rejection of the classical cycle and his solution, which is the “perpetual republic.” What is a perpetual republic in Machiavelli’s view?

It’s the republic of his principles, comparable to the City of God. The perpetual republic is the one that lives on in the succession of republics. Each state has a limited life because of competition and the effect of routine. When republics succeed, they get lazy and forget what made them succeed. This can be revived with sensational executions. But at some point, fortune will overturn every political arrangement; but it won’t overturn the understanding that political attainment requires overturning fortune. The perpetual republic is always Machiavelli’s thought.