Anything I don’t mention means (or will tend to mean) that I found it sufficiently clear in both Machiavelli and Mansfield not to require further explication. Further thoughts on the letter will be posted as comments to this post, as will be the case for subsequent posts on the individual chapters. At least, that is my present intention.
I've never quite understood why NM says he does not know who is less obligated if his friends do not like the book. That is, I understand why he himself would not feel obligated to them; after all they forced him to write what he never would have written for himself. But why would not they be obligated to him? Mansfield (p. 21) says that if they are satisfied, they are obligated. But if they don't, they are not? Why not? Either way, he did the work. A small question but one I’ve never been able to resolve.
Mansfield has an interesting sentence on p. 22: “Machiavelli’s friends forced him to write but he chose his friends; by choosing them, he chose the necessity they would imposed on him arising from the need to be grateful for their benefits; his choice was prior to his necessity but in accord with it.”
I take this to mean that Machiavelli somehow stands outside the necessity that, in the text, will insist governs the world. To have an enterprise and be capable of implementing it, this must be true. Machiavelli cannot himself simply be a creature or tool of necessity. Not that his heroes necessarily are, but in his thought the human race sometimes seems to be. Is NM claiming for himself a special status? A unique status? But wouldn’t his successors also require such a status in order to carry forward his enterprise? In any case this brings to mind Strauss’ remark (p. 294) that Machiavelli is “unable to give a clear account of his own doing. What is greatest in him cannot be properly appreciated on the basis of his own narrow view of the nature of man.” I take this to mean that when NM changes philosophy to make it an active participant in politics and the ally of the demos but he does not realize that he has created a paradox. There is no place for the philosopher in his world, but then what is he? How does he know what he knows? Surely he cannot do what he wants to do without knowledge, which points back to all those ancient metaphysical-epistemological issues that his new philosophy does away with. Perhaps Machiavelli thought it was a one-way street, that is, his enterprise to change philosophy was possible, but only once, making him unique in the history of philosophy. But this would seem to lead to the difficulty that his successors could not come to know what he knew and rule as he ruled.
This is a long winded way of saying that all reductionist accounts of the whole fail by failing to account for the one who takes it into account. That is, for example, if all thought is historical, how does the historicist know it? Strauss says two ways 1) he either posits a culmination, of which he is it; or 2) he posits a never ending process predicated on the truth that all historical thought is false because there is no truth. The first solution suffers from the problem that no satisfactory proof can be adduced—that in fact the claim looks rather suspiciously like a secularization of Christianity—and hence is ultimately wishful thinking and/or an act of will. The problem with the second is, if the only truth is that there is no truth, how can that A) actually be true, and B) known to be true? This is in keeping with Strauss’s remark in Natural Right and History (p. 24) that historicism “exempts itself from its own verdict.” Simplifying here of course.
So, Machiavelli’s reductionist account—classical metaphysics is wrong, there is no unmixed good; classical political philosophy is wrong, there is no best regime; classical epistemology is wrong; we can know, if not the good (which does not exist), various temporal goods and how to achieve them—fails to account for Machiavelli himself as the thinker who is able (so he claims) to articulate the whole and what is best for man. By CHOOSING to create modernity, Machiavelli must have stood outside the world he wanted to create, he must have had a broader perspective than that narrow world. “His choice” is prior to the necessity which he claims rules all. Hence it can’t truly rule all. Hence what Strauss calls Machiavelli’s “stupendous contraction of the horizon” (p. 295).
Strauss often notes that Machiavelli, especially early on, prefers to make his teaching seem conventional or traditional. In keeping with that, I think, is his emphasis on the superiority of knowing to doing in the dedication. That is, he says that those who know how to rule deserve to be princes more than those who rule without knowing. This is in keeping with the way that Socrates often calls himself the “true whatever,” that is, he will say something that on the surface is outrageous, such as that he is the only true statesman (Gorgias) or true midwife (Theatetus). The point seems to be that since he truly knows what these things are he is more truly their practitioner than those who perform the function without truly knowing. So, in this very first statement of the book, Nick is making himself appear to be in agreement with this tradition (at the same time that he disparages the tradition of dedicating books “to some prince”).
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