Book I, Preface

Mansfield adds a note (p. 26, n. 2) to Machiavelli’s’ famous reference to “unknown waters and lands” that cites Dante, Paradisio II 1-6.  The text of which is as follows: 

“O ye who are in a little bark, eager to listen, have followed behind my ship that singing makes her way, turn back to see your shores again; do not put forth on the deep, for, perhaps, losing me, you would be left bewildered.”

Interestingly, the very next line is “The waters I take were never sailed before.”  But Mansfield’s note does not include that. 

So, what does that cite mean?  Well, actually Mansfield does not place the note on Machiavelli’s reference to the waters but at his desire to bring common benefit to everyone.  So we have a contrast.  Dante goes on into Paradise alone.  He benefits no one but himself.  Not, it would appear, out of selfishness or parsimony but because he believes the reader would get lost trying to follow him.  I take it the implication is that for Dante, philosophy is still the preserve of the few, whereas Machiavelli intends to make it serve everyone?

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Another puzzling sentence in Mansfield (p. 26): referring to Machiavelli’s reference to the honor accorded to antiquity in his time, Mansfield says that “Such honoring could be interpreted as an instance of human envy, since men do honor to themselves when they honor their ancestors.” 

Now, I understand how men honor themselves by honoring their ancestors.  But in what way is this attributable to envy?  If any sin is relevant here, wouldn’t pride be the more obvious one?  I am scratching my head trying to think of a provisional answer to this one and I can’t.

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I note here also the first appearance in the book of the word “marvel” (it or a variant will appear 26 times overall).  Machiavelli “marvels” (and grieves) that no one in his time imitates ancient political men in their deeds.  This is an important word for Nick, which I trace in part to Xenophon’s use of it at the beginning of the Cyropaediea (I 1.6), where Xenophon says that Cyrus’ successful rule elicits “wonder” (thaumazō).  Contrast that with the beginning of Prince 4, which discusses the same kingdom (the kingdom of Darius, i.e., Persia), but Machiavelli in effect commands the reader not to marvel.  What Xenophon finds wondrous Machiavelli finds perfectly explicable.  At any rate, as we shall see, Machiavelli will be commanding us alternatively to marvel, and not to marvel, and we will need to pay attention to that.

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We also have here the first instance of Machiavelli saying that he “believes” something.  This must always be compared and contrasted to the other ways in which he speaks in his own name, in particular the phrase “I say.” We shall have to pay attention to this but as a provisional statement we may say that whatever Machiavelli “believes” is merely provisional, in accordance with contemporary prejudice and likely to be superseded later.  This is connected to what Strauss says about Livy being “Machiavelli’s Bible” (pp. 30, 93, 115, 133, among others).  The analysis of Livy is meant to stand for the analysis of the Bible.  What Machiavelli does to Livy could be done to the Bible.  He wants the reader to do the same to the Bible.  That is to say, Machiavelli first adopts the pose of a pious and uncritical believer in “this text” and then gradually moves “from reverence to acceptance to departure to disagreement to rejection (Mansfield and Tarcov, introduction to their Discourses translation, p. xli). 

The other meaning of his “belief” (I believe) represents his act of will, his stepping outside established modes and orders to make a free choice where clear reason cannot decide, or perhaps in the past, in other thinkers, has decided wrongly.  We shall see a decisive instance of this in I 6. 

In this case, what Machiavelli “believes” is a famous sentence that both Strauss (pp. 176-177) and Mansfield (p. 27) explain fully.  I can only add that I find this to be an instance of both kinds of his “belief.”  That is, it is provisional in that, in the final analysis, he does not believe that the cause of not imitating the ancients is owing to lack of true knowledge of the histories.  It is an act of free will—of rebellion even—in that his believe is precisely based on the two reasons he gives as secondary or dependent but which in fact are primary.  Nick is telling almost the whole truth here.

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I note as well the first appearance of “leisure” or “idleness” (ozio).  This will appear ten times as a noun and five as an adjective or adverb.  We all know that the “ambitious leisure” which NM attacks is a reference is to philosophy or a certain kind of religious devotion.  The important contrast here is to Aristotle (in particular Nicomachean Ethics X 7), for whom leisure is, or should be, man at his best, the that-which-for-the-sake-of we do everything else.  Here is a major disagreement between Machiavelli and the classics.

Dedicatory Letter

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.

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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.

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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).