Editor's Note
This is one in a series of posts on the common readings in Stanford’s 1980s “Western Culture” course. You can see all posts in the series here: Readings in Western Culture.
“The citizen must have a theory of knowledge which allows great latitude for public decisions upon public events. To attempt the erection of a civic way of life upon epistemological foundations which allow the recognition only of universal order and particular traditions is to be hampered by certain limitations. It can be argued that the history of Florentine political thought is the history of a striking but partial emancipation from these limitations.” — Pocock, 50.
This is the kernel of Pocock’s argument in The Machiavellian Moment. Both law and custom are insufficient to prepare a republic to respond to new circumstances or to initiate something new in the world (including, interestingly, the instantiation of the republic itself). A transformed understanding of history helps cut the path through the forest of universals and each tree of particularity, the darkly lit saeculum of time between the first and second coming of Christ in which the story of fallen humankind plays out toward a meaningful end. If all meaning will be made clear in some future resolution, then real understanding is retrospective – the significance of past events becomes clear only in the light cast back upon them from the clearing in which we stand, while the thoroughfare ahead of us is ours to make well or poorly.
In this book, Pocock traces the way that notions of contingency (historical circumstances which create the conditions for choices that are shaping an-as-yet indeterminate future) and what we might call (but he does not) “democracy” – the self-governance of citizens – develop together. Modern historical thinking and republican thinking emerge in tandem, and we see this pairing in works of political theory emerging from and responding to the intellectual milieu of Florence during the Renaissance. The great Florentine writers of the Trecento are subsumed and appropriated as forerunners of the rebirth, old eloquent Simeons singing their nunc dimittis in the courtyard of the temple. Thus Machiavelli ends The Prince by invoking Petrarch as a prophet, foretelling a glory for Italy that yet awaits fulfillment.
Pocock’s reading of Machiavelli would have been an interesting idea to consider in our Western Culture course at Stanford in the mid-1980s – and for all I know some sections of the course did engage with it, though how one might distil it (or, I suppose, mix and dilute it) in order to lead a group of freshmen through a discussion of it is something I will have to ponder. I’m not averse to dropping some Pocock on my own students here at Tarleton State University. There’s no reason not to – except perhaps for the fact that it’s probably more valuable to them to be able to read and to say they have read Machiavelli than to say they have grasped Pocock’s interpretation of him.
And that was the point of the Western Culture program. Its programmatic and explicitly stated value for Stanford students was first of all to introduce them to “great works” of the Western tradition, and then secondly to allow them to be able to present themselves to others as “knowing” those texts, knowing that reading list, belonging among an educated elite. Those are ideas I’ve found in both the prospectus for the curriculum before it was adopted and in defenses of it. The Western Culture program gave Stanford students the ability to claim membership in the club of liberally educated sophisticates the world over.
Because I was idealistic and sincere and naïve, in a way that some of my classmates who came from more sophisticated backgrounds were not, I assumed that the main value of the Western Culture program was in the liberal education itself. So I usually did all the reading. I took the texts seriously. I sought the truth in them and through them. I was earnest – oh, so earnest. Staying at Stanford was a struggle financially, and I took on debt and took on work that let me stay, and I believed that the value of the education I was receiving would be worth the cost to me.
I was both right and wrong. The value of a Stanford education had and has little to do with the content of the curriculum, then or now. It has everything to do with the doors of opportunity and belonging that it can open. It was, if you will, a Machiavellian institution – just like Yale, or Georgetown Prep. No matter who or what you really are, take care with who you seem to be.
I’m glad I didn’t understand that about my own education at the time, or I might have missed out on it.
I did understand that much about Machiavelli, and I hated The Prince for that reason. Our discussion leader was not able to sell me on the wisdom of abandoning one kind of virtue for another, character for skill in governing. I don’t remember now what it was precisely about Machiavelli that I most objected to, but I remember being one of the only students in our discussion to assert that Machiavelli was wrong, even if he was correct, because his advice was unethical. This is what comes of looking for truth rather than looking for wisdom – they are close, but not the same.
Wisdom is a woman. That’s one reason I missed her at Stanford. I expected wisdom to sound like a man.
Wisdom comes to visit Boethius, as Pocock points out, and she offers him a means of accepting with faithful resignation his fate at the hands of Fortune.
Fortune is a woman too. That’s what Machiavelli said, and what Pocock explored at some length in his preliminary chapters and in his chapter on The Prince. What makes the difference between a good prince and a bad prince, a worthy prince and an unworthy prince? It’s how he uses his virtu – his manly qualities – to master Fortune.
Here’s a translation of that passage published in 1987, in a volume for the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, a volume edited by Pocock’s friend and intellectual sparring partner Quentin Skinner and translated by Russell Price:
I conclude, then, that since circumstances vary and men when acting lack flexibility, they are successful if their methods match the circumstances and unsuccessful if they do not. I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you want to control her, it is necessary to treat her roughly. And it is clear that she is more inclined to yield to men who are impetuous than to those who were calculating. Since fortune is a woman, she is always well disposed towards young men, because they are less cautious and more aggressive, and treat her more boldly.
There it is, the secret to worldly success for men: “it is necessary to treat her roughly.” Don’t let circumstances master you, but be their master.
This translation, of course, was not the one used in Western Culture courses at Stanford – the program ended in 1988. I don’t remember the translation we used in class, though if I recall correctly, we read Machiavelli in a photocopied reader, not as a standalone volume. So it may have been a much older translation – perhaps this one by William Marriott, who died in 1927.
…For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.
If we read that translation – and well we might have; I don’t recall – then we read in rather plain language that, like women, Fortune ought to be seized with violence, beaten, and forced. Fortune must be raped, like women must be raped and mastered. The ability, the audacity, to master the one was found to be the same character of those who so practiced mastering the other.
This is Machiavelli’s answer to how a prince could know that he was fit and how a man could know that he was powerful. From among the ranks of powerful men princes arise, “chosen” by Fortune because Fortune cannot prevent the rapist from seizing what he wants. To train men to power, then, in Machiavelli’s telling, is to train them to rape, to seize, to take, to force, to master, to beat and intimidate and terrorize and command women.
Was Machiavelli on the formal curriculum at Georgetown Prep in the 1980s? I don’t know. Someone who went there or someone who teaches there now can answer that question. I’m not sure it matters, for Machiavelli was certainly on the informal curriculum at Georgetown Prep — at Georgetown Prep and Georgetown, at Harvard and at Yale, at Columbia, at Chicago, at Michigan, at Wisconsin. And at Stanford too.
Yes, at Stanford too.
9 Thoughts on this Post
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I guess I’d put a small question mark next to the passage that begins: “The value of a Stanford education had and has little to do with the content of the curriculum, then or now. It has everything to do with the doors of opportunity and belonging that it can open.”
I suppose so, on a certain narrow understanding or definition of “value,” but then you go on to say, in effect, that you were glad you were not attuned to this understanding of “value” at the time. Which leads me, by a sort of roundabout route, to wonder whether Machiavelli himself would have endorsed a “Machiavellian” (i.e., instrumental) view of “value” in this context.
There is, for instance, his well-known letter to his friend Francesco Vettori (reproduced as an appendix in the H. Mansfield translation of The Prince) in which Machiavelli describes taking off his muddy daytime clothes and putting on “regal” garments to read the ancient/classical historians etc., and noting how much pleasure he takes in their “conversation.” One may or may not like what Machiavelli made of his reading, but this was someone who, once his active political existence was over, was apparently happiest when immersing himself in his books. Of course the intellectual who fantasizes or rhapsodizes about violence of various kinds has appeared with some frequency, but I’m not sure Machiavelli quite fits this mold, the violent language of “the fortune is a woman” passage notwithstanding.
I considered quoting Mansfield’s take on that passage (at the end of the intro to his translation) — not that I agree with most of it, but in the interest of ‘viewpoint diversity’. But I’ve decided that, especially in the context of the current moment, it would read as offensive, at least to some people, so I’m not going to.
Louis, I’m disappointed that you didn’t share the Mansfield translation — I don’t see how one of our readers could be offended by one translation of this passage rather than another, unless they are offended by the translation’s accuracy or lack thereof. And I don’t have access to the Mansfield translation through my university library, so I can’t check it myself.
I do find it interesting that Mansfield is a Straussian, and Pocock (per the new introduction to Machiavellian Moment) is drolly dismissive of Straussians, so for that reason alone it would be interesting to see Mansfield’s rendering of the passage. In any case, you mentioning that you thought of posting the translation and then didn’t came across (unintentionally, no doubt) as a sort of “you can’t handle the truth!” statement.
What is available through my university library from Mansfield is a 1995 article he published in Commentary, “The National Prospect.” The library catalog summarizes the article thusly:
Liberals are responsible for America’s social problems. Liberals in the educational system are more concerned with multiculturalism and self-esteem than with the truth. Feminists undermine moral responsibility because they focus more on independence than equality.
The article begins, “Lack of virtue is dimming our national prospect…” and the jeremiad / declension narrative goes on from there.
So, yes, I think it would be important to consider how this translator, a Harvard professor, has rendered Machiavelli, and how he glosses the infamous passage in chapter 25, and how widely his translation might be in use as opposed to other versions, and how that influences and/or reflects American conceptions of Machiavelli or republicanism or citizenship or feminism or virtue. (From a quick search of Amazon, it looks like Mansfield’s translation is the third-best-selling scholarly translation, behind the Cambridge edition by Quentin Skinner and the Norton Critical edition by Robert M. Adams. I suppose most purchases of these more expensive editions of The Prince are for academic purposes / reading lists / classes, etc, so perhaps Mansfield’s understanding of Machiavelli is not predominant in academe.
But a quick glance at Mansfield’s Wikipedia page reveals that he is purported to have heavily influenced people like Andrew Sullivan, whose cultural reach is broad indeed.
So, anyhow, I would argue — I have argued — that it matters very much that Machiavelli likened the ability and strength and will to shape the circumstances that flow from a political agent’s choices to the ability and strength and will of men to rape women. I think it matters that Machiavelli is the go-to source for a meditation on political savvy in a secular age. I think it matters that a little pinch-mouthed prep-school prince like Brett Kavanaugh has credibly demonstrated and been rewarded for (or at least not penalized for) both that literal behavior and its figurative analog. Moreover, the Senate Majority Leader has vowed to “plow right through” any objections to his nomination.
That is, I would submit, an apt illustration for what the ethos of rape might look like in political terms.
But yeah — feminism is ruining America.
L.D.,
I think you probably know that I am on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Mansfield and that I do not agree (to put it mildly) with his conservatism and anti-feminism. (Nor am I fan of Straussians in general.)
It is not Mansfield’s translation of the passage that I thought would prove offensive, but rather what Mansfield writes about the passage at the end of his introduction to his edition of The Prince. But you’re right: I shouldn’t have said I was thinking of quoting the potentially offensive stuff and then not quoted it. I should either have quoted it or not said anything about it.
Anyway I’m thinking of sending you a possible short guest post on Machiavelli (if I can find time etc. to do it) that would not be about any of this but rather about other things.
P.s. I own three paperback editions of The Prince: Skinner/Price; Mansfield; and an old Mentor Books edition (reprint of an Oxford U.P. hardcover ed.) with an old translation (Luigi Ricci’s, as revised in 1935 by someone named E.R.P. Vincent) and with an introduction by Christian Gauss.
Louis, rest assured that I have not mistaken you for a Straussian! As to a guest post, I’d be delighted to run it. Send it to me when you can.
Meanwhile, for those interested, here is a .pdf of the full text of Il Principe in Italian.
And here is the passage in question:
Concludo, adunque, che, variando la fortuna, e stan-
do li uomini ne’ loro modi ostinati, sono felici mentre
concordano insieme, e, come discordano, infelici. Io iu-
dico bene questo, che sia meglio essere impetuoso che
respettivo; perché la fortuna è donna, et è necessario,
volendola tenere sotto, batterla et urtarla. E si vede che
la si lascia più vincere da questi, che da quelli che fred-
damente procedano. E però sempre, come donna, è
amica de’ giovani, perché sono meno respettivi, più fe-
roci e con più audacia la comandano.
For an early exchange between Mansfield v. Pocock, see Political Theory, 3,4 (Nov. 1975). It contains a the three pieces below. These are take no prisoners polemics. The two did not, and I assume still do not, like each other. To put it mildly.
Best, Richard King
An Exchange on Strauss’s Machiavelli
Strauss’s Machiavelli (pp. 372-384)
Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/190834
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Prophet and Inquisitor: Or, a Church Built upon Bayonets Cannot Stand: A Comment on Mansfield’s “Strauss’s Machiavelli” (pp. 385-401)
J. G. A. Pocock
https://www.jstor.org/stable/190835
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Reply to Pocock (pp. 402-405)
Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/190836
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Thanks for this great post! It’s interesting to me that you were in a minority in your class questioning Machiavelli’s prescription. Not sure if this reflects the period of your college experience, the instructors perspective or Stanford itself. In the early seventies, while the Vietnam War was still at the forefront of all political discussions, I was reading Machiavelli at a California state college. Although, Machiavelli’s counsel for the prince was immediately viewed as an early form of political realism it was also viewed by most as amoral or even unethical.
To reference one of your earlier posts, it strikes me that one of the common characteristics between Thomas Cromwell as depicted in “A Man for All Seasons” and later in “Wolf Hall” is his Machiavellian doings in the service of Henry. Those “doings” in “A Man …” are presented as duplicitous, ruthless, Cromwell is a villain. In “Wolf Hall” Cromwell is honorably even charismatically serving his prince. Also, Thomas More goes form heroic martyr to sideshow dupe.
The term Machiavellian always means for me, cunning, devious, amoral. This is the perspective of an old guy taken as common knowledge from a particular era… and yet, and here’s the rub, isn’t Pocock presenting this moment as a pursuit to ascribe a “virtue” and a “civic humanism” to republicanism? Is the foundation of civic humanism based on a kind of amorality? Does Pocock say this?
Richard and Paul, thanks for the comments.
Paul,
I’m glad you are surprised at the jadedness / cynicism of (a very small sampling) of Stanford freshmen in the 1980s. But that was around the time that the film “Wall Street” came out, with Gordon Gecko’s mantra, “Greed is good.” Anything “Machiavellian” in the popular sense of the term was being celebrated. I think of the movie “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off,” which I absolutely *hated*, as a celebration of that kind of Machiavellianism — and it was (one of) the signature films of my generation.
As to Pocock’s account of the relationship between Machiavelli’s idea of virtue and concepts of morality, it’s not so much that Machiavellian virtues were amoral so much that they were morally ambiguous and at least partly “unmoral” (pg. 184), because they are the actions taken in a milieu where custom has ceased to adequately govern. They occur somewhat beyond the reach of morality in time and create a new morality (potentially, I guess) in their wake.
Right now I’m reading Pocock’s chapter on Machiavelli’s *Discourses* and *The Craft of War,* and will keep making my way through the book and (I hope) finish it before my next blog post is due. So I expect I’ll see how/whether Pocock “complicates” the moral dimensions of Machiavellianism.
But yes, in common usage, to say someone is “Machiavellian” is never a compliment, and, though I don’t think I had heard the term before I got to Stanford (can’t be sure), I adopted that usage pretty easily as my own.
Pocock is certainly making it interesting.
Richard,
I’ve logged my writing time for the day, so now I’m going to read the linked articles in your comment above. It occurs to me that “famous / influential / riveting polemical debates between intellectual historians” would make a great blog post series. Hopefully our readers can help us come up with a list of spirited, intelligent polemics between rival thinkers.
Anyway, I’m glad that The Machiavellian Moment has sparked some good discussion on the blog. It’s fun to read, and I hope I’m doing at least an adequate job of conveying what is at stake in Pocock’s argument, though I am very much still in the middle of it. As historians go, I am a slow reader.
I think for Pocock (and for Machiavelli) its a question of accepting historical finitude as a condition for political life, one that irrevocably shatters the cosmological framework of the medieval church and the greek philosophy that informed it. This is what Frank Ankersmit calls the brokenness of political reality after M. For Pocock, its about M dethroning Aristotle, but I think most scholars would agree that Skinner and others (most notably Peter Stacey at UCLA) have argued a bit more successfully that M is really more concerned with Roman theories of the moral status of rule (Cicero for Skinner, Seneca for Stacey). Stacey’s work on Skinner is the best done now, IMHO. The work of John McCormick on M as a radical democrat is very interesting, but personally I don’t think he lands all of his punches against Pocock and Skinner, and overstates the republicanism/democracy distinction. Erica Benner argues at great and impressive length and erudition the usual picture is quite wrong, and that Machiavelli is a deeply moral thinker.
For Mansfield, its about the timelessness of Machiavelli’s wisdom and the maxims he is drawing from the ancients and reworking them so they can be used in an emergent modernity that will tell itself different stories, making all the more precious and valuable the wisdom being rescued. Personally, I think Pocock is just over Mansfield’s head in those exchanges, although his own early work on Machiavelli is also interesting, and important. Still, let’s not forget Mansfield’s ‘finest’ contribution to scholarship, his book Manliness, perhaps the forgotten text of the day.
I had not heard of Benner (or Stacey). Benner’s book sounds like it might be fun to read, though I don’t think I’d agree with the argument, at least not in the strong form in which it is apparently put.