MYTH 1: The Prince is a Guidebook for Tyrants. When Machiavelli sat down to write his little primer on politics, he couldn’t have known or even imagined that it would become the most infamous political tract of all time, one that would, in one way or another, influence some of the greatest political thinkers of all time, from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Montisiqueu to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. Instead, he intended it to be a sort of glorified job application in which he sought to dazzle and impress the Medici princes who held power in Florence with the vast knowledge he had acquired through years of experience and study.
In his dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de’Medici, he writes:
Those who desire to win the favor of princes generally endeavor to do so by offering them those things which they themselves prize most, or such as they observe the prince to delight in most. Thence it is that princes have very often presented to them horses, arms, cloth of gold, precious stones, and similar ornaments worthy of their greatness.
Wishing now myself to offer to your Magnificence some proof of my devotion, I have found nothing amongst all I possess that I hold more dear or esteem more highly than the knowledge of the actions of great men, which I have acquired by long experience of modern affairs and a continued study of ancient history.
His overtures, however, went unanswered and it’s not certain if Lorenzo even bothered to read his little gift.
Nevertheless, The Prince addressed an immediate crisis that Machiavelli had seen with his own eyes – the disunity and ruin of Italy – and was meant to be a kind of "how to" book, a pragmatic master plan, a pithy and pungent no-hold-barred call to action for a cunning and ruthless new ruler endowed with the ambition to create a strong, unified state, one that – and this is important – is “distinguished from tyranny by the fact that it serves what Machiavelli calls the ‘common good.’" And by that term he has in mind, according to historian Paul Rahe, “war, conquest, and empire aimed at satisfying at the expense of outsiders the ambitions of the citizens and their longing for power, glory and wealth.”
His republicanism, as Rahe explains: inflames appetite; it sanctions and encourages licentiousness; and then, by means of laws and practices...it orders and channels appetite in such a way as to sustain liberty and encourage expansion.
Bottom line: Machiavelli made it clear throughout his career that he hated tyrannies, and so for this and other reasons, it seems safe to say that he didn’t intend his little masterpiece to be a guidebook for tyrants.
MYTH 2: The Ends Justify the Means
Machiavelli didn’t actually write this infamous phrase in The Prince. What he wrote was more along the lines of: "in considering the actions of men...one must consider the final result." That’s not to say, however, that he wasn’t concerned with ends and means. In his Discourses on Livy, a longer and more thoughtful book, he writes, “while the act accuses him, the result excuses him, and when the result is good, like that of Romulus, it will always excuse him, because one should reproach a man who is violent in order to ruin things, not one who is so in order to set them aright.”
That’s a little arcane. But Machiavelli’s referring here to Romulus' murder of his brother Remus, an act that, according to mythology, led to the founding of the ancient city of Rome. So what’s the difference between justifying such an act and excusing it? Well, according to Peter Bandanella:
Machiavelli seems willing to excuse some shocking acts (such as the murder of Remus by Romulus) if the deed is done for an extremely important and moral cause (in this case, the foundation of the city of Rome, and implicitly its empire). To justify such an action as the killing of a brother means to render such an action just, and Machiavelli certainly does not believe that what Romulus did was just. But he is willing, in this particular and limited case, to excuse what Romulus did, not because it was just but because excusing an action means to recognize that an action is wrong but was committed under extraordinary circumstances that attenuate its wrongness.
In other words, justifying such an act assumes that no moral wrong was committed whereas excusing it concedes that a wrong was committed but its wrongness is attenuated or “excused” by the greater good or “end” that is served. Either way, the point remains that Machiavelli never wrote that phrase about the ends justifying the means to which he partly owes his sinister reputation.
MYTH 3: Machiavelli was a Meanie.
Machiavelli’s personal letters contain some of his most beautiful writing and reveal him as a loving father, loyal friend, and deeply thoughtful, sensitive man. (Of course, some of his letters are quite lurid but that’s a story for another day.)
In any event, in a letter to his son Guido, Machiavelli discusses the problem posed by a mad mule. “Since the young mule has gone mad,” he writes, “it must be treated just the reverse of the way crazy people are, for they are tied up, and I want you to let it loose...take off its bridle and halter and let it go wherever it likes...The village is big and the beast is small; it can do no one any harm.”
Here again, we see that there is more to Machiavelli than his brutal realism. And by that I mean that if he was as hard-hearted as his critics portray him to be, he would’ve instructed his son to simply destroy the poor beast, don’t ya think? Either way, the point remains that Machiavelli wasn’t a meanie. In fact, when it came to his family, friends, and even a mad mule, he could be, and probably often was, a real softie!
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