#375： The Misunderstood Machiavelli
Episode Stats
Summary
Niccolo Machiavelli is well known for his advice on how to become a tyrant. But what if his advice wasn't meant to be advice for tyrants, but meant to encourage republicanism? That s the argument Erika Benner makes in her new book, "The Prince and His World."
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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The ends justify the means. It's better to be feared than loved. Politics have no relation
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to morals. These are just a few of the maxims and ideas the Italian writer Niccolo Machiavelli
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is well known for. The cynical and duplicitous advice he offered in his book, The Prince,
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has made Machiavelli's name synonymous with manipulative self-interest and deceitful
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plays for power. But what if Machiavelli wrote The Prince not as sincere advice for would-be
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tyrant leaders, but as a work of irony and satire that's meant to shine a light on the futility of
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manipulative deception and the need for leaders of virtue. That's the argument my guest makes in
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her book, Be Like the Fox, Machiavelli and His World. Her name is Erika Benner. She's a professor
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of political philosophy. And today on the show, Erika and I discuss why Machiavelli is misunderstood
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and what he actually was trying to accomplish with his writing. Instead of being an advisor
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for tyrants, Erika argues that Machiavelli was an impassioned supporter of republicanism
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and spent his life trying to foster republican virtue in Florence. And she argues that if you
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look at Machiavelli's life and all of his writing, you'll find a man who didn't think politics
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had no relation to morals, but rather firmly believe that the only way for free republics
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to last for centuries was to develop citizens and leaders of virtue. You're not going to read
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The Prince the same way after listening to this episode. After the show's over,
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check out the show notes at aom.is slash Be Like the Fox. And Erika joins me now by phone.
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So you published a book called Be Like the Fox, and it's sort of, you're trying to redeem
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one of the most loathed men in at least political history, Machiavelli. His name's become synonymous
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with duplicity, amorality, evilness. Before we get into that, you've sort of made a career for
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yourself writing about Machiavelli. How did you get drawn to him as a subject?
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Yeah, this is a question that still puzzles me quite a lot. I mean, if anyone had told me about
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10 or 12 years ago that I'd end up writing three books about Machiavelli in that space of time,
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I don't know what I would have done. I would have been horrified. I mean, it was kind of an
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accident. I was working on something completely different, nationalism in the 18th and 19th
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century. And Machiavelli is somebody who a lot of kind of theorists of nationalism, like Rousseau,
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you know, and Hegel, would mention a lot in a favorable way. So I thought, well, I'll just kind
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of have a closer look at Machiavelli and see why he's so interesting. Of course, I've heard his
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reputation. I'd been teaching, you know, one segment of a course on political history and
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political theory. Machiavelli had been a character, but I hadn't read him closely. As soon as I started
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looking more closely at what he wrote, not just in the prints, but in his other works, like the
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discourses, I just realized he was a lot more confusing and interesting than I ever realized.
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You know, the main thing was that he contradicted a lot of the things that he's famous for saying
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over and over in his works. You know, he's famous, as you said, for being a teacher of evil,
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for saying, you know, better be feared than loved, you know, for seeming to promote princes
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ahead of republics. But when I read closely, it looked to me like he wasn't always saying that.
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And basically, I got hooked on trying to crack him, trying to kind of work out what's the bottom
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So how did he get the reputation? I mean, the reputation that he has is, as you said,
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favors princes or monarchies over republics. He's all about political duplicity. And then he's,
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you know, sort of been synonymous with, you know, that the prince is a work of Satan and he's evil.
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Well, at the time that he wrote, you know, he says a lot of very irreverent things about
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the Catholic Church and also about monarchs. And at the time that he wrote, both of these
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things were becoming stronger and stronger. And they didn't like somebody who was going and,
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you know, audaciously, or in some cases, very subtly, kind of satirizing them. A lot of other,
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you know, Republican authors at the time, actually, Republican readers, sorry, at the time,
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thought that Machiavelli was criticizing the Catholic Church and monarchs, and they approved of him for
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doing that. But that's the main reason, you know, at the time, why he started being kind of the poster
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boy for the church and defenders of strong monarchies, of, you know, somebody who's evil,
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who ought to be, who's teaching things that were subversive and ought to be avoided. But, you know,
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the reason why he continues to sound like a teacher of evil is that he really does say some pretty
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shocking things. If you kind of just glance through the prints and, you know, just skim without
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reading every lie very closely, you do come up with some takeaway quotes that are pretty horrifying.
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I mean, he says things like, you know, sometimes if you're a ruler, you sometimes have to be prepared
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to do evil. You have to enter into evil ways in order to protect your state. And that kind of thing,
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even now, even when we're not sort of immersed in Catholic and monarchical values, still worries us.
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And so what he was doing, so would it be safe to say that the prints is sort of a work of satire?
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That's what I think. And that's what, and I'm not claiming to be wholly original. I actually was
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inspired in that reading by early readers like Rousseau and Benedict Spinoza and others who saw
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the prints as a kind of work of very subtle irony. And in some cases of outright satire, I mean,
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the difference is sort of satire is kind of more in your face. I'm making fun of you. And you
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usually recognize satire when you see it. Irony can be a lot subtler, where, you know,
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the victim of an ironic remark doesn't always kind of know if you're kind of, are you teasing
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me or not? And the prints has a lot of both of those things about princes, basically about
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princes. And subtly, between the lines, says lots of very positive things about republics,
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while claiming up fun. I mean, Machiavelli says right at the beginning, I'm not going to say that
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much about republics. But if you keep on reading the prints really carefully, you notice all sorts
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of things he says. And republics always come out a lot better than princes. They're stronger.
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They're much better at fighting wars and winning them. They're much better at making the subjects
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or citizens kind of love their state and, you know, feel committed to it and hold it up through
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thick and thin. So, yes, there's this kind of subtle message all the way through.
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I love the argument because whenever I read the prints and I looked at some of the advice
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he was giving, I would look at it and I would think, if someone followed this advice, this
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is a recipe for actually diminishing your power, right? Because like, there's only so long that
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people would be like, are going to take that very authoritarian bully-like or duplicity that
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he promotes and then revolt. So when I read that, it's like, this is actually kind of sly
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of Machiavelli. He writes this manual. It's supposedly for princes or cardinals or whatever.
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And it's like, if they follow this advice, it'll actually lead to the ruin and actually
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Yeah. I mean, and this is kind of the odd thing to me about it kind of always kind of puzzled
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me. Why would someone as intelligent as Machiavelli, and he clearly is, as soon as I started really
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reading him carefully, I was, I've been so impressed by the analytical sharpness of this guy and the
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understanding of human nature he had. Why would someone who's that intelligent and subtle think
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that everyone else is so stupid that they just fall for this kind of trick and that princes could
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easily just kind of, you know, step all over, you know, whoever they felt like conquering.
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He does often, you know, he often says, yeah, men are easily taken in. People are, you know,
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one thing about human beings is that we're easily taken in by snares and traps. And that's the kind of
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weak point that human beings have, unlike foxes. That's, hence the title, Be Like the Fox. Foxes,
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he says, are really good at seeing through snares. And that makes it, you know, harder to kind of
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trap them. Human beings are kind of easy to trap because they're kind of gullible and they, you know,
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thinking about their present interests and not very much about the future. But once you've got them,
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if you're stupid enough to think that you can hold them easily, then you're going to get, you know,
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you're going to have another thing coming. And the prince, that's exactly what he says to princes about
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trying to hold republics. You can get them by being sneaky and people are kind of going to let
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you maybe be taken in by some of your tricks. But once you've got people conquered, if they're
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used to freedom, they're not going to like it and they're going to fight back and your life will not
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be fun as a ruler. The life of being the most powerful man in Italy or wherever is not going
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to be as rosy as you thought it was going to be. So I think to fully understand the context of
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Machiavelli's work, not just the prince, but his discourses, it's important to have at least
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a rudimentary understanding of Italian and European politics. And I'll admit, when I was
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reading the book, you had that like list of cast of characters at the beginning. I found myself
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having to go back over and over because there's so many different people involved and people would
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rise to power and then fall to power and then they would rise back to power. So what was the
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political world like in that Machiavelli grew up in? Yeah, I mean, that's a good, just on that point
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about, I mean, when I first started getting into Machiavelli about 10 years ago, I had no clue about
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this history. I was not, I'm a political philosopher. I didn't know much about it. I knew nothing about
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Italian history, really. And so I completely sympathize with anyone who just says, ah, you
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know, too hard to get, you know, everybody straight. And when you pick up the prince, you also might have
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that thought I used to. I'd read the prince and I'd think, oh, I'm not going to really be able to get
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into this because there are too many names of people that I don't know. But I just say it's really
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rewarding once you do. About the context, I mean, well, there's a political world in Europe that
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Machiavelli lived in. The basic fact about it, I think, is that borders were always changing. There
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was no territorial stability and states were constantly expanding and trying to take bits
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of other states. So it was very unstable in that sense, constantly in upheaval. The other fact about
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this is that most of this kind of expansion was happening with big monarchies. So there were, you
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know, kind of kings and queens who were hereditary, trying to take bits of each other's states.
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And the easiest way to do that was just to marry somebody from another royal family. And then you could
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make a claim on a bit of their state. Now, Machiavelli and Republicans like him thought this is a very,
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you know, this is not a recipe for stability in Europe. If you want to have a more stable kind of
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set up, wouldn't it be better to have not ruling families running states, but to have peoples running
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them on a kind of more permanent basis? That was one of the good arguments that they had for
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republics. The specific context of Florence, well, it was also upheaval because there was a kind of
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constant struggle and had been going on for about 80 years when Machiavelli was born between
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like the old republic. Florence had unusually in Europe, very unusually, a republican constitution based
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on a wide male franchise. But a very powerful family, the Medici, a banking family, had cropped
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up in the last sort of 60 or 70 years before Machiavelli was born, trying to kind of take
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control of the state. And they'd come to dominate Florence. Even though Florence remained in name a
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republic, in fact, it was one like a principality of the Medici family. So Machiavelli came into the scene
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at this crucial point when there was a life and death struggle for this old, venerable, proud
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republic, the only one really of its kind in Europe at the time, which had a lot of people by that time
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sort of saying, wouldn't it be better for Florence if we just went the way of everyone else and became
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a monarchy? I mean, the big powers were all monarchies, France, Spain, Habsburg Empire, England. Why
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shouldn't we try to form a monarchy? Wouldn't that make us stronger? And Machiavelli was one of those
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rare people who said, no, I don't think so. I don't think this is best for Florence, and I don't
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think it's best for Europe. Well, despite that opposition to monarchy, he still played the
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political games. Like even when there was sort of a monarchy put in place, effectively, he kind of went
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along with it and tried to find ways he could change things from within. Yeah, that's right. And that
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wasn't unusual at the time, because if you think about it, I mean, what happened, of course, is
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Machiavelli worked as a civil servant in a short period when Florence was in a very strong, well,
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there was a popular republic set up, and the Medici, the princes, had been kicked out for a while.
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When they came back, when Machiavelli was in his 40s, he did try to work with them, but it was,
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you know, a tiny, this is a tiny, tiny city where everyone knows each other. Everyone,
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you know, of a certain class is friends with each other. And, you know, somebody like Machiavelli
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couldn't go and be invisible. There was no way he could just go and hide, because the Medici princes
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had already singled him out as a troublemaker. He was somebody who was known to have supported
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the republic that they had expelled. And the only way for him to kind of live, to have employment of
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any kind, was to try to work for them. So he did try. He failed for a long time in getting any
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notice from them at all. So he had to make a living in other ways. But yeah, he did keep trying to get
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back into government, because A, that was the only way you could make a living, and B, he wanted to
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influence politics. He still wanted to try to steer his country back into the form of a republic.
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But getting into politics was hard for him because of his family background, correct?
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Yes. I mean, he, well, he and his father and brothers were actually not allowed to be full
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citizens. They had the status of people who could participate as civil servants in a kind of
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bureaucratic level of the state, but they couldn't vote. They couldn't stand for public office.
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So Machiavelli's posts, when he had them, were not elected posts. They were, and they were not
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kind of posts that he had as magistrates. They were kind of civil servant appointments of a
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lower status. So that's all he was allowed to have in his family, because of his family's, well,
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his father had been taxed at her. He owed money to the state. That's the main reason he and his sons
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could not be full citizens. But there's also a kind of darker story behind that, that kind of
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Machiavelli's father's cousins had been involved in a coup attempt against the Medici earlier,
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before Machiavelli was born. And this put them on the blacklist and made it much harder for the
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Machiavelli family to be trusted as long as the Medici princes were in power.
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Yeah. The coups, the, the, like the assassinations, like it was like, I was, as I was reading,
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like, this is like Godfather stuff, right? I think there was one instance they were at a church.
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I forgot what it was, but like they were escorting this guy and they just stabbed him with a dagger
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and he died there in the church. Yeah. Yeah. You know, let me just say that the kind of
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reputation of the Renaissance, you know, and Italian politics at the time for being so much
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worse than it is today and being so kind of bloody, I think you can overstate it because,
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yeah, there was this Pazzi conspiracy and I think that, and that was headed by the Pope.
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That was, that was somebody sent, and the Fasson sent by the Pope to make trouble for the Medici
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ruling family. The popes were especially bad at this. And that's one reason why, you know,
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the church didn't like Machiavelli because he brought this out. He talks about this in his
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writings, but the everyday politics, especially in Florence, was actually run under the rule of law
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as much as possible. They really, when the Medici were not in power, there were very strict rules
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about, you know, who could, what, what happened to whom. Assassination was extremely rare. When people
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were, you know, indicted for treason, the law said that the law actually gave rather soft penalties.
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They were going to be sent into exile rather than be, you know, killed. So, yeah, it's a bloody world,
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but it's also a world where there are a lot of people struggling to hold up the rule of law and
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to apply very ancient and clear-cut rules to, to kind of deal with political conflicts. And this is
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also the kind of thing Machiavelli was fighting to uphold, something people don't realize. If you
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read his writings all the way through, this is a man who cares about political order and
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order based on clear rules, clear and equal transparent rules more than anything. And that's
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something that the reputation of Machiavelli doesn't let you in on at all. He's supposed to be all dark
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and, yeah, sorry. Right, no, I was going to say, but how did he go about doing that, right? Like
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promoting that end? Was it like, was he like the ends justify the means? Did he use conniving and
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duplicity in order to promote the rule of law in this sort of weird political world that he existed
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in? Or was he pretty straightforward, a straight shooter? Well, yeah. And again, this, this depends
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on when, because there's Machiavelli when he was in the anti-Medici Republic, the Republic that had
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thrown these Medici princes out. And this lasts for 15 years. And that's the time when Machiavelli was a
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civil servant and actually politically active. Under that sort of system of government, he was really
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promoting the rule of law very hard and working with other citizens who did the same. And it was
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easier for them because the Medici were out of the picture for a while. But then when the Medici had
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their coup and came back, that's when Machiavelli had to become cunning in a way. And, but his cunning
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wasn't political cunning in the sense that he was going out and kind of, you know, kind of trying to
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plot and scheme and stab somebody in the back. His scheming took the form of writing because he was no
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longer allowed to take part in politics. And Medici banned him from political activity completely.
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So what does he do? He goes off and just starts writing and writing and writing. And he writes
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The Prince, first of all, which, as I think, is a kind of subtle critique of Medici power,
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and also an attempt to kind of warn fellow citizens about how princes actually operate. You know,
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a lot of the stuff he says there, we take as advice to princes. What if he's actually just saying,
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look, this is what princes do to get to power? A lot of it isn't very nice. Be careful what you,
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you know, be careful what you wish for if you're wishing for princes, because this is what you're
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going to end up getting, you know. But he, and so he's writing in this cunning way because it wasn't
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actually safe for him to say outright, you know, the princes and the Pope are, you know, lying,
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cheating, conniving, self-seekers that, you know, free peoples need to be careful about.
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What was, was Machiavelli ever able to implement some of his reforms that he thought would help
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Yes. I mean, this is one of his big dreams from the time he entered political office was to create
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a citizen militia to replace the mercenary system of, you know, military defenses that most Italian
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states had. And most, most Italian states, you know, they bought foreign soldiers from somewhere
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else, France, Spain, wherever, to fight their battles for them. And the battles were kind of
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very anemic affairs. People were not, you know, they wouldn't, the soldiers didn't like to, you
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know, they didn't want to lose their lives because they're not losing their lives for their own
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country. They're just out there being paid, you know, hired fighters. So because of that,
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the wars ended up being kind of really soft step, you know, step, step, step around your enemy,
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try not to actually hurt them too much, and then hope that there's going to be a stalemate and
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they'll call it off. And Machiavelli was up for a full-blooded battle by, ideally, by people who
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really, really cared about the outcome of the battle. And that was going to be for him, citizens
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whose lives were at stake and whose freedom was at stake in a territorial war. So he thought the best way
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to defend Florence was to get, you know, armed citizens, ordinary people in the countryside and
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the city, and get them to fight their own battles. Now, the aristocrats in Florence didn't like this
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idea at all because they were afraid that if you arm the ordinary people, they might use the arms
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against us. So Machiavelli just tirelessly fought for this citizen militia idea and worked with a lot
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of higher political people to get it realized. And it came to pass while he was, you know, while he was
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holding his civil service posts. And it worked. And they fought a war against a city, Pisa, who had
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left the Florentine cycle, won Pisa back. And Machiavelli was hailed by a lot of his friends as being
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the kind of author of this great concept. Unfortunately, a couple of years later, when the Medici came
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back, it's the first reform that they basically obliterated. They just wiped it off the map. And that was
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the end of Machiavelli's dream. Yeah, I think that's a perfect example of Machiavelli's actions
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contradicting, you know, advice he gives in the prince. Because one of the things people always
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point out in the prince's piece of advice is that a prince, one of the first things they should do is
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disarm the subjects. But there, you know, in his actions, Machiavelli's like, no, I'm going to arm
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the subjects. That is how you defend a republic. Absolutely. And this is the key. I mean, that's the one
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point where I think all Machiavelli scholars agree that this militia was, you know, the heart and soul
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of Machiavelli's kind of project. And, you know, we disagree about lots of other things, but everyone
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agrees on that. And like you just said, I don't understand why they realize how ready he was to
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kind of arm the citizens. And in fact, he also says very clearly in the prince, if you want to arm the
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citizens, you know, you have to actually give them some political power too. You can't just kind of
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give them arms and then leave them politically powerless because then, of course, they're not
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going to like you. And yeah, then the threat is going to be that they might use the arms against
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you. So if you want to feel safe in arming them, you have to give them more political power. You
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have to give them employment that, you know, economic employment that gives them some sense of
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dignity. And he actually uses this militia not just as a way of trying to find better military
00:22:27.300
defenses, but also as a kind of argument for making, you know, Florence into a deeper, more democratic
00:22:32.080
republic where, you know, people actually have more economic equality and more sense of, you know,
00:22:37.480
mutual respect. So that's, that's a, you know, pretty strong argument against the idea that he
00:22:43.120
thinks principalities are the best way to go. And Machiavelli was influenced substantially by,
00:22:49.320
significantly by ancient writers from Greece and Rome. Were there any writers in particular that
00:22:54.160
influenced his ideas about democracy, republic, republics, et cetera?
00:22:58.940
Yeah. I mean, the writer he mentions most often is the historian Livy, Titus Livy. And Livy wrote
00:23:08.060
this massive, massive history of Rome at the end of the Roman Republic, just when the, you know,
00:23:12.840
the republic had collapsed after years of being corrupt and had been replaced with kind of emperors.
00:23:19.060
Livy regretted this. He was very sorrowful. And he writes this big, long history of the republic and
00:23:24.020
how great it had been in the past, tries to diagnose the reasons why the republic fell. And Machiavelli
00:23:30.500
mentions him a lot as a source of lessons on how you can save republics from internal decay and
00:23:38.280
internal corruption that, you know, makes them self-combust. Tacitus is another Roman author he uses
00:23:44.980
a lot. Tacitus was a very sly, subtle, subtle critic of the Roman Empire when he lived under it. He
00:23:53.500
writes very subtle critiques without quite showing his cards. So it's hard to kind of, you know,
00:23:58.340
nobody could really easily persecute him because he didn't, you know, you can't really pin down what
00:24:02.520
he's really saying sometimes. I think Machiavelli was very influenced by his style of writing.
00:24:06.760
And yeah, like you talk about the book, this is when the printing press was first invented at the
00:24:11.240
same time. So he had access, like, how does he make trips just to buy these books for his own
00:24:16.760
personal library? Yeah, that was actually Machiavelli's dad, who was a really interesting guy.
00:24:21.380
And that was Machiavelli's dad who got, he's the one who, he didn't have a full-time job, even though
00:24:26.500
he was a very highly trained and respected lawyer by education. He hardly ever practiced law, probably
00:24:33.460
because he thought the Medici system he was in was too corrupt, or they didn't want him to
00:24:39.340
practice. But what he did do was, you know, spend a lot of time reading. And he offered to kind of
00:24:45.340
copy out a whole kind of index of Livy's many, many works, if he could get the book for free from
00:24:52.000
his friend, the printer. And so this is the book, you know, the great first 10 books of Livy that
00:24:57.740
Machiavelli wrote his discourses about. His book, The Discourses, is actually called The Discourses
00:25:03.120
on Livy. So, and he uses Livy as his main kind of inspiration, talking about how, you know,
00:25:08.440
and the theme there again is the theme that's so topical for us today, too. It's how do great
00:25:13.360
republics decline? What goes wrong? And how can you, you know, he was looking back as Livy
00:25:19.100
was on, you know, a glorious history of republics that nevertheless come to ends, and sometimes
00:25:27.280
by their own hands, by their own mistakes. And so I think Machiavelli's main, you know, point
00:25:34.140
was to try to teach future generations, as well as Florentines, how to kind of see the
00:25:39.360
dangers before they get too big, how to kind of try to protect your freedoms, your good
00:25:46.180
institutions, that we tend to take so much for granted, and to spot the kind of diseases
00:25:54.120
So another theme in Machiavelli's work, a big one, is this idea of fortune. And I've heard
00:25:59.500
people say that the prince is a sort of a guidebook on how to master fortune. First, what did Machiavelli
00:26:06.960
and his contemporaries mean by fortune? Because I think we use that word differently than people
00:26:12.560
Yeah. I mean, fortune is basically, it's a word that signifies the unpredictable in human
00:26:18.780
life. What is incalculable, unpredictable, what you cannot entirely control. That's what it
00:26:25.560
means for Machiavelli and for the ancients that he is drawing on. I mean, it's a concept
00:26:29.720
you find in all the ancient Greek and Roman writers, too. Now, the thing about, talking
00:26:34.280
about fortune being something you need to master, the thing about fortune, the way I just defined
00:26:39.560
it, is you can't master it. I mean, by definition, fortune is something that is not masterable.
00:26:45.060
So when modern people say, yeah, Machiavelli's teaching you how to master fortune, uh-uh, no, he's
00:26:50.320
not. He's teaching you, first of all, remember that fortune is not something you can master.
00:26:55.100
There's always going to be some unpredictability in life, in politics, whatever that might be. So
00:27:00.940
get used to it, you know, bite the bullet and understand it. Second point is, if you decide that
00:27:07.840
you're going to try to master fortune and waste a lot of time at that rather pointless end, you're not
00:27:14.160
going to get very far because fortune is unreliable. You might actually manage to get, you know, a good
00:27:20.140
string of luck and to think, okay, now I'm really getting this. I've got, you know, I'm controlling
00:27:25.640
things now. By one way or another, I've got it. You get too confident. You start to rely on luck and
00:27:32.840
that's going to make you work a lot less hard at what you actually need to do to make a stable state or to
00:27:39.700
consolidate your own personal power. Fortune is unreliable and, you know, you'll be surprised if you think that
00:27:46.300
you're doing really, really well and you find a lot of politicians who, to everyone's surprise,
00:27:50.800
seem to be kind of flying really high, getting, you know, massive successes, whether it's Napoleon
00:27:55.500
or Cesare Borgia in Machiavelli's own time or many people we don't have to name in our own time.
00:28:01.180
Why is this happening? This is amazing. Well, Machiavelli says, you know, if they're not doing the
00:28:06.640
things you need to do in order to consolidate your power, to consolidate power takes virtue,
00:28:12.200
virtue. That's how it's translated. And virtue is hard work. That's, you know, one of the main
00:28:17.600
qualities of virtue for Machiavelli is very hard work, looking way ahead, foresight, knowing your
00:28:23.580
own limits, getting firm allies because you can never do everything all by yourself. So you need
00:28:29.020
stable friends, not just fair weather ones. And getting this kind of, you know, building political
00:28:35.280
orders, institutions, and power bases in those ways, it's a much better guarantee than relying on
00:28:42.660
fortune. Yeah. As you said, highlight in the book, he uses Borgia, right? As an example,
00:28:49.040
like it was, it was sort of a subtle dig. It makes it sound like when he wrote it, that he was praising
00:28:54.280
this guy. But if you read between the lines, what Machiavelli was saying, this guy is only in power
00:29:00.140
because he just got lucky. Yeah. I mean, did you get that reading it? Cause it's, it's hard. This
00:29:05.540
is one of the hardest bits of Machiavelli and, and, you know, you'll get really, really excellent
00:29:11.400
lifelong Machiavelli scholars who still don't see that and others who do, but, but nowadays not so
00:29:18.000
many, but there is this kind of, it's a hard thing to do. It is wonderful satire. He, he, he uses all
00:29:25.180
these very good words with Cesar de Borgia. He says, I would, you know, I would always present
00:29:30.300
him as a model to be imitated by anyone who wants to win power through fortune. So here it is, here
00:29:37.700
are these wonderful things he did, but you got it, right? If you say, I would hold him up to, as an
00:29:41.880
example, anyone who wants to get power through fortune, but a few pages earlier, Machiavelli has
00:29:47.080
just told us, he says black and white, if you want to get power and hold it, fortune is not the way to
00:29:52.640
go. Don't rely on fortune, rely on virtue, which is the opposite of fortune because fortune is, you
00:29:58.580
know, fortune is easy. Virtue is hard work. Fortune is quick and fast. Virtue is long and hard. You
00:30:06.560
know, these are old classical themes that Machiavelli is just playing on again, but, you know, he, yeah,
00:30:12.720
he does seem to praise Cesar de Borgia, but between the lines, he tells you what, how did Cesar de
00:30:17.000
get to power? It's not precisely just luck because fortune here, Machiavelli breaks it down. Being a
00:30:23.640
very concrete-minded guy, he says, fortune is money. I've got a lot of money and so I can buy my way to
00:30:30.560
power. It is other people's weaknesses. Oh, good. I'm an opportunist. I see a chance to kind of jump
00:30:36.400
in there and make myself powerful because somebody else is in trouble. And fortune is relying on other
00:30:41.400
people's strengths and resources, not my own talents and hard work. And he shows you in this
00:30:46.840
little chapter about Cesar de exactly how he operates. And he never stops up working with
00:30:52.400
money and depending on fortune, sorry, on money and other people's weaknesses and other people's
00:31:00.300
resources. So that's what fortune is. And, you know, leads it to the reader. Does the reader get it?
00:31:06.580
If you're not going to get it, then, you know, you can read Machiavelli's prints and think,
00:31:10.960
do I get this or not? Well, if you don't get it, then you might try to imitate Cesar de and good
00:31:17.360
luck to you. You're going to end up the same way he did, you know, flying really high, everyone being
00:31:22.800
the terror of central Italy for a long time. And then within a few years, crash, fall, his empire breaks
00:31:28.720
up and he's dead. Right. I mean, that was one of my favorite takeaways from reading your book and
00:31:34.940
the critique that Machiavelli made, because I think that can, even if you're not in a position
00:31:39.860
of power, that being fooled by fortune can lead you to a lot of heartache. Sometimes you think
00:31:47.220
you're doing great and it's all you, you know, but it's really not. And then when something bad
00:31:54.060
happens because of just fortune, you feel terrible. You say, well, this is my fault. Well, no, it's not
00:31:58.160
entirely your fault. There's an element of fortune there. I thought that was a really,
00:32:02.280
really, that's the one thing I've been thinking about since I finished reading your book.
00:32:05.940
Well, you're obviously a much more virtuous character than Cesar de, because Cesar de
00:32:09.860
Borja, contrary to saying, oh, I fell, that must be my own fault. He did the opposite. He said,
00:32:15.880
oh, I fell, that's everybody else's fault but mine. That's what a really fortune dependent
00:32:21.980
character does. They blame everybody but themselves. We won't mention any politicians who do that.
00:32:28.160
We don't know any like that. But that's Cesar de, and obviously you're a good person because you
00:32:33.720
said you blamed yourself. Yeah. So focus on virtue rather than fortune or luck or whatever you want
00:32:41.040
to call it. That is a key to life. And like, I guess the challenge too is sussing out what is
00:32:45.880
fortune and what is based on your own virtue. That's another challenge. Yeah, that is. And that's
00:32:51.220
something that, again, I think Machiavelli, following his classical authors, he doesn't want to give you
00:32:55.980
simple answers. He doesn't want to do like a modern textbook would do and say, here's fortune,
00:33:01.480
here's virtue, go and pass a test telling us what's what. He actually wants, he's kind of mixing these
00:33:07.880
things up in his examples of individuals and invites readers to kind of say for themselves,
00:33:13.880
so where is Cesar de being virtuous here? You know, where is he being too reliant on fortune? Because
00:33:20.500
that's the only way that in practice, you know, ordinary citizens can start to judge their political
00:33:25.560
leaders as well. You know, you've got to, you see it on paper, you see this example of somebody
00:33:29.760
and you judge for yourself what's working and what's not and why. And, you know, then you can go
00:33:36.580
out into the political arena and see how people are operating there and judge for yourself.
00:33:42.220
He wrote his stuff, The Prince, The Discourses on Livy, over 500 years ago. People are still reading it.
00:33:48.040
What do you think it is about Machiavelli that's so timeless?
00:33:51.960
Well, I think the simplest level, you know, you just, it looks so simple and clear. His writing
00:33:58.120
style on the surface looks just so beautifully readable and simple. It isn't once you look more
00:34:05.400
closely, like we've said. And it's got these wonderful maxims that just stick out, but also
00:34:10.680
resonates so strongly. Whether the maxims are the kind of nasty Machiavellian ones about,
00:34:18.040
how, you know, conniving politicians operate, or whether it's his kind of more uplifting
00:34:24.680
points about republics and how to save them from decline. These are problems that are always
00:34:30.540
with us. Politics and human nature, as he says, don't change. As long as human beings are human
00:34:36.180
beings, there's no real progress in, let's say, the way that human beings function in their
00:34:42.940
relationships with each other, which is what politics is. We might get progress in, you know,
00:34:48.080
medical science or knowledge of the border universe. But this is one area where things
00:34:54.120
don't change much. And Machiavelli really, he's truthful. He's intriguing because it's not always
00:35:00.260
clear what he's getting at. It hits the nail on the head.
00:35:03.240
Yeah. I love that portrait, that famous portrait of Machiavelli, right? Sort of got like this sly
00:35:08.960
smile on him. And after kind of reading, like his whole work is just sort of a work of slyness.
00:35:15.500
And I like that picture. It makes me wonder what he was thinking when he had that portrait done of
00:35:21.160
Yeah. But don't you think he looks terribly, he looks like, it's a kinder kind of, a kind
00:35:27.060
sort of slyness. It's slyness not in the interest of, oh, let's just get ahead with what people
00:35:32.360
think. It's more of slyness and, hang on, let's defend ourselves better, all of us.
00:35:37.300
You know, not just me, not just me, me, me, but all of us.
00:35:40.080
That's all of us. So my last question is, how would you, what advice would you give to people
00:35:45.460
who want to revisit the prince? And they want to look at, you know, look at it with fresh eyes.
00:35:51.840
So they see these insights into how he's promoting virtue, how he was promoting freedom and
00:35:58.020
republicanism and getting over that idea that he's just showing you how to be a conniving
00:36:04.620
Yeah. I mean, first I'd say, first is a rule of thumb. Realize that it's not as easy as
00:36:10.680
it looks. It's not as straightforward as it looks. I think that's pretty important because
00:36:14.620
it can be seductively, you know, deceptively clear Machiavelli's prose. Realize it's harder.
00:36:23.080
And then I would say, although I'm in favor of kind of reading books like The Prince all
00:36:29.360
the way through, maybe counterbalance the reputation that is in all of our heads about
00:36:34.740
Machiavelli. Counterbalance it by doing the opposite of what most people do, reading The
00:36:39.080
Prince. Most people go straight for the kind of standout, jump off the page, you know,
00:36:44.380
Machiavellian quotations and say, okay, that's Machiavelli. The rest, they kind of skim.
00:36:48.700
At least I used to do that when I, before I really got into him. Instead of that, look
00:36:53.600
for the things where he talks about republics, you know, starting with, and when he mentions
00:36:57.240
the word freedom or republics, go for it and really look at what he's saying and feel, feel
00:37:03.760
the passion even. In chapter five of The Prince, which is where he first really talks about
00:37:09.420
republics, they just burst on the scene in this heated way. Everything that's happened
00:37:13.980
before it in the first four chapters is called princes, called, you know, this is how they
00:37:19.240
operate. Suddenly there's republics and what are they doing? They're resisting the prince.
00:37:24.060
They're resisting very hard and they're making life absolute hell for the prince. And I would
00:37:30.020
really go for that and then go to the discourses too and look at a couple of chapters where he
00:37:36.560
does the same thing, where he talks about republics in ways that's very hard to make you,
00:37:42.460
you know, to resist the thought that, hang on. He's so, this is somebody who's, you know,
00:37:47.220
not just saying that republics are sometimes the best form of government, pragmatically speaking.
00:37:51.940
This is someone who believes that as a matter of deep principle for human beings at all times,
00:37:59.120
And the other thing I've done is look, highlight the word fortune. That's some,
00:38:04.320
Fortune. But does that really help? Does that help you get to a republican like you really?
00:38:09.480
No, but the idea that virtue is more important, right? Don't just rely on like, sort of like the
00:38:15.640
Borgia guy. Like, don't be like him. He might, when he mentions fortune, it doesn't mean it's
00:38:21.480
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good point. Yeah. That's, that's highlighting. I mean, my, I could show you
00:38:26.500
some of my Machiavelli texts, like highlight, I've got highlights and highlights of all kinds of
00:38:31.400
words that stick out. I mean, I shouldn't, if you want to get a nice little guide to how I read the
00:38:37.140
prints, I've got a whole book on just Machiavelli's prints, where it's kind of chapter by chapter.
00:38:41.460
And I even set out at the beginning, a list of like keywords and how they're, how he plays with
00:38:46.600
them. So there's that book too, which is just Machiavelli's, it's called Machiavelli's prints
00:38:50.760
in your reading. So not to promote my other books as much, but, but it's, it's, you know,
00:38:58.080
at least it's, it's my way of it. It shows how I try to kind of come to terms with all these
00:39:02.220
difficulties in a very kind of, I think, very just honest way. So that's controversial, but
00:39:08.980
that's, you know, Machiavelli is one of those authors who is always going to be controversial
00:39:13.980
because that's just inherent in the way he writes. He writes in a tricky way. I don't think he wants
00:39:19.680
readers to say, oh, this is like a good lecture where we come away saying Professor Machiavelli tells
00:39:25.180
us to do X and Y. That's the wrong way to read him. The right way is he's testing, he's testing our
00:39:30.760
political intelligence by giving us examples that are confusing or that, you know, you might judge
00:39:36.120
in different ways. And, and I think that's the starting point. If anyone tells you, Machiavelli
00:39:42.040
is so easy and so simple, you know, they haven't really engaged with him.
00:39:49.840
Yeah. And then you learn to be a fox, but a good kind of fox, not one who's, who's trying to kind
00:39:55.820
of get one over somebody else, but someone who's trying to do what Machiavelli says foxes
00:40:01.260
do in the prints. What he praises them for is seeing through snares. They see through traps.
00:40:07.520
They don't try and try to cheat other people. These very good animals, other animals, non-human
00:40:12.440
animals, generally are not as cunning. We're not, they're not cunning in the same way.
00:40:17.160
Um, a lot more, you know, there's a lot you can learn from them without taking on these
00:40:22.960
human defects that we've projected onto foxes and lions.
00:40:29.040
Yeah. So Erica, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn
00:40:33.620
Um, well, since you asked, I've just been struggling with setting up a new personal website,
00:40:39.460
ericabenner.com. It doesn't seem to be really showing yet, but I hope it will be soon.
00:40:44.180
Fantastic. Well, Erica Benner, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:40:48.160
My guest today was Erica Benner. She's the author of the book, Be Like the Fox. It's available
00:40:51.780
on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash
00:40:56.020
Be Like the Fox. We're going to find links to resources. We can delve deeper into this topic.
00:40:59.560
Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast. For more manly tips and
00:41:15.720
advice, make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy the
00:41:19.460
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00:41:30.520
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