00:01:47.000How does he impact our world today on this incredibly important, deep, and intellectually focused episode of the Charlie Kirk Show that I think will clarify and give you, hopefully, some understanding of what's happening in the world around you.
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00:03:19.000So we kind of stumbled into Machiavelli last conversation, and I promised our listeners we will get back to it.
00:03:28.000Commonly, you'll hear on cable television with almost no explanation, someone say, well, that's very Machiavellian by this politician, or that's very Machiavellian.
00:03:37.000And I think people at best have a very surface knowledge of Machiavelli.
00:03:43.000Who was this man, and why was he so important?
00:03:47.000So Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy, and he lived during the middle of the 16th century.
00:03:53.000And he lived at a time during the Renaissance where there was growing frustration with politics, with the church.
00:04:01.000And there was a movement known as the Renaissance that wanted to revive classical virtue, stress the emphasis of moral education on restoring civic harmony and restoring statecraft, essentially.
00:04:14.000Machiavelli comes in and crashes in on this party and says, that's a no-go.
00:04:19.000You can't restore politics on classical moral virtue.
00:04:23.000And so what he wants to stress in books like The Prince, which is the book he's most famous for today, although the discourses many years ago was the one that people mostly focused on, he stresses that politics requires cunning.
00:04:40.000There are times when you're going to have to break with traditional moral virtue to essentially affect a transition in politics.
00:04:47.000So for example, in one of his many critiques of the Renaissance and the attempt to bring Christianity and classical moral virtue together in a modern republic, Machiavelli and the Prince talks about a situation in which a group of Christians in a small town wanted to deal with criminals, but on Christian grounds.
00:05:05.000And he says, well, this guy, Treasurer Borgia, who was a brutal dictator, essentially, showed mercy to the innocent by crushing these people, not turning the other cheek.
00:05:14.000So in other words, you measure your use of force in relation to your end goal.
00:05:20.000And if it's to bring about law and order, you don't do it by upholding some kind of classical moral virtue.
00:05:27.000And so that, of course, earns him the reputation of some kind of gangster, sort of a low philosophy of politics, but it's incredibly influential and foundational in many ways.
00:05:42.000You know, you mentioned how Machiavelli basically, you know, criticized Socrates and Plato and mostly Plato saying, why are we trying to build these imaginary republics?
00:05:55.000Can you talk about how Machiavelli in some way liberated this conversation, not in a good way, of the will, of kind of how the political will should triumph the good?
00:06:06.000Actually, you're referring to chapter 15 in The Prince.
00:06:09.000And it's one of those chapters that are so crucial that anytime I ever teach Machiavelli, this chapter has to get almost a full day of line by long line reading.
00:06:19.000Well, in chapter 15 of The Prince, Machiavelli says he's going to depart from all classical writers.
00:06:25.000So forget the debate whether or not Machiavelli was doing something new or if he was just sort of an ancient and modern clothing.
00:06:32.000He tells us that he's doing something new.
00:06:40.000He says, and because I know that many have written about this, politics and friendship, et cetera, I fear that in writing of it again, I may be held presumptuous, especially since in disputing this matter, I depart from the orders of others.
00:06:52.000So he tells us he is not going to follow anything that had been written about before regarding moral philosophy and politics.
00:06:59.000And then he says the following, since my intent is to write something useful, it's suggesting that classical thought is not useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to any imagination of it.
00:07:15.000So he makes a distinction between philosophy that is simply imaginary and philosophy that is actually effectually true, which is a unique phrase.
00:07:24.000No one's ever used that before, and I'll parse that out in a moment.
00:07:29.000He says that many have imagined republics.
00:07:32.000He's referring to Plato and principalities and kingdoms, say St. Augustine, kingdom of God, that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.
00:07:41.000Because they are so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.
00:07:50.000So now he tells you what philosophy really should be.
00:07:54.000The effectual truth is that which preserves your life and preserves your republic.
00:07:58.000An imaginary truth, moral or political, is that which leads to your ruin.
00:08:03.000So if turning the other cheek in a political circumstance leads to your ruin, then it's an imaginary teaching.
00:08:10.000And in that same chapter, he gives us a list of classical virtues, generosities, magnanimity, courage, et cetera.
00:08:18.000And then he mixes them up and makes it almost impossible for us to determine which one's the vice and which one's the virtue.
00:08:24.000And that's revolutionary because he's essentially saying that the virtues are not good in themselves.
00:08:31.000So sometimes it's good to be merciful and sometimes it's bad to be merciful.
00:08:35.000No one had spoken about moral virtue in those categories before, and that makes him completely revolutionary.
00:08:41.000And so for him, anything that would lead your own personal life to ruin or anything that would lead, say, the United States national interest to ruin is an imaginary moral prejudice.
00:08:52.000So do you think that he was onto something or, you know, without imparting too much of your own critique on this, I'm sure there's some truth in this.
00:09:00.000Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking about him.
00:09:03.000But I'm guessing he did not anticipate a couple hundred years later how someone would pervert kind of his revelation for this and say, you know what?
00:09:13.000There is no such thing as absolute truth.
00:09:17.000Let's try eugenics as an extreme example.
00:09:20.000You could see where this leads you, right?
00:09:22.000When you start to say that we're not going to have the struggle between the vices and the virtues or have, you know, some sort of golden mean, as Aristotle would say, instead, Machiavelli says, well, we kind of know what we want and let's just do it.
00:10:37.000It would be acquisition, in other words, imperialism and tough military institutions.
00:10:43.000Machiavelli never speaks of natural law.
00:10:46.000There's no natural right teaching in Machiavelli.
00:10:48.000There's not even a state of nature teaching from which you could deduce any of those principles in Machiavelli.
00:10:53.000So no, he is not, I hate to put it this way, it's simplistic, but I think it would explain a lot.
00:10:59.000Machiavelli's political teaching is very flexible.
00:11:02.000You don't want to hamstring your political leaders or your institutions behind any moral prejudice of any kind that could get in the way of your country being effective in defending its own national interest.
00:11:15.000So Machiavelli is used as pejorative in some sense.
00:11:21.000What can those of us that believe in the natural law, which both you and I do, what can we glean from Machiavelli?
00:11:27.000What can we learn from him where he says, wow, he was really right about this or he was really right about that?
00:11:34.000Where can we say that we need more Machiavelli in our political process?
00:11:38.000Well, where Machiavelli was right was on the importance of citizens remaining vigilant over their liberty.
00:11:44.000One of the innovations that he spotlights for us in the discourses is he says, everyone prior to me assumed that civic harmony was the goal of politics and that liberty could be achieved when there was moral virtue permeating society and people were just in harmony with one another.
00:12:02.000He says the secret to liberty is actually clashes and tumults properly guided by institutions to form checks and balances.
00:12:10.000Where he's absolutely right, he thinks that if a populace becomes indifferent to its liberty, it will lose it.
00:12:17.000And so he was not a fan of people simply just abnegating to public responsibility and just living just merely private lives.
00:12:25.000In the discourses, he constantly ties Rome's liberty and the strength that it had as a republic to the vigilance of its people.
00:12:34.000If you could say one thing about Rome, it had this.
00:12:37.000It trusts but verify every one of its leaders.
00:12:40.000Everybody had skin in a game and nobody would turn their back on politics.
00:13:32.000He was a Machiavellian in the sense that he wanted to bring the spirit of conquest, not so much to politics, but to nature.
00:13:39.000And so he encourages the liberation of science from theology and morality so that it can conquer disease, it can conquer geographical limits that had previously held people back.
00:13:51.000And so Bacon in his works wants to inspire a new kind of conquest, not so much the militaristic thing that you find in Machiavelli's discourses, but one in which science can interrogate and conquer nature and squeeze her for her secrets.
00:14:07.000That's very Machiavellian, but taken in a different direction.
00:14:11.000There are writers like Montesquieu who clearly read him and thought very highly of him, but saw him as ultimately a corrosive influence.
00:14:19.000And in the spirit of the laws, Montesquieu says we have yet to cure ourselves of Machiavellianism.
00:14:25.000He thought that Machiavelli had some great insights in politics, and on Montesquieu would polish them up and reform them and take them in different directions.
00:14:32.000But overall, he thought that he was a terrible influence.
00:14:35.000He didn't like the emphasis on militarism.
00:14:50.000He wants you to wake up every morning thinking your liberty is, somebody wants to take your liberty away from you.
00:14:55.000And he thinks that that is the kind of knot in your stomach you should have that will incentivize you to stay vigilant and focus on politics.
00:15:03.000What Montesquieu thought Machiavelli got right was the stress on the separation of powers that you begin to see developing in Machiavelli's discourses.
00:15:12.000Montesquieu will adopt that, but its ultimate aim is not empire.
00:15:18.000It's sort of a domestic commercial republic whose fundamental goal is tranquility and peace.
00:15:25.000That's not Machiavelli's taste at all.
00:15:28.000And so then Machiavelli influenced Bacon, who he influenced almost everybody as he kind of just upended the tradition before.
00:15:38.000And it's important to note, I think we talked about this in the previous podcast, where Machiavelli was in the midst of warring Italian city-states.
00:15:48.000Now, were these small republics, were these the same republics that they were talking about in the Federalist Papers, like the Genoan city-states or Genoan city-states?
00:15:58.000And they reflected the classical republics in the sense that they were completely unstable.
00:16:03.000But you add to the mix, though, something that wasn't in the classical world, according to Machiavelli, and that is the Catholic Church.
00:16:08.000So he never tires of critiquing the institution of Christianity.
00:16:13.000And in the discourses and in the prints, he says essentially what you have is an institution that is too strong to simply take over, but it's too weak to unify Italy.
00:16:23.000And his goal ultimately is to unify Italy, but unify it with a civil religion in which the state has national sovereignty and you don't have a universal institution like the Catholic Church dictating what a nation ought to do or not to do.
00:16:40.000A classic example of this is Shakespeare's play King John, where you have France and England at each other's throats, but it's the papal legate who's determined thus undermining their national sovereignty.
00:16:53.000So Machiavelli's other agenda for those times that you're talking about is to also considerably weaken the church as a political player and subordinate it to the state ultimately.
00:17:03.000And so if you were to ask kind of a normal political philosophy student at a school, not like Hillsdale, you know, what did Machiavelli stand for?
00:17:12.000There's two things that they would say.
00:17:13.000The most common things they would say, the ends justify the means, and it's better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.
00:17:20.000So let's start with that one, this kind of tension between as a ruler, you have to make a decision of do you want the citizenry to fear you or love you?
00:17:34.000The key to understanding almost every point Machiavelli wants to make is that chapter 15 that you would alluded to earlier.
00:17:40.000Remember for Machiavelli, the truth is effectual.
00:17:42.000How do you and I know a moral theory is true or not?
00:17:46.000Machiavelli would say, if it leads to your ruin, it's imaginary.
00:17:49.000So take better to be feared than to loved.
00:17:51.000For Machiavelli, people rarely fall out of fear, but they fall out of love.
00:17:56.000And if your only leverage over them is love and people are fickle, it's not effectual.
00:18:01.000He also doesn't think that you can found government on anything such as love.
00:18:05.000And instances where you have that have only shown that the people, especially criminals, will exploit it.
00:18:14.000But he also qualifies that very same idea and criticizes, for example, Agathocles and Ancient.
00:18:22.000And he talks about how sometimes you have to also adopt the persona of being loved, but only when circumstances allow it.
00:18:30.000So in other words, if you're dealing with hostile foreign actors, you don't want to take the moral high ground and want to be loved, you're going to end up losing your lunch.
00:18:38.000But if there's nobody really to fear and you've put your threats under control, then Machiavelli says it would be okay to be loved, but it's all optics for him.
00:19:23.000So the ends justify the means, which is a phrase he never actually says, but you can infer it from what he teaches, essentially comes down to a rejection of the idea that moral virtue, say moderation, is just inherently good in itself.
00:19:38.000For Machiavelli, sometimes moderation is good, sometimes it's bad.
00:19:42.000The way you determine whether it's good or bad is based on what the end goal of what it is that you want to achieve.
00:19:48.000So we'll go back to his favorite example of Treasurer Borgia, who didn't use mercy, didn't display any Christian virtue at all toward the criminals who were ransacking this town.
00:20:39.000And that's where you take your moral compass from, not some kind of abstract moral idea.
00:20:44.000And so two people that I love, and we talk about frequently here on the Charlie Kirk show that Hillsdale College has actually statues to would be Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln.
00:20:54.000Now, the two critiques that some people would have towards Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln is that they were willing to kill a lot of people, suspend habeas corpus, and participate in firebombing in Dresden.
00:21:08.000But the justification at times, and Dr. Arne would have a really good answer on the Churchill side of this, would be, no, they knew what they wanted and they knew that there was something that was greater and they had to eliminate the enemy.
00:21:21.000Now, obviously, this was in a combat theater and in a place of war, which obviously is an exception of just kind of domestic tyranny.
00:21:29.000But was Machiavelli totally wrong in this sense?
00:21:32.000Is that sometimes we need to put what we would consider to be peacetime morality and suspend it if we have to crush evil?
00:21:45.000And where it gets tricky, though, is if you're constantly fighting foreign wars, eventually the means that you're using to conquer your enemies can often come back home and be inflicted on your own citizens.
00:21:57.000That's where things get hairy and dicey.
00:22:00.000So for example, if you are involved in foreign theater and you're overturning elections for your own national interest, well, it's only a matter of time before something like that can turn on your own citizens.
00:23:18.000It can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
00:23:23.000Now, I suppose you could take that a variety of different ways.
00:23:28.000Did he mean war in the sense that we mean war, or was he writing this as advice to a political figure saying, like, if you have, you have to crush your political opponents now, or else they're only going to grow stronger?
00:23:41.000You're referring to a quote that comes, I believe, from chapter three of The Prince.
00:23:45.000At least in that particular chapter, he lays out the differences between ancient Rome and the way modern politics conducts its business.
00:23:52.000In modern politics, Machiavelli says there's an inclination that you think that somehow war is avoidable, that if you just avoid war, it won't come to you.
00:24:01.000In the context of the quote that you're mentioning, Machiavelli's talking about foreign enemies.
00:24:07.000For Machiavelli, it's natural for human beings to want to expand and to acquire.
00:24:13.000And so it's the natural inclination of all governments to want to grow.
00:24:17.000And that means impinge upon your own borders and national interests.
00:24:21.000So then you're caught in an arms race, so to speak, of expanding yourself.
00:24:26.000So for Machiavelli, he thought that the secret to Rome, a classical Rome, was they never thought war was avoidable and they always took to fight to their enemies.
00:24:35.000Now, in the discourses, he talks about the same phenomenon domestically.
00:24:39.000He says sometimes you're going to find that you have enemies within.
00:24:42.000You better strike while they're still weak before they grow and become a faction, in which case you're going to have to have either a civil war or even worse.
00:24:51.000Yeah, and that's why I believe, and you don't have to comment on this from Hillsdale, but I can, that some aspects of the Biden regime striking their domestic political opposition is taking a page out of the Prince.
00:25:25.000He was giving advice in the Prince to a ruler that has to always appear, he says, moral, has to always appear religious, but he just can't be either if he wants to be effective.
00:25:36.000And he's trying to encourage this leader to do what it takes to win political points against one's domestic and foreign enemies and essentially tell them it's okay.
00:26:05.000So just pretend to be something, right?
00:26:07.000You know, kind of basic public relations.
00:26:10.000So let's talk now about, and I hate to do this because I think you could learn something from everyone, but I could just already hear so many of our listeners being like, man, this guy is so dark and kind of all about earthly power and all this.
00:26:27.000What were some of the weaknesses in kind of what he wrote?
00:26:30.000And again, it was written 500 years ago.
00:26:32.000So who are we to try to critique weaknesses?
00:26:35.000But let's say like if someone were to embrace Machiavellianism, what are some of the spots that make it most vulnerable if it's employed as a governing strategy?
00:26:46.000And I'll just cheat off the smart kids like Montesquieu.
00:26:49.000Montesquieu raised the very same question and concern.
00:26:52.000He thought that what was wrong about Machiavelli is this assumption that empire is not only inevitable, but desirable.
00:26:58.000So in a short work called On Universal Monarchy in Europe, Montesquieu essentially argues that if you follow Machiavelli's advice and just have this foreign policy of imperialism, you're going to lead yourself to ruin.
00:27:10.000So he turns the tables on Machiavelli.
00:27:31.000Technology has made it almost superfluous to have the kind of ancient virtue that Machiavelli was talking about.
00:27:36.000So you're never going to cultivate that kind of gusto that he thought was necessary.
00:27:40.000So if you wanted to adopt Machiavellian policies in the modern world, which is to say imperialism, you're going to end up bankrupting your nation.
00:27:49.000The only way you could continue to fight these foreign wars is if you keep printing money.
00:28:03.000Where he goes off the rails is this idea that empire is necessary.
00:28:07.000For Monascu, empire in a modern age, especially when you throw in modern weaponry and modern wealth from manufacturing and industrialization, you're going to have to bankrupt yourself, arming yourself to the teeth that would be necessary for some kind of Machiavellian enterprise or agenda.
00:28:24.000The other thing I think he simply goes wrong is he just claims that it is natural for human beings to acquire.
00:28:29.000And what he means by that is there's no such thing really as moral virtue, which teaches you not to acquire and indulge your desires, but rather to moderate them.
00:28:38.000Now, the reason why I say that's fundamentally flawed is because, one, I don't think it's natural for human beings to do that.
00:28:45.000And also, what happens is if you don't encourage restraint and moral virtue, well, then you're going to have a society of degeneracy and license rather than liberty.
00:28:55.000So I think there's a fundamental flaw there.
00:28:57.000And in spite of the fact that he wants us to have skin in the game and be concerned with our liberty, what he says about morality actually teaches license and hedonism and not virtue.
00:29:09.000Yeah, I think we're living through that, an era of licentiousness, and the founders talked a lot about that.
00:29:14.000So that's an interesting question, which is what, so Machiavelli was, he was not necessarily, he was writing for a very specific type of person or a nation or a CEO, that whereas Aristotle in the ethics was talking, was writing for all people, right?
00:29:36.000I don't think a 19-year-old college student all of a sudden saying, you know what, I'm going to become a Machiavellian.
00:29:43.000What I'm getting at is how, if you applied Machiavellian belief to your own personal life, forget the macro side of it, like you're running, you know, Russia or Syria or India.
00:29:57.000Like, let's just say, you know, a regular school teacher says, you know what, I'm going to be a Machiavellian.
00:30:38.000And that's where I laugh because I wanted to say, like, just indulge your desire, like, indulge your nature, and you'll independently kind of live a Machiavellian life, I guess.
00:30:49.000Well, Machiavelli wrote such a work for that, actually.
00:31:05.000It's a play about let's just all pretend we're faithful to each other, get what we ultimately want, and just kind of play up appearances.
00:31:12.000So he's kind of written a book, you know, for something like the prince for the average guy, and it's in the Mandragula, but it has a deeper message as well.
00:31:21.000And I would say that somebody like Francis Bacon picked up on it, and that is it's a story about an old man who wants to have an heir, but he can't have a child.
00:31:29.000And so they concoct a bed trick to get his wife pregnant.
00:31:33.000Well, what Francis Bacon would say is, well, all of that would be unnecessary.
00:31:38.000Maybe we can find a way to overcome the limits that nature had placed on us temporarily.
00:31:43.000So there are Machiavellian ideas that do permeate everyday life.
00:31:47.000I would just say these days it comes mostly from science.
00:31:50.000Well, and I just want to reinforce this and emphasize this because this is why we're doing the partnership with Hillsdale College, which, you know, I'm oversimplifying it, but that's my job because I don't have the time to do a whole four years of this.
00:32:17.000Do you respect and appreciate, at least acknowledge a natural law, or do you think the will is superior to whatever were called the natural law?
00:32:24.000And that is what I believe is the tension in America and in the West right now.
00:32:30.000And in some ways, that debate has been going on for quite some time.
00:32:34.000But Machiavelli was the one that blew this whole thing open.
00:32:37.000And that's really why we've just dedicated this conversation to it, is prior to Machiavelli, there was at least people were at least going through the motions that, yes, okay, we acknowledge, you know, the five proofs of God of Aquinas, or we acknowledge that there is a natural law giver.
00:32:56.000And then from there, you get Hobbes and you get Rousseau and then you get Marx and you get Hegel and then you get Marx and then you get Nietzsche and then you get Derrida, you get Foucault.
00:33:57.000And then something like the extreme of Machiavelli, where, like I said, he never speaks of natural right or natural law.
00:34:03.000But then you have sort of a middle ground.
00:34:05.000And I would say that that would be modern natural right, that there is a standard by nature and we have a right to protect our lives and our property and our liberty.
00:34:13.000And sometimes that means we have to employ Machiavellian means to do it.
00:34:17.000So I would say there is a middle ground in natural right teaching.
00:34:20.000So 11 years from now, I want you to publish a book that says 500 years, God on trial, because that would be the 500th anniversary of the print.
00:36:18.000Now, some would say he was a nihilist, but I think he would defend that and say, no, he's actually concerned with elevating human beings from modern decadence and modern nihilism.
00:36:29.000So you're absolutely correct about that.
00:36:31.000Well, we're going to have to get into Beyond Good and Evil and Zarathustra.
00:36:35.000If I remember correctly, and that Zarathustra, among other things, was the book that inspired those two Chicago students to commit a murder.
00:36:44.000It was the pale criminal, the passage on the pale criminal and thus speak Zarathustra.
00:36:48.000And they thought they could become the overman and the ubermensch, which is a very interesting thing when you combine that with modern science and you look at kind of what these massive billionaires are doing to try to live forever and challenge, you know, kind of how we were made.
00:37:06.000This is all very interesting questions, but I think that our listeners, you know, we have all people of all faith backgrounds that listen.
00:37:12.000You know, we have a lot of Christians that listen.
00:37:14.000This is so important because the unraveling of society you see around you can go back to thinkers that might have just been passed over in your college experience or in your life experience.
00:37:26.000But that's why we're unpacking them and giving the good and the bad.
00:37:30.000And because we actually acknowledge good and evil, unlike some of these other thinkers.
00:37:34.000So any final thoughts, Doctor, as we summarize this one?
00:37:45.000No, Charlie, just wanted to thank you again for drawing attention to not only Hillsdale College, but the importance of these books.
00:37:52.000And like you said, we're living in a world where we're affected by these ideas.
00:37:55.000And so if you're interested in seeing the direction of where our culture may or may not be going, it's crucial to go back to the sources, the intellectual sources of those ideas.
00:38:04.000So I think you're doing an enormous public service here.
00:38:09.000For me and the work we do on the show and Turning Point, we're actually more effective because we know what motivates some of these people.
00:38:17.000We know what they're going to do next.
00:38:18.000And it gives us a piece of a piece and some comfort saying, okay, we kind of understand the philosophical underpinnings and we can more effectively counter them.
00:38:29.000I know that's more my job than your job, but it's so important to be able to pinpoint it because we all are born into a world we did not create.
00:38:36.000And in some ways, we're living in Machiavelli's world.