Machiavelli: 'stop being good' but 'avoid being loathed'
The Florentine held an unsparing mirror to the minds of statesmen and created the political 'reality' of Hobbes, Kissinger and Mearsheimer (this is an edited version of an earlier post)
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Next Thursday: Locke versus Leibniz
‘MACHIAVELLIAN’ is a byword for manipulative power and cynical statecraft. The lazy media wield the adjective as carelessly as they append ‘gate’ to a minor scandal, trivialising Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought and influence.
Born into a noble Florentine family on 3 May 1469, Machiavelli lived in a world of city-states that were under constant threat of violent usurpation. Machiavelli revelled in this milieu. A diplomat, historian and philosopher, he was fascinated by how a city-state should survive and flourish. His towering achievement was to unite a bundle of loose political ideas into a philosophy of statecraft of chilling clarity and brutal honesty.
The Prince (1512), his slim masterpiece, laid bare the methods by which popes and princes should seize and retain power, an eloquent self-help guide for statesmen, or ‘how to get ahead and crush people’. A core precept was that a prince should use merciless force if the survival of his realm were at risk.
An effective statesman, in Machiavelli’s estimation, was a ruthless yet sophisticated strategist, not an uncivilised brute. A shrewd prince understood the value of religious faith as a political tool for uniting and controlling the people. He knew how to harness the power of the people’s beliefs, however superstitious or fabulous, to a political programme.
By persuading ordinary people that the interests of the state were aligned with ‘the will of God’, the prince rallied the masses ‘in the name of God’ to go to war, conquer his enemies and so on. That is why Machiavelli so admired the polytheism of the Roman pagans: their gods served the state, inspired the people and boosted soldiers’ morale.
Machiavelli was no atheist. He was an avowed Christian, though of a necessarily malleable kind:
‘[A] prince ought to take care that he [seems] altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious,’ he observed. ‘There is nothing more necessary to appear to have than this last quality . . . Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are . . .’ A prince, then, must seem devout, but ‘should you require not to be so’, a prince should ‘know how to change to the opposite’.
Nor should a prince consult his Christian conscience in deciding matters of state, Machiavelli advised. A conscience was a useless encumbrance, a handicap, in the true statesman.
The pursuit and retention of power had no use of a ‘conscience’, in the Christian sense. The monkish fear of the afterlife, the covenant for the soul’s salvation, were dangerous distractions from the prince’s overriding purpose: to run an orderly regime and crush his enemies. If the prince’s methods ran afoul of Christian doctrine, that was the price of survival.
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Machiavelli was a psychologist of power as much as he was the father of modern political realism. War, and how to wage it, must be uppermost in a prince’s mind, he advised:
‘A prince ought to have no other aim or thought . . . than war and its rules and discipline . . . when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states.’ For a prince, it was safer to be feared than loved, ‘because [men] are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children.’
Stop being ‘good’, Machiavelli advised: ‘If you always want to play the good man in a world where most people are not good, you’ll end up badly. Hence, if a ruler wants to survive, he’ll have to learn to stop being good, at least when the occasion demands.’
Cultivate appearances, make good impressions, he taught: ‘Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived . . . The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.’
Above all, try to avoid being loathed, he wrote. A prince must not do that which ‘will make him hated or contemptible . . . It makes him hated above all things, as I have said, to be rapacious, and to be a violator of the property and women of his subjects, from both of which he must abstain.’
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Machiavelli’s bleak assessment of humankind and the character of statesmen anticipated the grim philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who taught that human beings were destined to fight a ‘forever war’ unless a dictator or monarch reined in their miserable natures:
‘To this war of every man against every man,’ Hobbes wrote, ‘nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.’
Hobbes saw no innate ‘good’ in human nature, no self-restraining conscience and no signs of a soul or mind worthy of salvation. Human beings were little more than beasts who sensed their environment in the way wild animals sensed theirs.
The qualities of compassion, charity, civic duty and cooperation were not intrinsic to human nature, Hobbes maintained. They could be taught and practised, even acquired, he allowed, but only under the wing of an omnipotent sovereign, or what Hobbes himself called a tyrant.
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Warming Machiavelli’s frigid outlook was his attachment to the ancient Roman quality of virtus. This differed from the idea of ‘virtue’ as taught in modern ethics. As the Romans understood it, virtus was public-spirited heroism and civic duty.
Machiavelli believed that Florence, then under threat of barbarian invasion, was in dire need of virtus. He felt he could not rely on the church to restore Florentine virtus: the Vatican of Machiavelli’s time was a corrupt and decadent institution on the brink of the Reformation.
In fact, Machiavelli blamed a craven papacy and the decline of faith for the loss of Italian virtus. Even in its uncorrupted form, Christianity enfeebled the ‘manly qualities’ of decisive leaders: ‘Our religion has glorified humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action,’ Machiavelli was fond of saying, pre-dating Friedrich Nietzsche by 370 years.
Where the popes had failed to inspire virtus to defend the state, princes should step up and do whatever they felt necessary: spread lies, recruit organised crime, deploy extreme violence. All had their place in the preservation of the state. Where possible, a prince should wrap these illegal (and immoral) actions in a religious motive, thus sanctifying his crimes in the name of God.
To be ‘Machiavellian’ thus meant someone who lied, committed crimes, evaded treaty obligations and liquidated enemies (and their entire families) in the service of the state and God. Statesmen who were serious about retaining power should be willing to ‘sell their souls’ – or the Catholic definition of a soul, as understood in Machiavelli’s day.
That was why God-fearing Christians were of little use to a prince. Conventional Catholics were flaccid and ineffectual, Machiavelli insisted. The Christian conscience prayed when it should have seized power; genuflected when it should have crushed the barbarians at the gate; and turned the other cheek when it should have kicked the enemy while he was down.
Apostles of Machiavelli will relish that advice.
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The survival of Moses and Muhammad and the deaths of Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are thought to have ‘proved’ Machiavelli’s observation that prophets who live by the sword (Moses called on God’s arsenal) tend to die in their beds. Prophets who preach peace without a sword tend to die on the tip of one.
Machiavelli might have added the ‘gift of miracles’ to the arsenal of prophets who survived: Christ and Moses would not have lasted so long without their reputed power to perform miracles.
A prophet without an army or miracles had only his charisma. When that failed, the people would dispatch him without pity or regret. The unarmed prophet Machiavelli had in mind was Girolamo Savonarola, the visionary friar whom he knew well.
‘[T]he nature of the people is variable,’ Machiavelli concluded, ‘and whilst it is easy to persuade them, it is difficult to fix them in that persuasion . . . when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force.’
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If he were a ‘Christian’, as he claimed, Machiavelli had a dim view of Christianity. A religion that ‘turned the other cheek’ and tormented the conscience had no place in running the realm.
Then again, Christianity had triumphed over the Roman Empire and conquered much of the known world. Therein lay the flaw in Machiavelli’s vision of statecraft: while he recommended the exploitation of the faithful to preserve the state, he underestimated the sincerity of the faithful in driving events and opposing princes - the fall of pagan Rome being the glaring example.
In this context, it is fascinating to learn that Machiavelli was a member of a secretive club of ‘true believers’, to whom he addressed a five-page, rarely cited ‘Exhortation to Penance’. Charity, he wrote to his ‘Fathers and Brothers’, is the ‘only thing that takes our souls to Heaven; this is the only thing that has more worth than all the other virtues of men’.
Here Machiavelli sounds like a man in fear for his soul, as well he might. A cruel user of prostitutes, an opportunist, deceiver and manipulator, he was said to have cried out on his death bed, ‘I desire to go to Hell and not to Heaven. In the former place I shall enjoy the company of popes, princes and kings, while in the latter are only beggars, monks and apostles.’
A privately devout Christian who publicly argued that Christianity hobbled the statesman: Machiavelli would have enjoyed the contradiction. For him, consistency was indeed the hobgoblin of petty minds.
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A Christian conscience, then, was incompatible with the advancement of political power, Machiavelli taught. The two were mutually destructive. Once said, that could never be unsaid, pivoting human self-awareness into the colder, bleaker ‘Machiavellian’ world we know so well.
His political philosophy fired the starting gun on the ‘will to power’ in those who hankered to exploit the people’s beliefs for their own advantage and who saw that brute force was the only meaningful currency in world affairs.
Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon, was acting in a ‘Machiavellian’ sense when he abandoned South Vietnam to the Communist North. He realised Hanoi could not be defeated, not even after the US administration’s resumption of the worst aerial bombardment in history, a war crime against Indochina that achieved nothing other than mass misery and a hardening of the enemy’s will to win.
The academic John Mearsheimer was being similarly ‘Machiavellian’ when he defended Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, arguing that NATO’s encroachment on Eastern Europe had given Putin no choice other than to go to war to preserve the Russian state.
Mearsheimer’s theory failed several tests, according to his numerous critics, notably that of ‘self-determination’: Eastern European countries were not forced, they chose to join NATO and the European Union to escape the Russian tyranny they’d lived under and feared the return of. Ukraine similarly sought to rid itself of the Russian hegemon, as was its right, with bloody consequences.
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Their power and egos blind aspiring tyrants and tycoons to the vicious image of themselves reflected in Machiavelli’s mirror.
We see this mini-Machiavellian ‘character’ all around us, in governments, the media, the universities, and on the religious councils and company boards: the soulless spawn of a giant mind who taught them (often without their knowing) that a conscience and qualities like honesty and decency were impediments to their rise to the top and should be dispensed with.
If he were alive today (he died in 1527 aged 58), Machiavelli might gaze on his progeny with a pang of disappointment: were so many unaware of the great Florentine who had inspired their cunning ruses, power grabs and brutal political games? Had so many forgotten whose mind contained theirs?
Next Thursday, 13th November 2025: Locke versus Leibniz
Selected sources and further reading:
Arendt, H. (2017) The Origins of Totalitarianism, London: Penguin Classics.
Clark, D.J. (2018) ‘Machiavellian Faith and Foundings: On the Armed Prophets of The Prince’, Ashland OH: Ashbrook Statesmanship Thesis.
Hobbes, T. (2019) Collected Works of Thomas Hobbes, Hastings UK: Delphi Classics.
Hobbes, T. (2018) Leviathan, New Delhi: Studium Publishing.
Kenny, A. (1998) A Brief History of Western Philosophy, Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Machiavelli, N. (date unknown) ‘Exhortation to Penitence’, Scribd.
Machiavelli, N. (2015) The Collected Works of Niccolò Machiavelli, London: PergamonMedia.
Machiavelli, N. and Bull, G. (transl.) (2003) The Prince, London: Penguin Classics.
Mansfield, H.C. (1998) Machiavelli’s Virtue, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Najemy, J.M. (1993) Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli–Vettori Letters of 1513–1515, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Norton, P.E. (Spring 1983) ‘Machiavelli’s Road to Paradise: “The Exhortation to Penitence”’, History of Political Thought, 4(1), pp. 31–42.
Runciman, D. (2021) Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas, London: Profile Books.
Waldron, J. (22 August 1996) ‘Politics Can Be Hell’, London Review of Books, 18(16).
Wolin, S.S. (2004) Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.