Machiavelli again

Machiavelli and Civil Society

By John Taylor ; 2006 December

Some kind of Hippocratic oath should be devised for
every profession; what is more, certain features of
the doctor's Hippocratic oath should be in every
profession's oath, most particularly the wonderful
dictum: "Above all do no harm." Teachers in particular
should pay attention to that, for poorly designed
educational systems do more to stifle than edify young
minds. It would be impossible to measure the loss to
society of thousands of minds being systematically
stifled, so it is best to start off every teacher's
career with an oath promising to do everything
possible to avert possible harm to students. The
teachers in Florence in the time of my hero, Niccolo
Machiavelli, were apparently very harmful.

What saved him from the conniving, harm-doing teachers
of the time was a lucky happenstance. His father made
up the index for the latest edition of Titus Livy's
Discourses on the History of Rome, and in recompense
for his labor was awarded a copy of the final
publication to keep for his library. At the time, a
person in his income bracket could never afford to buy
such a book. As a result, the young boy had access to
Livy's work, which he pored over in fine detail
throughout his adolescence, free of teachers' dirty
looks. It fed his genius, and after a career as an
official and man of action (he organized and trained a
local militia, following his own doctrine that
mercenaries do more harm than good) he returned to the
Discourses, commented on them, and read them to a
small circle of republican sympathizing friends. It
became his masterwork. In fact, Rousseau had an
interesting theory that Machiavelli's most famous work
was really a sham that affected the pretence of
instructing kings but in reality is a "handbook for
republicans," in other words, a demonstration of what
not to do, and why it is wisest to steer far clear of
a dictatorship. In a later edition of his Social
Contract Rousseau added this footnote:

"Machiavelli was a gentleman and a good citizen; but
being attached to the Medici, he was forced during the
oppression of his country to disguise his love of
liberty. The very choice of an execrable hero reveals
his secret intention, and the antithesis between his
principles in his book The Prince and those in his
Discourse on Livy and The History of Florence proves
that this profound political thinker has so far had
only superficial or corrupted readers. The Pope's
court strictly prohibited his book, which I can well
believe, since that was the Court he depicts most
plainly." (Social Contract, note, p. 118)

Machiavelli's abiding contribution to political
thought is his understanding of the value of what has
been called "civil society." The same Virtu (or
initiative, the nerve to do what has to be done in a
particular situation; for Baha'is, the Guardian and
his plans and gardens stands as the epitome of virtu)
that makes a prince great is multiplied in a republic,
because a large number of citizens, not just one, must
show forth this all too rare virtue of virtu. Rousseau
was clearly influenced by this when he wrote,

"If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern
itself democratically. A government so perfect is not
suited to men." (Contract, 114)

Machiavelli's appreciation of the value of civil
society starts, then, in Livy's thoughtful
observations on the history of Rome . Rome rose
quickly from an insignificant village to a large
empire for good reason. What did the early Romans have
that nobody else, including the cultured Greeks and
the brilliant Jews, did not have? There were thousands
of other towns, all ambitious, why did Rome win out?
What was it about them that people in other places did
not have?

Clearly, as Livy and other historians of the period
point out, the Romans somehow learned to breed and
teach successive generations of united, responsible
citizens willing to serve selflessly all aspects of
the Roman civitas. Romans consistently put their best
and brightest in positions of trust, and they
consistently lived up to that trust. That was their
secret. These bands of dull but dedicated men
fulfilled the hardest, rarest part of leadership,
summoning up the integrity and toughness to undergo
the travail of uniting together, forming a reliable
civil service and erecting the many other often
complex pillars of civil society that uphold a healthy
republic. Later, when Rome was the biggest kid on the
block, it became militarized, corrupt, tyrannical and
oppressive. It still bred some great thinkers and
writers in isolation, but all-in-all the virtu of the
early Romans had been eclipsed.

For Machiavelli Roman history offered an important
object lesson for all times. He believed that with
republican virtu "a people is more prudent, more
stable and has better judgment than a prince." (quoted
in Curry, Introducing Machiavelli, p. 94) Baha'is of
course will think right away of Abdu'l-Baha's teaching
about consultation, that a group of nine in an
Assembly is better and smarter than one leader if and
only if they are united, loving and practice good
consultation skills.

Civic society is collectivist, it is upheld by good
laws designed to steer people away from private profit
and power grabbing and towards duty. It should not
only punish but offer greater rewards for putting
public before private service. For Machiavelli the
real opponent of a republic is not a single ambitious
tyrant but a tendency among the many to break up into
factions. (yes, the Baha'i parallel is the law against
backbiting...) "I have seen the enemy," Machiavelli
might have said, "And it is not a prince but a
partisan."

Curry offers two modern examples of the harm that
selfish partisans do. In 1995 one man, Nick Leeson,
brought down the two-century-old Barings Bank in a few
minutes by gambling on the Tokyo stock market. Curry
imagines Machiavelli's snide comment: "What do we
find? Not merely greed and mismanagement, but
uncontrolled risks taken in secrecy without any regard
for civic responsibility." I would add to that a
Canadian example, Highway #407. Here was a covert deal
with a Spanish and Australian consortium made in
secret by an Ontario government just before an
election permanently selling out the rights to the
world's highest priced toll highway. Now there is a
permanent drain running straight through Toronto on
purses both public and private -- well, if only I
could summon up Machiavelli's ghost to comment on
that!

A second example Curry cites is documented by
historian Christopher Lasch in his 1995 book, "The
Revolt of the Elites." In America the top fifth of the
population have made themselves financially
independent of its crumbling industries, cities and
public services. They hire their own security (private
security guards outnumber police by a large margin),
send their children to private schools, gate
themselves off in segregated neighborhoods and send
their money off-shore where it is immune from
taxation. Then they ask, "Why should we pay for public
services that we do not even use?" They have no common
life or sense of civic obligation, and tend to have
more in common with the elites of Europe and Asia than
their fellow Americans. Since they own the mass media,
the common ideology of all classes, especially in the
States, has come naturally to reflect their values, or
lack thereof. Curry rightly points to a famous
statement of Margaret Thatcher that epitomizes a trend
that at the time had only begun to pick up momentum.
She said:

"There is no such thing as society. There are
individual men and women, and there are families."

This, from a head of state, was the cock crowing
thrice, the ultimate betrayal. Compared to that,
Caesar's coup d'etat in Republican Rome was a mere
knee-jerk. Curry has Machiavelli reply: "Nothing I
ever wrote was worse -- this is a republican nightmare
and a sure recipe for social and political disaster."
Then, if I may update this, in the second Bush
administration the so-called Republican party in the
States (it should be renamed the "Antinomian
Republican Party") learned to reach out to church
basements for a new voter base. This was only natural,
for the ideology that calls itself Christian today is
just as individualist and devoid of social conscience
as Maggie Thatcher tried to become.

But the beauty of Machiavelli is that he criticized
liberals as well as conservatives. He is one of the
few thinkers in history to treat government as the
rule of real people, and to criticize the tendency of
theorists to, well, theorize, to break things up into
idealized parts instead of realizing that everything
depends upon peoples' integrity and responsibility. He
said that he had never seen a government that could
not be improved upon, any more than he had seen a
person who was perfect and could not be improved upon.

We Baha'is have seen a perfect person, the Master, and
we do look forward to a sort of ultimate unification,
that of the entire human race in a world government.
But I do not think that anything in the Baha'i
perspective argues against the fact that, even now,
none of us is perfect or that government will not
constantly improve. In that sense, Machiavelli is a
thinker for the ages, even unto the Golden Age of a
united humanity.

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