The Prince by Machiavelli and Charles I from Hume’s History of England
Against the backdrop of his failing city-state Florence, Machiavelli writes to answer the question: “Why are we Italians so weak, unlike our Roman ancestors, and what kind of leader do we need?”
Consider the leadership of Agathocles, the Sicilian who became King of Syracuse. He tricked the people of Syracuse, murdered many of its citizens and seized the city without any civil dissension. He used wickedness to gain power. His brutality forced Carthaginians to leave Sicily in his control. Machiavelli praises him for rising above “a thousand hardships and dangers” to achieve high position.
But, we should not imitate or admire him, he argues, because it is wrong “to betray one’s friends, to be without loyalty, without mercy, without religion.” So he should be praised for his skill in rising to the top, but despised for his immoral means of getting there. These methods bring power, he writes, but never glory.
How do we justify these seemingly conflicting perspectives of Machiavelli? In the end, he doesn’t resolve it. Instead, he argues for hypocrisy, a strategy of apparently embodying the conflict itself. In chapter 18 he recommends that the prince be a “great hypocrite and dissembler,” and insists that such duplicity will triumph. Why? Because men are so simple and only obey present necessities. They only care about what affects them now, not about principle or moral correctness.
What sets the prince apart from the people is that he is not ruled by his appetites. He is able to manipulate events to his own end. He is cunning..skillful..smart. If he were writing today, Machiavelli would undoubtedly have an entire section of chapters on the presidency of Bill Clinton.
If Machiavelli argued for a moral opportunist and political pragmatist, Hume idealized the moral pragmatist and political conservative (?). Hume was asking a different, albeit related question: “Why are we English so misguided as to fight against our own government, and what kind of leaders have gotten us into this predicament?”
His question is answered, in part, by a critique of Charles I, who feels compelled to squash an insurrection in Ireland and Scotland (p. 346). But, ironically, by attempting to suppress this threat to his authority abroad, he allowed a fatal threat to his authority back home.
Parliament gained control of the regular military, so this left Charles to gather up a smaller force among his loyal followers. Then he made the mistake of going against the law of the land, opening the door for Parliament to do the same [Chapter LV, page 379]
It is remarkable how much the topics of argument were now reversed between the parties. The king, while he acknowledged his former error, of employing a plea of necessity in order to infringe the laws and constitution, warned the parliament not to imitate an example on which they threw such violent blame; and the parliament, while they clothed their personal fears or ambition under the appearance of national and imminent danger, made unknowingly an apology for the most exceptionable part of the king’s conduct. That the liberties of the people were no longer exposed to any peril from royal authority, so narrowly circumscribed, so exactly defined, so much unsupported by revenue and by military power, might be maintained upon very plausible topics: but that the danger, allowing it to have any existence, was not of that kind, great, urgent, inevitable, which dissolves all law and levels all limitations, seems apparent from the simplest view of these transactions. So obvious indeed was the king’s present inability to invade the constitution, that the fears and jealousies which operated on the people, and pushed them so furiously to arms, were undoubtedly not of a civil, but of a religious nature. The distempered imaginations of men were agitated with a continual dread of Popery, with a horror against prelacy, with an antipathy to ceremonies and the liturgy, and with a violent affection for whatever was most opposite to these objects of aversion. The fanatical spirit, let loose, confounded all regard to ease, safety, interest; and dissolved every moral and civil obligation.
Each party was now willing to throw on its antagonist the odium of commencing a civil war; but both of them prepared for an event which they deemed inevitable.
Charles I here dug his own grave. By elevating himself above the law when it seemed convenient (under the guise of necessity), he opened the door for his parliament to do the same. And since his power was already weakened by other mistakes, he was unable to recover.
These leadership mistakes broke the chain holding England together, and she simply could not find unity again until after a great civil war—a conflict that combined political power struggle with religious fervor, a catastrophe that questioned the age-old monarchy as a form of government (government by divine right no less), and a bloody slaughter that pitted a great nation’s brother against brother.
Both of these historians set leadership as their topic. Leaders are the rear view mirror they use to evaluate success and failure, virtue and catastrophe.
In Machiavelli we see the Renaissance passing on political theory to the Enlightenment, where God is no longer the author of government, but where government is a contract of the people who have a right to overthrow the government if it no longer serves them (Thomas More, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes). In Hume we see the failure of divinely appointed leaders to know their own followers and serve them in a principled manner.
There is no evidence in the creation story that man was ever designed to rule over nations, or even cities. God seemed to prefer personal relationship and being in charge himself. But in this fallen world, human leadership is a fact of life. Like the farmer who learns how to minimize weeds and maximize yields, we might as well learn to lead the best we can. And these two writers give us valuable lessons that can save our own leadership many years of pain, and our followers much grief.
Leadership is difficult. Success in leadership demands the highest morality, wisdom, courage, and self-control. To fail, only a single weakness can lead to a cascade of consequences, some of them even fatal.
Along with Machiavelli and Hume, we idealize a leader who gives the law, and abides by it. We envision a leader who speaks the truth, and lives it. We long for a leader who gives us a good life, and lives one before us. And when we meet this leader who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, we stop looking for any merely human leader and bow down and sing with the angels, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is, and is to come.”
Dates
1469-1527 Machiavelli
1478-1535 Thomas More, beheaded after trial for treason for denying that King Henry VIII was the Supreme Head of the Church of England
1513 Machiavelli writes The Prince
1516 More writes Utopia
1588-1679 Thomas Hobbes
1632-1704 John Locke
1642-1651 English Civil War
1651 Hobbes writes Leviathan (political theory)
1689 Locke writes Two Treatises of Government
1690 Lock writes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
1711-1776 David Hume (Scottish philosopher and historian)
1754-1762 David Hume writes History of England