Jon Lee Anderson Introduces "Machiavelli: On Politics and Power"

New Yorker writer and Che Guevara biographer Jon Lee Anderson introduces the Restless Classics edition of Machiavelli’s selected writings, out March 23. Anderson has spent his career observing, encountering, and writing about bad men and their methods, from Pinochet to Putin—a vivid lens through which to read this “epochal primer on the practical dos and don’ts of taking and holding power.” Below, we’re pleased to share his introduction to Machiavelli: On Politics and Power.

INTRODUCTION

In the art of things that humans do—exercising power, making love, and waging war—there are certain rules that transcend the ages. At times they are forgotten because of the conceits of a certain age, but they are, for better or worse, rules that have defined human behavior forever, and, one suspects, always will.

In early 2002, I visited the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The recent Taliban ouster had left behind a power vacuum, and Kandahar, their longtime stronghold, was full of intrigue, as rival mujahedin warlords and various foreign powers, including the Americans, the Iranians, and the Pakistanis, jockeyed for influence.

One day, after a week spent shuttling between power centers in an attempt to ascertain where the new alliances and fault lines lay, my Afghan companion and interpreter asked me if I wished to become a warlord myself.

To be a warlord was the ultimate expression of power in Afghanistan, and to him, a young man of twenty-one, who had grown up in a country in a state of perpetual war, it must have seemed a logical aspiration for anyone with means to have. When I asked him what would be required for me to become a warlord, he responded excitedly. All I needed to get started was ten thousand dollars, he said: enough to hire one hundred fighters and to pay them each a salary of a hundred dollars for one month. It was a handsome sum at the time. As Afghans, he explained, they would already have their own weapons, so I wouldn’t need to spend any money to arm them, but if I wished to appear more fearsome, I could also rent a few pickup trucks for my men and buy a couple of heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. He looked at me hopefully.

“But what then?” I asked. How would I pay my little army their second month’s salary?

Looking embarrassed at the obviousness of my question, my Afghan friend waved a hand in the direction of the Kandahar bazaar. “It’s simple. You just go to the merchants, and the people, and they will give you money.” After the first month, he explained, my only concerns would be to decide the terms of enforcement in the area under my sway, to maintain control over my fighters, and then, depending on the extent of my ambitions, to consider the possibilities for expansion. “How large do you want your army to be?” he asked.

A perennial battlefield of history, Afghanistan’s political landscape has changed very little over the centuries, making its rough-and tumble realities sharply reminiscent of the kinds of scenarios described five centuries ago by Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat, philosopher, and author, in The Prince, his epochal primer on the practical dos and don’ts of taking and holding power. Machiavelli’s era was a convulsed one, in which European monarchies, city-states, and dueling religious armies pursued wars of territorial conquest using any means necessary, from alliances forged through marriage, to outright warfare waged between dukes and kings and popes employing vassal militias and mercenary armies. The rewards of victory could mean the acquisition of power that bordered on the absolute; the consequences of losing power could be equally dramatic, often involving death by torture for oneself and, sometimes, one’s family, too.

In the contemporary age, things have moved on somewhat, here and there, but much is unchanged, not least, of course, in that the essential politics of power remain amoral, in the same way that the rules of chess are amoral. It is this immutable fact of life that has given The Prince its timeless currency and air of clairvoyant sensibility. In the end, wisdom is wisdom; there is a fount at which all princes drink, where the waters of knowledge and experience mingle. Some come away with the despot’s merciless cunning, while others find themselves incapable, unhappy with the ruthless behavior that is usually the key to unbridled power. Such princes may be better human beings, but, as Machiavelli pointed out, they do not necessarily make better leaders. “Everyone admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word.”

In such ways, Machiavelli’s scrutiny of power feels astonishingly modern, with the personality traits he noticed then among leaders just as visible in the world of power today. During the modern-day American presidency of Donald Trump, for instance, it became common for certain political commentators to describe his approach to politics, to foreign policy, and to power itself as “transactional.” The term afforded a polite neutrality to behavior that might otherwise have been described as ruthless, even inhuman, while less obsequious observers would almost certainly also call out Trump as a “Machiavellian,” a definition that has come to mean someone possessing the traits of cunning and deceit. The same term is appropriate for several of Trump’s more cynical contemporaries, such as Putin, Erdoğan, Xi, and Netanyahu.

If Machiavelli were alive today, however, he would probably demur, concluding that while Trump may have possessed the instincts to seek power and to wield it, his personal vanity usually overwhelmed his ability to use it effectively, while allowing others—including some of the leaders named above—to take advantage at his expense. One recalls the episode in which, following a phone conversation with Erdoğan, the foxy, ambitious Turkish leader, Trump ordered American troops to leave the battlefield in Syria, abandoning their Kurdish allies in the process, and giving up the territory they had won in battle to soldiers from Turkey and Russia, both rival powers. Later, when Trump rescinded his own order, it was too late; the battle space was now shared and infinitely more complicated, and he had lost the respect of his own generals as well as his adversaries.

In a chapter that feels as if it had been written with Trump in mind, “How Flatterers Should Be Avoided,” Machiavelli issued an admonitory warning about the kind of prince who “is either over thrown by flatterers, or so often changed by varying opinions that he falls into contempt.” One such man, wrote Machiavelli scathingly, was Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, whom he described as a leader who “does not communicate his designs to anyone, nor does he receive opinions on them. But as in carrying them into effect they become revealed and known, they are at once obstructed by those men whom he has around him, and he, being pliant, is diverted from them. Hence it follows that those things he does one day he undoes the next, and no one ever understands what he wishes or intends to do, and no one can rely on his resolutions.”

Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, during the Italian Renaissance, at a time when much of Europe was in ferment. Italy itself was a warring mosaic of city-states, with the Medici family installed as the dynastic rulers of Florence, while the papacy and the kingdoms of France and Spain were engaged in unceasing military campaigns to invade and annex new territories. Little Portugal had recently embarked on maritime voyages of discovery, and before long Spain also joined the race for overseas possessions, after defeating and dislodging the Moors at Granada, following eight centuries of Islamic occupation. In 1494, two years after Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, the Medicis were also expelled from Florence, and the city’s republican system of government restored after a sixty-year hiatus. The new order was a religious regime overseen by a charismatic Dominican priest, Savanarola, but in 1498, after a mere four-year tenure in office, he was toppled, tortured, and executed.

This was the dramatic turn of events that set the stage for Machiavelli’s own professional career. Florence’s representative body, the Great Council, named him Second Chancellor, handling its correspondence and internal reports. He was only twenty-nine years old, but evidently showed qualities that impressed those who met him because within a few short weeks he was also named as Secretary to the Great Council’s war cabinet, a position that made him the aide-de-camp to Florence’s new leader, Piero Soderini. Before long, Machiavelli had effectively become Florence’s foreign secretary, and he travelled frequently on diplomatic missions—to Rome to meet with the pope, to other Italian city-states, and to the royal courts of Spain and France—to carry messages and to negotiate, and to observe and become informed on behalf of Florence. Long before the term “shuttle diplomacy” was conceived as a definition for Henry Kissinger’s global missions by jet on behalf of the United States, Machiavelli was doing it for Florence on horseback.

While he was first and foremost a diplomat, as a man of his time, Machiavelli did not eschew violence as an aberration, but rather contemplated its political utility, and when he decided against it, he did so for its lack of value as a political tool. Citing the ancient Greek myth of the Centaur, Machiavelli believed that an effective prince must harness the fighting abilities of both man and beast, his respective terms for the law and the use of force: “but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second,” he wrote. “So it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use of both natures, and that one without the other is not durable. A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves.”

Such memorable parables were the result of Machiavelli’s close observation of the ways in which the princes he met with deployed their power. He had come away especially impressed by the fearsome duke, Cesare Borgia, whose proven determination and ability to outwit his adversaries and betray his friends—while also winning favor from his subjects—was, he suggested, a feat of near-perfection. He lauded Borgia in The Prince, writing: “Therefore, he who consider it necessary to secure himself in his new principality, to win friends, to overcome either by force or fraud, to make himself beloved and feared by the people, to be followed and revered by the soldiers, to exterminate those who have power or reason to hurt him, to change the old order of things for new, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy a disloyal soldiery and to create new, to maintain friendship with kings and princes in such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend with caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this man.”

Living as he did in embattled times, Machiavelli’s brief on behalf of Florence eventually extended beyond diplomacy to encompass the direct administration of warfare, and in 1506, in emulation of a practice he had seen Borgia implement in his conquered territories, he organized and trained a citizen’s militia. Two years later, he put it to use and successfully commanded it himself in a battle that resulted in the surprise defeat of the rival city-state of Pisa. But in the end, Machiavelli’s triumph was short-lived. In 1512, the members of that same Florentine militia turned and ran from a battle at Prato in an offensive that was backed by Pope Julius II and fought on the ground by hardened Spanish troops. Afterward, the Medicis returned to power in Florence, ending the Republic and dissolving its city-state. Fourteen years after becoming the city’s indispensable man, Machiavelli, then forty-three, lost his job, while his boss, Soderini, fled into exile.

It was not long before the Medicis sent for Machiavelli, and had him tortured, seeking his confession that he had taken part in a conspiracy against them. No historical evidence exists to suggest that Machiavelli was involved in an anti-Medici plot, and, in the event, he managed to withstand six strappados, a form of torture in which a victim’s wrists were tied behind their back, then used to hoist their body into the air before they were abruptly dropped, a process that causes intense pain and often lasting injury to shoulders and arms. Machiavelli was either wholly innocent, a man with an iron constitution, or both, for he did not confess to any transgressions after six such drops, and he was released after three weeks in custody.

After his ordeal, Machiavelli retired to his family farm outside the city, but he remained intellectually and socially active and, inasmuch as he was able, politically so too, albeit behind the scenes—reading, writing, corresponding with influential friends, and sniffing out his opportunities with the new rulers of Florence. A veritable one-man hive of energy, Machiavelli wrote several books, including one about war and another about the history of Florence, as well as poetry, plays, and even a bawdy comedy that was staged to great public success in Rome. But the work for which he earned his posterity is The Prince, which he dashed off in a flurry of intense activity following his arrest in 1513, some of it extrapolated from The Discourses on Livy, a much larger piece he was working on that was intended as a scholarly commentary on the first ten volumes of Livy’s History of Rome. (Machiavelli eventually completed The Discourses in 1517, but it was only published posthumously, in 1531.) Whatever its inspiration, it has long been an article of faith to historians that The Prince amounts to a job application letter from Machiavelli to the Medicis, and it is hard to find fault with that analysis.

As a calling card, The Prince is nothing short of effusive, with Machiavelli dedicating it to none other than one of the dynasty’s previous rulers, addressing him as “the Magnificent Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici,” while describing his effort on the opening page as a “gift” to his son and heir, and Florence’s new prince, Giuliano de’ Medici. After outlining the pearls of wisdom gleaned from his readings of Livy and his own experiences as the Florentine Secretary, Machiavelli concluded his primer by beseeching the latest Medici prince to seek historic greatness by using his “illustrious house” to unite Italy. There are no signs that Giuliano de’ Medici ever read the tract, however, nor did a job offer for Machiavelli ever arrive, and after another decade and a half of industrious hermitage, Machiavelli died of a sudden illness in 1527, at the age of fifty-eight—just as the Medicis were once again overthrown.

At the time of Machiavelli’s death, The Prince remained unpublished, but had already begun to circulate privately in circles of power and to cause a stir among its readers. As the years went by and Machiavelli’s writings became more widely disseminated—The Discourses was translated into English in 1536 and The Prince in 1640—his posthumous notoriety grew. Pope Paul IV banned The Prince, while in Tudor England, it was denounced as the work of Satan: “Old Nick” became a dual synonym for Machiavelli and the Devil. Over the ensuing centuries, not much has changed. Today, in spite of kinder treatment by modern historians (“Machiavelli no more invented political evil than Kinsey invented sex,” wrote Claudia Roth Pierpont in the New Yorker in 2008), his name carries overwhelmingly negative connotations.

In his own 1950 introduction to The Prince, Max Lerner addressed the conundrum of Machiavelli’s legacy. “Frederick, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck, Clemenceau, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, have gone to school to Machiavelli. But by bringing the work to this awareness Machiavelli did what every creative figure does. We might as well blame Shakespeare because, by creating Hamlet, he has intensified the agony of the indecisive and divided liberal.”

Perhaps. But Hamlet was a play, while The Prince is a handbook for princes, and it is Machiavelli’s clear-eyed cynicism in the way he set out the rules of power through a series of well-chiseled examples— much as Sun Tzu did in his Art of War—that will forever mark him as the man who came up with the phrase “the end justifies the means.”

In today’s world, power relationships are often costumed in less obvious ways than they were in the sixteenth century, but beneath the democratic trappings of many contemporary political regimes, violence remains an essential tool of power, just as the stratagems most commonly associated with Machiavelli, such as deceit or cunning— ruses deployed to avoid outright war while still gaining ground—are as useful and in use in our day as they were in his. While the rights of man have been institutionalized by modern states as a necessary legal concept, such rights coexist with the threat or the use of institutionalized violence by those same states. It is a duality that is as mutually exclusive, morally speaking, as it is ever-present, however dressed up by legal language or arguments made on behalf of humanity or the greater good of the community of nations.

It is in such murky waters that Machiavelli still swims, helping us out even now with the necessary language to rationalize the accidental civilian casualties caused when we use remote-controlled drones to assassinate suspected terrorists in foreign lands, not to mention the cumulative collateral damage of our recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. How do we justify the sale of weapons to repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia? While previous American presidents may have felt personally discomfited by such relationships even as they authorized them on vague grounds of “national interest,” Trump, a wannabee Machiavellian, took unabashed delight at the opportunity to express his support for Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman following the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi, explaining that the Saudis were about to spend billions of dollars on U.S. weapon systems, which was a good thing for the American economy. But Trump’s support for the Saudi prince and his displays of friendship for other tyrants, including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, also belied his longing to possess their kind of absolute power himself.

The fact is that men (and it is almost always men) have a tendency to admire and emulate those who possess greater power or authority than they do—much as Machiavelli did with Borgia. Saddam Hussein modelled his own tyranny on that of Josef Stalin, whom he consciously sought to imitate, right down to his body language. A former friend and Ba’ath Party comrade of Saddam’s once told me that as a young activist, Saddam had read Deutscher’s biography of Stalin three times in a row. The Ba’athists had taken their early ideological inspiration from Mussolini’s fascist state, but it was Stalin’s personal style and brutally effective use of power that Saddam wanted for himself.

In the late nineties, in a series of encounters with the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, I learned that the old anticommunist despot was also an ardent admirer of the late Chairman Mao Tsetung. Pinochet acknowledged that he had visited Mao’s mausoleum in Beijing not just once, but twice. When I asked him why, Pinochet expressed his awe for the power Mao had held “over the lives and deaths of millions.”

It was clear from the way Pinochet spoke that he wished he had possessed similar powers himself, but destiny—or perhaps it was the Chilean desire for democracy—had thwarted those ambitions. A few years earlier, seventeen years after seizing power in a bloody 1973 coup against the elected Socialist president Salvador Allende, Pinochet had allowed a public referendum on his rule, and to his great surprise and chagrin, he had lost. Obliged to step down as president, he had nonetheless retained his military command for eight more years before relinquishing control to a loyalist a few months earlier. At the time we met, Pinochet enjoyed immunity from prosecution for his crimes as a Senator for Life, thanks to the terms of a new constitution he had pushed through during his time in office. Chile had technically returned its democracy but it remained a country held in his grip.

When I asked Pinochet whether he would define himself as having been a dictator, he chuckled, shook his head, and said: “I was only an aspirant dictator.”

If he were alive, Machiavelli would surely have cracked a smile at Pinochet’s false modesty and recalled his parable about how the success of princes depended on the ability to emulate foxes as well as lions. “He who has known best how to employ the fox has succeeded best,” wrote Machiavelli. “But it is necessary to know well how to dis guise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; and men are so simple, and so subject to present necessities, that he who seeks to deceive will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived.”

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE INTRODUCER

Jon Lee Anderson has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1998. He has covered numerous conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, reported frequently from Latin America and the Caribbean, and written profiles of Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Gabriel García Márquez. He is the author of several books, including The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World, and The Fall of Baghdad.