Machiavelli in the doghouse BOOKS
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER
Machiavelli was born in 1469 and his 500th birthday seems a good opportunity (says Mr Anglo in his new book on Machiavelli,* pub- lished this week) to take 'a fresh look at his work —as far as possible without the preconceptions which still blur so much Machiavelli study.' On his last centenary, in 1869, Machiavelli was hailed as the prophet of the Risorgimento. That view has since been replaced by others. But those others, according to Mr Anglo, still do not show the real Machiavelli; they still 'blur' him. It takes Mr Anglo to see him plain.
How blinkered, how perverse these other scholars have been! There was John Adding- ton Symonds, for instance. He (we are sur- prised to learn) was 'badly hemmed in by the moral preoccupations of his time' and declared his errors from 'cloud-shrouded moral heights.' Contemporary scholars fare no better.! The work of the late Professor Chabod, that most penetrating of scholars, is 'very generalised' and is only mentioned to be dismissed. Pro- fessor Felix Gilbert's ideas are 'strange and unnecessary.' Professor Hans Baron, thejnost distinguished of Renaissance scholars, is, like Chabod and Gilbert, 'extraordinarily doctrin- aire' and his doctrines, like theirs, are 'un- warrantable.' Professor Hale is cited onlg for the sake of summary contradiction. The Marchese Ridolfi, that learned if enthusiastic scholar, is a particular bite noire of, Mr Anglo: he is never mentioned without a cold sneer.
There may be some scholars of whom Mr Anglo approves. If so, they must be among those whom he does not name. Or perhaps all these are embraced in the more general swipes by which whole classes are mown down: social historians who repeat 'the stale maxims of Max Weber'; research students disputing insoluble problems with the 'vehemence and ingenuity,' though not 'the rigorous logic,' of mediaeval Schoolmen: philo- sophers who 'prefer unsubstantiated flights of theoretical fancy to evaluation of evidence.' After all this, we are naturally eager to follow Mr Anglo's own rigorous method, which has led him (say his publishers) to 'a numlik of conclusions radically different from generally accepted estimates of Machiavelli.'
In fact Mr Anglo has written a competent, if dry thesis, in the course of which he takes us through Machiavelli's works, recapitulates many agreed facts and judgments, and flogs a full stable of dead horses. He is sometimes sensible enough; but when he is sensible; he is seldom novel. It is generally agreed, by now, that Machiavelli wrote The Prince and the Discourses at approximately the same time, and that they are complementary, not anti- thetical. The political occasion of The Prince is not in doubt. We all know that Machiavelli, for all his genius, was not (any more than Voltaire) a systematic thinker; that his style, like Nietzsche's, was dangerously aphoristic; • • Machiavelli : a Dissection Sidney Anglo (Gollancz 35s) that he strained after effect and liked to shock; and that, like every great innovator, he had precursors. We do not need to be told all this as if it were a new revelation. Nor do we need to be told that a man's work must be studied in its totality. Scholars have paid most atten- tion to The Prince and the Discourses because these are Machiavelli's most important works. But to pretend that, by concentrating on them, all scholars before Mr Anglo are sunk in a 'miasma of exaggerated responses, misconcep- tions and misrepresentations' is plain non- sense.
Where then is Mr Anglo original? As far as I can see, in one respect only: in his insist- ence that Machiavelli, like his modern inter- preters, is really no good. Occasionally Mr Anglo may admit, in general terms, that Machiavelli was a quick-witted fellow, and he concedes him a pretty style. But the price of this fine writing is, he tells us, 'some very poor thinking.' Speak first, think later': this, he declares, is Machiavelli's usual method, and he peremptorily demands, from his victim, 'less style and more penetration.'
But alas, one cannot furnish a man with understanding, and Machiavelli, it seems, can- not respond. He was not, by nature, a very 'original thinker': indeed, in some ways, he was 'an unimaginative traditionalist.' His idea of using history to understand politics, which he himself, poor thing, thought so novel, was 'already archaic' in his time. His boasted .realism was old hat. Much of his work is 'pretty poor stuff: it is 'extraordinary that any thinking person could write such a thing.' It is 'naive' to look in his work for any general theory of virtie (presumably Meinecke—whom Mr Anglo never mentions—was 'naive'), 'be- cause he had no such theory.'
It is equally naive to build 'cloudy arguments' about his theory of the state, 'when he obvi- ously never had one'; or about his historical theory 'when he never really worked one out'; The earliest authenticated likeness of Machi- avelli. From 'Tuite le Opere di Nicolo Machiavelli' (1550). or about his science of politics, which was purely emotional; or about his intellectual method, which 'pretends to be inductive and is obviously not so'; or, for that matter, about his avowed purpose of regenerating Italy and ex- pelling 'the barbarians'—the French and Spaniards. Machiavelli's purpose in writing The Prince, says Mr Anglo, was not political but personal. If he ever showed signs of despair at the plight of Italy, he was really lamenting the emptiness of his own purse. All he wanted was a job under the Medici: 'a job, public or private, here, there, or anywhere.'
Where does one begin to criticise a book lice this? It is easy to criticise in detail. Of course The Prince was a !lyre d'occasion. So were Areopagitica, Les Lettres Provinciales, Locke's Treatises. Bacon's Advancement of Learning was written with an eye on princely favour. So was Ralegh's History of the World. So, according to Hobbes, was Leviathan. Does that devalue their content? If Mr Anglo cannot find any originality, any philosophy, any general theory in Machiavelli, may it not be that he has not looked as closely as some of the other scholars whom he so freely cen- sures?
May it not be that some of his: own answers are too easy? He dismisses Machi- avelli's proclaimed desire to see Italy freed from 'the barbarians' by saying that ,`bar- barians, of one sort or another, had been the bane of Italian politics for a millennium" and that foreign mastery of Italy was anyway, 'im- possible'—although it was to be imposed in Machiavelli's lifetime and to last for, 300 years. Thus the great crisis of Italian hkstorY, the background and explanation of Machi- avelli's thought, is quietly washed away in order that a revolution in political philosophy may be reduced to a gambit in the local ad- ministrative rat-race.
But ultimately the fault of this book lies deeper than the-arguments it parades-..After all, Machiavelli has been with us for a, long trne. His political message seemed new to "mself. It seemed revolutionary in its , own century. It was banned in Catholic and Pro- testant countries alike. After several _painful attempts, it was digested in the seventeenth century, His historical theory inspired• the 'civil history' of the seventeenth century, the ;philosophical history' of the eighteenth., When the nineteenth century Risorgimento reversed the 'barbarian' conquest of his own time, his work was reinterpreted. It has never ceased to . attract interpreters, and all of them (until Mr Anglo) have believed that it had a novel, dis- turbing content : that it posed profound prob- lems which had never been altogether exor- cised.
,. These problems do not lie in the for- mal statements to which Mr Anglo applies his 'rigorous logic': they lie in the philosophy which is implicit in them, and which must be deduced not only from • them, by an imagina- tive process of which Mr Ang,lo is clearly in- capable, but also from the historical context in which they were written, and which he has ignored. It is thanks to these major defects (and indeed some others which will be obvious to the reader), not to any superior 'penetration' of the superficial areas to which he has ad- dressed himself, that Mr Anglo has been able to come forward, 500 years late, and tell us. from Swansea University, that nobody need havaell.worried, as there was really nothing there at
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