Machiavelli
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Morality, Religion, and Politics
These basic building blocks of Machiavelli's thought have induced considerable controversy among his readers going back to the sixteenth century, when he was denounced as an apostle of the Devil, but also was read and applied sympathetically by authors (and politicians) enunciating the doctrine of “reason of state” (Meinecke 1924 [1957]). The main source of dispute concerned Machiavelli's attitude toward conventional moral and religious standards of human conduct, mainly in connection with The Prince. For many, his teaching endorses immoralism or, at least, amoralism. The most extreme versions of this reading find Machiavelli to be a “teacher of evil”, in the famous words of Leo Strauss (1958: 9–10), on the grounds that he counsels leaders to avoid the common values of justice, mercy, temperance, wisdom, and love of their people in preference to the use of cruelty, violence, fear, and deception. A more moderate school of thought, associated with the name of Benedetto Croce (1925), views Machiavelli as simply a “realist” or a “pragmatist” advocating the suspension of commonplace ethics in matters of politics. Moral values have no place in the sorts of decisions that political leaders must make, and it is a category error of the gravest sort to think otherwise. Perhaps the mildest version of the amoral hypothesis has been proposed by Quentin Skinner (1978), who claims that the ruler's commission of acts deemed vicious by convention is a “last best” option. Concentrating on the claim in The Prince that a head of state ought to do good if he can, but must be prepared to commit evil if he must (Prince CW 58), Skinner argues that Machiavelli prefers conformity to moral virtue ceteris paribus.
Disinterest in ethical concerns also permeates the claim, popular in the early- and mid-twentieth century, that Machiavelli simply adopts the stance of a scientist—a kind of “Galileo of politics”—in distinguishing between the “facts” of political life and the “values” of moral judgment (Olschki 1945; Cassirer 1946; Prezzolini 1954 [1967[). He is thereby set into the context of the scientific revolution more generally. The point of Machiavellian “science” is not to distinguish between “just” and “unjust” forms of government, but to explain how politicians deploy power for their own gain. Thus, Machiavelli rises to the mantle of the founder of “modern” political science, in contrast with Aristotle's classical norm-laden vision of a political science of virtue. More recently, the Machiavelli-as-scientist interpretation has largely gone out of favor, although some have recently found merit in a revised version of the thesis
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