Machiavelli has long been popularly regarded as an amoral manipulator on a par with Shakespeare’s Iago or Richard III. But a senior humanities scholar says the author of The Prince was in fact an early realist, with a revolutionary position on human identity.
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Dr Simon Haines is an avowed ‘realist’, although his next book will be on the Romantic period.
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The name Niccolò Machiavelli straddles the realms of fame and notoriety, but is this reputation justified? An Italian civil servant and scholar who lived during the flowering of Renaissance Florence, he has gained his place in the Western canon thanks largely to The Prince, his ‘how to rule’ manual published in 1532. Perhaps mercifully, Machiavelli died five years earlier, without ever knowing what his book’s reputation would be.
Written in 1513, The Prince offers advice for rulers (especially the Medici family of Florence) on the effective use of power. It counsels a sort of realpolitik, in which brutality, cruelty and fear are as valid as justice, benevolence and generosity in the maintenance of civil stability.
It’s not hard to see why such a work might be condemned by the Catholic Church, which promptly included The Prince on its list of prohibited books. Nor is it such a stretch to see why, nearly a century after his death, Elizabethan dramatists would characterise Machiavelli as ‘Old Nick’, the devil.
Instead of tracing yet another set of horns onto this portrait, Dr Simon Haines, Head of the School of Humanities at ANU, contends that Machiavelli’s classic work has something remarkable to say about that which is common to princes and subjects alike – the idea of ‘the self’.
In his book Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau, Haines parachutes in on a series of great writers and philosophers ranging from the eighth century BC to the 18th century AD. The purpose of his journey is to trace the parallel literary histories of what he argues are two competing concepts of identity.
“The book claims that no matter whether you look at great philosophers or great imaginative writers – call them poets – you find that, consciously or not, they’re relying on one of two basic models of the self,” Haines explains. “Either they believe there is a single concept at the centre of the self, a defining concept that the self lives by – or they don’t.”
Haines argues that for the former group, which subscribes to what he calls a “romantic” model, the self is like “a nucleus, a dimensionless inner point out of which decisions and agency just emerge”. But for the others the self is “all the passions, ideas, memories and reasons together, even the decisions and choices”. This broader, more textured conception is described by Haines as a “realist” model.
Haines says these competing models of personal identity can be traced back to the earliest recorded Western literature. He says Plato is an early proponent of the romantic model, whereas Homer and Aristotle, in their different ways, subscribe to the realist model. For them the self is much more diverse, diffuse and variegated.
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"Machiavelli says there’s a lot more – the passions, the desires, the appetites are not things you leave aside to pursue your virtuous goals."
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“These writers and thinkers weren’t taking sides in an oppositional sense on this issue,” says Haines, “but it’s striking how often they fall into one or the other of the two camps”.
Haines is quick to point out that he is not a political scientist or Renaissance historian. He stresses that his interest in Machiavelli arises from the concept of the self that underpins his writing. There is a radical realist model of the self at work in The Prince.
“Machiavelli definitely falls into the realist camp. He’s somebody for whom the self is not defined around a central concept. In that he was revolutionary, because the advice books for rulers that were popular at the time were all built around a concept of the self, based on Cicero and Seneca, in which it is ruled or driven by key virtues or virtue-concepts, like currants in a cake. Machiavelli doesn’t do that. He says the self is like a whole fabric, a tissue of agencies: no currants.
“In terms of the contrary model this makes him look as if he’s just advocating a ruthless realpolitik of the self. This may be why he has got such a bad reputation. Many people are still captured by the other model of the self, as something with (they hope) a virtuous centre.
“Machiavelli says there’s a lot more – the passions, the desires, the appetites are not things you leave aside to pursue your virtuous goals. The whole self always has to be taken into account. People naturally find that disturbing, because our passions and appetites are often rather unattractive.”
When asked which of the two camps he’d put himself in, Haines answers without hesitation.
“I’m a realist. When you think about real or imagined lives and selves, a lot of them are driven by central, almost fanatical, conceptual cores. It would be silly simply to disapprove of them. A lot of lives just are like that and you often need that cast of mind in order to achieve great things. But go too far or too often down that track and you find zealotry, obsessiveness and inflexibility – a lack of awareness of the breadth and depth of other selves and lives.”
Haines’s essay on Machiavelli has also been extracted in Renaissance Perspectives, a collection of essays by scholars in the humanities at ANU. His next book will focus on the Romantic period, which bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s unlikely that he will approach the works from this era with the ruthlessness of Machiavelli, but he will certainly be writing as someone who identifies with the sense of personal identity inherent in The Prince.
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