Reviewing a number of new books on Machiavelli, Michael Ignatieff argues that the author of The Prince was “hardly the first theorist to maintain that politics is a ruthless business, requiring leaders to do things their private conscience might abhor.” So what set him apart?
He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that
they shouldn’t worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call the problem of dirty hands. The great Princeton philosopher Michael Walzer, borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre, describes the feeling of having dirty hands in politics as the guilty conscience that political actors must live with when they authorize acts that public necessity requires but private morality rejects. “Here is the moral politician,” Walzer says: “it is by his dirty hands that we know him.”
Walzer thinks that we want our politicians to be suffering servants, lying awake at night, wrestling with the conflict between private morality and the public good. Machiavelli simply didn’t believe that politicians should be bothered about their dirty hands. He didn’t believe they deserve praise for moral scruple or the pangs of conscience. He would have agreed with The Sopranos: sometimes you do what you have to do.
But The Prince would hardly have survived this long if it was nothing more than an apologia for gangsters.
With gangsters, gratuitous cruelty is often efficient, while in politics, Machiavelli clearly understood, it is worse than a crime. It is a mistake. Ragion di stato [reason of state] ought to discipline each politician’s descent into morally questionable realms. A leader guided by public necessity is less likely to be cruel and vicious than one guided by religious moralizing. Machiavelli’s ethics, it should be said, were scathingly indifferent to Christian principle, and for good reason. After all, someone who believes he has God on his side is capable of anything.
In other words, Machiavelli’s innovation was not to teach evil, but to remind us that agonizing over it was the real mistake:
He insisted that when tough or risky political decisions have to be made, Christian charity or private empathy simply will not serve. In politics, the polestar must be the health of the republic alone. Following the querulous inner voice or tacking to and fro when moralizers on the sidelines object is just weakness, and if your hesitations put the republic at risk, it is contemptible weakness. Machiavelli’s ethics valued judicious decisiveness in politics over the anguished search for rectitude.
He was the original person who regarded torture, for example, the same way that Dick Cheney did: as “a no-brainer.” Previous Dish on Machiavelli here, here, and here. A reader adds:
I’ve always loved this statue of Machiavelli in Florence, and it’s the very first thing that came to mind when I saw your FOTD of Putin [seen above, via Getty].
The Dish 
