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This Day in World History

November 7, 1512

Machiavelli dismissed from Florentine office

From 1507 to 1512, Niccoló Machiavelli led the foreign policy of the Republic of Florence. In September of 1512, however, the republican government was overthrown and the powerful Medici family returned from years in exile to resume control of the city-state. Machiavelli spent the first week in November imploring the Medici to continue with a republican government. The message went unheeded; indeed, the day he completed his memorandum on the subject was the day the Medici dismissed Machiavelli from office.

Worse trouble followed.  In February 1513, he was arrested, charged with conspiracy, and imprisoned, where he was tortured. Released in March, Machiavelli retired to his family estate outside the city. There he undertook the work that would bring him his greatest fame: writing The Prince, a how-to manual for political leadership. Dedicating the work to Lorenzo de Medici, possibly in the hope of winning back a position of power and influence, Machiavelli carefully laid out how a prudent prince could secure and maintain power by being both the powerful lion and the cunning fox. In analyzing governance as a matter of following necessity, Machiavelli wrote the first text in political science.

Often criticized for a seemingly amoral view, Machiavelli was actually more complex. While writing The Prince, he also wrote The Discourses on Livy, a thorough exploration of republican government. In addition, the end of The Prince calls for some powerful and charismatic leader to rid Italy of foreign armies. While Machiavelli was never returned to Florence’s government, he did work for two Medici who held high positions in the Roman Catholic Church, one of whom commissioned an official history of Florence. In it, Machiavelli criticized the original Medici regime, the republican government, and the restored Medici rule that followed, proving himself intellectually honest but less cunning than the fox to the end.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on the economic stimulus bill. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Necessity is a key word in Washington these days. President Barack Obama tells us that if we don’t pass a stimulus package the consequences will be unthinkable. “We can’t afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary,” he told the nation in his radio address last Saturday.

How can that which is imperfect also be absolutely necessary? Even though imperfection runs on a spectrum, the President will have us believe that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing. Well, we’ve heard this before. There are no ifs and buts when emergency calls. Better a decisive mistake than an indecisive impasse, said Machiavelli to his Prince. But as the Bard taught us, “they stumble that run fast.”

Fortunately, Obama isn’t the only one playing this game. Congressional Republicans have cloaked their ideological priorities in the language of necessity too. Aid to states was slashed in the Senate version of the bill, as was money designated for school construction. We are told
that none of these are pressing concerns that deserve a place in a stimulus package, and so the vocal Republican minority have decided that that is OK for state employees like teachers to lose their jobs even if the impact of this on the economy would be immediate and demonstrable – the very criteria they are using to decide what counts as a “stimulus.”

The Senate will likely pass its version of the stimulus package bill by a precarious margin early next week, and Congressional leaders should be able to work out the differences between the House and the Senate bills. The end result will not be bipartisan, and it will not solve all our economic woes. But in its imperfections we shall see that we are not slaves to anybody’s invocation of necessity. In our system of government, no institution, no party, and no one has a monopoly – at least not for long – on what necessity demands. Even at the brink of a grave recession, we remain free to disagree on if, when, and how. And so in our recalcitrance we shall live and suffer our liberty.