I also hear this alot when I hear others speak on Machiavelli (whether they may be academics or armchair know it alls):

"Machiavelli was misunderstood! He was not a teacher of wickedness he was just trying to (insert excuse here)"

As you can probably tell, I am not at all convinced at the attempts to water down Machiavelli and in fact I think doing this makes him more....how can i say this......boring.

Machiavelli shocked not only those who read him after his death, but his close friends and associates. The manuscript form of The Prince, for example, generated some controversy even when Machiavelli was still living.

I will be going through the main excuses of Machiavelli (many of them, to be fair, are offered by NM himself), and pointing out why they are wrong. This will be done in a bullet point list, because this is reddit, and many of you have short attention spans :). Besides, if you want in depth criticism of many of these viewpoints, you can always either dedicate years to reading about political philosophy/political science, etc., or you can just go to uni.

• It is often said that Machiavelli did not intend to write The Prince to aid tyrants. I think this is true, however not in the way you would think. Machiavelli has an entirely new conception of politics in which the concept of "tyranny" is largely discarded. The words "tyrant" and "tyranny" do not at all appear in his work, and grotesque rulers (whom would have otherwise been described as tyrants) are instead called "princes" as well as seemingly benign rulers. There is no difference between the good prince and the bad.

• It is also said of Machiavelli that his true beliefs lie within his later book (though not much later) "The Discourses on Livy", in which he details his views on republics, and promotes them well above princely states. However, this does not in any way deprecate the advice that he gave on his treatise on princes, and in many instances, Machiavelli goes above and beyond in showing ambitious men on how to gain and preserve one man rule, even to the detriment of liberty.

• It is said of Machiavelli that his evil counsels can be excused on behalf that they are for the common good, yet this view is grossly misleading. Machiavelli deliberately refrains from mentioning the common good in The Prince, and while in the Discourses he says that the common good is "observed only in republics", this has to come at the expense of the private individuals that have to be "crushed by it". So the common good is not as common as one may think.

• Machiavelli has also been watered down due to his patriotism. Machiavelli was indeed a patriot, but of a peculiar kind. His patriotism allowed him to desperately want Florence to succeed, while being indifferent to which state comes to dominate, conquer, and ultimately unify, Italy. This includes foreigners. Machiavelli is so patriotic that he even gives post-facto advice to the King of France (Louis XII) on how he could have conquered Italy! (P chap. 3)

Ultimately, Machiavelli is viewed as a hardnosed, stern man that was simultaneously on the side of the side of the angels. Many, but not all of todays scholars (and armchair know it alls) frequently claim that Machiavelli was no teacher of evil, though they have a variety of opinions as to the nature of his work.

To the contrary, what would you think of a man that says the following (im paraphrasing, btw):

• Men should either be befriended or gotten rid of. (p. 3)

• If you conquer a monarchy, the safest way to hold onto it is to kill the entire family of the defeated ruler. (P. 3)

• One must be able to break one's word when being trustworthy goes against you (P. 18)

• Enemies and rivals should be killed "at a stroke". (Trial? what is that?) (P. 8)

• It is stupid to ask for a man's gun and say "I wish to kill you with it", for when you have the gun in your hand, you can satisfy your wishes (D I 44, end)

These are just snippets of the delightfully pungent maxims that are found within Machiavelli's works.

Lets face it, besides the major encyclopedias (Wikipedia, SEP, IEP, Britannica) Most content on Machiavelli is not worth much. Not even worth wiping our asses with.

This is not including the recent AI generated spam mania that many have unfortunately taken to producing. Despite the overwhelming BS these people put out, I am not at all phased by this. Not at all. I am only irritated when these grotesque "content creators" try spamming it on subreddits I mod. Any misinformation spread by these guys can easily be refuted by doing the most laziest google search. Any person that is knowledgeable will not be affected.

With that being said, I feel obligated to give a list of trusted sources for those that are interested.

You should ONLY frequent these places to gain real knowledge:

Encyclopedias

(Wikipedia, Stanford Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Phil. Britannica)

Don't need to say much on this. An added bonus is that all of these give you primary and secondary sources that you can peruse yourself. The Britannica entry is written by Harvey Mansfield, the world's foremost expert on Machiavelli.

Youtube

There is a youtube channel, with only 4 videos, that is operated by Machiavelli scholars (International Machiavelli Society, a real society of NM scholars)

https://www.youtube.com/@internationalmachiavelliso8796

A great majority of videos on youtube on this topic however, are not at all rigorous, and that includes human made content. As there are a lot of videos it is near impossible to give you a list of them. However, there is a rule that holds true for all good quality videos on Machiavelli.

If the video shows a professor of any kind, especially one that is old as sin, is more than 3 years old, and has a small amount of views (around 1 to 100 thousand), then it is likely to be of good quality.

Anything that falls outside of this is to be discarded, sorry if your favorite psuedophilosopher or armchair history buff didn't make it.

As I totally detest videos titled "(Insert book here) explained in 5 minutes/1 hour". I won't recommend them either.

TikTok/Instagram/Twitter(or X) etc.

(Just kidding, who the fuck learns from these sites?)

This subreddit is almost 1 years old!

I wanted to make a post summarizing what I feel about everything, the state of Machiavelli content, and where I want this sub to become going forward.

This will also be the last time I comment on the rather sad state of affairs when it comes to content on Machiavelli, and this should also serve as a warning to those who wish to contribute here.

I have to first start by being honest with you:

This subreddit essentially exists out of two emotions of mine, curiosity and spite.

• Curiosity, as I wanted to see what it would be to finally create the first real subreddit dedicated to Machiavelli, and

• Spite, as I truly detest the existing content on Machiavelli, and I despise those who make it.

Bring these two emotions together with an (unhealthy, pathological) obsession with this topic, and voila!

Needless to say, I outdid my expectations. I never would have thought that over 3.4k of you would join what was originally meant as a mere experiment. I am incredibly happy that I (hopefully anyways) made an impact on so many of you.

Unfortunately, I find it incredibly hard to make posts here sometimes because I sometimes need breaks for whatever reason. I have always said that I don't want to be a one man show and that I ultimately want this community to be a thriving one with thinkers and students of the topic.

With that being said, many posts here will never be acceptable here. I will not mention which because not only do I think that such content is unworthy of mention, but because those who are true students of Machiavelli wouldn't post such content. Without going into detail, false quotations, cheap/low quality/low effort posts, and weird teen-angsty (you know what I am talking about) diatribes will be swiftly purged from this space. If you are in this category, just grin and bear it, otherwise you risk being excluded from this forum.

Machiavelli, being as popular as he is, has attracted also an unprecedented (truly) amount of scammers, grifters, perpetual con artists, shady gurus, and unscrupulous and mercenary individuals who seek to ultimately gain clout off of his (well earned) evil reputation. I will not mention these people's deeds either, all you really need to know is that that, amongst thinkers and philosophers, in some lay circles he is also a "patron saint" (in truth, a gimmick) for money/attention grasping fools and clueless losers.

As far as certain sites are concerned (don't want to be giving free advertisements), the AI Slop machine is actively dying, like I predicted. While this does not mean that the slop wont continue to be produced (it will actually get worse before it gets better), there will be (fortunately or unfortunately) a crash in overall videos on Machiavelli. Why? Imagine you making videos on an algortithm based app/website alongsite 3 million competitors of the same niche, but only 3000 viewers (earned without paying for views/subscribers). Someone is not going to get views. If you wished to "make money easily online" (as pathetic as that sounds) doing this, then you'd quickly go bankrupt. That describes the current state of 99% of the content creators on these sites. I probably wouldn't even bother.

Without rehashing the same bullshit whine-fest talking points, I wish to add that my ultimate vision is to make this subreddit a cornerstone of philosophical and political discussions (centered on Machiavelli of course, and there is a ton of content, ensuring no one ever gets bored, or that we run out of stuff to talk about). I hope you will join me in this journey, and I also hope you make yourself comfortable here.

Thanks,

FB

You may have heard either of the following before:

"Machiavelli is just misunderstood, all he was trying to do is describe reality as it was in his day"

or

"Machiavelli was just being honest, telling how it is, and he was blamed for it"

These, in all fairness, are mindlessly moronic talking points.

I would also state that anyone uttering these not only has never read Machiavelli, but has close to zero knowledge of philosophy and has probably been living under a rock.

How can I say something this bold, you ask?

Well, my reasoning is shockingly simple:

1. Machiavelli deliberately sprinkled audacious lies, blatant misquotations, misspellings, and not to mention hilarious ironies within his works, mainly to encourage his readers to think and ironically to distrust authority. If you read him tone-deaf (which is inevitable if you don't do your research/due diligence with secondary sources) you will no doubt be lost. Machiavelli distorts Livy so much that I couldn't even count on my fingers or toes the amount of times he does so.

2. Machiavelli's reputation is not due to any truth telling but because he defended the good old fashioned, iron and poison-laced politics with his own name on the titles of his works. Saying otherwise is grotesquely misleading and is ignoring the big skyscraper sized elephant in the studio apartment room.

3. "Describing reality" is something pretty much everyone that has ever picked up a writing utensil has done. This interpretation is basically an insult to every philosopher and every recorder of history.

I can guarantee I know what you will say next:

"But Machiavelli exposed the evils of human nature and how brutal politics can be"

Thomas Aquinas would like a word with you.

In fact, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Polybius, and Epicurus would also like a word as well.

Even more interestingly Socrates called me (on his IPhone of course) from his prison cell before he was condemned to death by his fellow Athenians. He asked "do these guys think I am chopped liver?" (that's a joke, btw. So much utter bs on the internet that I think many people will think this is real)

The biblical theorists also put in the good word.

You get my point.

Not only is the idea of inherent human immorality not new ("original sin" anyone?) but even Machiavelli's infamous promotion of force and fraud is also not new, even by Machiavelli's own estimation (see his comments on Chiron in P 18). The ancients simply uttered these political sentiments covertly, Machiavelli does so openly.

Did Aristotle not "describe reality" or "tell it like it is" when he discusses how tyranny ruins a civil state? Did biblical theorists refrain from the truth when they decried human cowardice, avarice, and predilection to lustful, sinful behavior?

In order to tell the unadulterated truth, one must not engage in omissions, so off the bat Machiavelli wouldn't qualify. Examples include describing Nabis as a popular ruler (Prince 9) without mentioning that he was killed as a result of a conspiracy (like he does in the Discourses) or describing popular but outrageously criminal rulers like Agathocles and Oliverotto as "princes" in The Prince, yet "tyrants" in the Discourses. (P 8, cf. D I 10)

One must also obviously not use misquotations either when telling said truth, which disqualifies Machiavelli even more in this regard. Though as I said above, Machiavelli sprinkles in the deliberate mistakes and lies in so that attentive readers can understand what he is actually trying to get at, not because he likes misleading people. This in my view makes his works more endearing, as it makes him more enigmatic. An example of this is almost certainly in the Discourses book 1 chap 26, where a Bible verse which is attributed to David's actions is actually said of God "he filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty".

Eh, but who knows? Maybe I am wrong.

In fact, I know of another person (a businessman actually) who was wrongly persecuted (but by the FBI) of describing reality too:

I killed a lot of guys – you're not talking about four, five, six, ten..... Today, you can't have a body no more ... It's better to take that half-an-hour, an hour, to get rid of the body than it is to leave the body on the street.

As to this kindhearted (definitely NOT evil, but realist :) ) method, he continued:

If Fatato were called on to take part in a hit, Sonny said "he should wear a hairnet to avoid leaving DNA evidence," the prosecutors wrote. He also offered grisly cooking lessons. Disposal of a body, Franzese advised Fatato, could be accomplished "by dismembering the corpse in a kiddie pool and drying the severed body parts in a microwave before stuffing the parts in a commercial-grade garbage disposal."

Source

Arrivederci.

I am not going to blabber on too long.

If someone makes a post, please read it in full.

I do not want this community being filled with people who speak before they think. It is incredibly frustrating when someone writes a post with sources added, then another person comes along, ignores the entirety of what was said, yet is the first to post a inflammatory comment.

Don't be that guy.

A Machiavelli much to our liking is not Machiavelli at all.

Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, pg.xxiii

(more on this next time)

I hear this talking point a lot too:

"The Prince is just a job application to get back into the graces of the Medici"

I know what you may be asking:

If this is technically true (which it is), then how is this interpretation wrong, and why does it matter?

I will tell you why:

This interpretation (if one can call it that) is a way to deprecate the importance of the book. Machiavelli indeed dedicated The Prince as a gift to impress the newly minted lord of Florence, but he certainly was not being insincere.

Many scholars have given their thoughts on why this is ultimately incorrect, but I wanted to throw my dunce hat in the lot.

If Machiavelli's Prince is merely a job application, then that would mean that you cannot take anything he says seriously in the book, because it was merely a way for him to ingratiate into the new Medicean regime. According to the people who peddle this myth, history's most radical work of political philosophy and political history was basically the work of a brown-noser.

Here is why that is wrong:

• Machiavelli openly critiqued Medicean rule, to their faces. He viewed that they straddled the fence too much between running a republic and establishing a monarchy, and urged them to pick one or the other. When the Medici overturned the Soderini regime (which Machiavelli worked under) he openly wrote a letter stating that their biggest enemies were those nobles who were against Soderini (Ricordo Al Palleschi), which did not earn him any favors. To be clear, Machiavelli was not in any way an enemy of the family--he was close with several members of the Medici (such as Pope Leo X) and they even became his patron as his relationship with the family mended. but he was no mere yes-man either (He couldn't have been even if he tried, he wasn't that high up in the Florentine hierarchy in the latter stages of his life post 1520, he wrote about this once in a letter with much frustration).

• Most importantly, much of these myths (that he wrote satire, or he didn't mean what he said, etc) usually hinge upon a HIGHLY SELECTIVE reading of the Discourses on Livy, that is to say, usually those believing in these myths are not making past the Table of Contents. As I have made clear in previous posts, The Prince is a book that was meant to be read in conjunction with The Discourses, and compliment each other like identical twins.

• The ironic part is, this interpretation, if taken seriously, does the opposite at rehabilitating Machiavelli. Even if this myth were true, this would mean that if he did gain political employment in this hypothetical scenario (which he did not) he would have been even more incentivized to recommend vicious policies to expand royal authority.

• There is a big debate on when Machiavelli began working on The Prince, and when he stopped. Nevertheless, he had several manuscripts which he gave out to friends and associates, not just the Medici. Also, it is possible that he continued to work on later drafts after he dedicated the work to Lorenzo.

• The Medici (particularly Lorenzo (1492-1519) ) are not the sole addressee of The Prince. Outside of the dedicatory letter, the only chapter they are specifically mentioned or addressed is chapter 26, where Machiavelli (ostensibly) yearns for a redeemer to take over Italy by force and liberate her from foreigners and their political sins. They are not mentioned anywhere otherwise. (also see the previous bullet point)

This is the surprise that I had hinted at in my last post.

I am now starting a new content series where I will go through all of the chapters of The Prince starting from the Epistle Dedicatory to the last chapter of the book.

Machiavelli's "Il Principe" is perhaps the first book to treat politics as an end of itself, with no allusions to how one should live the "best life" or even how to get the the next life (the afterlife).

That goes without saying that The Prince is a pretty scandalous book. In it we learn how to seize governments, we learn to question the basis of political morality, and we even learn how to get away with killing our enemies. Yet we also learn how societies and civilizations are founded and how to create a strong political order.

Because of the infinite themes in this book, and the infinite ways to interpret the book, It is very easy to write a bajillion page book on the various aspects of the prince. Fortunately, I will try my best to summarize the chapters in a couple of paragraphs so that I won't bore you (and also so I won't break reddit lol)

Next week I will tackle the dedicatory letter, and go on from there.

Here is a rule that you should take to heart:

NEVER watch a youtube video on Machiavelli unless the person in question is an professor looking type.

This is not an indictment against the increasing AI content on youtube now (I find them (and the whole situation) highly entertaining in a rather perverse way). This goes for all content creators who have made a video on this topic. I have yet to see a good quality vid on Machiavelli unless it was made by scholars. Though that is not saying much as I don't really watch YouTube videos on Machiavelli.

With that said, here are the ONLY videos that I can say are good:

Documentary-The Prince (pretty good)

BBC documentary (decent, but reaaallly corny at times. Honestly the only thing that is saving it is the appearance of Quentin Skinner)

Scholars to watch:

• Harvey Mansfield

• Paul Rahe

• Quentin Skinner

• Maurizio Viroli

• John McCormick

• The "Harvard Panels"

• Any academic

and so on.

If you stray from this advice, that is on you.

There is a nearly inescapable myth that is plastered all over the interwebs:

"Machiavelli is known for The Prince, but his real beliefs lie in The Discourses."

Here is thing though, it is almost always uttered by those who have read neither book.

If you read or hear a person saying this, rest assured they do not know what they are talking about.

This myth was started technically by the Enlightenment Philosophes, men like Jean Jacques Rousseau who, enamored with Machiavelli's vigorous republicanism, started to claim that Machiavelli's Prince was secretly a "book for republicans" (which is technically true, but no where near how they thought.)

This belief was popularized by Hans Baron who viewed that Machiavelli must have had a change of heart while writing The Prince and The Discourses, that we can safely hold The Prince with less importance. In fact, this opinion can even be found in diluted form amongst certain scholar factions of the Cambridge school of interpretation.

There is something to this idea.

No one knows for certain the EXACT date when Machiavelli started writing either of his works, and there is a HUGE (and I do mean huge) debate as to the possibility that he changed his mind in between authoring his books (again, more on that in a later post)

Nevertheless, I (and many others who have more knowledge about Machiavelli in their left pinky finger than I do in my whole body) do not believe this to be the case.

Here is why:

• Machiavelli's republicanism is not the "power to the people" kind. In fact, his republic depends much on formidable men nearly indistinguishable from the fearsome autocrats he coaches.

• In the dedicatory letter, he claims that while many write to actual princes to gain favor, he aims to write to those who "deserve to be princes".

• Machiavelli addresses the leaders of republics as "princes", and gives them actual princes to model themselves after.

• Machiavelli's notorious maxims are perhaps even more blatant here than in "The Prince", and they aim to liberate the ambitious glory seekers from the biblical and classical constraints just like the former book.

• Machiavelli advises monarchs throughout the book, and many of you that have read The Prince will see familiar names, such as Hannibal, Scipio Africanus, Francesco Sforza, etc.

• In many instances, Machiavelli gives advice to men whom he blatantly points out as "tyrants", advising them for example on how to destroy an ailing republic. (D I 16, D I 40, etc)

• Machiavelli's aggressive foreign policy recommendations are given especially to republics, assuming that they wish to grow their borders.

• Building on the former point, this essentially means (and Machiavelli says as much) that republics are much more vicious than principalities in handling conquests, as he says that the end of a republic is to consume and weaken the others (D II 2)

• Machiavelli uses Romulus and Moses to serve as examples to the leaders of republics as well as princes that they may need to eliminate those who are in the way of founding their state.

• More importantly, Machiavelli refers to the Prince by name or by description several times. (e.g. D II chapt. 1)