Transcript for Q&A Session on Machiavelli's Ethics

Answering Tough Questions on Machiavelli’s Ethics | Q&A

1. Why Write The Prince?

Guest 1: Yes. You’re reading of Machiavelli that he’s perfectly genuine in his intentions, in writing ‘The Prince’, that he’s just trying to inform these, like, great men of history with the tactics that will make them most effective at like creating types of societies that he would favor or... Because it seems like somewhat of a reckless act to sort of hand these tactics over indiscriminately to like the public, to both great men of history that he wants leading, but probably, probably many more sort of bad leaders. So is there, like, some Straussian reading we should be taking in terms of his intentions?

Johnathan Bi: So, first of all, there is a reason why Strauss went to town on Machiavelli. Right? Machiavelli is one of his, I would say, most engaged with thinkers. His thoughts on Machiavelli is canonical work. And the reason is because Machiavelli is so difficult to pin down of what he actually thinks. One reason is just how he writes. Machiavelli would sometimes, in the same paragraph, say Agathocles, we cannot call this virtue when he betrays his friends, and then he just calls them virtue, virtue, virtue. He just uses virtue all the time. And Machiavelli does this a lot. Remember when I said he ranks founders higher than philosophers and he actually ranks religious leaders higher than founders of political states? He potentially changes that later on in the book. So Machiavelli is so hard to pin down, especially in the ‘Discourses’, because he is someone who kind of entertains ideas in their extreme mode. The reason he does this, like, back and forth and it seems completely inconsistent because he says X here, he says Y over there, and he oscillates a bunch with conquest and expansion as well. And I read that as him... How should I put this? I read him as him thinking that the extreme form of an idea is able to tell us more than its ordinary form.