Aristotle & Machiavelli
Fall 2007
Overview
• Aristotle
• Machiavelli
• Mill
Aristotle
• Biographical Overview
– 384-322 B.C.E.
– Born in Macedonia, to
wealthy parents connected
to the royal household
– Studied with Plato for 17
years
– Tutor to Alexander the
Great 343-335 B.C.E.
– 335/4 returned to Athens
and founded own school –
the Lyceum
Aristotle’s Regime Types
“End” of Regime
Public Good
Size
Of
Regime
back
Private Gain
Monarchy
Tyranny
Aristocracy
Oligarchy
Polity
Democracy
Aristotle’s Regime Types
“End” of Regime
Public Good
Size
Of
Regime
Private Gain
Monarchy
Tyranny
Aristocracy
Oligarchy
Polity
Democracy
Aristotle’s Regime Types
“End” of Regime
Public Good
Size
Of
Regime
Private Gain
Monarchy
Tyranny
Aristocracy
Oligarchy
Polity
Democracy
Aristotle’s Regime Types
“End” of Regime
Public Good
Size
Of
Regime
Private Gain
Monarchy
Tyranny
Aristocracy
Oligarchy
Polity
Democracy
Aristotle’s Regime Types
“End” of Regime
Public Good
Size
Of
Regime
Private Gain
Monarchy
Tyranny
Aristocracy
Oligarchy
Polity
Democracy
Aristotle’s Regime Types
“End” of Regime
Public Good
Size
Of
Regime
Private Gain
Monarchy
Tyranny
Aristocracy
Oligarchy
Polity
Democracy
Aristotle’s Regime Types
“End” of Regime
Public Good
Size
Of
Regime
Private Gain
Monarchy
Tyranny
Aristocracy
Oligarchy
Polity
Democracy
Aristotle’s Polity
• Monarchy?
– No: we want the
highest level of
communal activity
possible. Monarchy
won’t allow that
Aristotle’s Polity
• Democracy?
– No: remember our
inegalitarian
understanding of
nature; therefore
unlikely that the virtues
will be distributed
evenly through the
population
Aristotle’s Polity
• Aristocracy?
– Yes.
– Why?
• Allows for public
participation in reason
• Power will be diffused
through the group rather
than concentrated in a
single individual
• Likely that will be able to
have moral virtue or
goodness in this restricted
group of people
Aristotle’s Polity
• Evolution of the polis problem
• How to prevent the decay or at least stave
off the decay.
• How do we account for the collapse of these
regime types?
Aristotle’s Polity
• Answer?
– The existence of factions within the body
politic
• Why do factions arise?
– Need to re-examine the organization of the
polis
Aristotle’s Polity
•
What is the first necessity of the polis?
–
•
But
–
•
Need to sustain mere life in order to begin to
pursue the good life
The production of mere life creates class
differences which makes pursuit of the good
life untenable
How or Why?
Aristotle’s Polity
• If we assume that:
– Scarcity exists, and that
– Talents and luck are unevenly distributed in the
population, then
• In the division of labor of the city, we will
inevitably get an inegalitarian social system,
with the population divided into distinct and
competing classes
Aristotle’s Polity
• The Power of the Rich:
– The wealthy have a natural common interest in
protecting wealth
– Oligarchic faction is inevitable
– Claim to power?
• Since wealth is necessary for polis to run, and
wealth is built on inequality, it is permissible to treat
unequals as unequals.
Aristotle’s Polity
• Power of the Poor?
– In a city, likely to have many more people who
are poor rather than rich
– Power of numbers
– Ideological claim?
• Since demos (the people) defend the city and the
wealthy who live there, then each group contributes
equally important functions to the polis, so that
justice then means allowing everyone into the ruling
class
Aristotle’s Polity
• How to settle between the two?
• Aristotle argues that at one level, both
groups seem to be right, but that at a deeper
level both are wrong
• Both forget that the aim of the polis is not
simply mere life, but the good life (III, ix,
1280b29-1281a2)
Aristotle’s Polity
• The city needs an aristocratic faction
• Not necessarily wealthy, but a small group
concerned with the good (moral virtue)
• Unfortunately, such people are relatively
powerless (not necessarily rich and not a
majority)
Aristotle’s Polity
• Life of the polis will degenerate to the
Lowest Common Denominator (pursuit of
mere life) where either the demos or the
oligarchs rule, and pursuit of the good life is
lost
• So… need to determine how to control
factions
Aristotle’s Polity
• His solution?
“The first and obvious point to make is that if
indeed we do understand the causes of their
[i.e., Constitutions’] destruction, then we
understand also the causes of their preservation.
For opposites are productive of opposites, and
destruction is the opposite of preservation” (V,
viii, 1307b26)
Aristotle’s Polity
• His solution?
– Given that we have two different factions, what can we
do?
• Options are constrained by the raw material we have to work
with
• Don’t allow officeholders a financial gain in holding office:
“It is most important in every constitution that the legal and
other administrative arrangements should be such that holding
office is not a source of profit”
-- V, viii, 1308b3I
• Implication: only oligarchs will rule
• Pay people to vote
– Demos can control the rulers
The Polity of Mixed Government
• People will choose their rulers on the basis
of which are the “best” oligarchs
• Aristotle argues that we need to try to mix
the oligarchic and democratic elements
together so that once we assemble the
government, it is neither democratic nor
oligarchic
The Polity of Mixed Government
• In this way we can try to get the oligarchs to
act more like aristocrats
• Why?
– In order to gain votes they’ll need to appeal to
the interests of the other class. They’ll need to
offer a vision of the good life for the city as a
whole.
The Polity of Mixed Government
• So Aristotle’s vision of the best regime is
the polity – a political association which
attempts to form a just regime with less than
perfect people
Machiavelli
• Niccolò Machiavelli
(1469 – 1527)
• European Renaissance
– Declining power of
Church
– Advancing in Science,
Arts, Literature
• The Prince written in
1513 during period of
political exile
Copernican Universe
Machiavelli
• Machiavelli & Florence
– Medici family rules city
– French forces invade, set up
republican government
– Machiavelli gets role in
government, ends up as
high civil servant, some
diplomatic missions and
military operations
Machiavelli
• Machiavelli & Florence
– Spanish defeat the French, and reinstall the
Medici
– Machiavelli is arrested, tortured, and eventually
exiled to his country home beyond the city
walls
– During this period (he’s in his 40s) he begins
his philosophical/political writing, including
The Prince and The Discourses
II. Machiavelli
• In the Prince Machiavelli asserts:
“For one can generally say this about men: they
are ungrateful, fickle, simulators and deceivers,
avoiders of danger, greedy for gain; and while you
work for their good they are completely yours,
offering you their blood, their property, their lives,
and their sons, as I said earlier, when danger is far
away; but when it comes nearer to you they turn
away” (chapter XVII).
Machiavelli
• For Machiavelli, people are essentially
selfish and motivated by selfish desires
• If that’s the case though, what sort of
political regime do we need -- a monarchy
or a republic?
• What’s the advantage to obeying the rule of
law?
II. Machiavelli
• According to Machiavelli, if a Prince or
ruler wants to stay in power, he must
“Learn how not to be good, and to use this
knowledge or not to use it according to
necessity” (chapter XV)
II. Machiavelli
• What does this mean?
• Machiavelli is not advising us to behave
badly simply for the sake of being evil
II. Machiavelli
• Rather since we see power in political life
we need to see how rulers gain and exercise
power over us
• He notes that for princes to surive, the basic
strategy is don’t help others, be cruel,
stingy, deceptive…
• And get others to do the dirty work so you
can escape blame
II. Machiavelli
“You must, therefore, know that there are
two means of fighting: one according to the
laws, the other with force; the first way is
proper to man, the second to beasts; but
because the first, in many cases is not
sufficient, it becomes necessary to have
recourse to the second” (chapter XVIII).
II. Machiavelli
“Since, then, a prince must know how to
make good use of the nature of the beast,
he should choose from among the beasts
the fox and the lion;
for the lion cannot
defend itself from
traps and the fox
cannot protect itself from wolves.
It is therefore necessary to be a fox in
order to recognize the traps and a lion in order to frighten the wolves.”
II. Machiavelli
•
Examples?
“Cesare
Borgia acquired the
state through the favour and
help of his father, and when
this no longer existed, he lost
it, and this despite the fact
that he did everything and
used every means that a
prudent and skillful man
ought to use in order to root
himself securely in those
states that the arms and
fortune of others had granted
him”
II. Machiavelli
– Background here:
– Cesare’s father? Pope Alexander VI
– The Pope put Cesare in charge of Florence, and
issued a formal papal bull (order) authorizing
him to expand the power of Florence
– What were some of the means used by this
“prudent” and “skillful” man?
II. Machiavelli
Borgia takes over Romagna, but is meeting
resistance since “it was ruled by powerless
noblemen who had been quicker to despoil
their subjects than to govern them, and gave
them cause to disunite rather than to unite
them”
II. Machiavelli
• He decided it was necessary to bring “peace
and obedience of the law” and installed a
man named Remirro de Orca, a “cruel and
efficient man” to rule
• Then, after the area was pacified, Borgia
does the following:
II. Machiavelli
“Since he knew that the severities of the
past had brought about a certain amount of
hate, in order to purge the minds of those
people and win them over completely, he
planned to demonstrate that if cruelty of any
kind had come about, it did not stem from
him [Borgia] but rather from the bitter
nature of the minister…”
II. Machiavelli
“And having found the
occasion to do this, he
had him placed one
morning in Cesena on
the piazza in two
pieces with a piece of
wood and a
bloodstained knife
alongside him.”
II. Human Nature and Power
“The atrocity of such a spectacle left those
people at one and the same time satisfied
and stupefied.”
II. Machiavelli
Agathocles the Sicilian (chapter VIII)
Oliverotto of Fermo (chapter VIII)
Footnote:
– A year after the events described here (1512),
Cesare had Fermo strangled and the corpse
displayed on the main square of Senigallia for 3
days
II. Machiavelli
• Conclusion?
“In taking a state its conqueror should weigh all
the harmful things he must do and do them all
at once so as not to have to repeat them every
day, and in not repeating them to be able to
make men feel secure and win them over with
the benefits he bestows upon them”
II. Machiavelli
• Machiavelli is not counseling the need to be cruel,
nor denying that cruelty is sometimes useful, but
rather showing the true nature of monarchic rule
• Could these atrocities occur in a democracy?
• The primary requirement for selfish individuals
seeking personal goals is to enter into reciprocal
relationships where each needs power or influence
over the behavior of others
II. Machiavelli
• In entering these relationships, all are equal
in their selfishness, and all are free to seek
power
• He’s not saying that people will never act
on the common good, only that they will do
so only if they see an identity between their
private interest and the common good
II. Machiavelli
• Those who appear good or altruistic to
others are either rational actors really
motivated by desire for personal advantage,
or ruled by laziness and retreating from
their political responsibilities
• Even if you think you have a good prince,
be careful
II. Machiavelli
“And it is essential to understand this: that
a prince, and especially a new prince,
cannot observe all those things for which
men are considered good, for in order to
maintain the state he is often obliged to act
against his promise, against charity, against
humanity, and against religion…”
II. Machiavelli
“And therefore, it is necessary that he have
a mind ready to turn itself according to the
way the winds of fortune and the
changeability of affairs require him; and, as
I said above, as long as it is possible, he
should not stray from the good, but he
should know how to enter into evil when
necessity commands” (Chapter XVIII).
II. Machiavelli
• What is the best way to maintain the state?
• What is the best form of government?
• What are the basic forms of government?
II. Machiavelli
•
Unlike Aristotle, Machiavelli argues that
basically we have two forms:
1. Republic
2. Monarchy
“All the states, all the dominions that have
had and still have power over men, were
and still are either republics or
principalities” (first sentence, Chapter 1)
II. Machiavelli
• Republics:
– Founded by a strong, inspirational leader
rallying the citizenry
– Based on law
– Governed in the interest of the majority, not of
a special elite
– Mixed class – members of all classes have
opportunity to participate
II. Machiavelli
• Note, republics require a special citizenry:
active, engaged, public spirited
• Unlikely to have those conditions in every
area, so tyranny is inevitable
II. Machiavelli
• Tyrannies
– Masses are subjects, not active participants in
political life
– Ruling classes enjoy more liberty, and when
interests of rulers conflict with liberty of the
masses, the rulers prevail
II. Machiavelli
– The masses are content with this arrangement
since they recognize that without the ruler,
anarchy would ensue, or
– They’re content because they are either fearful
or awestruck of the powers that be
II. Machiavelli
– Lacking the virtue of citizens in a republic, the
masses under tyrannical regimes both merit and
need tyranny
– And when a tyrant is stuck governing a bunch
of corrupt, vulgar masses who lack virtue, then
ordinary morality is not binding and
he/she/they can pretty much do what they must
to stay in power