Prophetic Statebuilding: Machiavelli and the Passion of the Duke

Prophetic Statebuilding: Machiavelli and the Passion of the Duke

John P. Mccormick

Representations: Vol. 115, No. 1 (Summer 2011), pp. 1-19

Abstract

Niccolò Machiavelli’s use of Cesare Borgia has always posed a puzzle for interpreters of The Prince . For those who denounced the scandalous quality of Machiavelli’s “piccolo libro,” the laudatory presentation of Borgia—cunning, lascivious, ambitious, and brutal—proved decisively that the Florentine secretary cared little for piety, morality, good government, or basic decency. In attempting to shield Machiavelli from such charges, no less a luminary than Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted that Machiavelli’s use of Borgia was instructively ironic: Machiavelli didn’t really mean for Borgia to serve as an exemplar for anything other than the kind of tyranny that inevitably emerges in circumstances where republics do not abide.

Interpreters more willing to take Machiavelli at his word detect in the Borgia example Machiavelli’s head-on confrontation with the dire political realities of his day: Jacob Burckhardt, for instance, understood Machiavelli’s account of Borgia’s career to illustrate how a ruthless, mendacious warlord could use the authority of the papacy to accumulate power and even create circum- stances where the papacy itself might be converted into a proper hereditary monarchy, a more conventional principality that might expel foreign invaders and unify Italy.

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