Machiavelli's Ethics

by Erica Benner

Machiavelli's Ethics challenges the most entrenched understandings of Machiavelli, arguing that he was a moral and political philosopher who consistently favored the rule of law over that of men, that he had a coherent theory of justice, and that he did not defend the "Machiavellian" maxim that the ends justify the means. By carefully reconstructing the principled foundations of his political theory, Erica Benner gives the most complete account yet of Machiavelli's thought. She argues that his difficult and puzzling style of writing owes far more to ancient Greek sources than is usually recognized, as does his chief to teach readers not how to produce deceptive political appearances and rhetoric, but how to see through them. Drawing on a close reading of Greek authors--including Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch--Benner identifies a powerful and neglected key to understanding Machiavelli.


This important new interpretation is based on the most comprehensive study of Machiavelli's writings to date, including a detailed examination of all of his major The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories . It helps explain why readers such as Bacon and Rousseau could see Machiavelli as a fellow moral philosopher, and how they could view The Prince as an ethical and republican text. By identifying a rigorous structure of principles behind Machiavelli's historical examples, the book should also open up fresh debates about his relationship to later philosophers, including Rousseau, Hobbes, and Kant.

Genres: Philosophy

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, even though it was a bit of a chore to work through - and you do need to work through it. Why recommend a book strongly, when its punchline is far from obvious and there is much room for disagreement on central points? (I actually started and stopped on this multiple times before my current effort.) I will try to explain.

Let’s start with Machiavelli. If you have not read The Prince, start there. It is short and easy to read. The key points seem to jump off the page and suggest M as the star example of a power political logic that has motivated dictators and other operators for the 500 years. It was on the Vatican Index of prohibited books. There was even an episode in the old TV series “The Time Tunnel” of the evil Machiavelli escaping into the present. There is even a popular psychological scale to measure Machiavellian personality traits. If you just read The Prince, then the above seems plausible even reasonable. The trouble is that if you read anything by Machiavelli besides The Prince, it becomes clear that stereotypes from The Prince about amoral power politics are ... well stereotypes and oversimplifications. They are either that or Machiavelli was grossly inconsistent and seemed to have different messages for different audiences.

My first encounters with Machiavelli came when I was just beginning to read political theory and they were very powerful. Realizing that M was much more complex than he first seemed and that many of my first impressions were in need of revision motivates one to dig deeper. The problem of course is that Machiavelli lived 500 years ago in Renaissance Florence and I lack the knowledge, language skills, and experiences to proceed much further besides wondering what M really meant. This problem of access, even to literate giants of the past is not an unusual one. As I have learned more about my own family, it is obvious that I have little understanding of the world that my great grandparents lived in and that they would have quite a shock waking up in the present. Now extend the time frame back five centuries. This is a real issue for biographies of giants like Luther and Leonardo.

Now meet Erica Benner. She captures a few basic insights to get started - most importantly that some key intellectuals who were much more proximate to Machiavelli than we are today thought very differently about his work and his value - in fact viewed him as a philosopher of liberal republics rather than of despotic princes. With this and some other insights, she began her project on Machiavelli, of which the current volume is the earliest one I have seen (2009). She has gone back and read M in the original, read the classic and contemporary sources he read from, and read what’s his contemporaries were also writing about. To this she adds a careful and systematic inquiry to produce a deep and nuanced view of Machiavell’s ethics that focuses on the importance of freedom and related republican values and that demonstrates M to have been a serious philosopher in the tradition of Socrates. I can only wonder at the amount of intellectual horsepower she can bring to the seminars and presentations in which she participates.

The book is a powerful achievement, even if most of its points are likely to be disputed by experts. To me this is an example of how the craft of writing is at its best tightly linked to the thoughts being written about. Machiavelli writing the way he did and requiring careful reading is central to the contribution that he made to the understanding of ethical and political life in Renaissance Florence.

Readers be warned. This is a long and not particularly easy book, but it is well worth the effort.

[Cary Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the rate I'm reading, re-reading, and highlighting this book, I don't know when I'll finish reading it; so I wanted to pitch it now. This is the second book by Erica Benner about Machiavelli that I'm reading, and I've enjoyed them both. Having read The Prince before Disourses on Livy, I had a basic understanding of his political philosophy; but Ms. Benner's scholorly examination is much more in-depth in terms of contextualizing what he wrote. By "contextualizing" I not only mean in terms of his contemporary politics in Florence, Italy, and Europe; but also in terms of Western philosophy. I think both Machiavelli's work and Ms. Benner's works are especially poignent today, given the internal and external threats to republics that seem both divided by hyper partisanship and under all manner of threat from both within and abroad. Her analysis of Machiavelli's writings on the importance of honest and fair evalutations of one's history and how to deal demagogues (especially wealthy ones) that claim popular mandates is incredibly relevant and important - and I'm only 10% of the way through the book. Echoing the last reviewer, the book is a major achievement. Some people may find in dense and academic, and it may not be accessible to everyone; but those seeking out a book like this will very likely appreciate the style and voice.