MACHIAVELLISM. – The term “m.”, which after centuries of customary use has now entered political lexicons as well, has stimulated curious investigations, not yet concluded, into its earliest origin and dissemination. Although Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire confirmed the attribution to Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) of the “création de ce mot,” Tommasini did not fail to point out that the term already existed in a pamphlet by G. Giorgio Betlimges, from 1638, while nevertheless thinking that its first diffusion was to be sought in France, “in seno alle turbulenze della Riforma e della Lega”; according to others, however, it was the Jesuits who created the word “m.”; and still others, such as Benoist, go back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, especially in France, in order to trace, if not precisely the term in question, at least the verb and noun connected with II. It may nevertheless reasonably be held that the term was already current between the end of the sixteenth century and the very beginning of the seventeenth. If “machiavellists” are already referred to by the Protestant Gentillet in those first polemical attacks (1576) that helped initiate the official condemnation of the Florentine secre-
tary, Campanella and other writers living at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were familiar with the expressions “machiavellizzare,” “machiavellisti,” and “m.”
In any case, this term came to designate, in the sphere of politics, a canon of government which, aiming essentially at the rigid “interest of the State,” does not hesitate to sacrifice every moral demand before the requirements of sheer practical utilitarianism, compounded by covert instrumental devices: those which certain chapters of the Principe (chs. 15–18) elucidated with an overt scientism that could not fail to appear, in the doctrinal milieu inspired by Erasmian, reformist, and Counter-Reformation culture, at the very least a brutal disengagement from higher categories of ethical values.
“M.” was therefore, by definition and by centuries-old linguistic convention, synonymous with intrigue, fraud, simulation, petty immediate gain, and, in short, the pursuit of “success” at the expense of “the good.” In truth, gradual critical inquiries, aimed at redeeming Machiavelli from a hasty as well as merciless characterization as vulgar cynic, tend to detach the thought of the Florentine secretary from its ill fortune, and to divest adjectives and nouns relating to Machiavelli of their defamatory character; although the now invincible seasoning of these terms in common usage has recently led some to prefer the use of “machiavellano” rather than “machiavellino” when one wishes to refer to a genuine statement by the writer, without any prejudicial incriminating charge.
The fact remains that “m.” has persisted, and will foreseeably remain, in current speech a synonym for astute politics, for a normative technique based on concealed and egoistic interests. To be sure, from this point of view one may quite properly speak of an “m.” avant la lettre, and investigations in this direction appear justified: if D. Saint-Hilaire pointed to anticipations of m. in Aristotle (Pol., VIII, 9) and even in Plato (Rep., Gorgio), recent examinations of political thought preceding that of the Florentine secretary have been able to shed light on not a few antecedents of what in Machiavelli became a precise and conscious formulation. Similarly, from the seventeenth century onward, it was recognized that the concept of “reason of State” was known in antiquity and, in short, had already spread before the official success of the expression and the theory associated with II. The concept of “m.” is likewise commonly linked precisely to “reason of State,” as well as to “despotism,” “tyranny,” and similar notions.
Against the merely utilitarian interpretation of politics, against the doctrinal legitimation of the harsh interest of the State, against that “m.” on which, Voltaire said, nothing in practice is founded, the insurrection of human feeling has remained permanent—whether or not religion is involved. To this concept of politics there responds the eternal longing for an ever closer attachment of civil life to the solid and universally valid foundations of a juridical order consistent with a moral order. For example, the principle pacta sunt servanda responds to the well-known dictum of the Principe concerning the lawfulness of violating sworn agreements; to the separation of the useful from the just responds the Ciceronian fixed point of the coincidence of utile and honestum; to the dissociation of ethics and politics responds the vision of identifying the two terms.
It follows that, if a history of “antimachiavellism” has been written and will be written again, it must be interpreted as the history of the reaction that developed—regardless of whether appreciably or not—against what seemed the most conspicuous and offensive mark of a political science cynical in its utilitarianism, officially (if not then actually) endorsed by the Florentine secretary.
The expressions “m.” and “antimachiavellism” are, moreover, destined to endure, precisely because they are objectifications of mental attitudes by now even independent of Machiavelli’s true teaching.