MACHIAVELLISM. - The term "M.," which has now entered, after centuries of customary use, even into political lexicons, has stimulated curious investigations, not yet concluded, into its first origin and dissemination. If Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire confirmed the attribution to Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) of the "création de ce mot," Tommasini did not fail to note that the term already existed in a pamphlet by G. Giorgio Betlimges of 1638, though he thought that its first diffusion was to be sought in France, "in the bosom of the turmoils of the Reformation and the League," while according to others 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, to trace, if not exactly the term in question, at least the verb and noun connected with it. But one may well hold that the term was already current between the end of the sixteenth century and the very early seventeenth. If the Protestant Gentillet already refers to "Machiavellians" from those first polemical darts (1576) that helped give rise to the official execution of the Florentine secretary, Campanella and other writers at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are familiar with the words "to machiavellize," "Machiavellians," "M."
In any case, by this term it was agreed to designate, in the sphere of politics, a canon of government which, aiming essentially at the rigid "interest of State," does not hesitate to sacrifice every moral claim before the demands of mere practical utilitarianism, with the aggravating circumstance of underhanded instrumental expedients: those that certain chapters of the Prince (chaps. 15-18) elucidated with an undisguised scientism that could not but appear, in the doctrinal milieu inspired by Erasmian, reformist and Counter-Reformation culture, at the very least a brutal disengagement from superior categories of ethical values.
"M.," therefore, was by definition, and by centuries-old convention of language, one and the same with intrigue, fraud, simulation, petty contingent profit, and in short the pursuit of "success" at the expense of the "good." In truth, the gradual critical deepenings aimed at redeeming Machiavelli from a hasty and ruthless connotation of vulgar cynicism tend to detach the thought of the Florentine secretary from his misfortune, and to empty of infamous character the adjectives and nouns relating to Machiavelli; although the now invincible seasoning of such terms in common usage has recently advised some to prefer "Machiavellian" rather than "Machiavellian" [sic], where one wishes to refer to a genuine statement of the writer, without any prejudicial incriminating charge.
The fact remains that "M." has remained, and predictably will remain, in current speech a synonym for cunning politics, for a normative technique based on hidden and egoistic interests. Of course, from this point of view, one may well speak of an "M." before the letter, and investigations in this sense appear justified: if D. Saint-Hilaire alluded to anticipations of M. in Aristotle (Pol., VIII, 9) and even in Plato (Rep., Gorgias), recent examinations of political thought prior to that of the Florentine secretary have been able to shed light on not a few precedents of what in Machiavelli was a precise and conscious formulation. In the same way, from the seventeenth century onward, it was recognized that the concept of "reason of State" was known to antiquity and in short already widespread before the official fortune of the phrase and the related theory. Precisely to "reason of State," as to "despotism," "tyranny" and the like, the concept of "M." is also customarily linked.
Against the merely utilitarian interpretation of politics, against the doctrinal legitimization of ruthless interest of State, against that "M." on which, as Voltaire said, practically nothing is founded, the insurrection of human feeling has been permanent - religion or no religion. To this concept of politics reacts the eternal yearning toward an ever greater anchoring of civil life to the solid and universally valid hinges of a juridical order in keeping with a moral order. For example, to the well-known dictum of the Prince concerning the lawfulness of violating sworn pacts, the acquired principle pacta sunt servanda reacts; to the separation between the useful and the just, the Ciceronian fixed point of the coincidence between utile and honestum reacts; to the dissociation of ethics and politics, the mirage of the identification of the two terms reacts.
It follows that, if a history of "anti-Machiavellianism" has been written and will still be written, it must be interpreted as the history of the reaction that developed (whether appreciably or not is of no importance) against what seemed the most conspicuous and jarring hallmark of a political science cynical in its utilitarianism, officially (if not actually) countenanced by the Florentine secretary.
The phrases "M." and "anti-Machiavellianism" are, moreover, destined to endure, inasmuch as they are, precisely, objectifications of mental attitudes by now even independent of Machiavelli's own true teaching.
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Rodolfo De Mattei