Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
This review was originally published in Perspectives on Political Science. Volume 53, Number 2 (2024). Republished with permission.
In The Prince, Machiavelli adjures his reader not to attempt to understand things in terms of Platonic ideas or Aristotelian substances—in terms of what things are—but in the surer, more visible, terms of what their effects are. This evidently comports with his Heraclitan claim that nothing stable exists, that change is the only constant. To put it another way, “Machiavelli’s effectual truth is opposed to the truth according to nature” (3) This is a philosophic claim and Mansfield shows that Machiavelli is indeed a philosopher, unrecognized as such by most academic philosophers today—moreover, a philosopher whose influence has endured, not only among the philosophers who succeeded him but in the way our world now works. The effectual truth of Machiavelli is that he not only understood the modern world but created it. In keeping with such creativity, “Machiavelli appears to have invented the word effectual” (3). He was able to do so by giving his philosophic successors, preeminently Montesquieu (another philosopher unrecognized as such) the scope to exercise their own formidable capacities of invention or creation, while remaining within the line of thought Machiavelli forged. Mansfield opposes the assumption of most scholars, who take Machiavelli and his writings to have products of their time and place, the Italian Renaissance. Against these historicists, Mansfield assets that “modernity had a founding rather than an emergence, a founding by a philosopher, the philosopher being Machiavelli, who was a philosopher” (4).
These are large claims. Mansfield vindicates them in seven chapters, seven being the number of days in which, the Bible testifies, God created the world. The character of the world, and the character of creation, loom large in Mansfield’s interpretation of what Machiavelli calls his “enterprise.” Unlike God, Machiavelli could not effectively create a world in seven days, or even in his own lifetime. He needed the effectual truth to be instantiated by succeeding thinkers and doers, philosophers and political men.
They would do so by obeying what Machiavelli says is necessity. “Necessity pays no regard to the complete nature of a virtue that is distinct from accidental circumstances” (6). Necessity requires thinkers and doers alike to cultivate the classical or Christian moral virtues that complete or ‘save’ human beings according to their nature but to cultivate virtù, which empowers men to master the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune, using them as weapons against their rivals. [1] “Using” is exactly the right word, as Machiavellians do not have honesty or dishonesty, fidelity or infidelity, charity or miserliness; they use them in order to rule. Although Machiavelli does not hold up Bacon’s project, the modern scientific project of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate, he “anticipates” it “more or less clearly” (6). Scientific “facts,” etymologically related to “effectual” things, by necessity tell you what to do, but also enable men of virtù to manipulate them. Human nature itself is malleable. “The ‘is’ of necessity leads to the ‘ought’ of necessity” (8). That is, the lure of the conquest of fortune and of nature will keep subsequent philosophers and doers more or less in line, not despite but because of their own grand ambitions, ambitions fired by the experience of reading Machiavelli, whose overarching ambition they perpetuate and perfect.
Although Machiavelli famously or notoriously deprecates imagined principalities, such as Plato’s ideal republic or Augustine’s City of God, imagination itself remains, albeit redirected from “imagined things ‘above’ this world” to future things within it (12). Imagination must be “disciplined by fear and advantage in this world, fear of failure and perception of the main chance afforded by the effectual truth” (12). (“Strange but true, the word ‘effectual’ made its way into the king James version of the Bible in 1611,” about a century after Machiavelli passed on to his reward.”) (12). Thus disciplined, imagination enables one to conceive of an impresa, that is, an enterprise or a campaign in a war which, like Christianity, is a spiritual war primarily, one that may entail physical wars. Imagination and deed can now be brought together. “Borrowing their unification from Christianity, and transforming the sovereignty of God into the government of necessity,” Machiavelli “had to show that what Christianity did through revelation as opposed to philosophy, he would do through philosophy alone” (15). That is, God’s providence, acknowledged in the formidable, prayerful, “Thy will be done,” gives way to the combination of natural necessity and human virtù; the effectual truth of necessity now dominated by the effective thought, speech, and actions of Machiavellians. This Machiavelli has done, as seen in the continued existence of the modernity he founded. “By substituting necessity for the good, and effectual truth for the imaginary truth, Machiavelli has made a fundamental change in the relation of philosophy to politics” (20). In this, he is, despite his many successors, uno solo, a man alone (29). Machiavelli’s perspective on political science is that politics as Aristotle understands it, as ruling and being ruled in turn, should not and cannot really exist, that the ultimate relation is that of one ruler over the ruled, of masterly or perhaps parental rule, rule for the good of the master or for the good of the master and his subjects or ‘children’—their good now defined in terms of virtù, not virtue. The Christian as child of God gives way to the prince as child of Machiavelli, ruling children of his own.
Machiavelli, then, is the prophet of the modern world because he is a king or prince of the modern world; he created it by discovering and asserting “the fundamental principle that builds and maintains the modern world” to this day (32). He has been ‘saved’ not by God but by himself, having achieved “a life beyond life” by his own efforts, with no divine assistance. As for the soul, Machiavelli hints that it does not exist, either. Instead of souls, human beings have “humors”; the few seek dominance, the many seek to resist domination. Whereas Aristotle sought to reconcile the few and the many via his “mixed regime,” consisting of a harmonious agreement between the two factions, Machiavelli lauds the two factions. Both seek to acquire, in defiance of classical moderation and the Biblical injunction against greed. They must acquire because they fear one another, and so need to provide for themselves against one another. To found and maintain a sound political regime, men must be brought back to that primal fear of one another, and of fortune. Their very disharmony brings life to republics, animated not by agreement but mutual hatred. Animosity inspires virtù. “The goal of virtù,” the goal of the prince, whether spiritual or political, is the power and the glory, world without end (47). “The prudence of a prince can put his form on the material of his principality” (55), and Machiavelli’s principality is the modern world he foresees/imagines, rules (‘in spirit’) and creates, by the grace of fear and acquisitiveness, well-used.
But are they well used? “To make a judgment on the success of Machiavelli’s enterprise one must be aware of the alternative to it in the classical tradition” (70). For an account of that tradition, Mansfield turns to the one who upheld it against Machiavelli, Leo Strauss. Yet Strauss used one aspect of Machiavellianism against Machiavelli even as Machiavelli used one aspect of Christianity against God. He effected a line of philosophic captains, called ‘Straussians,’ of whom Mansfield himself has been rumored to number. And indeed, Mansfield acknowledges that in his book, Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss identifies Machiavelli as a philosopher and as the founder of modernity, judgments Mansfield has affirmed. Strauss further identifies the Bible as book that “sets for the demands of morality and religion in their purest and most intransigent form,” a formula that “appears to leave open the possibility that philosophy, whether classical or Machiavellian, might find a reasonable substitute that does not attempt an impossible purity, that does not seek to remove the taint of unreason arising from every human being’s (including every philosopher’s) necessary concern with his own body” (78). Machiavellian philosophy, by contrast, opposes both the Bible, “which says that man needs God, and the classical tradition, which says that he needs nature” (78).
Machiavelli thus partakes of some of the nobility of philosophy, the province or principality of only a few persons in any generation. He “teaches evil,” as Strauss wrote, in the sense that he undermines all antecedent forms of morality; accordingly, he makes the young his principal audience, not the old men brought up under those forms. Machiavelli does not, however, undermine morality simply, for the many who do not philosophize cannot be ruled very long unless convinced that what they are commanded to do is right. Machiavelli’s new morality will consist of orderly pursuit of acquisition by the many and resistance to princes who interfere with that orderly acquisition. He arranges things so that the great ambitions of the few will seem less blameworthy to the many, now with their own more modest ambitions.
As for Strauss, by juxtaposing Machiavelli to the Bible and to classical philosophy, he shows that the Great Tradition, seen in the Great Books, deploys a sort of Machiavellian device against any unthinking appropriation of Machiavellianism. Rather like the conflict between the few and the many in a republic, in which their opposition gives each a degree of liberty even as each side acknowledges the necessity of guarding itself against the other, so do the Great Books sustain the liberty of thought necessary to philosophizing by its train of authors who contradict one another. Ancients and moderns, reason and revelation confront one another, forcing those who attend to them to think. “Strauss has no enterprise aiming at conquering the world” but he does intend “to contribute towards the recovery of the permanent problems” (85 n.26).
During the course of this chapter, Mansfield notes that Machiavelli lacks any sense of the tragic. In tragedy, we are invited to admire the hero while weeping at the consequences, the effectual truth, of his flaw. Like morality itself, the tragic hero demands to be taken seriously. Comedy inclines to deflate such claims, to laugh at flaws, to ridicule failure. Mansfield’s following chapter, central to the book, concerns Machiavelli’s comedy, Mandragola. “The Mandragola makes for a good introduction to Machiavelli” (95). If so, why does Mansfield place it fourth in a sequence of seven chapters? The placement is a spur to wonder, the beginning point of philosophizing. The chapter itself partakes of comedy and one might be pardoned for thinking it even more entertaining than the play itself. Although rather smutty, “the play is about morality, not about eros” (96). Machiavelli portrays a childless couple, a wife who cannot conceive a child because her husband is impotent or sterile. She needs a stud, a lusty lover, to inseminate her. The wife’s name, Lucrezia, recalls ancient Rome’s Lucretia, whose rape “occasioned the founding of a republic” (97) when outrage over the crime inspired people to raise against the tyrant who committed the crime. In his Discourse on Livy, however, Machiavelli treats “these affairs” in a manner “altogether distant from the chaste spirit of republicanism” in ancient Rome (98), the chastity that makes erotic longing more intense both in the classical world and in the Christian world of knights in shining armor. In the Mandragola, the seduction, rather than the rape, of Lucrezia is treated with a spirit equally distant from ancient republicanism. It is a play about keeping up the appearance of morality, depicting an intricate conspiracy in which all the players—wife, husband, lover, priest, matchmaker/pander—effectively collaborate to get what they want, betraying “every ordinary human trust” while never letting on that trust has been betrayed (101). Everyone acts out of considered necessity, including the necessity to pretend that morality and the trust that morality generates, the trust that holds republics together, has remained as inviolate, as chaste, as Lucrezia is persuaded, and persuades herself, to be. The priest/fox/sophist persuades her, and in doing so demonstrates that Christianity, or at least Christian priests, might be adapted, used, for Machiavellian ends, as indeed they were in many of the modern states founded by Machiavellian princes, who subordinated the church to the state in still another example of acquisition. In all, “Men need to believe in order to trust one another, and to trust one another in order to work together, and to work together in order to survive” (113). Morality is necessary, even if it is necessary to invent a new morality. Lucrezia’s impregnation is a parody of Mary impregnation by the Holy Spirit, whom Machiavelli thereby suggest was neither holy nor a spirit. The new morality of virtuosity aims at the mastery of Fortuna, to which topic Mansfield turns in the final three chapters.
He begins by contrasting Machiavelli with his contemporary ‘civic humanists,’ with whom he is often lumped by careless scholars. The matter is philosophically important: to borrow Socrates’ image, does Machiavelli ascend from the cave that represents the conventional opinions of his time and place, including the conventional academic opinions, or does he not? Is such an ascent even possible? Mansfield maintains that it is and proves it by contrasting Machiavelli’s thought with that of “the hero of ‘civic humanism,'” Leonardo Bruni, a serious man of formidable learning (127). The great historian Jacob Burckhardt errs in as it were folding Machiavellian thought into the Renaissance, in effect making the Renaissance somewhat ‘Machiavellian’; other, lesser, scholars even more carelessly fold Machiavelli into Renaissance humanism, making him seem more or less the same as Bruni and Petrarch. Mansfield has a high old time needling the likes of Hans Baron, J.G.A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner, who take this position; it would be a mistake to assume that his own comedy ends with the chapter on the Mandragola. One such person, he writes, “seized on civic humanism and used it for all it was worth, and more” (13)). Another invokes Aristotle’s thought, as “beamed through the ontology of Martin Heidegger” (131). Admirers of the civic humanists “in fact” (as Machiavelli might say) “would not want to live in the polis if it meant doing without clean underwear—which it does” (132) While having his fun, Mansfield also gets down to business, remarking that while Bruni’s Laudato Florentinae Urbis “remains very much within the Aristotelian tradition” of epideictic rhetoric, praising Florence as Rome’s worthy successor in order to inspire it to live up to the praise, Machiavelli intends to set Florence and the rest of Italy and indeed the world generally on a course that will depart both from ancient and Catholic-Christian Rome. Most pointedly in terms of political science, Bruni looks to the classical idea of the regime as the central concern of that science. But “whereas Bruni, following Plato, considers the site [of the city] as a place for a regime, Machiavelli considers it so as to bring out the necessities that override the choice of regimes” (139). Machiavelli’s ‘geopolitics’ puts emphasis on the ‘geo’ as a means of spurring princes to conquer it. The earth is not God-given, only a pile of clay susceptible to remodeling by hands wielded by men of virtù. The regime question, which depends upon the answer to the question, ‘What is justice?’ takes second fiddle, at most. “The political is essentially tyrannical; no one who rules acts for the common good”; “effectually politics is acquisitive tyranny” (141). This notwithstanding, and speaking for himself, Mansfield is far from dismissing men like Bruni: “It seems to me that on the whole the humanists understood politics better than we do”—for starters, they took Aristotle seriously—and “possibly even better than Machiavelli” (146). The same cannot be said for their enthusiastic admirers of the past half-century.
It might even be that one could fault Machiavelli’s approach to the conquest of fortune from within the framework of his effectual truth. For such a critique, Mansfield turns to Montesquieu and his magisterial The Spirit of the Laws, a work in which the philosopher (whose philosophic status, like Machiavelli’s, is equally denied by academic philosophers today) makes a show of rejecting “Machiavellianism” while tacitly showing how its effectual truth can be made more effective. Again following Strauss, who demonstrates the importance of the central passages of certain kind of books but also the importance of the longest chapter within them, Mansfield devotes by far his longest chapter to Montesquieu not only because Montesquieu wrote an unusually long book himself but because he wrote an unusually subtle and important one. In writing about this chapter, one can only skim the surface, although it may be that the surface of a thing tells one something about what lies beneath.
“Through Montesquieu’s relationship with Machiavelli, one may find the key to the argument of this marvelous work as a whole” (151). While “draw[ing] the foundation of his work from Machiavelli’s critique of the ancients and of Christianity, summed up in his notion of effectual truth,” Montesquieu “corrects the influence of Machiavelli, known as Machiavellianism, because it maintains rather than removes the error it was meant to criticize” (151). By emphasizing the rule of “one alone,” the rule of a prince of the (modern) state or the rule of a prince of thought, Machiavelli is despotic, all-too-despotic. He is, one might even venture to say, insufficiently comical; he does not apply his characteristic ‘reductionism’ to the pretensions of loners. Montesquieu’s “disapproval of despotism” is “the spring behind his most characteristic political teaching, the constitutionalism of separation of powers and of checks and balances that is to ensure the power of ‘one alone’ does not prevail” (151). “Montesquieu departs from the orders of Machiavelli in replacing the shock of encountering the world”—the use of a spectacular act of cruelty to leave the people satisfied and stupefied—with “the impression (producing the ‘opinion’) of comfort and trust we know as ‘security'” (155). For him, necessity remains both a sobering reality and a thing to be mastered, but it is not as harsh. To be sure, Plato’s Laws, in which the argument might be said to circle back around to the argument of his Republic is (in Montesquieu’s phrase) “not suitable today” (157), and perhaps never—partaking, as it does, too much of an illiberal despotism. But so does Machiavelli’s republicanism, on display in the Discourses. Similarly, the Biblical God, preeminently “One Alone,” rules with an iron fist. But there is a way of ruling, and of acquiring the things that men want, that isn’t despotic. Commerce is “a topic of extreme importance to Montesquieu” because “commerce softens the harsh mores of the ancient republic and enables regimes to devote themselves to peace rather than incessant war” (159). Commerce requires the rule of law bolstered by an independent judiciary, neither conducive to despotism. Commerce replaces the passion despotism instantiates with mild “interest,” guided by a “sense of dispassionate calculation” (160, 161)—the ‘modern’ substitute for classical phronēsis. More precisely, it emerges from the Machiavellian passion of acquisition, tempering it without transforming it into a classical, much less a Christian, virtue. “Machiavelli is correct that the passions govern mankind, but he did not understand how they can work to cure their own vicious effects” (162). He may not have tried very hard to inquire into the possibility.
But what, exactly, does Montesquieu mean by the spirit of the laws? Machiavelli relegates law to the status of a mere product of force smartly or stupidly used. Montesquieu takes law much more seriously, although he too attends to the “spirit” that animates a given set of laws. While laws are formed and executed by spirited men, they also form “the general spirit, the mores and the manners of a nation,” Montesquieu insists (164). The modern philosophers writing in the centuries between Machiavelli and Montesquieu imagined a ‘state of nature’ whose necessities drove men to form the civil societies that framed laws for themselves, but “Montesquieu does not adopt the liberal state of nature” (165). Like Hobbes and Locke, he does want to “enlighten men by drawing from them their prejudices,” which they used the state-of-nature doctrine to do so, but he will do so by “relying on [men’s] flexibility, not on a fixed nature found by consulting the state of nature,” rejecting “the simplification of politics in the liberal state of nature previously set forth because it substitutes a theory for careful reasoning and thus abstraction for awareness” (166).
Far from rejecting the materialism of the moderns, Montesquieu “compares the government as well as the soul to the mechanism of a watch that has a spring that makes it work, distinct from other parts” (166) A “spring” of the soul obviously is not “spirit” in the Christian sense, resembling rather Machiavelli’s term, animo, which contrasts with anima, the Latin word for the Greek psyche, seen, for example, in the title given to Aristotle’s book on the subject. For Montesquieu, the effectual truth of the spirit of the laws is equally “as human as the mechanism of a watch” (167)—man-made. But the effectual truth of Machiavelli and Hobbes denies scope for human liberty, having yielded absolute monarchy or princeliness in European political practice. A more subtle and measured account of human action is, to borrow their own term, necessary. In the numerology deployed by both Machiavelli and Montesquieu, the number seventeen denotes nature. Sure enough, seventeen relations form the components of “what is called THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS,” as Montesquieu fairly shouts to his readers. These include the main physical characteristics of the country, “to which the laws are related,” “the relations of the laws, both civil and political, to one another” (170) That is, for Montesquieu nature isn’t something to be understood as a whole, as a cosmos, let alone a cosmos created by God, but as a set of things, human nature being “the various encounters humans have with nature,” things “isolated in separate kinds, each responsible as the cause of human responses in their positive laws” (170). This could not be farther from a distinction without a difference with respect to its implications for political science. By ‘complexifying’ nature and the relationship of human beings to it, Montesquieu denies the possibility of effectively conquering it by the virtù of ‘one alone.’ Princeliness of philosophers and political men alike must stand aside, giving “room for choice” and balance among this “large number of specific necessities” (170). Not the “friendly companion,” the cosmos, the “home for man” posited by the classical philosophers nor the “enemy to be mastered” posted by the moderns, nature gives man space to be “neither passive nor aggressive but reactive in a spirit of self-defense against necessity, shown in human laws rather than in Machiavellian virtù, hence moderately” (170).Montesquieu downgrades necessity to “the ‘spirit’ that moves men to act, distinct from the reason or end toward which one moves,” as propounded by classical political science, while making the constitutional mechanisms of separation and balance of powers more consistent with if not identical to the Lucretian nature of things and the Machiavellian way of the world (171).
In Montesquieu, classification of forms of government follows neither Aristotle’s regime theory nor Machiavelli’s classification of states into principalities and republics, although he is closer to Machiavelli. He divides the rule of the one into monarchy, whose “spring” is honor—a false honor philosophically but “useful to the public” because it combines obedience to the will of the prince with obedience of both prince and people to the laws (173). It is therefore “moderate” in Montesquieu’s own, un-Aristotelian way, one “compatible with” the “materialism of effectual truth” (174). Despotism, whose “spring” is fear, is the rule of the one without the rule of law, much less useful to the people for that reason. When the people themselves ruled in the ancient republics, the “spring” of government was virtue, later “epitomized in the monks devoting themselves to the virtue of the Christian republic” (177). Such austerity amounts to still another form of despotism, a despotism of the many; “the virtue of the ancients runs into despotism and destroys itself,” as indeed it did in Rome, its republicanism giving way to Caesarism, its Caesarism to Christianity (178). Mansfield notes that all three of these political forms, including monotheistic Christianity, exemplify the rule of “one alone”; Christian and modern political thought and practice bear down hard on human liberty. “The practice of the ancient republics of relying on virtue leaves them in the situation of having to decide whether to excuse or punish its absence, which is either too weak or too strong” (180). This is precisely the situation of governments under the dominion of Christianity (itself “the effectual truth of Socratic philosophy” [188]): whether “to follow the New Testament and forgive or the Old Testament and punish severely” (186). Machiavelli’s critique is sound but his cure no better; modern states, Montesquieu famously writes, themselves need to be cured of their Machiavellianism.
The cure is a new republic, one constructed to avoid the despotism inherent in the old republics. Its “spirit” is “negativity, enshrined in the separation of powers, and its most characteristic end, the opinion of each person that his liberty is secure” (195). This republic derives not from the state of nature, which “the fearful one alone” escapes by contracting with similarly fearful ‘ones’ (196). It derives instead from the experience, the spirit, of England, in which Montesquieu discovers “the individual,” the one “we know today in a civil society of political liberty” (196). Montesquieu calls England “the only nation in the world whose constitution has political liberty for its direct purpose” (196). Borrowing the notion of “power” from Hobbes, Montesquieu shows that England separates and distributes it into the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches of government. In the power of negation inherent in each, ‘between the slats,’ as the saying goes, the English citizen-individual enjoys the opinion of his own liberty. No philosopher designed this regime and no priest or set of priests rules it. Nor do the people, who register their opinions politically by the device of representation. The liberty of the people is best characterized not as full security but negatively, as a sense of inquietude; they rule themselves not by strict reason, as philosopher-kings might do, but by a sort of reasonableness. One thinks of Locke’s formula, the reasonableness of Christianity. They exercise reasonableness in civil society by practicing liberty of commerce; the few philosophers living in such regimes will practice commerce in what would later become known as the marketplace of ideas, practicing the study of what our contemporary academics now call the topic of ‘comparative regimes,’ a practice at which Montesquieu himself was no slouch. Incidentally, in his liberal—now in the sense of generous, hospitable—spirit does Montesquieu not seem reminiscent of a great man who lived between himself and Machiavelli, another man now seldom classified as a philosopher, Michel de Montaigne?
For both citizens and philosophers, “nature is not man’s enemy, as with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the human spirit of liberty thrives in the cold [climate] that forces reactive industriousness upon us” (202). Lazy priests come out of the hot climates of the East and the South; they have no just place in the bracing winds of the North, since such men preach that industry is punishment for sin. At the same time, the ambition to conquer nature stoked by the philosophers of modern science resembles “in its rigid universality” the “religions it replaced,” tending toward “a universal doctrine of rigid destiny”—a not-so-divine form of providence (205). Belief in that doctrine accounts for the principal weakness of the English, their tendency to commit suicide, despairing of the very liberty they should enjoy. Such Baconianism must be cured, being a form of Machiavellianism—itself the one wrongful piece of Machiavelli’s thought. “A free constitution needs a free self” (207). A free self secures its preservation but also maintains the liberty that secures its pleasure and happiness.
Similarly, in philosophizing one needs the liberty to think for oneself. Hence the exoteric character of philosophic writing, ancient and modern, and the esoteric character of philosophic thought. “It is never enough for readers to be told what is there in the text, for they will never be convinced by someone else’s discoveries. One must make them for oneself; that is why they are hidden.” (209). One cannot discover a secret concealed by a writer without exercising reason, thought governed by the principle of noncontradiction, first enunciated by Socrates. In this, Montesquieu, Machiavelli, Aristotle, and Plato concur, and their disagreements also invite their readers to and then require their readers to exercise reason. Mansfield demonstrates that such inquiry can find things, that “one should not lose heart” in observing the contradictions of great men or the varieties of “spirit” seen in the world (209).
Mansfield characterizes “the three central books of The Spirit of the Laws” (Books 15-17) as a consideration of civil and political liberty against slavery, which at core is a consideration of how to “save” liberalism “from the slavery to philosophy it has inherited from Machiavelli” (210). If the modern state Machiavelli invented is large and centralized, and therefore inclined to tyranny, its very size (deemed necessary for effective self-defense and acquisition) enables its civil society to be distinguished from its government in a way that the small, centralized ancient polis could never be. In commending this distinction, Montesquieu extends and complicates the liberalism of John Locke. Locke finds political liberty in the social contract which men have made to emerge from the state of nature, a condition of “perfect freedom” nonetheless “within the bound of the law of nature” (210). But this oversimplifies nature, as Mansfield has shown, making it too much a thing of necessity, too ‘Machiavellian,’ impinging upon the liberty Locke esteems. To save political liberty from philosophers’ overly necessitarian conception of the nature of things, Montesquieu introduces the topic of “women,” who symbolize philosophers, and their relation to “men,” who symbolize politics. Women-philosophers are fickle of spirit and indiscreet, gossipy, as may readily be seen in such examples as Machiavelli and Socrates. But this is admissible in a modern republic, preferable to the enslavement of women seen in in the ‘Oriental despotism’ of, for example, Persia (where, the eunuchs, by the way, in Montesquieu’s hands symbolize “the priests of in the Church”) (212). Women-philosophers should enjoy the liberty republicanism affords them, but legislators should reign them in a bit by “giv[ing] effect to their natural modesty or shame”—in the case of philosophers, “the shame of their original imperfection, their ignorance” (212). (For Montesquieu, one might suppose, not a certain kind of knowledge but ignorance is the original sin.) That is, Enlightenment philosophes should rethink their project—set a “damper on “their ambition and turn it to moderation,” become more ‘politic’ (213). Philosophy is the highest form of commerce; ergo, its practitioners should take care to become ‘economical’ in their bearing. It is true that modern commerce, now far more wide-ranging and precisely aimed than its counterpart in earlier epochs—thanks to the compass, an instrument of modern science—cannot “produce voyages that compare with ‘the charms of the Odyssey and the magnificence of the Aeneid‘” (221), and the money that serves as the instrument of commerce lends itself to the establishment of “the impersonal state rather than Machiavelli’s stato,” and even “excludes a personal God as well” (222). It may be, Mansfield suggests, that Montesquieu contemplates a time when the wisdom of the ancients might “come in handy” (223), unironically, not in the Baconian spirit. If modernity “is not permanent, it may be wise not to obliterate previous sects, as new sects like to do” (223).
Consequently, “Montesquieu is careful to set himself at some distance from Machiavelli’s,” and the Enlightenment philosophe Pierre Bayle’s, “hostility to Christianity” (224). Christianity’s gentleness sets it apart from despotism, even if its monotheism tracks too closely to ‘one alone.’ (One might even suggest that its trinitarianism resembles the wholesome separation of powers.) Machiavelli’s conspiracy against the soul, which the Christian God would save for Himself and for its own good, and his liberation of the desire to acquire in the name of harsh necessity, will not simply be abandoned but it will be tempered. Montesquieu “softens the harshness of modern subordination to necessity—no extreme measures!—and calls it moderation” (228). (One recalls Nietzsche’s indignant counter-thrust: this is mediocrity that is but called moderation—to which Montesquieu might reply, ‘Just so, and consider the effective truth of your stricture, in the centuries since you wrote it.’)
Montesquieu’s political philosophy retains natural right among the several sorts of law. It is no longer “the dominant principle of all principles as with Plato’s idea of the good or Aristotle’s archē,” but it survives as knowledge of “how the order of laws must relate to the things of nature being enacted upon and in not causing confusion among the plural principles that should govern men” (228), a prophylaxis the principle of non-contradiction has the power to effect. Nor does human reason need “to conquer nature,” with the earlier moderns; “instead, it can come to terms with nature as the ‘order of things.'” (228). As for natural law, as distinguished from natural right, “natural sentiments” replace them both, in anticipation of Adam Smith, that eminent philosopher of commerce (229). Human law now “takes a path that could be understood as natural and in this way to replace natural law” (236). In all of this, Montesquieu carefully distances politics from philosophy, married by the Church and not divorced by Machiavelli. Looking ahead to future excesses, Montesquieu would reject any religion of humanity as a return to simplisme. Political philosophy is good, so long as it restrains itself from becoming all too political; Christianity is also good, so long as it restrains itself from becoming all too political. This is to say that Montesquieu “legislates not as a founder, all at once, like his predecessors the ancients and the early moderns, but in his way, ‘little by little,’ through history” (237). “He will be a rare prince of moderation and discretion” (237). If the spirit of the laws “is its reason,” reason is seen in the variety of laws, adapting itself circumstances in the in the variety of places for the varieties of people, as the peoples move through time (238). Reasoning that ‘abstracts from’ the various natural and conventional, and natural-conventional, things has the effect of despotism in philosophy and in the state—that is, in theory and in practice. Within that modern state, Machiavelli’s inclination to erase the forms of aristocracy, of nobility (along with the sense of the good and of the noble), foments despotism, as Tocqueville would warn, a century later. The modern state needs a civil society with groups of men organized to resist the despotic inclinations of ambitious ‘executives.’ Among these, the philosophers should thrive, so long as they do no more than inherit the quest of wisdom from one another and do not seek to rule as if they have achieved comprehensive wisdom, even and especially about the effectual truth of things, which becomes visible in time but is hard to see ahead of time. In light of this teaching, Montesquieu may be said to have issued a firm warning to the Enlightenment philosophes he inspired.
Mansfield concludes his study with that very Tocqueville and his “startling Machiavellianism” (247). He, too, “feared that philosophy had become dogmatic and was giving bad advice to society as well as to other philosophers,” concluding “that the best way to oppose a bad philosophy was to show it bad effects rather than to argue openly against its mistaken premises” (249). But perhaps going beyond Montesquieu’s correction of Old Nick, Tocqueville opposes materialism with praise of spirituality as a way of moderating the effects of civil-social egalitarianism. In civil society itself, he moderates egalitarianism not by opposing democracy with by-now-weakened aristocrats (who might at best serve as benevolent ‘guides’ of democracy), but with civic associations consistent with democracy but resistant to its excesses. The risk Tocqueville sees is that with Machiavelli’s “destruction of gentlemanly honor the principle of egalitarian democracy is given entrance, later to develop into the spiritless sort of democratic republicanism Machiavelli did not want,” a form of government wherein “the princely element of mastery becomes the centralized administration” the Tocqueville calls “the science of despotism” (251). For “if risk can be contained by rational control, there is little or no need for virtue—or even of Machiavellian virtù—and rigorous necessity can be led by degrees to security and comfort, leaving honor and glory behind” (251). “Instead of giving aristocracy new life, Machiavelli had destroyed it with his formula of ferocity and cunning, lion and fox,” thereby inadvertently founding “modern democracy” (255). Now, it should be observed that Tocqueville doesn’t quite say that, saying rather that modern democracy evolved in rather the manner Montesquieu might expect, beginning not with Machiavelli but Christianity. Further, Christianity revealed what the ancient philosophers had reasoned out for and among themselves, that human beings are all equal in the sense of being all of the same natural species. It is this that enables Tocqueville to combine, as Mansfield so well puts it, “democracy, Christianity, and ancient nobility in a whole”—although “democratic overall,” to be sure (256). In this sense, “From Machiavelli…Tocqueville has learned how to reacquire the world” (258).
Note
- Strictly speaking, of course, Christian virtues do not save Christians souls; God does. Christian virtues are perfections of the soul made possible by the indwelling of God in the soul of the Christian, whose soul has been converted, turned around toward God thanks to the unmerited grace of God.
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