NewsletterDwarkesh Patel· 06-16 · 17:27

《君主论》被误读了五百年：拆解真实的马基雅维利

Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

Had Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time.

Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence.

In 1513 the Medici retook control of Florence and, wrongly suspecting Machiavelli of participating in a coup attempt, fired, tortured, and exiled him.

Machiavelli could have fled his exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents.

Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career’s lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici.

But at least the Medici were in a position to use his insights to defend Florence. Machiavelli the patriot did not want any other hands to touch this book, because those hands, armed with these lessons, might pose an existential danger to Florence.

The closest modern analogy, at least as Machiavelli would have seen it, would be Szilard’s letter warning FDR about the possibility of a nuclear fission bomb.

What were those insights? And how were they inspired by Machiavelli’s dangerous diplomatic missions all across Europe, and his extensive reading of antiquity? Watch this episode with Ada Palmer to find out!

By the way, Ada is launching a new podcast which I’m very excited about. The first season will be about Machiavelli – a perfect way to dive deeper into the topics we discussed in this episode. Subscribe at Beforecast’s website to be notified of the first episode, subscribe on YouTube, follow her on Patreon, and if you want even more Ada, check out her FixTheNews Podcast episode, and check out her books and more.

Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) – How Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival

(00:15:08) – Machiavelli’s analytical innovations

(00:23:58) – Why popes became warlords

(00:36:13) – Why the common people demanded nepotism

(00:47:57) – Cesare Borgia brought terror to rulers and justice to the people

(00:57:55) – Art as a proxy for war

(01:06:41) – Florence, a city famous in hell

(01:15:57) – The Prince was a job application to Machiavelli’s torturers

(01:41:39) – During the Renaissance, original ideas had to be couched in antiquity

(01:50:44) – Why copyright began with the Inquisition

(02:02:12) – Machiavelli wasn’t Machiavellian

Transcript

00:00:00 – How Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival

Dwarkesh Patel

Okay, I’m back with Ada Palmer, who is a science fiction author, composer, and historian at the University of Chicago. Today, I want to talk to you about Machiavelli. He writes The Prince. He dedicates it to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici and gives it to him in 1513. He says in the final chapter, “You’re the only person who can bring Italy from its current place of ruin and ravage.” Why were things so bad? What is the historical context in which he’s writing The Prince?

Ada Palmer

I’m going to give a two-part answer to that, although of course with any granular history there can be many parts. The papacy is part of it, and then the city-state structure of Italy is another part of it.

I’ll start with the city-state structure. There’s a principle in politics that when there’s long continuity of a government, and the government has been in power a long time, that government has a lot of legitimacy. People believe in its institutions. People are used to it. Even if you complain about it, it’s the government. When you break that—when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing—it doesn’t have that same staying power. So it’s very common when there’s one regime change for there to then be five regime changes, rapid fire, over and over.

We see this with how many iterations the French Republic goes through: the French Republic, and then restored monarchy, and then republic, and then monarchy. When a long thing cracks—boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—you get chaos. England’s Wars of the Roses are similar. There was one stable dynasty for a long time. The moment that a king is overthrown, then you have overthrow, overthrow, overthrow, overthrow for a long time, because the thread of continuity was cut.

In Machiavelli’s lifetime, that thread of continuity is cut for the majority of cities in Italy. And that guarantees, from his perspective, that there are going to be more, and more, and more overthrows in those governments. When Machiavelli was born, there were six or seven city-states in Italy that had had their governments uprooted recently. By the time he’s writing The Prince, it’s dozens, in fact, the majority of these places. So it’s volatile. Almost no government has staying power. Almost every government is ripe for yet another replacement, yet another replacement, yet another replacement. That’s half the answer of why he perceives there to be this urgency and this guarantee that there cannot be stability.

The other half is the papacy. The papacy, of course, is a long and evolving organism. The papacy is one of the oldest institutions in the world now. It was one of the oldest institutions in the world even then, even though this is 500 years ago. As we all know, when you have power centralized in an authority, especially an executive, there can be changes in how that executive uses that power. Each one sets norms for the next one.

Over the course of Machiavelli’s lifetime and just before, a bunch of consecutive popes expanded executive power, especially in the military side, and launched more wars, or did more arbitrary overthrow of governments. You have a number of city-states that are directly ruled by the papacy, and in theory, the pope can appoint anybody to be ruler of that city. Here is a pope. He has an illegitimate son. He wants his illegitimate son to be ruler of something, so he overthrows the government of a city and puts in his son. The next pope does it to three cities. The next pope does it to five. Soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it.

Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. This creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to, because there is no predictability to who’s going to be pope next. It isn’t hereditary. You can’t plan for it. The next pope is elected. As is often the case with elections, very frequently the next pope will be elected by a coalition of all the people who hate the current pope.

One of the things that electoral politics does is that it tends to swing, in which those outside of power work hard to get into power with the next regime. Let’s assume the average length of a papacy is ten years in this period. So every ten years, you suddenly have a completely unpredictable new monarch who’s almost guaranteed to be one of the enemies of the old monarch, and will therefore rip up and replace all of the things that that monarch tried to do with new things.

So Machiavelli, when he’s writing the last chapter of The Prince, is looking around and saying, “Okay, we have a perfect storm. Practically every polity in this region has just had the thread of legitimacy cut. Its institutions have no traditions. Its people have no investment in its current rulers. These are all pawns that have been knocked over before and barely stood up again. They’re ready to fall.” Meanwhile, nothing will stop the turnover of popes. The only thing that could stop the turnover of popes would be one person gaining enough power and ascendancy near this region, who has staying power, who has sons and heredity, that he can do what Cesare Borgia tried to do: have enough power near the papacy to strongly influence the next pope to create a kind of stability that’s otherwise impossible.

Dwarkesh Patel

So he wants the Medicis to not unify Italy, but stabilize Italy at the very least.

Ada Palmer

Exactly, by having conquered enough of a chunk that the papacy fears them and must negotiate with them, as opposed to the papacy being surrounded by small, weakened powers that will constantly be turned over and turned over and turned over.

Dwarkesh Patel

Right, and the pope now is a Medici, right?

Ada Palmer

At that moment, yes.

Dwarkesh Patel

So it makes it even more plausible. Let’s lay down a little more historical context. Before Machiavelli writes The Prince, he’s a bureaucratic diplomat. He meets through his career a lot of these famous figures. I want to know what he makes, for example, of King Louis of France, Maximilian of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire. I want to know what he made of Cesare Borgia.

Ada Palmer

He spends a lot of The Prince, in fact, trying to veil how much more he cares about Cesare Borgia than everyone else. It’s so interesting. He tries to be balanced. He tries to talk about this example, and this example, and this example, and Valentino, and this example. Sometimes he just can’t.

There’s that incredible, magical moment when he’s discussing Valentino’s fall. It’s the moment when he has amassed all this power, he’s successfully conquered almost everything within Italy. Suddenly both his father, the Pope, and him fall ill at once. When Machiavelli describes this, he’s saying, “Everything Cesare Borgia did, he did right. He conquered this kingdom. He would’ve kept it. The only reason he lost it was fortune.”

What Machiavelli should say is, “Valentino had planned for every contingency at his father’s death, except the possibility that he would also be on death’s door.” But that’s not what Machiavelli says. What Machiavelli says is, “He told me that he had planned.” The first person breaks in. Our historian cannot veil himself anymore. He cares too much. “He told me”, first person, that he had prepared for everything in the event of his father’s death, except the possibility that he himself would also be incapacitated at the moment.

It’s such a magical moment where the veil between the author and the reader breaks for just that moment. We realize that all of these others, he observed from a distance. But Machiavelli was in the room next to Valentino, at Valentino’s side through this. He had the most incredible, life-changing, first-person view of this man so unique, and charismatic, and terrifying, that when you read accounts of him, they range from “This was the most incredible, charismatic leader I’ve ever met,” to “This man was supernaturally charismatic to the degree that he must be literally the Antichrist or an incarnation of the angel of death on Earth, because I have no other explanation of how he could be so persuasive and charismatic.” Machiavelli was in the room. And every so often you just feel that he’s still in the spell of this incredible figure at whose side he had the scariest job in the world.

Machiavelli’s job dealing with Cesare Borgia… It’s very clear that the Borgia plan is to conquer the Papal States in the middle of Italy. Tuscany, Florence’s dominion, is this little notch, like a puzzle piece out of the side of the Papal States. Anybody with a map looking at it is like, “You’ve got to conquer that. You just have to conquer this. You can’t have a kingdom without it.” There is no way to stop it. So what do you do?

Machiavelli’s advice to his polity is: this time we’re not going to succeed in persuading this conqueror to pass us by. We can’t bribe him into doing something else permanently. But we can buy time. We can absolutely and abjectly swear to do anything he wants. We can give him our forces, and we can give him our money. We can pay him and help him conquer the rest of it, and betray our allies. Betray Bologna. Florence had had a 300-year alliance to defend Bologna. He said, “We have to break it. The whole world is broken right now. We have to break every promise and every hereditary alliance we had. We must be at the side of this man.”

The only possible survival mechanism is to win from him through loyalty, through support, and through Machiavelli being at his ear whispering forever, “Florence is loyal. Florence is loyal.” By that, we buy the boon of Polyphemus, the terrifying promise of the conqueror: “I like you, my guest. I’ll eat you last.” That’s the republic’s only hope. That’s Machiavelli’s job: to stand next to the scariest man who has lived in Europe since Frederick Barbarossa and whisper constantly in his ear, “The Florentine Republic will support you and will give your grace anything you ask. Just eat us last.”

Dwarkesh Patel

Doesn’t it contradict what he was saying in The Prince about how you should never rise with the help of great powers, for even in success you have empowered somebody who is stronger than you and at whose mercy you are?

Ada Palmer

This is not Florence aiming to rise. This is not Florence expecting that it will gain anything by this. This is Florence knowing it will lose. Machiavelli’s very open about the fact that if Alexander had lived another year, Valentino would have finished his conquests, and taken Florence at last, and it would’ve been over. But popes are mortal. Buying time is sometimes the survival mechanism.

So Machiavelli has this incredible firsthand experience of being with Valentino through all of these decisions, being with him at the massacre at Senigallia when rumor had reached Valentino that some of his people were terrified of him and plotting to overthrow him. They were so scared of him, they decided to abandon the plot, and he heard. He met with them and told them, “I forgive you. It’s okay. You’ve renewed your loyalty to me. You’ve passed the test. I trust you. All is well.” He invites them to the banquet, and then massacres them all. The forgiveness is false. The betrayals are punished.

There’s this amazing letter a couple of months afterward where Machiavelli’s loved ones are writing from Florence because they’ve received a letter from him after the massacre at Senigallia. They say, “Oh, thank God, you’re alive. We had no idea. All we heard was that he had massacred a large number of the people who were with him. We didn’t know if you were alive.” It took months in the chaos, the postal system had completely broken down. It took months for them to get word that Machiavelli was still alive. They didn’t know whether he had been caught up in the conspiracy. He easily could’ve been on a list of names of people the conspirators intended to recruit, and been gone. So his wife and his loved ones back at home, his children, had to wait months to find out whether he too had been slaughtered. It felt to them like a miracle that he hadn’t.

But it meant that he watched these incredible deeds: you encounter them, you forgive them, you renew vows of amity—sacred vows taken in the cathedral—and then you slaughter them at dinner, violating the laws of hospitality. Dante would say if you do that, you’ve committed such a grave sin that you’re not just regular damned. A devil comes up out of Hell and takes your soul out of your body and inhabits you. You’re actually already in Hell even though your body is still alive on Earth, because that’s how heinous a sin this is. And yet, it works, and all the rest of Valentino’s men are more loyal to him afterward than ever before, and won’t even whisper to each other about dissatisfaction, because even the faintest whiff of conspiracy might result in death.

So why does Valentino’s kingdom, for which he did everything right, ultimately fall apart? Because he happens to eat the same thing that gives him food poisoning as his father, and happens to be ill at the wrong moment. Also the puppet that he manages to get in power, Pius III, dies too fast, and then he’s outmaneuvered by Julius. If all those things hadn’t gone wrong in a row, the kingdom would’ve stood, and indeed, he would’ve conquered Florence.

Machiavelli is constantly reminding us that, yes, we have all of these things we can try to do. We can remember it’s better to be feared than loved. We can remember not to be hated. We have power over, at maximum, half of what causes outcomes. The other half is always going to be fortune. We look at Machiavelli. We know he’s the origin of utilitarian thought, and that he says we need to evaluate people’s deeds based on outcome. But he doesn’t just say we need to evaluate their deeds based on outcome. He says we need to evaluate their deeds based on what the most probable outcome was before fortune intervened.

So he says people look at Valentino Borgia and say, “But the Borgias fell. They were feared, and then they were hated, and then they fell, and then their enemies took power and chiseled their coats of arms off of every surface in Rome, so that to this day you’re walking through Rome and you sit down at a pizzeria and there’s a weird scar on the wall, and that scar is where the Borgia bull is no more.” People want to make the moral of that be, “Don’t do what the Borgias did. They fell.” Machiavelli’s like, “No, they did not fall because of their choices. They fell because half of what happens in the world is never in our control. You can do everything right, and it’s out of your control. But we have to evaluate what would have happened, and therefore we should imitate them, because everything they did was right.”

00:15:08 – Machiavelli’s analytical innovations

Dwarkesh Patel

I think one misconception of Machiavelli that I had, because I had not read these books before, is that he says the means don’t matter, the end matters. There’s a virtue ethic sense in which maybe he doesn’t think the means matter, but he is way more concerned about the means than I would’ve naively thought. He thinks the means are incredibly important, because the means by which you achieve power determine how stable and how fruitful that power will be.

In the context of military conflicts, he says if you achieve some power with the help of mercenaries or with the help of great powers—people who become stronger than you as a result of you achieving power—that is a very precarious spot to be in. But speaking of Julius, he makes another point that if you achieve your power by lying, by breaking oaths, by being unfaithful, that this is okay, because his view is that people will forget that you are not faithful. They will just take you at your word the next time they encounter you.

It’s actually a very interesting meditation on by what means you can achieve power that will make that power stable versus not. The fact that he thinks breaking your word is totally fine…

Ada Palmer

It’s even subtler than that. Because if you are someone who breaks your word and you break it this way, it’ll bite you in the ass. If you break it these ways, it’ll be okay.

He also does analysis of figures like Savonarola, who would make prophecies and promises, and then some of them would happen and some of them wouldn’t. He would then make new ones and correct what he said yesterday. He handled his manipulation and untruths badly, in Machiavelli’s analysis, in a way that did turn people against him and make him lose power. Partly because Savonarola, as a religious demagogue, the core of his power was people believing that he was divinely inspired and that he wouldn’t make mistakes and wouldn’t err. So his power base was fragile vis-à-vis untruth. For him, because of the specific shape of his power and then the specific way he handled his contradictions, that did hurt him.

Whereas if it’s somebody like Cesare Borgia, who will make an alliance and work with that ally for a while and then betray them—because meanwhile he was such an effective conqueror and he was so scary and everyone was so afraid of him—even when he would betray an ally, his other allies would say, “I’ve got to be more faithful to him so that the next person to be betrayed isn’t me, and try to work hard to be in the good graces of the prince so that I’m not next”, as opposed to turning on him, because he was so scary.

Savonarola was not scary. Savonarola was charismatic and persuasive and had one of these voices that made crowds thrill and women swoon. Decades later, when people asked Michelangelo what Savonarola had been like—when Savonarola had been dead for decades—Michelangelo’s answer was, “I still hear his voice.” He had one of those charismatic presences. That wasn’t enough when he started flip-flopping on policy and truth. Whereas Valentino was so scary that he could betray his top general and seize his lands and overthrow his city, and all of his other generals would say, “Better step even further into line.”

So it’s not just that lying is okay, it’s that lying is sometimes okay if you check these other boxes, and it’s not if you don’t. So this is even more reinforcement of how much he zooms in on the means. If you do A and B, you’re okay, but if you do A and C, you’re not. He’s looking at the minutiae of different ways you can wield power and different reasons people can have to follow you. If you’re a prince who’s decided to invest in being loved, you have to keep it up, or cultivate being feared alongside it. If you’ve invested heavily in being feared, there are things you can then do that you can’t do if you’re a prince whose power depends on being loved.

Dwarkesh Patel

This actually gets to the famous quote in The Prince, “It is better to be feared than loved.” What he’s getting at there is, I think, that he’s very cynical about people’s nature. If people make you a promise, they’ll just go back on it. If your power base depends on people’s promises and loyalties, as soon as your rule seems to be tattering, they’ll go back on it. Whereas if your rule depends on people having the expectation that if they break their oath to you, they’ll be punished, that’s much more stable.

He basically thinks people will act as badly as they are allowed to, whether they’re the tyrant or the people or the nobles. This goes back to the thing in The Discourses. His whole justification of checks and balances is not dissimilar to the founders of the US and their reason for wanting checks and balances and wanting to put different factions against each other. He’s just cynical and thinks people will act as badly as you allow them to.

Ada Palmer

On that topic, Machiavelli is the first person that we have ever in the European tradition to suggest that it could be viable for there to be more than one political party in a state at the same time, and that they would compete against each other and vent the society’s tension through competition and vie to try to dominate an election and then the next one. This is what we’re used to, but this is innovative in Machiavelli. He talks about how competition within a city, if the parties are kind of stable—he’s observing Siena as one of the examples of this—can vent local tensions and allow interior adjustments of who has power, and be stable. I’m going to come back to interior adjustments of who has power in a second.

The standard attitude toward political parties is that if there are two political parties in a polity, it will not be stable until one of those political parties is dead, and their heads have been cut off and put on spikes, and their houses have been burned down and paved over. That has been Florence’s solution to political parties before. Florence massacred its Ghibellines and killed all of them, and rubbed salt into the earth where the houses used to be so nothing can grow there. Nothing still grows there. Then when the Black Guelphs and the White Guelphs split into two sub-parties, they immediately started slaughtering each other as well. The standard was that one party must wipe out the other party for there to be stability. There are comparatively few examples, although Florence’s neighbor Siena is one, where political parties managed to not only coexist side by side but be politically helpful.

Dwarkesh Patel

One element of governance, or of being a good prince at the time, that I didn’t appreciate but Machiavelli makes a huge point of, is how formidable and reputable people consider you to be. That’s relevant both for preventing others from invading you and for extracting concessions from other people. In his diplomatic career, he is sent out to a bunch of different foreign polities to basically determine, “Hey, is this a serious person?” So Maximilian is trying to extract a bribe from Florence to not invade it on its way down to Italy. Florence says, “Go check out if this guy’s for real.” He has to make some judgment about this person.

Ada Palmer

It’s useful to remember, Florence has paid these bribes a lot. Florence’s tactic is: if someone is invading the area, can we bribe them? Because paying somebody to not attack you is a much more surefire thing than preparing to actually fight against them. Your family’s lands get trampled by soldiers. You suffer economically. So it’s an old Florentine tactic. It’s not a new thing that Maximilian is threatening to invade Italy and trying to extract a bribe.

Florence basically every year is like, “Okay, who do we need to bribe this year to not invade us? Here’s this year’s bribing-a-king budget. To whom does it go? Is Maximilian a serious threat, or are we saving this money in case there’s a threat from somebody more serious like the King of Naples or the King of France or Milan or the Venetians?”

00:23:58 – Why popes became warlords

Dwarkesh Patel

At this time, the pope is not just a spiritual leader but a temporal power.

Ada Palmer

Very much so.

Dwarkesh Patel

He and his son are literally fighting wars against other Catholics, but the other Catholics are fighting them back. What does it mean to be a Catholic who is fighting a war against the pope?

Ada Palmer

Here is where geographic proximity is everything. If you’re far from Rome—when you’re Denmark or Iceland, and the pope is all the way over there—the way you interact with him is that occasionally an incredibly impressive papal legate will visit. There’ll be vast pomp and circumstance, and the city will rename a street in honor of the fact that somebody sent by the pope has visited. He has this great power to say yes or no to petitions, and different countries have been trying to petition for specific things for ages, and the pope’s legate is here to interview the emperor, to judge whether the queen can be queen or not, and it feels like a big deal, and the pope is very abstract.

It’s easy to have a lot of respect for that pope, because what do you see that pope do? You see that pope in pomp and circumstance. You see that pope make judgments about fates of popes and kings. You see that pope put out papal bulls and edicts that give theological answers to questions. You see that pope exercise judgment of life or death over people at a distance. He’s very abstract, and the difference between one pope and the next pope is kind of small from your perspective. You don’t see their policy differences.

If you’re in Italy, the pope is that asshole who went to college with your brother and beat him up when they were at college, and then was drunken and irresponsible at middle age, and you’ve been negotiating with him in these other jobs, and you know this jerk. You know his family. You know the other jerks who are also competitors for this. You’re allied with him, you’re not allied with him. His ancestors are allies of yours or not allies of yours. He’s a specific dude.

You’re much more likely to judge a pope based on, “He’s that guy.” This is not Pope Julius II. This is Giuliano della Rovere, and I judge him based on his uncle who put him in power, and the actions of his friends, and the actions of the city he’s from. You know all of his dirty laundry. You are subject to the fact that when he moves into power, everyone who’s related to him is going to get promoted within Italy, and everybody who’s not is going to get removed from Italy. So it’s much easier for an Italian to see this pope, and it’s actually quite hard to see the papacy. That’s how you have these fascinating wars where even the cities that are hereditarily incredibly loyal to the papacy will sometimes be fighting a war against the papacy.

All Italy is divided into these two factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Theoretically, what these two factions mean is that Guelph powers, Guelph families, Guelph cities believe the correct successor to the Roman emperors is the pope. The pope is the emperor. He has the right to be the ruler of Italy, and indeed of everything that was once Rome’s. He is the ultimate political and military power, and he is the rightful and only rightful overlord of Italy.

The Ghibellines believe that in 800 AD, when Charlemagne conquered a bunch of stuff and made the empire that we now refer to as the Holy Roman Empire, when the Pope crowned Charlemagne, he delegated the political and military side of his authority to that emperor, and made himself the spiritual authority, but the emperor the political and temporal authority. Therefore, the rightful ruler of Italy is the emperor, the successors of Charlemagne.

These are the two factions for which these parties fought originally, 300 years ago. These days, what these factions actually mean is, “Those jerks murdered Uncle Tybalt, and we will never forgive them.” They are the team that is our enemy, and we are this team. They are that team, and we hate them. We want to crush them because they want to crush us.

This means that sometimes a pope will be elected who’s from a hereditarily Ghibelline family, and the pope will start promoting people from the anti-papal faction, and the pro-papal faction will unite against the pope. It makes no rational sense until we remember that they are serving the pope abstractly. So you get multiple situations where there’s a war between Rome and Florence over the fact that Florence wants to defend papal authority in papal lands against the pope itself, because that individual pope was from the anti-papal faction.

Dwarkesh Patel

Do they not believe that he is the vicar of Christ on Earth? It makes sense in a normal political state for you to think, “I believe in America, but I don’t like the president,” or something. But isn’t the pope supposed to be…?

Ada Palmer

Yes and no. Again, when you’re far away, yes. When you’re close up, you know too much of the dirty laundry of these people. So let me use a fun example: the most passive-aggressive letter ever written in the entire history of time, in my opinion.

There’s a type of ceremony that happens when a new pope is elected, which is the giving of oaths of obedience. A major ambassador from every polity in Christendom comes to Rome. They wait in line for a long time, and then they give a long-winded speech about how great the monarch is that they’re there to represent, and how vast his power is, blah, blah, blah, and how pious he is, and how glad he is, Your Holiness, that you’re the pope now. Congratulations on behalf of my wonderful king.

And you’re supposed to send the highest-status possible person who can leave your polity without it falling down. You might send a younger son of the king. You might send a lord chancellor. In the case of Florence, you’re going to send the most prominent citizen you can.

So when Pope Sixtus was elected, it was Lorenzo de’ Medici himself—not the dedicatee of The Prince, the grandfather and namesake of the dedicatee of The Prince—who went to deliver this oration of obedience, which means literally prostrating yourself in front of the pope, literally kissing his feet, and giving this oath. Lorenzo did this for Pope Sixtus, with whom he was negotiating to try desperately to get a cardinalship for his brother. Pope Sixtus instead organized the Pazzi conspiracy to try to butcher the Medici family, killed Lorenzo’s brother, killed a number of his allies as well, and attempted to have a coup to take over Florence.

Then the next pope was elected after Sixtus, Pope Innocent, who was as everyone knew, a puppet of the same faction that Sixtus was from. So we go from this very dangerous pope who had tried to wipe out Lorenzo’s family to a puppet of the same faction. Lorenzo sent his son, instead of himself, to give this oath. He had his son deliver the message, apologizing to His Holiness that, “I could not come myself, but the last time this duty fell upon me, I had a brother upon whom I could leave the burden of the state in my absence. Since now I have no brother, I cannot come in person.” It’s a very respectful letter, but it’s also very overt about the fact that he does not trust and will not again trust this faction.

So they negotiate very carefully how to deal with the fact that the popes have this great spiritual power, but sometimes the popes are acting as horrifically selfish warlords. That’s also something which has worsened over time, and it’s important for us to remember that the papacy becomes gradually more corrupted over time. This is because with every generation, more people leave donations of wealth to the Church. A widow who has no son and has property decides to piously leave this to a monastery. The Church gets wealthier and wealthier. As the Church gets wealthier, with wealth comes power. More and more power is in the state. This makes a stronger and stronger incentive for every ambitious family to send their second son into the Church.

And this goes all the way down. We have personal letters of Machiavelli writing to and from relatives of his, where they’re debating the correct-sized bribe to offer to buy a priesthood for his little brother, Totto. They don’t want to offer too big a bribe, because it would impoverish the family. They don’t want to offer too small a bribe. They’ve heard that another family that’s after this priesthood offered an extra big bribe. That’s kind of not fair. How do they respond to being out-bribed? They just write about this as the most everyday, normal thing in the world. This is a wealthy merchant-prince-level family. They are in the top 5% of wealth and power in Florence, but not in the top 1%. But for them, too, it’s normal to talk about paying a bribe to get a priesthood. That’s just how it works.

Every generation sees the Church get wealthier and have more power. Therefore the incentives to corrupt it are even greater. It even becomes a kind of prisoner’s dilemma system. If you’re the duke and you don’t manipulate the papacy, if you don’t bribe the pope, if you don’t work hard to get your brother to be bishop, and your enemies do, you’re screwed. So you even see it as defensive: “I must manipulate the Church. It’s the only way my people will be safe. If I don’t manipulate the Church, my enemies may manipulate the Church, and then there’s danger.”

This happens all the way up to the scale of kings, where popes can make your enemy the most powerful bishop in your kingdom or can deny you the right to marry, because inevitably the person you want to marry is a cousin, and you’re going to need a special dispensation to marry them. The pope can prevent that and mess with your marriage alliances. You need the pope very desperately if you’re a king. You also need the pope all the way down. That means bribes and other kinds of incentives make the papacy more corrupt with each generation.

So the papacy is worse in everyone’s lived experience than it used to be even a few popes ago. You see every generation for 100 years say, “Popes are much worse now than popes used to be when I was young.” Everybody says that. Dante says that in 1300. Machiavelli’s grandparents’ generation is saying that in 1400. Machiavelli is saying that in 1500. In everybody’s lived experience, the popes are getting more secular, more military, and more corrupt over time. It’s a gradual accumulation, and it comes to a peak, as such things do, triggering the reformation, when it becomes so bad that there has to be a massive move against it.

Machiavelli, in an interesting way, anticipates this, because Machiavelli says, “All institutions are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed and returned to their foundations, or they will collapse under the weight of their corruption.” He thinks that the papacy has been undergoing this, and that Christianity has been undergoing this. And that, if not for the fact that St. Francis of Assisi—and also to some extent St. Dominic a couple of centuries before his time—reformed the Church and brought in a lot more popular support, Christianity would already have cracked under the weight of its own corruption 200 years before, and that it will need such a restoration again—as any institution needs, as city governments need, as republics need—as corruption accumulates over time.

00:36:13 – Why the common people demanded nepotism

Dwarkesh Patel

One big way in which our world is different from 500 years ago is the focus on patronage and it being the basis of political power. It was much more prominent, right? So that’s something that would be interesting to understand.

Ada Palmer

It’s not just that it was more prominent, but that it was the fundamental glue of the society, as opposed to one of several glues of the society. Patronage, which was also familial and therefore entangled with nepotism, was so fundamental. For example, when Alessandro Farnese was elected Pope Paul III in the middle of the 1500s, he didn’t corruptly make one of his kinsmen commander of the papal armies. He instead appointed a really competent, experienced general instead of his own not very competent, illegitimate son.

And there were riots in Rome. “Your Holiness, the people demand more nepotism. You must appoint your illegitimate son to command your armies, because your illegitimate son will never betray you, and we will know we can trust the papal armies not to turn on Rome if the Pope’s son is the commander. We don’t know that about this other commander. He might turn against Your Holiness. There might be a rift between the Pope and the papal armies if he’s not somebody who rises and falls with you the way your son does. Therefore, by popular demand, the people want more nepotism, because the system depends on it.”

That’s how you see how the system depends on it. There are levels of trust that the patronage system creates, because it involves multi-generational entanglement of families. If these families rise, they rise together. If they fall, they fall together. That creates levels of trust that can sustain things like this world where the oath of a soldier is to his commander, not to the polity that he serves.

In modernity, we realize another solution to that. The oath of the soldier is not to the commander, but to the Constitution, or to the country, or to the people. But in this period, the oath of the soldier is to the commander, mostly because communications are so slow that the commander has to be able to give speedy field commands. But it means you’re creating an army and handing it to a man. If you cannot trust that man, then the people will be terrified that there could be a rift between Rome and its own armies, or between Rome and its treasurer, or between Rome and its other allies. Patronage is the glue that makes things work all the way down.

All the way down to the level of, if you need a defense attorney, that’s done through patronage. The outcomes of trials are a really great way to see patronage. We’re all familiar with the fact that law codes in the Middle Ages are really cruel: death for everything. Death for theft, death for adultery, death for homosexuality, death for setting fire to the prince’s beehive. Whatever it is, that’s the sentence on the books. You look at the actual trial records and maybe one in 100 convictions for that crime actually ends in a capital sentence. Almost all of the other ones end in a fine or a public flogging, but not in the sentence that’s on the books. We say, “Why and how is that happening?” Patronage is the answer.

So say it’s the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, and you’re a carpenter, and your teenage son gets drunk and punches somebody in a brawl, breaks the guy’s nose in a way that makes him die. He accidentally kills a guy in a drunken brawl and your son is now on trial for murder. You’re a carpenter. You have worked for the rich family whose family carpenter you are. Let’s say it’s the Medici family. Whenever they need new pews for the family church or new furniture or repairs for the family gates, they go to you.

So you go to them and say, “My son is in danger. He’s on trial. Please put in a good word.” Your patron has the ability to influence the judges, and they will put in a good word for you, and you will get a lighter sentence. This is an ancestor of having a character witness to say, “So-and-so is such a good person, they should have the milder punishment, not the more severe one.”

The norm is: you’re accused of a severe crime, you’re put on trial for your life, your patron intervenes, and you get a lighter sentence. This is how justice is supposed to work. This is a very severe line that changes in the 18th century with the Enlightenment. Because we now think of proportional justice: the sentence for the crime should be this, and ideal justice is that everyone who is guilty of the crime gets that sentence. That is fair. It doesn’t matter who you know. It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor. The sentence should be the same. This is the ideal of Enlightenment justice.

The ideal of this period’s justice, which is much more shaped by Christianity, is that the purpose of the trial is the spiritual interior correction of the soul of the sinner. Therefore the ideal outcome is for them to fear for their life. They’re before a terrifying judge who is the earthly representation of God. They know that they’re guilty, and they deserve to be thrown into the pits of hell. But miraculously, they are given grace, and they are pardoned. The process of being put on trial, fearing for your life, begging to the patron, and then receiving mercy is supposed to be an earthly preview of the process your soul will undergo when you are before divine judgment. Therefore it should make you come out the other end a good person.

The goal of the justice system is the spiritual improvement of the sinner and the hope that they will come out the other end better and more likely to go to heaven. Even when people are being sentenced to death, there are religious organizations who sit with them overnight, having a final prayer group, and walk with them to the gallows, holding their hand and holding a painting of the Virgin Mary in front of their face, so that to the very last moment, the person who’s about to be executed is thinking about heaven. The ideal outcome of the execution is that the soul goes to heaven.

So the whole structure of the justice system expects the intervention of a patron, who represents the intervention of a patron saint, persuading the judge, who is God, to give you mercy. So when we see 100 trials end with 99 where the person paid a small fine, and one where the person was executed, what that actually means is that in 99, their patron stepped in. Somebody persuaded somebody who put in a good word, and they got the light sentence. In one, that person had fallen out of the patronage network. That person had angered their boss, their protector. That’s why it went all the way to being a capital offense.

Probably a lot of people listening are familiar with Giordano Bruno, very famous as a martyr for science because he was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. Fewer people know that that was not his first Inquisition trial. He was investigated a number of times by the Inquisition for doing various radical forms of thought. The earlier trials had the usual outcome for that kind of trial. He had a patron, there were rich people that he worked with or for, the university was hosting him. They put in a good word. He’s fine. The Inquisition tells him, “Be good,” and things continue as they are.

That time, he had angered the person he worked for. He pissed off his patron. It’s his patron who turns him into the Inquisition and says, “This guy is a charlatan. He promised he could teach me these things, and he can’t. I don’t trust him. He’s no good. Throw the book at him.” The reason that trial goes all the way to a capital sentence is that he doesn’t have a patron. He’s the 99th case that time.

If he had had a patron protecting him, despite how radical his stuff was, he would’ve been okay. We see that in the trial of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was candidly substantially more radical than Giordano Bruno. But when Pico is on trial, Lorenzo de’ Medici and other powerful people really care about Pico, and they pull out all the stops. Lorenzo talks to his brother-in-law, who’s an Orsini. The Orsini have enormous influence in Rome. They get permission for Pico to be let go and sent home to Lorenzo to sort of live under house arrest, under Lorenzo’s promise that he’ll be good from then on.

Or you have Marsilio Ficino who is this radical Platonist who publishes a book on how to project your soul outside of time and summon angels, arguing for the existence of reincarnation, and is very clearly being extremely theologically weird. This is the man who wrote the best letter of recommendation ever written in the history of time when he was recommending a young scholar for a job with the King of Hungary. He writes in the recommendation letter, “This young man is the reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas, so you should give him a job.” Now, that is a letter of recommendation. But you think, “The reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas, huh?”

And the Inquisition comes knocking on Ficino’s door and is like, “Hmm, reincarnation?” Ficino’s like, “Oh, no. Help. Talk to Lorenzo.” Lorenzo talks to his brother-in-law, Cardinal Orsini. Cardinal Orsini shuts it down, and Ficino is told, “Maybe lay off talking quite so overtly about the reincarnation.” Ficino says, “Yes, of course, and I will only teach very pious people how to summon angels and project their souls out of their bodies. I promise I won’t teach it to anybody who will use these powers irresponsibly.” The Inquisition is like, “Okay,” and goes home. Because patronage kicked in.

Patronage is the glue that makes everything work. You can’t even stay in a hotel or buy an apple—I’m not kidding—without a patron. You arrive at a city. Nobody knows you. You’re a stranger. What you have is a letter of recommendation from your patron who’s friends with some important person there. You present that at the hotel. That’s why they let you stay.

00:47:57 – Cesare Borgia brought terror to rulers and justice to the people

Dwarkesh Patel

To tie together a couple of threads you were talking about, The Prince is painting a picture of regimes being incredibly unstable. You have to worry about foreign powers. You have to worry about rival factions within your own country. You have to worry about mercenaries. You have to worry about lots of different things. So any given regime is very unstable. So what had to happen for things to get more stable? We’re talking about a couple of the ways in which people owed their loyalties not to the regime, but to others within the regime, which created instability.

In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli talks about how one of the reasons the Roman Empire’s fall was instigated is that these generals were months away on the frontier fighting these wars because the empire was so big, they had to amass for periods of years—or in some cases, for Caesar of course, decades—the command of so many men who have for decades just been listening to this guy tell them what to do, who to fight next. This is the person they’re loyal to. As opposed to, say, if the consuls could be giving dictates every single day, then the loyalty could be to the regime in Rome.

Same with patronage, if there’s not a system of deterministic justice like we have in the modern world today. A lot of The Prince and Discourses on Livy is dedicated to: how do you make sure that a family is not pissed off that their son got killed and it wasn’t avenged? If you just have a reliable criminal justice system, that problem goes away. It’s the same with the welfare state and getting rid of the patronage system. If you don’t have to rely on this family, then this disintermediates them, and the state can have your loyalty.

So it’s interesting to connect all these threads together—communication time, impartial justice system, impartial welfare state—as being what is required for the regime to have enough legitimacy and then, as a result, enough stability to have modern nation states.

Ada Palmer

Yeah. One thing that everyone is surprised by is that when Cesare Borgia—Valentino is much more what he’s called in the period—conquers these cities in Central Italy, he goes in, and he massacres the ruling family. He works hard to kill every member of them that he can so that there isn’t a potential rival claimant to come displace him. He implements neutral justice, because he and his cronies have no side in that city. They aren’t connected with one group of families against another. When they implement justice, they do so neutrally because they aren’t interested in the local backstory of factions.

As a result, to everyone’s surprise, he moves into a city, he massacres the rulers, he implements an authoritarian regime, and he’s incredibly popular and beloved by the people. Everyone says, “Why are they liking this man? He is a cruel, murdering tyrant.” The answer is, for the first time in generations, they have something close to fair justice.

Meaning, it used to be that there was one faction in power and another faction out of power. In our scenario where a carpenter’s son gets drunk and kills someone in a drunken brawl, if that carpenter’s son is the carpenter of the power that’s in power, then there will be no justice and no consequences for this murder. It’ll be maybe the smallest of fines. If that carpenter works for the families that are out of power, then throw the book at him. His son will be executed for that death. There will be no fair justice. The outcome of the sentence will be entirely who’s in power and out of power, not the fairness of the case.

But when both of those ruling families have been wiped out, and an outside power is here, and a homicide takes place, the neutral judge hears this neutrally and gives the same answer regardless of whose family’s carpenter that is. The people who have lived in generations of “justice for some and injustice for others,” suddenly having equitable justice, are delighted by this and find that wrongs are finally being punished. The people that they’ve resented and hated for so long who are in power are finally being punished for the crimes that they commit.

This makes Valentino’s conquering and violent regime incredibly popular with the everyday people of these cities, who are therefore willing to sign up for his armies and help defend his conquests and keep them in power and man his fortresses. So Machiavelli and others are startled by this. They had expected that if a conqueror moves in and massacres the rulers of a city, everyone in the city will hate and fear that conqueror. But if the conqueror is feared and not hated, because he wiped them out but then was fair toward the people, then it works.

Dwarkesh Patel

So why would it have been so bad if Valentino took over Florence and he had survived? He would’ve massacred maybe the ruling regime at the time, the republic, but I don’t know what Machiavelli is especially concerned about. Would the cultural treasures of Florence and everything have survived?

Ada Palmer

The cultural treasures of Florence would potentially have been okay. There’s two answers to that. One of them is that Machiavelli is very adamant that if you live such that there is somebody who can have you summarily executed—he can walk by you in the street and point at you and say, “Him, kill him,” and it happens—then you are not free. In his vocabulary in the text, if you live in a state where there is an arbitrary power who can have you put to death, you are a slave. If instead you live in a system where there must be a trial, and there must be a process, and this must be examined and public, if there is a system, then you have liberty. That system may be unfair. It may be biased. It may be, in Machiavelli’s case, the very system that tortured and exiled him. But there was a system. He considers that difference to be enormously important.

So if Valentino conquers Florence, it’s not going to be that system anymore. There will be a man who can walk down the street and point at a Florentine citizen and say, “Kill him,” and they will kill him. Will that tyrant be fair? Maybe. Will that tyrant exercise this power well? Perhaps. Will his successor be worse or better than him? We don’t know. We can’t predict. It’s a monarchy. It’s vulnerable to good successors and bad successors. But the people of Florence are not free if there exists a man who can say, “Execute him.”

That meant a lot to Machiavelli, and it meant a lot to the Florentine people. It’s kind of hard for us to see how few liberties and how little franchise they had and yet how much they cared. Florentines are constantly willing to go into the street and risk their lives flying the banner that says “Libertas” across it: liberty. The banner LIBERTAS is the coat of arms of the Signoria, the Senate, which is selected from the 1% super mega elite, tiny minority of the city that is eligible to be in government.

They aren’t rioting to defend their right to participate in the republic. They’re rioting to defend their boss’s boss’s right to be in the republic. Yet they care so deeply about it, and they consider it fundamentally different from the situation in which there is a man who can walk down the street and point at you and say, “Him, kill him.” That tradition of liberty means a lot and would be gone even if the most beneficent tyrant in the world took the city. So that’s half of the answer.

Dwarkesh Patel

Can I ask about that real quick? When Lorenzo de’ Piero di Medici takes over, is he not that guy?

Ada Palmer

That’s the second half of the answer. There is a huge difference between when the conqueror is from your city, loves your city, and wants to take care of your city, and when the conqueror is from the outside. When the Medici take over Florence, they want Florence, and they want Florence to be Florence. They want all of its beauty and all of its treasures to still exist and be theirs. They would never consider razing important parts of it to the ground. They would never consider threatening the Florentines with, “We will destroy your city walls,” or, “We will destroy your cathedral if you rebel.” Any outsider would.

So Florence looks more like Florence under a Medici duke than Milan looks like Republican Milan under a Visconti or Sforza duke, or than Ferrara, which has no remnants of its republic, does under the dukes d’Este, who can do anything they want, including murderously gouging each other’s eyes out and the city will never take one step against them.

So Machiavelli is aware that if Florence has to fall, falling to the Medici is gentlest. It’s most volatile perhaps, because they aren’t going to be feared as much as an outside conqueror would be feared, but certainly gentlest. You preserve some important rights when you’re conquered from inside that you don’t when you’re conquered from outside.

00:57:55 – Art as a proxy for war

Dwarkesh Patel

Obviously, we remember this period for producing all these great cultural artifacts, all these amazing buildings, all this art. Then we’re talking about the precariousness of the prince, the constant wars, how they’re literally fighting all the time. How is there this surplus that is available for all these different projects?

You write in your book about how the older Lorenzo de’ Medici spends what would be today, because of the expense of building libraries and buying books, $30 million to build a library to educate his grandsons. How is there all the surplus available for education and arts and so forth in a period where everybody’s fighting everybody, and if you lose a war, your city will get, if not razed, at least the ruling faction of it will get killed?

Ada Palmer

Half of that answer is finance is incredibly profitable. If you’re the banking center, the amount of money that is flowing in is staggering. Big Wool, the big industry for Florence, is also incredibly wealthy. In the same way that Henry Ford becomes incredibly rich, in a period when a suit of clothing is something you save up for like buying a car, and everybody needs one, you can get very rich that way.

So, there’s lots of money. But, do you remember how it’s often said that the biggest impact per dollar for US defense spending is the Fulbright Program? Because diplomacy is cheaper than war. Sending a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young graduate student out to a country to enthuse about its culture and make connections and make everyone feel positive does a lot more to avoid conflict, and also get help in conflict, than the same amount of spending on the actual army does. Dollar for dollar, diplomacy is cheaper than war.

They’re using the art to do diplomacy. So in one sense, if you’re not doing the art, you would have to spend more on the war. It’s not that the art is being made from a surplus of the war. It’s, “Oh, no, we can’t afford enough armies to actually defend us against France. Even if we spent every penny we have on armies, it would not defend us against France. But we sure can spend it on painting fleur-de-lis all over our seat of government and creating beautiful, expensive gifts for the King of France, so that when the King of France comes, he will feel like we are friends and we are giving him all of this cultural output. If we fought him, we would lose. But if we play the culture victory game, that’s cheaper, and we can try to win.”

Dwarkesh Patel

We talked about this last time, the experience of what it must have been like for a French diplomat to arrive at Florence and look at these people he considered to be nothing, not even descended from the Caesars, and they’re producing all this stuff.

When one goes to visit Florence now, the interest is in part because these are historical artifacts, because somebody made them 500 years ago. But if you’re seeing them at the time, this would be something either you thought only the Romans could have done that we can’t do anymore, or something that even the Romans couldn’t have done.

Ada Palmer

Right. They’re high-tech then. They’re like when we look at an incredibly impressive skyscraper that’s taller and more precarious and amazing than any past skyscraper.

Dwarkesh Patel

I think that is an underrated aspect of what it must have been like to be a foreign power evaluating Florence at the time.

Ada Palmer

Yeah. We have to remind ourselves that these are high-tech achievements as well as historic achievements. Also that this is a period in which backwards is forwards. That is to say, this is not a period that, like us, thinks of the future as where potential is, and that humanity might get better and better over time. The potential of humanity is recapturing Rome. Backwards is forwards. If we can get more and more like that, that’ll be better. That’s what we aspire to.

They do debate: can we surpass the Romans? Can we make things even better than the Romans? But it’s an “if,” it’s a debate. It’s not a “definitely, of course”. For us, it’s “definitely, of course.” We’re moving forward. We’re trying to build bigger and more impressive things. Even people who are cynical about progress will say, “Yeah, we will be more powerful in the future. We’ll be able to do more. We may use it to stab ourselves in the foot, but we will be more powerful in the future.”

For them, it’s very much: will we ever be as powerful as the Romans were? We don’t know. We can debate it. We hope so. We aspire to it. Will there be another Pax Romana? Will there be another universal peace someday? Will we ever achieve that again?

So when we look at something like Florence’s cathedral or Florence’s neoclassical buildings, we look at it and we know they’re imitating the past. So we don’t think of it as cutting-edge technology. But for them, cutting-edge technology is imitating the past.

Dwarkesh Patel

We talked about last time how both Machiavelli and the other umanisti, in the different ways they understood virtue, were trying to emulate the virtues that made Rome originally great. How much are they going off of just these random myths that Livy or whoever would write down about something that supposedly happened, where Brutus killed his own sons, or who was that guy who put his hand in a fire to show that the Roman people will be loyal and you shouldn’t fight us?

You look at actual Roman history, and it’s incredibly fucked up. We were just talking before we started recording about the life of Claudius and the period of the emperors and so forth, and surely this must have been known to them that actually…

Ada Palmer

Part of it is they’re zooming in on different emperors. When we want to make an HBO drama, we don’t make it about the boring, competent emperors who just do a really good job. Our society might be better off if we did. But the dramatic emperors where there’s lots of stabbing and lots of orgies make for good television.

Everybody curates their history. Often when you’re writing the history of your own culture, you pick the heroes. You look at a middle school history textbook, it’s going to celebrate the heroes of that country. If it’s trying hard to be unbiased, it will also acknowledge the faults, but the heroes are going to be in there.

When they are trying to create a handbook of what was, what stands out for them is what’s different from their present. Their present has plenty of tyrants. Their present has plenty of orgies. Their present has plenty of massacres. Their present does not have 70 years of peace. So that’s what stands out as different.

I think for us, some of the orgies and massacres stand out more because we don’t have as many orgies and massacres now, or at least not publicly that we know about. When we do expose that our leaders have been involved in scandalous orgies, we get very upset about it. But to them, they read about all of this, and they read about the successes and the stability from Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius, and they say, “That is alien to us. That we haven’t had in so long. That is what we want to have again.”

Dwarkesh Patel

So much so that when Gibbon is writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in multiple volumes, in the late 18th century he says that there’s never been a better time for humanity than during the era of the five good emperors.

Ada Palmer

Yeah and to the degree that medieval Europe can’t cope with the idea that these good emperors were also pagans and are therefore in hell… It’s where you get this gorgeous legend that Pope Gregory the Great summoned the ghost of Trajan and baptized his ghost so that he could go to heaven, even though Trajan is a during-the-persecution-of-the-Christians emperor. But they just love him so much, they can’t handle the idea that he would be in hell despite being a great Caesar.

So in the medieval world, it is canon that Emperor Trajan was posthumously baptized so that he could go to heaven, because he’s such a good emperor. Dante centers him in Paradiso as the ideal Christian ruler. But he wasn’t Christian. He was persecuting the Christians. But medieval and Renaissance Europe are very good at having their cake and eating it too—in terms of getting to pick and choose the best parts of the pagan world and the best parts of the Christian world when constructing their imagined antiquity—to have both and celebrate both at once.

01:06:41 – Florence, a city famous in hell

Dwarkesh Patel

Here’s something I’m confused about. Machiavelli makes a point of pointing out Cesare Borgia’s betrayals because of how remarkable they are. For example…

Ada Palmer

Ramiro d’Orco?

Dwarkesh Patel

Yes. Slaying the very deputy that he had tasked with being harsh—and as a result bringing peace to a region—for that harshness that he had delegated. Or inviting, as a gesture of goodwill, some people who are going to do a revolution against him, and then killing them all at the banquet.

But should we take the fact that he’s making a special point—”hey, take this kind of betrayal or this kind of deed as something you should consider doing”—as evidence that this was actually rare at the time? Maybe another way to ask the question is, to the extent that they are all Christians at the time, surely they really did believe they’re going to go to hell if they betray people or lie or break their oaths, right?

So just as you were saying a second ago about how capital punishment was actually less prominent at the time than we in retrospect think it to be, are these kinds of crazy political intrigues less common than these stories make them out to be?

Ada Palmer

Two halves to that answer, and I’ll do the second one first, the second one being about the religious one. They all believe in this religion that says, “If you do this, you’re going to go to hell,” and then they all do this. That’s something that this period really wrestles with.

Everybody is sinning and breaking their rules all the time: killing for honor, committing usury, lending money at interest. They’re all sinning all the time. They’re all doing these things that are against the rules all the time. People in the period do bring that up and say, “Hey, this is not okay.” This is one of the big focuses of Dante’s Commedia.

Dante in it says, “Look, when you do these things, you will go to hell for them”. He fills his hell with Florentines. There’s that wonderful line where he meets yet another group of Florentines, and he says, “Congratulations, Florence, a city famous in hell,” because he considers his Florentine peers to be particularly hypocritical.

As he goes through, we see Florentines especially in the sections for usury and for sodomy, but also heretics and unbelievers. All through he’s encountering his countrymen, including people he himself loves and respects. Because Dante is making this painful point of, “Guys, it says that if we do this, we go to hell. I’m going to make a book where that’s literally true.”

One of the chapters of Inferno that hits extra hard in his period and in ours is Canto V, where he’s encountering the lustful, and we see Paolo and Francesca. Paolo and Francesca is a story that was an incredibly popular love story at the time. There was a young, beautiful noblewoman who had an older, horrible husband. While he was away, there was also this wonderful, handsome, young nobleman who visited her, and they read the romantic stories about King Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot. One thing led to another, and they committed adultery together. Then her husband came home and found them and murdered them both. Everyone loves this story. It is the ubiquitous love story. It’s their cultural equivalent to Romeo and Juliet, a touchstone story. People sing songs about it. Everyone knows this exciting love tragedy.

And he puts them in hell because they were guilty of adultery. It’s really shocking to everyone who has celebrated this love story. “No, if this is true, and this is our religion, then this is where they would be.” Dante is very stern and very strict and very unusual, and starts a lot of discussion of this question. “We’re breaking these rules all the time. Should we just take this more seriously than we have?” He says, “Repent, or you will all go to hell, my fellow citizens.” So they’re worried about that.

But another part of it is that Christianity as practiced then has much less of a focus on purity than the Christianity that especially America is used to, and also the Protestant-dominated parts of Europe. There was a big change in Christianity that comes in the course of the Reformation, primarily from Calvin, Calvinism, and then Puritanism, which has a greater focus on trying to live an unspotted and pure life. It’s the idea of, “we’re going to create a community of people who are all going to stick to the rules and live by them. And if you are a sinner and have broken these rules, you should be expelled from this community. You are impure, you are stained.”

That is not the way Christianity thinks in this period. The assumption is everybody sins all the time. There is no such thing as purity. Everybody sins every five minutes. Everybody is envious. Everybody is lustful. Everybody is slothful. Everybody will make these mistakes, and then you repent of them, and you feel sorry, and you do penance, and you make spiritual progress, and you are forgiven, and then you sin again. Everybody sins. St. Francis of Assisi sins. He had a big focus on himself as a sinner and was constantly self-flagellating despite being, in many ways, the most virtuous man in all of Europe, but stressing his own sin.

So one saint who’s super popular in the Renaissance who is not very popular today is St. Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of murderers. He is the patron saint of murderers because his legend is an Oedipus-like legend. When he was born, he was cursed by a witch that when he grew up, he would slay his parents. He runs far away hoping that he will never encounter his parents and so not meet them. But eventually he feels homesick and comes home, and is tricked by the devil into slaughtering his parents, and he slaughters his parents. He spends the rest of his life trying to make up for it, going on pilgrimage, and then dedicating his life to running pilgrim hostels to help others be pilgrims. He is the patron saint for people who have committed murder and feel really sorry and need to live with it and repent of it.

That’s not the attitude we have toward murderers right now. Our cultural attitude toward murderers is, “That person is a murderer. They should be shunned. They should be locked in a box without the key, or they should be executed. They should be removed from society. There is no turning back from homicide.” But the Renaissance’s idea is sometimes you have to commit homicide, and then what’s important is that you feel sorry. You need to have a patron saint whose job it is to be a spiritual mentor for you, he too committed homicide. He committed a worse homicide than you did, because he killed his parents. If he went on a spiritual journey to recover from being a murderer, so can you.

There are dozens and dozens and dozens of icons of St. Julian all over Renaissance Florence. Everywhere you go and you see one, you’re like, “That was commissioned by somebody who committed a homicide and is trying to live with it.” This is a society that really thinks about sin as something you do, and then you pay for it afterward.

And people like Dante and Savonarola come to people and say, “No, this is not okay. You are perverting these things. No, you cannot put your family’s coat of arms all over the inside of a church, turning the church into an advertisement for your banking business when it should be a place of God. That’s inappropriate, and no, God will not forgive you for it.”

And society says, “Yeah, well, but God forgives maybe anything if we repent a lot.” So it’s a complicated, sophisticated hypocrisy that builds up a lot of apparatus to let the society’s actions be at odds with its religious precepts to that degree.

01:15:57 – The Prince was a job application to Machiavelli’s torturers

Dwarkesh Patel

I couldn’t get enough of Ada or of Machiavelli, and so there are a few more questions I wanted to ask you. Thanks for hopping on again.

Ada Palmer

Oh, my treat.

Dwarkesh Patel

We didn’t talk last time about the fact that Machiavelli was exiled. He’s writing these books in exile. We were talking about his diplomatic career, so maybe you can give a bit of context around how he ends up in exile, and what his plan is once he’s there.

Ada Palmer

Here we have to start with the fact that everybody who’s anybody in the intellectual tradition lives in exile for a while. Dante does. Voltaire does. Rousseau does. Thomas Hobbes does. Machiavelli does. More importantly, exile is a very common thing in Florence and doesn’t have the permanence that one expects. In Florence, exile means the people who are in charge of the regime distrust you right now. They want you out of the city, but they’re testing your loyalty. They’re testing whether you will stay true to them, and you’re told not, “Get out of the city,” like a Roman exile, but, “Go to a specific place. Go to London. Go to Bruges. Go here. Stay there, and we will send you instructions.”

You’re expected to act as a kind of unofficial official emissary for the government of Florence while in your exile. You’ll be asked to do diplomatic missions after a while. They’ll say, “Go talk to this person on our behalf,” or, “Go deliver this trusted letter.” If you’re good and you behave, then after some years of service to the republic, you’ll be recalled. So it’s a provisional exile. They pick a specific place to send you, and if you go and are good and do what they say, then after a while, they consider bringing you home. If you don’t–if you leave and you don’t stay where they said, if you run off to work for someone else—then you’re not allowed back in Florence anymore. You’re an exile at this point.

Machiavelli’s exile is unusual because they really don’t trust him. So they don’t send him to Bruges or London or Barcelona or the Germanies or any number of other places where he actually has political contacts. They send him to a middle-of-nowhere hamlet in the countryside outside of Florence in Tuscany, where there is nobody important and there is nothing to do. This isn’t a “go wait for instructions.” This is a “go rot and we’re testing whether you will faithfully stay and do basically nothing and be forbidden to talk to important people, be in isolation.”

When that exile is given, everybody expects that Machiavelli’s response will be, “Okay. They’re not giving me even a second chance. I’m going to run off and work for somebody else.” Because there are a jillion people in Europe who would love to employ a skillful classicist historian with military and diplomatic capacities who has political contacts in Rome and in France and has visited the court of the emperor. He could have worked for any number of cardinals. He could have gotten a very prestigious diplomatic job in any of a dozen courts. A Florentine historian especially is something that you absolutely want to hire to write a flattering history of your own family. For even a century before this, kings as far away as England had been trying to hire Florentine historians to come write about them.

So he could easily do this, and this is what is expected, and he doesn’t. Machiavelli says, “No. I’m going to stay, and I’m going to rot, and I’m going to write The Prince, which is my job application begging the new regime to bring me back and let me work for them and demonstrating my loyalty, and I’m going to send it to them and only them, them and my immediate friends. I’m not going to share it with anybody else.” Because Machiavelli is a patriot, and he will not serve any cause that is not his country.

No matter whether the pay at a royal court somewhere would be three times what he would ever get at home, that doesn’t matter to him. No matter whether this is the regime that just arrested, tortured, and exiled him despite him not having plotted against them, he wants to work for that. Because Machiavelli fundamentally is possibly one of the most patriotic patriots in Earth’s history. He will faithfully sit in the countryside and rot while begging to work for the people who ordered his torture, so long as they will recall him so that he can serve his country.

And this connects to the question we always ask about the target audience of The Prince, because his other work—his discourses, his histories, his comedic play—those were for public circulation. Those increased his fame. Those made important arguments. His history of Florence joined other important histories of Florence circulating, influencing the way people thought about politics. Not The Prince. The Prince is secret and proprietary, the secret sauce of how to maintain power.

He will not let any other power have that. It’s like a nuclear scientist with diplomatic secrets who is faithful to his country and will not sell out and let those secrets fall into other hands. Machiavelli knows that he has the beginnings of a new world of political science. He will only share that with the government of his country because he wants it to protect his country, and he will not serve any other cause.

This is why it’s so weirdly ironic to me that the reputation—the word “Machiavellian”—means “self-serving”, when Machiavelli himself is one of the most selfless men I’ve ever read about in the history of the Earth. He will give up and sacrifice career, diplomacy, fame, friends, the opportunity to even be in a city and have a nice day, to rot in the countryside to be faithful to his country. He would rather serve nothing and no one than give an hour of his time to advancing anything that is not Florence.

Dwarkesh Patel

You’re making the point that he is advocating a viciousness and a realism and a cynicism, but in service of protecting Florence, not in service of a generic prince of any generic principality.

Ada Palmer

Exactly, and he doesn’t let copies of it circulate to anybody but the rulers of Florence and his immediate scholarly, social, intimate circle of friends, people that he’s known for decades who are scholar peers who have discussed his ideas with him. That’s the audience of The Prince during his lifetime.

Dwarkesh Patel

Does he expect that at some point it will be more widely distributed? Is he writing in a way that suggests that? It is a literary masterpiece as well. I’ve only read, obviously, the translation, so I don’t know what it’s like in the original Italian. But somebody putting in that much literary effort into something that is just supposed to be a very pragmatic manual for a particular person seems a bit weird.

Ada Palmer

We have to remember this is a moment of transition from the manuscript to the print period, and also therefore an important moment of transition in what makes a written work important and how that written work is important to the career of someone who’s written it. It’s a normal thing in Machiavelli’s youth for a major important scholar like, say, Pontano, one of the greatest scholars of the previous generation, to be hired to write a handbook of princes that will exist in just one copy or three or four copies that are written for a specific prince.

For example, you have King Alfonso of Naples, the Spanish king who conquered Naples, Alfonso the Magnanimous, made famous for his vast patronage of arts and letters and for carefully cultivated personal anecdotes. There’s a moment when he was in the middle of fighting a war and a messenger rushed into his room, sweaty and covered with things, to interrupt the king’s morning time with his scholar friends discussing Plato. The king turned angrily on the messenger and said, “Get out. This is a place for men in togas, not for men in armor,” and refused to listen to the urgent message until he’d finished his hour of scholarly contemplation of the soul. As a result of which, he lost that battle but actually won the war. His reputation cultivated by anecdotes like that make him beloved.

He will pay a salary five times what the Republic of Florence will pay to hire somebody like Machiavelli. What does he hire them to do? He has a lot of children, princes and princesses, and he commissions a scholar to write a unique bespoke handbook of how to rule and use power for each of his children. These exist in manuscript only in one copy or three copies, and the addressee is the Duchess of Ferrara, who is a daughter of King Alfonso. That book is never intended to circulate. It’s intended to be private guidance for her and for her to perhaps pass on to her sons and daughters.

Meanwhile, the author’s fame is magnified by being told the special bespoke handbook of princes cultivated secretly for this important princess was written by so and so. That’s so cool, and letters circulate and let you know that it’s happening. In the same way that a scientist might become famous because we know he’s developing cool proprietary technology that only his government has, but we know that it’s happening, we have to think of these books as proprietary technology.

In that sense, it’s not an unusual thing to write a book with an audience of one, or an audience of one and her immediate circle. This is also one of the moments where the handbook of princes also means for women. The title of that book for the princess who becomes Duchess of Ferrara addresses her as a prince, because prince is a gender-neutral word at this point. It’s lexically masculine in terms of ending, the same way a table is feminine, but prince is used for men and women. Even Queen Elizabeth is Prince Elizabeth at this period of her life.

Dwarkesh Patel

That is so fascinating.

Ada Palmer

We have trouble wrapping our heads around the idea of writing a book for an audience of one. It’s just not what a book is to us.

Dwarkesh Patel

The funny thing is, I think we are entering a new era where that might be once again possible. It already is somewhat true, where at least half of the words I read on a given day are generated specifically for me and nobody else, because of AI. Obviously, AI is not capable of writing something which I think would be a literary masterpiece that everybody would want to read if they had access to it just yet. But eventually it will be. So it’s interesting to consider that as this knowledge progresses, it would bring us back to this era of bespoke scholars dedicated to a particular prince.

Ada Palmer

It’s important to remember that that never went away. Two halves of that. One, for ages it’s been true that half of the words we read every day are bespoke only for us, because they’re email. They’re letters. They’re the correspondence back and forth which has the audience of one, the addressee, and that’s the majority of what all of us read and write in our lives.

It’s also always been the case that in the halls of power, there are book-long things with an audience of one or an audience of five. There are historians and other scholars and scientists whose job is to provide that 100-page report on the history of Syria, to be given to a committee of Congress, where these nine senators or these nine congresspeople need the background on what’s happening so that they can understand a current events thing.

There are historian friends of mine who work for the Department of Defense Intelligence, who produce these book-length research projects with an audience of five or an audience of eight or an audience of a couple dozen, because it is the bespoke proprietary knowledge needed by the government at that moment. Sometimes it’s technological knowledge, but just as often it’s going to be historical knowledge of, “Here are the important rivers where military things are likely to happen,” says the historian who knows the history of this stuff.

Dwarkesh Patel

That actually brings up the question of how many such tracts through history, which are of the quality of The Prince—as original at their time as The Prince is and as wonderfully crafted and so on—have been lost to history? Maybe one way to answer this question or think about it is to talk about how The Prince itself went into mass publishing.

At some point in 1532, the Medici pope allows for its publishing, and then 27 years later, it is censored by that same papacy. So how does this book that Machiavelli himself did not want out in wide circulation end up in wide circulation and then stop ending up in wide circulation and then end up in wide circulation again?

Ada Palmer

It goes in and out and in and out, like a lot of important works. I’ll give the zoomed out answer and then the zoomed in answer to that question. It is often the case that a work which contains radically unusual ideas will drift along being not particularly zoomed in on by society and not widely read, until it hits a moment that the new questions being asked in that century or that decade are answered by something in that text. Then suddenly everyone will start reading it.

A different example of this, probably well known to the audience, because everyone here is a cool, smart, learned person, is Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, De rerum natura, which is our best capsule of ancient atomism and the atoms and vacuum theory of matter. It’s written around the BC/AD turn, and drifts along being not very important for ages, until the 1600s when we’re getting the first ideas of germ theory of disease, very interested in new science. Suddenly it gets 30 print editions and is all over the place and influences science, and is even more influential in the 19th century when we’re interested in atoms and cells. So a book can exist for literally 2,000 years or close to it, and then suddenly answer the questions of that decade.

In that sense, The Prince will drift along and be not very important for a while. Why is it first published? It’s first published when Machiavelli’s still surviving relatives want fame for the family and fame for their beloved now dead kinsman. Here is a work of his that hasn’t been published yet. They ask for permission because this can spread his fame. It’s also dedicated to members of the Medici family, so the Medici are like, “Yeah, we get fame for publishing this thing too.” They don’t think as seriously about the power of its contents as its author did.

And so it’s one more book that can spread the fame both of the Machiavelli family and of the Medici family, and it goes around, and people are like, “Oh, that’s actually full of fairly scandalous ideas. Hmm.” That’s how it then ends up on the index as book censorship kicks up as a result of the printing press. Mini thesis: every time there’s a new information technology, there’s a subsequent wave of censorship to try to censor the new technology, and a bajillion books get banned all at once. Machiavelli’s is not a particularly prominent example among this. The index of banned books that contains his work carefully differentiates between the dangerous books by arch-heretics and the slightly dangerous books by meh people, and arch-heretics are in all caps.

I remember when I was first reading through one of these indexes, I was so excited to flip through and find Machiavelli, and there he was, not in all caps, and I was so angry. I was like, “What’s wrong with that? He should be in all caps.” But all the all caps people are Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, a bajillion Protestant theologians you’ve never heard of. All-caps arch-heretic status is reserved for Protestantism in this period. Machiavelli doesn’t catch on until later. So he’s censored in a wave of censoring everything, when there’s a big censorious wave, and then it diminishes and goes up and down.

The second zoomed-in half of that: if we say Lucretius becomes exciting when people want to know about the germ theory of disease, when does Machiavelli become exciting? Machiavelli becomes exciting first in the aftermath of the publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan, because Hobbes’s Leviathan hits European thought like a truck full of bricks. It has this incredibly persuasive, gorgeous reasoning that lands you on a terrifying vision of what humanity is and a terrifying vision of what God is that people find very scary, but also incredibly persuasive. It’s no exaggeration to say that in the aftermath of publishing Leviathan, there’s a 40-year period where the sole goal of Western European philosophy is coming up with a good way to refute Hobbes.

At that moment, they say, “Okay, Hobbes is using a lot of logics about politics and about history that sound like Machiavelli.” He’s doing these utilitarian consequentialist analyses of “if we do this, there’s that result”. He’s analyzing the origins of government as if there’s no divinity setting it up. He has this man in a state of nature inventing government instead of God from on high telling Adam, “Here is how you should organize the world.” So they say, “Okay, Hobbes is the monster. Hobbes is Leviathan the great, or the beast of Malmesbury,” as newspapers call him during his lifetime.

How do we refute the monster? Let’s look at the daddy monster that spawned the baby monster. If we can read Machiavelli and find holes in Machiavelli, maybe we can use those to refute Hobbes. So Machiavelli is suddenly useful not to people who sympathize with him, but to people who see him as an enemy and want to use him to try to defeat what to them is the greater enemy. So he surges in popularity at that point.

A different surge happens in the 19th century, and it’s not until the 19th century that Machiavelli’s Prince becomes a major global staple that you would put in a great book series. In the 19th century, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment’s revolutions—the American Republic, the French Republic, the transformations and democratic movements that are happening in lots of other governments—people want new ways to think about politics, and they want to think about politics in separation of church and state.

If you want to think about separation of church and state, which is a new Enlightenment-era value, what do you need? You need an apparatus for thinking about politics and ethics that doesn’t depend on God being part of it. The vast majority of political treatises available to humanity at that point have some sort of entanglement of religion with politics at their root, but Machiavelli doesn’t. Machiavelli is this early foundational “what if we think about government in a box without plugging into religion? What if we just think about government operating by itself and its earthly consequences?” It’s incredibly useful in the 19th century for developing a statecraft for separation of church and state.

It’s also useful for Italian nationalism to celebrate and claim, “Hey, we invented separation of church and state. Here’s Machiavelli, the first modern man. He’s our bid at ‘Italian culture invented modernity’ via Machiavelli.” At the same time, England is saying Francis Bacon is the first modern man because he invented the scientific method. At the same time, France is saying René Descartes was the first modern man because he invented logical reasoning and modern principles of logical deduction. There’s a competition in the 19th century, a nationalist one, of different countries that want to claim their cool thinker as the first modern man. Machiavelli becomes one of Italy’s big bids for the first modern man because he came up with separation of church and state. It’s a phrase that Machiavelli would not have recognized if you said it to him, but he would have thought about it for a long time, decided it was cool, and then written letters about it.

Dwarkesh Patel

Can I try out a counter-thesis just so you can dispel my confusion? One reason why Machiavelli might have gained a special significance in the 19th century is that now that you have these republics in the world, there’s a question of how you make sure that they are maintained. That is really the question that at least the first third of the Discourses is obsessed with. But one of the ways it says that you do this is by having a religion that people take into very strong consideration.

I think he says at some point early in the Discourses that more significant than Romulus in the founding of Rome was Numa, or whoever it was who was the prophet who gave the Roman gods and the Roman religion some legitimacy. Then it is this legitimacy and the fear of offending virtues, because you believe in some god that will punish you, that motivates people to act in a way that defends the republic.

He gives the example of Scipio after the battle in which Hannibal absolutely destroys the Roman armies. The people are about to flee Rome as a result because they think Hannibal’s coming. Scipio himself, with his sword, goes down and says, “Swear to our gods that you will stay and defend our homeland.” Just having them give the oath in that moment is enough to convince them, “Hannibal can’t be worse than the gods, so I have to stay here and defend our republic.”

It seems like he thinks that religion is super important to the legitimacy of the state.

Ada Palmer

Agreed. He’s thinking about it in a way parallel to the way late 18th-century, 19th-century figures are also thinking about it. We have to separate the institution of religion from the psychological effect of religion on the populace. The useful example here is Thomas Paine. We all know Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”. Thomas Paine does a lot of thinking about the foundation of the institutions of the US. Thomas Paine is a deist and a radical. He has lots of treatises about how the most destructive force in the world is institutional religion. Whether it’s Catholicism or the Church of England, these institutions are giant, centuries-old or millennia-old conspiracies to control your mind and steal your money, and are incredibly pernicious to everything.

However, he says, religion is vital to citizenship because it is what makes people be good and is what makes people fear laws and want to obey the laws. So, says Thomas Paine, every country must have religion, and religious education must be mandatory in schools, but it doesn’t matter which religion. Thomas Paine advocated mandatory religion in total indifference to what religion it is, with the idea that fearing God and posthumous punishment is necessary to make a citizen, in a practical sense, willing to obey law.

Notice how that is Paine thinking in a utilitarian way about the psychological effects of religion being there. It’s very different from the older view that the state and a state religion are entangled with each other. The state promotes this state religion because it believes it to be true, and we’re going to have a Christian nationalist or Catholic nationalist or Roman paganism nationalist religion that advances X against others.

So Machiavelli is absolutely thinking about the psychological effects of a religion on the people. He has that wonderful analysis in the Discourses of the utility of Roman religion. He talks in one really striking and memorable passage about how Roman religion says that your ghost depends on being remembered. This is out of the Homeric tradition. Your ghost only retains its identity to the degree you are still remembered on Earth. If on Earth your name is forgotten, your ghost forgets its name.

This is not a “your ghost is okay forever,” like in Christianity. It is a “your ghost depends on being honored by your descendants on Earth.” When you are forgotten, your soul becomes an empty, mindless, wandering shade. Therefore, you have an incredibly strong incentive to be remembered by doing great deeds, especially sacrificing yourself for your country, because then your name will be honored for as long as your country lasts. Machiavelli says this is one of the big motivators that makes people sacrifice themselves for the state in ancient Rome, because then they’re guaranteeing their good afterlife.

While Christianity, he points out, says all that matters for a good afterlife is being pious and then ideally being martyred. You have no incentive to sacrifice yourself for your state. The safety of your afterlife is guaranteed by your interiority. This is going to encourage a citizen to sit in a box and be a monk, not to sign up for the military and defend his country. So, says Machiavelli, Roman religion was much better for patriotism and political stability than Christianity. But he says at the end of the chapter, “Christianity has the advantage of being true,” period, end of chapter. You’d say, “Hello, Machiavelli, we know that you had the mandatory subscript there.”

So think about Thomas Paine and Machiavelli in parallel. They’re thinking about the utility of religion for forming a citizen, but they’re not thinking about “this religion is true, we are doing God’s work, we need to craft our state to match the values of our religion,” which is what a theocrat would argue.

What you have is separation of church and state with the expectation that religiosity will be there. It will affect the people, it will affect the citizenry and their behavior. You need to think about it. You need to decide whether to cultivate it, but you need to think about it in the same neutral way you think about cultivating literacy skills or math skills in your citizenry. What skills do we want our citizenry to have for them to be well-informed citizens? What do we need? We need religion and we need good newspapers so that people are up on the news and can vote prudently. You are evaluating those things side by side from a utilitarian standpoint instead of “this religion is true, it is the obligation of our government to advance it, and our government expects to receive divine blessings if we advance the correct religion, and divine curses if we don’t.” It’s a radically different way of thinking about religion, while still recognizing it as a powerful factor affecting the psychology of the populace.

01:41:39 – During the Renaissance, original ideas had to be couched in antiquity

Dwarkesh Patel

That makes sense. Last episode we were talking about the psychological impact on scholarship of having books be so expensive and having to meditate on the same copies that are available in one library. Maybe Machiavelli’s the strongest example of this, where maybe through his life we’re seeing the impact of the printing press diffusing and making printing cheaper. But early on in his life, it’s still not been that long since Gutenberg came up with the first printing press. As a result—correct this story for me—his dad has to do months of drudge work indexing Livy in order to get a copy of Livy.

Ada Palmer

In the infancy of printing, books are scarce and few. For example, one of my favorite manuscripts ever that I’ve worked with is a copy of Lucretius in Machiavelli’s hand. He copied out the entire poem. This is in the Vatican library.

But what’s really neat is he copied the text from a printed copy. But as he copied it, he integrated into it corrections and improvements of errors in that one, taken from a manuscript copy, so that what he produced was better than either the printed version or the manuscript version. And then he made his marginal comments as he went.

But notice this is somebody who, even though print copies of this book exist, is so much in the manuscript world that he’s happy to spend months probably copying out and making his own custom improved version of this text that he can then work from, even though inevitably new print copies will come out in a few years that may have the very corrections that he’s working with. But he isn’t going to wait for that, and he’s not sure, so he makes his version. So he’s from this moment when print and manuscript are parallel technologies being used at the same time. The very people who are buying the first printed books are also producing manuscripts imitating those printed books and influenced by those printed books.

Dwarkesh Patel

I want to think about the impact that having this copy of Livy—which presumably is one of the very few books that young Machiavelli had access to—has on his intellectual development. We have this mode of scholarship at the time. Why does he spend two decades writing Discourses on Livy? Unlike us—where we can go through an audiobook a week or read our Kindle at night— he’s presumably just reading this book again and again and again, and is trying to connect it to the events he’s seeing in his own life on his 10th reread. So that I feel is very interesting psychologically in understanding how scholarship and intellectual thought must have been different at that time as compared to now.

Ada Palmer

Machiavelli can easily access other books by visiting friends, by asking to go to the library of his Medici patrons when he’s working for the Medici, of his Soderini patrons when he’s working for the Soderini. But that’s different from having it at home and being able to have it at your bedside and look at it at all hours and have this intimacy with it, and it’s your father’s copy and it’s your copy.

There’s another part of that though, and this is weird for modern people to understand. In the Renaissance, there is so much enthusiasm for antiquity. Antiquity is the cutting-edge thing. Antiquity is where it’s at. Antiquity is how we’re going to end the chaos of the previous world and have this new world where we’re basing everything on ancient Rome. There’s going to be peace. There’s going to be a golden age. It’s all coming from and imitating antiquity.

Therefore, if your book is a comment on an ancient, it is going to be way more popular and sell way better, and people will care more and think more of you than if your ideas are original. Nobody wants original ideas. Original ideas are out of vogue. Original ideas are dead. All ideas need to be from the ancients.

So a Renaissance scholar will bend over backwards to pretend that his beautiful original ideas are actually Livy or are actually Plato, or to couch them as a commentary on these things. That’s going to have a way bigger audience and be more popular and taken more seriously than if it’s original. So there are points where Giordano Bruno, in his commentaries on Aristotle, claims that Aristotle says things absolutely Aristotle does not, the opposite of what Aristotle says. But if he claims it’s Aristotle, people will take it more seriously.

The most extreme version of this is the brilliant and fascinating figure of Annius of Viterbo, who Tony Grafton has a great book about. Annius of Viterbo had this radical vision of how he wanted to rethink history and faked ancient texts. He made them up. He faked archaeological digs. He would secretly bury artifacts and then dig them up to great drama. And he forged antiquities to create this book that advanced his visionary original idea of ancient history, because if he pretended he got it from antiquity, people would take it more seriously than if it was an original book.

So Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy are his big bid to have a popular, important, prestigious thing, because discourses on Livy are a bigger deal and more important and more interesting to everybody, and more likely to sell and get attention, than a Florentine history or a treatise of original thought on princes. Who wants that? That’s a very niche kind of thing. “Discourses on Livy, oh, exciting, we have to have this.”

This goes on for the next century. For example, huge amounts of radical political thought, including, believe it or not, commentaries on Machiavelli, happen in the footnotes in editions of Seneca and Livy. The text of Seneca will be a small square in the middle of the page, and then there’ll be these masses of footnotes and commentary. Huge original moments of political thought for the entirety of the 1600s are going on in wars, in footnotes, in editions of Seneca. But it’s not original thought. It’s all about Seneca, because that was what was in vogue then. The vogue of scholarly stuff shifts fast and is very interesting.

This is one of the weird reasons that Renaissance philosophy and Renaissance innovative thought—with the exception of a couple of oddball works like The Prince—gets pushed out of the history of philosophy, especially in the 19th century. Because when you get to the 19th century, the vogue is that everything has to be original. The philosopher’s ideas should be born like Athena, fully formed from the head of Zeus. The ideal philosopher lives in a cabin by the raging sea, contemplating in the wilderness. What they want is original treatises.

If you look at a 19th-century historian of philosophy, they’ll say, “in the Renaissance, there was almost no original thought.” There was Machiavelli’s Prince, and there was maybe a little bit of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. (We have since proved it’s not an oration and it’s not about the dignity of man.) These things are the few lights in the darkness, and everything else in Renaissance philosophy is... Here’s a quote from a philosophy department person who actually said this to me: “The Renaissance is 200 years of people being wrong about Plato.”

A lot of people look at it, and you pick up Ficino, and he’s like, “Plato said these things.” You’re like, “No, Plato totally did not say those things at all. That’s absolute gibberish. No, Plato didn’t say that. What are you saying, Ficino?” If you think Ficino is what he says he is, a commentary on Plato, then indeed the Renaissance is 200 years of people being wrong about Plato, being wrong about Livy, being wrong about Aristotle. But if you realize that their style guide requires original thought to be presented in the form of a commentary on an ancient, what it is is 200 years of original thought using the ancients as the trellis up which the rose climbs in order to bloom.

When you restore that and recognize that in order to get at the real Renaissance, you need to not read the goofy outlier works like Machiavelli’s Prince, which present themselves as original—which is a weird thing to do—but read the commentaries on Livy. That’s where the original stuff is hidden, by pretending and claiming and sometimes sincerely convincing themselves that this is the secret coded true meaning of the ancient thing.

Like Ficino, the translator of Plato, definitely genuinely believes that all of the incredibly original cosmology and magic that he’s figured out is secretly coded in Plato, and he’s wrong. It’s not. It’s so adorable that he really, really believes it is. But what it is is an incredibly original vision of the universe that he got from reading Plato and thinking hard about it and combining it with other things. So he presents it as commentary on Plato, commentary on Dionysius the Areopagite.

That’s core to why this is a discourse on Livy, because a discourse on Livy is what a scholar is supposed to be doing. All the other things Machiavelli does are second-tier weird things for a scholar to be doing on the side of discourses on Livy.

01:50:44 – Why copyright began with the Inquisition

Dwarkesh Patel

So adult Machiavelli is now seeing some of his work start to get mass-produced. What is his reaction to this?

Ada Palmer

At first excitement, but also horror, because Machiavelli is facing this fascinating moment in the history of being an author when printing has come into being, but there isn’t copyright yet. In the manuscript period, there’s no such thing as copyright. If you find out that someone has made a copy of your book, you say, “Oh, thank God. There’s another copy of my book.” That reduces the chances of it being completely destroyed in a fire. Making one copy of a book is six months of incredibly difficult labor. You’re just grateful every time a text is reproduced.

But when it comes to printing, then you have this experience, which Machiavelli is one of the first men ever to have, of finding out that a local printer is printing a work of his without ever having asked him, without ever having talked to him. He looks at it, and it’s full of typos and minor errors. He’s panicking in these letters and saying, “Oh, no, everyone’s going to think I’m a bad scholar. There are all these little mistakes in the text, and they aren’t me. They’re the compositor having made typos when setting it up, and no one will know that. They’ll blame me, and it’ll destroy my reputation. What do I do? There’s nothing I can do because there’s no legal process and no legal recourse. Printing has just come into being.”

It’s neat seeing him and friends writing to each other about, “What can I do about the fact that this printer has printed my book without asking me?” There is no law. There is no apparatus. There is no anything. His friends are like, “Well, write letters to everybody who matters and tell them that the typos aren’t you. That’s all I can suggest,” because they don’t have the idea of authorial copyright yet. It’s going to come in the next couple decades.

The weird thing is how this gets entangled with censorship. Copyright and censorship are born together in Machiavelli’s world, counterintuitively, from the Inquisition. When the Inquisition begins book censorship after 1515, which is during Machiavelli’s lifetime, the policy that the Catholic Church promulgates is: before you may print any text, you must take it to an authority licensed by the church to do this—meaning an inquisitor or a bishop—and they must read it and give permission for it to be printed. This is so that they can make sure there isn’t heresy in it. So all books are effectively born pre-banned until you get permission for them to be printed.

In return for this, you get a monopoly license, and only the printer that took the book through the process can print it. You may now use the actual Inquisition record of you having gone through censorship as the document to prove that you and only you have the right to print the book. Therefore you can sue people for plagiarizing it or printing an unauthorized edition. So the very first version of copyright is the Inquisition.

Places outside the Catholic world then, like England, look at this. There’s actually popular demand in England for censorship, when they say, “Hey, we need what the Inquisition does, because the Inquisition is so cool. They let printers have a monopoly on printing a book, and they let authors deny print permission. We need something like that.” The very first version of what is not yet copyright passed in England—which is of course the ancestor of what applies in all Commonwealth nations and in the US—was originally an imitation of the Inquisition. It was: you need a license before you can print your thing, and then in return you get a monopoly.

Later, when there was a freedom of the press push—and by later, I mean this is happening over the course of the first half of the 1600s, so about a century after Machiavelli’s death, it takes a century for all this to get ironed out—the first version of copyright law is them basically saying, “Okay, we’re going to keep the copyright half of censorship while getting rid of the censorship half of censorship, or changing the censorship half of censorship.”

But it’s all born out of the Inquisition having met this weird demand that you feel in Machiavelli, where he’s like, “They printed my book. They did a bad job. There’s nothing I can do. Help. Authorities, give me some way to do something about this.” So that’s where you can feel Machiavelli as one of the first generation that needs copyright, which will then be born in the aftermath.

Dwarkesh Patel

Fascinating. And what was the Inquisition’s incentive to enforce the author’s prerogative on the text?

Ada Palmer

Partly the Inquisition does it because that encourages authors to come to them. It makes people much more willing to collaborate with their process. But also, think of an individual Inquisitor as an individual person who lives in a place and needs to have relationships in that place, and needs to have an income, and who is not usually getting enough to live on from the Inquisition itself.

If you’re working for the Inquisition, you’re an officer of the Inquisition, you’re probably a Dominican monk. You get some support from the monastery, but you have reason to want money, and you have family, they want money. You’re as pragmatic and self-serving as any other average human. So the fact that people want to have this positive relationship with you, they might gift you some bottles of wine in return for you being extra generous in your reading of their text.

They also have to negotiate with authorities. The Inquisition wants us to think of it as very centralized and very monopolar—the Inquisition, the Vatican, it controls everything—which is completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns, and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican. They’re making their own decisions.

For the most part, they don’t have their own large amount of funding. They don’t have their own officers to jail people. They don’t have their own jails. They don’t have their own authority to arrest directly. They get all of those from the local government. They collaborate with the local government, which means if the local government likes them and is pleased by them, and is like, “Ooh, the Inquisition, I can use this to scapegoat my enemies,” then the local government will drown the Inquisition in funding and give them all the guards and all the incentives they could want.

So when we hear about the infamous Spanish Inquisition, which everyone was expecting me to mention, the Spanish Inquisition is infamous because Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain really want to scapegoat the Jewish and Muslim populations that they’re anxious about. So they throw money at their Inquisition and really cultivate and make it big. That’s coming from them. It’s not coming from Rome.

Meanwhile, if you’re in somewhere like Florence, where the duke—if it’s early Medician ducal Florence, right when this is happening—is a Medici, he’s in deep with the weird Ficinian Platonic soul projection magic people. He’s an intellectual radical descended from intellectual radicals. His court is full of intellectual radicals. Here you are, the Inquisitor, and you’re like, “Your Grace, can I arrest this guy?” He’s like, “No, that guy works for me. You can’t touch him.”

You can only arrest as many people as the duke will give you funding for, or the local republic will give you funding for. So you need to please the local government if you’re the Inquisitor. We have letters of Inquisitors complaining, “This is a really liberal duke. He’s protecting all of these heretics around him, and there’s nothing I can do about it because I depend on the local authority for my ability to do stuff.”

So this is a really bizarre comparison, but think of the Inquisition operating kind of like Doctors Without Borders. It’s not the government. It’s an international organization that’s set up to try to achieve a goal that it believes is beneficial in different places. But it’s only as strong as, or as weak as, the government’s willingness to collaborate with it. If the government collaborates with it, it can be enormously powerful in an area and do a lot.

If the government is hostile to it and starves it of resources and doesn’t let its people in and insists on pushing it out, then you can get bubbles where the Inquisition is nearly impotent. Every time they want to arrest someone, they have to go to the duke’s agents, and if the duke’s agents keep saying no, they can’t do anything. What this really creates is bubbles of privileged access, where if you’re in with the government, you can be as heretical as you like, and the Inquisition can’t touch you.

This is also a lot of how homosexuality operates at the time. If you are in the protection of a powerful person, they can prevent the Inquisition or other officers of the church from getting at you. They just won’t do it, and they’re more powerful than those agents are, so they can’t touch you.

Machiavelli was, I would say, very definitely solidly bisexual, in that this is a man who recreationally had boyfriends and girlfriends throughout his life that he writes to. We have homoerotic poetry. We have heterosexual poetry. He’s definitely very excited by both sexes. He has a lot of gay friends.

He and his gay friends are writing back and forth about how at this particular moment in Rome, one of the agents in charge of Rome’s enforcement is really cracking down on homosexuality. Therefore all of their gay scholar and artist friends are rushing to get jobs working for cardinals, because if you work for a cardinal, nobody can touch you. Almost all of their friends have succeeded in getting jobs working for cardinals, except for one. So he has resorted to hiring two female prostitutes to hang out with him all the time and make him seem straight, by having him hang out with sexy courtesans, to defend himself against charges of homosexuality.

Heresy and homosexuality operate very similarly in this period. They’re both forbidden by the same things and policed by the same structures. So if you work for the cardinal or you work for the duke, you can be doing very radical magic, radical philosophy, radical politics, radical sexuality, and nobody in authority can touch you because authority’s trumped by a higher authority that is protecting you. This is part of the patronage system.

Dwarkesh Patel

How does that come back to the copyright?

Ada Palmer

The way that comes back to copyright stuff is that the Inquisition needs to please local authorities in order to get to operate at all. So the Inquisition will therefore try to figure out things that will please local authorities. If a book is being presented for publication that has a recommendation letter at the beginning written by an important political figure, the Inquisition will push it through. When printing presses and authors say, “Hey, can we have this be a monopoly license?”, figures like Machiavelli realize we could ask for, “Hey, you’re giving us permission. Can you deny everyone else permission?” The Inquisition immediately realized, this is a great way to get publishers on our side, to get authors on our side, and to get their bosses on our side, because we are protecting the book that is important to the duke because it’s dedicated to the duke, or it’s dedicated to his grandfather.

The Medici give permission to print The Prince partly because it’s dedicated to a member of the family, and it celebrates their fame. They want to be able to control its quality and make sure that it’s published in good quality and that it always has that dedicatory letter at the front. They have an incentive to control what we would now think of as copyright. The Inquisition, wanting to please them, has an incentive to give them that control.

02:02:12 – Machiavelli wasn’t Machiavellian

Dwarkesh Patel

To close off, do you have some sense of how to think about why Machiavelli’s remembered so differently from not only what he wrote, but why he was writing?

Ada Palmer

Sometimes in the history of thought, there are authors who become separated from their work. You have a parallel where there is the actual content of what the person did and said, and separately there is the idea of this person. In the case of Machiavelli, we have Machiavelli the patriot, Machiavelli who did all this work, and separately we have “Machiavellian” — “the murderous Machiavel”, as Shakespeare calls him. Old Nick, which is a nickname for the devil but became popular because of Niccolò Machiavelli. Old Nick, literally a synonym for the devil.

He splits, so that the idea of Machiavelli—the Machiavellian villainous figure that Shakespeare’s Richard III invokes as someone he’s modeling himself on—is useful to people as a character, as an idea. It’s the idea of the scheming politician who is probably atheistic, definitely self-serving, and who wants nothing but to advance himself in power. Of course that isn’t the real Machiavelli if you read the work. The real Machiavelli is not about advancing yourself. It’s not a manual for getting ahead. It shouldn’t be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People, because it’s a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power. If you have a government and want it to be stable and protect the people’s lives, do this.

But the idea of the murderous Machiavelli is very exciting, and this happens at other times to other intellectual figures. It happens to Thomas Hobbes in the phase that Thomas Hobbes is the Beast of Malmesbury, and the idea of Thomas Hobbes separates. It happens fascinatingly to Spinoza, an important radical Jewish thinker of the later 17th century. Spinoza is a neat one, because when you actually read Spinoza, he’s really warm and sweet. Like Machiavelli, he’s passionate and cares about people, and in his case is an incredibly pious theist. He’s a monist. He believes the entire universe is the body of God. You are a part of God. The table is part of God. The camera is part of God. Everything is God. Isn’t that great?

But a fact about Spinoza—and I know this feels tangential, but it’s not—was that he was the first person in ages and ages to be targeted with the Jewish equivalent of excommunication, the ceremonial, “Your radicalism is too radical. We are expelling you from the community of Jews.” It was such a rare ceremony that the Jews of his region actually had to send somebody traveling all around Europe to find a Jew who knew the ceremony, because it was so incredibly rarely done.

The fact of that spread around, and people had the idea that Spinoza must be even more weird and heretical than any heretic if even the Jews would expel him. The idea of Spinoza the arch-heretic becomes a character. Everyone talks about Spinoza the arch-heretic, and then you read him and it’s nothing like it.

But sometimes the character is useful. The thought experiment figure of Machiavelli the villain is useful for our philosophy. We like to talk about, “what is a Machiavellian self-serving politician?” What would they do? This has a separate life from Machiavelli’s real ideas, to the degree that all the way through the 16th century, there’s these amazing discussions of Machiavellianism in Spain. They’re talking about the Jews as Machiavellian and Machiavelli as the prince of the Jews. You’re like, “Machiavelli was in no way a Jew at all.”

But what they mean by Machiavellian and by Jewish is somehow the political thought that is undermining our good Catholic Spain. So Jewish and Machiavellian can become synonyms, mad as that is for us. Because for them, both of these are labels for the sinister underground of thought, and now we’re talking about the sinister underground of thought.

The idea of Machiavelli as the villain is itself enchanting and interesting. As we look at when Machiavelli is invoked in the modern day—when The Prince sits on the shelf and it feels like something exciting to buy and to read and to think of as a manual of getting ahead, when having it on your shelf makes it feel like you’re participating in the idea of strategic advancement and rationalism—that’s much more Machiavelli the character, Old Nick, than it is the Niccolò Machiavelli who faithfully sat in exile, willing to give up wealth, fame, society, the ability to visit his wife, anything, in order to serve his country.

To me, I think even more fascinating than looking at either Old Nick, the fictitious Machiavellian villain, or Machiavelli the patriot, is to look at how did we double-image this? What is the fascinating tendency of our society to take something real, powerful, exciting, intimate, and then say, “But we can also make the character,” and the character is itself interesting.

So if you take away a main message from this with Machiavelli, it’s that Machiavelli, the character of thought experiment, is an important backbone of our society. We use him as we think about politics. Machiavelli, the actual innovator, is a different backbone of our society and how we think about politics. If Machiavelli can be two such different things, Old Nick and Machiavelli the patriot, so many other things we encounter in life have actually been teased apart by our social utility and made into multiple things which are useful to us in different contexts.

If you have The Prince on your shelf, read it and remember it was written by somebody who was willing to give up anything to serve his country, and you’ll see a very different Machiavelli come through.

Dwarkesh Patel

I think that’s an excellent place to close. Ada, thanks so much for hopping on.

Ada Palmer

This was a pleasure, as always. I hope it won’t be the last time.

Dwarkesh Patel

I hope so, too.

《君主论》被误读了五百年：拆解真实的马基雅维利

封面图

德瓦克什·帕特尔（Dwarkesh Patel）这一期请回了阿达·帕尔默（Ada Palmer）——芝加哥大学历史学家，同时也是科幻作家和作曲家。两人上一次聊的是文艺复兴的思想环境，这一次只谈一个人：马基雅维利。整整两个小时，帕尔默做的事其实只有一件，就是把那个被「马基雅维利主义」这个词压垮了五百年的真人,从词的废墟底下挖出来。她的核心判断很冲：被后世当成「邪恶教科书」作者、当成自私自利化身的这个人，恰恰是她读过的历史上最无私的爱国者之一，《君主论》也根本不是一本教人往上爬的厚黑学手册。这期谈话的全部张力，就建立在「词」和「人」这道裂缝之上。

要点速览

一、《君主论》不是邪恶教科书，是一份危机应对方案。 一五一三年的意大利撞上一场完美风暴——绝大多数城邦的合法性同时断裂，加上教廷连续几代教皇疯狂扩军扩权。脱离这个具体绝境去读马基雅维利，必然误读。

二、能力只决定一半结果，另一半永远是命运（fortune）。 帕尔默说马基雅维利评价一个人，不看结局，看「命运介入之前最可能的结局」。波吉亚什么都做对了，输只是因为他和教皇父亲同时病倒——这不能怪他的选择。

三、马基雅维利比你想象的更在乎「手段」。 他不是说「目的正当手段就无所谓」。撒谎、背信只在你「被恐惧」时才安全；萨佛纳罗拉同样违背诺言却垮台，因为他的权力建立在「被相信」而非「被害怕」之上。

四、庇护制（patronage）是整个社会的黏合剂，不是众多黏合剂之一。 一百桩死刑判决里九十九桩最后只罚款，差别不在案情，在于你有没有靠山。布鲁诺被烧死的真正原因，是他得罪了庇护人。

五、自由的定义极其朴素：只要存在一个能随手指着你说「杀了他」的人，你就是奴隶。 佛罗伦萨人愿意上街为「自由」流血，哪怕这个共和国只对百分之一的超级精英开放。

六、《君主论》是一份求职信，写给且只写给佛罗伦萨的统治者。 马基雅维利在流亡中宁可在乡下烂掉，也不把这套「政治科学的雏形」卖给任何外国宫廷。他是地球史上最爱国的爱国者之一。

七、这本书被反复禁、反复火，每次都因为它恰好回答了那个年代的新问题。 霍布斯之后的四十年欧洲哲学忙着反驳霍布斯，于是回头找「祖宗怪物」马基雅维利;十九世纪要论证政教分离，又发现只有他的政治学不插电于宗教。

八、「马基雅维利主义」这个反派形象，本身是社会自己造出来、自己在用的工具。 Old Nick（魔鬼的诨名）和那个爱国者马基雅维利，是同一个人被切成的两个镜像——而这种「双重镜像」恰恰是人类对待很多真实事物的通用习惯。

要点速览

【一】一五一三年的「完美风暴」：合法性集体断裂，加上一个永远换人的教廷

帕尔默把马基雅维利写《君主论》时的绝境拆成两股力。

第一股是城邦结构。政治里有条朴素的规律：一个政府执政越久，合法性越强——人们信它的制度、习惯了它，哪怕一边骂一边还是认它。可一旦这条连续性被剪断——推翻了统治者、解散了共和国、换上新东西——新政权就再也没有那种稳定的黏性。所以历史上常见的模式是,一次政权更迭往往触发连续五次更迭，砰砰砰砰砰地翻车。法兰西共和国就是这样反复横跳：共和国、复辟、又共和国、又君主制。英国的玫瑰战争同理——一个王朝稳了很久，国王一被推翻，接下来就是没完没了的推翻、推翻、推翻。问题在于，在马基雅维利活着的这几十年里，意大利绝大多数城邦的这根连续性之线都被剪断了。他出生时，意大利有六七个城邦刚被连根拔起;等他写《君主论》时，已经是几十个，而且是这些地方的大多数。几乎没有一个政府站得稳，几乎每一个都熟透了等着下一次替换。

第二股是教廷。教廷是世界上最古老的机构之一，哪怕在五百年前的当时也已是。问题在于,执行权一旦集中在一个人手里,这个人怎么用权,会给下一个人立规矩。教皇直接统治着好几个城邦,理论上他能任命任何人去当某城之主。于是一个教皇有个私生子,想让儿子当个什么领主,就推翻一座城的政府把儿子塞进去;下一个教皇对三座城这么干;再下一个对五座。很快「教皇高兴就能掀翻棋盘上任何一颗棋子」成了惯例,哪怕一个相当温和的教皇,也继承了「教皇就是要推翻和替换政府」这个预设。

更要命的是教皇这个位置不世袭、选出来、无法预测。平均一任十年,每十年就冒出一个完全无法预料的新「君主」,而且几乎必然是上一任教皇的某个敌人——因为选举常常由「所有恨现任教皇的人」联合推出来——他上台就要把前任的一切撕掉重来。所以马基雅维利环顾四周看到的是:几乎每一个政体的合法性都刚被剪断,制度没有传统,人民对现任统治者毫无投入,全是被掀翻过、勉强重新站起来的棋子,一推就倒;与此同时没有任何东西能阻止教皇的轮替。唯一能阻止的,是某个人在教廷附近积聚起足够的权力和子嗣传承,让教廷不得不忌惮他、跟他谈判——这正是切萨雷·波吉亚（Cesare Borgia）当年试图做的事。

所以马基雅维利想让美第奇家族（Medici）做的,不是统一意大利,而是至少把意大利稳住:占下足够大的一块地盘,让教廷怕他们、必须跟他们谈,而不是被一圈不断翻车的小弱邦包围。而此刻教皇恰好就是美第奇家的人——这让事情更有可能。

一五一三年意大利的完美风暴

【二】波吉亚与命运：你能掌控的永远只有一半，另一半叫运气

写《君主论》之前,马基雅维利当过多年外交官僚,见过法王路易、神圣罗马帝国的马克西米利安一干名人。但帕尔默说,他在书里花了大量篇幅试图掩饰一件事——他对切萨雷·波吉亚（在当时更常被叫作「瓦伦蒂诺」Valentino）的在意,远超对其他所有人。他努力想显得平衡,举这个例子那个例子,可有时候就是绷不住。

最神奇的破壁时刻,出现在他描述瓦伦蒂诺的垮台。波吉亚几乎征服了意大利全境,然后他和他父亲教皇突然同时病倒。马基雅维利本该平静地写:波吉亚为父亲死后的每一种意外都做了预案,唯独没料到自己也会同时躺在鬼门关上。但他没这么写。他写的是——「他亲口告诉我」（"he told me"）他为父亲之死的一切都做了准备,唯独没准备自己同时丧失行动能力。第一人称突然撞进来,这位历史学家再也藏不住自己了,他太在乎了。那一瞬间作者和读者之间的帷幕被撕开:其他人马基雅维利都是远远观察的,但波吉亚不一样——他就在瓦伦蒂诺身边的房间里,亲历了这个独特、有魅力又令人恐惧的男人。当时人对波吉亚的记述,从「我见过最有魅力的领袖」一直到「他超自然地有魅力,以至于必然是敌基督本人、或死亡天使的肉身化身,我找不到别的解释」——而马基雅维利就在那个房间里,有时你能感到他仍未走出这个人施下的咒。

马基雅维利当时的差事是欧洲最可怕的工作。波吉亚的计划明摆着是吞下意大利中部的教皇国,而佛罗伦萨的领地像一块拼图缺口嵌在教皇国侧面——任何看着地图的人都会说:你必须拿下它,没有它就拼不成一个王国。这一步无法阻挡。怎么办?马基雅维利给自己城邦的建议是:这次没法劝这个征服者绕开我们了,也没法用钱永久买他改道,但我们能买时间。我们卑微地发誓做他要的任何事,把军队和钱都给他,帮他征服其余地方,背叛盟友——背叛波伦亚,哪怕佛罗伦萨为保卫波伦亚维持了三百年的同盟。他说:整个世界现在都碎了,我们必须打破每一个承诺、每一个世袭同盟,站到这个人身边,唯一的活路是靠忠诚、靠支持、靠我马基雅维利在他耳边不停地低语「佛罗伦萨永远忠于您」,来换得「波吕斐摩斯之恩」——那个征服者可怕的承诺:「我喜欢你,我的客人,我会最后才吃你」（"I'll eat you last"）。这就是共和国唯一的指望。

帕特尔追问:这不是和《君主论》里「永远别靠强权崛起,因为成功也意味着你扶起了一个比你强、能拿捏你的人」自相矛盾吗?帕尔默回答:这不是佛罗伦萨想崛起,这是佛罗伦萨明知必输还在求生。如果教皇亚历山大再多活一年,瓦伦蒂诺就会完成征服、拿下佛罗伦萨,一切就结束了。但教皇是会死的,而买时间有时就是求生机制。

马基雅维利亲历了塞尼加利亚（Senigallia）的大屠杀:有人因恐惧密谋反波吉亚,又因更恐惧而放弃了密谋,波吉亚听说后召见他们,说「我原谅你们,你们通过了考验,我信任你们」,然后请他们赴宴,在宴席上把他们全杀了。宽恕是假的,背叛被惩罚了。事后几个月有封信:马基雅维利的家人听说波吉亚屠杀了一大批随从,却因邮政系统在混乱中彻底崩溃,花了好几个月才确认马基雅维利还活着——他本可能就在密谋者打算拉拢的名单上,妻儿等了几个月才知道他没被一起宰掉,简直像个奇迹。按但丁的标准,在宴席上违反待客之道屠杀宾客,是重到「魔鬼会直接从地狱上来把你的灵魂从身体里拽走、自己钻进去」的滔天大罪。然而它管用——屠杀之后,波吉亚剩下的部下比以往任何时候都更忠诚,连私下抱怨都不敢,因为哪怕最微弱的密谋气味都可能招来死亡。

所以波吉亚什么都做对了,为什么王国最终散架?因为他恰好吃了和父亲同样的东西食物中毒,恰好在错误的时刻病倒;他扶上去的傀儡教皇庇护三世又死得太快;接着他被尤利乌斯（Julius）算计出局。这几件坏事要是没有连环发生,王国就站住了,佛罗伦萨也会被他拿下。这就是马基雅维利反复提醒我们的:我们能做的事很多——记住「被恐惧好过被爱」,记住别被人憎恨——但我们至多只掌控造成结果的一半,另一半永远是命运。他是功利主义思想的源头,主张按结果评价人的行为;可他不止于此,他说要按「命运介入之前最可能的结局」来评价。人们看着波吉亚说「但波吉亚垮了啊」——罗马至今的某个比萨店墙上还留着一道疤,那是波吉亚家的公牛纹章被人凿掉的痕迹——人们想把这件事的教训定为「别学波吉亚,他垮了」。马基雅维利说:不,他们不是因为选择而垮,是因为世上一半的事永远不在我们掌控之中。你可以全部做对然后仍然失控。但我们必须评价「本来会发生什么」,因此我们应当效仿他们,因为他们做的每一件事都是对的。

命运的天平：你只掌控一半

【三】撒谎只在「被恐惧」时才安全：手段比你以为的重要得多

帕特尔承认自己读这两本书之前对马基雅维利有个误解:以为他主张「手段不重要,只看结果」。读完发现恰恰相反——马基雅维利对手段的在意,远超想象。因为你「凭什么手段」获得权力,决定了这权力有多稳、多有结果。靠雇佣兵、靠那些会因你的崛起而变得比你强的大国,你的位置就极其危险。而说到尤利乌斯,马基雅维利又抛出一个看似矛盾的点:靠撒谎、毁约、不守信用获得权力是「可以的」,因为人们会忘记你不守信,下次遇到你照样信你的话。

但帕尔默把这一点拧得更紧:不是「撒谎可以」,而是「撒谎有时可以——前提是你勾上了另外几个框」。他分析萨佛纳罗拉（Savonarola)——那个佛罗伦萨修士会做各种预言和承诺,有的应验有的没有,然后他再修正昨天说过的话。在马基雅维利看来,萨佛纳罗拉对自己的操弄和谎言「处理得很糟」,真把人心转向了反对他、让他失去权力。原因在于:萨佛纳罗拉作为宗教煽动家,权力核心是人们相信他受神启、不会犯错;一旦在真话上反复翻车,他的权力基础就崩了。

换成切萨雷·波吉亚就完全不同。波吉亚结个盟、合作一阵子再背叛盟友,可因为他是如此有效的征服者、如此可怕、所有人都怕他,即便他背叛一个盟友,其他盟友的反应也是「我得对他更忠诚,免得下一个被背叛的是我」——他们拼命想留在君主的好感里,而不是反水,因为他太吓人了。萨佛纳罗拉不吓人。他有魅力、能说服人,声音能让人群颤栗、让女人晕眩——萨佛纳罗拉死后几十年,有人问米开朗琪罗他当年是什么样,米开朗琪罗的回答是「我至今还能听见他的声音」。可这种魅力型存在,一旦开始在政策和真话上反复横跳就不够用了。而瓦伦蒂诺如此可怕,他可以背叛自己的头号大将、夺其领地、掀翻其城,而他所有其他将领只会说「最好更老实地排进队列」。

所以马基雅维利极度聚焦于手段的细节:做 A 和 B 你就没事,做 A 和 C 你就完了。如果你是个把权力投资在「被爱」上的君主,你就得一直维持被爱、或者同时培养被恐惧;如果你重金投资在「被恐惧」上,那你能做一些「被爱型君主」绝对不能做的事。「被恐惧好过被爱」这句名言,内核是他对人性极度悲观:如果你的权力基础依赖别人的承诺和忠诚,一旦你的统治看起来摇摇欲坠,他们立刻反水;而如果你的统治依赖「人们预期毁约会被惩罚」,那就稳得多。他基本认为人会坏到你允许的程度——这和美国开国者要搞制衡、要让不同派系互相牵制的理由,惊人地相似。

帕尔默在这里补了一个常被忽略的创举:马基雅维利是欧洲传统里有记载的第一个提出「一个国家里可以同时存在不止一个政党、让它们彼此竞争、通过竞争来宣泄社会张力」的人。这在今天是常识,但在他那里是革命性的。当时对政党的标准态度是:一个政体里若有两个政党,在其中一个被斩首示众、房屋焚毁夷平之前,不可能稳定。佛罗伦萨对付政党的老办法就是屠杀——它屠尽了吉伯林派,在他们房屋原址撒盐,至今寸草不生;后来黑党白党分裂,又立刻开始互相屠杀。标准答案是一党必须灭掉另一党才有稳定。而佛罗伦萨的邻居锡耶纳是少数反例之一:那里的政党不仅共存,还能在政治上相互助益。

【四】庇护制：连住旅店买苹果都离不开靠山

帕尔默反复强调,五百年前那个世界和我们最大的不同之一,是庇护制不只是「更突出」,而是「社会的根本黏合剂」,而非众多黏合剂之一。

她举了个极端的例子。十六世纪中叶法尔内塞被选为教皇保罗三世,他没有腐败地任命某个亲戚当教廷军队统帅,反而任命了一位真正能干、有经验的将军,而不是自己那个不太行的私生子。结果罗马爆发骚乱——「教皇陛下,人民要求更多裙带关系!您必须任命您的私生子当军队统帅,因为您的儿子永远不会背叛您,我们才能确信教廷军队不会反水罗马!」按民众的要求,人民要更多裙带,因为整个系统依赖它。庇护制创造的是一种多代家族纠缠出来的信任:这些家族一起上升、一起跌落。这能支撑起一个「士兵效忠于指挥官、而非他所服务的政体」的世界——因为通讯太慢,指挥官必须能在战场上即时下令。现代性给出的另一个解法是:士兵效忠于宪法、国家或人民。但在那个年代,你建起一支军队就是把它交给一个人,你若不能信任这个人,人民就会恐惧罗马和自己军队之间出现裂痕。

庇护制一路渗透到底层,而看清它最好的窗口是审判结果。中世纪的法典极其残酷,偷窃处死、通奸处死、同性恋处死、烧了君主的蜂箱也处死——可你翻实际审判记录,同样的罪名,大约每一百次定罪里只有一次真的执行死刑,其余几乎都是罚款或公开鞭打。为什么?答案就是庇护制。假设文艺复兴时期一个木匠的儿子喝醉了在斗殴中失手打死人,被以谋杀罪受审。木匠为某个有钱家族(比如美第奇)做家具,他就去求这家庇护人说句好话,庇护人有能力影响法官,儿子就得到轻判。这是「品格证人」的祖先,但常态是:你被控重罪、被审判到危及性命,然后庇护人介入、你获得轻判——这就是当时「正义应有的运作方式」。

这条线在十八世纪启蒙运动时发生剧变。现代人想的是「比例正义」:罪对应刑,所有有罪者得同样的刑才算公平,跟你认识谁、是穷是富无关。而这个时期的正义观更受基督教塑造:审判的目的是罪人灵魂的内在矫正。理想结局是被告在「代表上帝的可怕法官」面前为性命颤抖、知道自己有罪该下地狱,却奇迹般地被赦免——这个「受审、为命求情于庇护人、最终获得仁慈」的过程,被设计成你灵魂将来面对神圣审判时的尘世预演,从而让你出来后成为更好的人。所以当一百桩审判里九十九桩只罚小钱、一桩被处决时,真实含义是:九十九桩有庇护人出面说情,那一桩是这个人跌出了庇护网络——他得罪了他的老板、他的保护者,所以才一路滑到死刑。

帕尔默用三个人把这条逻辑钉死。乔尔丹诺·布鲁诺(Giordano Bruno)以「科学殉道者」闻名,被宗教裁判所烧死,但很少有人知道那不是他第一次受审。早先几次审判都是常规结局:他有庇护人,有钱人或大学罩着他,说句好话,裁判所让他「做个好人」就算了。可烧死他那次,他得罪了雇主——是他的庇护人把他举报给裁判所,说「这家伙是个骗子,我不信任他,严办」。那次审判一路走到死刑,正是因为他没有庇护人,他成了那「第一百桩」。对照看皮科·德拉·米兰多拉(Pico della Mirandola),论激进其实远超布鲁诺,但皮科受审时洛伦佐·德·美第奇和一群权贵都真心在乎他、使出浑身解数,洛伦佐找他那位奥尔西尼家的姻亲(奥尔西尼家族在罗马势力巨大),把皮科捞出来送回洛伦佐身边软禁了事。再如费奇诺(Ficino)——那个写过「灵魂如何投射到时间之外、召唤天使」、论证轮回存在的激进柏拉图主义者,裁判所找上门时,他喊「快,找洛伦佐」,洛伦佐找枢机主教奥尔西尼一压,事情就摆平了,费奇诺只被叮嘱「别再那么公开地谈轮回」。庇护制就是让一切运转的黏合剂——帕尔默说,没有庇护人你连旅店都住不进、连个苹果都买不到,因为你到一座城没人认识你,你手里有的就是庇护人写给当地某个要人的推荐信,你把它递到旅店,他们才让你住下。

庇护制：社会的黏合网

【五】只要有人能随手指着你说「杀了他」,你就是奴隶

帕特尔追问:既然如此,瓦伦蒂诺要是真拿下了佛罗伦萨,坏在哪?佛罗伦萨的文化珍宝大概率会没事。帕尔默说,马基雅维利真正担心的是另一件事,而这件事是理解他全部共和思想的钥匙。

马基雅维利极其坚决地认为:如果你活在一种状态里——存在某个人,他能在街上走过、指着你说「他,杀了他」,而这真的会发生——那你就不自由。用他文本里的词,在一个「存在专断权力、可以处死人」的体系里生活,你是奴隶。反过来,如果你活在一个「必须经审判、必须有程序、必须被检视、必须公开」的系统里,那你就有自由(liberty)。这个系统可能不公、可能有偏见、甚至可能就是那个折磨并流放了马基雅维利本人的系统——但它是个系统,而他认为这个差别极其重要。如果瓦伦蒂诺征服佛罗伦萨,那就不再是这个系统了:会有一个人能在街上指着某个佛罗伦萨公民说「杀了他」,然后他就被杀。那个暴君会公正吗?也许。他的继任者会更好还是更坏?不知道,无法预测——它是君主制,既可能出好继任者也可能出坏的。但只要存在一个能说「处决他」的人,佛罗伦萨人民就不自由。

这一点对马基雅维利、对佛罗伦萨人民都意义重大,而我们很难体会:他们其实拥有的自由和参政权少得可怜,却如此在乎。佛罗伦萨人会一次次走上街头、冒着生命危险打出写着「libertas」(自由)的旗帜——而这面旗其实是「执政团」(signoria,即元老院)的纹章,而执政团是从那百分之一的超级精英里选出来的。他们不是在为「自己参与共和国的权利」暴动,他们是在为「他们老板的老板留在共和国里的权利」暴动。可他们依然如此深切地在乎它,把它和「存在一个能指着你说杀了他的人」的处境视为根本不同。这份自由传统意义重大,哪怕世上最仁慈的暴君拿下这座城,它也会消失。

但这只是答案的一半。帕特尔问:那洛伦佐·德·美第奇接管时,他难道不就是「那个能指着你说杀了他的人」吗?帕尔默给出第二半答案:征服者来自你的城、爱你的城、想呵护你的城,和征服者来自外部,是天壤之别。美第奇接管佛罗伦萨时,他们想要的就是佛罗伦萨、想让佛罗伦萨还是佛罗伦萨,想让它所有的美和珍宝都还在、都归他们所有。他们绝不会考虑夷平它的重要部分,绝不会用「你们敢反叛我就拆你们的城墙、毁你们的大教堂」来威胁佛罗伦萨人。任何外来征服者都会这么威胁。所以美第奇公爵治下的佛罗伦萨,比维斯孔蒂或斯福尔扎公爵治下的米兰更像共和国时期的米兰,更不用说埃斯特公爵治下、连共和国残迹都没留下的费拉拉。马基雅维利清楚:佛罗伦萨如果非得陷落,落入美第奇之手是最温和的——也许最不稳,因为他们不会像外来征服者那样被恐惧,但从内部被征服,你能保住一些从外部被征服时保不住的重要权利。

【六】被误读五百年:从霍布斯余波到「魔鬼诨名」的双重镜像

那么问题来了:这本作者本人都不愿广泛流传的书,是怎么进入大规模出版、又被禁、又复火的?帕尔默先给「拉远」的答案。

很多包含激进异常思想的著作,会长期无人特别关注、不被广泛阅读,直到某个时刻——某个世纪、某个十年提出的新问题,恰好被这本旧书里的某样东西回答了,于是所有人突然开始读它。卢克莱修的《物性论》就是这样:它是古代原子论最好的浓缩,写于公元前后,却漂流了上千年无人在意,直到十七世纪人们开始有疾病的细菌理论雏形、对新科学极感兴趣,它一下子出了三十个印本到处都是,十九世纪人们对原子和细胞感兴趣时影响更大。一本书可以存在近两千年,然后「啵」地一声突然回答了那个十年的问题。

《君主论》最初为什么被出版?是马基雅维利还在世的亲属想为家族、为这位已故的亲人争名声——这是他一部尚未出版的作品,能传播他的名声;它又题献给美第奇家成员,于是美第奇也乐得「出版这东西我们也得名」。他们没像作者本人那样认真对待书里内容的力量。然后人们读了开始觉得「这书里满是相当骇人的想法」,于是它进了禁书目录——而禁书目录的兴起,本身是印刷术的产物。帕尔默有个小论点:每出现一种新信息技术,随后就有一波审查浪潮去审查这种新技术,一大批书一起被禁。马基雅维利在这波里其实不算显眼:禁书目录里把「大异端」用全大写标出,而全大写的「大异端」名额在这个时期都留给了新教——路德、加尔文、茨温利和一堆你没听过的新教神学家;马基雅维利只是普通字体,他要更晚才「火起来」。

接着是「拉近」的两次复活。第一次复活,发生在霍布斯《利维坦》出版之后。《利维坦》像一卡车砖头一样砸进欧洲思想,用极具说服力的优美推理把人引向一个关于人性、关于上帝的可怕图景,人们觉得吓人却又极度信服。毫不夸张地说,《利维坦》出版后有四十年,西欧哲学唯一的目标就是想出一个好办法来反驳霍布斯。在那一刻人们说:霍布斯用的很多关于政治和历史的逻辑听起来像马基雅维利——功利主义、后果主义,分析政府起源时仿佛没有任何神性在背后设立它。于是他们说:霍布斯是怪物,那我们去读「生出小怪物的老怪物」吧,在马基雅维利身上找漏洞,也许就能用来反驳霍布斯。马基雅维利于是因「被当成敌人」而骤然走红。

第二次复活在十九世纪——直到这时《君主论》才成为会被收进「伟大著作」系列的全球经典。启蒙运动及其革命之后,美国共和国、法兰西共和国、各地的民主运动都需要新的政治思考方式,尤其需要在「政教分离」框架下思考政治。而要思考政教分离,你就需要一套「不依赖上帝」的政治与伦理装置。当时人类手头绝大多数政治论著的根基里都缠着宗教,唯独马基雅维利不缠——他是那个「如果我们把政府放进一个不接宗教这根电源的盒子里思考」的早期奠基者。这对发展政教分离的治国术极其有用,也顺便被意大利民族主义拿来邀功:「政教分离是我们发明的,这是马基雅维利,第一个现代人,意大利文化经由他发明了现代性。」与此同时英国说弗朗西斯·培根才是第一个现代人(他发明了科学方法),法国说笛卡尔才是(他发明了现代逻辑演绎)——十九世纪有一场民族主义竞赛,各国都想宣称本国的酷思想家是「第一个现代人」。「政教分离」这个短语,马基雅维利本人听了根本不会认得,但他想必会琢磨很久、判定它很酷,然后为它写一堆信。

帕特尔在这里抛出一个反论:马基雅维利在十九世纪获得特殊意义,也许还因为《论李维》(Discourses on Livy)前三分之一痴迷于一个问题——共和国如何被维系。而他给的办法之一,恰恰是要有一种被民众极其当真的宗教。他说罗马奠基中比罗慕路斯更重要的是努马(Numa),是努马给了罗马诸神和宗教以合法性,而正是这份合法性、这份「怕冒犯神明会被惩罚」的恐惧,激励人们去捍卫共和国。他举西庇阿的例子:汉尼拔在坎尼会战中歼灭罗马军队后,罗马人正要弃城逃跑,西庇阿拔剑逼他们「向我们的神发誓你们会留下来保卫家园」——仅仅这个当场的誓言就足以说服他们:「我赌汉尼拔不会比神更可怕,所以我得留下来保卫共和国。」看起来马基雅维利认为宗教对国家合法性极其重要。

帕尔默同意,并指出这正是十九世纪人物思考宗教的方式:必须把「宗教这个机构」和「宗教对民众的心理效应」分开。最好的例子是托马斯·潘恩。潘恩是自然神论者和激进派,有大量论著说世上最具破坏性的力量就是建制宗教——无论天主教还是英国国教,都是延续数百上千年的阴谋,用来控制你的心智、偷走你的钱。然而他说:宗教对公民身份至关重要,因为它让人向善、让人畏惧并愿意守法。所以潘恩主张每个国家都必须有宗教、学校必须强制宗教教育——但具体是哪个宗教无所谓。这是潘恩在用功利主义的方式思考「宗教在场」的心理效应,和那种「政教交缠、国家推崇国教是因为相信它为真」的旧观念截然不同。

马基雅维利正是在思考宗教对人民的心理效应。他在《论李维》里有段精彩分析:罗马宗教说,你的鬼魂依赖于「被记住」(出自荷马传统)——你的鬼魂只在还被人记住的程度上保有身份,一旦名字在世上被遗忘,你的鬼魂就忘了自己的名字,变成空洞游荡的影子。这不像基督教里灵魂永远安好,而是「你的灵魂取决于子孙在世上的尊崇」。因此你有极强的动机去做伟业被人记住,尤其是为国捐躯,因为那样你的名字会与国家同寿。马基雅维利说这是古罗马人愿意为国牺牲的一大动力,因为这保障了他们美好的来世。而基督教说,好来世只取决于虔诚、最好是殉道,你就没有为国牺牲的动机了——你来世的安全由你的内在性保障,这会鼓励一个公民坐进盒子里当修士,而不是参军保卫祖国。所以马基雅维利说,罗马宗教对爱国主义和政治稳定远比基督教有利。但他在那一章结尾加了一句:基督教有一个优势,就是它是真的(the advantage of being true),句号,本章完。

帕尔默最后回到那道核心裂缝:为什么马基雅维利被记成的样子,和他写了什么、为何而写,如此不同?思想史上有些作者会和他们的作品分离,形成一种平行——一边是这个人实际做和说了什么,另一边是「关于这个人的观念」。在马基雅维利这里,一边是那个爱国者马基雅维利、那个做了所有这些工作的人;另一边是「Machiavellian」,是莎士比亚笔下的「凶残的马基雅维尔」,是「Old Nick」——魔鬼的诨名,本因人们管马基雅维利叫 Nick 而流行,字面上成了魔鬼的同义词。这个反派形象——那个图谋算计、多半无神论、绝对自私自利、只想往上爬的政客——当然不是读过原著后的真马基雅维利。真正的马基雅维利讲的不是往上爬,《君主论》不该和《人性的弱点》摆在一起,因为它不是一本「如何获得权力」的手册,而是「如何保住权力」的手册:如果你有一个政府、想让它稳定、想保护人民的性命,就这么做。

但「凶残的马基雅维利」这个形象太刺激了。同样的事也发生在霍布斯身上(被叫作「马姆斯伯里的野兽」),发生在斯宾诺莎身上——你真去读斯宾诺莎,他温暖、甜美、像马基雅维利一样满怀热情地关心人,是个极虔诚的一元论者,认为整个宇宙就是上帝的身体、你是上帝的一部分、桌子是上帝的一部分、摄像机也是。可斯宾诺莎是几百年来第一个被处以犹太版「逐出教门」的人——这仪式罕见到当地犹太人得派人跑遍欧洲找一个还懂这套仪式的犹太人来主持。这件事一传开,人们就有了「斯宾诺莎一定比任何异端都更异端,连犹太人都要驱逐他」的观念,于是「大异端斯宾诺莎」成了一个角色,而你真读他,根本不是那么回事。一直到十六世纪,西班牙还有把犹太人说成「马基雅维利主义者」、把马基雅维利说成「犹太人的君主」的荒诞讨论——马基雅维利跟犹太毫无关系,但他们用「马基雅维利主义的」和「犹太的」互为同义词,因为这两个标签都指向「那个正在破坏我们良善天主教西班牙的、思想的阴暗地下世界」。

所以帕尔默给出的临别讯息是:与其只盯着「Old Nick 这个虚构反派」或「爱国者马基雅维利」,不如去看我们是怎么把它「双重镜像化」的——我们社会有一种迷人的倾向,把某样真实、有力、亲密的东西拿过来,然后说「我们也可以造一个角色出来,而这个角色本身也很有意思」。如果马基雅维利能同时是 Old Nick 和爱国者这样两个截然不同的东西,那么生活里我们遇到的许多其他事物,也早被「社会效用」撕成了在不同语境下各有用处的多个版本。所以,如果你书架上有一本《君主论》,读它,并记住它出自一个愿意为服务自己的国家放弃一切的人——你会看见一个非常不同的马基雅维利浮现出来。

代表性短摘与中文转述

关于波吉亚垮台那刻破壁:帕尔默说马基雅维利本该平静叙述,却脱口而出第一人称——「他亲口告诉我」("he told me")他为父亲之死的一切都做了准备,唯独没料到自己也会同时倒下。她说这是作者与读者之间的帷幕被撕开的一瞬,「我们的历史学家在任何地方都藏不住自己,他太在乎了」。

求生策略的隐喻:马基雅维利给佛罗伦萨的活路,被帕尔默概括为换取「波吕斐摩斯之恩」——那个征服者可怕的承诺:「我喜欢你,我的客人,我会最后才吃你」("I like you, my guest. I'll eat you last")。

但丁笔下的佛罗伦萨:帕尔默引但丁在地狱里一次次撞见同乡时的讥讽——「恭喜你,佛罗伦萨,一座在地狱里都出名的城」("a city famous in hell"),因为但丁认为他的佛罗伦萨同胞格外虚伪。

罗马宗教 vs 基督教的功利比较:马基雅维利论证罗马宗教对政治稳定远胜基督教,却在章末突然收住——基督教有一个优势,「就是它是真的,句号,本章完」("the advantage of being true, period")。帕尔默笑称那句"true"上方分明该有个「(强制)」的脚注。

「马基雅维利主义」与本人的反讽:帕尔默说,这个词意味着自私自利,而马基雅维利本人「是我在地球史上读到过的最无私的人之一」——他愿意放弃事业、外交、名声、朋友,乃至连待在一座城里好好过一天的能力,只为忠于祖国;他宁可服务于无、不为任何非佛罗伦萨的事业花上一个钟头。

注

两个洛伦佐别混:文艺复兴佛罗伦萨有两个著名的洛伦佐。盖图书馆花相当于今天「三千万美元」教育孙辈、向西克斯特斯教皇行臣服礼、保护皮科和费奇诺免于裁判所的,是祖父洛伦佐·德·美第奇(即「伟大的洛伦佐」Lorenzo il Magnifico);而《君主论》的题献对象是一五一三年那个孙子洛伦佐·迪·皮耶罗·德·美第奇(Lorenzo di Piero)。原谈话明确区分了二人,本文相应处理。

瓦伦蒂诺 = 切萨雷·波吉亚:「瓦伦蒂诺」(Valentino,源自其瓦伦蒂努瓦公爵头衔)是当时对切萨雷·波吉亚更常用的称呼;本文为统一可读性主要用「波吉亚」,偶尔保留「瓦伦蒂诺」以贴原文语气。注意区别于古罗马的「凯撒」(Caesar)。

塞尼加利亚屠杀:一五〇二年波吉亚以和解为名设宴,诱杀密谋反他的部将,史称塞尼加利亚屠杀;马基雅维利时任佛罗伦萨派驻波吉亚的使节,亲历此事。

波吕斐摩斯之恩:典出《奥德赛》,独眼巨人波吕斐摩斯对奥德修斯说「我会最后才吃你」,本是嘲弄式的「恩典」;帕尔默用它比喻弱邦向强暴征服者乞求的、仅有的喘息空间。

萨佛纳罗拉:十五世纪末佛罗伦萨的多明我会修士、宗教煽动家,曾以末世预言短暂主导佛罗伦萨,后被处决焚尸。

Old Nick:英语中「老尼克」是魔鬼的俗称,据帕尔默说,这一诨名之所以流行,部分正因人们把马基雅维利叫作 Nick(Niccolò 的昵称),「凶残的马基雅维尔」遂与魔鬼同义。

关于字幕纠错:本文据自动字幕整理,已据已核验实体表纠正人名地名(如 Sinigaglia/Senigallia、Valentino、Ficino、Pico 等)。原视频中夹有三段与主题无关的赞助商口播(分别为某 AI 编程工具、某量化公司招聘、某数据中心公司),整理时已剔除,不计入正文。

最后:一个被自己发明的反派吞掉的人

帕尔默这一期最锋利的地方,不在于「为马基雅维利平反」——平反是廉价的,任何替历史人物喊冤的人都能做。她真正干的是一件更难的事:她拒绝在「Old Nick」和「爱国者」之间二选一,而是把镜头对准那道裂缝本身,问「我们为什么需要把一个真人切成两个镜像」。这才是这期谈话值得追踪的真问题。

但这里有一处张力,帕尔默没有完全摊开,值得点破。她把真马基雅维利描述成「地球史上最无私的爱国者之一」——可《君主论》里那套「被恐惧好过被爱」「该背信时就背信」「按命运介入前的概率而非结局评价行为」的冷酷算计,并不会因为作者动机高尚就变得不冷酷。换句话说,「Machiavellian」这个反派标签之所以五百年甩不掉,恰恰因为它抓住了文本里真实存在的东西。帕尔默对此的回应其实藏在第三章:马基雅维利对「手段」的极度聚焦——做 A 和 B 你就没事,做 A 和 C 你就完了——本身就否定了「目的正当手段无所谓」的庸俗读法。真马基雅维利不是道德虚无主义者,他是一个把政治后果算到小数点后两位的工程师。可问题在于:一个把背信、屠杀、欺骗都纳入「在特定条件下有效」工具箱的工程师,和一个「邪恶导师」,在文本层面到底差多少?帕尔默给的答案是「差在为谁服务、为何而写」——只为佛罗伦萨、只给佛罗伦萨的统治者看的秘密武器,和一本卖给任何想往上爬的人的厚黑学,是两回事。这个区分成立,但它把全部重量压在了「意图」和「受众」上,而文本本身的冷酷依然站在那里。这是听完之后真正值得继续追的问题:当我们说一个思想家「被误读」时,我们到底是在说后人读错了文本,还是在说后人读对了文本却读错了人?

第二个值得追踪的点,是帕尔默那个「思想会被社会效用撕成多个版本」的元论断。她举了斯宾诺莎、霍布斯,说这是人类对待真实事物的通用习惯。这个观察很漂亮,但它有个自我指涉的危险:如果连「真马基雅维利」也只是帕尔默这位历史学家、为芝加哥大学和这档播客的受众、精心构建出的又一个有用版本呢?她笔下那个「宁可在乡下烂掉也要忠于祖国」的悲情爱国者,叙事张力之强,几乎像她自己科幻小说里的人物。这不是说她错了——她的史料(马基雅维利亲手抄录卢克莱修、流亡期的求职信、和同性恋友人的通信)都是硬的——而是说,任何「我还你一个真实的 X」的叙事,本身也是一次镜像制作。帕尔默最诚实的地方,是她其实已经预告了这一点:她说的「双重镜像」机制,逻辑上同样适用于她自己正在做的事。真正成熟的听法,不是从她手里接过「真马基雅维利」当作终点,而是把它当作又一面有用的镜子——一面比 Old Nick 更接近史料、但仍是镜子的镜子。

最值得带走的一句,是帕尔默对自由那个朴素到近乎暴力的定义:只要存在一个能在街上指着你说「杀了他」的人,你就是奴隶,哪怕这个暴君碰巧仁慈、哪怕你原来那个系统不公又腐败。这个标准放在今天依然锋利——它不问统治者好不好,只问「有没有一个谁都不能绕过的程序」。佛罗伦萨人为一面只代表百分之一精英的「自由」旗帜流血,在帕尔默看来不是愚蠢,而是他们比我们更清楚:程序的存在与否,是奴隶和自由人之间那道无法用「统治者人品」来填平的鸿沟。

《君主论》被误读了五百年：拆解真实的马基雅维利

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Timestamps

Transcript

00:00:00 – How Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival

00:15:08 – Machiavelli’s analytical innovations

00:23:58 – Why popes became warlords

00:36:13 – Why the common people demanded nepotism

00:47:57 – Cesare Borgia brought terror to rulers and justice to the people

00:57:55 – Art as a proxy for war

01:06:41 – Florence, a city famous in hell

01:15:57 – The Prince was a job application to Machiavelli’s torturers

01:41:39 – During the Renaissance, original ideas had to be couched in antiquity

01:50:44 – Why copyright began with the Inquisition

02:02:12 – Machiavelli wasn’t Machiavellian

《君主论》被误读了五百年：拆解真实的马基雅维利

要点速览

【一】一五一三年的「完美风暴」：合法性集体断裂，加上一个永远换人的教廷

【二】波吉亚与命运：你能掌控的永远只有一半，另一半叫运气

【三】撒谎只在「被恐惧」时才安全：手段比你以为的重要得多

【四】庇护制：连住旅店买苹果都离不开靠山

【五】只要有人能随手指着你说「杀了他」,你就是奴隶

【六】被误读五百年:从霍布斯余波到「魔鬼诨名」的双重镜像

代表性短摘与中文转述

注

最后:一个被自己发明的反派吞掉的人