Philip Bobbitt - The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made

The Garments of Court and Palace

Also by Philip Bobbitt

Tragic Choices (with Guido Calabresi)

Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution

Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy (with Lawrence Freedman and Gregory Treverton)

United States Nuclear Strategy: A Reader

Constitutional Interpretation

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century

Published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Philip Bobbitt, 2013
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1843546849
E-book ISBN: 978 1782391425

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For Guido Calabresi

Il miglior fabbro

Italy at the End of the Fifteenth Century

Prologue

Arte dello Stato The Machiavelli Paradox

T HERE CONTINUES TO be enormous interest in Machiavelli and his works, but it is not entirely clear why this is so.The Prince is often described as a great book that changed the world, yet while it is doubtless secure in its inclusion in a canon of such books, it has been so variously and contradictorily interpreted that any change in the world it may have brought about is likely to have been through a kind of horrible inadvertence that would have amused, though perhaps not surprised, Machiavelli.

Indeed, there remain a number of controverted questions about even the most basic of Machiavellis views. Was he a forthright totalitarian or a human rights-respecting republican? Was he a Christian or a pagan? Did he give priority to the lawgiver or the war fighter? Was he essentially an ethical writer or an unabashed amoralist? Was he the first political scientist, attempting to do for statecraft what Galileo sought to do for cosmology, or was he a committed sceptic where prediction is concerned? Was he a Renaissance humanist or a neoclassical realist? Did he believe that the affairs of mankind were determined or that there was a decisive role for individual free will?

There are passages in Machiavellis works that would appear to support each of these antinomies, and there are some writers who have concluded that his ideas were simply incoherent, while others have decided that they were written in the code of satire or of some gnosticism even more oblique. In the course of this book, my own views on each of these questions will become evident, and though I have tried to marshal evidence for my interpretive conclusions, I would be surprised if many of the facts or passages to which I draw attention, while perhaps new to some general readers, were not familiar to the large collegium of Machiavelli scholars. I hope, rather, that my particular perspective that of a constitutional lawyer and historian of diplomacy and strategy has offered a means of putting these excerpts, events and surmises into a persuasive and sensible pattern; and that the concepts I have elaborated in previous books and introduce again here provide a structured and useful way to understand the complex and sometimes apparently contradictory body of Machiavellis work.

My book is a commentary, which Harvey Mansfield one of the most gifted scholars of Machiavelli has trenchantly defined: A commentary, he writes, attempts to bring forth and interpret the authors intent, and so supposes that he has one, that it is worth finding, and that it is not manifest on the surface. The morphology of the state was first depicted by Machiavelli with his description of the princely state, a constitutional order that would evolve, successively, into the kingly states, territorial states, imperial state-nations, and eventually the industrial nation states within which we now live. This achievement is clearer now than it has ever been, just as it is now clearer that he was grievously misunderstood by his feudal contemporaries.

Five particular ideas have structured the understanding of The Prince since it was posthumously published in 1532, and it is these basic background assumptions that have given rise to those longstanding scholarly problems that remain so notably prominent in the study of Machiavellis work and which are themselves artifacts of the Machiavelli Paradox. That paradox is: how can a mans body of work mark him out as one of the most perhaps the most influential political philosophers since Aristotle when there is such profound disagreement over what he was actually saying?

The first of these background understandings is that The Prince is a mirror book that is, it is exemplary of a genre going back to classical times in which the writer advises a prince or official at court how to behave. Ciceros De officiis provides a model for this genre, but so too do a number of other influential examples.basis for the claim that a Machiavellian prince is one who disdains classical or Christian virtues a claim that has provoked much controversy. But both the claim and the controversy, though derived from this background understanding, are not identical with it. Critics may differ as to whether Machiavelli is writing his mirror book to serve as a warning or as a guide, but they agree that it falls into the category of mirror books either way.

The second basic understanding is that The Prince is a work that seeks to serve autocracy and therefore appears to be incompatible with the republican ideas Machiavelli expressed in his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (hereinafter the Discourses). This observation has given rise to the following questions: was Machiavelli lying about his true preferences when he wrote The Prince? Did his views change as he became older? Is the corpus of Machiavellis work inconsistent, or is it perhaps coded in some way to hide his true preferences because they were likely to offend his political patrons?

The third fundamental notion is that The Prince represents Machiavellis solution to the problem of destiny and fate. The Prince counterposes two ideas fortuna and virt. It answers the question whether or not a prince can control his fate by suggesting that he can, mainly through the sufficient exercise of virt. The metaphor for this struggle between fortuna and virt given by Machiavelli is that of a mighty river, the currents and tides of fortune, that is banked and directed by levies, the product of human ingenuity and enterprise. The principal example of a leader of such