Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, July 2022

Attention conservation notice:: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on the Italian Renaissance, political philosophy, intellectual history, or even game theory.

Niccolò Machiavelli, Selected Political Writings: The Prince, Selections from The Discourses, Letter to Vettori (edited and translated by David Wootton)

I have, of course, no qualifications to opine on translations of Machiavelli, but having worked my way through a fair number of versions of The Prince over the years, this is easily the most-readable one I've run across. (Wootton's introduction, in particular, is a remarkable production in its own right --- I'd say more but I don't want to spoil the effect!) It would be easy to treat these works as mere documents, artifacts illustrating a dead past, of merely-historical relevance. This translation makes them feel remarkably like a part of arguments we could be having right now, maybe are having right now.

Admittedly there is a cost to this --- when Wootton has Machiavelli use contemporary expressions like "political mechanism" or "social structure", I for one am curious about what the actual phrasing was. (If it really was "political mechanism", that'd be very interesting for the history of mechanism, so I suspect it wasn't.) But if I truly cared about that, I could consult other translations, or for that matter the original text. And the difficulties of trying to be more word-for-word literal are well-illustrated by Wootton's practice of parenthetically marking every place where Machiavelli used virtù (or one of its derivatives --- on p. 191 alone this has to be translated as, variously, "skill", "effect" and "will-power".

One thing reading this leaves me pondering is how to interpret The Prince: when (if ever?) was he speaking sincerely; when was he being ironic; when was he unmasking hypocrisy by plainly describing what his contemporaries were doing* (in a spirit I might characterize as somewhere between "I learned it from you" and "you say you want results, I'll tell you how to get results"); when was he using coded, "Aesopian" language to talk safely about dangerous matters; and when was he trying to make himself appear useful to dangerous gangsters and blasphemous grifters in the hopes they'd give him a desperately-needed job? (These are not mutually exclusive and I can well imagine him being especially pleased with himself when passages worked in multiple ways at once.)

The Discourses, by contrast, seem much more straightforwardly sincere. (Unless: maybe that's just what he wanted us to think!) But I will just mention two things which intrigued me. (1) I presume it's well-known to scholars, but new to me, that the famous opening to Gibbon's Decline and Fall about the age of the Antonines is clearly ripped off from elaborating on book I, chapter 10 of the Discourses. (Except for the bits in Gibbon about religion, which are from Machiavelli's book I, chapter 11.) (2) Has anyone written a good comparison between Machiavelli and ibn Khaldun, especially their ideas about institutions, personal character, and cycles of political founding, decay and re-formation? It's very interesting to see two inheritors of ancient political philosophy trying to found a generalizing science of politics based on historical examples, and I'm equally intrigued by the similarities and the differences. (Virtù is not how you say 'asabiyya in Italian, and neither is arete, but...)

This concludes this episode of my nattering about books I am not entitled to judge. §

ObLinkage: Previously on Wootton on Machiavelli.

*: Thus on Ferdinand of Aragon, ch. 21 begins "if you think about his deeds, you will find them all noble", but by the end of the paragraph, "exploiting religion, he practiced a pious cruelty, expropriating and expelling from his kingdom the Marranos: an act without parallel and truly despicable" (pp. 67--68).

Alain Bensoussan, Jens Frehse and Phillip Yam,