The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

In the film version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, on discovering that the Wizard is a charlatan who cannot deliver on his promise to return her to Kansas, says, "You're a very bad man." To which the Wizard replies, "No, I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad wizard." Dorothy identifies incompetence in office with moral blameworthiness. The Wizard distinguishes them, holding himself "good" - morally blameless - as a person though "bad" - incompetent - as a wizard.

At its beginning in Chapters XV-XVII, the analysis of virtues and vices delivered by Machiavelli's Counselor rests on the same distinction. "The qualities for which men are praised" - personal goodness, being bene rather than male - are to be distinguished from the skill, or virtu, required to rule. When the two conflict, the prince must "learn to be able not to be good."To act otherwise is to choose the mere name of a praiseworthy quality over the quality itself. To be liberal (generous) in the obvious and personal way - by being open-handed - turns out to mean, in a prince, taking from the many to give to the few. Thus a prince who chooses the reputation - il nome - of stinginess can in fact be generous to the many from whom he does not take. Similarly, if by a few well-chosen examples of cruelty he can establish peace and order, he is, in effect, more merciful than one who, by exercising personal mercy - refraining from the punishment of malefactors - effectively licenses private bloodshed.

So far, so good: Machiavelli's Counselor presents an argument certain to shock the pre-utilitarian conscience, but a serious moral argument nonetheless. The common-sense identification of the good ruler with the good man is shattered, not in terms of extraordinary circumstances or reason of state, but on the grounds that the requirements of public and private life are different.

A prince can be effectively merciful only by the skillful use of cruelty, effectively liberal only by being tight-fisted, and he must accept the resulting bad reputation as the burden of office unless his

skill at what would now be called "impression management" - based around his observation that "many see, but few touch" - suffices to give him the reputation of the surface virtues as a bonus added to the effectual ones. One looks for this pattern to be repeated in the discussion of keeping one's word, but in vain. Silently, the Counselor reverses the terms. The ability to deceive involves no acceptance of the reputation for deceit. On the contrary, the deceiver must be reputed honest, or his deception fails. While Chapter XVI attempts to show that the "effectual truth" of liberality in a prince is parsimony, and Chapter XVII that effectual mercy consists in well-used cruelty, there is no argument in Chapter XVIII that in some higher sense one keeps one's word by breaking it. While the examples in Chapters XVI and XVII involve benefits to the subject from the ruler's exercise of qualities for which blame is customarily assigned, the examples of successful deceit in Chapter XVIII involve benefits only to the princes involved.

Merely choosing all the "bad" qualities from the conventional list is no better than merely choosing all the "good" ones, but tyrants and their flatterers are likely to take even a partial liberation from copybook morality as a generalized license to do evil. The Counselor may be able to persuade the Prince that a simple reversal of classically assigned moral categories is a complete political morality, but "he who understands" - the member of Machiavelli's chosen audience - will understand more, and will learn also the wisdom of the maxim "put not [your] trust in princes." Thus the device of using the Counselor as his spokesman allows Machiavelli to show at once the necessity of reappraising conventional moral categories in the context of political life and the danger that the reappraisal will get out of hand. This recalls the way Plato uses the characters in Book I of the Republic to show both the inadequacy of conventional morality as conventionally understood (Cephalus and Polemarchus) and the danger of half-digested "advanced" doctrines (Thrasymachus).

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