Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince:
Inspired by the Devil?

by Don Brown

Background
The purpose and process of this directed review of The Prince has been three-fold; to isolate content relevant to the study of the applied behavioral sciences, to articulate significant learning’s experienced by the author through the exercise, and to pose questions for further discussion. Sources accessed for this write-up include the Bantam Classic release The Prince, copyright 1966, along with several Internet data sources, and the 8th edition of Management of Organizational Behavior by Paul Hersey, Kenneth H. Blanchard and Dewey E. Johnson.

Per Wikipedia, The Prince “is a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli”⁷. Controversial and thought by many in its time to be inspired by the devil, The Prince was first published in 1513, and remains the author’s most recognized work.  Born in 1469 in Florence, Italy, Machiavelli experienced an unremarkable youth, and entered Florentine government as a secretary⁵.  He rose quickly through the ranks to diplomatic missions and “met many of the important politicians of the day…but none with more impact on him than a prince of the Papal States, Cesare Borgia. Borgia was a cunning, cruel man, very much like the one portrayed in The Prince”⁵.  Accordingly, it is thought that Machiavelli then began to believe that a ruler like Borgia could achieve Machiavelli’s life-long goal of a unified Italy.

Unfortunately, “Machiavelli’s official political life ended…with the return to power in Florence of the Medici family. Following his dismissal and banishment, he was accused of complicity, imprisoned and tortured”⁴. Although he was officially exonerated, Machiavelli suffered public as well as political fallout through the regime change and was “retired to his meager farm near San Casciano”⁴. It was during this time of exile from public life that Machiavelli wrote his signature work.

Machiavelli drafted The Prince in the form of personal correspondence to Giuliano de Medici in an attempt many thought to curry favor and a return to public life.  Machiavelli was reputed to be miserable in his surroundings, lamenting that he was “going to waste.  I cannot go on this way for long without becoming contemptible in my poverty…there is my wish that these Medici lords would begin to use me”⁴. According to Daniel Donno “Machiavelli’s chief contribution to political thought lies in his freeing political action from moral consideration”, and that perhaps his notoriety was born of Machiavelli’s apparent message that “the political imperative was essentially unrelated to the ethical imperative”⁴.

Evil Inspiration
As to the work’s reputation of being “inspired by the devil”⁴, Machiavelli has indeed been “condemned as a defender of tyranny, a godless promoter of immorality, and a self-serving manipulator”¹.  Within the American Heritage dictionary on my desk today, Machiavellianism still carries the definition of “the political doctrine…that craft and deceit are justified”³. In fact, in 1559, long after his death, all of Machiavelli’s works were placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books because of “perceived offenses against Christian ethics”¹. Machiavelli’s political doctrine was even blamed for the French Catholic leadership’s attempts in 1572 to exterminate France’s Protestant population¹.

Was The Prince a work of evil, or “a classic study of power – its acquisition, expansion, and effective use”?⁷.  At first pass, this author looked only in harsh judgment on Machiavelli’s precepts, but through further study I have come to at least understand and even support some, though not all, of Niccolo Machiavelli’s observations and recommendations.

Relevant Content
In order to position Machiavelli’s ideas within the context of effective leadership, and thereby within the bounds of a higher calling than desired ends justifying any means, I would like to pass them through the filters of the work of Maslow, McGregor, Alderfer and Hersey. To begin, Machiavelli’s opinions reveal many assumptions as to the human condition, that at face value could indeed be taken as outlandish or evil:

• “Injuries must be committed all at once…benefits should be bestowed little by little”⁴
• “A prince must have no other objective, no other thought, nor take up any profession but that of war, its methods and its discipline"⁴
  
• “for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin”⁴
• “A prince, therefore, must be indifferent to the charge of cruelty”⁴
• “Disorders harm the entire citizenry, while executions…harm only a few”⁴
• “about the generality of men: they are ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, anxious to flee danger, and covetous of gain”⁴
• “anyone compelled to choose will find greater security in being feared than in being loved”⁴
• “means of law, and by means of force.  The first belongs properly to man, the second to animals; but since the first is often insufficient, it is necessary to resort to the second”⁴
• “a wise prince cannot and should not keep his pledge when it is against his interest to do so”⁴
• “it is often necessary to act against mercy, against faith, against humanity”⁴
• “all men are wicked and will act wickedly whenever they have the chance to do so”⁴

Reviewed as isolated quotes, a case can be made for the charge of inspired evil.  Considered within the paradigm of 21st century civilization, Machiavelli might properly be condemned, but perhaps there is a rational method to his madness. Let’s take first the work of Douglas McGregor in which he differentiates between two theories, X and Y, which operate from two sets of “assumptions about human nature and human motivation”². McGregor’s Theory X assumes that people tend to avoid work, prefer to be directed, and must be controlled and coerced to be led². One supposition might be that managers need to therefore “adopt a more authoritarian style based on the threat of punishment”⁶. Theory Y on the other hand assumes that individuals desire and require independence, self-direction and creativity to be effectively led.

According to Hersey, Blanchard and Johnson, “Theory X and Theory Y are attitudes, or predispositions, toward people”⁶. Although they believe that “the ‘best’ assumptions for a manager to have may be Theory Y”, they are equally adamant that managers “may find it necessary to behave…as if they had Theory X assumptions”² in order to help others prosper. What then were the assumptions underlying the prescriptions set forth in The Prince?  Surly Machiavelli’s mindset was that of Theory X, but was he wrong or right in his assumptions about human nature in the 15th and 16th century?

Consider now the works of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. Maslow published that “human needs arrange themselves into a hierarchy”² and that our behavior is governed by which need, physiological, safety, social, esteem or self-actualization, is our strongest felt need at any given time. Clayton Alderfer arranged Maslow’s hierarchy into the groupings of Existence (Physiological/Safety), Relatedness (Social) and Growth (Esteem/Self-Actualization) as a way of understanding what drives human behavior.

A key concept for me in the treatment of all these theories is presented early on in Management of Organizational Behavior, that of the connection between “motives and the incentives that tend to satisfy them”².  That is to say – the connection between the needs driving the behavior of a follower, and what it takes to effectively “understand, predict and control”² them. Which of Maslow’s needs drove the majority of the people of Machiavelli’s time?  Likely, it was physiological and safety, maybe even into social, or existence and relatedness in the lexicon of Alderfer. Given these driving needs, was Machiavelli’s the right approach to effective leadership in that era rather than some evil inspiration to personal gain?

Significant Learnings
Dr. Paul Hersey foundationally positions that “the primary reason why there is no one best way of leadership is that leadership is basically situational, or contingent”². Dr. Hersey’s pioneering work is right on in that behaviorally we know which leadership styles will give us the highest probability of success given different situational variables.

The horns of the dilemma in interpreting Machiavelli’s work is that many of his foundational concepts, while supported by the work of many behavioral science giants, also run counter to the like of Frances Hesselbein. The past CEO of the Girl Scouts of America gives us that “Leadership is a matter of how to be, not just how to do it. And the one indispensible quality of leadership is personal integrity with a sense of ethics that works full-time”².

Significant learning’s for me in this process have been

• Through integrating the works of McGregor, Maslow, Hersey and Alderfer I can better take a scientific approach to understanding – and not judging - the actions of others. Even the words and actions of a reputed “devil” can be studied from a dispassionate perspective.
• I can personally take comfort from the words of Ms. Hesselbein in confidently rejecting some of Machiavelli’s tenets less relevant to 21st century western civilization.
• I also found several of Machiavelli’s truisms to significantly resonate with me, even today; “it is the nature of men to feel as much bound by the favors they do as by those they receive”⁴, “men love as they themselves determine but fear as their ruler determines, a wise prince must rely on what he and not others can control”⁴, “Minds are of three kinds: one is capable of thinking for itself; another is able to understand the thinking of others; and a third can neither think for itself nor understand the thinking of others. The first is of the highest excellence, the second is excellent, and the third is worthless”⁴.

Questions for further discussion include

1. Can there be such a thing as properly used cruelty?
2. Given the culture and consequences of today, is it ever ethical, excusable or permissible to not keep one’s pledge simply because it’s no longer in one’s interest to do so?
3. In evaluating means to an end, is it only individual judgment that should govern our actions?
   

References
¹CliffsNotes. (2008). “The Prince.” Retrieved December 4,
2008, from http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/The-Prince-Critical-Essays Machiavelli-the-Devil.id-148,pageNum-83.html
²Hersey, P., Blanchard, K. H., & Johnson, D. E. (2001). Management of Organizational Behavior: Leading Human Resources (8th ed.). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
³Machiavellianism. (1975). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed., Vol. 1). New York: American Heritage Publishing Company.
⁴Machiavelli, Niccolo. (1981, March). The Prince. Toronto: Bantam Books.
⁵“Nicollo Machiavelli.” (n.d.)Retrieved December 4, 2008, from http://www.ctbw.com/lubman.htm
⁶Theory X and Theory Y. (2008). In Wikipedia. Retrieved December 4, 2008, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y
⁷The Prince. (2008). In Wikipedia. Retrieved December 4, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince