Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at New York University Law School, is the author of Law and Disagreement and God, Locke and Equality.
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Vol. 18 No. 16 · 22 August 1996
pages 12-13 | 3230 words
Politics can be Hell
Jeremy Waldron
- Machiavelli’s Virtue by Harvey Mansfield
Chicago, 371 pp, £23.95, April 1996, ISBN 0 226 50368 2
Man, said Aristotle, is a political animal; it is his nature to live in a state. Men and women may live in political communities, modern liberals have retorted, but there’s nothing particularly political in the nature or character of most people. In every society there are some who have a taste for politics, some who want to be rulers or representatives; but they are a tiny minority. As for the rest, they desire nothing much more than to live in peace, tending their farms or their businesses, making a life for themselves and their children, enjoying their property free from fear and insecurity. A good society will do what is necessary to provide this assurance, which means among other things allowing whatever political animals there are among them to compete for and succeed one another in office without undue disturbance, but certainly does not mean encouraging any more people than necessary to participate actively in politics.
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Letters
Vol. 18 No. 17 · 5 September 1996
From David Wootton
Jeremy Waldron (LRB, 22 August) asks: ‘If Agathocles’ – in Machiavelli’s Prince – ‘is to be condemned as someone who has crossed the line into tyranny, how are we to distinguish him from other apparently unscrupulous princes, like Cesare Borgia, whom Machiavelli praises for their ruthlessness?’ The answer is simple, and evident from Machiavelli’s telling of the story: Agathocles had murdered his fellow citizens and destroyed the free constitution under which they lived. Borgia had not, but had brought order where there was only disorder. The reason this simple answer hasn’t been adopted is that scholars tend to assume that in The Prince Machiavelli is advising the Medici to destroy the surviving remnants of Florence’s shattered liberty. In 1967 C.H. Clough explained why this is a mistaken interpretation. Once one sees that Machiavelli believes in the use of wicked means to defend freedom, but not to destroy it, his repeated insistence that there are some things no one should be prepared to do becomes consistent and comprehensible. Waldron is right to think that Machiavelli does not regard the traditional distinction between tyranny and legitimate authority as meaningless – and that’s the point of the Agathocles story.
David Wootton
Brunel University, Twickenham
