an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 11, January - March 2014,
ISSN 1552-5112
Kant or Machiavelli?
Anthony
H. Lesser A key theme in The
Prince is, as is well known, the impossibility of combining successful
governance of a state with consistently acting in a way that is under other
circumstances morally right. Thus at the end of chapter 15 (1950, p. 57),
Machiavelli says that the ruler “must not mind incurring those vices without
which it would be difficult to save the state, for if one considers well, it
will be found that some things which seem virtues would, if followed, lead to
one’s ruin, and some others which appear vices result in one’s greater security
and well-being”. In chapter 18 (1950,
p.65) he says that “a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all
those things which are good in men, being often obliged, in order to maintain
the state, to act against faith, against charity, against humanity and against
religion”. What is under normal circumstances wrong is not merely permissible
but obligatory when the safety of the state is at stake; and given human
wickedness this situation often arises. One could add that, while in this work
Machiavelli is considering the needs of a monarch, even though his preference
was for a republic, the same conflict of values arises in a democracy. This means, first of all, that the prince should
certainly seem to be virtuous, and should practise the virtues whenever it is
safe to do so, but must be ready to abandon virtue when necessary: “it is well
to seem merciful, faithful, humane, sincere, religious, and also to be so; but
you must have the mind so disposed that when it is needful you may be able to
change to the opposite qualities” (ibid). Indeed, one virtue, that of
generosity, is so dangerous, because of the way it depletes a prince’s
financial resources, that “a prince must care little for the reputation of
being a miser, if he wishes to avoid robbing his subjects, if he wishes to be
able to defend himself, to avoid becoming poor and contemptible, and not to be
forced to become rapacious” (p.59). The prince also “must not mind incurring
the charge of cruelty for the purpose of keeping his subjects united and
faithful…he will be more merciful than those who, from excess of tenderness,
allow disorders to rise, from whence spring bloodshed and rapine” (p.60). The
case of honesty is somewhat different. A “prudent ruler ought not to keep faith
when so doing would be against his interest and when the reasons which made him
bind himself no longer exist” (p.64). But “it is necessary to be able to
disguise this character well, and to be a great feigner and dissembler”, this
being made easier for the prince because “one who deceives will always find
those who allow themselves to be deceived” (p.65). A point Machiavelli himself does not make, but with
which he might have agreed, is that there would seem to be some virtues which a
ruler should always possess but which he might have to appear to lose at times.
S/he should presumably always be self-controlled; but it may occasionally be a
good tactic, though one available only to a single ruler, to throw a tantrum.
S/he (or they) should always be courageous, but when the safety of the state is
at stake it may be necessary to back down from a challenge in a way that a
courageous private citizen would not. And—though this varies—at times it may be
useful for the ruler to be more prudent than anyone realises. It is important to be clear that Machiavelli is not
advocating systematic neglect of the virtues, but a readiness to use either
good or bad qualities as the situation requires. He gives examples of Roman
emperors, such as Commodus, Caracalla and Maximinus, whose cruelty led to their
downfall, but also the examples of Pertinax and Alexander, who because of their
good character refused to indulge the army at the expense of the people and as
a result were conspired against and murdered: “hatred is gained as much by good
work as by evil” (p.71). The crucial point is that the ruler must be prepared
when necessary to break faith. A prince must, as appropriate, imitate both the
fox and the lion, “for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox
cannot defend himself from wolves” (p.64). His example of someone who was both
a fox and a lion is the emperor Septimius Severus. When Severus was made
emperor he had two rivals, Nigrinus in the East and Albinus in the West, and
considered he was not strong enough to divide his forces and attack both. He
therefore marched successfully against Nigrinus and showed friendship to
Albinus, only accusing, attacking and killing him after Nigrinus had been
defeated and killed (p.73). Earlier in the book Machiavelli gives the example
from his own time of Cesare Borgia. When Borgia took over the We may now compare this with what Kant says in the
Appendix to Perpetual Peace
(370-386), of which the first section is entitled “On the disagreement between
morals and politics in relation to perpetual peace” and the second section “On
the agreement between politics and morality under the transcendental concept of
public right”. These two titles imply that Kant recognises Machiavelli’s
problem but wishes to give it a different solution. Kant and Machiavelli agree
about the corruption of human nature, the “inherent wickedness” in people of
which Kant speaks in a long footnote (376). They also, I think, agree that it
is not that people have no awareness of morality and justice, but that they act
unjustly and wrongly despite this awareness. Finally, they agree that a major
cause of their acting unjustly is their belief that this is how other people
will treat them. Thus Machiavelli follows his recommendation that a ruler ought
not to keep faith when it is against his interest (see above) with the comment
that “If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one, but as they
are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to
keep faith with them” (p.64). Here Kant parts company from Machiavellianism. He
holds that even if other people are not likely to keep faith with you, there is
still a moral duty, or duty of virtue, to keep faith with them: if other people
are likely to break their contracts, the appropriate moral reaction might be,
from a Kantian point of view, not to make contracts with them at all, rather than
making and breaking them. Kant also holds that one has a clear moral duty to
work to bring such a situation to an end, and to replace it with one in which
everyone has a reasonable expectation that other people will treat them justly.
Kant expresses this, in section 44 of the Doctrine
of Right, as an obligation to leave the “state of nature”, in which
everyone “does what seems good and right in his own eyes”, and contributes to a
civil society, subjecting themselves to “the external restraint of public
compulsory laws”. The “state of nature” for Kant is like that envisaged
by Locke, rather than that described by Hobbes. It “need not be represented as
a state of absolute injustice” (ibid); but it is a state in which there is no
authority to settle disputes and in which “no one can be secured against
violence” (section 42). In this state, although people have a notion of what is
just, there is no authority other than their own consciences to require them to
act in accordance with it. Hence a) there is a strong, and for some an
overwhelming, temptation to act unjustly when this is to a person’s advantage,
and b) when two people genuinely disagree about what is just and the demands of
both cannot be satisfied (e.g., when they lay claim to the same property), the
dispute can be settled only by force. Whether Kant thought such a state had
actually existed prior to “civil society”, or even still existed in some parts
of the world, is not quite clear. But he was clear that in any such state there
was a moral obligation to replace it with civil society, i.e. with a state
governed by laws and with force being used whenever necessary to obtain
obedience to the law, so that there may come into existence juridical as well
as moral duties, i.e. duties that may rightly be enforced, as well as duties of
virtue. Moreover, “it is…reasonable that anyone should constrain another by
force to pass from such a non-juridical state of life and enter within the
jurisdiction of a civil state of society” (section 44). With much of this Machiavelli might well agree. He
lived before political theorists talked about the “state of nature”; but he
might well have taken the view that not only had states of nature preceded
civil societies but civil societies were often in danger of falling back into a
state of nature, not because there was no law but because the law was ignored
and the authorities too weak to enforce it. Hence, he would probably have
agreed with Locke that the sense of justice existed in the state of nature but
was often ineffective; and with Hobbes that the state of nature was
characterised by frequent violence against persons and property. The So Machiavelli would agree with Kant that it is
praiseworthy to force people in a state of nature to accept government by law.
And Kant might agree with Machiavelli that some degree even of cruelty may be
necessary. But there is a very important difference between them, regarding the
duty of a ruler or ruling group. Machiavelli regards it as the business of a
ruler to produce order and stability. To do this he (as Machiavelli would say,
though some historians regard Elizabeth I as a particularly successful
Machiavellian) should use whatever methods are necessary, however cruel or
dishonest: the only restriction is that there should be no needless cruelty or
breaking of faith. The exact nature of the order does not matter, provided that
as many sections of the population as possible are sufficiently contented not
to rebel, and the rest are too powerless to organise a revolt. In contrast, Kant holds that the obligation, on us
all and not only the rulers, is to work not simply to produce an ordered
society but to produce a just society, in which the basic human right, to be
free to act in any way which can co-exist with the freedom of all others, is
upheld and protected. This means both that, as was said above, in a state of
nature there would be an obligation to work to replace it with a civil society,
using force if necessary, and in civil society, “once a fault that could not
have been anticipated is found in a nation’s constitution or in its relations
with other nations, it becomes a duty, particularly for the rulers of nations,
to consider how it can be corrected
as soon as possible and in such a way as to conform with natural right” (Perpetual peace, 372). This, of course, assumes that there is an objective
justice, about which everyone agrees, even when they ignore it in practice.
Machiavelli would not quarrel with this, but others might. However, for the
purposes of this argument it is sufficient to say that a just society is one in
which the persons and property of all citizens are protected from attack by
violence or deceit, whether coming from their rulers or fellow-citizens, and in
which people honour their contracts and promises. This leaves various questions
unanswered: how this is derived from the basic innate right to freedom, how the
basic right itself is justified, how we decide when property has been legitimately
obtained and therefore should be protected,
how short of this ideal a society can fall and still be considered just,
and what else justice involves? But it represents Kant’s main concerns in the
parts of Perpetual Peace and the Doctrine of Right which are concerned
with justice in general terms. Also, it is true that almost everyone would
regard respecting property and keeping promises as just and right, even when
disregarding justice in their actions. So we can agree with both Kant and
Machiavelli, who do not differ on this point, that justice involves these two
principles and that we have an obligation to be just. The difference between
them is that Machiavelli thinks that this obligation is often outweighed by the
need to obtain and preserve stable government, and Kant denies this. One reason for his denial is that for Kant the
obligation of justice is not derived from its consequences but is independent
of them, a moral obligation to which the politician, like everyone else, is
required to conform irrespective of its effects. Thus at 370 he says that
“Honesty is the best policy” can be challenged, whereas “Honesty is better than
policy” is unanswerable. Right has to be a “limiting condition of politics”.
For Machiavelli the aim of politics is a stable society, and justice is to be
pursued whenever it contributes to this end, but overruled when it does not. In
Kant’s terminology, Machiavelli is trying to be “a political moralist, i.e. one
who forges a morality to suit the statesman’s advantage” (372). But Kant
considers this to be impossible: the “political moralist” has not forged a new
morality, but produced a set of prudential precepts, or even, Kant might admit,
an art of politics, and called this purely prudential system a morality. In
contrast, the “moral politician”, who “so interprets the principles of
political prudence that they can be coherent with morality” (ibid.)
demonstrates how, in contrast to some versions of popular wisdom, politics and
morality can be made entirely consistent. Machiavelli’s retort might be “Indeed they can, but
at the cost of failing as a statesman, and increasing social disorder”. Kant’s
reply to this would be that, although the obligation to be just is not based on
its good social effects, nevertheless a just society has a much better chance
of maintaining order than an unjust one. There are three reasons for this,
which Kant does not state explicitly, but which are implied or presupposed by
what he does say. The first is that there is a clear moral duty to support and
maintain a just society, acknowledged, on Kant’s view, by all. This moral
motivation is often overridden by considerations of self-interest, but
nevertheless does have its effect and its influence. If Machiavelli were to
reply that there is equally a moral obligation to maintain order, even in an
unjust society, Kant would probably agree, unless the injustice was extreme,
but would certainly see the motive to action based on it as being in practice
less powerful and less effective. Secondly, if a society is a just one, everyone has a
long-term interest in maintaining it, because no group is strong enough, even
if they are successful in obtaining an unjustly powerful position, to maintain
that position indefinitely. Indeed, it is the more unjust societies that have
been most often overthrown, though they have sometimes been replaced by
something even worse. Admittedly, strong government can be enough to maintain a
state, and justice is not always enough to save a state from destruction,
especially if foreign powers get involved. Just as morality may lose out
against self-interest, so long-term self-interest may lose out against
short-term morality. But the best chance for stability is to be found when
there is both strong government and a commitment to justice. Thirdly, and here again Kant disagrees with
Machiavelli, despite the “radical evil” of human nature, and the fact that
there is always a potential, and often an actual, gap between what we ought to
do and what we want to do, there is a natural tendency for people to improve.
Kant calls this an assumption of his, rather than something demonstrable, but
nevertheless he says “since the human race’s natural end is to make steady
cultural progress, its moral end is to be conceived as progressing towards the
better. And this progress may well be occasionally interrupted, but it will never be broken off.” (Theory and
Practice (short title), 309). Now
Kant makes an absolute distinction between juridical and moral duties, between
duties of right and justice, which may and should be enforced, and duties of
virtue, which may not. But the existence of justice is a strong encouragement
to virtue. It not only makes it against a person’s interest to break the law,
but also creates an environment in which there is a general expectation that
people will honour their commitments, including those not supported by the law,
and will not try, even by legal means, to obtain property to which they have no
right. Allied to the natural tendency to improve, this can result in an
increase in virtue among the population, and this in its turn will result in an
increased observance of juridical duties. Virtue and Right are different, for
Kant, but they support each other. Conversely, in an unjust society the natural tendency
towards progress may be interrupted, and injustice and moral wrong-doing may
encourage each other, so that stability becomes more and more threatened. In
short, Kant’s answer to Machiavelli is that, given the universal sense of
justice, the long-term advantages of justice and the capacity of humans to
improve, stability and order always have a better chance in a just society, in
which people have some measure of trust in their rulers and their fellow
citizens, than they do in a society where fear of the rulers has imposed a measure
of order but this trust is lacking. People do not always listen to their sense
of justice, their long-term interests or their instinct to improve; but they
are much more likely to listen to them in a just society. Kant insists,
as said above, that justice should be pursued for its own sake, irrespective of
the benefits it brings. But he also believes that justice, as well as being
required in itself, will in fact do good rather than harm. At 379 he endorses
the saying “Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus”, literally “Let justice be done,
though the world perish”, but he says that this means in German (by which he
may mean, in plain German), “Let justice rule, though all the rogues in the
world go to the grave”. The only “harmful” consequence of justice would be that
bad men perish, and “The world will certainly not cease to exist if there are
fewer bad men”(ibid.). This does not mean that justice “trumps” all other
duties. One does not have “permission simply to press with the utmost vigour
for one’s own right (which would be contrary to one’s ethical duty)” (379).
Kant cannot have read Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas, which was not published even in part until 1808,
four years after his death, but it seems clear that, had he read this account of
the terrible consequences of insisting on vindicating one’s personal rights
regardless of the consequences, he would have regarded Kohlhaas as being
entirely wrong morally as well as prudentially. Rather, the principle means that those in power have
an obligation “not to deny or diminish anyone’s rights through either dislike
or sympathy”. It also means that a nation must have “an internal constitution
founded on principles of right” and has an obligation to form a union with
other nations in order to settle their differences legally (ibid.). From this
there follows, a point that Kant makes earlier in Perpetual Peace (at 372), that there is a duty to correct any
injustices in a state’s constitution as soon as is practicable (see above for
his exact words). But Kant goes on to point out that it is contrary to morality
as well as prudence to “sever a bond of political or cosmological union before
a better constitution is prepared to put in its place”. Hence to try to improve
things too rapidly or too violently is both unwise and wrong. At 373 Kant
refers to people who try to do this as “despotic moralists”. One might say that Kant is here agreeing to a limited
degree with Machiavelli, in that he holds that it is necessary to put up with
injustice if an attempt to improve things, or even the actual removal of this
particular injustice, would make matters worse rather than better. A historical
example would be the events of 1938: a genuine injustice to the Sudeten Germans
was removed, but at a terrible cost of massive injustice to the Czechs and
Slovaks and perhaps even at the cost of making the Second World War inevitable.
But he still maintains that it cannot be right actually to perpetrate
injustice, whether as a single act or as an unjust law or policy. He also still
maintains that, though not everything can be done at once, to aim at justice,
provided one is not a “despotic moralist”, is part of what is politically best
as well as what is morally right. It should be followed because it is morally
right, but it is also the best way of achieving political stability and a basis
for prosperity. Hence in the penultimate paragraph of the section “On the
disagreement between morals and politics in relation to perpetual peace” Kant
says that objectively there is no conflict between morality and politics.
Subjectively, there is a conflict between the “self-seeking inclinations of
people” and what is right. But the idea that human frailty and corruption
entitle or require us to behave unjustly is a “deceit of the evil principle in
ourselves”, a piece of self-deception that has to be admitted as such and
rejected. (see again 379). But the Machiavellians still have a partial reply.
They could agree with Kant as regards the internal government of a country, but
argue that international relations are different. For, it might be argued,
nations are with regard to each other always in a state of nature, there being
no authority above them. Moreover, it is a state of nature from which it is
impossible to emerge. Individuals can form a society and submit to its rulers,
voluntarily or through coercion, while retaining their basic human rights, but
nations would have to give up their national sovereignty to some larger nation,
so that the state of nature among the nations could only be avoided by the
whole earth being one nation—certainly not possible in practice, and perhaps
not even intelligible in theory. Kant certainly agreed that at the time all nations
were still in a state of nature. Thus in section 54 of the Doctrine of Right he says that states “are naturally in a
non-juridical condition”, and “this natural condition is a state of war”,
although not always “a state of actual war and incessant hostility”. In section
349 of Perpetual Peace he says “the
natural state is one of war, which does not always amount to an outbreak of
hostilities but to the constant and enduring threat of them.” But this condition can and should be replaced by
peace. Again, Kant says very similar things in both works. In Perpetual Peace (254) he says “For the
sake of its own security, each nation can and should demand that the others
enter into a contract resembling the civil one and guaranteeing the rights of
each”. In the Doctrine of Right (61),
he puts the emphasis more on the moral aspect and says “The natural state of
nations, as well as of individual men, is a state in which it is a duty to pass
out of in order to enter into a legal state”. So it is both a matter of
self-interest and a moral duty for nations to leave the state of nature. There are three ways in which this might be done, but
Kant rejects two of them. It might be done by the creation of one super-state,
but even war is “rationally preferable” to a “universal monarchy” (Perpetual Peace, 367). This is for three
reasons. First, any state of that size would inevitably be despotic, without
genuinely representative institutions or a respect for individual freedom.
Secondly, one would lose the healthy competition between different nations,
peoples and languages which Kant thinks is the main source of human progress:
without it people may have comfort and contentment, but no incentive to improve
themselves or resist their baser instincts.
Thus at the end of 367 he compares the peace imposed by despotism, which
puts an end to freedom and to any cultural or moral advance, with what can be
“produced and secured by an equilibrium of the liveliest competing powers”. And
this despotism produces a condition worse than war, in Kant’s view, because of
the moral and cultural decline to which it leads. Kant is brief on this point
in this particular passage, but makes more of it elsewhere in his work, for
example in the essay Speculative
Beginning of Human History, at 120. Thirdly, the peace imposed by despotism
does not last: “laws invariably lose their impact with the expansion of their
domain of governance, and after it has uprooted the soul of good, a soulless
despotism finally degenerates into anarchy” (Perpetual Peace, 367). Kant gives no examples of this, but perhaps
had the On the other hand, perpetual peace cannot be secured
merely by treaties, which can produce only a temporary cessation of hostilities
for as long as it is to the advantage of all parties: “although a treaty of
peace can put an end to some particular war, it cannot end the state of war”
(355). The solution is a federation of
nations, not a federal body forming one nation, as in the At this point the Machiavellians will say that even
this is impossible, because without a powerful central authority to force the
contracting parties to abide by their agreements none of these federations of
nations will last for any length of time. Kant gives two reasons why, on the
contrary, their prospects can get steadily better, even if perpetual peace is
unobtainable. These reasons parallel the reasons Kant gives for thinking that
civil society is able to perpetuate itself (see above) The first is that we
can, even with regard to international relations, expect the human moral sense
to improve. Despite the “depravity of human nature”, there is a “homage that
every nation pays (at least in words) to the concept of right” (Perpetual Peace, 355); even when waging
what is in fact an aggressive war, governments still see to it that the
writings of the classic natural law theorists, such as Grotius and Pufendorf,
are “always piously cited in justification” (ibid.). This shows that the
principle of morality cannot be eradicated, even when people do not act in
accordance with it. And at 376 Kant says that people “cannot altogether refuse
obedience to the concept of public right (which is particularly important in
the case of international right)…they give this concept all due honour, even if
they also invent a hundred excuses and evasions to avoid observing it in
practice.” Now, as Kant says in effect in the long footnote to
376, one of the main reasons for these excuses is the belief that other people
will pay no attention to considerations of right and justice: “everyone
believes of himself that he would truly venerate and abide by the concept of
right, if only he could expect the same from everyone
else.” Machiavelli himself says that under such circumstances it would be right
always to act honestly (see above). In domestic civil society this expectation
can be created by having an effective and well-enforced legal system. In a
federation of states, where enforcement can be obtained only through voluntary
cooperation, the expectation will be lower. Nevertheless, given that the states
have entered into this federation for the purposes of peace and justice, there
will be some expectation that they will both respect these aims and take action
against those who do not, so that one ground for ignoring “international right”
has been removed, and some, maybe limited but some, advance in international
morality has been made. Secondly, once the federation is in existence,
everyone can see the advantages of maintaining it. In particular (368), “The
spirit of trade cannot coexist with war, and sooner or later this spirit
dominates every people.” So human nature and self-interest can now work in the
cause of maintaining peace. Kant concludes this section of Perpetual Peace, which is entitled “On the guarantee of perpetual
peace”, by saying, in effect, that although one cannot say, as a matter of
theory, that perpetual peace must develop, we can be confident that as a matter
of practical fact, it will. As said above, in the Doctrine of Right he is less optimistic; but he still emphasises
that something close to perpetual peace is attainable (section 61). So Kant has two powerful arguments against
Machiavelli, that justice should be pursued irrespective of the consequences
and that in fact, long-term stability is attainable only if basic justice has
been secured; and he argues that this is equally true, though harder to obtain,
in international relations than it is in the institutions of individual states.
As a final point, it is worth repeating that Kant is not talking about what he
calls “despotic morality”, the pursuit of justice in all its forms whatever the
consequences, but about a level of respect for persons and their property and
of maintenance of contracts and promises that is at least greater than what is
available in a state of nature or of unrestricted sovereignty, and which is
attainable not only within states but also on the international level. an international and interdisciplinary journal of
postmodern cultural sound, text and image Volume 11, January - March 2014,
ISSN 1552-5112 Bibliography Hobbes,
T.(1968), Leviathan, ed. MacPherson, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kant,
I.(1952), Doctrine of Right, trans. Hastie under the title “The Science of
Right” in Great Books of the Western World, ed. Hutchins, Chicago: Encyclopedia
Britannica, Inc. Kant,
I.(2011), Zum ewigen Frieden, ed. with commentary, Eberl and Kant,
I.(1983a), Perpetual Peace, trans. Humphrey, in Perpetual Peace and other
essays, Kant, Kant, Kleist,
Heinrich von(2004), “Michael Kohlhaas” in
The Marquise of O— and other stories, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Locke,
J.(1993), Second Treatise of Government in
Political Writings, ed. Wootton, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Machiavelli,
N.(1950), The Prince and The Discourses, (In quoting
Kant, I have usually used the translations of Hastie and Humphrey, but
occasionally my own).
