Posted on 24 October 2013
Five hundred years after Machiavelli wrote The Prince, what influence does the seminal text have on today’s political scientists and constitutionalists?
“Machiavelli is the father of modern constitutionalists,” states Mortimer Sellers of the University System of Maryland, “But to be a father of a discipline you need to have children.”
According to Sellers, Machiavelli’s great strength was to look back to ancient Rome and Greece and apply logic and realism to a realm previously dominated by religion and idealism. “Politics was at a standstill, there needed to be an understanding of the ancients so they could emulate and surpass them.”
In the years that followed Machiavelli’s writings political thinkers from the English Civil War, through the revolutions of the US and France cited Machiavelli in their individual texts.
Machiavelli’s influence is however more pronounced than simply being the first in a chain that leads to today’s political theorists and constitutionalists. In crystallising in the public consciousness the idea that those in power will act in underhanded ways to achieve their ends, The Prince provides a warning to ensure the structure of the government enables the creation of good and just laws, for the common good.
“Everyman infused with power will want to abuse it, they will push until they find something they cannot push passed,” says Sellers.
“Common citizens, to live free of tyranny need their own institutions,” sums up John McCormick of the University of Chicago, these institutions then act as a check and a balance to those who weild the largest amounts of power.
The Machiavellian principle is perhaps best encapsulated in the apocryphal quotation ‘the ends justify the means’. However, there’s another side to the Machiavelli, says Kim Lane Scheppele from Princeton University : “The Machiavelli of The Discourses argues a prince is better served by creating and living under good laws as well as by promising security to his subjects rather than by promoting anxiety and fear.”
“In our present context The Discourses speak louder than The Prince.”
The speakers were taking part in “500 years since the writing by Niccolὸ Machiavelli of ‘The Prince’” a conference organised by the EUI Department of Law, in collaboration with the International Association of Constitutional Law and the University of Oslo.