CROSSPOST: ADA PALMER: I Am a Huge Machiavelli Fan!
From “murderous Machiavel” to patriot-diplomat: Ada Palmer rereads Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, dropping him back into his world of papal warlords, collapsing city-states, and patriots desperate to preserve the independence of his Firenze against a very malignant Fortuna. Machiavelli did not write The Prince to help generic thugs “get ahead”, but as a proprietary survival manual for the Medici thugs who had taken over his beloved Firenze, and whom he thought needed to utilize his talents and stabilize the situation, lest they be followed by something worse. It is his job application to a particular few princes and princelings—not a public-sphere literacy-culture document intended for a broad distribution…
CROSSPOST: ADA PALMER: I Am a Huge Machiavelli Fan!
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1FrhkLQnCI> <https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer-2>
Brad here: Ada Palmer argues that Machiavelli was a fiercely patriotic, analytical innovator whose work has been profoundly misread as a selfish manual for villainy.
Her key interpretive pivot is her line that Machiavelli would faithfully sit in the countryside and rot while begging to work from the Medici who had ordered his torture, in the hope that they would recall him to occupy some office so that he could continue to serve Firenze. Why? Because after the fall of the republic, Firenze faced a choice between being tyrannized by locals—the Medici—who loved the place, or being tyrannized by foreigners who did not love the place. The first would be vastly better than the second. And for the first to be stable, Firenze needed to be strong, and Machiavelli believed that his skills with diplomacy could make her stronger—if only the Medici could be convinced to use him as one of their tools.
Coupled with this is her claim that The Prince is a private memo intended for Medici princes and princelings, focused on how they can stabilize their “new state of affairs” in control of Firenze. It is not a general manual for how murderous thugs can get ahead as tyrants wherever they find themselves. It was a secret job application to the very régime that had tortured and exiled him, written to arm Firenze’s rulers with dangerous knowledge he refused to share with foreign powers.
And, maybe, if one of the Medici princes is smart, bold, and favored enough by Fortuna, he might be able to do more than stabilize Medici tyranny over Firenze: he might be able to unite Italy, expel the French, Swiss, and Spanish barbarians, and curb the chaos-monkey elective monarchy that is the corrupt secular-minded papacy.
Yet, somehow, he was turned him into a symbol of amoral, self‑serving politics. Cf.: William Shakespeare, “Henry VI 3”, 3:2:
Richard of Gloucester: ‘Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry “Content” to that which grieves my heart,
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
I can add colors to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down…
Palmer places Machiavelli in the concrete northern Italian world of the early 1500s:
collapsing city‑state legitimacy,
papal warlordism,
chronic regime turnover,
in which The Prince is a desperate, patriotic handbook for a few power players on how to preserve the independence of Firenze and stabilize Italy. She discusses the lessons he learned from watching the career of Cesare Borgia, starting with his mission to the court of Duke Valentino in the run-up to Sinigaglia, and how he learned that:
justice perceived as neutral can make even a terrifying, much-feared tyrant conqueror very popular,
if he combines terror toward élites with impartial justice toward commoners,
and such a prince would be not loved, not hated, but feared and respected—and that is actually the best way to stable rule.
outcomes hinge half on prudence and half on sheer fortune.
Thus Machiavelli unexpectedly and unintentionally birthed a secular “political science”. He birthed a more honest, less moralizing way of thinking about power: institutions, incentives, fear, legitimacy, and fortune, rather than fairy‑tale notions of good rulers and bad rulers. Palmer’s Machiavelli pushes us to ask not just what we wish rulers would do, but how concrete means, institutional design, and human psychology actually determine whether polities endure or implode.
And then print, censorship, and later ideological battles split “Machiavelli the patriot” from “Machiavelli the analyst” from “Machiavellian the cynical villain”.