"In our own times we've had examples of leaders who've done great things without worrying too much about keeping their word."įorget the idea. It wasn't simply a matter of personal opinion that true generosity demanded meanness, cruelty compassion, and honour deceit. Time and again, Machiavelli punches through the lazy pieties of the genre in which he wrote or, more precisely, allows the real world to punch through them. Honour is fine, up to a point, but "a sensible leader cannot and must not keep his word if by doing so he puts himself at risk." Once again, the chapter opens in perfect pitch: "Everyone will appreciate how admirable it is for a ruler to keep his word and be honest rather than deceitful." And once again the author shows how irrelevant this is in the real world. It is the same story when it comes to honour and honesty. On balance, therefore, one has to be cruel to be kind – or, as Machiavelli puts it in one his most quoted aphorisms, "it's much safer to be feared than loved". "Excessive compassion leads to public disorder, muggings and murder," writes Machiavelli, sounding like a letter to the Daily Mail. Again, there is the same self-consciously weak opening: "I'm sure every leader would wish to be seen as compassionate rather than cruel." But compassion, like generosity, creates more problems than it solves. There is a similar paradox when it comes to cruelty and compassion, detailed in the following chapter. "In our own times the only leaders we've seen doing great things were all reckoned mean." The paradox is that to be truly generous, a ruler had, therefore, to be mean. Even more seriously, it costs money, which drains resources and causes resentment. The unpalatable fact is that generosity breeds expectations. He goes on to demonstrate that generosity is, at best, a questionable virtue.Īlthough essential "for the man seeking power", it is dangerous for the ruler "already in power". "It would be nice to be seen as generous," he writes at the beginning of chapter 16, the "nice" hanging in the air, limp and ineffectual. He repeatedly begins with a self-consciously feeble statement. Machiavelli's subversion of the humanist paean to virtues is clearest, and wittiest, when he tackles openly questions of generosity, compassion and honour. The Prince sets out to expose this hypocrisy: "Many writers have dreamed up republics and kingdoms that bear no resemblance to experience and never existed in reality," Machiavelli writes witheringly. He had spent a lifetime observing the business of ruling – first within Florence and then across Europe – and he knew only too well that the link between virtue and success was tenuous at best.
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