I will be brief. Straussianism is a set of interpretative practices along the following lines, as best as I understand it. The great philosophers and thinkers may have a specific private belief – let’s call it x. But they may not be able to say exactly what they want to say, especially when times are bad, and they risk making enemies. Hence, they need to write indirectly. This means that when a thinker is saying not-x, we should sometimes understand that they really mean to say x. They are communicating ambiguously – but the Truly Wise can grasp their real meaning.
The relationship between this esoteric tradition – Straussianism – and Leo Strauss is a little complicated. I’ve seen recent arguments that Straussianism has taken on a life of its own – has become vulgar, if you like, however much of a contradiction in terms Vulgar Straussianism might seem to be.
The obvious objection to Straussianism is the standard one. If you help yourself to the claim that when this or that Great Man is saying x, they may actually mean not-x or x, depending, you are making it harder to reach a shared understanding of the truth. If you further contend that only those who grok your particular hidden lore can distinguish sincerity from dissimulation, you can redefine the history of thought to mean whatever you want it to mean.
But there is a second – and perhaps more serious – objection. Straussianism – especially in its vulgar form – may present even more pernicious temptations to the writer than the reader.
If you conceive of yourself as a Straussian, and find yourself caught between the desires of different audiences with directly contradictory desires over what you write, you may adopt the following protocol. Write x to please Audience One, while throwing out subtle hints that actually you agree with Audience Two, and secretly believe, and are secretly arguing, not-x.
The dilemmas of this style of communication are the major theme of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night. Is Howard Campbell Jr, the American turncoat and Nazi propagandist, actually a secret anti-Nazi, who only boosts the arguments of evil people so that he can convey hidden messages that help the forces of good? Or is he a sincere Nazi, who sends coded messages as an aside or a failsafe? Nobody really knows, not even Howard Campbell Jr. He ends up in a horrible mess.
One could state the broader problem in game theoretic language. Straussianism makes it more difficult to reach a separating equilibrium in the communications game, which would allow you to clearly distinguish Nazis from anti-Nazis. And as with game theory more generally, you may also find yourself in infinite regress. Are communications about Straussianism themselves Straussian or non-Straussian? Is there any way to navigate the wilderness of beliefs, meta-beliefs and meta-meta-beliefs, except by assumption, so that expectations might actually converge on some shared truth? But since I think the problem of enacted Straussianism is practical, not abstract-theoretic, I’ll leave it at that, and say nothing further.
{ 54 comments }
Peter 09.10.24 at 1:24 pm
That book made a huge impression on me in my Uni days. I’d say that its message has built itself into my ethical DNA.
J, not that one 09.10.24 at 2:11 pm
I think the bottom line for Straussianism is that the history of thought is unreachable through the superficially obvious means of reading the texts and reading the histories of them.
Then either the history of thought is irrelevant, or there’s a way of reaching it nondiscursively, or there’s an existential choice to be made that won’t ever be subject to any criticism by any other human ever.
Strauss assumes the ancient or traditional social order is inevitable and that for 99% of the people thought is irrelevant and that forbidding it to them is the best course. It’s really that simple. And then the Mother Night problem doesn’t arise.
oldster 09.10.24 at 2:20 pm
The real burden of Farrell’s message is of course carried by the frame:
“I will be brief.”
“… I’ll leave it at that, and say nothing further.”
Between those endpoints there is fluff, filling, expansion and misdirection — nothing of significance.
But what he has said at the beginning and ending — positions of maximal emphasis — provides sufficient indicia to recover his intent, for those able to descry it.
steven t johnson 09.10.24 at 2:23 pm
From a perspective of decades since reading the novel, a central premise is that, no, you can’t tell. And the unstated concluding moral is, maybe, probably, the best policy really is honesty, in the long run. The stance is that no compromise with Nazis is acceptable, only open and unremitting defiance is truly moral? I suppose a consequentialist approach might ask how it would have worked out if the coded messages had not been sent. But it’s like trolley problem approaches, the “correct” answer requires information unavailable. Requires counterfactual facts not in evidence, to repeat a cliche.
Straussianism, conceived as a textual reading strategy of looking for esoteric meanings, is fundamentally a practical question. First, one has to demonstrate there is censorship, or genuine penalties official and unofficial motivating self-censorship? Second, one has to demonstrate a pattern of deviations incompatible with the manifest content and professed aim? Third, one has to demonstrate the discovered pattern was intentional, not merely the rediscovery of the conventional wisdom or unexamined premises perpetrated unwittingly by a writer not fully in command of the material? There are no commercially available touchstones to distinguish the correct answers. Vonnegut’s Mother Night tells us I think the pursuit of intentions leads down a rabbit hole.
As to the game theoretic, not being a game theorist I’m way too far behind. I am puzzled even by the notion of a communications game where winning is correctly distinguishing Nazis and anti-Nazis. For that matter I don’t even know how one distinguishes the players of a miscommunication game from the players of a communication game. But then I suppose I’m just saying I’ve never understood how game theory can be a universal theory, because there is no universal game. Every potential player can be playing different games.
Brad DeLong 09.10.24 at 3:02 pm
There is one piece by Strauss where I think it is 99.99% certain that he is letting his hair down and saying what he believes plainly. I see no reason not to take him at his word here. Via Scott Horton https://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html:
To my knowledge, Leo Strauss never set out his “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” critique of the Nazis. It would have been a doozy…
Brad DeLong
Very, very few people in history have responded to the desire of the fascists to kill him by doubling down on their assertions of the truths of fascist principles.
LFC 09.10.24 at 4:04 pm
A classic critique of Strauss is M. Burnyeat’s “Sphinx Without a Secret,” published many years ago in New York Rev Bks.
The Strauss and Cropsey (eds.) History of Political Philosophy gives Straussian interpretations of figures from Thucydides to Heidegger (interesting that the book, at least the 3rd ed., concludes with him).
CJColucci 09.10.24 at 4:35 pm
I don’t have a problem with the idea that, say, Aristotle couldn’t safely say X, so he wrote not-X, perhaps in a way and with the intention of letting some select group know that he really meant X. I could imagine a scholarly enterprise devoted to finding actual evidence that there were people in the know who got it, and may have passed it on. This would involved literary and manuscript detective work of a high order, and my impression is that nobody is doing it, or has successfully done it. Am I wrong about this?
If that sort of thing is unavailable, then what we have is 2000-plus years of people reading the Aristotle That You Can Read and That Says What it Says, with its enormous influence. Where does that leave the Straussians?
J, not that one 09.10.24 at 4:56 pm
I think for Strauss himself the issues in the second paragraph of @4 aren’t real ones.
For Strauss there’s no question whether censorship exists, there’s always censorship.
There’s no question for Strauss what a great writer really is saying, they’re all always saying the Truth, which is to say, the same thing.
Great writers who appear to be supporting ideas Strauss thinks are wrong, are actually “deconstructing” those ideas (to coin a phrase). That’s what their greatness inheres in.
In every age, there are ideas that can’t be questioned publicly, but readers in any age can penetrate through these and attain the Truth. The fact that they’re not the Truth doesn’t make those ideas wrong. There’s not much that can be said about them because no age permits criticism of its own ideas, and anyway thinking should be about Truth.
Modern social science, according to Strauss, ignores the Truth because it prefers to manage society to make people happier. It might be ok if it left that kind of thing to lesser folk, but it’s tricked people into thinking that’s what philosophy is about.
“Straussians” if they’re doing practical politics are already those lesser folk, though, surely.
So for Strauss there’s a truth that everyone you know would be disgusted by, or maybe just insulted by, or even simply annoyed by, and it’s a positive good for you to make every effort to find out what that is (assuming your community says it’s an okay way for you to spend your time and doesn’t find out what the details are).
Cervantes 09.10.24 at 6:00 pm
Well, Vonnegut himself answered this question in the novel: You are what you pretend to be. That is the basic point of Mother Night
Daniel 09.10.24 at 7:16 pm
The abstract problem at the end doesn’t require Straussianism, it only requires that people can lie to your face. And no, there’s no way out of that: you can be fooled by liars, however vigilant you try to be. Not even “assumptions” can help you out of this predicament. So there’s not actually any special problems for Straussianism in this area. Everyone has to be aware they might be being hoodwinked. It’s a price of entering conversation at all.
LFC 09.10.24 at 7:28 pm
This is OT from Vonnegut and the OP, but I remember about 20 years ago that much was made in some quarters about the fact that several leading proponents of the Iraq invasion had studied either with Strauss himself or with Straussians. I’m a total non-fan of Strauss, but I thought the suggestion that he was somehow to blame for the Iraq war was less than persuasive. For one thing, one of the ideological justifications for it had to do with replacing tyranny with liberal democracy, and Strauss — as the letter quoted above indicates — seems to have had no real liking for that at all.
SamChevre 09.10.24 at 7:38 pm
One helpful bit of reading on the topic is Ada Palmer, Was Machiavelli an Atheist.
I think “Straussianism makes it more difficult to reach a separating equilibrium in the communications game, which would allow you to clearly distinguish Nazis from anti-Nazis” is exactly the right observation, but exactly the wrong conclusion. The point of “Straussian” communication is to keep the Truth in circulation, without it being ascertainable that the Straussian believes it.
J, not that one 09.10.24 at 9:03 pm
As Steven Johnson suggests, a Wittgensteinian understanding of language as a game is probably more influential than Straussian belief in being able to find the true intention of any writer. Though maybe it’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from within the chaos that would be created where the elites were Straussians.
Fletch 09.10.24 at 10:36 pm
This is irritating. I’m an anti-Straussian. I was briefly intrigued by Straussianism as an undergraduate, and after a little investigation, concluded that most of Strauss is silly and most of Straussianism is stupid. Time (and meeting a few Straussians) reinforced those conclusions.
But the reason I was briefly intrigued by Strauss as an undergrad is because what Farrell describes as the “protocol” was just common sense to me. I grew up as a racial and sexual minority and not religious in a religious family. I talked according to the “protocol” constantly. I could sense when other people were doing the same. I sought out authors who employed allusion, misdirection, and irony. The Strauss “protocol” had way more in common with real life to me than the way analytic philosophers talk in seminar rooms.
Straussianism is junk but Farrell has completely bungled the case.
MisterMr 09.11.24 at 6:46 am
This is the whole point of the “death of the author” thing: we can’t know what the real living author tought so we can only speak of how the author presents himelf/herself textually.
The death of the author thing actually was born against an excess of freudian interpretations I think, but the problem is the same.
In an unrelated note, there are still people who mantain that Macchiavelli was ironic and pro democracy, and I don’t know what they are smoking.
Chris Bertram 09.11.24 at 10:25 am
The Straussian problem, well one of them anyway, is the addiction to always finding the hidden message that contradicts the surface meaning. But we still need to read the classic texts of the past with the sense that we are not the intended readers and that the author’s imagined audiences will have understandings, expectations etc such that they will readily detects irony, sarcasm, dissimulation etc. which the plain reader to the text centuries later will be minded to miss. All of this is what makes something like Rousseau’s Dedicace to the 2nd Discourse so hard to interpret: does he really mean to praise the rulers of Geneva, or is he taking the piss?
engels 09.11.24 at 10:47 am
I once studied literature with someone who was an actual living author and he understandably felt the “death of the author” idea had been a bit overdone.
steven t johnson 09.11.24 at 2:31 pm
Fletch@14 doesn’t claim to be part of a religious minority, but that seems to me to copy the privileging of religion. Personally old enough to remember older people and writings and movies, I remember how common it was to call out racial bigotry. It was felt necessary to distinguish racial bigotry from the older understanding of bigotry as a disorder of religious people. It seems to me the reduction of “bigotry” to only racial bigotry is a fundamentally conservative reaction to secularism, an attempt to deny religious bigotry is really a thing. The exclusive use of racism is part of an attempt to deny the massive overlap. Reaction has its own perverse intersectionality.
MisterMr@15 seems to be working from a personal definition of democracy, likely enough some notion of an ideal democracy. It doesn’t seem to me far fetched at all to claim Macchiavelli was against a Medici prince for Florence and for a united Italy free from foreign princes. That seems to me to be a plausibly large part of what actually existing democracy was then. Careers open to talent and limitations on individual oligarchs by class collaborating under law in a state seems to me to have a been a good part of actually existing democracy for quite a long time. Seeing democracy as a kind of individual voters choosing policies and personnel the way a consumer bought commodities became more common as that kind of life became more common. Of course Macchiavelli was no more a contemporary democrat than a Jefferson.
alfredlordbleep 09.11.24 at 4:04 pm
@15 “In an unrelated note, there are still people who mantain that Macchiavelli was ironic and pro democracy, and I don’t know what they are smoking.”
see Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics (1962, and five subsequent editions, the last in 2002)
see Machiavellian Democracy First Edition
by John P. McCormick (Author)
[from the first pages]
The plebian tribunate, the centerpiece of Machiavelli’s prescriptions for popular government, was an intensely controversial institution in assessments of the Roman Republic throughout the history of Western political thought. Yet, inexplicably, scholarship devoted to elaborating Machiavelli’s “republicanism” virtually ignores it. Aristocratic republicans such as Guicciardini, and many more before and after him, from Cicero to Montesquieu, criticized the tribunate for opening the doors of government to upstarts, who subsequently stir up strife, sedition, and insurrection among the common people. Machiavelli, on the contrary, argues that the establishment of the tribunes made the Roman constitution “nearly perfect” by facilitating the plebians’ assertion of their proper role as the “guardians” of Roman liberty.
As we will observe in Chapter 4, when Machiavelli proposes constitutional reforms to restore the Florentine Republic, he creates a tribunician office, the proposti or provosts, a magistracy that wields veto and appellate powers and excludes the republic’s most prominent citizens.* Even commentators who understand Machiavelli to be an advocate of the people, an antagonist of the grandi, or— albeit more rarely—a democrat pure and simple largely neglect the crucial role that the Roman tribunes play in his political thought and consistently overlook his proposal to establish Florentine tribunes, the provosts, within his native city.
*N. Machiavelli, “Discursus on Florentine Affairs” (1520-21)
bekabot 09.11.24 at 4:29 pm
“Is there any way to navigate the wilderness of beliefs, meta-beliefs and meta-meta-beliefs, except by assumption, so that expectations might actually converge on some shared truth?”
The non-Straussian answer to this question is “no”, and the Straussian answer would be “don’t threaten me with a good time.” The Straussian practitioner is getting what he signed up for: he doesn’t want a shared truth, what he wants is a truth which is available to him and to a few other select cognoscenti alone, and the reason he’s into Straussianism is that it gives him what he’s after. Straussianism is constructed (meticulously) to produce exactly the impasse you describe. Straussians regard most information-seekers as benighted by nature, not misinformed by circumstance, and it’s not part of their program to place truths (which are valuable) within the grasp of undistinguished people (who are not). That would be insufficiently respectful toward the truths.
If Straussianism makes access to the truth exceptionally dependent on clubbiness and membership in cliques, that would be because it’s meant to. During the phase of the postulant’s journey which takes place while he still worries about the truth, he’s intended to realize that he can’t receive the truth from an enemy but only among friends, and that the distinction between friends and enemies is among the great real distinctions which will always prevail. He can sniff at other lines in the sand but he ought to pay attention to this one. (It’s also a pretty good tactic for keeping out riff-raff and useful in that respect.)
Leo Strauss was no Howard Campbell, because Howard Campbell is a bumbler, and Leo Strauss was not. Howard W. Campbell is incompetent, but Leo Strauss was effective. Howard W. Campbell ends up with a result he didn’t plan for, but Leo Strauss finished with the outcome he desired. Leo Strauss engineered his philosophy so that it would produce the results it does produce — he must have felt contempt for thinkers who entrust the outcome of their thought to mere chance. (And if comes to that, Howard Campbell isn’t even a thinker, is he — he’s just a mouthpiece, poor schlub.)
MisterMr 09.11.24 at 7:17 pm
@steven t Johnson 18 and alfredlordbleep 19
Machiavelli literally wrote his main work, The Prince, with the purpose of having a single guy take power and unify Italy as a dictatorship.
Perhaps in a different political climate he would have preferred a democracy of sorts, but because he was pissed off that non italians were taking power in Italy he preferred a strong ruler (makes me think of Oda Nobunaga in Japan). His model was Cesare Borgia who was quite an asshole.
Neville Morley 09.12.24 at 5:28 am
Some of my best friends are Straussians – or at any rate valued interlocutors, as a classical Greek author I work on (Thucydides) is one of their favourites. On the basis of this limited sample, I would say that a distinction between Strauss and Vulgar Straussianism is insufficient; leaving aside what Strauss himself had to say, there are those who identify with him by emphasising a particular kind of close reading without presupposing what this will find, and those for whom the close reading is simply a means to uncover the kinds of truth which are assumed to be present but concealed.
This more or less maps onto a distinction between those who engage with non-Straussian scholars of the same text, and those who are interested only in talking with one another. The latter can be entirely unintelligible to non-initiates. One of the weirdest experiences of my career was wandering into a panel at APSA on Xenophon, and hearing a series of people talking about familiar texts in a way that made absolutely no sense to me; on the face of it, a series of disconnected banalities. Someone explained to me afterwards that Xenophon has become a favourite of a particular group of Straussians, whose discussions refer only to each other, and the mere existence of a panel on Xenophon should have been enough of a warning sign.
wacko 09.12.24 at 8:49 am
People make declarations, pronouncements, but they don’t mean them.
I can see two possibilities here:
1. they know what they do. They are being sarcastic, opportunistic, or something like that. Sure. This happens all the time. And
2. they are pious hypocrites. They declare, for example, that “free speech” is everyone’s right, but when people they don’t like want to practice it, suddenly it must be stopped. While “free speech” is still “everyone’s right”.
That’s the funny one.
Sashas 09.12.24 at 12:57 pm
I haven’t interacted with Straussianism before this conversaion, but it reminds me of Schrodingers Douchebag, and I think it merits the same response. Namely, speakers should be on the hook for what they actually say, and no later claims of secret messages should get one off the hook. When they say contradictory things, they should be on the hook for the worst aspects of all the things they say.
It also looks to me like Straussianism as a textual analysis strategy suffers from having cause and effect backwards. I don’t care what Machiavelli (for example) believed. Machiavelli’s writings don’t have value because he was a great thinker. We call him a great thinker because his writings have value. I love a good secret message, but it sounds like a Straussian believes in an almost-Platonic “Truth” that can be only ambiguously conveyed, and once you admit the failure of writing to convey that Truth I see no reason to value the Truth over the writing…
Mike Huben 09.12.24 at 1:07 pm
I’ve never read a word of Strauss. But from the author’s description, Strauss has produced a simple conspiracy-theory generator. As such, Straussian claims should be granted all the respect of conspiracy theories, and can be addressed the same way. Conspiracy theories can never be “disproven” because another epicycle of conspiratorial regress can always be added. Instead, the best possible resolution is to show that they are unlikely. Another resolution is to show that the same basis can be used to make a large number of different but equally possible theories.
steven t johnson 09.12.24 at 1:47 pm
MisterMr@21 says The Prince is Machiavelli’s main work and his model was Cesare Borgia. Yes, it’s Machiavelli’s most famous work. But I am inclined to think Discourses on Livy is his main work, the context for The Prince, not the other way round. For assessing Machiavelli’s social attitudes, his play Mandragola/The Mandrake seems to me to be equally, if not more, useful. Most of all, it seems to me if Cesare Borgia was the model for the prince (who would save Italy) it was a kind of literary conceit, a strategy of flattery. Cesare Borgia is better seen I think as the target, not an intervention aimed at inspiring an appreciation of Cesare Borgia among the public. (Especially since it’s not clear there was a public in the sense we assume today.)
This may just show that a US citizen doesn’t understand Italian history, I suppose. Or any history in MisterMr’s view? The notion that national unity and independence in the face of foreign interventions is not part and parcel of “democracy” strikes me as quite wrong. Thus, “with the purpose of having a single guy take power and unify Italy as a dictatorship…” seems to me to concede the point, because 1)Cesare Borgia was guaranteed to die eventually while a unified and independent Italy would not and 2)Cesare Borgia was not the Pope, who could also have been the single dictator. Rhetorical question: If Machiavelli just wanted a dictator to unify Italy, why not him?
The moral to me is, actually existing democracy is not ideal democracy, never has been, never will be. And the necessarily idiosyncratic nature of ideal schemes makes them risking. If there ever was a work that called for a reading that looked for irony, covert agendas, hidden positions (a “Straussian” reading?) it is in my opinion The Prince.
J, not that one 09.12.24 at 4:12 pm
It’s hard not to see the debate over Straussianism as essentially a referendum on whether humanism is dead. For the anti-humanist, to hope for “expectations [to] actually converge on some shared truth” is meaningless and distracting. The good humanist finds it difficult to really believe that anti-humanists exist, however, and maybe she’s right.
LFC 09.12.24 at 4:29 pm
stj @26
If The Prince has “a target” (i.e., an addressee), it is, in the first and most concrete instance at any rate, the person to whom the book is dedicated: Lorenzo de Medici (1492-1519), grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
MisterMr 09.12.24 at 5:37 pm
@steven t. johnson
National unity might or might not be a good thing, but it is not the same thing of democracy, although not having a “foreign” power making the calls might be considered a precondition of democracy.
“If Machiavelli just wanted a dictator to unify Italy, why not him?”
If by “him” you mean Cesare Borgia, Cesare Borgia died a few years before Machiavelly wrote the prince. If instead you mean Machiavelli himself it’s because he didn’t have an army. The whole point is that M. didn’t think that any republican government (in Italy at the time) would have been strong enough to conquer the others, so he wanted a “strongman” to do it.
steven t johnson 09.12.24 at 11:59 pm
MisterMr@29 The sentence before the “him” mentioned the Pope and that’s the him who I meant.
The point by MisterMr and LFC about the date of Cesare Borgia’s death makes me realize the practice of circulating manuscript copies before publication at large may have been common, but I shouldn’t have thoughtlessly assumed that. Lorenzo de Medici as the target of sincere advice?
bad Jim 09.13.24 at 5:08 am
Perhaps the clearest indications of Machiavelli’s sentiments are his efforts on behalf of the Florentine Republic, which would make The Prince a perhaps not entirely sincere work of practical political science.
both sides do it 09.13.24 at 7:05 pm
The movie’s pretty blah but Sheryl Lee is amazing in it
Something I see in Mother Night that doesn’t get excavated much, and somewhat relates to the Strauss discussion, is:
“relating to an epistemic frame in the face of uncertainty is inevitable, and whatever you choose will destroy you”
Howard Campbell is a hysteric: he doesn’t know how to define himself / pick an epistemic frame. This destroys him.
The climax of the plot is an American nationalist who’s come to murder Campbell. He’s a paranoiac: he knows exactly who he is and how he relates to things through an elaborate fantastical frame he’s created. Campbell destroys him; spiritually through a great speech demolishing that fantastical frame, and physically by shattering his kneecap with a wrench (which he’s easily able to do, because the American’s fantasy didn’t take into account the American is much older and feebler).
There’s no escape into love, either. Howard’s intense and perfect romance (which is both lower- and upper-r) falls apart because it was based on an epistemic frame that couldn’t survive reality; when reality intrudes, as it must, the Romance then collapses
(The closest thing to a way out from this dilemma the novel points to is in the small consolations of a thin and complicated humanism, typical of Vonnegut, in Campbell’s speech to the American: “don’t hate unreservedly so that you find yourself excusing murder”)
Straussianism might be a technique for being an intellectual actor in this environment of radical epistemic uncertainty where choice is both inevitable and will destroy you: present different frameworks to different people/environments in the hope of escaping specific destructions or shaping specific ends.
Interestingly, this is what Campbell seems to choose to do in the novel: he is constantly serving different presentations of himself/the world to different audiences, in the hope of avoiding calamity or gaining something.
For the most part he is successful, and the final pages consist of an opportunity to simply allow an outside actor to present a new version of himself to the public one last time. By telling the truth, even.
But social life can’t be lived that way, and he can’t go through with it, and he kills himself.
MisterMr 09.13.24 at 11:23 pm
IIRC Machiavelli said nothing about the Pope not being the Prince, I assume that one strongman or the other made small difference.
@bad Jim
The fact that M was pro Florentine republic at some point doesn’t negate that years later M could have lost his hope in said republics, after his own ass was severely kicked together with that of the republic.
Even if this was not the case, and he was just sucking up to the new Medici overlord while secretly planning for his downfall (might well be), he didn’t write it into the Prince, so according to my “death of the author” principles said hidden motives are not relevant for the literary Machiavelli, who comes out from his texts.
The problem of assuming an hidden meaning is that we tend to project our own opinion on others, so since we take for granted that democracies are better than tyrannies we assume that M tought the same. But all the proofs are in our assumptions, not in his writings.
CarlD 09.14.24 at 4:47 am
“And this must be taken as a general rule: that never or rarely does it happen that any republic or realm is well-ordered from the beginning, or altogether reformed from its old order, if it is not ordered by one… but a prudent orderer of a republic, if he has this will to benefit not himself but the common good… has to arrange to have this authority alone; nor will a wise mind take issue with any extraordinary action necessary to order a realm or constitute a republic…. [But] if one is appropriate to order things, the order will not last long when it remains on the shoulders of the one, but very well when it remains in the care of many, and when it is up to many to maintain it. Because just as many are not suited to order a thing, due to not knowing its good because of the diverse opinions among them, so once they know it they cannot agree to abandon it.” Discourses, book I, chapter IX.
EWI 09.14.24 at 2:38 pm
J @ 2
Strauss assumes the ancient or traditional social order is inevitable and that for 99% of the people thought is irrelevant and that forbidding it to them is the best course. It’s really that simple. And then the Mother Night problem doesn’t arise.
I first encountered this Strauss mystery 20 years ago via the witterings of a gay conservative Irish Catholic Bush II supporter (inevitably a nepo-baby hire within UCD), when it seemed all the rage with young West Brit Tory types, and this coterie (mostly to be found in something called the ‘Freedom Institute’ seemed very taken with the elitist mystery of it all.
Nothing since has caused me to change my opinion that it’s just CMA BS by careerists, and that if you want to see the real deal in action then look to the cultures of long-time oppressed groups and the very careful speech such groups are conditioned into, by survival necessity.
J-D 09.15.24 at 5:49 am
Do you think in terms of a single literary Machiavelli, who is deteremined by the aggregate of all his works, or multiple literary Machiavellis, one for each text?
The Prince is the only one I have read, but I do remember that near the beginning he mentions that he’s not going to discuss republics in that book because he’s dealt with them elsewhere. Doesn’t this mean that a literary Machiavelli based solely on the text of The Prince alone is somebody who has no view about republics one way or the other?
MisterMr 09.15.24 at 7:09 am
@J-D
I do think that multiple Machiavellis is an acceptable interpretation (since people can change their mind in time), but also checking other writings, or the context where/when one is writing makes sense, as long as it is about something that can be checked.
For example, if Machiavelli lived in a time where democracies were the standard, this would be enough to say he was pro democracy unless he stated the opposite, it would be the historically correct way to read his works.
But he lived in a period where democracies existed but were not the norm, and also our egalitarian idea that every citizen has the same rights (which is the reason we prefer democracies) wasn’t really common either.
So if in the “discourses” (that I didn’t read) he said that democracies are great and monarchies suck I would accept that as evidence, but I don’t think he ever said that (or people would cite it).
@CarlD 34
Okay, that indeed is a relevant citation, but then we have M writing the Prince to have a “Prince” unify Italy through war, treasons and political murders, we have this prince act under the priciple that is better to be feared than loved because people forget favours easily but not punishment, this Prince will also be very cautious and not let the population have weapons because they might revolt (even though mercenary troops have the disadvantage of fighting less)… All this because after he is dead he won’t leave the loot in the hands of his son, he will let the underlings found a republic/democracy.
I see some problem.
PS: I also did read the Prince 20+ years ago so I don’t remember that bit about democracies.
J-D 09.15.24 at 9:32 am
Chapter I of The Prince begins like this: ‘All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and are either republics or principalities.’ Chapter II begins like this: ‘I will leave out all discussion on republics, inasmuch as in another place I have written of them at length, and will address myself only to principalities.’
I think that makes it clear that the text of The Prince tells us, of itself, that it reveals nothing about the author’s opinions about republics and that if you want to know what the author thinks about republics you must look elsewhere.
QuidProQuo 09.15.24 at 2:40 pm
But do Strauss’ ideas or his not-very-hidden beliefs even matter, when now it’s completely socially acceptable & even commonly career-enhancing to air your fascism on Xitter? Isn’t that more our issue to decry?
steven t johnson 09.15.24 at 2:59 pm
“But [Machiavelli] lived in a period where democracies existed but were not the norm, and also our egalitarian idea that every citizen has the same rights (which is the reason we prefer democracies) wasn’t really common either.”
My personal ignorance defeats me again, and I can’t think of any contemporary democracies whose practice Machiavelli might have observed. Further, “our” supposed egalitarian ideas about the equality of citizens omits that the equal right to property of all citizens is a guarantee of inequality in practice. Such issues are still contentious. Projecting a preferred personal notion of ideal democracy back onto Machiavelli, regardless of whether you judge him a proponent or an enemy, is questionable I think.
Another thing, the question “Who is a citizen?” is essential. For Machiavelli, judging from his political career and more of his writings than The Prince, there was a sense in which all the Italian people were “citizens.” The notion that “democracy” means equal rights even of citizens by the way forgets that women and children were commonly held to be citizens of a sort yet without equal political rights, so even that assertion is riskier than may seem.
To repeat myself in different words, the notion that the people can be free when their country/city is not, is an absurdity. National liberation and national unity are democratic, and essential to “democracy.” Not ideal democracy as currently avowed (which is modeled in practice I think on notions of politics as a market, with voters as consumers) but such ideals tend to be idiosyncrasies, individual mental phenomena not truly observable to others. That’s why so much of political discourse on texts starts (and sometimes ends?) with heated debate on what someone meant to say, perhaps.
Even in terms of formal political rights accorded to full citizens, Machiavelli’s apparent refusal to advocate for papal rule is very much a repudiation of that openly hierarchical system, no? It makes very much difference if it’s the Pope. The Borgia project was in the end for one thing about replacing the papacy with a secular system, a principality (that united Italy.) It’s not an ideal democracy, but then, like ideal socialism, it’s the actually existing democracy that ultimately matters. You can presume your personal version of democracy and put any actually existing “democracy” in scare quotes at will, but it is not at all clear this is substantive, much less conclusive. But then, I confess I see a democratic element to the Lollards and the Hussites and the Protestant Reformation too, so take that for what it’s worth.
Machiavelli’s secular world view, which sees an intelligibility of politics beyond the prevalent at that time moralizing, played its part even in the emergence of democracy I believe. (Discourses on Livy could be considered an early essay in political science/sociology/history as a science rather than one of the humanities?)
Last, on the death of the author: “The problem of assuming an hidden meaning is that we tend to project our own opinion on others…” This is true of all fiction and all texts of any sort, including Mother Night. “Our” opinion that Nazis were an extraordinary evil is projected into our reading of the novel. There’s no novel is collaboration of any kind, even a pretense of collaboration, is morally wrong, if I remember correctly.
My belief based on decades old memory is that Vonnegut shared that common belief, widespread (not universal) then and now. I don’t recall any distinct excursus in the text affirming this openly however…. The issue of when a reading of the intent of the author is a bad reading, defying the manifest content in the name of an imputed reading, is not even addressed by a mere assumption that the text is a complete universe, so to speak, self-contained as an entity. I don’t know whether assuming an oeuvre is a literary cosmos serves either, but I suspect not. Criticism, deep criticism at least, of texts is also deep criticism of the readers. Look at the arguments between fans! Criticisms of taste is criticism of persons too.
The problem with the death of the author thesis is the assumption that the author has put only their intentions into the text, and only them. But could they have inadvertently put in commonplace ideas they never meant consciously? I don’t see how they could avoid it! In Mother Night, is Campbell truly a significant figure, whose fate is a moral tragedy, or another victim of war, more pathetic than heroic or villainous? Is Campbell somehow a commentary on John W. Campbell? If so, what does that say and why does it matter?
How would Machiavelli have adapted Mother Night as a play?
alfredlordbleep 09.15.24 at 5:40 pm
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
While The Prince is doubtless the most widely read of his works, the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy perhaps most honestly expresses Machiavelli’s personal political beliefs and commitments, in particular, his republican sympathies. The Discourses certainly draw upon the same reservoir of language and concepts that flowed into The Prince, but the former treatise leads us to draw conclusions quite different from—many scholars have said contradictory to—the latter. In particular, across the two works, Machiavelli consistently and clearly distinguishes between a minimal and a full conception of “political” or “civil” order, and thus constructs a hierarchy of ends within his general account of communal life. A minimal constitutional order is one in which subjects live securely (vivere sicuro), ruled by a strong government which holds in check the aspirations of both nobility (grandi) and people (Popolo), but is in turn balanced by other legal and institutional mechanisms. In a fully constitutional regime, however, the goal of the political order is the freedom of the community (vivere libero), created by the active participation of, and contention between, the nobility and the people (Pedullà 2011 [2018]). . . .
MisterMr 09.16.24 at 10:42 am
@steven t johnson 40
Perhaps we are speaking past each other.
“The problem with the death of the author thesis is the assumption that the author has put only their intentions into the text, and only them.”
No, the “death of the author” logic is that only what the author says in the text counts, not that these are the real intentions. For example, if Dante says in the comedy that he loved Beatrice, we have to assume that he really loved Beatrice, even if we can’t know this for real. The only exception is if culturally in that narrative genre there was a known convention of speaking of imaginary angelicized women (so the cultural context does count in the death of the author thesis).
Depending on what you mean by “democracy”, Florence, Siena, Venice were more or less democracies, with a limited part of the population that could participate in the democratic process. Perhaps in modern terms we could call those “oligarchies”, but generally an “oligarchy” is supposed to be one where only the “grandi” (nobles or literally “big” citiziens) count. I think that many italian “comuni” of the times would be better understood as limited democracies, like the form of democracy where only the ones who own land can vote or similar.
“Machiavelli’s apparent refusal to advocate for papal rule”
He doesn’t call for papal rule but he doesn’t exclude it explicitly, plus he lived in Florence, he couldn’t say “hey I want the guy from another italian ministate to conquer us” because it would have been literal treason.
“It makes very much difference if it’s the Pope. The Borgia project was in the end for one thing about replacing the papacy with a secular system, a principality (that united Italy.)”
The Borgias got into power because one of them was a Pope so I don’t really follow you here (it is in the link you gave before?), plus yes, the “Prince” is not an aristocratic prince, more like a dictator. But this was already the norm in italian “comuni”: originally and formally those were sort of limited democracies, however as society evolved some (non aristocratic) families got really a lot of money, with which they managed to control these comuni and took away much of the real bite of the sorta more or less democratic power of the guilds. They also bough aristocratic titles.
But when Machiavelli writes about monarchy he is not thinking in terms of divine rights of the king, he is thinking of one “big” citizien who manages to get enough power to lord over the others, like Julius Caesar or Augustus (or the Medicis).
The problem is not between secularism and feudal style right of the kings, it is between a secularist limited democracy and a secularist autocracy (that technically is a form of monarchy).
” For Machiavelli, judging from his political career and more of his writings than The Prince, there was a sense in which all the Italian people were “citizens.” ”
Yeah, but please note that in M times Florence, Siena, Rome, Venice etc. were different states, so he is asking for a “prince” to take away this sort of local citizenships and unify them in a bigger unit, on the (correct, it turned out) assumption that if they didn’t unify they would have been conquerd by foreigners. He wanted the Prince to conquer these people (who were already “free” in the limited sense you mean) because he believed that in the future they would not have been “free” anymore, something that really happened.
If we stretch a bit the comparison, it would be like someone who asks one politician of an EU state (say Meloni because he would have been italian, but it could have been a lefty too) to subvert the EU and turn it into an autocracy, and merge the unruly EU nations together, because otherwise the Chinese (or the Indians or maybe even the Americans) will come and kick our collective asses.
MisterMr 09.16.24 at 11:03 am
@alfredlordbleep and J-D
I didn’t read the “discourses”, but reading on the wikipedia page I see:
“Echoing Aristotle’s Politics, He states that there are six main different types of government, three of which are good, but “no precaution will prevent it from slipping into its opposite, so closely are the virtues and vices of the two related.”[4] Namely, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy will become tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy, respectively. Machiavelli then tries to determine what type of government Rome was; he says it was a republic, mixing all three functional political systems together, which kept the violent tendencies of one another in check. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy
So “democracy” is not intrisecally better than “monarchy”, and in the Prince, for other reasons due to the political situation of his times, he asks for a “monarchy” (autocracy) to take power and unify Italy. So on the whole in his times he wanted a “monarchy” (due to reasons, not because he liked monarchies more in principle).
If someone said something like it in modern days, say something like “I want a leftish guy to take power to stop the power crawl of the far right”, or “I want a right wing dictator to stop the commies before they force me to use pronouns”, or “I want a strongman to stop democracy in the USA or Europe because otherwise the Chinese will dominate us”, we would not call him a friend of democracy, even if he said that, in an ideal situation, democracy is better than autocracy.
J-D 09.16.24 at 11:55 am
Then you don’t know what Machiavelli thought about republics. That’s all I’m saying.
J, not that one 09.16.24 at 1:03 pm
EWI @35 No doubt Strauss was terribly confused by his interactions with gay Irish conservatives, not least by wondering what they were doing in Vienna in the 1930s (poor Mr. Joyce!).
I think anyone would admit the obvious fact that Vonnegut’s saying “you are what you pretend to be” is asymmetrical in its application. Can you become a billionaire by pretending to be one? Can you become a highly moral person by pretending to be highly moral? Clearly not! The issue is what kinds of excuses really get one off the hook for bad behavior. (Howard) Campbell would like to brush off (self-)criticism for performing traitorous acts by claiming he had non-traitorous intentions.
How to balance effect and intention and constraint against moral blame have kept theologians busy for thousands of years, and I think to say all Vonnegut is doing is pointing to the dilemma trivializes his work. Certainly it’s not helpful for readers. An examine of the uses of rhetorical irony, analysis of implied audiences and so on, might get us farther.
MisterMr 09.16.24 at 6:50 pm
@J-D 44
If I read a book by someone who says “wow an autocrat should really conquer a lot of small semi democratic republics, it would be cool” then I think I’m justified to say that this guy is pro dictatorship, whatever else he wrote before.
That said, I read the first few chapters of the Discourses and he seems to think that:
There are three brands of governments, by “princes”, by “optimates” (he uses this latin term in italian, not nobles or aristocrats), and by the people in general; the three forms tend to degrade so an ideal state should have all three balancing each others. He counts roman consuls as “princes” so perhaps he would be ok with presidential republics (?) but then he thinks that Sparta was much better than Athens because Athens was too democratic.
Nothing in what I read tells me that M tought that democracy was in line of priciple morally superior to a dictatorship, only that dictatorships can be bad if the dictator act as an ass (but then this is equivalent to democracies becoming too lenient).
Evan 09.16.24 at 11:24 pm
Re #5, Brad Delong, & Strauss’ “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” critique of the Nazis.
Wouldn’t this basically be Jabotinsky?
J-D 09.17.24 at 4:52 am
I don’t recall that from anywhere in the text of The Prince. Where are you finding it?
alfredlordbleep 09.17.24 at 9:52 pm
Machiavelli’s office of constitutional dictator in the republic
. . . Of course, the temporary suspension of consultation and appeal could easily
lead to abuses of dictatorial power. However, Machiavelli argues that dictatorial
power could not be abused as long as it was accorded “in ordinary ways [in vie
ordinarie].” As both Geuna and Pasquino rightly emphasize, the notion that emergencies should not be confronted “through extraordinary ways,” but “through
ordinary ways,” is a guiding principle of Machiavelli’s theory of dictatorship
(Geuna 2015, 235; Pasquino 2010, 15–6). More particularly, for Machiavelli, it is
crucial that a dictator is appointed “according to public orders [secondo gli ordini
publici], and not by his own authority” (Discourses, I, 34, 5). By contrast, if dictatorial authority is granted in an extraordinary way, for instance, if a dictator appoints
himself or is allowed to maintain his powers after his term expires, it will be
harmful to the republic. As Machiavelli explains, such extraordinary concessions to
dictatorial power are always harmful because of the precedent they establish, “[f]or
although the extraordinary mode may do good then, nonetheless the example does
ill; for if one sets up a habit of breaking the orders [una usanza di rompere gli ordini]
for the sake of the good, then later, under that coloring, they are broken for ill”
(Discourses, I, 34, 16). Hence, according to Machiavelli, it is crucial for a republic to
have legal provisions that recognize and regulate the dictatorship in advance. If
such provisions are lacking in a republic, “it is necessary either that it be ruined by
observing the orders or that it break them so as not to be ruined [e` necessario o
servando gli ordini, rovinare o per non ruinare rompergli]” (Discourses, I, 34, 14).
It is this distinction between ordinary and extraordinary grants of dictatorial
power that enables Machiavelli to distinguish dictatorship from tyranny, and to
claim that “no dictator ever did anything but good to the Roman republic”. . .
https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/23358777/Wilde_2018_Ratio_Juris.pdf
MisterMr 09.17.24 at 10:00 pm
@J-D 48
Its the whole point of the Prince, that he had to unify Italy. Italy at the time was composed by many states, some of them semi-democratic (Florence, Siena, Venice, Lucca, also San Marino even if it was very small), although in many cases like Florence with the Medicis the semi-democracy already sorta decayed in a “signoria”, a one family rule.
But formally these states were semi-democratic.
J-D 09.18.24 at 2:31 am
So, where does the text say that an autocrat should conquer them?
steven t johnson 09.18.24 at 12:41 pm
Yes, many English liberals thought Lincoln conquering the democratic (also literally Democratic) states was tyranny too. (Yes, Mill was an exceptional liberal who didn’t condemn the tyrannical North—or maybe it was a liberal who made an exception?) I’m on the other side, though and that seems to be the end of it.
It seems to me the apparent digression into Machiavelli has made it clear the ideal is the enemy of the real. Or, it is the Hanging Judge of History, a la Lord Acton? The irrepressible conflict of morality and power lurks there in the pages of Mother Night too, if I remember anything clearly at all, so maybe it’s not too much of a digression at all?
MisterMr 09.19.24 at 7:38 am
@J-D 51
I read the book a lot of years ago, but by reading the summary on Wikipedia it should be chapter 26, “Exhortation to Seize Italy and to Free Her from the Barbarians”
@steven t Johnson 52
Yeah I don’t think he was super evil, he had his reasons in the historical period in which he lived; but he certainly wasn’t a pro democracy writer.
J-D 09.20.24 at 12:37 am
I can’t help what Wikipedia editors choose to write, but I can’t find anything in the text of that chapter about an autocrat conquering semi-democratic republics; or, at least, nothing favouring that happening. It does say this–
–and this–
–which to me seems more like saying that Italy has already been conquered and that this is a bad thing.
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