Alberto Moravia
PORTRAIT OF MACHIAVELLI
In
these notes I shall speak only of the
Prince
and the
Mandragola
and some of the minor works, not of the
Histories,
the
Discourses,
or the
Art of War.
The reason is that I do not
inten~
to
write an essay on the political works of Machiavelli but only on
certain of his characteristics, and it seems to me that these emerge
more clearly in the writings I have selected than elsewhere.
In
par–
ticular, I want to try to define Machiavellianism-however much or
little of Machiavellianism is inseparable from Machiavelli. By Machi–
avellianism I mean not a theory of politics but a moral passion, which
found in Machiavelli an unconscious but perfect exponent. Hence
these notes will take shape rather as a psychological portrait than a
critical essay.
It
will be objected that Machiavellianism is nothing but a
slanderous fiction invented by posterity and by his less disinterested
critics; and that Machiavelli developed a line of thought in all his
works that was rigorously coherent. To this I answer that in many
of his writings, and often in the
Prince
too, Machiavelli is in fact
no more Machiavellian than any other political thinker. But all the
same, there remain a certain number of facts that absolutely cannot
be explained if one considers Machiavelli as a mere essayist in the
same class, say, as a Montaigne or as his contemporary Guicciardini.
Facts, moreover, which are so loaded with a satisfaction that is not
just verbal, so extravagant, so fundamentally un-thought-through, that
when one comes up against them, one must necessarily either ignore
them-as do most of Machiavelli's
admirers~r
denounce them
hotly, moralistically, as his enemies have always done. Both attitudes,
examined closely, are equally evasive and unsatisfactory.
Posterity has always rebelled against certain of the tenets and
