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states: "They alone have states and do not defend them; subjects
and do not govern them: whence the states being undefended are not
taken away from them; and the subjects being ungoverned show no
concern about this. Wherefore only these principates are secure and
happy. But as the cause is due to superior reasons beyond human
comprehension, I will not attempt to speak of them; for they are
supported and maintained by God, so that he would be presumptu–
ous who would dare discourse of them." Now in this passage one
must notice, apart from Machiavelli's antipathy and bitterness to–
ward the Church and its politics within Italy and internationally, that
there is a final, definitive condemnation of medieval politics, which
are indivisible precisely from those "superior reasons beyond human
comprehension." In other words, in a negative form there is mirrored
here the distinction between politics and morality, politics and religion,
politics and ideals, which is the most solid foundation of Machiavelli's
glory and his political science. Let us observe
in
passing that Machia–
velli's judgment on the Church states, while brilliant and justified
by the long medieval constriction, is unfounded historically because
he is considering those states at the exact moment when all their
historical, psychological, moral, political and cultural justifications
had ceased to be, and when the politics of the papacy, in its practice
as in its ends, no longer differed from that of all the other Italian
principates. Machiavelli could not have drawn the same conclusion
about the Church and its politics with reference to, say, the time of
Hildebrand or even Boniface. But let us proceed.
What I mean to say is that the violent separation of politics
from morality, from ideology, from religion, does not lead to the
creation of a political science but rather to a political technique.
For while it is more than doubtful that science can release itself from
ethical values or in any case ignore them, technical know-how–
being concerned only with the carrying out of acts and not with
what happens before or after-is by its nature amoral and indifferent.
Technique is only one moment in the scientific process, and not even
the most important one.
Now if one remembers how in examining the
M andragola
and
the minor works we defined Machiavelli as not immoral but morally
exhausted, one can explain how he was able to make this separation
and give so much importance to the technique of politics. Technique
-while certainly valid when one speaks of the construction of a
