Why was machiavelli tortured

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Live TV. Rather than being amoral or immoral, as commonly assumed, Machiavelli was an ethical consequentialist, who thought that the end justifies the means. He argued that, in the normally brutal world of real politics, rulers are often forced to choose between two evils, rather than between two goods or between a good and an evil.

In such tragic circumstances, choosing the lesser evil over the greater evil, however cruel and repugnant in itself, is the ethically right thing to do. The truth of this was made apparent to Machiavelli when he visited the town of Pistoia in Tuscany in the opening years of the sixteenth century, which visit he recounts in The Prince. The town was torn between two rival families, the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi, and the conflict risked escalating into a bloody civil war, so the Florentines sent Machiavelli in to broker a settlement.

When he reported back to Florence that things had gone too far and that they should step in forcefully, his advice was ignored for fear that it would lead to a reputation for brutality. The classical ideal of virtue Machiavelli rejected was expressed by Cicero BCE , whose De officiis On Duties was read and copied more frequently during the Renaissance than any other single work of classical Latin prose.

Cicero argued that rulers are successful only when they are morally good — by which he meant adhering to the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, restraint and courage, as well as being honest. For Cicero, the belief that self-interest or expediency conflicts with ethical goodness is not only mistaken but deeply corrosive of public life and morals. In Renaissance Europe this idealistic view of politics was reinforced by the Christian belief in divine retribution in the afterlife for the injustices committed in this life, and the cardinal virtues were supplemented by the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

Machiavelli believed that the ethical outlooks of both Cicero and Christianity were rigid and unrealistic, and actually cause more harm than they prevent. In the imperfect world of politics, populated as it is by wolves, a sheepish adherence to that kind of morality would be disastrous. A ruler must be flexible about the means he employs if he is going to be effective, just as the virtue of a general on the battlefield is a matter of how well he adapts to ever-changing circumstances. So he must be mentally prepared to act as circumstances and changes in fortune require.

As I have said, he should do what is right if he can; but he must be prepared to do what is wrong if necessary. Still, he understood that many of his ideas, being so radically new, would meet resistance. To the culture at large, the danger was real.

Although his ideas have drawn sporadic support throughout history—among seventeenth-century English anti-monarchists, among nineteenth-century German nationalists—it was not until the present age that scholars began to separate the man from his cursed reputation. Leo Strauss, a few years later, claimed that Machiavelli intended his most outrageous statements merely to startle and amuse. There is today an entire school of political philosophers who see Machiavelli as an intellectual freedom fighter, a transmitter of models of liberty from the ancient to the modern world.

Machiavelli may not have been, in fact, a Machiavellian. But in American business and social circles he has come to stand for the principle that winning—no matter how—is all.

And for this alone, for the first time in history, he is a cultural hero. But even while he lamented his fate, and continued to angle for Medici favor, he went on writing, almost feverishly, and in a variety of forms. He devoted himself to poetry, working on classical themes in Dantesque terza rima, and he discovered a gift for the theatre. Most striking, in the midst of these dark years, he turned to comedy.

To succeed in life a man must be adaptable. He, however—in circumstances very different from the Medici conspiracy a decade earlier—was neither arrested nor implicated. Scholars have agreed with the Florentine authorities that Machiavelli knew nothing of the plot; he was too historically suspect a figure for his friends to risk including.

Of course, in there was not a scrap of evidence against him. But then it may have been the incriminating scrap of that made him think so hard about the rules by which conspirators must proceed: confide in absolutely no one except when absolutely necessary, try to leave no one alive who might be able to take revenge, and, above all, never put anything in writing.

He did his job enthusiastically—even ecstatically—and well. Instead, the angry, starving, part-Spanish, part-Lutheran, barely controllable army marched directly on to Rome, where soldiers poured through the walls and viciously sacked the city—robbing, raping, murdering, and destroying for days on end. Machiavelli himself helped Clement to escape. But he had done even more for his beloved Florence than he knew, and less for himself.

In the ensuing chaos, the Medici regime in Florence was overthrown; the republic was restored; the Great Council was reinstated. This was everything that Machiavelli had hoped for even when he appeared to be on the other side. He was seen not as brilliantly adaptable, however, but simply as on the other side. As a Medici supporter, he found himself once again unemployed, subject to the same sort of political suspicions as when the Medici had first returned.

But, at fifty-eight, he no longer had the resources to start over. Odd, that an expert at winning should have lost so much, and then lost it all again.

Machiavelli was his times: he gave permanent form and force to its political habits and unspoken principles. Although it is often said that modern politics begins with Machiavelli, most politicians still run and hide at the mention of his name. We insist that our leaders convince us that they are exemplary and increasingly God-fearing human beings, who are nevertheless able to protect us from enemies not so constrained.