On Macchiavelli and other sinners - Erin Maglaque in LRB:

“‘Surely it is a great wonder’, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote to his friend Francesco Vettori in 1514, ‘to contemplate how blind human beings are in matters that involve their own sins.’ But it isn’t really very strange. Few of us have the strength to face our flaws. Machiavelli knew that he was the real wonder: a connoisseur of depravity; an atheist who passionately hated the clergy, who thought the institution of the Catholic Church should be dismantled and replaced with the bloodstained altars of pagan Rome. He had lots of sex – from the abject to the sublime and everything in between – with beautiful women and young men throughout his marriage. He hung around with people he called ‘lice’: gamblers and reprobates in the taverns of the Tuscan countryside. He pranked his friends, cheated people out of money, played elaborately cruel practical jokes on holy men. Unlike the ordinary, unselfconscious sinners he despised, he made a study of human nature in its worse aspects, casting a practised eye over the hellscape of 16th-century Italy, with its warrior popes and courtesans and condottieri. He turned that realism into the foundation for the most original political theory of his time – possibly of all time.”

(…)

“In 1501 Machiavelli married Marietta Corsini. She and their children flit in and out of his personal correspondence: in 1503, after the birth of their son, Marietta reported that ‘the baby is well, he looks like you: he is white as snow, but his head looks like black velvet, and he is hairy like you. Since he looks like you, he seems beautiful to me.’ But these glimpses of domesticity mingle with wilder stories of courtesans and adventures in male brothels. La Riccia, named for her curly hair, was a favourite of Machiavelli’s, and so were the boys of Donato del Corno’s shop. Many years later, his friend Vettori observed that ‘you never would have married if you had really known yourself; my father, if he had known my ways and character, would never have tied me down to a wife.’ But being married wasn’t really a practical impediment. Away on a diplomatic assignment in 1509, Machiavelli wrote a letter describing a strange sexual encounter. He had stepped into his laundrywoman’s barely lit house to inspect a shirt, but instead, he ‘fucked her one’ (it’s better in Italian: la fotte’ un colpo): Although I found her thighs flabby and her cunt damp and her breath a bit rancid, I was still so desperately horny that I went at it. And once I had done it, feeling like taking a look at the merchandise, I took a burning piece of wood from the fire that was there, and lit a lamp that was hanging above it; but no sooner was the lamp lit than it almost fell from my hands. Ye gods! I nearly dropped dead on the spot, that woman was so ugly.
Machiavelli itemised her ugliness: her nose ‘slit open and full of snot’; her mouth ‘twisted to one side’, pooling with drool because she had no teeth; her ‘long, pointed chin that twisted upwards a bit, from which hung a flap of skin that dangled.’ He was so ‘assaulted’ by the stench of her breath that he vomited all over her. In the retelling, he arranges his own abjection on the page, coolly observing the consequences of physical want.”

(…)

“Dismissed from government, he was soon implicated in an anti-Medici conspiracy. He was imprisoned and tortured with the strappado: his hands were tied behind his back with a rope and he was dropped six times from a height, probably dislocating his shoulders. Finally released, he retired broken and depressed to the family farm, an outcast from politics.
Though his visits to La Riccia and Donato’s shop were welcome distractions, Machiavelli was unable to turn his mind from politics. ‘I could not help but fill your head with castles in the air,’ he wrote to Vettori in 1513, ‘because since Fortune has seen to it that I do not know how to talk about either the silk or wool trade, profits or losses, I have to talk about politics.’ He spent the days chewing the fat with woodcutters on the farm and playing cricca in the tavern. But in the evening, he told Vettori, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them ... and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus.
Even now, at the distance of five centuries, Machiavelli’s words in The Prince still register physically: you brace for impact. Human nature is fundamentally rotten. Hope and virtue are for the weak, for life’s losers. Raw power must be dressed up in the trappings of piety, but never constrained by it. The ultimate aim of political life is glory and not, as philosophers had argued for centuries, the public good. Machiavelli dismantled traditional morality, but refused to offer a new ethic in its place. Instead he made simple, practical recommendations. Shed illusion. See people as they really are. Adapt nimbly to what you discover. He paid close attention to those princes and popes whose characters became his raw material. He fixated, for example, on Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, who had carved out a state of his own in northern Italy through considerable military intelligence and diplomatic cunning – and, of course, with the help of his father.”

(…)

“His ambitions crushed, Machiavelli retreated to the Rucellai gardens, where the humanists and philosophers, poets and playwrights of Florence gathered to converse and to stage their work. It was here in 1518 that Machiavelli dramatised the key themes of The Prince in his sexual comedy La Mandragola. The play follows the bold youth Callimaco, who dupes the beautiful – and married – Lucrezia into sleeping with him. Callimaco is a sensation in bed, and Lucrezia’s wafer-thin virtue crumbles. Callimaco impregnates her and so asserts his mastery over her aged husband, representative of an older generation made redundant by the audacity of the young. This was the triumph of manly virtù over virtue, the hyper-masculine over the weak; it was The Prince translated into the obscene language of Florence’s streets, a playbook showing how a ruler might found a new dynastic state through sheer moxie. La Mandragola played to sold-out audiences during carnival season and made Machiavelli famous. (It also allowed him to spend lots of time with his current obsession, the strawberry blonde Barbera Raffacani Salutati, who sang the madrigals between acts.)”

(…)

“‘Machiavelli, who had the misfortune to be on the wrong side of every major Florentine political upheaval, died on 21 June 1527, entertained by the possibility of meeting Seneca and Plato, both pagans, in hell. ‘The worst that can happen to you is that you’ll die and go to hell,’ he wrote in La Mandragola. ‘But how many others have died! And in hell how many worthy men there are!’”

(…)

“Today, Machiavelli’s ruthlessness and cynicism are mostly embraced by those at the contemptible end of the political spectrum: members of the Trump administration have adopted him as a patron saint; in the UK, we have Dominic Cummings, ‘the Machiavel in Downing Street’. But the Succession fans and trolls who revere Machiavellian shrewdness mistake his cynicism for insensitivity to the world, when in fact it reflected precisely the opposite. His cynicism developed from an almost unbearable clarity of insight (it is true that, more often than not, he was disgusted with what he saw). He obviously wasn’t a feminist – Fortuna, remember, was a woman to be mauled – but his ruthless self-inquiry is bracing to read at a time when the right has claimed a monopoly on political realism and popular feminism confuses the cheap pang of emotional recognition for thought.”

(…)

“He knew that the variety of his own writing – veering between the personal and the political, the sexual and the solemn – was astonishing, even disorienting. Rebuffing any future readers and commentators who might be foolish enough to try to pin him down, he assured Vettori: ‘if this behaviour seems contemptible, to me it seems laudable: because we are imitating nature, which is changeable; whoever imitates nature cannot be censured.’”

Read the article here.

I read the “The Prince” when I was eighteen, a friend had recommended it to me. It made a huge impression.

The question is, how you can embrace Machiavelli and his insights without becoming an unbearable right-winger with a superficial belief in power as the ultimate good.

Those who believe that paradise on earth is within reach if only radical changes will materialize are not only naïve – there is nothing wrong with naivete per se– but probably malicious as well. The desire to establish paradise on earth usually goes hand in hand with slowly growing bloodthirstiness.

Yes, the ultimate aim of political life is glory and not the public good, the same can be said about most activism.
But some activists may be less rotten than the contemporaries of Machiavelli – and do we believe that we are better than these contemporaries? – not all idealism can be reduced to nothing but attempts at glory.

In other words, how can we learn from Machiavelli without becoming ruthless defenders of a status quo? To study human nature is to study power. But not all moral positions can be dismissed as sheer power games, even though morality is also about power.

What’s missing in the current cultural climate is the realization that depravity is the basis of human nature, not just the basis of our enemies.
If you want to embrace mankind embrace depravity first.
All other positions appear to me nothing but fake humanism.