Moral Right and Political Motivation
Thoukydides and Machiavelli on the Public Good
The thesis which we want to briefly sketch out here is that there exists, in political realism, a tension between what we are provisionally calling “Machiavellianism” and “Thucydideanism” with respect to the status of the public good as a motivator of political action. It will suffice to lay out what these two camps say to elucidate what we mean.
Realism is often accused of and accursed for its supposed amoralism. Much can be said of this and whether it is even a fair characterisation of the theory to begin with, but for the person of Thoukydides it must be accepted as essentially accurate. Nowhere in Thoukydides’ account of the actual historical occurrences which he recorded, nor in the theory of politics which can be abstracted from them, do moral concerns ever arise. The Athenians are driven towards empire by fear¹, and the Spartans into war with them because of the underlying rationale of geopolitics: the balance of power. The “right” of both states to wage war, exercise dominion², and expand their influence is explicitly formulated thusly: power is power, and needs no justification; the question itself is wrongheaded. And so we have probably the most famous (and infamous) words Thoukydides ever wrote:
[W]e [Athenians] shall not trouble you [Melians] with specious pretences about how we have a right to our empire because we defeated the Persians, or are now attacking you because you have wronged us, and make a long speech which would not be believed; in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Spartans, even though you are their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible [when negotiating with us], holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while [between non-equals] the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.³
The reference to right “between equals” should not have too much read into it: Thoukydides is not saying that there really does exist such a thing as rights (principles which trump power) in politics, only that, between equals, that is, between actors whose power is comparable and so not able to control the other, negotiations have to proceed in a more or less respectful way as neither side can compel the other to acquiesce. Between non-equals, this unavoidable requirement of peer competition is utterly superfluous and actively counterproductive (does not best serve interest defined as power); the stronger power (the Athenians) can simply demand what they want of the weaker power (the Melians) because there is no way they can stop them. So we find that, for Thoukydides, the question of what is right simply does not occur to him; only the questions of how, or whether. The student of history would do well to internalise from this the lesson that the Christian moralism which insists that politics should be pursued so as to achieve what is right, good, and proper, is not the default viewpoint of mankind and is in fact merely a historically contingent — and frankly neurotic — prejudice. Politics is found by the antique theorist to be above, or beyond, moral consideration.
In Machiavelli, who like any good Renaissance intellectual was a skilled Romanist and therefore drew extensively from Roman sources, we find a starkly different position. Machiavelli proved beyond any reasonable doubt that being a good politician is not reducible to being a good person, indeed that the two are near enough contradictory. In so doing, he freed nascent⁴ political theory from the shackles of Christianity. But this should not be mistaken for amoralism: Machiavelli took moral concerns very seriously, and gave them a pivotal place in his theory. Why should a politician be a bad person? What can justify this? His answer was that it is the public good. All the cruelty, all the violence, all the desperate power struggles are for one sole, final purpose: the flourishing of the commonwealth. Republic is identified as the goal and purpose of political activity; the prince, as the property of the people: his life, their possession; their wealth, his only in trust.⁵ We present, therefore, this Machiavellianism as the antithesis to the Thucydidean thesis.
Really Machiavelli is only reviving a notion of republicanism which would have been very familiar to a Roman citizen. We find the sentiment expressed in maxim-form in Cicero (to whom Machiavelli is broadly and deeply indebted): Salus populi suprema lex⁶ — the welfare of the people is the highest law. It would be wrong to ascribe such a simplistic and naïvely moral viewpoint to Machiavelli, but nevertheless it is a major influence on him and the basis of his (more articulate and developed) belief, which we might schematise as follows: the welfare of the people is the highest law, but this law stands beyond what is right or moral. This is how we find such a sentiment in Machiavelli as:
[W]hen the entire safety of our country is at stake, no consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or shameful, must intervene. On the contrary, every other consideration being set aside, that course alone must be taken which preserves the existence of the country and maintains its liberty.⁷
Such a prescription is unthinkable to an out-and-out moralist, but to a Machiavellian it can only be right: in the service of the republic, all crimes can be forgiven. It is worth reintroducing Thucydideanism here to appropriately juxtapose the two theses: to a Thucydidean, justification is an apolitical concept, strictly speaking; power simply is. To ask why a politician can be (is allowed to be) a bad person is a bizarre, misplaced question to them; politics is subordinate to nothing, and is most certainly not teleological: the pursuit of power has no goal. Machiavelli’s humanism is therefore clear to see: such an answer was, ultimately, unacceptable to him; he could not help but to care for human flourishing. The role which political activity has in society — what role it has for humanity — is the preservation of the republic, the republic being a state operated for (but not necessarily by) the citizenry. This is true both for the consul and the prince, the senator and the courtier. The particularities of history and the differing forms which governments take should not obfuscate the underlying similarity that some states are commonwealths and some are not. The Machiavellian can explain, and can even make recommendations for, the actions of those princes for whom the state is their personal possession, but they cannot endorse or justify it. Nor, as it is often presumed the realist is committed to being, are they stripped of any ability to prefer one form of state over another, or to have particular hopes and dreams which they seek to realise through politics, liberty, equality, and fraternity being paradigmatic examples.
The Thucydidean cannot be committed to the French dream. She cannot even entertain the thought. States may well achieve the dream, but only insofar as doing so advances their power; it does not in the slightest amount to a reason for the state to exist or an explanation of its action.
To close, let us briefly carry the discussion further, beyond the limits of realism. If Machiavellianism represents a humanist synthesis of republicanism and realism, what might an antihumanist synthesis look like? It would look something like this: the welfare of the people is not a law — this is an anachronistic and ultimately reactionary category — but an interest. Political interest is defined in terms of power; popular interest is defined more heterogeneously, but let us, for convenience’s sake, say they all more or less consist of happiness. A precondition of happiness is security; a precondition of security, in turn, is power. And so we find that the welfare of the people, as an interest and not a law, will be pursued, and that this pursuit is beyond any concerns for justice and morality. ‘An insurrection of the popular masses needs no justification’.⁸
But why should the interests of the people be pursued? Why should interests be pursued at all? The only feasible answer is that they just are pursued; that is what it means for something to be an interest. And so we find ourselves returned, full circle, to precisely where we started: politics only has questions of that, and how; none of ought. This is why we say that the pinnacle of political philosophy and political realism is that of the ancient Greeks, and why we insist on the study of history: the answer to the most quintessentially modern question — the question of revolutionary class struggle, of the seizure of power, of the world to win — is to be found, more or less complete, in antiquity.
Endnotes
¹ Thoukydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War 1.3
² This English word is excellent, but perhaps overly general and vague. Any theoretical system can specify more precise definitions and meanings than the common usage, and so it can easily and profitably be used in discussions of geopolitical power and influence. It is worth noting, however, that there are good technical terms for this concept in both Latin and Greek, namely imperium and hegemonia respectively. It is very telling that these two ancient cultures had such things in their lexicon; a kind of realism was almost baked into their psyche, the arrogance of Rome notwithstanding.
³ Thoukydides (tr. our own, adapted that of Richard Crawley), The History of the Peloponnesian War 5.17
⁴ Really it was already old and decrepit. Machiavelli didn’t so much invent realist political theory as wake it from a coma, a coma imposed by the shock and horror of the death of classical antiquity and pagan wisdom.
⁵ Arrianos, The Anabasis of Alexander 7.10–11
⁶ The Laws 3
⁷ Machiavelli (tr. Ninian Hill Thomson), Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius 3.41
⁸ Trotsky (tr. Max Eastman), The History of the Russian Revolution 3.47
