ABSTRACT
Machiavelli (I469-I527) has been said 1 to have "thrown ethics out of politics as Spinoza threw eth£cs out of ethics." This statement owes its plausibility to the emphasis which, from the needs of his own country, Machiavelli was forced to lay on the need of strength and cohesion in a State and worldly wisdom in the rulers. But, in his Dz'scourses on the Fz'rst Ten Books of Livy, and even in the Prz'nce, there is proof that he recognized the complexity of the body politic and the presence of factors that were only indirectly of political importance. He would use the study of history as a means of discovering political truth. Human nature is the same, he says, in his day as it was in Livy's (Discourses, III. XLIII.) ; we can see, for example, that then, as now, the people were less fickle than the princes, and that both needed the restraint of laws and of customs. 2 He recognises the importance of the economical element in the national life. Money, he says, is not, as Quintus Curtius affirmed, the sinews of war, for it is useless without soldiers; 3 but well-governed and rich provinces are the sinews of a State; and political security is the sinews of agriculture and commerce on which the riches depend, for every man naturally likes to make what he can himself enjoy in his own person after it is made-private benefit thus securing public benefit. The wealth procured by commerce and industry is perhaps most durable of all.' Machiavelli recognises the power of self-interest as a motive to action, and the insatiableness of human desires. From his favourite notion that to be successful a man must be either perfectly good or perfectly bad,5 we can hardly venture to draw economical conclusions where he certainly drew none. He sees in the perpetual failure of the Agrarian laws of Rome a sign that men's desires always outrun their powers of satisfying them.6 When they cease to fight from necessity they fight for ambition. There are in such passages the beginnings of economic analysis, but it does not go very far. He
praises the plain living of Cincinnatus ; 1 a people may be rich if it reckons by its necessaries, not by the extent of its possessions, also if its money does not go forth of the country to buy foreign goods. Extravagance in a prince is a mischief if it leads to taxation, and public works are less important than a contented people. But idleness is the root of all evil. Christianity has praised humility at the expense of the active virtues.2 Machiavelli, far from having the modern notion of progress, thinks 3 that there is a fixed quantity of happiness and unhappiness in the world at all times, but distributed differently at different times, so that a man may complain if he likes that he was born in Turkey and not in Italy, but not that he was born in one century and not in another. Such a notion reminds us of the belief of Adam Smith, that, on the whole, happiness was equally distributed among all classes of men. 4 But the latter, though it might weaken the zeal of reformers, could hardly allow one group of men to grieve at the prosperity of another group, whereas Machiavelli's dictum would mean that, in proportion to the wideness of the areas, the gain of one group would be the loss of another. Such a conclusion was indeed in keeping with the prejudices of Machiavelli's times. That in every bargain there is one party which gains and another which loses, or, as Bacon says in his Essay on Seditions, "whatsoever is somewhere gotten is somewhere lost," is the idea that probably first occurs to every man when he first gives any thought at all to such matters. It was the impression of the earliest economical thinkers ; or, at least, it was a popular prejudice, which they were not entirely able to throw off. This problem contains the whole question of equitable exchange in miniature. Modern economists, while they reject the view that one party must necessarily be a loser, do not adopt simpliciter the opposite dictum that in a willing bargain both must
equally gain. Such discussions, however, are not to be found at all in our author, and his political philosophy, on the whole, yields scanty gleaning for the economist.
