ABSTRACT
The problem of judgment grows out of the relationship of what is distinctively human to what is natural: our own bodies and animal instincts as well as the natural world around us, out of which we construct civilization, technology, morality, politics. The latter, in turn, imply standards for action and judgment, right and wrong ways to do things, good and evil conduct. The status of those standards is a mystery, a cluster of mysteries. The problem of action raises the question of what constitutes the “beginning” of a community or an individual, how causation and the animal turn into the capacity for action and the human. Now come these closely related questions: How does the causally determined natural turn into the moral and political, capable of choosing right from wrong, of judging and being judged? What is the origin of concepts such as justice, virtue, civility, honor, and the practices connected with them? How does any human individual make the transition? And what, accordingly, is the status of our norms of right conduct and judgment, the basis of their validity? Are they merely conventional? Or are they anchored in nature or in some transcendent authority guaranteeing their validity? Such philosophical questions become politically acute in times like Machiavelli’s,
when there is a great disparity between the inherited ideals and standards, on the one hand, and people’s actual activities, needs, and feelings, on the other. Traditional forms and ceremonies are experienced as empty, and they no longer sanctify. Traditional rules virtually guarantee failure, for there is “such a difference between how men live and how they ought to live that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his destruction rather than his preservation” (Machiavelli 1965: 57-58 [Prince, ch. 15]. Inherited theories no longer make sense of the world, and actual practice remains chaotic, inconsistent, untheorized. It may be time for new theory, for the (re)creation of value and meaning. But where are they to come from? The political theorist is not merely an observer but also a teacher, a bridge
builder offering a new vision of the familiar world and trying to make it accessible
to people through and despite their old ways of seeing. But how does one teach in such times of dislocation in judgment and action? Confronted by such conditions, a theorist may feel that the most urgent task is to destroy the remaining pretensions of existing ideals and unmask those who exploit them. Moved by a yearning for truthfulness, a rage at the prevailing hypocrisy, he may speak in the cynical mode, teaching that ideals are fraudulent devices, not merely conventional but foisted by the powerful on the credulous. He may, that is, equate truth telling with the systematic description of current, exploitive, and hypocritical practice. Or he may, instead, choose the other side of the gap between ideals and
practice, cleaving to the standards to which others only pay lip service-or to some different, perhaps historically earlier, set of ideals-and exhort his audience to live up to those standards. But if the corruption of the time has gone very far, neither of these modes of teaching is likely to be effective. The cynical mode may win popularity but can offer no cure, for it tells only a partial truth and can neither restore nor replace the old commitments. Yet exhortation is likely to fall on deaf ears, for everyone has learned to ignore the familiar cant of preachers and teachers, since taking it seriously so frequently means disaster “among so many who are not good.” Machiavelli is sometimes drawn to each of these modes: cynical in the image of
the fox, hortatory in relation to the Founder. Yet at his best he transcends and synthesizes both into what one may justly call a political and humanist realism: a truth-telling theory that perceives in the objective world not only the corrupt and exploitive practices currently pursued, but also their disastrous results, and therefore also the potential practical reality that ideals have. He seeks to theorize the verity effettuale della cosa, but that includes human achievement and potential along with human failure and corruption.1
