College Honors Program

Machiavelli on Necessity: Expansion, Founding, and Renewal

Date of Creation

5-31-2023

Document Type

Campus Access Only

First Advisor

Faisal Baluch

Abstract

In our age, highly influenced by Montesquieu’s doux commerce, conquest, and its attendant vocabulary of “honor” and “glory,” appears neither profitable nor just. Yet, Machiavelli challenges our liberal point of view on the ethics of conquest, employing the language of necessity to defend his desire for a revival of heroic expansion. Indeed, I argue that Machiavelli advocates the necessity to expand in the name of a grandeur that conquers fortune, but he nonetheless thinks that Rome’s expansion has led to the loss of virtue among his Christian contemporaries. Moreover, Machiavelli declares that his four great founders, Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus, merely needed to receive an opportunity from fortune to found their wholly new principalities, although I find that upon close examination this opportunity is a fiction invented by writers to amplify the greatness of these legendary figures, enabling them to serve as individuals worthy of being imitated by future princes. Machiavelli’s notion of renewal is also connected to necessity since political communities must be brought back to the goodness of their origins through virtuous individuals, which can be done through the humanity of a Scipio or the cruelty of a Hannibal.

Comments

Reader: Jeffrey Bernstein

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