Excerpts from“Administrative” Rhetoric in Machiavelli

[read the complete text of Machiavelli's The Prince]

[emphasis added]

[158] Machiavelli’s The Prince can be treated as a rhetoric insofar as it deals with the producing of effects upon an audience. Sometimes the prince’s subjects are his audience; sometimes the rulers or inhabitants of foreign states are the audience, sometimes particular factions within the State. If you have a political public in mind, Machiavelli says in effect, here is the sort of thing you must do to move them for your purposes. And he considers such principles of persuasion as these: either treat well or crush; defend weak neighbors and weaken the strong; where you foresee trouble, provoke war; don’t make others powerful; be like the prince who appointed a harsh governor to establish order (after this governor had become an object of public hatred in carrying out the prince’s wishes, the prince got popular acclaim by putting him to death for his cruelties); do necessary evils at one stroke, pay out benefits little by little; sometimes assure the citizens that the evil days will soon be over, at other times goad them to fear the cruelties of the enemy; be sparing of your own and your subjects’ wealth, but be liberal with the wealth of others; be a combination of strength and stealth (lion and fox); appear merciful, dependable, humane, devout, upright, but be the opposite in actuality, whenever the circumstances require it; yet always do lip-service to the virtues, since most people judge by appearances; provoke resistance, to make an impression by crushing it; use religion as a pretext for conquest, since it permits of “pious cruelty”; leave “affairs of reproach” to the management of others, but keep those “of grace” in your own hands; be the patron of all talent, proclaim festivals, give spectacles, show deference to local organizations; but always retain the distance of your rank (he could have called this the “mystery” of rule); in order that you may get the advantage of good advice without losing people’s respect, give experts permission to speak frankly, but only when asked to speak; have a few intimates who are encouraged to be completely frank, and who are well plied with rewards. . . . .

[160] True, though both books are concerned with the rhetoric of advantage, [161] principles of amative persuasion rely rather on fraud than force. But the point to note for our purposes is that in both cases the rhetoric includes a strongly “administrative” ingredient. The persuasion cannot be confined to the strictly verbal; it is a mixture of symbolism and definite empirical operations. . . .

We might put it thus: the nonverbal, or nonsymbolic conditions with which both lover and ruler must operate can themselves be viewed as a kind of symbolism having persuasive effects. For instance, military force can persuade by its sheer “meaning” as well as by its use in actual combat. In this sense, nonverbal acts and material instruments themselves have a symbolic ingredient. The point is particularly necessary when we turn to the rhetoric of bureaucracy, as when a political party bids for favor by passing measures popular with large blocs of voters. In such a case, administrative acts themselves are not merely “scientific” or “operational,” but are designed also with an eye for their appeal. Popular jokes that refer to policemen’s clubs and sex organs as “persuaders” operate on the same principle. For nonverbal conditions or objects can be considered as signs by reason of persuasive ingredients inherent in the “meaning” they have for the audience to which they are “addressed.”

[162] The use of symbols to induce action in beings that normally communicate by symbols is essentially realistic in the most practical and pragmatic sense of the term. It is neither “magical” nor “scientific” (neither ritualistic nor informational) for one person to ask help of another. . . .

[164] But by treating the book as a manual of “administrative rhetoric,” we can place the stress where it belongs: on the problem of the orator’s ability to choose the act best suited to the situation, rather than choosing the act best suited to the expression of his own nature. . . .

[166] In this last chapter, the universal, sacrificial motives are adapted to a competitive end. The Christian vision of mankind’s oneness in the suffering Christ becomes the vision of Italians’ oneness in the suffering Italy. Since Italy actually is invaded, the analogy is not forced as it is in the vocabulary of imperialist unction. (Contrast it, for instance, with the building of empire under slogans like “the acceptance of grave world responsibility,” or “the solemn fulfillment of international commitments,” when the support of reactionary regimes was meant.) But whether the nationalist exaltation be for conquest or for uprising against conquerors, in either case there is the possibility of identification between ruler and ruled. Hence the new prince, in bringing about the new order, “would do honor to himself and good to the people of his country.” And by such identification of ruler and ruled, Machiavelli offers the ruler precisely the rhetorical opportunity to present privately acquisitive motives publicly in sacrificial terms.

Machiavelli is concerned with political cooperation under conditions, which make such cooperation in part a union of conspirators. Where conspiracy is the fact, universality must often be the fiction. The ambiguity in Machiavelli is thus the ambiguity of nationalism itself, which to some extent does fit with the ends of universal cooperation, and to some extent is conspiratorial. The proportions vary, with the Hitlerite State probably containing as high a percentage of the conspiratorial as will be attained in our time, though the conspiratorial motive is now unusually strong in all international dealings. Sovereignty itself is conspiracy. And the pattern is carried into every political or social body, however small. Each office, each fraternal order, each college faculty has its tiny conspiratorial clique. Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since the struggles for advantage nearly always have a rhetorical strain, we believe that the systematic contemplation of them forces itself upon the student of rhetoric. Indeed, of all the motives in Machiavelli, is not the most usable for us his attempt to transcend the disorders of his times, not by either total acquiescence or total avoidance, but by seeking to scrutinize them as accurately and calmly as he could?