Niccolo's Smile, What Would Machiavelli Do? and Machiavelli on Modern Leadership

Hello, Jim,

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I'm sure it was inadvertent, but yesterday you presented me with what one of our authors identifies as a quintessential Machiavellian dilemma as we tried to hash out via e-mail who would file this first entry in our dialogue. You asked--very sweetly, as it happens--if I would do it because you had a huge unexpected deadline that required your attention until after midnight. If you had to go first, you suggested, you would be up half the night, exhausted, hallucinating, ingesting amphetamines and propping your eyes open with toothpicks just to be a good sport.

In What Would Machiavelli Do?, an aggressively dumbed-down stocking-stuffer that exhorts executives to embrace the principles of ruthlessness, opportunism, and selfishness, Stanley Bing presents a similar scenario, plucked from the world of business. Mary, the deputy, is planning to go on a long-scheduled vacation this weekend; Bob, the boss, doesn't want to miss his golf game but feels a twinge of conscience about making Mary stay behind to finish the department's project. What would Machiavelli do? No question, Bing says: He would make Mary reschedule the vacation, load her up with work, and enjoy his weekend at the club.

So by trying to be nice, I failed Bing's test. (Of course, it wasn't a tough call: Time is on my side, here in England, and I wasn't the one facing the gruesome 24-hour death march through a magazine piece. And I'm not your boss and am never likely to be anyone's boss). But it turns out that Bing's test was a false one. He seems to have fallen into the trap that most people do when they think about Machiavelli or use the term "Machiavellian." To him, a Machiavellian executive is someone who would do whatever was necessary to consolidate his power and whatever was necessary to keep it. He would also use his power as a justification for a whole host of ignorant, selfish, petulant, willful, arbitrary, self-aggrandizing, paranoid, cold-hearted behaviors, cheerfully screwing over friends, associates, underlings, and family members for his own benefit or just for the hell of it.

But that's not what Machiavelli was about, according to the two other books in our trio: Maurizio Viroli's Niccolo's Smile, an irritatingly titled but interesting and gentle biography, and Michael A. Ledeen's Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As Timely and Important Today As Five Centuries Ago, a sometimes incisive look at Machiavelli's philosophy that, to my mind, veers off far too often into a loopy right-wing screed on such topics as the foolishness of having women in the military, the moral superiority of Ronald Reagan, and the Falklands War as a triumphant juncture in British foreign policy.

In fact, these books argue that Machiavelli was a much more subtle and thoughtful thinker than is generally known, at least to unknowledgeable people such as myself. First of all, his philosophy doesn't really apply to ordinary people in ordinary situations: It is addressed specifically to heads of state. And though it does hold that the ends can justify the means, it does so only in the narrowest of situations, as a way for a good and virtuous ruler to consolidate his power and then run his territory wisely. Though he believes that rulers shouldn't put up with opposition--and shouldn't shy from brutally slaughtering the occasional political opponent--he doesn't like tyrants, despots, or rulers who are mean for the sake of being mean. Nor does he think people should rule just for personal gain. They should be honest and scrupulous. He himself was so scrupulous that in his years of toiling indefatigably as an ambassador-at-large in the service of Florence, where he lived in the late 15th century, he was often so broke that he had no money to get home. What I'd like to know is, how much do you think that Machiavelli's principles can apply to 21^st-century situations? Also, do you think Machiavelli is smiling in the picture on the cover of Niccolo's Smile or just exhibiting a bemused expression? And did you finish your magazine article?

All best from the other side of the world,
Sarah

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Who was Machiavelli, and what advice would he give Bush and Gore? This week, our critics examine Maurizio Viroli's , a biography of Machiavelli, as well as Stanley Bing's What Would Machiavelli Do? and Michael Ledeen's Machiavelli on Modern Leadership.

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