In a note added to the edition of 1782 of The Social Contract Rousseau interpreted Machiavelli’s The Prince in an unusual way:

Machiavelli was a gentleman and a good citizen; but being attached to the house of Medici, he was forced during the oppression of his country to disguise his love of liberty. The very choice of an execrable hero reveals his secret intentions, and the antithesis between his principles in his book The Prince and those of his Discourses on Livy and The History of Florence proves that this profound political thinker has so far had only superficial and corrupted readers. The Pope’s court strictly prohibited his book, which I can well believe, since that was the Court he depicts most plainly.[1]

This is an inviting interpretation! Se non è vero, è ben’ trovato. I propose the following task: A manual should be written “for” the planner who works within the framework of “market socialism.” The entries could read as follows:

1. Write long reports, from two- to three-thousand pages, so that you can be sure nobody can read them in their entirety. If the client (an administrator) reacts negatively to this, which he is unlikely to do since he does not need the study or plan anyway, prepare for him a short excerpt with an emphasis on the least comprehensible part of the original text. Stress that all the important things can be found in the original text, which is an indivisible whole, etc.

2. Stress that everything you do is scientifically based, and be sure that the less understandable the study or plan is, the more scientific it will appear. (An abundant use of illegible mathematical formulae is recommendable in this respect. To the laymen mathematics always appears scientific.) The client wants to legitimize his objectives through your work and he knows that the adjective “scientific” works wonders on his constituency.

3. The study or plan you are to make should be very expensive. The more expensive it is, the more secure you are from criticism, since the administrator who ordered it puts himself in jeopardy if a very expensive study or plan turns out to be worthless. He or she is your best ally in that case. Furthermore, expensive things generally appear to be of higher quality.

4. If the study or plan you produced is of poor quality, your competitors will not attack you seriously since they live off the same bread. They will concentrate upon technicalities, avoiding all the substantive shortcomings. For the same reason, you must not attack their work substantively. This may start an utterly unnecessary “war” between you and them, whereby both risk overexposing the secrets of your trade.

5. If you are asked to make a study or plan, insist on the longest possible time horizon, since that way you will be able to avoid all the difficulties associated with dealing with present problems. After all, the administrator who hires you has essentially the same objective. He or she will tend to avoid or postpone action by ordering a study or plan.

6. In the acknowledgements implicate as many “authorities” as possible. That helps divert criticism, or, at least, distribute the blame for failure. All of the potential critics should be involved in your work in some way.

7. Furnish the introduction and the conclusion of your reports with abundant quotations from Marxist classics. The words “self-government” and “working people” should also be used as often as possible. Do not attempt to link these expressions logically with the content of the text, since that is by no means necessary. All that is required is a pledge of allegiance.

8. The larger a meeting of people who are supposed to review your work, the better for you. A large group is much easier to manipulate than a small one (especially if it is a priori neutral toward you). In addition, the larger the group that accepted your work, the more secure the legitimization they provide.

9. Do everything possible to protract the meeting to the physiological limits of the participants, while keeping all of your key arguments for the moment when their will is weakened by long and fruitless discussion. Meanwhile you should do everything possible to exhaust the participants by directing them toward superfluous complications. It should be added that for all these reasons, you should attempt to schedule meetings for the end of the working day.

10. For such meetings you should prepare all the required materials as late as possible, and take these to the meeting itself rather than distributing them beforehand. That way you make adequate preparation of the participants impossible.

Etc., etc. I only wonder who would prohibit such a manual?

Addendum I (May 15, 1977)

This extension does not concern my proposal, but only the interpretation provided by Rousseau. Gramsci[2] goes much farther. He agrees that Machiavelli had something else in mind, but he shows that this was not simply to expose the technique of politics used by “execrable” rulers. Machiavelli provided a political manifesto for the people of Italy, and simultaneously explicated the method that must be followed if Italy is to be unified on the basis of “collective will.” As Gramsci writes, “Machiavelli himself notes that the things he is writing are applied, and have always been applied by the greatest men in history; it does not seem, therefore, that he wants to advise those who already know […].”[3] Gramsci continues:

We can therefore suppose that Machiavelli had in view “those who do not know,” that he intended to give political education to “those who do not know,” not a negative education of hatred for tyrants […], but a positive education of those who must recognize certain necessary means, even if those of tyrants, because they want certain ends. […] Who then “does not know”? The revolutionary class of the time, the Italian “people” and “nation” […]. It can be considered that Machiavelli wanted to persuade these forces of the necessity for a “leader,” who would know what he wanted and how to obtain it and to accept him with enthusiasm even if his actions might be or appear to be contrary to the widely held ideology of the time, religion.[4]

And Gramsci concludes: “This position of Machiavelli is repeated for Marxism.”[5] Consequently—The Modern Prince.

Does not this interpretation invalidate my own proposal, however? Does it not expose it as an expression of crude cynicism, and nothing else? Only to some extent. In connection with some other notes of mine, in which an argument is made for the revolutionary purpose of planning under socialism, this note does appear in a different light. Still, it must be admitted that this note is quite ambiguous in this respect. Gramsci’s essay nevertheless cannot be used as the criterion for the critique of this ambiguity, since his concept of rationality tends to be too unambiguous from the point of view of our experience with totalitarian and authoritarian rule. This ambiguity, exposed quite thoroughly by Horkheimer and Adorno,[6] as well as Marcuse,[7] does not even appear in Gramsci’s interpretation. The best example of this is his pragmatic acceptance of the position that “there do in fact exist rulers and ruled”[8] as an axiom, “given things as they are.”[9] The future is left to the future.

Addendum II (July 10, 1980)

The Machiavellian character of communist politics has been analyzed (quite ineptly in most cases) by many. However, Gramsci’s inversion is indeed unique. The Modern Prince rarely becomes as explicit as in the passages already quoted that Machiavellianism “from above” must be followed pari passu by Machiavellianism “from below.” Gramsci himself did not dare go beyond a couple of explicit demands on this score. Hence the device of historical analogy.

The fact that actual communist policy never spelled out this principle of correspondence only shows Gramsci’s enormous courage, however. The execrable Modern Prince, the party, was always glorified in humanistic terms suggesting nothing about the real instruments of power and the need to accept them universally if the communist project is ever to be realized. This was done only implicitly, though forcefully, through the fetishism of labor and the derived myth of economic growth, together with its sacrifices. Thus, Gramsci stands alone in an attempt to both warn and cajole the masses. For this reason at least, he deserves a special place in the history of political thought.

Footnotes

1. Rousseau, J.-J., The Social Contract, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968 (first published in 1762), p. 118.

2. Gramsci, A., The Modern Prince and Other Writings, New York: International Publishers, 1957.

3. Op. cit., p. 141.

4. Op. cit., p. 142.

5. Loc. cit. He writes further (Loc. cit.):

Machiavellianism has helped to improve the traditional political technique of the conservative ruling groups, just as has Marxism; but this must not conceal its essentially revolutionary character, which is felt even today and which explains the whole of anti-Machiavellianism from that of the Jesuits to that of the pietistic Pasquale Villari.

6. Horkheimer, M., and T.W. Adorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment, New York: Seabury Press, 1972 (first published in 1944).

7. See, e.g., Marcuse, H., Negations, Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.

8. Gramsci, Op. cit., p. 143.

9. Loc. cit.