One of Machiavelli's more memorable quotes comes from Book One of his Discourses, where he states: "The best thing for a republic or a monarchy is not to have someone in charge who governs well for as long as he lives; it is better to have someone who organizes the state so that when he dies it will continue without him" (Pg. 66). While governments have certainly evolved since the time Machiavelli wrote the Discourses, I think that quote can be accurately applied to a couple a current governments we see today.
The beginning of the United States republic is, in my opinion, a perfect embodiment of the first part of Machiavelli's quote. Our first president, George Washington, stepped down from the office of the presidency after only two terms, when he could have served as president for as long as he lived. He has a variety of reasons for stepping down, including age and a general dissatisfaction with government itself. But one of the main reasons he stepped down was because he understood everything he did was setting a precedent that would be followed by his successors for years to come. He understood that if this new republic were to succeed, it would need to adjust to different executive leaders and go through peaceful transitions of power. Washington's precedent was followed by his successors for 130+ years, and the two term precedent set forth by Washington helped ensure the stability of the new republic.
While the United States is a perfect embodiment of Machiavelli's belief, there are more then a few governments that have sprung up and not followed this same belief. Many new states in Africa and Asia started with political leaders that were only concerned with empowering themselves as much as possible, with little regard to the overall well being of their state. In the USSR, Joe Stalin, who took over shortly after the birth of the Soviet Union, died with without leaving a steady foundation for growth within the country, and the USSR subsequently collapsed less then 40 years after his death. I think the world his full examples of new governments that have failed to take Machiavelli's advice, and many of those new governments have struggled to gain any sort of stability.
Can you think of any other applications of the quote by Machiavelli from above, in government or in other realms of everyday life?
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ReplyDeleteYour example of the US is dead on. I think George Washington knew that if he were to stay on as president any longer he would set a precedent that likely would have damaged to the foundation of the US executive branch. I personally agree with Machiavelli's quote, as I believe that having fresh minds in the executive branch is of great importance. If you look at all the past few two term presidents you will see that their approval ratings always go down towards the end of their presidency.
ReplyDelete#GoHawks
Before I interrogate the quote presented, it's important to put it into context, I feel: in the larger text, Machiavelli is talking about religion in Chapter Eleven, and purports that in the absence of a religion with good guiding principles, the state has to run solely on their fear of a leader. That doesn't mean that the quote is any less germane to the idea of political terms as versus a leader staying in power for long spans of time, of course, it's an excellent statement to apply to them. I merely think it's interesting that the idea being advanced in the text is that religion is a powerful backing force when a leader wants to introduce new ideas to the populace: in the absence of familiarity, couching novelty in the trappings of religion is a good way to make it more palatable. (It certainly ties to the fact that our presidents are Christian almost without fail, I would say.)
ReplyDeleteOur understanding of the reasoning behind election terms, though, to bring this back to your original posting, leaders do get a bit stale after a while. Generally the thinking goes that the longer in power, the more tempted to use that power to ensure that the power keeps coming. Machiavelli's text seems to say, to my reading, that this is of no consequence, rather, the inability of a leader to rule from the afterlife would be -- that the entire organizational structure of a government cannot be built on the back of a single person, or it is tied inextricably to their lifeline. As you said, Stalin didn't really leave much to pick up again afterward. So, in the end, the revolving door of term-based leadership is still justified, merely in a different way from our usual thinking. Would the discrepancy be due to the evolution of politics since Machiavelli's time? Has combating single-person-in-power-forever style corruption become more important than the blunter, less complicated fact that leaders bite it early? Does the religion aspect of all of this matter less to the subject at hand now, when we can perhaps say that religion is not so direly important as it was in Machiavelli's time?