Machiavelli
I'm teaching Machiavelli this week.
That sentence doesn't mean anything out of context. Well, it means it's the fifth week of a fifteen week semester, and that we've left the ancient world for the classical. It means last week was the Greco-Arabic period and next week is Hobbes. It means that I've got my copy of the Portable Machiavelli next to me on the cafe table, it means I have papers on Plato and Aristotle to grade on Saturday, it means that I'm weighing how much to explain about Savonarola in my notes and what context to give to Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, in order to keep her down, to beat her and to struggle with her.
But that's not it, and that's my problem. My problem is that I love Machiavelli. I love reading him. I love thinking about his work. There is a purity and passion to his writing that catches me every time I turn to it. I am struggling not to use the words "Machiavelli is my fucking homebody" in my lecture notes, because that's probably inappropriate, but that's how I'm feeling. I love Machiavelli, and I want to share him with my students.
The problem is that what I feel for Machiavelli isn't intellectual--it's fannish. It's about the love of him, as much as his arguments. (I mean, yes, I'll argue that Machiavelli is the necessary progenitor of Foucault as long as you want me to, and also that he's the genesis of the realist tradition in international relations, and that there is a valid separation between normative and empirical work, but that's not precisely it.) I can't give my students my fannishness. For fuck's sake, I'm teaching on the internet; it's hard enough not to have Amal be my guiding consciousness in the classroom. (I posted Kanye macros. What is wrong with me?) I can't reach through the computer and say, love him the way I do. I sat before his tomb in Santa Novella and cried for his man, and I can't communicate that in any way that makes sense in a classroom.
So I'm giving you this, because you are the people I can give this to. This is the first scene of a short story I wrote in college, in a writing seminar. It's not perfectly autobiographical, not by any means, but, like any work of fiction, it carries a set of emotional truths that are mine, even if the words are someone else's.
***
Imagine it: my freshman year, trapped in my dorm, surrounded by thin girls who wanted to fix all that was wrong with the world, wanted to teach elementary school and pick up trash along highways. They thought they could keep the BMWs Daddy gave them and still make meaningful change in the world, they wore their Tiffany charm bracelets when they volunteered at the soup kitchens. They went to classes, they hung out with friends, they went to cafés and nice restaurants on their parents’ charge cards, they talked about people. They dithered between majoring in art history and French, literature or philosophy. They were upper-East-side radicals.
I was working twenty hours a week in the basement of the library, sitting at the reserve desk in the white-walled silence, seeing the inside of a café only when I looked into the window on the way to class. My scholarship said social science on it, so social science is what I took: statistics, game theory, national defense policy, and political philosophy. I hid in the back of classrooms, in my generic jeans and shirts with holes in the sleeves that I would sew up to avoid having to buy new. I wore the hood of my sweatshirt up, to try to hide the growing bitterness in my eyes.
But then in October, my philosophy class had pushed through the Greeks, pushed through the Romans, and finally came to the Renaissance. Getting home at midnight, after the library closed, walking down the long hall of pizza boxes and Styrofoam cartons holding fried chicken bones, , I lay down on my bed with a box of store-brand crackers and picked up The Prince.
This is what he does, that no one else does, that no one around me does, at any rate: he tells the truth. He is a straight-up man. No bullshit, no finessing, no political niceties. He doesn’t avoid the unpleasant bits. He doesn’t dodge around. He spent his life a cog in the system, doing the bidding of his city, convinced it was right. And when they sent him away for it, for his loyalty, he wanted to come back so badly he wrote a book of strategy for a leader he hated, a dynasty he despised. But he couldn’t lie, he wouldn’t make things easy. He wrote about the brutality of rule, of the firmness it took to hold power. He wrote the most powerful condemnation of autocracy ever written, and he wrote it to try to get a job from the autocrats.
Machiavelli saved me that year. I watched the lying around me, the false idealism that masked a need to keep things as they are. I watched my peers talk their way out of the truth in seminars, trying to prove to themselves that what they thought was the best course of action was, despite evidence to the contrary. They lied to themselves, they lied to each other, they had been lying to me all my life. They continue the lie because otherwise they can’t look at themselves, can’t look at their possessions, at the homeless man they pass every day, at the gunfights around the corner. They don’t give up easy, because it requires honesty: it involves knowing that you are the problem.
The thin book under my pillow told the truth. It said that power was nasty and brutish. It said that control required an iron fist. It said it is better to be hated than to be loved. Machiavelli was hated. He knew why it was better. He knew it made you free.
***
Oh, Niccolo. It's so good to see you again.
That sentence doesn't mean anything out of context. Well, it means it's the fifth week of a fifteen week semester, and that we've left the ancient world for the classical. It means last week was the Greco-Arabic period and next week is Hobbes. It means that I've got my copy of the Portable Machiavelli next to me on the cafe table, it means I have papers on Plato and Aristotle to grade on Saturday, it means that I'm weighing how much to explain about Savonarola in my notes and what context to give to Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, in order to keep her down, to beat her and to struggle with her.
But that's not it, and that's my problem. My problem is that I love Machiavelli. I love reading him. I love thinking about his work. There is a purity and passion to his writing that catches me every time I turn to it. I am struggling not to use the words "Machiavelli is my fucking homebody" in my lecture notes, because that's probably inappropriate, but that's how I'm feeling. I love Machiavelli, and I want to share him with my students.
The problem is that what I feel for Machiavelli isn't intellectual--it's fannish. It's about the love of him, as much as his arguments. (I mean, yes, I'll argue that Machiavelli is the necessary progenitor of Foucault as long as you want me to, and also that he's the genesis of the realist tradition in international relations, and that there is a valid separation between normative and empirical work, but that's not precisely it.) I can't give my students my fannishness. For fuck's sake, I'm teaching on the internet; it's hard enough not to have Amal be my guiding consciousness in the classroom. (I posted Kanye macros. What is wrong with me?) I can't reach through the computer and say, love him the way I do. I sat before his tomb in Santa Novella and cried for his man, and I can't communicate that in any way that makes sense in a classroom.
So I'm giving you this, because you are the people I can give this to. This is the first scene of a short story I wrote in college, in a writing seminar. It's not perfectly autobiographical, not by any means, but, like any work of fiction, it carries a set of emotional truths that are mine, even if the words are someone else's.
***
Imagine it: my freshman year, trapped in my dorm, surrounded by thin girls who wanted to fix all that was wrong with the world, wanted to teach elementary school and pick up trash along highways. They thought they could keep the BMWs Daddy gave them and still make meaningful change in the world, they wore their Tiffany charm bracelets when they volunteered at the soup kitchens. They went to classes, they hung out with friends, they went to cafés and nice restaurants on their parents’ charge cards, they talked about people. They dithered between majoring in art history and French, literature or philosophy. They were upper-East-side radicals.
I was working twenty hours a week in the basement of the library, sitting at the reserve desk in the white-walled silence, seeing the inside of a café only when I looked into the window on the way to class. My scholarship said social science on it, so social science is what I took: statistics, game theory, national defense policy, and political philosophy. I hid in the back of classrooms, in my generic jeans and shirts with holes in the sleeves that I would sew up to avoid having to buy new. I wore the hood of my sweatshirt up, to try to hide the growing bitterness in my eyes.
But then in October, my philosophy class had pushed through the Greeks, pushed through the Romans, and finally came to the Renaissance. Getting home at midnight, after the library closed, walking down the long hall of pizza boxes and Styrofoam cartons holding fried chicken bones, , I lay down on my bed with a box of store-brand crackers and picked up The Prince.
This is what he does, that no one else does, that no one around me does, at any rate: he tells the truth. He is a straight-up man. No bullshit, no finessing, no political niceties. He doesn’t avoid the unpleasant bits. He doesn’t dodge around. He spent his life a cog in the system, doing the bidding of his city, convinced it was right. And when they sent him away for it, for his loyalty, he wanted to come back so badly he wrote a book of strategy for a leader he hated, a dynasty he despised. But he couldn’t lie, he wouldn’t make things easy. He wrote about the brutality of rule, of the firmness it took to hold power. He wrote the most powerful condemnation of autocracy ever written, and he wrote it to try to get a job from the autocrats.
Machiavelli saved me that year. I watched the lying around me, the false idealism that masked a need to keep things as they are. I watched my peers talk their way out of the truth in seminars, trying to prove to themselves that what they thought was the best course of action was, despite evidence to the contrary. They lied to themselves, they lied to each other, they had been lying to me all my life. They continue the lie because otherwise they can’t look at themselves, can’t look at their possessions, at the homeless man they pass every day, at the gunfights around the corner. They don’t give up easy, because it requires honesty: it involves knowing that you are the problem.
The thin book under my pillow told the truth. It said that power was nasty and brutish. It said that control required an iron fist. It said it is better to be hated than to be loved. Machiavelli was hated. He knew why it was better. He knew it made you free.
***
Oh, Niccolo. It's so good to see you again.