MACHIAVELLI ON LITERARY SUCCES

It cannot be said that Machiavelli sought success when he wrote The Prince.

He was not a first-time author when he published this work. He already had a long experience in writing, but above all he had vast experience in the world of embassies, palaces, offices and houses and gardens where kings and popes and princes and counts made government decisions. The job he sought and obtained was: to create and shape policies and government actions for the benefit of his city, Florence.

On what it means to be a citizen, Pericles said in his Funeral Oration that although not all of us can give rise to a policy, we must all be able to judge it. Although not all of us can plan a war or give good reasons for it, we must all be able to judge whether the Republic should declare one or not. Machiavelli was the kind of person who could create and put together a policy.

Machiavelli’s job was to indicate, suggest, evaluate, and persuade how the government and ruler of Florence should behave in the face of the other neighboring countries competing for power in Europe. What would have happened if France had won an alliance with England? How can we win alliances with the Pope in Rome, with the kingdom of the island of Sicily, with the king of Castile, and with Italian cities like Venice or Ravenna? What to do so that King Ferdinand of Aragon would not fear until he saw fit that Florence would attack the Pope’s domains in Italy.

Some readers will clearly remember Henry Kissinger, an American diplomat during the Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford governments. It was he who proposed ideas and gave opinions for or against how to end the Vietnam War. He negotiated the US rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. He helped Israel and Egypt negotiate peace in the Yom Kippur War. He favored friendly diplomatic relations with right-wing military dictatorships in South America and was even accused of planning the murder of a large number of left-wing militants in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Machiavelli had the job that Kissinger did in the 16th century. With access to the resources and information that such work requires. Surrounded by the admiration and envy that such a position arouses.

If Machiavelli had lived in the 20th or 21st century, he would undoubtedly have been much better known and even popular. He would have been forced to appear in the press constantly. Dozens of journalists from all over the world would seek him out to ask his opinion or to extract information from him. He would have had no problem publishing his books, on the contrary. Many publishers would have offered him good contracts to publish them.

We may wonder if Machiavelli, unlike Kissinger, would have sought the spotlight of fame. Perhaps Machiavelli would never have sought to be a political star. But can one govern and be a public figure at the same time?

Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. Machiavelli would certainly have won it, and certainly the Nobel Prize for Literature as well.

But Machiavelli was born in a world without the press and without social networks.

He was born in a world where access to the channels and resources needed to become known as an author was very different. Not closed, but very different from what there is now.

The reading public was predominantly ecclesiastical and aristocratic, although there was already a number of readers who were neither part of the Church nor of the nobility. They numbered in the thousands and tens of thousands throughout Europe. Becoming known and becoming appreciated among the aristocratic and ecclesiastical public was a game of personal relationships. Publishing success in those circumstances meant being sponsored by a figure of nobility or the Church; the more important that figure was, the greater the success. It had nothing to do with how many books you had sold. Success was measured by who was reading you.

Readers were closer to the author. They sometimes knew him in person, sometimes they even knew his personal history and that of his family.

Since the important reading public was the aristocratic and the ecclesiastical, the books were much more transparent. Authors could not disguise or disguise their intentions. If you wrote a book on theology, however obscure the subject, you knew that your readers were going to be other specialists at least as educated as you. That they would criticize your book often with envy. Often interested and positively intrigued by your ideas, which had to be truly solid and original to impress that public. That would receive your book asking themselves a clear question: why did he write this book? And your ideas were almost automatically going to be tested against the dogmas and conventional morals and the prejudices and desires of those readers. It was not easy to sugarcoat an insult. It was very easy to step on toes. And if your ideas were really new and different from the norm, you had to work hard to ensure that they were not dismissed simply because they were not the norm and conventional ideas.

The world in which Machiavelli wrote was a world in which the relationships between authors and readers were much closer, much more emotional, and in many ways much more important than they are now.

That closeness eliminated propaganda. You could not advertise yourself because your readers knew you well.

If you have something like an interview, the audience listening to you were people who either know you well or who could easily research you and know your family, your friends, and the history of your ideas. Who could quickly tell who liked you and why. Who disliked you and why? A world in which the reasons for disliking or liking someone were not due to the way you dressed or your hairstyle or the sound of your laugh. You were liked or disliked by someone for reasons of life or death.

Machiavelli dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo de Medici, who is not Lorenzo the Magnificent, but the grandson of that man. Which was not at all strange for that time.

To know if Machiavelli was pursuing success with The Prince, you don’t have to look at the dedication.

You have to understand what he wanted to teach and to whom.

You have to understand the prejudices of those to whom he sent the book and how he wrote to criticize those prejudices and to make them receptive to new ideas on the subject that mattered most to them: how to govern.