Ada Palmer on Machiavelli, The Prince, and Renaissance Statecraft

Renaissance historian Ada Palmer returns to argue that Niccolò Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time. The word that bears his name — Machiavellian, meaning self-serving and amoral — is close to the inverse of the man, who gave up wealth, fame and society to rot in the countryside and write The Prince as a secret job application to the very regime that had tortured and exiled him. Along the way, Palmer reconstructs the world that produced the book: a Florence where the papacy was a warlord, patronage was the glue holding society together, art was a cheaper form of war, and original thought had to disguise itself as a footnote to the ancients.

Key ideas

1. Machiavelli wasn’t Machiavellian. The Prince is not a manual for getting ahead; it is ‘a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power’ — how to keep a state stable enough to protect its people. Machiavelli wrote it in exile, dedicated it to a member of the family whose regime had tortured him, and deliberately kept it out of wider circulation because in the wrong hands its lessons could endanger Florence. Palmer calls him ‘one of the most selfless men I’ve ever read about’, a patriot who ‘would rather serve nothing and no one than give an hour of his time to advancing anything that is not Florence’.

2. You control at most half of any outcome; the rest is fortune. Machiavelli’s real innovation is to insist we judge deeds not by their outcome but by ‘what the most probable outcome was before fortune intervened’. Cesare Borgia ‘did everything right’ and lost his conquests only because he and his father, the Pope, happened to fall gravely ill at the same moment — so, says Machiavelli, we should imitate Borgia regardless, because the fall was fortune, not error.

3. The means matter intensely — but conditionally. Far from ‘the ends justify the means’, Machiavelli obsesses over how power is gained, because that determines whether it is stable. Lying and betrayal are ‘sometimes okay if you check these other boxes’: the feared Borgia could massacre allies and watch his remaining generals grow more loyal, whereas Savonarola, whose power rested on being believed divinely inspired, was destroyed the moment his prophecies contradicted each other.

4. Patronage was the glue of the whole society. Not one glue among several — the fundamental one. Roughly 99 of 100 capital-crime convictions ended in a fine or flogging rather than execution, because a patron intervened; the rare execution (Giordano Bruno) was the man who had fallen out of the patronage network. ‘You can’t even stay in a hotel or buy an apple — I’m not kidding — without a patron.’

5. Liberty is a system, not fairness. For Machiavelli you are ‘a slave’ if any one man can point at you in the street and have you killed. You have liberty if there must be a trial, a process, something public — ‘that system may be unfair… but there was a system’. This is why Florentines rioted under the banner LIBERTAS to defend a republic in which only a tiny elite could serve.

6. The papacy was a uniquely destabilising institution. An elected, non-hereditary monarchy that turned over roughly every decade to ‘a coalition of all the people who hate the current pope’, each new pope ripping up his predecessor’s arrangements. And proximity bred contempt: to a distant Icelander the pope was awesome and abstract; to an Italian he was ‘that asshole who went to college with your brother’. Corruption compounded each generation as wealth flowed to the Church, until the pressure triggered the Reformation.

7. In the Renaissance, backwards was forwards. Human potential lay in recovering Rome, not in an open future — ‘cutting-edge technology is imitating the past’. So original ideas had to be smuggled in as commentary on the ancients. What a nineteenth-century historian dismissed as ‘200 years of people being wrong about Plato’ was really ‘200 years of original thought using the ancients as the trellis up which the rose climbs in order to bloom’.

8. Copyright and censorship were born together, out of the Inquisition. After 1515 every book was effectively ‘born pre-banned’ until an inquisitor licensed it; in return the printer received a monopoly on printing it. England imitated the model, and the ancestor of Anglo-American copyright is this licensing bargain — the censorship half later stripped away, the monopoly half kept.

Content

A perfect storm of instability

Machiavelli finishes The Prince in 1513, telling Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici that he alone can rescue Italy ‘from its current place of ruin and ravage’. Why so bad? Palmer gives a two-part answer: the city-states and the papacy. Government draws its legitimacy from long continuity; when that thread is cut, one regime change tends to trigger five in rapid succession (as with the oscillations of the French Republic, or England’s Wars of the Roses). In Machiavelli’s lifetime that thread was cut for the majority of Italian cities — ‘almost every government is ripe for yet another replacement’. Layered on top is the papacy: an elected monarchy with no hereditary predictability, where each new pope was likely to be chosen by his predecessor’s enemies and would overturn everything the last one built. Stability required one power near Rome strong enough that the papacy would have to negotiate with it — which is what Cesare Borgia nearly achieved.

Borgia, fortune, and the man in the room

Palmer’s most striking claim is biographical: Machiavelli, who tries throughout The Prince to be balanced, cannot hide how much more Cesare Borgia (whom the period called Valentino) fascinates him than any other figure. At the account of Borgia’s fall the historian’s third-person veil slips and he writes in the first person — ‘He told me that he had prepared for everything in the event of his father’s death, except the possibility that he himself would also be incapacitated’. Machiavelli was in the room. His job as Florentine envoy was to stand beside ‘the scariest man who has lived in Europe since Frederick Barbarossa’ and whisper constantly that Florence was loyal — buying time, in the knowledge that popes are mortal and Borgia’s conquest would end the moment his father died. He witnessed the massacre at Senigallia, where Borgia forgave conspirators, renewed sacred vows with them, then slaughtered them at a banquet — a violation of hospitality that, in Dante’s scheme, damns the soul before the body even dies, and which nonetheless made Borgia’s remaining men more loyal.

Feared, not hated — and neutral justice

The famous line ‘it is better to be feared than loved’ is, for Palmer, a claim about human nature: people ‘will act as badly as they are allowed to’, so a rule resting on their promises collapses the moment it looks weak, while a rule resting on the certain punishment of oath-breakers is stable. But fear must not tip into hatred. The surprising proof is Borgia’s popularity: when he conquered a city and exterminated its ruling families, he became beloved, because he and his outsiders had no stake in the local factions and so delivered, for the first time in generations, neutral justice. Under the old order a carpenter’s son who killed a man walked free if his family’s patron was in power and hanged if it was not; under a conqueror with no local loyalties, the same verdict fell on everyone. Machiavelli was startled that terror could buy legitimacy this way.

Patronage all the way down

Palmer’s largest structural point is that Renaissance society ran on patronage entangled with nepotism, from the summit to the street. When Pope Paul III appointed a competent general instead of his own illegitimate son, there were riots demanding more nepotism — because a son ‘will never betray you’, so the people trusted the papal armies only under a kinsman’s command. The same logic governed justice: the gap between savage law codes (‘death for setting fire to the prince’s beehive’) and the actual leniency of trials is explained entirely by patrons intervening, an earthly rehearsal of the patron saint interceding with a divine judge. Giordano Bruno burned not because his ideas were the most radical — Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino were more so — but because he had angered his patron and fallen out of the network. Even a hotel bed or an apple required a letter of recommendation from a patron known to someone in the city.

Art as a proxy for war

How did a Florence perpetually at war afford Lorenzo de’ Medici’s ~$30 million library? Partly because banking and wool were staggeringly profitable — but chiefly because art was diplomacy, and diplomacy is cheaper than war. Florence could never field an army to beat France, but it could paint fleurs-de-lis across its seat of government and lavish beautiful gifts on the visiting French king: ‘if we play the culture victory game, that’s cheaper, and we can try to win’. To a contemporary, Florence’s cathedral was not a heritage site but high technology — ‘like when we look at an incredibly impressive skyscraper’. And because this was an age in which ‘backwards is forwards’, that cutting edge consisted precisely in imitating antiquity, aspiring to recover a Roman greatness they were not even sure they could equal.

The Prince as a secret job application

Exile in Florence was usually provisional — a posting to Bruges or London with instructions to serve as an unofficial emissary and earn recall. Machiavelli’s exile was unusual precisely because the regime distrusted him so deeply that it sent him to ‘a middle-of-nowhere hamlet’ with nothing to do. Everyone expected him to defect; a skilled classicist-diplomat with contacts in Rome and France could have named his price at any court. Instead he stayed, rotted, and wrote The Prince as a demonstration of loyalty addressed to the men who had tortured him — and, unlike his freely circulated Discourses and histories, kept it proprietary. Palmer’s analogy is a nuclear scientist who will hand his secret only to his own government: Machiavelli believed he had ‘the beginnings of a new world of political science’ and would share it with no cause but Florence. Dwarkesh notes the resonance with an emerging age of bespoke, audience-of-one texts; Palmer replies that such writing never left — most of what we read (email, letters) has an audience of one, and book-length secret briefs still circulate among a handful of officials.

Original thought disguised as antiquity

Because antiquity was ‘where it’s at’, a Renaissance scholar’s original ideas sold better dressed as commentary on Livy, Plato or Seneca. Giordano Bruno attributed to Aristotle the opposite of what Aristotle said; Annius of Viterbo forged texts and buried fake artefacts to dig up, so that his own vision of history would carry the authority of the ancients. This is why Discourses on Livy — not a treatise of avowedly original thought — was Machiavelli’s bid for prestige, and why The Prince, which brazenly presents itself as original, is the ‘goofy outlier’. Nineteenth-century historians, prizing originality, therefore wrote the Renaissance out of the history of philosophy as derivative; recover the convention and it becomes two centuries of original thought climbing the trellis of the ancients.

Copyright, the Inquisition, and bubbles of protection

Machiavelli was among the first authors to feel the sting of print without copyright: a local printer reproduced his work full of typos he feared would be blamed on him, and there was no legal recourse. Copyright emerged, counterintuitively, from Inquisition censorship after 1515: books were pre-banned until a licensed inquisitor or bishop approved them, and the licensing record doubled as proof of an exclusive monopoly to print — the seed of English, and thus Commonwealth and American, copyright. The Inquisition itself, Palmer stresses, was not the monolith of legend but ‘a whole bunch of isolated guys in isolated towns’, dependent on local governments for jails, guards and funding — closer to Doctors Without Borders than to a secret police. Where a duke was protective (Medici Florence, full of Platonist radicals), it was near-impotent; where rulers wanted scapegoats (Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spain), it was lavishly resourced. This created ‘bubbles of privileged access’ in which the well-connected could practise radical philosophy — or, like Machiavelli and his circle, live openly bisexual lives — untouchable so long as a cardinal or duke shielded them.

Two Machiavellis

Sometimes a thinker splits from his work. There is Machiavelli the patriot, and there is ‘Old Nick’ — Shakespeare’s ‘murderous Machiavel’, the scheming, atheistic, self-serving villain whom Richard III models himself on. The character is genuinely useful to us as a thought experiment about power, which is why it took on a life of its own (in sixteenth-century Spain, ‘Machiavellian’ and ‘Jewish’ became interchangeable labels for a sinister underground of thought). But the character is close to the opposite of the man. Palmer’s parting instruction: if you keep The Prince on your shelf, remember it was written by someone willing to surrender everything to serve his country, ‘and you’ll see a very different Machiavelli come through’.

See also

• Ada Palmer — the guest; Renaissance historian, science-fiction novelist, and this wiki’s other Palmer appearance
• Ada Palmer on Viking Metaphysics, Contingent Moments, and Censorship — her earlier conversation, on the Inquisition-as-infrastructure and contingency in history
• Niccolò Machiavelli — the subject; diplomat, political theorist, author of The Prince
• Dwarkesh Patel — the host