Niccolò Machiavelli: life of the week

0:00Insurance isn't one-size-fits-all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy. Or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options.

0:32No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit Progressive.com and give the Name Your Price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping, and find coverage that fits your life, on your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

0:54When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen, and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching, and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. You may think you know McDonald's drinks, but you don't know them like this.

1:30From fruity refreshers like the Strawberry Watermelon Refresher, and the Mango Pineapple Refresher with Popping Boba, to crafted sodas like the Sprite Berry Blast, with berry-flavored Sprite topped with cold foam. Who knew ice-cold drinks could be so fire? Six all-new drinks are here. Try them all now at McDonald's. Where freshers contain caffeine.

1:54United connects you to more of the world than any U.S. airline, and United for Business can get your company where you need to go. Whether you're growing a business or managing travel for thousands, they offer solutions to fit your needs. Track expenses, create reports, and manage traveler perks. Plus, employees earn mileage plus miles while your company saves on travel. Get started with no minimum spend or flight requirements. Visit business.united.com slash podcast. From obscure beginnings to torture, exile, and desperate reinvention.

2:33The biography of Renaissance diplomat and author, Niccolo Machiavelli, reads like political theatre at its most brutal. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Alexander Lee speaks to Danny Bird about the man behind the myth. He presents Machiavelli as an everyman who loved his family and friends, sang poetry, drank, gambled, and wrote by night, producing one of the most contentious books ever, The Prince.

3:04Long condemned as a manual for tyrants, might it instead be better to see it as a clear-eyed guide to political survival in unstable times? To start us off, could you paint a picture of the world Machiavelli was born into? What was life like in Renaissance Florence at the time? The world of 15th century Italy was marked by disorder and upheaval, almost without end. When Machiavelli was born in 1469,

3:35Florence was notionally a republic under the de facto control of the Medici family. Nevertheless, it was marred by profound social conflicts, social disorder, rivalry between the rich, the grandi, and the less well-off popolo. At the same time, Italy itself was divided between a whole range of different states, of which Florence was just one. When Machiavelli was in his 20s, the Medici family got booted out of the city as a result of a French invasion of the peninsula.

4:07King Charles VIII of France was determined to claim the throne of the Kingdom of Naples in the south and on his way through, ended up causing all manner of trouble, including in Florence. The Medici fled and they were replaced by what was notionally a kind of more popular republic under the influence of a religious firebrand called Girolamo Savonarola. He only lasted a few years before he was eventually burnt at the stake and dispensed with. However, the tensions remained. Florence was constantly fighting for its survival against a multiplicity of different enemies outside

4:43and struggling to contain social tensions within. So it was very much a febrile world where nothing was certain. Do we know much about the circumstances of his early life, his background, what his family was like? Absolutely. Machiavelli's family was relatively middling, I'd say. They had a casa, a house, just south of the River Arno, not far from what we now know as the Ponte Vecchio. It doesn't exist anymore, but we know exactly where it was. Machiavelli's father, Bernardo, was a notary.

5:15He had a solid legal training. He was a very learned man. He was, at a certain point, commissioned to compose a topographical index to Livy's history of Rome, which sounds a bit arcane today, but actually is testimony to his learning. He was, however, somewhat on the fringes of social and, well, political life at least. Although he knew most of the leading men and certainly most of the leading intellectuals in the city, but Nadda never practiced law and never took any part in the political process.

5:47And that was because he was a public debtor. And in late 15th century Florence, if you didn't pay your taxes and you were found to be a public debtor, then that was terribly shameful and you couldn't participate in civic life as much as anybody else. So Machiavelli was born into, you know, an educated, modestly well-off family, but one that was definitely far from the centre of affairs. It was undoubtedly a happy family. He had memories of his mother singing songs to him. She wrote poems and canzoni and things like that.

6:18Of his schooling, we know relatively little. Some of his early teachers, private tutors, have been identified. We even have a Latin textbook that was written for him and one of his relatives. One thing that has recently been suggested is that Machiavelli, while a young schoolboy, may, and I must stress may, have been a victim of sexual abuse, given that one of his tutors was later, you know, found to be doing that with others. It's unclear whether he went to the university, the studio of Florence, but it certainly seems possible.

6:52He had a very good grounding in the Latin classics. He was able later in life to quote Virgil and other Latin poets and writers from memory. And he was anxious to join the top table, as it were. When the Medici were still kicking around, Machiavelli seems to have tried to join their circle by writing poems to one of them. And they're quite charming, not brilliant poems, but they're quite charming poems. He never succeeds, however. So, compared to many other men of his time, he's actually a bit unremarkable by the time he's in his early 20s.

7:28You look at his early life and you don't think, wow, this guy is going to make waves. Quite the opposite, in fact. As it turned out, however, that would prove to be something of an advantage when openings did appear. Could you go into a little bit more detail about what those openings were? For example, was there some sort of career path that he was pursuing? When Savonarola, the religious firebrand I mentioned earlier, fell from grace in Florence, there was a tremendous amount of people. Even though the structures of government didn't change all that much,

7:58there was a certain shift in personnel, particularly in the bureaucracy of Florence. And in 1498, Machiavelli was unexpectedly elected second chancellor. Now, what did the second chancellor do? Well, it was a civil service job, essentially. As second chancellor, he was responsible for maintaining relations between Florence and the little towns and cities in Tuscany that it ruled. It was quite a responsible post.

8:30And you might ask, why did such a, well, I don't want to exaggerate, but why did such a nobody suddenly get thrust into such a prominent role? And the answer was probably because he was a nobody, or at least somebody who wasn't tainted by any political associations. After, you know, the upheaval of the Medici's departure, and four years under Savonarola's influence, Florentine politics was very polarised. It was important at that point to have somebody who was able, you know,

9:01but not dazzlingly so, talented, but not remarkably so, but crucially, not associated with one faction or another to perform such an important role. So he was elected to that and was then set on course for a career in political life. Now, again, as I said, he's not a politician, he's not an elected politician in the sense of someone who holds public office, like he's not a magistrate, he's not taking executive decisions, he's very much on the kind of bureaucratic side of things, but he's very much in the swim.

9:33And not long after he enters into that post, he is also pushed into diplomatic roles, not as a full-blown ambassador, but as an emissary who can go and negotiate to a certain point, gather information, et cetera, et cetera. Machiavelli's career took a rather dramatic turn when he was ultimately exiled from public life. How pivotal was that moment in shaping the thinker we know today? In his position as second chancellor and later secretary to a body known as the DICI,

10:03which is responsible, like the Ministry of War, really, and as a diplomat, he becomes very quickly and very closely intertwined with the major political questions facing Florence. He goes on diplomatic missions to France, into the German lands to see the emperor. He sees Caterina's Riareus Forza, the so-called Tigress of Fawley. He negotiates with leading mercenaries. Condottieri is there known. He founds the militia. He is writing texts that are policy papers advocating one position or another,

10:38and he's overseeing troops. He's very bound up in the political survival of this republic, perhaps more so than he should have been, in fact. Don't forget, he was a civil servant. So, technically speaking, there are no regulations about this, but technically speaking, he might have been wiser to have remained a little above the fray, having been elected because of his lack of affiliation originally. He, by 1509, 1510, 1511, is a very close ally of the kind of head of state, if you like.

11:13It's an office known as Gonfaglia di Vita, occupied by a man called Gersodrini. And Machiavelli is very, very, very close to him indeed. Now, that ultimately becomes a big problem. Even though Machiavelli is trusted with a lot of jobs and he thinks he's doing pretty well, the fact that he is so bound up with a republic ends up being a crucial weakness when, in late 1512, the Medici, with Spanish help, eventually end up fighting their way back into the city, booting Sodorini out and taking over control of the city, again on a de facto basis.

11:49At first, Machiavelli is left in office, like most of the other bureaucrats in the city. But after a couple of months, during which he tries to show them that he is actually quite useful, he's kicked out of his job. And this is a big deal. You know, like all of us, he has a family, he has bills to pay, and he's just lost his major source of employment. It's a great weakness. He goes off to sort of sulk for a little while, and he doesn't really have much else to do. No real other hope of employment,

12:20no other major source of income apart from a meagre income from his farm outside the city, that's Sant'Andrea in Bercusina. So, you know, unsurprisingly, after a little while, he starts hanging around in bars and shooting his mouth off. And this, again, is the worst thing he could have done. In 1513, a conspiracy is uncovered, called the Bosco di Caponi conspiracy against the Medici. The ringleaders are taken into custody,

12:52and it turns out that they have drawn up a list of people who might be joining them in this conspiracy, might be at least sympathetic to it, and wouldn't you just know it, but Machiavelli's name is on that list. So he's dragged in, he's tortured using a technique known as tarpada, whereby his hands were bound behind his back, and he was hoisted off the floor effectively until his shoulders dislocated. And he's then sort of left the molder in a prison known as the Stinque.

13:25And while he's there, he, in typical fashion, he does try to wheedle his way out, remembering his youthful connections with one of the Medici, a guy called Giuliano de Medici, one of the younger ones. He writes a couple of poems that are humorous and self-mocking. They start off in an heroic style, but they very quickly turn into an exercise in self-mockery. He's saying, you know, I can't stand this, please let me out, go on, be a good fellow, etc. He is eventually released, but not because of any of his, any ties with the Medici,

13:56simply because one of them gets elected post-pope, and there's an amnesty. So what does Machiavelli do then? Well, really, now he is effectively at rock bottom. He has no choice but to go out of Florence after a little while with his tail between his legs to this little farm that he has in Sant'Andrea in Percusina and occupy himself. And he writes a very charming and revealing letter to one of his friends, Francesco Vettori, about his life there. And it's very much what you might imagine

14:26from a certain person like Machiavelli in such a situation. You know, in the mornings he would go out and he would try and catch birds, he'd read poems, books of poetry by the river, etc. Then at lunchtime he'd go out for a drink and he'd gamble and get into fights and he would become what he called a real gallioffo, a real good-for-nothing. And then at night time, when the bar finally closed, he would go back home and, as he said, he'd put on the clothes of court and palace in his study, take up his books and begin to write.

14:58And why did he begin to write? Because what else was he going to do? He needed to make a living. He needed to try and forge some kind of career for himself. His whole professional life was in ruins. Everything on which he'd based his career was gone. There was no republic. Well, there wasn't the republic he had served, at least the way that the institutions were still there. The Medici were back in control. What better way to forge a path for himself in this most desperate of times than to prove to the Medici that he could be of some value? And how better to do that than by writing them a book of advice,

15:29a book that today we know as The Prince. Perfect. And I'd like to come on to The Prince shortly. But before we get to that, you've painted a picture of Machiavelli there where he comes across almost like an everyday kind of bloke, essentially. You know, he's going into taverns, he's playing games, but then he's also writing poetry, he's writing. So he's obviously a very rounded person in many respects. And yet, for most people listening, he probably has this image as being somewhat cold,

16:00calculating, an advisor to rulers. How fair do you think that image of Machiavelli is? That can be answered in two parts, really. Number one, the reality of Machiavelli. You're absolutely right in saying that he is quite an everyday kind of guy. There's no doubt that he had an absolutely brilliant mind, that he was very learned, etc. But I often like to think of Machiavelli as the sort of guy you would like to go and have a drink with. He was tremendously funny. He was very much beloved by his colleagues in the Chancery in Florence. He was well known amongst them

16:30for regaling everyone now and again with improvised poems, which he would sing to the accompaniment of an instrument. He did write very, very funny poems. He wrote a story about devils coming to see if it's true that getting married is a bad thing. He wrote plays later in his life that are still performed today and are still genuinely enormously funny. He's very human. He is married. He does have many affairs, but he's married and he's a very, very devoted husband, despite his infidelity.

17:02He loves his children. Some of his last letters that he writes, fleeing from an advancing army of mutinous lands connects, are to his son, his young son at school asking about his lessons. But yeah, it's true that when we think about Machiavelli today, we often think about someone called, calculating, cunning. Where does that come from? Oh, it's from the prince. It derives more from the way in which the prince has been received than anything else. And one can understand that to a certain extent. The prince is, as you suggested,

17:33and as I suggested as well, a work of advice. It seeks to set Machiavelli up as a counsellor to princes, the Medici aren't really princes in the true sense of the word, but they seek to be de facto rulers of Florence. And what does he argue? Well, he essentially asks the question, how does a prince who has gained his state through the aid of fortune and the arms of others keep power, keep hold of power?

18:03That's to say, how does somebody in the position of the Medici, who's gained their city with another person's army and a bit of luck, stay in charge? And the answer he provides is, compared to what most political theorists of the day had said, pretty remarkable and in many ways shocking. Of course, the obvious thing that he says you need is a reliable army. And the one thing that most states relied upon at this time were mercenaries. And mercenaries, as we have seen ourselves

18:34in recent years in Russia's campaign against Ukraine, mercenaries are very, very unreliable. So he says, don't rely on mercenaries. Instead, you really want to have your own citizen militia, a militia composed of people, citizens who are willing to defend the homeland. So that's all fine. But then you need some way of keeping hold of the people, of making sure that they're going to support you. And this is tricky. Because when you look at states, it's hard to avoid the sense that fortune plays a very fickle game.

19:07And this is something with which I think we can all sympathise at the moment. Just as you think you've got everything sorted, fortune comes along and throws everything into confusion. Machiavelli used a rather misogynistic image of a capricious woman to explain this. He said, you know, she's going wild and crazy. So how do we deal with this? Most political theorists of the day had said that it was best to be good, essentially to be virtuous in a Christian stroke stoic sense. That's to say, embody the virtues of faith, hope, charity, of prudent justice, blah, blah, blah.

19:39Be honest, be good, be kind, be merciful, and the people will follow you. Machiavelli thinks that's all rubbish. Just complete rubbish. And why does he think it's rubbish? He thinks it's rubbish because, well, for obvious reasons, actually. He says, if fortune is going to change her attitude every other minute, it's pointless to limit your options by remaining fixed on a single predetermined course of action. Of course you're going to go wrong. You're going to become a cropper if you try and do the same thing no matter what,

20:11and affairs are changing around you. So instead, you should embrace not virtue in this sense, but what he calls virtu, and that's the quality of being a man. That's to say, being daring and bold and courageous and ready to seize any opportunity. More specifically, that means being ready to be something other than virtuous in the traditional sense as well. And in The Prince, he goes through the attributes that are often associated with a good prince. That's to say, honesty. He says, well, if necessary, you need to lie. Obviously, that makes sense.

20:42Generosity. You know, it's nice to be generous, but that's stupid as well, because if you're a prince and you spend all your money on being generous, then at a certain point, you're going to run out of cash and you're going to have to impose pretty hefty taxes, and nobody likes that. But the key one is mercy, and this is where I think Machiavelli's reputation really comes from. Mercy's a lovely thing. Machiavelli's in no doubt about that. But he says it's also quite dangerous. You should rather be ready to be cruel, he says.

21:12Now, of course, there's a danger here. If you're too cruel, you end up being hated, and you should really avoid that. There's a famous episode or passage in The Prince where Machiavelli considers specifically the question of whether it is better to be loved or feared, and he says, well, it's nice to be loved. Of course, everyone likes to be loved. Who doesn't? But love is fickle. You can't be sure that someone who loves you today is going to love you tomorrow. Fear is a far stronger and more reliable motivator of people. As long as you don't make yourself hated, you'll be fine.

21:48So, when The Prince appeared, it circulated initially in manuscript. It didn't appear in print until long after Machiavelli's death. And to be fair, when it did start circulating, it received a very kind of mixed reaction. The Medici didn't respond to it quite as well as he'd hoped when he eventually does dedicate it to one of the Medici, Lorenzo, the younger of the Medici. According to one account, Lorenzo is more interested in his dogs than Machiavelli's book. However, later, when it's picked up by later thinkers,

22:19it is viewed frequently in quite a negative way. You have some people like Cardinal Reginald Pohl, who was a close associate of Bloody Mary, May the 1st of England, described as a tremendously amoral book. I think he even said that it was a kind of book that was written by Satan or something. I forget these exact words. He doesn't want to say that political figures, princes, should always be a model. He's not saying that the best prince is someone who lies as a matter of habit or is parsimonious from compulsion

22:51or is mean and cruel, kicks puppies in the face. That's not what he's saying at all. In actual fact, what he's saying is that a prince should just be ready to break with virtue, traditional senses of virtue, if necessary. He shouldn't constrain himself. He should be open to these possibilities. Of course, he says, you know, if you can be seen as being, you know, good and nice and kind, that's great. In fact, if you can actually be those things and stay safe, that's okay, but don't let it blind you to the reality. And certainly we should also be a little bit careful

23:22about presuming that he really was breaking the mould here. Although it's true that most earlier systems of political thought had stressed that a good ruler was a virtuous ruler, there was plenty of precedent for this kind of argument, in piecemeal form at least. You know, there was already, Immaculat himself has seen an instance where the Florentine government had accepted that states, in order to preserve their security, should dispense with the normal dictates of morality that constrain individuals. When he was very new in political office,

23:55Florence had executed a general who had failed to take the lost port city of Pisa without any firm evidence that he'd done anything wrong. But they decided to execute this general, Pala Vitelli, anyway, pour encourager les autres, to encourage the others, because, you know, states can't take risks. And even if he was innocent, it's better to kill him and keep the others in line. And so we find other echoes running through earlier systems of thought as well, in Roman law and in some other sources as well.

24:27So, we're turning to a question, is it fair to view Machiavelli as this sort of prince of darkness? Well, not really. If we're interested in him from a biographical perspective, it's absolutely not true. Nor is it really fair as a representation of what he actually thought. It is, however, interesting to consider, as I said, why he got this reputation. And he used that as a kind of framework for looking at his most famous work.

24:57Springtime is my catalyst to switch out the major players in my closet and take stock of what I have and haven't been wearing over the last year. It's a great time to get a bit more intentional about what you're wearing day to day. And if I'm getting rid of anything, I want to make sure that I'm replacing it with quality pieces. And I've been turning to Quince for that so often recently. Their clothes are made really well and priced even better. So it makes shopping for and wearing their pieces simple. Quince uses premium materials like organic cotton and ultra soft denim.

25:27And their lightweight linen pants, dresses, and tops start at just $30. I have a few pairs of their 100% European linen pants. They come in a variety of colors and patterns. It has an elastic waist and a pretty wide leg. So they're really, really comfortable, but they also look super nice. So I think they're the perfect versatile pair of pants for spring and summer. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for the quality and craftsmanship of the products, but not a brand markup.

25:59Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince.com slash history extra for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash history extra for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash history extra.

26:22Expedia and Visit Scotland invite you to come step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape today at Expedia dot com slash Visit Scotland. They call this one Bill.

26:54Whoa, aliens? Am I on a spaceship? Affirmative, Bill. What's with the laser saw? An Xfinity mobile transmission says you can cut your bill in half. Oh, your mobile bill, not me, Bill. Xfinity internet members cut your mobile bill in half. Plus, try Xfinity mobile free for a year. No commitment. Learn more at Xfinity mobile dot com. Restrictions apply. Savings compares one line of Xfinity mobile select to comparable plans from T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T as of $324.26. Taxes fees extra. $30 monthly discount limited to new mobile customers only. After 12 months, regular rates apply. I wonder as well, Alex, whether you,

27:24looking beyond Machiavelli himself, whether you'd be comfortable talking about why the prince has had this enormous sort of outsized and controversial legacy throughout history ever since it was published. Like, why do you think it is still such an enduring text to this day? It's a text which has been interpreted in a wide variety of fashions throughout history. As I just said, he has been viewed as, you know, a devilish figure who has been advocating for autocracy and tyranny. But at the same time, he's also been taken as almost a satirical writer

27:54who has, in fact, held up a mirror to the realities of princely power and, as such, maybe in the prince provided justification for those of a more republican bent. Certainly, it was the case that Maximeleine Robespierre in the French Revolution held him up as the father of the revolution, rightly or wrongly, I don't say. Others still saw him as establishing a more kind of realistic view of politics as someone who was interested in really the technology

28:24of power, if I can put it like that, the techniques that were necessary to govern, to exercise authority over a fractious and febrile people. I don't see that any one of these interpretations is right. Certainly, it is the case, however, that Machiavelli was unusually able to appreciate the reality of political life. Now, this too has been exaggerated greatly by many scholars over the years. Machiavelli was not the first person

28:55to look at the world around him as a guide to political life, even if you go back to Aristotle, for example. Aristotle collects constitutions from ancient Greece as a way of understanding the underlying rules of human political behaviour, understanding how societies work. Even in Machiavelli's own day, there was another thinker called Patrizzi in Siena, who was similarly advocating quite a realistic view of politics, looking at how things really were, rather than how one would like them to be, rather than idealised view. But where Machiavelli is different,

29:26I think at least, is that he is interested in a way that nobody else was, to my mind, before that point, in change. In The Prince, there was a key passage halfway through in which he kind of sets out his project. He pauses his discussion to explain what he's doing with politics. Unlike a lot of other thinkers who have really looked at things as they would like them to be, I am going to look at the effectual cause of things, the verità effettuare delle cose. And this phrase has caused a great deal of discussion over the years and a huge amount of ink has been spilt over it.

29:58However, what it appears to pick up on is an idea borrowed from Aristotle, namely that Aristotle said there were many causes of things, I won't go through them all, but one was particularly important and that was the efficient cause. And the efficient cause was the process which precipitated a change in the status of something. And for Machiavelli, that's crucially important. If you are going to be a stable political ruler, you need to be aware of why things change and of the dynamics that underpin the shifts

30:28in the sands of human society. That's why he's so interested in looking at the relationship between the grandi and the popular, for example, why he's so interested in fortune, why he is so interested in instability more than anything else. And that, I think, does mark him out as unusual. So, I think that he has had a capacity to be many things for many people, but his true importance lies in this, sensitivity for change, for a dynamic politics, if you like. And that resonates even today.

30:58If you look around us at the current situation in the Middle East, in Ukraine, things change from day to day and it's only by a sensitivity to that intense instability that we can begin to calibrate our political reactions appropriately. And of course, some people may be surprised to discover a very different side to Machiavelli in the discourses on Livy. What do you think that text reveals about his political ideals? Ah, well, the Discourses is a wonderful text that's completely different from The Prince in, at least in its style.

31:28A bit of context first. After Machiavelli wrote The Prince and failed to secure a position with the Medici of the back of it, he kicked around a little bit and then joined a discussion group essentially in a garden in Florence known as the Orte Orcellari, the Ruccellai Gardens. And it was the home to quite a dynamic group of thinkers, poets, political figures, dramatists, even some people who favoured

32:00extraordinary reforms to the Italian language. It was a very exciting place. Machiavelli was one of the older ones, however. And in this context, he wrote The Discorsi, The Discorsi so per la prima decada di Tito Livio, The Discorsi on the First Decade of Titus Livy. Now, ostensibly, this book is intended to just describe what you need to know in order to understand Livy's history of Rome. It's notionally

32:30a commentary of sorts and there were plenty of those at the time. But in reality, interwoven between all the historical discussions is a much more searching political analysis. Machiavelli is really thinking about republics here and the question he seeks to answer is how did Rome as a republic become great? And the answer, it turns out, is very simple. It became great because it was free. So, in other words, you know, a free republic becomes great, a bold point to make in and of itself in a city under the Medici yoke.

33:01So how does a city keep itself free? Machiavelli's argument is quite contorted but we can simplify it without too much difficulty. He says, well, obviously, it has to be founded in the right kind of way in a nice place with, you know, good laws and good people and blah, blah, blah. Most of all, it needs vertu, this thing called vertu that he discussed in The Prince. That means being willing to do anything to defend the republic, to keep it free from tyranny, to keep it free from external domination.

33:33Even if that means, you know, robbing, murder, all well and good so far. Well, then, Machiavelli asks himself, isn't it the case, though, that people aren't always virtuous? And that's absolutely true. Unfortunately, if you look particularly at Rome's early history and look at any society, really, you find that very quickly, any given form of government quickly corrupts as people themselves corrupt. Monarchy collapses into tyranny and then it gets overthrown and then you have a kind of aristocracy like in Rome and that collapses

34:04into an oligarch and it goes on. So how do you deal with this? Well, Machiavelli says, fine, what you should have is a mixed constitution. Have, you know, a monarchical element, an aristocratic element and a popular element. Fine. Now, that seems okay but again, the problem is you can't rely on that to contain the tensions that exist within any society, within any society, even within our own. There are always going to be tensions between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the not-so-rich, the popular and the grandi.

34:35And yeah, there are things you can sort of do to anticipate that but it's always going to be there. Now, Machiavelli doesn't think this is necessarily a problem. In actual fact, he thinks it could be a bonus and that caused a lot of ruckus amongst his friends when this argument appeared and he said, well, you can understand this very easily if you look at, say, Sparta or contemporary Venice, 15th century Venice or 16th century Venice and ancient Sparta. Both had no social

35:05conflict at all. They were both completely harmonious. Venice, you know, had almost no social upheaval in its entire history. I mean, there are little exceptions to that. Sparta too. What's the problem here? Why isn't harmony good? Machiavelli says, well, okay, they were peaceful but they weren't great. Sparta didn't have an empire. Venice, okay, had a couple of colonies overseas but it's not what you'd call a real empire compared to Rome. So, that's a problem. You need tension, Machiavelli says, to keep a people free and great. That's because, you know,

35:36in Venice it was, you know, and Sparta it was the nobles who had the weapons and the military might and the people didn't but the nobles being, you know, quite self-interested didn't want to risk anything so they weren't going to go out. So, if you have tension the people arm themselves to keep the nobles in check and are ready to go and fight other people. So, great. Problem is, thereafter, this tension is going to bubble over and there are things you can do to try and keep it in check so you can have libel or slander laws

36:07and, you know, watchdogs essentially, tribunition watchdogs. But even Machiavelli is alert to the fact that these social tensions are likely to run out of control so what are the solutions? And the solutions are quite simple. You can, you know, you have limited economic inequalities, you make sure the gap between rich and poor isn't so great, you can use law to teach people to be virtuous in the sense of vertu. More interestingly, he says you can use religion and by religion he doesn't mean

36:37contemporary Catholicism