fabian s. klinkeMachiavelli and the world as it is
Source: MACHIAVELLI: Be the Wolf Among Sheep, Horses, 23:47, uploaded 2023-08-30, playlist index 115.
Niccolò Machiavelli enters the video as history’s original villain. He abandoned the old link between political leadership and moral goodness, then described power as a field that rewards ruthlessness, deceit and the ability to change sides. Horses treats that reputation as deserved in part, yet finds a harder subject underneath it: Machiavelli’s account of the world contains ideas about agency, preparation and political appearances that remain useful even when his preferred methods are repellent.
Florence, corruption, and exile
The video begins with Machiavelli’s life because his political ideas grow from a specific setting. He was born in Florence in 1469. His father, Bernardo, worked as a lawyer and struggled to support the family, whilst his mother wrote religious poems and hymns. The combination of scepticism around religion and a devout literary household becomes, in the video’s telling, an early condition for Machiavelli’s later work.
Florence was a republic on paper. Eight priors governed the city, with one acting as a kind of prime minister for two months. A lottery selected respectable men from wealthy Florentine families, which should have kept power moving between professions and parts of the city. The Medici family manipulated the system so that the names drawn would support Medici interests. Short terms then produced constant changes in policy whilst the same family held real control. Florence looked like a republic and behaved like a dictatorship.
The wider Italian peninsula offered the same lesson at a larger scale. Wars over territory crossed Europe, mercenary leaders changed their allegiance quickly, and governments rose and fell with little stability. Machiavelli saw the difference between political forms and political reality early. Around his ninth birthday, conspirators against the Medici were hung upside down from the government’s main building and left to rot for weeks. Corruption and public brutality formed the background against which he later wrote about power.
After the Medici were pushed from Florence in 1494, Machiavelli entered government service. He wrote official documents, joined the Second Chancery and became Secretary of the Ten of War, the committee responsible for foreign relations and war preparations. He was twenty-eight. The record gives no clear reason for his rapid rise, although he spent more than a decade as Florence’s leading diplomat during a period when the city was weaker than its principal Italian rivals.
The Florentine Republic fell in 1512 and the Medici returned. They suspected Machiavelli of conspiracy, imprisoned him, tortured him and exiled him. He wrote his most famous book in that exile.
The Prince and the value of a ruler
The Prince was a guide for a ruler, written for Lorenzo de’ Medici, head of the family that had removed Machiavelli from office. Earlier political theory treated a leader’s moral character as the measure of greatness. The ideal leader was good, even when governments often failed to meet the ideal.
Machiavelli changes the measure. A ruler succeeds by gathering and keeping power, then using it to build a strong state. The book treats political effectiveness as its own problem. Moral conduct remains admirable, yet a leader cannot follow it in every situation and still retain power. The claim gives The Prince its scandal. Machiavelli could have hidden the same advice behind a pious warning about the corruption of power. He writes the advice plainly and accepts the cruelty that follows from it.
Cesare Borgia supplies the video’s main case. In 1502, Borgia conquered Cesena and left his lieutenant Ramiro de’ Orco to impose order. De’ Orco used public violence. He beheaded men before their families, seized property and castrated people who resisted. Once the city had become quiet, Borgia needed to separate himself from the hatred that de’ Orco had earned.
Borgia had de’ Orco cut in two and displayed in the town square with his severed head on a stake. The people who saw the remains already hated him, so Borgia could present the execution as a rescue. He told the citizens that de’ Orco had seized power and acted without permission, then cast himself as the ruler who had removed a sadistic monster. The same violence that created order now became evidence of Borgia’s mercy. Machiavelli admires Borgia as an ideal leader because the act joins cruelty with timing, public theatre and a clean transfer of blame.
Fear, love, and hatred
Machiavelli’s question about love and fear follows from the Borgia example. Love can change because it depends on another person’s feeling. Fear rests on a punishment that remains tangible, so a ruler can shape it more directly. The safer position, in his account, is fear when love cannot be secured.
Fear has a boundary. A ruler should avoid hatred because hatred gives conspirators a reason to act. Violence must therefore arrive quickly and quietly enough to prevent a population from turning its anger against the ruler. Machiavelli’s successful politician tries to control the public feeling around cruelty. The force itself becomes secondary to its timing and its visible author.
The same reasoning allows a ruler to discard honesty. A leader may break a promise when circumstances change, deceive an opponent or use a betrayal as a political weapon. Machiavelli argues that people lie to one another, so a politician who insists on truth gives away an advantage that opponents will use. The standard is effectiveness rather than ethical consistency.
Appearances still matter because most people encounter a ruler through speeches and public acts. Few constituents see what happens behind closed doors. A leader therefore needs the appearance of compassion, loyalty, honesty and humanity, together with results that make those appearances believable. The source presents public virtue as a political instrument. The method behind the result can remain hidden as long as the population sees the right qualities and experiences the intended outcome.
Virtù, fortuna, and the river
Machiavelli’s reputation for pure cynicism hides his account of agency. The Prince sets human capacity against Fortuna, the force of chance and changing circumstance. The Italian word virtù does not mean moral virtue in this setting. It names the qualities that let a person act effectively: boldness, intelligence, courage, cunning, skill and the strength to pursue a chosen end.
The narrator uses a river to explain the relation. A river that floods its plain can destroy a village and kill its people. That is Fortuna. Banks and dams change what the flood can do, which gives preparation the role of virtù. Fortune retains force, yet it gains power through the openings a person leaves unprepared.
The same action can succeed one day and fail the next because circumstances change. Machiavelli’s answer is adaptation. A person has to change an approach when the world around it changes. The idea carries further than the political examples because it treats preparation and flexibility as forms of agency within conditions that no one controls.
The beast and the world as it is
The video then turns from external power to the animal inside a person. Machiavelli believes that beneath the moral rules people claim to follow sits a drive towards desire. The narrator connects this loosely with Carl Jung’s shadow and Freud’s subconscious, although the video does not develop either comparison through a separate source.
Machiavelli’s advice is to work with this animal. A person should act ethically and kindly when circumstances allow, then recognise that moral rules alone cannot solve every threat. The lion frightens away hyenas. The fox avoids traps. The two animals represent force and cunning, which a ruler needs because human laws and moral methods cannot govern every encounter.
The most lasting distinction in the video concerns the world as it should be and the world as it is. A person who acts only according to an imagined good world becomes vulnerable to lies, traps and threats in the actual one. Machiavelli’s point is severe: goodness exists, yet the world contains enough danger to punish anyone who treats goodness as its whole structure. Resilience requires seeing those dangers before deciding how to respond to them.
The failed political life behind the theory
Machiavelli’s own career exposes a problem in the doctrine. He wrote The Prince as a gift to Lorenzo de’ Medici in the hope of regaining the family’s trust and securing a government post. The plan failed. Lorenzo probably never read the book, and the man who openly recommends deceit, betrayal and cruelty would make a dangerous addition to any ruler’s inner circle.
Machiavelli never reached lasting political power. He drafted no constitution, led no revolution and governed no city or country. The historical record offers no large achievement that shows him applying his own methods with the force he attributes to Cesare Borgia. Secrecy could explain part of that absence, since a successful Machiavellian would conceal his work, yet the record still leaves the theory looking self-defeating. Publicly advertising the virtues of cunning makes other people wary of the person who advertises them.
After The Prince failed as a political application, Machiavelli returned to romantic pursuits and wrote sexual comedies that brought him quick fame. He still wanted a place in politics. A Medici cousin later asked for his advice about a conflict between France and Spain, then gave him responsibility for Florence’s defensive walls. When the Spanish army arrived, it bypassed Florence and sacked Rome. The Medici collapsed again, Machiavelli lost his position and fell ill. He died within a month.
The source therefore holds two records together. Machiavelli’s political career remained small, whilst his writing became historically powerful. His ideas describe a method for power that his own life never demonstrates at large scale.
The making of a villain
The Prince was published after Machiavelli’s death. An English cardinal called it a work written by “Satan’s finger”, and Pope Paul IV soon banned it. The book became attached to the religious and political conflicts that followed its publication.
The video focuses on France during the conflict between Huguenots and Catholics. Charles IX was young and sickly, so his mother Catherine de’ Medici held practical power. Catherine was a Florentine and the granddaughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the man to whom The Prince had been dedicated. During the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, thousands of Huguenots were killed and Catherine was blamed.
The Huguenot writer Innocent Gentillet escaped the violence and wrote a work that fixed Machiavelli’s place as a villain. He presented Catherine as a compulsive reader of Machiavelli and treated the author as the expression of a cruel Italian character. His account separated Machiavelli’s ideas from their context, then gathered the most brutal passages into a single doctrine. Translations into Latin and English carried that image from intellectual circles into popular culture before The Prince itself appeared in English. Plays and literature turned “Machiavellian” into a synonym for evil.
The video gives a narrower thesis. Machiavelli argues that Christian morality and effective political leadership can conflict. Modern politicians across political systems still maintain moral appearances whilst pursuing power, and the narrator sees that separation in current political life. The claim belongs to the video’s interpretation. It does not establish that Machiavelli caused modern political behaviour or that every politician follows the same pattern.
The danger of taking him whole
The narrator resists Machiavelli’s cynicism and says that people are inherently good. Machiavelli would call that a failure to understand the world as it is. The exchange gives the video its final tension. The point of reading Machiavelli lies in recognising the traps that a hopeful view can miss. His political programme remains dangerous when treated as a complete way of life, whilst ignoring his account of power leaves a person exposed to the behaviour he describes.
The useful part of the philosophy stays narrow. Agency requires preparation for Fortuna. Political appearances can hide methods that deserve scrutiny. A leader who relies on fear has to manage hatred. A person who treats the world as wholly good may fail to see a threat until it has become irreversible. Those observations can sharpen judgment without turning Cesare Borgia into a model.
Limits
This note reconstructs Horses’ argument from the complete English caption track and the video’s description. The video provides no bibliography beyond a Tim Parks translation of The Prince and a Michael Sugrue lecture. Its figures about Florence, the political history of Italy, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and Machiavelli’s career remain claims made by the source here. The sections on Jung, Freud and modern politicians also stay at the level of the video’s comparison and interpretation. They would need separate historical or scholarly sources before they could support a stronger claim.