Niccolo and I on Corruption and Its Cure

In the cosy tavern somewhere in the land of dreams, where spirits are served to the spirits and soft conversation is had between ghosts

I feel almost like a personal friend with Niccolo Machiavelli. We two sit conversing across a table in a ghostly tavern serving spirits to the spirits beyond time, he a ghost from the first quarter of the 1500s and I a dreamer, as now our tortured 21st century rounds its first quarter.

Niccolo Machiavelli is famous for writing his advice to dictators, Il Princep, The Prince. He is less famous for writing his more extensive work, “Discourses on the History of Titus Livius”, about the Roman Republic and republics in general and why, throughout the known centuries of European civilization, republics – meaning systems of government which try to be democratic to one degree or another – always seem to fail.

Niccolo was personally invested in the question. He had been a diplomat for the Republic of Florence for 20 years until in the early 1500s the republic was overthrown and the Medici family, richest bankers in Europe, re-installed themselves as dictators. During this revolutionary coup Niccolo was arrested and tortured and finally released and confined to his house and small family-owned wooded acreage some miles outside Florence. It was there that he scraped a bare living selling wood from his woodlot and there where he spent evenings during the 1510s writing his famous works.

He wrote The Prince in order to try to get some desperately needed patronage money – which he never did get – from Lorenzo di Medici. He wrote The Discourses out of his love for the lost Florentine Republic and his need to explain why it failed and to discern out of the evidence of history what may be the consequences for the future of Italy and of Europe of the failure to live up to the civilization of the Ancient Roman Republic at its best. The Roman Republic lasted for seven hundred years but it eventually failed.

Why, he asked, do republics always fail? Corruption is the one-word answer. The powerful few, the “Gentlemen” use their wealth to corrupt the honest servants of the popular will so that over time those who should enforce the public laws and political constitution are bought and sold. Even the laws and the councillors who make them are perverted into the means of denying the common people the voice in government which the Republic had promised that they would always have.

“And, to be clear,” said Niccolo, ”By the term “Gentlemen” I mean those men who live on the interest of their property and money alone without doing any other productive activity. Such men are the enemies of free government everywhere. And worse than these are those who have castles and followers who obey them. The overabundance of these types in other parts of Italy south of Tuscany has always made it impossible to erect a republic there.”

The terrible paradox, the downward spiral of the feed-back loop of corruption is inherent in human society. The tragedy of republics is this paradox:

As Niccolo put it in his uniquely terse style, “Good laws require good customs in order that they may be obeyed. But good customs require good laws in order that they can be preserved”.

There is the terrible vulnerability of republics: perverting the laws corrupts the people so good customs die. When thieves and criminals become legislators and judges a common man must break the law or he and his family cannot survive.

When corruption at the top has thoroughly rotted the republican society, eventually the common people must admit that the powerful and privileged few at the top get away with theft and murder and moral depravity which a healthy comity must not permit if it is to remain peaceful, prosperous and functional for all.

Dictatorship and social and economic degradation and eventual poverty always accompany despotism because the oligarchy at the top convulsively annihilate any rivals who may try to rise up. So they drive honesty and competence out of all institutions. Those who are given authority became progressively more idiotic and incapable until stupidity crosses the border of sanity itself. Niccolo saw it in his day and now we see it too.

When the rot has proceeded so far without being checked the oppressed and robbed people imagine that a revolution, the violent overthrow of society, might be the cure-all. But Niccolo had little faith in the idea.

“Reforming society presupposes a good man. But overthrowing society by violence presupposes a bad man. Thus in history one always sees that once the bad man has overthrown society by violence it seldom or never comes into his head to reform it.”