Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli as the Founder of Modernity

Conversations with Bill Kristol

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🗓️ 21 October 2021

⏱️ 72 minutes

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Summary

But since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. — Niccolo Machiavelli, in Chapter 15 of The Prince. According to Harvey Mansfield, these lines including the phrase effectual truth—a term invented by Machiavelli—are central to Machiavelli’s founding of the revolution in philosophy, science, and politics that we call modernity. In this Conversation—our 200th episode!—our first and most frequent guest Harvey Mansfield returns to the program to discuss his recent work on Machiavelli, and presents an incisive and provocative account of some of the more challenging and too-little-understood aspects of Machiavelli’s teaching. In particular, Mansfield draws out the world-historical significance of Machiavelli’s discovery or invention of the effectual truth and shows why Machiavelli can justly be called the founder of modernity. This Conversation has also been added to the Harvey Mansfield site on Contemporary Thinkers and the Machiavelli site on Great Thinkers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very glad to be joined again by Harvey Mansfield,
0:20.4	the Harvard professor, the original converser or conversationalist or whatever the
0:26.2	proper term is here. But it's great to have you back and great to be discussing Machiavelli,
0:31.6	which you've worked on for a long time, translated several of the major works. And I'll tell you
0:38.4	to be here. Thank you. Well, good to have you. And I'll tell you an earlier volume from 1996,
0:43.1	Machiavelli's Virtue. And now of the forthcoming volume of articles, Machiavelli's
0:50.9	Effectual Truth. At least that's where you're intending to go online. That's your title, right?
0:57.2	And of which there's a new introduction, which we'll focus on perhaps today, which is really
1:02.3	terrific and important, I think. And then a very long essay, which could be a short book on
1:07.4	Machiavelli and Watchescue, which you could also, if you can touch on that too. That would be great.
1:13.0	So it's really great to have you back first of all, and right to have you here,
1:18.8	meeting interpreter Machiavelli, one of the two great modern interpreters Machiavelli. Well,
1:25.0	well, it's okay to put Leo Stras in the same category. Elevate him to the same category.
1:31.7	That's a great elevation for me. So let's talk about an undeserved elevation. Let me say a word
1:43.1	for Leo Stras. And his thoughts on Machiavelli is a famous game-changing book of 1958.
1:50.0	He changed his opinion about Machiavelli as well. I think it's well-known. An earlier book
1:56.0	in the late 30s on the political philosophy of Hobbes, he said that Hobbes was the founder of
2:03.4	modernity. And in this book, he changed his mind. And he said, no, it wasn't Hobbes. It was
2:11.1	Machiavelli. He had not paid sufficient attention to the forces that prevented Machiavelli
2:20.5	from being as explicit as Hobbes was. And that was the reason that he gave for his mistake,
2:31.0	as he said. And in his Hobbes book, he claimed, he made it in arguments, still powerful,
2:41.5	and read by most of the scholars on Hobbes, and believed by some of them, that Hobbes is more
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