The Republic’s Purpose: A Few Thoughts Inspired by Cicero and Machiavelli

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. “ 

-Marcus Tullius Cicero  (106-43 BC)

Leaders and citizens ungoverned by an ethic of political responsibility to a democratic republic, perhaps most especially to its formal and informal norms, may be more dangerous than any ‘enemy at the gates.’  Indeed, they may become the ‘enemy within the gates.’  Such leaders or citizens need not be driven by evil from foreign sources.  The evil that motivates them may be entirely their own, cultivated within themselves and their home culture.  They may be treasonous in their subversion of the essential norms and processes of the republic and the traditions and processes that sustain it. They may adopt ideas and attitudes opposing  deliberation and compromise.  They may deceive and distort to manipulate and undermine.  Some may be so certain of their own rectitude that they do not doubt themselves and cannot tolerate being doubted by others.  They may encourage extreme and rigid partisanship focused upon who they are not and be so desirous of unifying against the “other” that common ground and negotiation are unacceptable.  They are apt to place their personal benefit above the general interest or to believe them to be identical.  All of which is accompanied by decreasing restraint, decreasing cooperation, and increasing conflict.  Cicero enjoins us to understand that such an actor  “speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.”

Ignorance, misinformation, and disinformation have long been dangers to the sustenance of the republic but in our time have become ever more so given the character, speed, complexity, and magnitude of communications technology and capacities to manipulate and corrupt the human conversation.  In the present, the republic needs to deal with ignorance in the presence of an excess of misinformation pushing truth aside.  Rigid certainties often mistaken but embedded in many minds work in contradiction to the republic’s purposes and expectations.   In this setting the free exchange of opinions and ideas supposed to expose deceit and subterfuge, produce better lives and an improving community seem to fail, giving way to ‘gas-lighting’ by which lies become facts in the minds of too many.  Both the emergence of leaders and the leaders themselves as well as the thoughts and acts of citizens are corrupted.  But, human achievement is poorly understood and inadequately recognized if we do not see its occurrence in the context of human error, failure, and struggle as well as the seeking for wealth, power and glory.

Yet, republican culture in its emergent political religions/ideologies has a powerful tendency to seek perfection rather than ongoing, malleable progress.  We periodically experience fear launched populisms or “children’s crusades” seeking leadership to an idealized society by which we make ‘the perfect the enemy of the good.’  Or, we fall back upon deep seated cultural tendencies that deny rationality and the value of thought and deliberation.  Indeed, we allow belief unsupported by coherent evidence to become an absolute claim to knowledge.  Then deliberative compromise becomes an unacceptable violation of unfounded fundamental principles that need only to be asserted to claim power to govern.  We allow belief to confound reason and precede truth, eschew the benefits of doubt, permit passions to override empirical reality, and ignore science in seeking final answers rather than more and better questions.   Perhaps most absurdly some may even seek to escape or to bring an end to politics while thinking that would purify and preserve ideal intentions but, rather,  assures their destruction.

It may be a truism that a republic need not be a democracy and a democracy need not be a republic but it is not difficult to see some union of the two conceptions.  Machiavelli’s thoughts in The Prince (1513), when read without knowledge of his other writings, often misleads people into thinking that he was an advocate of ruthless authoritarianism as a natural or preferred type of  government.  Shakespeare’s reference to “the murderous Machiavell” in  Richard III is a noted example suggesting that common misreading.  A full study of the work of Machiavelli tells us that what he seems to most want was a stable, strong republic that served its citizens well.  It should be noted that the idea of a republic speaks more to the structure of the state than to its mode of operation whereas democracy speaks more to a system of operation that to its structure.  Both, taken together would serve his purpose but only if those who govern and those who are governed gain the skills and dedication needed to sustain a republic.

A republic may be marked by autocracy, oligarchies or plutocracies, not far removed from the kingdoms and principalities that Machiavelli hoped to replace.  Democratic values are mainly procedural in nature and can be made effective in a republic but both the processes of democracy and the institutions of a republic can be corrupted.  The underlying strength and weakness of a democratic republic is to be found in its leaders and citizens neither of whom always evidence the needed qualities.  Blood claims or other claims to inherent competencies assign legitimacy to princes whereas the choices of citizens and leaders assign it to republican government.  In both cases power may be assigned erroneously.  Neither blood nor wealth convey political virtue, yet we may persist in seeking a “perfect prince” allowing expectations and exhortations to disengage us and distort reality so to endanger the republic.  As a result both leaders and citizens may subvert the political order intentionally or unintentionally, or may simply fail to comprehend or apply the politically responsible ethics needed for its sustenance.  The organization of the republic may not be respected and/or the necessary procedural values of governance may not be observed.

Machiavelli’s prince, at the highest level of his expectation, was a leader who cultivated the basis of a republic and bequeathed it to successors who might establish and keep it.  It is the ‘keeping’ that is most critical although Machiavelli paid more attention to the founding “prince” rather than the problem of successors since, perhaps, “princes” would no longer be needed in a republic of citizens.  Now, more than five centuries since Machiavelli, we may say that the survival and well-being of a republic requires citizens to assume the attributes of wise princes and wise princes to put citizenship first.  As a ruthless political realist he surely knew that would be a tall order and likely vain hope.  Still he hoped. After all, is it not action in the present that opens or closes the door to the future?

Both citizens and leaders must appreciate, here adapting Martin Luther King’s famous line, that the “arc of the moral universe” must be made to bend toward justice, it does not automatically do so and that their tasks are eternal and sometimes resemble the labors of Sisyphus.  Indeed, a republican order often founders on the attempt to identify and define justice itself or defines it wrongly.  Once identified, justice rarely is to be realized by stepping into a known past but requires moving toward a hitherto unanticipated future.  We expect much of ourselves as a species.  For does it not appear that we cannot measure the full nature, extent, or content of justice except from the perspective of our nature and the time and place in which we make the attempt, as well as the future we imagine and desire yet must construct in reality?

But, the attempt must be made if we would defend and keep the republic for it remains the best means by which to seek justice in the face of human imperfection and despite the sly and whispering enemies acting from both without and within.  It requires us to think critically, to seek evidence to support any claims to truth or rectitude, and to continually engage in a search for justice that recognizes that the results ultimately must apply to all or none.  A just liberty is to be achieved through effective and efficient government and is ever a result of changing knowledge, balance and compromise.  Thus we may have what may be the keys to our understanding of the republic’s purpose, it is a means, not an end.

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