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these are closely related to Christianity. What Machiavelli says is that these values are
neither right nor wrong, but for politico-military purposes, the leader must not take them
seriously, and if needed, he may feign to have them. These qualities are those of
liberality, generosity, mercy, faith, weakness, chastity, honesty, agreeableness, lightness
of spirit, and religiosity. These are close to Christian tenets, yet Machiavelli advises the
emperor, prince, or leader to not believe that they are immutable moral laws. By positing
these as antinomies with their opposites, Machiavelli suggests that moral behavior is a
matter of degree rather than of categorical distinctions. In fact it is more important to
appear to have a particular quality than to actually have it. This is an aesthetic approach,
since it is concerned with appearances and the imitation
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of values rather than their
actual practice. Hence Machiavelli allows the emperor to behave in ways that are the
opposite of the Christian gospel.
The central (im)moral advice is to be able to use cruelty well. This allows the
leader of a nascent empire to acquire the life, liberty, and land of foreigners. As a result,
the invading state—and its citizens—will gain much. Thus the acts of the emperor are not
truly selfish, they are done in the service of the common good, but the common good of a
particular people alone. If one were to value liberty as an abstract universal principle, one
could not act in an imperialistic manner, since it would entail the violation of other
people’s freedom in what would be a partisan enterprise. Instead of the golden rule,
Machiavelli would endorse a different maxim: ‘do onto others before they do onto you.’
Moral principles, then, cannot be at the heart of the quest for political power in
the view of the Florentine. This applies to either principalities or republics, and for this
reason he blames Florence for not having in its bosom a man like Cesare Borgia, one who
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Imitation is the basic category of aesthetics, owing its origin to Plato’s view of mimesis.
Convention