she finds that Machiavelli is not as unfavorably disposed to Agathocles as Lefort implies
(she notes that Agathocles is soon after “offered as an example of someone who used
cruelty well rather than badly, and who was consequently ‘able to reassure people, and
win them over to his side with benefits.”)
But as we have already seen, such actions in
and of themselves do not lead to glory but only acquiescence (maybe even popularity), a
private calculus that each of us makes for ourselves. Kahn furthermore hints that there
remains at least the possibility of some ethical substance in the nature of glory although
not necessarily something that classical rhetoricians would recognize. In what she calls
an “optimistic” version of how to read Machiavelli (and she goes on to supply a more
pessimistic reading as well,) Kahn writes of how the need to win esteem—and ultimately
glory--can in effect serve as a real check on private ambition:
The prince must in the long run please his audience if he is to maintain his rule. In
the end, the rhetorical topic of truth proves to involve an ironic version of the
ethical constraint that the humanists located in custom and consensus. This
constraint also helps us to see how the analysis of power in The Prince logically
gives way to that in The Discourses: the prince, to be successful in the long run,
must found a republic because republics are capable of greater longevity and virtu
than principalities. The ‘understanding’ reader will see that when representation
and force are mutually implicated, when representation becomes a means of
power, and thus finally when power is mitigated by the exigencies of persuasion,
the short-lived individual self-aggrandizement gives way to communal glory, and
the prince must of necessity become a fellow citizen.
Kahn shows quite effectively how Machiavelli does not merely describe but practices the
manipulations of public esteem (taken in its broadest sense) on his own readers . To get
the reader to accept a more destabilized and contingent notion of virtù, the very question
of what they find worthy of esteem must be explored and exploited.
His textual manipulations notwithstanding, it remains true that for Machiavelli,
glory cannot be cajoled or bought, but must be earned (or more accurately, produced via
the means he describes in his various writings). Glory, however much it may be the
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Convention