Read Trump the Art of the Deal Vs the Prince Machiavelli

"Real ability is – I don't even desire to utilize the give-and-take – fear."

This sentence could have been written by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was spoken by Donald Trump in March 2016 when Trump was all the same only a candidate for the The states presidency, and these words now appear as the epigraph to Bob Woodward's volume Fear: Trump in the White House.

Is a more off-putting introduction to our subject imagin­able? If nosotros are tempted to assign words spoken by Don­ald Trump to Machiavelli, it's not just because many western leaders have, and for a long fourth dimension, bolstered their sense of their ain power by affecting a cynical and crafty tone in the belief that it represents the last word in Machiavellian thought. It's considering nosotros literally don't know what to think of Machiavelli. Should nosotros admire him or non, is he with us or against us, and is he notwithstanding our con­temporary or is what he says ancient history?

My little book doesn't pretend to resolve these questions; nor is it addressed to those who will read it to feel that they have right on their side – whether that side is answerable to justice or to power. On the contrary, this book tries to stay in that uncomfortable zone of thought that sees its own indeterminacy as the very locus of politics.

I should, at this stage, give a few explanations – who is speaking, and to whom. I don't con­sider myself a historian of political ideas, but I approached Machiavelli a decade ago, yoking him with Leonardo da Vinci in an essay on contemporaneousness. Unexpect­edly, I establish Machiavelli a useful guide and support – I'd almost say a faithful friend, one whose intelligence never failed me.

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My conversations with Machiavelli became more regular and fruitful as I approached topics of which the Florentine author was, in his day, the most clear-sighted analyst. This happened first as I researched the political meaning of the compages of the quattrocento. Machia­velli taught me to meet it less as a representation of power than as a car for producing political emotions: per­suasion, in the public buildings of the republican city-states; and intimidation, in the fortified strongholds that the princes congenital to keep those states in line. In every instance, Machiavelli proved a worthy brother-in-arms who, because he had thrown lite on his own times, threw light on ours – proving himself a contemporary in the very all-time sense.

During the summer of 2016, I gave a series of daily talks on French public radio in which I tried to articu­belatedly this capacity of Machiavellian thought to sharpen our understanding of the present. My picayune book col­lects those texts, which in their biting brevity and direct address effort to harmonize in mode with Machiavelli – non just his manner of writing merely his art of thinking, which brings to flashpoint the fusion of verse and politics.

Only one of these talks was non broadcast on the French republic Inter network during the summer of 2016, the fifth, focused on Machiavelli's reading of Lucretius'southward De natura rerum, "a dangerous and deviant volume that makes the world leap its rail and come off its hinges". The programme was to air the episode on Friday 15 July, but it was swallowed up by the sorrow, acrimony and numbness that followed the terrorist attack on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on 14 July, France's national holiday, when 86 peo­ple were killed and more than than 400 wounded. Although this volume restores the text to its original identify, in that location is still a gap left by the lasting stamp of fear.

Is that why I have called to give prominence in the book's American edition to the politics of fear? Not solely. Equally I write this preface, I am remembering a dia­logue that I had with the political scientist Corey Robin, the author of a major book in 2004, Fear: The History of a Political Idea.

"One day," he wrote, "the war on terror­ism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, just of the domestic rulers that fear has left backside." Our discussion, which led to the publica­tion in 2015 of L'exercice de la peur: usages politiques d'une émotion (Spreading fear: the political uses of an emo­tion), asked whether the American manner of fear might be exported around the globe.

We touched on Hobbes, of course, De Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, but likewise Machiavelli, who continually inquired about the fears of those who govern: what makes them truly afraid? When justice stops existence effective (or when crimes of corruption stop being punished) and when political vio­lence is no longer a threat, at that place is nothing left to crusade fear in those who govern shamelessly, that is, buoyed by a mood they aren't in control of and that no ane is on mitt to countervail. What will then happen to the repub­lic? This question inevitably arises when anxiety is felt most democracy, because the republic loses its stability when it no longer reflects a pacified equilibrium between the different fears that carve up information technology.

Niccolò Machiavelli, past Santi di Tito. Photo: Imagno/Getty Images

In 1975, JGA Pocock defined that loss of equilib­rium as "the Machiavellian moment", when there is daylight between a democracy and its values. American his­torians have since associated Machiavelli'south name with that form of political crisis, a practice I have followed in this book. And today we are undeniably living through another Machiavellian moment, again bringing the Flor­entine author shut to the core of American reality.

Living in unstable times, Machiavelli was keenly aware that the onetime political dictionary, which the Mid­dle Ages had inherited from Aristotle, no longer served him adequately. He defined the intellectual's task every bit a kind of resoluteness toward truth – beingness unmoved by the dazzle of words to "go straight toward the actual truth of the thing".

This feel, which is profoundly Machiavellian in nature, is ane that recurs once again and again in history, whenever the words for expressing the things of politics become obsolete. What do we do when confronting adversaries nosotros can't put a name to? Nosotros telephone call them "fascists", for want of a better term – just as in Italy's medieval communes, the people called the lords "tyrants". We intend to confound them, to abash and bring them downward, when we should in fact be examining what they say closely for its fascist potential. One thing is certain: when we use words from the past, we are show­ing our inability to empathise the present.

Since the summer of 2016, in France merely besides in the United States and elsewhere, every political forecast has been systematically proven wrong. In the past few years it seems that the perverse pleasance that the pub­lic takes in contradicting pollsters – who minimize the voters' ability to choose past presenting developments equally foreordained – has turned to fierce vindictiveness. Looking only at electoral results, from the United King­dom'south Brexit vote on 23 June 2016, on whether to remain in the European Wedlock, to Donald Trump'southward election to the US presidency on 8 November of that same year, the qualità dei tempi has definitely turned to storms.

The consequences for the French electoral bike, starting in January 2017, were similarly astounding. Following a series of extraordinary circumstances that eliminated all the expected candidates one after another – those picked either every bit favorites or as dead certainties – the election gave the presidency to Emmanuel Macron, a man who happened in his philosophical youth to have written an essay on Machiavelli. When a journalist asked me well-nigh this electoral boom-and-grab, and then feature of the boldness commended past the writer of The Prince, I glibly described Macron equally a "Machiavelli in opposite", pregnant that the French president had abandoned philosophy for politics, whereas Machiavelli chose to make his mark in philosophy when politics abandoned him.

What import does a virtuoso of political ruses like Machiavelli accept for us? If he were nil more than the wily and unscrupulous strategist that a hostile pos­terity has portrayed him to be, so not much at all. In these troubled times, when the stutterers can't be told from those who are talking of the future, the last peo­ple anyone wants to hear from are the then-chosen experts at predicting trends, who reduce all the indeterminacy in political life to a few elementary rules of collective activeness. The simplicity of those rules has everything to practise with the experts' lack of imagination.

Machiavelli is that thinker of alternatives who dissects every situation into an "either/or", drawing a crossroads of meaning at every phase of historical evolution. But if he is captivating, it'south because he lets us run into how the social free energy of political configurations e'er spills out of the neat constructs in which it's meant to stay put. His sentences invariably run away with him; he has no sooner declared that there are merely two avenues than he proceeds down a 3rd. When nosotros endeavour to work out whether a detail political situation is going to turn out one way or another, it's well to remember that it is carried along past a general motility that has already occurred. Possibly this is what awaits many European and other world nations: they are so worried near a awaiting ending that they won't empathise when it has already happened.

People who see history every bit primarily tragic take always felt that the scenes of our disarray might well have been penned by a ghostly Shakespeare. Just as "the grotesque wheels of power" (in Michel Foucault'due south phrase) grind into movement, it seems that the coarsening of public discourse we are now experiencing got its start on a less exalted stage – none other than that misleadingly named feature of Trumpian America known every bit "reality TV". Information technology is in that location that a general disregard for the "actual truth of the thing" was patiently nurtured. Not for the first time have upcoming politics had their start in fiction.

An showroom at the University of New Mexico. Photograph: Russell Contreras/AP

That'due south why, in 2017, there was such a surge of interest in the United States in George Orwell'due south 19 Eighty-Four. Literature doesn't predict the hereafter whatsoever more than than it protects us from its threats. It warns, yes, in the sense that it sounds the alert about a ending that generally doesn't hap­pen, or not in the way it was imagined. Ever since 1984 came and went without bearing out Orwell'southward dystopian predictions, we no longer read his novel as a foreshad­owing or preview of a totalitarian regime. At this stage, we know that totalitarianism is a category not so much meant to depict a political reality as to make that real­ity fit into a pre-established form – for instance, at the end of the second globe war, when the liberal democracies were intent on demonstrating that communism would pur­sue nazism by other means.

In a sense, totalitarianism is a political fiction. Information technology had its starting time trial in George Orwell'south 1949 fable and was then given a theoretical analysis by Hannah Arendt in 1951. Nosotros now know that what came subsequently, what obtains today, took its place without receiving a name. Orwell imag­ined the tyranny of a "Ministry building of Truth" but that'southward non what happened, and we don't yet know if it'due south for ameliorate or worse. "The Political party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears," Orwell's hero, Winston Smith, says in Xix Lxxx-Four. And: "Not simply the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied." What the novel describes is the capacity of propaganda to hollow out a receptive space in people by undermin­ing reality and sense experiences. "The bear witness of one's eyes and ears" referred to by Orwell could exist common sense; it could also be that 6th sense Machiavelli spoke of, the accessory knowledge that the people take of what is dominating them.

Admittedly it was not the Party, as imagined past anti-totalitarian writers, that spoke when Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, declared, "Our inten­tion is never to lie to y'all," before adding "sometimes we can disagree with the facts." It's not a Party, but information technology's something else that we don't know what to call, a fiction that is taking on body under our eyes. And what we need to empathize is: what is this taking on of torso, and how can our own gild come to embody monstrousness? Gramsci read Machiavelli's The Prince replacing the word "prince" with the give-and-take "party". We could in plough read Orwell and replace "party" with "prince". Either way, Machiavelli needs to be read not in the nowadays, but in the future tense.

Should we look in Machiavelli's work for the art of coming to terms over our disagreements or look instead for that skill the dominated take of recog­nizing the science of their domination? And in that instance, why not look at his theater, his histories, even his love verse?

I tried during the summer of 2016 to reconstruct the face of Machiavelli hidden by the mask of Machiavel­lianism; and if that face turned out to be as changeable as a storm-tossed sky, it'south because its owner hardly had the time to cull amid his different talents. They all brought him back to his fine art of naming with precision that which was happening, his ability to take stock implaca­bly, inextricably joining poetry and politics.

3 years after, what is the sense of spending fur­ther time with Machiavelli? The aforementioned sense, perhaps, that Walter Benjamin attributed to the very ambition of history: "To clear the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it actually was'. Information technology means to seize hold of a retentiveness as it flashes upwardly at a moment of danger."

• This is an edited extract from Machiavelli: The Art of Instruction People What to Fear past Patrick Boucheron, published in the US by Other Press

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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/08/real-power-is-fear-donald-trump-machiavelli-boucheron

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