Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Okay, I'm back with Ada Palmer, who is a science fiction author, composer, historian at the University of Chicago. Ada, this time I want to talk to you about Machiavelli.

**Ada Palmer** (0:08)
Yes.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:09)
So he writes The Prince, he dedicates it to Lorenzo de Piero de Medici, and gives it to him in 1513, and he says in the final chapter, you're the only person who can bring Italy from its current place of ruin and ravage. Why were things so bad? What is the historical context in which she's writing The Prince?

**Ada Palmer** (0:25)
So I'm going to give a two-part answer to that, although of course with any granular history, there can be many parts. But the papacy is part of it, and then the city-state structure of Italy is another part of it. And I'll start with the city-state structure. There's a principle in politics that when there's long continuity of a government and the government has been in power a long time, that government has a lot of legitimacy. People believe in its institutions, people are used to it. Even if you complain about it, it's the government, etc. When you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. So it's very common when there's one regime change for that, there'll then be five regime changes rapid fire over and over. We see this with how many iterations the French Republic goes through, the French Republic and then restored monarchy and then republic and then monarchy. When a long thing cracks, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, you get chaos. England's Wars of the Roses are similar. There was one stable dynasty for a long time. The moment that a king is overthrown, then you have overthrow, overthrow, overthrow, overthrow for a long time because the thread of continuity was cut. In Machiavelli's lifetime, that thread of continuity is cut for the majority of cities in Italy.
That guarantees from his perspective that there's going to be more and more and more and more overthrows in those governments. Because if when Machiavelli was born, there were six or seven city states in Italy that had had governments uprooted recently. By the time he's writing The Prince, it's dozens and in fact the majority of these places. So it's volatile. Almost no government has staying power. Almost every government is ripe for yet another replacement, yet another replacement, yet another replacement. That's half the answer of why he perceived there to be this urgency and this guarantee that there cannot be stability. The other half is the papacy.
The papacy, of course, is a long and evolving organism, right? The papacy is one of the oldest institutions in the world. Now, it was one of the oldest institutions of the world even then, even though this is 500 years ago.
As we all know, when you have power centralized in an authority, especially an executive, there can be changes in how that executive uses that power. Each one sets norms for the next one. Over the course of Machiavelli's lifetime and just before, a bunch of consecutive popes expanded executive power and especially the military side and launched more wars or did more arbitrary overthrow of governments. Because you have a number of city states that are directly ruled by the papacy. In theory, the pope can appoint anybody to be ruler of that city.
Here's the pope, he has an illegitimate son, he wants his illegitimate son to be ruler of something, so he overthrows the government of a city and puts in his son. The next pope does it to three cities, the next pope does it to five, and soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it.
Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. This creates a unique instability within Italy, that no other part of Europe is subject to, because there is no predictability to who's going to be pope next. It isn't hereditary, you can't plan for it. The next pope is elected. As is often the case with elections, very frequently, the next pope will be elected by a coalition of all the people who hate the current pope.
One of the things that electoral politics does is that it tends to swing, in which those outside of power work hard to get into power with the next regime. Which means if we assume that the average length of a papacy is 10 years in this period, every 10 years you suddenly have a completely unpredictable new monarch who's almost guaranteed to be one of the enemies of the old monarch, and will therefore rip up and replace all of the things that that monarch tried to do with new things. So Machiavelli, when he's writing the last chapter of The Prince is looking around and saying, okay, we have a perfect storm of power in this region, and we have a perfect storm of power in this region. So he's saying, practically every polity in this region has just had the threat of legitimacy cut. Its institutions have no traditions, its people have no investment in its current rulers. These are all pawns that have been knocked over before and barely stood up again. They're ready to fall. And meanwhile, nothing will stop the turnover of popes. The only thing that could stop the turnover of popes would be one person gaining enough power and ascendancy near this region who has staying power, who has sons at heredity, that he can do what Cesare Borgia tried to do and have enough power near the papacy to strongly influence the next pope to create a kind of stability that's otherwise impossible.