Ada Palmer Reclassifies Machiavelli as Selfless Patriot, Not Cynic

Ada Palmer重评马基雅维利：是无私爱国者而非犬儒 马基雅维利撰写《君主论》是作为一份高度专有的手册来帮助美第奇家族拯救佛罗伦萨，而非作为个人谋求政治晋升的指南。 历史学家 Ada Palmer 重新审视了马基雅维利，指出他并非冷酷无情、工于心计且不讲道德的人，而是一位坚定奉献的佛罗伦萨爱国者，其战略洞见被设计为专属知识，旨在保护自己的城邦免受生存威胁。对话探讨了文艺复兴时期意大利混乱的地缘政治，从 Cesare Borgia 冷酷的现实政治和教皇制的结构性动荡，到庇护机制、公民宗教以及宗教裁判所的实际运作。通过追溯马基雅维利的著作在数个世纪中如何被利用、查禁和神化，Palmer 揭示了这位为佛罗伦萨牺牲个人财富的历史爱国者与流行文化中“马基雅维利式”恶棍原型之间的鲜明鸿沟。 1513年，马基雅维利在意大利城邦体制崩溃与教皇任期变动导致政局反复洗牌的绝境中写下《君主论》，将其献给洛伦佐·德·美第奇，试图为拯救佛罗伦萨寻求出路。 (0:00) 通过观察切萨雷·博尔吉亚的铁血手腕，马基雅维利提炼出政治评估的理性框架：他认为人类德能（virtù）与命运（fortuna）各掌管一半事务，评判决策应依据其在信息有限下的合理胜算，而非偶发厄运。 (10:00) 基于对人性自私的现实主义洞察，马基雅维利指出君主立威于令人敬畏（fear）远胜于受人爱戴（love），因为基于惩罚恐惧的威慑力始终可靠，而依赖善意的盟约在危机来临时极易瓦解。 (15:00) 马基雅维利是欧洲思想史上首位主张多党竞争合理性的学者，认为政治派系在体制内共存竞争可作为社会压力的安全阀，从而稳定城邦而非招致毁灭。 (20:00) 在文艺复兴时期以私人庇护作为维稳纽带的社会中，马基雅维利深刻区分了“自由”与“奴役”：即便独裁统治高效公正，任凭专制者主观意志摆布的臣民依然是奴隶，唯有依托既定法律体制与制度制衡才能维系真正的公民自由。 (50:00)

Historian Ada Palmer argues that Niccolò Machiavelli is profoundly misunderstood: rather than an amoral archetype of selfish ambition, he was a deeply patriotic civil servant whose ruthless political analyses were designed to achieve civic stability in a catastrophically volatile Renaissance Italy. Institutional Instability and the Logic of Italian Statecraft (0:00) Machiavelli's political philosophy emerged from an era characterized by chronic regime changes and external threats. In 16th-century Italy, the collapse of long-standing municipal legitimacy left city-states vulnerable to serial overthrows. This instability was exacerbated by the Papacy, which operated as an elective monarchy where successive popes frequently purged rivals, installed illegitimate sons, and triggered regional conflict. Italian states were forced to navigate constant existential threats, with cities like Florence regularly budgeting annual payouts to bribe foreign monarchs, such as Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, simply to avert catastrophic warfare. Analytical Pragmatism Beyond the Caricature of Ruthlessness (10:00) Palmer clarifies that Machiavelli did not promote indiscriminate brutality or simply assert that the ends justify the means. Instead, he evaluated political actions based on their probable outcomes prior to the interference of Fortuna (luck). How a leader acquired power dictated its durability: relying on mercenaries left a state fragile, while decisive cruelty could establish lasting order. For example, Cesare Borgia’s pacification of Romagna eliminated feuding local factions and instituted an equitable justice system, making his rule surprisingly popular among ordinary citizens despite his ruthless methods. Structural Inventions: Multiparty Balance and Secularized Civic Religion Machiavelli introduced foundational concepts to Western political science, including the radical proposition that competing political factions could stabilize a state. Observing Siena, he argued that multi-party tension acted as an institutional release valve, contrasting with Florence’s historical practice of completely exterminating rival factions like the Ghibellines. Furthermore, as reflected in his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli viewed religion through a utilitarian lens: ancient Roman paganism successfully bound citizens to patriotic sacrifice through civic fear and oaths, offering a pragmatic tool for republican survival that later thinkers like Thomas Paine would also advocate. Patronage Networks as Renaissance Institutional Glue Machiavellian statecraft operated inside an era where formal legal systems depended on informal patronage. Severe statutory penalties were rarely carried out as written—Palmer notes that roughly one in one hundred capital sentences was actually executed—because patrons routinely intervened with judges on behalf of clients. Nepotism was viewed as essential security rather than corruption; for instance, the Roman public rioted when Pope Paul III selected a merit-based commander over his own illegitimate son, because a family member's survival was inherently tied to the regime. Patronage also allowed nonconformists and radical thinkers, including Marsilio Ficino and Machiavelli himself, to navigate risks around heresy and bisexuality. The Proprietary Patriot and the Myth of 'Old Nick' (80:00) Palmer emphasizes the stark divergence between Machiavelli’s personal life and his cultural legacy. Following torture and banishment to the countryside by the Medici, Machiavelli chose isolated poverty over lucrative employment with foreign courts. He treated The Prince not as a universal manifesto, but as a confidential, bespoke handbook intended for Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici to safeguard Florence. Posthumously, cultural reaction transformed Machiavelli into the caricature 'Old Nick,' a symbol of atheistic deceit referenced by Shakespeare and weaponized in anti-Semitic rhetoric in Spain, obscuring his foundational commitment to republican liberty and civic devotion. Palmer highlights a recurring historical pattern where complex, secular thinkers—including Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Baruch Spinoza—are flattened into cultural bogeymen to serve political paranoia. Engaging with Machiavelli's actual historical context reveals an analyst attempting to construct durable institutions capable of protecting citizens from the chaos of state collapse.

历史学家兼作家 Ada Palmer 指出，Niccolò Machiavelli 是历史上最被误解的思想家：后世常将其塑造成冷酷利己的文化恶魔，但历史上的他实为极度无私的爱国者，其政治理论是在 16 世纪意大利城邦崩溃、教皇政权动荡的极度危机中为国家的生存与稳定寻求现实解方。 意大利地缘危机与手段的政治精度 (0:00) Palmer 分析，理解 Machiavelli 必须回到当时的结构性危机：一是意大利各城邦传统政权被连根拔起，政权普遍缺乏历史合法性；二是教皇国权力的军事化与非世袭选举机制，导致每十年一次的教皇更迭都会引发清算。Machiavelli 亲历了 Cesare Borgia 等势力的威胁，认识到单纯道德说教无法阻挡侵略。尽管他常被视作功利主义者，但 Palmer 指出，Machiavelli 评估行动依据的是在“命运（Fortuna）”介入前的“大概率成功结果”，且极其讲求政治手段的精确性，而非盲目的“不择手段”。 庇护网络、司法宽宥与制度性现实 在文艺复兴时期，庇护（Patronage）与裙带关系是维系社会运转的核心粘合剂，而非单纯的道德腐败。Palmer 举例说明，当时严酷的死刑法条在实际执行中仅有约百分之一落实，绝大多数都会经由庇护人介入而减刑为罚款或鞭笞；司法审判在神学逻辑上更像一场灵魂忏悔的预演。甚至在 Cesare Borgia 占领罗马涅后，由于他是外来者、不受当地派系缠累，反而推行了超越家族特权的中立司法，从而赢得了平民的广泛拥戴。Machiavelli 由此意识到，只要统治者能提供可预期的公平治理，即便手段严酷也能做到“被畏惧而不被憎恨”。 《君主论》的专属性与无私爱国特质 (75:00) 后世将 Machiavelli 视为阴谋家的代名词，但 Palmer 强调这与真实历史截然相反。在遭到美第奇家族逮捕、酷刑折磨并流放到荒僻乡间后，Machiavelli 拥有深厚的外交与军事经验，本可轻易投靠外国君主换取荣华富贵，但他甘愿在隔绝与贫困中忍耐，拒绝为佛罗伦萨以外的任何政权效力。他于 1513 年写就的《君主论》，在当时是一份高度保密的“定制化战略手册”，专供 Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici 阅览，其目的是为拯救佛罗伦萨提供独家政治科技，甚至严防其外泄成为对抗本邦的武器。 古典复兴框架与宗教工具论 (105:00) 文艺复兴时期的知识界认为人类巅峰在于古典罗马时代，原创思想反受冷落，思想家往往将激进理论伪装成古典注疏，Machiavelli 撰写《李维史论》正是顺应此一潮流。对谈中指出，Machiavelli 极度推崇公民宗教的功用，认为正如古罗马创立者 Numa Pompilius 用神明敬畏凝聚罗马人一样，对超越性力量的敬畏是促使公民遵守法律与为国赴死的必要心理工具；这种将宗教视作国家治理实用工具的观点，深远影响了后世启蒙思想家 Thomas Paine 等人。 版权诞生的反讽与双重形象的分裂 (110:00) 随着印刷术兴起，未经授权的印刷与排版错误倒逼了版权概念的萌芽。讽刺的是，现代版权与垄断出版特许权，最初源自天主教宗教裁判所（Inquisition）的出版审查流程。随着作品被广泛传播与曲解，Machiavelli 死后被分裂为两个形象：一个是甘愿为国牺牲的真实学者，另一个则是被莎士比亚戏剧等通俗文化符号化的恶魔化身“Old Nick”。Palmer 总结道，恶魔化的虚构符号被后世用作解剖权力机制的思想实验，而历史真实的 Machiavelli 则展现了极端逆境下对公民职责与国家理性的深刻求索。 理解 Machiavelli 需剥离数百年积累的“邪恶阴谋家”文化滤镜；将《君主论》与《李维史论》置于 16 世纪意大利城邦解体的生存困境、庇护网络以及手稿向印刷术过渡的历史脉络中，方能读懂其追求国家稳定与公民自由的深层思想动机。

## Background 本期节目由德瓦尔凯什·帕特尔（Dwarkesh Patel）于2026年6月16日发布于其个人同名播客（RSS及网页端），特邀历史学家艾达·帕尔默（Ada Palmer）共同探讨马基雅维利为何是“有史以来最被误解的思想家”。节目简介指出，马基雅维利在遭受美第奇政权的怀疑、严刑拷打与流放后，拒绝了欧洲各大王室的高薪延揽，而是选择在乡村贫困中将毕生外交洞察写成《君主论》献给迫害者；这绝非逢迎，而是如同齐拉向罗斯福递交制造原子弹的绝密预警信一样，试图将保卫佛罗伦萨生存的“终极技术”托付给唯一有能力拯救城邦的人。 ## TL;DR 艾达·帕尔默从文艺复兴时期意大利城邦合法性崩塌与教皇国地缘动荡的真实绝境出发，系统还原了马基雅维利思想的底层逻辑。对谈深入剖析了马基雅维利对切萨雷·波吉亚铁腕手段的观察、文艺复兴社会以庇护制和司法救赎为纽带的深层机制，以及将艺术赞助视作高性价比国防外交的独特智慧。帕尔默强调，马基雅维利将世俗权力运作从超自然神学中彻底剥离，其核心著作《君主论》本质上是一份不容外泄的机密专有技术；马基雅维利本人是一位甘愿忍受流亡与贫困也誓死效忠佛罗伦萨的无私爱国者，与后世将其妖魔化为自私阴谋家“老尼克”的流行文化标签形成了尖锐反差。 ## Atmosphere & style 对话充满高密度的智识激荡与极具临场感的历史叙事，帕尔默以学者兼小说家的生动口吻，将残酷的宫廷大屠杀、教廷世仇与基层庇护档案讲得扣人心弦。帕特尔的提问紧凑而具颠覆性，频繁将前现代制度与现代博弈论、制度设计及AI时代做跨时空对照，二人互动充满智力默契与幽默回甘。整场节目既有解剖冷酷权谋时的战栗与清醒，又在探寻马基雅维利孤寂乡村晚景时流露出深沉的悲剧感与敬意，带给听众一种穿透历史迷雾、直面真实人性与政治底色的震撼感。 ## Bulletin - `01:20:00` 《君主论》绝非公开出版物或自私钻营的成功学手册，而是马基雅维利在遭美第奇政权拷打与放逐托斯卡纳乡间后，出于至深爱国情怀为祖国佛罗伦萨量身打造的一份机密治国指南与防御性专有技术。 - `02:00` 文艺复兴时期意大利城邦政局极度脆弱的制度根源，在于城邦统治连续性链条被暴力打破后导致的合法性丧失，以及教皇非世袭选举制每隔约十年引发的剧烈政治清洗与地缘动荡。 - `01:52:45` 现代版权制度并非始于作者权益保护，而是脱胎于宗教裁判所的事前异端审查凭证——印刷商借助教会特许获得排他性印刷垄断权以打击盗版，该机制随后被英国世俗化移植并演变至今。 - `01:35:40` 马基雅维利在思想史上开创了世俗后果主义政治学，不仅先于现代宪政构想了以党派竞争释放政治戾气的制度减压阀，更将宗教剥离真理神圣性，视为激发公民爱国牺牲精神的大众心理效用工具。 ## Key takeaways - `00:00` 统治连续性的链条一旦被暴力截断，新政权便会失去深厚制度合法性，直接导致马基雅维利时代的绝大多数意大利城邦陷入政变与推翻的恶性循环。 - `02:00` 教宗选举制度具有极强的摇摆性与不可预测性，平均约十年一次的政敌换届清洗使得意大利中央动荡不休，唯有兼控佛罗伦萨与教皇国的强大世袭君主方能形成抗衡机制。 - `13:00` 马基雅维利推崇切萨雷·波吉亚并非以成败论英雄，而是看其在命运（Fortuna）干预前做到了最高概率的正确决策；人的理性最多掌控一半结果，另一半永远归于不可控的命运。 - `15:00` 手段的有效性取决于权力的底层逻辑：依赖道德爱戴建立的政权一旦破誓必将迅速坍塌，而基于铁腕恐惧建立的政权反而能通过冷酷清洗与背信强化绝对震慑。 - `20:00` 马基雅维利是欧洲首位提出党派竞争有益论的思想家，认为体制内多党博弈能作为社会减压阀促成权力平稳更迭，打破了文艺复兴时期肉体消灭政敌的零和屠杀惯例。 - `23:45` 神圣感与地理距离成反比：远离罗马的信徒将教皇视作上帝在人间的威严化身，而近在咫尺的意大利同侪则深知教皇是充满私欲、大肆搞裙带分赃的世俗政客军阀。 - `36:25` 庇护制是前现代社会维系信任与运转的核心黏合剂；在缺乏现代法治与合约保障的时代，罗马民众宁要忠诚绑定教廷的平庸私生子执掌军权，也绝不容忍才华出众的外姓指挥官。 - `40:00` 前现代审判本质上是末日救赎的神学预演，被告通过恩主网络求情模拟圣人代祷，使得多达99%的法定死罪最终以罚款轻判化解，唯有被恩主彻底遗弃者才会真正走上绞刑架。 - `50:00` 切萨雷·波吉亚在被占领城邦斩草除根旧门阀并设立中立外来法官，终结了本地世家操纵司法的特权压迫，使得底层平民因冤屈得雪而反常地衷心拥戴这位残暴征服者。 - `53:15` 马基雅维利区分自由与奴役的根本标准在于是否存在制约任意权力的法定程序；即便君主仁善公平，只要其拥有随意处决臣民的特权，该制度下的所有人本质上仍是奴隶。 - `57:08` 文艺复兴时期的艺术赞助并非战乱之余的奢侈消费，而是极具性价比的国防与外交工具，佛罗伦萨通过惊世骇俗的文化软实力构建尊荣以化解庞大外国军队的直接毁灭。 - `01:20:00` 马基雅维利在流亡中展现了极致的爱国主义，断然拒绝欧洲各大宫廷的重金延揽，甘愿在乡间受苦，将平生治国智慧编纂为绝密手册献给佛罗伦萨统治者，防范外敌灭亡母邦。 - `01:32:00` 17世纪欧洲思想界为驳斥霍布斯《利维坦》展现的无神人性图景，被迫溯源研究运用纯世俗后果主义分析国家起源的“怪兽之父”马基雅维利，推动其学说重新成为显学。 - `01:35:40` 马基雅维利从社会心理效用角度推崇古罗马多神教促使公民为追求尘世英名而慷慨赴死，批评基督教纯个人内心的天国救赎教义削弱了保家卫国的战斗意志与城邦凝聚力。 - `01:55:00` 宗教裁判所并非高度集权的恐怖机器，因缺乏独立警卫与监狱，其权力高度寄生于地方世俗政权的配合，使得美第奇等权贵治下形成了包庇异端与激进学者的特权泡沫。 - `02:02:44` 历史上真实的马基雅维利是一位为祖国存亡牺牲名利的无私爱国志士，但在莎士比亚戏剧等通俗文化中被剥离并异化为冷酷自私、投机钻营的魔鬼化身“老尼克”。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` 意大利城邦合法性的断裂与政权更迭的恶性循环 1513 年，马基雅维利完成《君主论》，将其献给小洛伦佐·德·美第奇（Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici）。在全书最后一章中，他疾呼唯有美第奇家族才能将意大利从当下的废墟与蹂躏中拯救出来。要理解这股紧迫感，必须从当时意大利极其恶劣的地缘与历史背景切入。艾达·帕尔默（Ada Palmer）指出，核心根源由两部分组成：第一是意大利城邦的结构性脆弱，第二是教宗国独特的制度机制。 从政治学原理来看，一个政权如果长期保持统治的连续性，就会积累深厚的政治合法性。民众习惯其制度、信任其机构，即便对执政者有所抱怨，政权仍享有持久的生命力。然而，一旦这种连续性的链条被生生截断——无论是统治者被推翻，还是共和国遭到解体——新建立的政权便不再拥有稳固的根基。历史上一旦发生一次暴力政权更迭，往往会引发一连串暴风雨般的连续更迭。无论是法国大革命后共和国、波旁复辟、再次共和与帝制的不断拉锯，还是英国在长久稳定的王朝被推翻后陷入你死我活的玫瑰战争，都揭示了这一规律：一旦连续性的细线被斩断，混乱便接踵而至。 在马基雅维利的一生中，意大利绝大多数城邦的连续性纽带都被彻底斩断： - 在马基雅维利出生时，整个意大利半岛只有六到七个城邦在近期遭遇过政权颠覆。 - 到了他撰写《君主论》的 1513 年，遭遇覆灭和推翻的城邦已达数十个，甚至涵盖了绝大多数政权。 - 几乎所有政体都丧失了制度传统与民众的忠诚投入，变成一推即倒的棋子，注定陷入一次又一次政变与更迭的恶性循环。 ### `00:02` 教宗选举制与教宗国扩张带来的地缘动荡 造成意大利无法自我稳定的另一半原因在于教廷。教宗国是世界上最古老的政治有机体之一，而在马基雅维利出生前后，数任教宗急剧扩张了教廷的行政与军事权力，频繁发动战争，并肆意废黜各地政权。在教宗直辖的领地内，理论上教宗可以指派任何人担任统治者：一位教宗为了给自己私生子安排领地，推翻了一个城邦的政权；下一任教宗则照方抓药推翻了三个城邦；再下一任推翻了五个。这种恶劣先例使得后续即便是性情温和的教宗，也理所当然地继承了“教宗有权随心所欲扫落棋盘上所有棋子”的权力惯性。 更为致命的是教宗选举制度所带来的极端不可预测性。教宗并非世袭，无法按家族继承来提前规划，而是由枢机主教团选举产生： - 选举政治的摇摆效应极其强烈，新教宗往往由痛恨现任教宗的反动联盟推选上位。 - 掌权周期极短，假设当时一任教宗平均在位 10 年，就意味着每隔大约 10 年，意大利中央就会迎来一位敌视前朝、且毫无规律可循的全新君主。 - 新君主一上台，必然会全盘撕毁并推翻前任的所有政治遗产与布局，重新洗牌。 这一机制使得意大利陷入整个欧洲绝无仅有的系统性动荡。在马基雅维利眼中，面对遍地合法性破裂的城邦以及不可阻挡的教宗更迭循环，唯一的破局之法就是出现一位拥有稳固权力、且能通过家族世袭保持连续性的强人。唯有让一个强大的政权直接控制教宗国周边足够广阔的疆域，教廷才会对其心生畏惧并被迫进行对等谈判，从而斩断教宗随意颠覆周边弱小势力的权力狂潮。当时美第奇家族正好既掌控佛罗伦萨，同时家族成员（良十世）又恰好坐上教宗宝座，这让美第奇家族成为了马基雅维利眼中稳定意大利局势的唯一现实希望。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 意大利地缘动荡与稳定机制推演 accDescr: 展示城邦合法性断裂与教宗选举制如何导致持续动荡，以及马基雅维利设想的集权稳定方案 subgraph Instability ["系统性动荡根源"] A["城邦连续性链条断裂\n民众丧失制度认同与忠诚"] --> C["政权更迭恶性循环\n政体极度脆弱易倒"] B["非世袭教宗选举制\n平均每10年政敌翻盘大清洗"] --> C end subgraph Consequence ["现实困境"] C --> D["教宗国肆意颠覆吞并周边\n意大利沦为废墟与棋盘"] end subgraph Solution ["马基雅维利的破局方案"] D -.-> E["强力世袭君主崛起\n美第奇家族掌控佛罗伦萨与教廷"] E --> F["形成与教廷抗衡的稳固地缘缓冲\n终结多米诺骨牌式政变"] end ``` ### `05:00` 与切萨雷·波吉亚的致命周旋：独眼巨人的恐怖庇护 在撰写《君主论》之前，马基雅维利曾作为佛罗伦萨共和国的高级外交官穿梭于欧洲各国宫廷，近距离观察过法王路易十二与神圣罗马帝国皇帝马克西米利安一世等顶尖统治者。然而，纵观《君主论》全书，马基雅维利花费最大力气试图掩饰、却又最无法自拔的，正是他对瓦伦蒂诺公爵——切萨雷·波吉亚（Cesare Borgia）的极致着迷。 当马基雅维利论述切萨雷·波吉亚的垮台时，发生了一个震撼人心的文学与历史瞬间。切萨雷凭借雷霆手段几乎征服了整个意大利中部，却因其父教宗亚历山大六世暴毙的同时自己也身染重病而功亏一篑。马基雅维利极力论证切萨雷的所有举措都是无懈可击的典范，其失败纯粹是由于命运（Fortuna）的残酷捉弄。在行文中，冷静客观的历史学家假面突然碎裂，马基雅维利直接打破了第三人称的距离感，以第一人称写道：“他曾亲口对我说（he told me）”，自己早已为父亲去世预备了所有后手，唯独没有料到父亲咽气时自己竟也命悬一线。这种作者与读者之间屏障的骤然破裂，暴露出他曾置身事内、近距离伴随在切萨雷身侧的心灵震撼。当时的文献对切萨雷的评价两极分化，有人视其为最具魅力的政治天才，也有人认为他具有超自然的魔力、必定是敌基督或死神在人间的化身；而马基雅维利曾亲身处于这种令人战栗的磁场中心。 对当时的佛罗伦萨和马基雅维利而言，直面切萨雷·波吉亚是全世界最凶险的外交差事： - **地缘的必争之地**：波吉亚的战略野心是吞并整个意大利中部的教宗国领地，而托斯卡纳（佛罗伦萨）的版图就像一块拼图缺口，硬生生地嵌在教宗国侧翼。任何摊开地图的征服者都绝不可能绕过佛罗伦萨。 - **生存的极限制衡**：马基雅维利清醒地意识到，常规的贿赂或说服根本不可能让切萨雷放弃吞并，佛罗伦萨能争取的唯有“时间”。 - **残酷的背叛代价**：为了在风暴中存活，马基雅维利力主佛罗伦萨彻底屈膝臣服，向切萨雷提供金钱与军队协助其征服，甚至必须悍然撕毁与博洛尼亚（Bologna）长达三百年的防御同盟。 - **波吕斐摩斯的恩赐**：马基雅维利整日守在切萨雷耳边低语“佛罗伦萨是忠诚的”，佛罗伦萨用尊严和背叛换来的，仅仅如同荷马史诗《奥德赛》中独眼巨人波吕斐摩斯对奥德修斯许下的可怕诺言——“我喜欢你，我的客人，所以我决定把你留到最后再吃”。 ### `10:00` 伴虎而行：塞尼加利亚大屠杀与“最后再吃我们”的绝望外交 马基雅维利代表佛罗伦萨共和国出使切萨雷·波吉亚（即瓦伦蒂诺公爵，Valentino）的宫廷，其核心任务并非争取荣耀或利益，而是在“自腓特烈·巴巴罗萨以来欧洲最可怕之人”的耳边不断低语：“佛罗伦萨共和国将支持你，满足阁下的任何要求，只要你把我们留到最后再吃。”当被问及这是否与《君主论》中“切勿仰仗大国崛起，否则反受制于人”的告诫矛盾时，艾达·帕尔默解释道，佛罗伦萨根本不是为了崛起，而是自知必败，唯一的生机在于“拖延时间”。若非教皇亚历山大六世暴毙，波吉亚只需再多一年便可彻底吞并佛罗伦萨；但希望与生命一样脆弱，苟延残喘本身就是求生机制。 正是在这种极端处境下，马基雅维利亲历了载入史册的“塞尼加利亚大屠杀”（Massacre at Senigallia）。当时波吉亚察觉部下因畏惧而密谋背叛，随后叛变者因恐慌放弃阴谋，波吉亚便面见他们，伪称：“我原谅你们，你们通过了忠诚考验，一切如初。”他在大教堂与叛将重立神圣盟约，随后邀请他们赴宴，并在宴席上将他们一网打尽、残忍屠尽。数月后佛罗伦萨家书才辗转送达——信中他的妻儿惊魂未定地写道，听闻波吉亚屠杀身旁侍从的消息后，因邮政系统瘫痪，家人等待数月杳无音讯，不知马基雅维利是否已被列入清洗名单或遭杀害，得知他幸存宛如神迹。 这种当面宽恕、盟誓后屠杀的背信弃义，践踏了最神圣的待客之道。按照但丁《神曲》的设定，犯下此类重罪之人甚至不需死后受审，恶魔会直接从地狱涌出夺其肉身，将其灵魂拽入地狱。然而令人惊骇的是，这一极端行径在现实政治中奏效了：部众非但没有反叛，反而因恐惧连丝毫不满的耳语都不敢发出，忠诚度达到了前所未有的顶峰。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 塞尼加利亚大屠杀权力逻辑 accDescr: 展示切萨雷·波吉亚通过伪装原谅与设宴清洗建立绝对恐惧与服从的动态过程。 subgraph Betrayal["密谋与瓦解"] A["部下恐惧波吉亚并密谋造反"] --> B["因过度恐惧而放弃阴谋"] end subgraph Trap["伪善与清洗"] B --> C["大教堂中立下神圣誓言<br/>公开赦免并重拾信任"] C --> D["设宴款待（践踏待客之道）<br/>宴席伏兵突起展开大屠杀"] end subgraph Outcome["权力重构"] D --> E["幸存部将彻底陷入极度恐惧"] E --> F["掐灭一切反叛苗头<br/>对波吉亚产生前所未有的绝对服从"] end ``` --- ### `13:00` 命运与功利：为何做对一切的波吉亚依然覆灭？ 既然波吉亚在每个环节都做出了“正确”的政治决策，为何其庞大帝国最终土崩瓦解？答案是极为戏剧化的恶运连环：他和父亲同时误食毒药或染上严重胃肠感染，在他最不能虚弱的关节点病倒；好不容易扶植的傀儡教皇庇护三世在位仅数周便猝逝；随后教廷选举被宿敌尤利乌斯二世完全逆转。马基雅维利反复警示后人：人类最多只能掌控决定结果的“一半”因素，另一半永远受制于命运（Fortune）。 作为功利主义与唯结果论思想的先驱，马基雅维利的评判标准却比后世想象的深邃得多。世人往往以成败论英雄，认为波吉亚家族失势、被仇敌推翻、罗马城内连墙壁上的公牛徽章都被凿平至如今只剩疤痕，便断定“波吉亚的做法是错的”。然而马基雅维利反驳： - 评价行为必须看“在命运插手前，该决策所能带来的最高概率结果”，而非命运干预后的单一残局。 - 波吉亚的每一步谋略都是精妙绝伦的范本，他的覆灭归咎于不可控的概率事故。 - 因此，后继君主仍应效仿波吉亚，因为在人类人力所及的半数因果中，他做到了极致。 --- ### `15:00` 手段的精微算计：背信为何对波吉亚奏效，却摧毁了萨沃纳罗拉？ 大众常将马基雅维利误读为“只要目的崇高，手段完全无所谓”。事实上，他极其沉迷于“手段”的微观机制，因为获取权力的手段直接决定了该政权的稳固与成果。若仰仗雇佣军或强权外力崛起，所得之位便摇摇欲坠；而关于通过说谎、背弃誓言来夺取权力，马基雅维利的洞察并非“可以随意撒谎”，而是极其微妙的条件论： 德瓦尔凯什·帕特尔提出，马基雅维利似乎认为人们很健忘，下次仍会相信破誓者的话。帕特尔指出，这种破誓的有效性必须视权力的底层逻辑而定。以宗教煽动家吉罗拉莫·萨沃纳罗拉（Girolamo Savonarola）为例，他的权力基础在于信徒相信他是“绝对不会犯错的神谕代言人”。他虽然声线富有磁性、充满奇魅魅力（即便去世数十年后，米开朗基罗仍感叹“耳边依稀回响着他的声音”），但当预言落空，萨沃纳罗拉试图自圆其说、前后矛盾地修补谎言时，其权力基石便迅速坍塌，最终身败名裂。 相反，波吉亚的权力基于绝对的“可怖威慑”（fear and terror）。当他出卖大将、夺其封邑时，其余将领绝不会揭竿而起，反而会战战兢兢地想：“我必须更加忠顺，才能确保下一个被清算的不是我。” - **手段与权力性质的匹配**：如果君主的统治依附于“受人爱戴”（Love），就必须持续维持道德信用；一旦破誓，将满盘皆输。 - **恐惧的不可逆威慑**：若君主已将筹码押在“令人畏惧”（Fear）上，背叛与铁腕清洗反倒成为强化震慑的工具。 - **人性的冷酷本质**：马基雅维利的核心论断源自对人性的极端现实认知——人类受制于利益，若统治仅维系于誓言与好感，一旦局势动荡，盟友会毫不犹豫地违背诺言；唯有将秩序建立在“背叛必遭严惩”的恐惧预期之上，政权方可长治久安。这种通过利益分歧和权力制衡防范人性恶的逻辑，与后世美国制宪先贤推崇的分权制衡思想不谋而合。 ### `20:00` 政治派系竞争与佛罗伦萨的“花钱消灾”外交 在欧洲政治思想传统中，马基雅维利是首位提出“一个国家内部同时存在多个政党不仅可行、甚至可能大有裨益”的思想家。在此之前，欧洲普遍的政治教条认为党争即叛乱，唯有彻底消灭对立党派才能实现国家稳定。马基雅维利通过对锡耶纳等城邦的敏锐观察指出，如果各派系力量相对稳固，党派竞争反而能像减压阀一样释放社会积压的张力，让权力的内部更替与调整在竞选博弈中平稳落地。这种对现代宪政多党制具有先驱意义的见解，与当时血腥的主流观念形成了鲜明反差。在马基雅维利时代，对待党派的标准方案是“肉体消灭”：斩首示众、把头颅插在长矛上、彻底烧毁对手的宅邸并用压路机碾碎。佛罗伦萨历史上正是这么对待吉伯林派（Ghibellines）的——屠杀殆尽后，甚至在废墟上撒盐，导致那里至今寸草不生；而当执政的归尔甫派（Guelphs）后来分裂为黑党与白党时，内部同门之间也迅速掀起了另一场残酷的互相屠杀。 马基雅维利在论述君主统治时极度强调的另一个关键维度，是外界对统治者“威严与声誉”的判断。声誉既是阻止外敌入侵的威慑武器，也是向别国勒索利益的核心筹码。在担任佛罗伦萨高级外交官期间，马基雅维利屡次被派往欧洲各地，去评估各路统治者究竟是“货真价实的强权还是虚张声势的骗子”。神圣罗马帝国皇帝马克西米利安一世在南下进军意大利途中，曾试图对佛罗伦萨敲诈一笔巨额买路钱。佛罗伦萨向来精于算计：面对外来军事威胁，直接行贿求和往往比耗费国力备战打仗划算得多，因为士兵过境会践踏家族庄园、毁灭商业贸易。因此，佛罗伦萨每年都预留有一笔“买通外国君主专项预算”，而马基雅维利的核心任务就是奔赴前线刺探马克西米利安是否真的具备入侵能力，以决定是否要把当年的保护费拨给他，还是把钱留给更具实质威胁的那不勒斯国王、法国国王、米兰公国或威尼斯人。 - **多党制竞争的先驱理论**：马基雅维利颠覆了“一国不容二党”的传统观念，认为体制化竞争能释放政治戾气，促成非暴力的权力再分配。 - **佛罗伦萨的政敌清洗**：吉伯林派被清算后其地基被撒盐废置，黑白归尔甫党分裂后同样陷入零和内讧。 - **佛罗伦萨的外交买路钱逻辑**：算清战争与和平的账本，依靠“年检式贿赂”消灾，差遣外交官实地测定敌人的威慑成色。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 佛罗伦萨的外交风险决策逻辑 accDescr: 展示佛罗伦萨通过外交评估决定是将预算用于行贿马克西米利安还是保留给更大威胁 A["马克西米利安一世威胁南下入侵"] --> B["派遣马基雅维利实地评估其威慑力"] B --> C{"威胁是否真实且不可抵挡？"} C -- "是虚张声势 / 战力不足" --> D["拒绝支付买路钱，保留年度预算"] C -- "确实具备毁灭性打击力" --> E["从'君主贿赂专项预算'中拨款求和"] D --> F["预算保留给法国、那不勒斯、米兰或威尼斯等更致命对手"] E --> G["避免军队践踏领地与经济破坏"] ``` --- ### `23:45` 远方的圣人与近邻的混蛋：作为世俗君主的教皇 当探讨文艺复兴时期的教皇国时，一个常让现代人困惑的现象是：教皇不仅是精神领袖，更是拥有军队、领土并亲自发动战争的世俗君主；教皇甚至经常与同样信奉天主教的世俗君主拔刀相见。身为一名天主教徒，却在战场上同教皇的军队厮杀，在当时究竟意味着什么？帕尔默指出，这里的核心奥秘在于“地理距离决定信仰滤镜”。对于远离罗马的边陲教区（如丹麦、冰岛或北欧诸国）而言，教皇是一个神圣、崇高而抽象的符号。遥远的信徒只能偶尔目睹华丽肃穆的教皇特使巡游，城市会为了纪念特使的到访而重新命名街道；教皇在他们的视野里处理的是帝国继承、君王废立、神学谕令与灵魂救赎等宏大命题。在远方看来，历任教皇之间的细微差异根本无法被察觉，教皇完全等同于上帝在人间的威严化身。 然而，一旦置身于意大利半岛内部，这种神圣性瞬间荡然无存。对近在咫尺的意大利同侪而言，教皇不再是一个抽象的神权领袖，而是“那个当年和你哥哥同窗打架的混蛋、人到中年还在烂醉放荡的政客”。教廷内部的每一个人、每一个家族、每一段丑闻，周边的贵族世家都了如指掌。坐在圣座上的不是高高在上的“尤利乌斯二世”，而是私生活被彻底看透的“朱利亚诺·德拉·罗韦雷”。当某位教皇上台时，全意大利都能立刻预见到一场赤裸裸的分赃盛宴：教皇的本家亲友会全盘占据意大利的显赫官职，非其一派的势力则会被无情清洗。因此，意大利人看到的是一个个具体的、充满缺陷与私欲的凡夫俗子，他们对教廷的神圣权威有着天然的免疫力，也由此催生了世俗政权一边虔诚信仰上帝、一边在现实战场中将教皇军队痛揍出局的奇特景象。 - **地理与神圣感的反比定律**：距离教廷越远，教皇越显神圣不可侵犯；距离越近，教皇的世俗政客嘴脸与家族私欲越暴露无遗。 - **个人取代圣职**：意大利各邦眼中的教皇是带有明确家族利益的派系领袖（例如德拉·罗韦雷家族），而非纯粹的彼得继承人。 - **教廷政治的裙带分赃**：教皇换届意味着全意大利范围内家族势力的重新洗牌，亲属鸡犬升天，政敌遭逐黜免。 --- ### `26:30` 归尔甫派与吉伯林派的百年世仇：为了保卫教权而向教皇开战 意大利内部复杂的派系撕裂深刻体现在归尔甫派（教皇派）与吉伯林派（皇帝派）长达数百年的对抗中。在神学与法理层面，这两派最初有着严肃的政治哲学分歧：归尔甫派认为教皇是罗马帝国的合法继承人，拥有统治全意大利乃至原罗马疆域的最高世俗与军事霸权；吉伯林派则坚持公元800年教皇为查理曼加冕的法统，认为教皇在那一刻已将世俗与军事统治权全权委托给了神圣罗马帝国皇帝，自身仅享有精神宗教权力。然而，经过三百年的仇恨沉淀，到了马基雅维利的时代，这些高深的宪政理论早已蜕化为宗族复仇的代名词：“归尔甫”与“吉伯林”的实质变成了“那群混蛋曾杀害了我们的提伯尔特叔叔，此仇不戴天”。政治站队变成了赤裸裸的帮派世仇，其目的仅仅是为了压垮世仇家族以防自身被消灭。 这种理论脱节造成了政治上极为荒诞的奇观：当一位出身于吉伯林家族背景的红衣主教被选为新教皇时，这位“教皇”会本能地开始提拔、任用原本反教权的吉伯林派亲信。结果，全意大利一贯效忠教廷的归尔甫派家族与城邦反倒立刻结盟，集结军队向教皇本人开战。这种现象看似精神分裂，但在当时的地缘逻辑下却异常自洽：归尔甫派是在保卫一个“抽象的教皇至高主权”，而不得不去消灭那个“坐镇教廷却属于反教权世仇阵营的活人教皇”。这种对“基督在世代理人”的抽象崇敬与现实仇恨之间的割裂，不仅塑造了意大利各城邦与罗马之间反复无常的战争，也催生了外交史上无数讽刺的场面。例如在历任新教皇登基时举行的“宣誓服从仪式”（Oath of Obedience）上，来自基督教世界各国的全权大使必须排着漫长的队伍依次进献颂词，这些冗长浮夸的外交辞令表面上极尽谄媚与虔敬，背地里却往往暗藏着各方君主最隐蔽、最刻薄的被动攻击与利益算计。 - **派系理念的部落化蜕变**：从罗马帝国法统之争沦为家族仇杀与“站队博弈”，思想旗号掩盖了“杀叔之仇”的暴力循环。 - **“向教皇宣战以保卫教皇”的怪圈**：吉伯林派出身的教皇引发归尔甫派叛乱，神圣主权与代理人身份彻底割裂。 - **服从仪式的虚与委蛇**：欧洲君主派特使向新教皇宣誓效忠的长篇演说，本质上是各怀鬼胎的地缘政治暗牌展示。 ### `30:00` 服从宣誓与帕齐阴谋：洛伦佐·德·美第奇与教皇的致命交锋 在文艺复兴时期的意大利，任何政权面对新当选的教皇，都必须派遣其领地内“在政权不至于崩溃的前提下地位最高的人物”前往罗马，行使所谓的“服从宣誓”（oration of obedience）。这个仪式绝非走过场，使节必须在字面意义上五体投地匍匐在教皇脚下、亲吻教皇的双足，并郑重宣誓效忠。君主国可能会派出国王的小儿子或大法官，而对于佛罗伦萨共和国而言，代表城邦的必然是声望最隆的首席公民。当西克斯图斯四世（Pope Sixtus IV）当选教皇时，正是“豪华者”洛伦佐·德·美第奇（Lorenzo de' Medici，即《君主论》题献者的祖父兼同名者）亲自前往罗马行跪拜之礼。洛伦佐当时正不顾一切地与教皇斡旋，试图为自己的亲弟弟争取一顶枢机主教的红帽。 然而，西克斯图斯四世并没有回以善意，反而一手策划了骇人听闻的“帕齐阴谋”（Pazzi conspiracy）。这场旨在灭绝美第奇家族的流血政变中，刺客在佛罗伦萨大教堂的弥撒上拔出匕首，残忍刺杀了洛伦佐的弟弟朱利亚诺，并屠杀了多位家族盟友，企图颠覆佛罗伦萨的政权。数年之后，当下一任教皇英诺森八世（Pope Innocent VIII）当选时，人人都心知肚明这位新教皇不过是当年西克斯图斯同一派系扶植的傀儡。此时的佛罗伦萨再度面临派使节前往罗马行服从礼的要求。 洛伦佐这一次断然拒绝亲身涉险，而是派出了自己的儿子替他前往。他让儿子当面向教皇呈上一封极具外交手腕却又字字带刺的信函，信中写道：“请代我向圣座致歉，我无法亲自前来；因为上一次此项重任落在我肩头时，我尚有一位胞弟可以让我托付国政，安心离开。而如今我已再无兄弟，故无法亲身前往。”这番话表面上礼数周全、恭敬得体，实则无比直白地向罗马表明：他绝不会再信任这个曾经屠杀他血亲的派系。这种在极具神圣权威的教皇与极度自私冷酷的军阀角色之间反复博弈的残酷现实，正是当时意大利城邦每日必须面对的凶险棋局。 --- ### `32:15` 逐渐累积的腐败与囚徒困境：从平民行贿到列国博弈 这种教廷权力的世俗化与堕落并非一朝一夕之功，而是在数百年间代际累积的结果。随着历史推移，每一代信徒都在向教会捐赠财富——一个没有儿子的遗孀出于虔敬，可能会将名下所有地产立遗嘱赠予修道院。教会因此变得愈发富有，而伴随着惊人财富而来的必然是庞大的政治权力。这种权力结构在世俗社会中创造了一个日益强大的逆向激励：每一个有野心的家族都会争先恐后地把自己的次子送进教会。 这种买官鬻爵的腐败早已渗透到社会的毛细血管。从马基雅维利与其亲戚之间的私人通信中，我们可以看到极其荒诞的一幕：家族成员们正在信中认真探讨究竟该出多大数额的贿赂，才能为马基雅维利的弟弟托托（Totto）买下一个神职职位。他们精打细算，既不想行贿过多导致家族财产被掏空，又生怕出价过低错失良机。信中甚至抱怨另一个参与竞争的家族给出的贿赂实在太丰厚了，这“简直不太公平”，并焦虑地商议如何应对这种“恶意竞价”。值得注意的是，马基雅维利家族属于佛罗伦萨财富与权势排名前5%的富有商贾绅士阶层，然而即便在这样的精英家庭眼中，靠大笔行贿来换取神职也完全是一件司空见惯、理所当然的寻常家事。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 教会财富与腐败的正反馈循环 accDescr: 展示教会通过信徒捐赠积累财富，进而获得世俗权力，引发家族争夺并陷入囚徒困境的恶性循环机制。 subgraph WealthPower["财富与权力集聚"] A["信徒代际捐赠与遗产累积\n（如寡妇向修道院捐赠房产）"] --> B["教会财富极度膨胀"] B --> C["教会掌握庞大世俗权力"] end subgraph FamilyIncentive["社会竞争与囚徒困境"] C --> D["各家族竞相送次子进入教会\n（神职买卖与常态化行贿）"] D --> E["统治者陷入博弈：\n不操控教会则敌人必会借机操控"] E --> F["教皇权力愈发世俗化与军事化"] end F --> B ``` 在更高层级的地缘政治中，教会腐败演化成了一种无法逃脱的囚徒困境： - **防御性操控的需求**：如果你是一位公爵，你不去讨好、贿赂教皇，不拼尽全力扶持自己的兄弟当上主教，而你的敌对家族却这么做了，你就彻底陷入死局。统治者往往将行贿教廷视为一种“不得不做的防御性自保”。 - **君王层面的掣肘**：对于欧洲君主而言，教皇拥有随时将你的死敌册封为你王国境内最具权势的大主教的权力；君主若想建立政治联姻，对象往往是某位表亲，必须依赖教皇特许的免除权（dispensation），教皇只需卡住一纸特许令就能彻底粉碎你的外交同盟。 - **不可逆的代际恶化**：每一代人的亲身体验中，教皇都在变得比过去的教皇更糟、更世俗、更具军事扩张性。但丁在1300年发出过教皇堕落的哀叹，马基雅维利的祖父一代在1400年同样如此抱怨，而马基雅维利在1500年面对的局面更是登峰造极。 --- ### `35:10` 制度的退化与重回根基：马基雅维利对宗教改革的预见 这种跨越百年的代际腐败积累，最终在16世纪初达到了不可承受的临界点，从而直接引爆了席卷欧洲的宗教改革。马基雅维利以惊人的敏锐度预见到了这种历史必然。他在其政治哲学中提出了一个根本性论断：世间所有的制度——无论是城邦政体、共和国还是教会——都会随着时间的推移自然累积腐败，最终必须通过彻底的改革“重返其奠基之初的本源”（return to their foundations），否则它们必然会在自身腐朽的沉重负荷下彻底坍塌崩溃。 马基雅维利指出，基督教与罗马教廷在历史上早就经历过这种系统性溃烂。在他看来，早在两百多年前，如果不是阿西西的圣方济各（Saint Francis of Assisi）和圣多明我（Saint Dominic）发起托钵修会运动，以清贫与布道重新赢回了底层民众的狂热支持与道德认可，整个基督教体制早在两个世纪前就已被自身的腐败彻底压垮。马基雅维利清醒地意识到，历史正再次走到这一生死关头，无论教会还是各城邦的共和制度，若无法打破权钱交易与官僚僵化、回归创制之初的精神，剧烈的崩解与反噬便无可避免。 --- ### `36:25` 庇护制与“群情激愤求裙带”：文艺复兴社会的底层黏合剂 现代社会与500年前的文艺复兴世界之间，最大的断层在于对“庇护制”（patronage）的理解。在现代人眼中，庇护与裙带关系是腐败的同义词；但在当时，庇护制不仅比今天显著得多，它甚至是“维持整个社会运转的根本黏合剂”，是文明得以维系的绝对信任基石。因为庇护系统与家族血缘深度交织，造就了一种跨越数代、同生共死的命运绑定：这些家族荣辱与共，如果一损俱损、一荣俱荣，从而在缺乏现代法治与合约保障的时代构筑了极高层级的信用机制。 这种信任机制扭曲到了何种程度？一个极具讽刺意味的历史名场面发生在16世纪中叶，亚历山大·法尔内塞当选为教皇保禄三世（Pope Paul III）之后： - **拒绝裙带引发暴动**：保禄三世最初没有顺应惯例任人唯亲，他没有任命自己资质平庸的私生子，而是挑选了一位极具军事经验、才干出众的外姓将领来担任教皇国军队的总指挥官。 - **罗马平民抗议请愿**：“平民们反而走上街头抗议甚至引发骚乱”，向圣座愤怒地请愿：“圣父啊，人民要求更多的裙带关系！” - **民众背后的安全逻辑**：罗马市民的恐慌极其现实——如果军队交给教皇的亲生骨肉，他的身家性命与教皇绑定，无论发生什么他绝不可能背叛教皇或背刺罗马；可如果把兵权交给一个精明的外人，谁能保证他不会在紧要关头反戈一击、勾结敌国洗劫罗马？民众无法承受罗马教廷与教皇国军队之间出现分裂的巨大风险，因此他们宁可要低能但忠诚的私生子，也绝不要才干卓越的外人。 在那个时代，军队士兵宣誓效忠的对象从来不是抽象的城邦、宪法或国家，而是手握兵权的指挥官本人。由于受限于极度迟缓的通讯手段，战场指挥官必须拥有绝对的现场决断权，一旦把一支大军托付给一个人，如果缺乏血缘或代际庇护绑定的信任，整个统治阶层便会陷入彻头彻尾的恐慌之中。庇护制因此自上而下贯穿了一切权力层级，从小到挑选财政大臣，大到在法庭上请律师辩护，甚至决定了司法的生死边界。 --- ### `38:40` 法律严苛与司法宽赦：庇护网络在生死审判中的运作 庇护制作为社会核心机制的威力，在当时的司法审判记录中体现得淋漓尽致。粗看欧洲中世纪和文艺复兴时期的法典，其残酷程度令人发指：无论是盗窃、通奸、同性性行为，还是在君主的领地内放火烧了一个蜂箱，法条明文规定的刑罚几乎清一色是死刑。然而，一旦去系统查阅当年的实际审判档案，历史学家会发现一个极其惊人的反差：在所有被定罪的死罪案件中，真正最终被判处死刑并执行的，大概只有百分之一。绝大多数案件最终都以罚款、公开鞭笞或流放草草了结，法典上冷酷的死刑判决在现实中极少兑现。 促成这种从“必死法条”到“宽大处理”巨大转变的唯一隐秘杠杆，正是庇护网络。当时的平民如果犯下重罪，法治的冷酷逻辑立刻就会被庇护的人情网路所消解。例如在典型的文艺复兴城市中，假设你只是一个底层的木匠，你的青春期儿子在酒馆里喝得酩酊大醉，在一次街头斗殴中一拳打碎了对方的鼻梁骨，而伤势意外恶化导致受害者死亡；当你的儿子以杀人重罪被押上法庭面临断头台时，作为一个无权无势的普通木匠，唯一能拯救你儿子性命的途径，绝不是依赖法条的公正辩护，而是沿着家族世代依附的庇护阶梯层层向上求援…… ### `40:00` 文艺复兴时期的恩主网络与司法神学 文艺复兴时期的司法逻辑与 18 世纪启蒙运动后建立的现代法治观念截然不同。现代法治追求比例原则与形式公平，认为无论涉案者贫富贵贱、社会关系如何，触犯同等罪行就应受到对等的法定惩罚。然而，在当时深受基督教神学塑造的社会里，法庭审判的核心目的并非机械式惩罚，而是“罪人灵魂在内在精神层面的改过与救赎”。 审判的过程在结构上宛如一场尘世间的神圣末日审判预演：罪犯直面威严骇人的法官，法官在世间代表着上帝；罪犯深知自己罪孽深重、理应堕入地狱深渊，因而陷入对死亡的极度恐惧中。就在这时，奇迹般的恩典降临——被告人的庇护人（恩主）出面干预求情，法官遂施予宽恕，减轻刑罚。整个体系的预设就是：当罪人经历濒死恐惧、恳求恩典并最终获得赦免后，其心灵得到净化，从而成长为一个向善之人。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Renaissance Judicial System vs Patronage accDescr: 展现文艺复兴司法审判中恩主干预模拟神圣救赎的流程 subgraph Court ["尘世审判（神学预演）"] A["严重指控与死罪审判"] --> B["面临严厉法官<br>（罪人体验濒死恐惧）"] end subgraph Patronage ["恩主网络介入"] C["向贵族恩主求助<br>（如美第奇家族）"] --> D["恩主向法官求情<br>（象征主保圣人代祷）"] end subgraph Resolution ["判决结果"] B --> E{"是否有恩主庇护？"} D --> E E -- "有庇护 (99%)" --> F["获得赦免 / 缴纳小额罚金<br>（灵魂净化，步向善道）"] E -- "失去庇护 (1%)" --> G["被判极刑<br>（临刑前修士持圣母像导引升天）"] end ``` 这种司法干预正是尘世对神圣秩序的投射——恩主的求情，对应的正是天主教神学中“主保圣人”（Patron Saint）在上帝面前为罪人代祷乞求怜悯。即便被判处死刑，宗教善会也会整夜陪伴死囚祈祷，一路牵着他们的手走向绞刑架，并把圣母玛利亚的画像举在囚犯眼前，确保其生命最后一刻仍在仰望天堂，使灵魂得以得救。因此，在当时一百起重罪案件中，多达九十九起会以轻微罚款结案，只有一起真正执行极刑；这并不代表法律宽泛，而是意味着那九十九个人背后都有恩主打招呼、走动关系，而唯一被处决的人，往往是因为触怒了自己的恩主或被恩主网络彻底遗弃。 - **乔尔丹诺·布鲁诺（Giordano Bruno）的审判真相**：布鲁诺常被视作科学殉道者，但他被宗教裁判所烧死并非初次受审。他此前多次因异端思想被调查，均因合作的富豪恩主或接待他的大学出面说情而安然脱身，裁判所仅告诫他“老实点”。他最终被处死，是因为彻底激怒了雇用他的威尼斯贵族恩主莫切尼戈（Giovanni Mocenigo）；恩主亲自向宗教裁判所告发他是骗子、未兑现传授知识的承诺并要求严惩，失去庇护网的布鲁诺才沦为了那“第一百个”死刑个案。 - **皮科·德拉·米兰多拉（Giovanni Pico della Mirandola）的避风港**：皮科的思想甚至比布鲁诺更为激进，但他受审时，洛伦佐·德·美第奇（Lorenzo de' Medici）动用了一切政治资源，联络其具有巨大罗马影响力的奥尔西尼家族（Orsini）姻亲，成功将皮科保释回佛罗伦萨软禁，免于火刑。 --- ### `45:00` 赞助庇护制：前现代社会的日常黏合剂 激进柏拉图主义学者马尔西利奥·费奇诺（Marsilio Ficino）不仅出版书籍传授如何让灵魂出窍、召唤天使以及论证轮回转世，还曾写过一封堪称“史上最绝的推荐信”——在向匈牙利国王引荐一名年轻学者时，费奇诺赫然写道：“这位年轻人是圣托马斯·阿奎那转世，因此你应当录用他。”当宗教裁判所因轮回异端登门质问时，费奇诺迅速向洛伦佐·德·美第奇求助，洛伦佐随即让奥尔西尼枢机主教出面摆平。最终裁判所仅仅警告他少公开谈论转世，而费奇诺则顺从地保证“往后只向极其虔诚的人传授出窍召唤天使的秘法，绝不传给轻浮之人”，审判便就此烟消云散。 在文艺复兴时期，恩主庇护制是整个社会赖以运转的核心黏合剂。一个普通人若无恩主支持，甚至寸步难行——当你踏入一座陌生的城市，既无身份凭证也无熟人，唯有出示由自身恩主写给当地要人的介绍信，客栈才敢接纳你入住，市集才愿意做你的买卖。 *(播客中段插播赞助商环节：主持人 Dwarkesh Patel 与量化做市商 Jane Street 的机器学习研究员 Ricson 展开讨论。二人分析了一道曾用于实际面试的图像复原谜题——半数数据集的像素以一致的固定置乱模式遭到破坏，探讨通过训练分类器判别真伪，或是利用色彩阶调梯度（gradient）进行无监督逆向恢复等多种 ML 求解路径与失效边界。)* --- ### `48:00` 忠诚割裂、国家能力与现代秩序的诞生 回到《君主论》与《李维史论》，马基雅维利笔下的政权之所以极度脆弱动荡，根源在于统治者必须同时防范外敌入侵、国内派系倾轧与佣兵背叛。政权不稳定的核心症结，是民众与军队的忠诚并未赋予抽象的国家政权，而是被内部的私人中介（将军或地方恩主）截留： - **帝国边陲的私人军队**：在《李维史论》中，马基雅维利分析了罗马帝国衰亡的关键动力。由于帝国幅员辽阔、边境信息传递耗时数月，远征将军（如恺撒）常年独自统领大军长达数年乃至数十年。边境军团日常只听从将军一人号令，其忠诚完全依附于将领个人，而非远在罗马的执政官或元老院；一旦通信延迟打破了中央政权的直接掌控，私人拥兵自重便不可避免。 - **确定性司法与福利国家的替代作用**：在私人庇护制盛行的社会中，若某一家族的子弟遭杀害而无法通过中立渠道复仇，便会引发旷日持久的家族世仇与动乱。马基雅维利在两部代表作中耗费大量篇幅探讨如何安抚这些家族的怨气。现代社会的制度演进正是通过两项重大变革打破了这种脆弱性： 1. **客观中立的刑事司法体系**：以确定性、不偏不倚的现代法律替代恩主私力救济，消除家族私怨诱发的政治火药桶； 2. **非人格化的现代福利国家**：由国家直接为普通人提供基本保障，彻底剥离了平民对地方豪强与贵族恩主的生存依附。 从漫长的信息通信时滞，到人格化的恩主恩庇网，前现代政权始终无法建立直接穿透民间的合法性通道。唯有当通信技术普及、公正的司法程序建立，以及普遍的社会保障体系成型后，国家才能消除中间阶层的忠诚拦截，获得稳固的政治合法性与持久的统治稳定。 ### `50:00` 切萨雷·波吉亚与“中立正义”的意外吸引力 在文艺复兴时期的意大利中部，切萨雷·波吉亚（Cesare Borgia，当代多称其为瓦伦蒂诺公爵 Duke Valentino）的崛起带来了一个令所有人瞠目结舌的政治现象。波吉亚在攻占意大利中部的各个城邦时手段极度残暴，他有计划地屠杀当地的原统治家族，斩草除根以防日后有任何宣称者卷土重来。按常理推断，这样一个嗜杀凶残的征服者建立起独裁政权后，理应招致满城百姓的切齿痛恨。然而令人大跌眼镜的是，波吉亚在被占领城市中竟然赢得了广大平民难以置信的爱戴与拥护。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 派系倾轧与波吉亚中立司法的对比 accDescr: 对比传统城邦统治下的派系偏袒司法与波吉亚外来中立司法的社会效果 subgraph Old["旧体制：派系司法"] A["城邦内部两派争权"] --> B{"木匠之子醉酒杀人"} B -->|"属于掌权派系"| C["免于刑责 / 极轻罚款"] B -->|"属于在野派系"| D["从重严惩 / 立即处死"] C & D --> E["世代积怨 / 司法不公"] end subgraph Borgia["波吉亚：外来中立司法"] F["屠灭本地统治家族"] --> G["设立无派系牵连的外来法官"] G --> H["不论背景一律依法审判"] H --> I["平民深感冤屈得雪"] I --> J["底层百姓拥戴独裁者并自愿从军"] end ``` 这种支持的根源在于波吉亚为当地带去了几代人未曾见过的“中立正义”（neutral justice）。在过去的自治城邦中，政治权力长期被本土几个互相对立的世家门阀所把持。帕尔默举了一个生动的假想案例：如果一个木匠的儿子喝醉酒在街头斗殴中杀了人，判决结果完全取决于他的雇主属于哪一派——如果他是当权家族的木匠，这桩命案就会被轻描淡写地放过，甚至只罚极少的罚款；而如果他是失势在野家族的木匠，法庭就会“依法从重处决”，根本谈不上客观公正。然而，波吉亚消灭了旧日的所有门阀，他和他的亲信与城内错综复杂的家族恩怨毫无瓜葛，他任命的中立外来法官只看案件事实，无论犯罪者是谁的附庸都一视同仁。长期生活在特权与司法压迫下的底层民众惊喜地发现，平日里骑在他们头上作威作福的权贵终于因为作恶受到了惩处。这种“正义终于得到伸张”的快感，使得老百姓欣然接纳了这位残暴的独裁者，甚至自愿加入波吉亚的军队，替他把守要塞、捍卫征服果实。马基雅维利等人由此发现了一个惊人的统治规律：一个征服者可以通过残酷手段树立令人畏惧的威严，只要他能做到公正对待平民而不招致民众的“仇恨”，其政权就能坚如磐石。 ### `53:15` 马基雅维利的“自由”与“奴役”：制度程序与专制暴政的界线 面对切萨雷·波吉亚这种能带来高效与公平司法的君主，德瓦凯什提出疑问：既然波吉亚治理得如此得民心，马基雅维利为何仍极力反对他吞并佛罗伦萨？如果波吉亚吞并佛罗伦萨并保全了城内的文化珍宝，对佛罗伦萨人来说难道不是一件好事吗？帕尔默解释道，在马基雅维利的核心思想体系中，区分“自由”（Liberty）与“奴役”（Slavery）的根本标准，并非统治者是否仁善，而是城邦是否存在能够制约任意权力的法定程序。 在马基雅维利看来，只要政权中存在一个人能够在大街上指着一个公民说“把他拖下去杀了”，而手下人会立刻照办，那么生活在这种制度下的所有人本质上都是“奴隶”。相反，只要一个城邦拥有一套必须经过审讯、程序与公开法条检视的体制，即便这个体制充满了偏见与不公——甚至是那个曾经残酷拷打并将马基雅维利本人流放的司法体制——只要制度与程序存在，公民就拥有自由。在君主制下，或许波吉亚本人是个公正的法官，但谁也无法保证他的继任者不会是个暴虐无道的疯子；只要至高无上的任意权力存在，自由就不复存在。 佛罗伦萨平民对“自由”的执着在现代人看来往往难以理解。在当时，有资格参与执政团（Signoria，即参议院）的仅仅是城内占人口1%的超级寡头精英，绝大多数平民根本没有投票权与参政权。但即便如此，当危难来临之际，佛罗伦萨普通市民依然会毫不犹豫地涌上街头，高举绣着“Libertas”（自由）字样的旗帜浴血奋战——他们冒着生命危险捍卫的，其实不过是“自己老板的老板”的执政特权。但这面旗帜背后承载的，正是佛罗伦萨人不愿向任何个人独裁者屈膝、拒绝沦为任意支配之奴隶的深厚共和传统。 ### `55:40` 本土征服与外来征服：为何美第奇家族是两害相权取其轻 德瓦凯什随即追问：当小皮耶罗之子洛伦佐·德·美第奇（Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici）卷土重来重新控制佛罗伦萨时，难道不也是这种可以随意处决他人的独裁者吗？帕尔默指出，马基雅维利深知“本土征服者”与“外来征服者”之间存在着无法逾越的本质差异。 当美第奇家族夺取佛罗伦萨时，他们本身就流淌着佛罗伦萨的血液，对这座城市怀有根深蒂固的自豪感与爱意。他们希望佛罗伦萨依然是那个万众瞩目的佛罗伦萨，希望城内的艺术珍宝、宏伟建筑和繁荣景观原汁原味地保留下来作为自己的功勋与财产。美第奇家族绝不会威胁拆毁佛罗伦萨的城墙，也绝不会放言轰平宏伟的圣母百花大教堂；但任何一个外来征服者在面对反抗时，都会毫不犹豫地用焦土政策威胁城邦。帕尔默对比了其他城邦的下场： - 米兰在维斯孔蒂家族（Visconti）和斯福尔扎家族（Sforza）公爵的铁腕控制下，早期的共和遗迹被荡涤殆尽； - 费拉拉（Ferrara）在埃斯特家族（d'Este）公爵的残暴统治下，公爵甚至可以在家族内斗中残忍地互相剜出对方的双眼，全城百姓却噤若寒蝉、无力反抗； - 相比之下，美第奇公爵治下的佛罗伦萨，依然在很大程度上保留了原有的城邦样貌与部分传统权利。 马基雅维利非常清楚，如果佛罗伦萨的共和政体注定要沦陷，落入美第奇家族之手无疑是动荡中“最温和”的选择。尽管因为本土统治者不如外来者那般令人闻风丧胆，政权可能面临更多内部政治波动，但至少城邦的核心文化与重要权利得以在废墟中勉强存续。 ### `57:08` 战争阴影下的文艺繁荣：艺术何以成为最具性价比的“国防外交” 谈话转向文艺复兴时期一个著名的历史谜题：整个意大利半岛常年处于极度危险的战乱与朝不保夕的政权更迭之中，城邦一旦战败往往面临统治层被屠尽的命运，在如此严酷的战争消耗下，佛罗伦萨究竟从哪里获得如此巨额的社会盈余，来兴建恢弘的建筑、资助顶尖艺术，甚至如老洛伦佐·德·美第奇（Lorenzo the Magnificent）那样，仅仅为了教育孙辈就挥霍相当于今天三千万美元的巨资来修建图书馆并搜罗古籍？ 帕尔默从经济与地缘战略两个维度解答了这一悖论： - **金融与高端制造业的暴利支撑**：佛罗伦萨当时是全欧洲的金融银行业中心，跨国借贷与汇兑带来的财富流动堪称天文数字；同时，佛罗伦萨的支柱产业是高端毛纺织业。帕尔默以汽车工业巨头亨利·福特（Henry Ford）作比——在一个平民需要像今天攒钱买车一样攒上很久才能置办一套体面正装的时代，垄断了欧洲高端毛纺面料的佛罗伦萨巨贾积累了极其惊人的原始资本。 - **“艺术即外交”的高效国防逻辑**：更关键的机制在于，艺术赞助本质上不是消费过剩盈余，而是一种精打细算的防御性外交手段。帕尔默引用美国国防支出的格言指出，性价比最高的军事预算往往是“富布赖特学者计划”（Fulbright Program）——派遣充满热情、才华横溢的年轻学者前往别国交流，激发文化好感并建立深厚的人际纽带，其化解潜在冲突、争取战时盟友的效果，远比把同等金额的真金白银直接砸进正规军军费中要划算得多。文艺复兴时期的佛罗伦萨正是用惊世骇俗的艺术作品充当最高级的外交名片与文化统战工具。如果不把资金投在震撼欧洲宫廷的艺术与学术上，城邦在残酷的地缘博弈中就必须付出多得多的直接军费与鲜血代价。因此，伟大的艺术作品并非战乱之余的奢侈品，而是城邦赖以生存的防卫战略核心。 ### `01:00:00` 文化胜利与“向后看即向前走” 佛罗伦萨在面对法国入侵的绝对军事劣势时，采取了一种看似无奈却极度理性的应对策略——“文化胜利”。佛罗伦萨人深知，就算掏空国库的最后一分钱去招兵买马，在庞大的法国军队面前也无济于事。因此，与其注定惨败，不如把钱花在市政大厅内外画满法国王室的鸢尾花饰（fleur-de-lis），并为法国国王打造极其精美昂贵的国礼。当法国国王君临城下时，他感受到的不是敌意，而是源源不断的文化进贡与尊荣；佛罗伦萨以这种远比打仗便宜得多的软实力手段保全了自己。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 佛罗伦萨的现实抉择 accDescr: 面对法兰西帝国的军力碾压，佛罗伦萨放弃昂贵且必败的军备竞赛，转向成本较低且能保全城邦的文化进贡策略。 subgraph Dilemma["绝境评估"] A["法兰西大军压境"] --> B["军备耗尽亦必败"] end subgraph Strategy["文化胜利策略"] C["绘制鸢尾花纹饰"] --> E["建立友好认同"] D["进献高规格艺术品"] --> E end B -.->|"放弃军事对抗"| Strategy E --> F["以极低代价保全城邦"] ``` 当法国外交官来到佛罗伦萨，面对那些他们原本视为“无名小卒”、甚至连恺撒血统都没有的市民阶层时，他们被眼前展现的恢宏艺术所彻底震慑。从现代人的视角来看，佛罗伦萨的艺术品是历经五百年的“历史文物”；但置身于那个时代的人眼中，这些作品代表着令人不可思议的“尖端高科技”（high-tech）。它们展现的工程与美学水平，要么被认为只有古代罗马人才能做到，要么甚至连罗马人都不曾企及——就像现代人仰望一座突破力学极限、前所未见的新摩天大楼一样令人眩晕。 更关键的是，文艺复兴时期的世界观是“向后看即向前走”（backwards is forwards）。与现代人认为未来蕴含着无限潜能、人类社会必将持续进步的线性历史观截然不同，文艺复兴时代的人们认为人类潜力的巅峰早已留在古罗马。现代人即便是悲观主义者，也坚信未来人类会掌握更庞大的科技与能量（哪怕这些力量可能被用来毁灭自己）；而文艺复兴时期的知识分子却在反复论证：我们是否真能超越古罗马？未来还会不会出现长治久安的“罗马和平”（Pax Romana）？因此，像圣母百花大教堂穹顶这样的新古典主义奇迹，看似在模仿古人，在当时却是最顶尖的科技成就。 --- ### `01:03:30` 历史的投射：古代神话与和平渴望 在追慕古代罗马的过程中，马基雅维利与其他文艺复兴人文主义者对“德性”（virtù）的理解，常常取材于李维（Livy）笔下的历史典故与神话传奇——例如布鲁图斯（Lucius Junius Brutus）处死叛国的亲生儿子，或是穆齐乌斯·斯凯沃拉（Mucius Scaevola）将右手直接伸入火盆忍受炙烤，以此向敌人昭示罗马人誓死不降的忠诚与坚毅。 历史总是被当代人按需编纂的。现代大众文化在改编历史时，往往偏爱暴政、刺杀与奢靡狂欢的戏剧化情节（如同 HBO 的古装大剧）；然而，文艺复兴时期的学者在阅读罗马史时，最打动他们的反而是现实中极端罕见的东西。当时的意大利城邦充斥着暴君、屠杀与道德堕落，最稀缺的恰恰是长达数十年乃至数百年的和平与秩序。 因此，图拉真、哈德良、马可·奥勒留这几位“五贤帝”所铸就的稳定盛世，在文艺复兴学者眼中宛如不可企及的天堂。这种对“罗马和平”的推崇一直延续到 18 世纪晚期——爱德华·吉本（Edward Gibbon）在《罗马帝国衰亡史》中写道：如果让人类挑选历史上最幸福繁荣的时代，毫无疑问是在五贤帝统治之下的罗马帝国。 - **德性典范的经典意象**：布鲁图斯大义灭亲、斯凯沃拉火灼其手，均被文艺复兴学者视作罗马得以伟大的公民精神支柱。 - **历史记录的当代过滤**：现实缺乏什么，历史著作中最渴望的便是什么；中世纪与文艺复兴最缺乏长久和平，因而五贤帝时期的秩序被无限神圣化。 - **爱德华·吉本的定论**：晚至18世纪末，吉本依然断言公元2世纪五贤帝时期的罗马是全人类历史上境遇最好的阶段。 --- ### `01:05:00` 异教英灵的救赎与切萨雷·博尔吉亚的权术 中世纪与文艺复兴时期的欧洲对古罗马贤君的崇拜，甚至撕裂了当时不可动摇的基督教神学体系。在纯粹的神学教条下，五贤帝皆为未经洗礼的异教徒，且图拉真在位期间还曾残酷迫害过基督徒，他们理应永坠地狱。但中世纪教会对图拉真的爱戴到了难以自拔的程度，以至于民间与教廷中衍生出一段著名的传说：教皇大圣额我略（Gregory the Great）感念图拉真的仁政，通过祷告从炼狱召唤出图拉真的幽灵，并为其亡魂受洗，破格将他送入天堂。在但丁的《神曲·天堂篇》中，图拉真甚至被直接奉为理想基督教君主的化身。文艺复兴与中世纪人极擅长“鱼与熊掌兼得”，随意裁切基督教教义与古典异教世界中最优秀的碎片，拼贴出他们理想中的古代乌托邦。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 中世纪对异教贤君的神学调和 accDescr: 中世纪欧洲通过神话传说与诗歌重构，将迫害基督徒的异教皇帝图拉真破格受洗并引入天堂，实现古典崇拜与神学教条的妥协。 A["历史现实：图拉真迫害早期基督徒且未受洗"] --> B{"神学教义冲突：异教徒必下地狱"} C["现实向往：五贤帝的善治与长久和平"] --> D["大圣额我略传说：召唤亡灵并受洗"] B --> D D --> E["但丁《神曲》：图拉真置身天堂篇"] E --> F["同时拥抱古典美德与基督救赎"] ``` 这也引出了政治现实中的深层困惑：马基雅维利在《君王论》中大篇幅刻画切萨雷·博尔吉亚（Cesare Borgia）的冷酷背叛——例如切萨雷任命雷米罗·德·奥尔科（Ramiro de Lorqua）以铁腕平定罗马涅地区的动荡，待秩序恢复、民众怨恨积聚后，切萨雷为平息民愤，竟直接将这位功臣腰斩并弃尸于广场；又或者假意邀请图谋反对他的叛变将领赴宴讲和，随后在席间将他们一网打尽。马基雅维利如此浓墨重彩地强调这些背信弃义的手段，究竟是因为这些残忍政治手腕在当时十分罕见，还是因为所有人都在暗中践行，唯独切萨雷将其执行到了极致？ 面对“既然举国皆笃信背叛者要下地狱，为何统治者与权贵们仍肆无忌惮地犯罪”的矛盾，答案正是这一时期的核心张力所在。当时的意大利人全都在犯戒：为家族荣誉杀人、从事被教会视为重罪的高利贷买卖。 但丁在《神曲·地狱篇》中便以极大的痛苦和讽刺直面这群虚伪的同胞。地狱里挤满了但丁生前熟识的佛罗伦萨同僚，但丁甚至借书中人物之口讽刺道：“恭喜佛罗伦萨，你在地狱里名扬四海！”高利贷者、鸡奸者、异端分子层出不穷。最具代表性的是《地狱篇》第5歌中保罗与弗朗切斯卡（Paolo and Francesca）的故事：年轻美貌的贵妇被迫嫁给残暴年老的丈夫，丈夫外出时，英俊年轻的小叔子保罗前来拜访，两人因同读亚瑟王与兰斯洛特、桂妮薇儿的骑士通奸浪漫小说而情不自禁越轨，最终双双被丈夫撞破并刺死。这段极具悲剧美感、在民间被当作凄美爱情传诵的世俗故事，在但丁笔下却被毫不留情地定罪——即便再符合世俗浪漫，两人依然因通奸罪被打入永恒的风暴地狱之中受苦。这种宗教戒律与世俗罪欲之间的巨大撕裂，正是文艺复兴时期意大利社会最真实的底色。 ### `01:10:00` 文艺复兴时期的原罪、忏悔与圣朱利安信仰 艾达·帕尔默（Ada Palmer）指出，但丁在《神曲·地狱篇》中将保罗与弗朗切斯卡（Paolo and Francesca）打入地狱，对当时的读者造成了极大的震动。在当时的佛罗伦萨，这段发生在家主捉奸并杀死二人的悲剧，是人尽皆知的普遍爱情故事，相当于他们的《罗密欧与朱丽叶》，人人传唱。然而但丁却无比严肃地打破了这种浪漫滤镜：因为他们犯下了通奸罪，按照天主教教义就必须堕入地狱。但丁此举像当头棒喝，警醒同胞们必须严肃对待宗教戒律，否则“若不悔改，你们都将下地狱”。 由此引发的核心问题是：文艺复兴时期的基督教与现代（尤其是美国及欧洲受新教、加尔文主义与清教徒传统影响）的基督教在“纯洁性”（purity）观念上存在巨大鸿沟。新教与清教徒追求一种“毫无瑕疵的纯洁生活”，一旦有人打破规则，就会被视作不洁之人逐出社群。但文艺复兴天主教的底层假设是：“每个人每时每刻都在犯罪”。人人都有嫉妒、色欲与懒惰，即便是被视为欧洲最具德行之人、却极度强调自身罪孽的阿西西的圣方济各（St. Francis of Assisi）也不例外。当时宗教生活的核心节律是：犯罪、感到懊悔、行补赎（penance）、获得灵性成长并被宽恕，接着再次犯罪。 这种观念最极端的体现是当时极受欢迎、而现代罕有人知的“杀人犯的主保圣人”——好客者圣朱利安（Saint Julian the Hospitaller）。圣朱利安的传说带着强烈的俄狄浦斯式悲剧色彩：他出生时被女巫诅咒长大后会弑杀双亲，他为了避祸远走他乡，却在因思乡返家时受魔鬼蒙骗残忍杀害了父母。事后他终生忏悔，四处朝圣，并修建朝圣者驿舍救济旅人。在现代文化中，杀人犯被视为不可饶恕、必须处决或永久驱逐的社会异类；但在文艺复兴时期，人们却认为“有时杀戮难以避免，关键在于事后是否真心悔恨并接受精神救赎”。如果圣朱利安杀害父母都能找到救赎之路，其他杀人者也可以。 - 佛罗伦萨随处可见圣朱利安的圣像，许多都是曾犯下命案并试图在余生中寻找心灵救赎的委托人出资绘制的。 - 像但丁和萨伏那洛拉（Savonarola）这样的人物不断斥责这种“复杂的精致伪善”——例如富商家族把家族纹章贴满教堂内部，把神圣敬拜场所变成自家银行生意的广告牌，却寄望于巨额赎罪能换取上帝的无限宽恕。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 文艺复兴天主教与现代清教徒罪孽观对比 accDescr: 对比文艺复兴时期不断循环的犯罪与忏悔体系，与现代清教徒非黑即白的纯洁性排斥模式。 subgraph Renaissance["文艺复兴天主教：动态循环"] A["人人皆罪人 (每5分钟都在犯罪)"] --> B["真心懊悔与灵性补赎"] B --> C["获得宽恕与精神提升"] C --> A end subgraph Puritan["现代/清教模式：二元排斥"] D["追求无瑕纯洁"] --> E["违规/犯罪"] E --> F["被视为污点，永久驱逐出社群"] end ``` --- ### `01:15:00` 佛罗伦萨流亡制度与马基雅维利独特的“放逐乡村” 德瓦凯什（Dwarkesh Patel）重新开启对话，询问马基雅维利从高层外交官跌落到流亡乡村的经过与心境。帕尔默解释道，在欧洲知识分子传统中，流亡（exile）极其普遍，但丁、伏尔泰、卢梭、托马斯·霍布斯和马基雅维利无一例外都经历过。在佛罗伦萨，流亡通常并非永久决裂，而是一种附带政治考察性质的“暂定放逐”（provisional exile）。执政当局如果暂时对你不信任，会将你派往布鲁日、伦敦、巴塞罗那或德意志诸邦等特定商业中心，让你作为非正式使节继续执行外交与联络任务。只要你保持忠诚听从调遣，几年后便极有希望被召回城邦重返政坛。 然而，美第奇家族对马基雅维利的流放极为反常且残酷： - 他们完全不信任马基雅维利，甚至在此前对他进行了抓捕和严刑拷打（尽管他并没有真正参与反美第奇政变）。 - 当局没有把他派往欧洲的主要贸易与政治中心，而是将他打发到佛罗伦萨城外托斯卡纳乡下一个荒无人烟的小村庄。 - 这一命令的目的不是“在外待命”，而是“去那里烂掉”（go rot）——剥夺他与重要人物的所有政治接触，切断一切资源，陷入彻底的社会隔离。 面对这种绝境，当时整个欧洲社会的普遍预期是马基雅维利会立刻叛离，去为其他外国君主效力。凭借他卓越的古典学造诣、历史学修养、军事与外交才华，以及在罗马、法国宫廷与神圣罗马帝国皇帝身边的丰富人脉，欧洲有无数红衣主教和宫廷求贤若渴，渴望以三倍于佛罗伦萨的高薪聘请他撰写家族赞美史或担任顶级外交高官（远至英格兰的君主此前一个世纪都在高薪延揽佛罗伦萨学者）。然而马基雅维利彻底违背了常理，断然拒绝离开。 帕尔默评价马基雅维利是“人类历史上最纯粹的爱国者之一”。尽管美第奇政权冤枉他、拷打他并试图让他发霉烂掉，但他唯一的执念依然是报效祖国佛罗伦萨。他在乡间撰写《君主论》，本质上是一份极其绝望的“求职信”，向新政权展示自己的忠诚与治国智慧，乞求他们允许自己重返岗位。出于最深沉的爱国主义，他决不肯将这些洞见与策略出卖给任何外国势力，因为任何武装了这些权术的外部强权，都可能转头毁灭他挚爱的祖国。 ### `01:20:00` 为城邦保守“核机密”：马基雅维利的无私与《君主论》的私密定位 马基雅维利甚至渴望重返政坛为下令对他施加酷刑的美第奇家族效力，其唯一动机就是被召回后能够继续为心爱的佛罗伦萨服务。理解这一点，正是解开《君主论》（*The Prince*）目标受众之谜的关键。他撰写的其他作品——无论是《李维史论》（*Discourses on Livy*）、《佛罗伦萨史》（*Florentine Histories*），还是讽刺喜剧《曼陀罗》（*Mandragola*）——都是为了公开发行、扩大个人名望并参与重塑当时的政治思想公共讨论。唯独《君主论》截然不同：它是一份秘密的“专有技术”（proprietary technology），是维系政权存续的核心秘方（secret sauce）。马基雅维利深知自己开启了一门全新的政治科学，但他绝不允许这些洞见落入外邦势力之手。他就像一位掌握最高外交机密的核物理科学家，因绝对忠诚于祖国而坚决不肯背叛泄密。 这种纯粹的忠诚揭示了思想史上最大的讽刺之一：在后世的语汇中，“马基雅维利主义”（Machiavellian）已沦为阴险、自私和冷酷权谋的代名词；然而马基雅维利本人却是历史记载中最无私的人之一。他宁愿舍弃外交官的锦绣前程、抛弃名声与挚友、放弃在繁华都市中享受体面生活，甘愿在穷乡僻壤中受苦消磨，也绝不出售自己的才华。“他宁可什么人都不侍奉，也绝不愿浪费自己哪怕一个小时的时间去为佛罗伦萨以外的任何事物效劳。”正如德瓦尔凯什所总结的那样，马基雅维利在书中鼓吹的残酷、现实主义与犬儒策略，其全部目的都是为了保卫脆弱的佛罗伦萨，而非提供给任何泛泛而谈的平庸君主作为压迫工具。在马基雅维利生前，这部书稿仅在佛罗伦萨统治者以及极少数与他相交数十年的顶尖学者、密友圈子中传阅。 - **公开发行 vs. 绝密专有**：与面向公众、旨在引发社会思潮的《李维史论》不同，《君主论》被严格限制在统治者与极亲密的私人研讨圈内。 - **“马基雅维利”概念的悖论**：后世指责其倡导极端自私的权谋，但马基雅维利本人的动机全然出自保护佛罗伦萨城邦免遭灭顶之灾的至高爱国主义。 --- ### `01:22:45` 手抄本时代的专属性：“只写给一个人的书”与王者之镜传统 针对德瓦尔凯什提出的疑问——既然《君主论》只是一份供个别统治者阅读的务实行动指南，为何马基雅维利还要在其中倾注如此精湛的文学造诣？艾达·帕尔默解释道，当时正处于手抄本向印刷术过渡的关键转型期，文本的价值评判标准及其对学者声誉的作用方式与现代大不相同。在马基雅维利青年时期，顶尖学者接受雇佣、为特定的某一位统治者撰写仅存一册或寥寥数册的“君主手册”（Mirror for princes），是一种极为普遍的惯例。例如，上一代最负盛名的大学者之一乔瓦尼·蓬塔诺（Giovanni Pontano）就曾受雇于征服那不勒斯的阿拉贡国王“博大者”阿方索（Alfonso the Magnanimous）。 这位以挥金如土赞助文人著称的阿方索国王，极为擅长通过私人逸事塑造自身威望。据说有一次战事正酣，一名浑身泥污、大汗淋漓的传令兵闯入房间，打断了国王清晨与学者朋友研读柏拉图的时光。国王勃然大怒，呵斥道：“滚出去！这是一个属于穿长袍的人的地方，而不是穿盔甲的人的地方！”他甚至拒绝听取前线急报，直到按计划完成这一个小时对灵魂哲学的静思。这导致他输掉了当下的战役，却赢得了整场战争的最终胜利，并通过这类传奇轶事赢得了广泛敬仰。阿方索支付给学者的薪酬是佛罗伦萨共和国的五倍，他委托学者为自己的每一位王子和公主撰写独一无二的定制统治手册。例如，其中一部献给其女儿、后来的费拉拉公爵夫人埃莱奥诺拉（Eleanor of Aragon）的孤本手稿，初衷绝非公开流传，而仅供她私人参阅并传给子嗣；但作者却能因为外界盛传“某学者为尊贵的公主量身定制了绝密执政手册”而名声大噪。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Renaissance Bespoke Political Handbook Production accDescr: Flowchart showing how bespoke handbooks were commissioned, kept private, and generated scholarly fame. subgraph Patronage ["王室赞助与学术委托"] King["统治者/君主<br/>(如那不勒斯阿方索国王)"] --> Commission["高薪委托顶级学者<br/>(撰写专属统治手册)"] end subgraph Production ["文本制作与专有保管"] Commission --> Scholar["受雇学者<br/>(如蓬塔诺、马基雅维利)"] Scholar --> Manuscript["仅存1至数份手抄本<br/>(专有绝密政治技术)"] end subgraph Audience_Impact ["定向受众与外溢声誉"] Manuscript --> SingleTarget["单一受众/继承人<br/>(如费拉拉公爵夫人)"] Scholar -. 外部书信网络传播.-> Prestige["作者声名远扬<br/>(掌控统治秘诀的威望)"] end ``` - **“君主”（Prince）的中性含义**：文艺复兴时期的“君主”（Prince）词汇在语法上虽有阴阳性后缀，但实质上指代国家统治者，男女通用；甚至伊丽莎白一世女王在其早期统治阶段也被称为“伊丽莎白君主”（Prince Elizabeth）。 - **学术声誉机制**：作者无需依靠大众畅销来确立地位，只要外界知晓他正在为最高统治者研发机密“政治专有技术”，其学术威望便足以登顶。 --- ### `01:25:35` 独家报告的延续与《君主论》沉浮史 德瓦尔凯什指出，现代人往往难以理解“一本书只写给一位读者”的逻辑，尽管在当代 AI 定制化生成内容的背景下，人类似乎又在重新接近这一模式。帕尔默反驳称，这种现象其实从未在人类历史上消失：一方面，人们每天阅读的大半文字原本就是只针对一人的私人电子邮件与书信；另一方面，在权力中枢内部，学者和智囊为极少数决策者编写长达百页的独家著作始终是常态。例如，现代历史学家或情报分析员受雇为美国国防部或国会委员会撰写详尽的叙利亚地缘政治报告，或分析军事冲突关键河流的历史沿革，其全部读者往往仅限于九位国会议员或十几名军政高官。马基雅维利的《君主论》本质上就是这种供核心决策层使用的专属定制报告。 随后，对话转向这部原本绝不打算公开的手册为何会走向大众出版，并在后世反复经历被禁与解禁。帕尔默解释，具有颠覆性思想的异端著作往往会在历史长河中潜沉漫长岁月，直到某个时代提出了全新的困惑，而这些文本恰好提供了答案时，才会瞬间爆发出轰动效应。这与卢克莱修的《物性论》（*De Rerum Natura*）如出一辙——这部保存了古希腊原子论和虚空理论的著作在漫长的中世纪默默无闻，直到17世纪早期病菌学说和近代科学萌芽时期才突然再版三十余次，并在19世纪细胞学与原子理论大发展时再次产生巨大影响力。《君主论》也是如此，1527年马基雅维利逝世后，其后人为了家族荣耀与纪念这位才华横溢的先人，才推动其遗作于1532年在美第奇家族教皇克莱孟七世的许可下正式出版，从而打破了马基雅维利生前竭力维持的私密防线。 - **现代等价物**：美国国防情报部门及国会顾问撰写的非公开深度调研报告，在性质上完全等同于文艺复兴时期的机密君主手册。 - **《君主论》的出版与查禁轨迹**： - **1532年**：马基雅维利去世五年后，由幸存亲属推动，获得美第奇教皇特许首次公开印刷出版。 - **1559年**：在教皇保禄四世主导下，罗马教廷颁布《禁书目录》（*Index Librorum Prohibitorum*），《君主论》随即遭到教会全面查禁。 - **思想沉浮定律**：激进的超前文本往往处于休眠状态，唯有当社会演进至遭遇特定历史困境时，才会因应时代的提问而突然成为显学。 ### `01:30:00` 美第奇的短视、印刷术引发的禁书潮与“非大写”的马基雅维利 马基雅维利的家族在他去世后向当局申请出版他的著作，初衷只是为了延续并扩大其名望。这些书当时依然题献给美第奇家族成员，美第奇家族也乐见其成，心想：“出版这书也能为我们家族增添光彩。”他们完全没有像马基雅维利本人那样，深切意识到其文本内含的危险力量。然而，书一面世，公众很快发现书中充斥着离经叛道的惊世骇俗之论。随着活字印刷术普及引发的信息爆炸，宗教与世俗权力立刻掀起了声势浩大的书籍审查浪潮，马基雅维利的作品旋即被列入《禁书目录》（*Index Librorum Prohibitorum*）。帕尔默提出了一个历史规律的小论题：人类历史上每一次新兴信息技术的诞生，必然会伴随一轮试图管控新技术传播的剧烈审查潮，数以万计的书籍瞬间被封杀。 不过在当时，马基雅维利并非审查机器眼中最危险的靶子。《禁书目录》有着极其严密的等级划分，严格区分了“罪大恶极的头号异端”与“仅具有轻度危险性的次要异端”，唯有头号异端的名字才会被全大写（ALL CAPS）印刷。帕尔默分享了一段生动有趣的个人回忆：当年她第一次翻阅这些早期禁书目录时，满怀期待地想去寻找马基雅维利，结果发现他的名字竟然没有大写，这让她感到极其失望和愤愤不平：“怎么回事？他凭什么不大写？！”事实上在那个时代，全大写殊荣完全被宗教改革领袖垄断——马丁·路德、加尔文、慈运理以及无数现代人从未耳闻的新教神学家才是教会的心腹大患。马基雅维利只是在一场全盘扫射的审查大潮中被顺带波及，他的真正轰动还要等到后世。 ### `01:32:00` 霍布斯《利维坦》带来的冲击：为了击溃“幼兽”而重新发掘“怪兽之父” 就像卢克莱修的《物性论》是在人们试图探究疾病的病菌学说时重新爆火一样，马基雅维利第一次在欧洲思想界掀起巨大波澜，是在托马斯·霍布斯的《利维坦》出版之后。《利维坦》的面世如同一辆满载砖头的重型卡车，狠狠撞击了欧洲思想界。霍布斯用令人战栗却又无懈可击、极富说服力的华丽论证，构建了一幅关于人性与上帝的恐怖图景。这套理论既令世人恐惧万分，又让人欲罢不能。毫不夸张地说，在《利维坦》问世后的整整四十年里，西欧哲学的头号甚至唯一目标，就是想方设法驳倒霍布斯。 在苦思破局之策时，学者们敏锐地察觉到：霍布斯关于政治与历史的底层逻辑，简直同马基雅维利如出一辙。两者都在运用一种功利主义与后果主义的分析方法——推导“如果采取 A 策略，就会导致 B 结果”；更关键的是，他们都在完全不依赖神明设定的前提下剖析政权的起源。霍布斯描述的是处于自然状态中的人类为了自保而发明了政府，而非上帝居高临下指引亚当该如何统治世界。当时的人们把霍布斯视作恶魔，称其为“巨兽利维坦”或“马姆斯伯里的野兽”。思想界普遍认为：“既然霍布斯是横空出世的怪兽幼崽，那我们就必须去寻找孕育这头幼兽的‘怪兽之父’。如果我们能把马基雅维利的学说研读透彻并找到其中的破绽漏洞，或许就能借此击溃霍布斯。”马基雅维利在此刻之所以名声大噪，并不是因为获得了同情者，而是因为被视作克制更大死敌的有力理论工具。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 霍布斯引发的马基雅维利研究回潮 accDescr: 展现学者为了反驳霍布斯而溯源研究马基雅维利的逻辑链条 subgraph Origin["思想源流：世俗政治学"] M["马基雅维利思想<br/>纯世俗权力分析 / 后果主义"] --> H["霍布斯《利维坦》<br/>自然状态 / 无神设定的国家起源"] end subgraph Reaction["欧洲学界危机（长达40年的驳斥潮）"] H -->|"极度震撼与恐慌"| Threat["哲学界面临的终极威胁<br/>'马姆斯伯里的野兽'"] Threat -->|"寻找思想漏洞"| Counter["回溯源头：研究'怪兽之父'<br/>从马基雅维利文本中寻找反驳武器"] Counter -.->|"重新精读"| M end ``` ### `01:34:00` 十九世纪的政教分离思潮与“第一位现代人”的国家争霸赛 马基雅维利的《君主论》真正成为全球名著丛书中必不可少的奠基性经典，其实是十九世纪的事情。随着启蒙运动以及随之而来的美利坚共和国建立、法兰西大革命和全球范围内的民主宪政运动，人们迫切需要一套全新的视角来思考政治，尤其是“政教分离”（Separation of Church and State）。当时人类所能查阅的绝大多数政治学论文，其底色无一例外地将宗教与政治紧紧捆绑在一起。而马基雅维利成了极其罕见的先驱——他将政府置于一个封闭的盒子里单独审视，完全不接入任何超自然宗教电源，只考察政治在尘世间运作的实际后果。这种“无神圣介入”的政治推演，恰好为十九世纪探索现代政教分离制度的理论家们提供了完美的思维工具箱。 与此相伴随的是十九世纪欧洲各国的民族主义争霸，各国都在争相推举本国思想家抢夺“第一位现代人”的桂冠： - **英国**主张弗朗西斯·培根是第一位现代人，因为他确立了科学方法。 - **法国**推举勒内·笛卡尔，认为他奠定了现代逻辑演绎与理性思维的基石。 - **意大利**则将马基雅维利推上神坛，宣称意大利文化凭借马基雅维利发明了“政教分离”，从而率先开启了现代性。 “政教分离”这个词汇本身带有典型的后世色彩，如果当面说给马基雅维利听，他未必能立刻理解其现代语境；但帕尔默指出，马基雅维利必定会陷入深思，随后兴奋地觉得“这想法真酷”，并立刻动笔给朋友们写信高谈阔论。 ### `01:35:40` 宗教是城邦的粘合剂：从托马斯·潘恩到古罗马亡魂的心理功利主义 面对帕尔默关于“马基雅维利开创政教分离”的阐述，德瓦尔凯什提出了一个反论假说：在十九世纪共和国兴起后，统治者最焦虑的是如何维持共和国的长治久安，而这恰恰是马基雅维利在《李维史论》前三分之一篇幅中极为着迷的核心问题；马基雅维利在书中明确强调，维持共和国的关键在于拥有一个能让民众产生极强敬畏心的宗教体系。他甚至指出，在罗马建国史上，赋予罗马诸神与宗教合法性并制定宗教规约的努玛·庞皮利乌斯（Numa Pompilius），其历史贡献甚至超越了建国者罗慕路斯；不仅如此，马基雅维利还援引了大西庇阿的例子：在罗马军队被汉尼拔彻底击溃的至暗时刻，罗马军民陷入绝望准备仓皇弃城而逃，年轻的西庇阿拔出利剑逼迫众人对罗马诸神发誓誓死守卫祖国，众人因为敬畏神明降下的惩罚不敢违背誓言，心想“汉尼拔再可怕也比不上触怒神明”，从而重新集结保卫了罗马。这是否说明马基雅维利实质上高度重视宗教对国家合法性的决定性意义？ 帕尔默赞同德瓦尔凯什指出的文本事实，但解释道：必须将“建制化宗教组织”（Institutional Religion）与“宗教对大众产生的心理效应”（Psychological Effect of Religion）严格区分开来。马基雅维利在此处的思考方式，与十八世纪末至十九世纪的思想家如托马斯·潘恩完全相通： - **托马斯·潘恩的思想实验**：作为撰写《常识》的激进自然神论者，潘恩痛斥天主教与英国国教等建制化宗教是延续千百年的贪婪阴谋，其目的无非是精神控制与搜刮钱财；但潘恩同时极力主张每个国家都必须有宗教，学校必须强制开展宗教教育——至于是哪一种宗教则完全无所谓。潘恩认为，唯有对死后惩罚与神明的畏惧，才能从实用心理层面迫使公民遵纪守法。这完全是一种功利主义的工具论考量，彻底脱离了旧时代“国家奉行某宗教是因为相信其教义是宇宙唯一真理”的神权国家逻辑。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 传统神权国家与现代功利主义宗教观的对比 accDescr: 对比传统政教合一与马基雅维利式功利主义宗教心理学的核心差异 subgraph Traditional["传统神学国家逻辑"] Truth["国家确信其宗教为绝对真理"] --> Coercion["国家机器推广国教<br/>消灭异端维持神权统治"] end subgraph Machiavellian["马基雅维利与潘恩的心理功利论"] Mind["宗教心理效应工具化"] --> Afterlife["利用神罚敬畏 / 亡魂名誉机制"] Afterlife --> CivicDuty["促使民众遵守法律<br/>自愿为保卫国家献身"] end ``` - **古罗马亡魂观念与基督教的致命反差**：马基雅维利在《李维史论》中有一段极其震撼的经典分析。古罗马继承了荷马史诗的传统：死后亡魂的存在与清晰意识，完全取决于尘世活人对你的记忆；如果你的名字被世人遗忘，你的鬼魂就会沦为一个失去自我认知、浑浑噩噩漫无目的游荡的空虚残影。罗马人因此拥有无穷的动力去立下丰功伟绩、在战场上为城邦慷慨赴死，因为只要祖国长存，他们的英名就会被后世万代传颂，从而换取死后永恒的荣耀。 - 反观**基督教**，马基雅维利尖锐地指出，基督教许诺只要个人保持虔诚或最好直接殉道，灵魂就能在天国获得永生。这种死后救赎完全脱离了尘世政治实体，导致基督徒没有任何为保卫国家而牺牲生命的世俗动力。马基雅维利正是在这种赤裸裸的社会心理学与国家效用层面上，对宗教机制展开残酷而冷峻的剖析。 ### `01:40:00` 宗教的功用主义与早期印刷术时代的学者生态 马基雅维利在考察宗教时展现出一种高度功利且冷峻的政治视角。他指出，如果一个宗教告诉人们“来世的救赎完全取决于内心的虔敬”，其结果必然是促使公民躲进盒子里当修士，而不是踊跃参军保家卫国。因此在马基雅维利看来，古罗马的多神教在激发爱国主义和维持政治稳定方面，远比基督教有效得多。然而，在论述该观点的章节末尾，他又附上一句看似敷衍的免责声明：“但是，基督教的优势在于它是真实的——本章完。”这种处理方式与托马斯·潘恩（Thomas Paine）的思想颇为相似：他们关注的不是某种宗教是否代表绝对真理、国家是否必须迎合神权意志，而是将宗教视为塑造良好公民素养的一种工具。就像政府评估要不要普及识字率、提升公民数学水平或是资助报纸以便选民明智投票一样，宗教在这里被视为影响大众心理的现实要素，而非求取神明祝福或降灾的法门。 随后对话转向文艺复兴早期的学术物质环境。德瓦凯什提到在古腾堡印刷机刚刚问世不久的年代，书籍极端昂贵，学者们必须在极少数可用的文本上反复沉思。马基雅维利的父亲当年不得不通过为李维（Livy）的著作编制索引，以此辛苦劳作数月才换得一部《罗马史》。埃达·帕尔默分享了她在梵蒂冈图书馆亲手接触过的一件珍贵手稿：马基雅维利亲手抄写的整部卢克莱修（Lucretius）《物性论》。耐人寻味的是，马基雅维利并非从古旧手抄本直接誊写，而是对着一份印刷版抄写，并在抄写过程中融入了另一份手稿中的校勘与订正，同时写下密密麻麻的边注。这创造出了一个在质量上超越当时任何单一印刷本或手抄本的“私人订制修正版”。在活字印刷与手抄传统平行的过渡时期，学者们既拥抱新媒介，又不得不耗费数月甚至数年用手抄来完善自己的藏书。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 文艺复兴早期学者的知识获取路径 accDescr: 展现马基雅维利通过印刷品与手抄本融合订正卢克莱修文本的过程 subgraph Sources["稀缺的文本源头"] A["早期印刷本<br/>(存在排印错漏)"] B["不同手抄本<br/>(含独特勘误)"] end subgraph MachiavelliMethod["马基雅维利的学术重构"] C["对照比对并校正错误"] D["亲手誊抄整部作品"] E["空白处写下大量边注评论"] end F["私人定制的优质文本<br/>(质量超越市售印刷品与单一手抄本)"] A --> C B --> C C --> D D --> E E --> F ``` - **宗教效用论的核心**：将宗教当作如同读写能力（literacy）和数学技能（math skills）一般的社会建构工具，剥离神权政治中“推行正统以换取天佑”的狂热。 - **李维著作的获取代价**：马基雅维利的父亲为出版商承担繁重的索引编制苦工，才让年轻的马基雅维利在床头拥有一部终身反复研读的《罗马史》。 - **双轨并行的书籍时代**：15世纪末至16世纪初的文人并不消极等待几年后可能上市的新印刷版，而是以手抄与文献校勘相结合的方式自制学术工作母本。 --- ### `01:45:00` “托古改制”：以古代注疏为伪装的原创思想繁荣 德瓦凯什指出，马基雅维利倾注数十年心血撰写《李维史论》（Discourses on Livy），正是因为这本常备枕边的经典成了他理解周遭动荡现实的核心滤镜。帕尔默补充了更深层的时代背景：在文艺复兴时期，“原创思想”不仅不受欢迎，甚至声名狼藉。彼时的知识界沉浸在对古典时代的无限狂热中，坚信重返古罗马才是走出中世纪混乱、迎来和平与黄金时代的唯一解药。如果一个学者宣称自己的观点是凭空独创的，根本无人问津；相反，若将其包装为对古代大师的注疏，不仅身价倍增，更能获得广泛的受众与威望。 为了让自己的激进观点被世人接纳，学者们极尽曲解之能事： - **乔尔丹诺·布鲁诺（Giordano Bruno）**：在对亚里士多德的注疏中，理直气壮地宣称亚里士多德讲了某些话，而那些话实际上与亚里士多德的原意彻底相反。 - **维泰博的安尼乌斯（Annius of Viterbo）**：托尼·格拉夫顿（Anthony Grafton）笔下的这位奇人为了兜售自己对古代历史的重构理论，伪造了整套古文献，甚至预先在地下埋藏假文物再戏剧性地当众“发掘”。 - **《李维史论》的真实定位**：对马基雅维利而言，写一部《李维史论》比出版一本佛罗伦萨地方历史或论君主的独立小册子更加体面、更具声望，也更容易在主流学界引起轰动。 这种“在注疏中夹带私货”的风尚主导了此后近两个世纪的欧洲知识界。整个17世纪，大量最激进的政治哲学思辨——包括对马基雅维利本身的隐秘评注——实际上都爆发在塞内卡（Seneca）和李维作品的页边注释（footnotes）与学术论战中：正文中央往往只是塞内卡的一小块拉丁文段落，四周却被浩瀚繁复的政治论争批注彻底包围。 然而到了19世纪，学术审美发生剧烈逆转，浪漫主义崇尚“从宙斯头部直接诞生的雅典娜式原创天才”，推崇那些隐居惊涛骇浪边的木屋中独自苦思的哲人。其结果是，19世纪的哲学史家将文艺复兴哲学几乎全盘否定，讥讽其“除了《君主论》和皮科·德拉·米兰多拉被误读的《论人的尊严》外，不过是两百年间人们在不断曲解柏拉图”。帕尔默强调，如果将这些作品仅仅当成字面意义上的注疏，它们确实在胡说八道；但若明白古典权威只是当时学者搭建思想的“花架”，玫瑰花（原创思想）正是在这个支架上才得以盛开绽放，那么《李维史论》等评注著作才是真正隐藏文艺复兴思想火种的核心宝库，而《君主论》这种自立门户的奇书反而才是当时格格不入的异类。 ### `01:50:00` 文艺复兴学者的注疏传统与印刷术带来的声誉危机 阿达·帕尔默（Ada Palmer）指出，像翻译柏拉图的马尔西利奥·费奇诺（Marsilio Ficino）这样的人，由衷且深切地坚信自己构想出的那套极其原创的宇宙学与魔法，全都被秘密编码在柏拉图的文本之中。尽管事实并非如此，但这恰恰反映了当时学者的思维模式：他们通过精读古典经典并融合其他知识，形成全新世界观，却必须以“注疏”的形式呈现出来——比如对柏拉图的注疏，或对伪狄奥尼修斯（Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite）的注疏。这也是为什么马基雅维利会写下《李维史论》（*Discourses on Livy*），因为在当时，撰写李维的注疏才是一名学者“本职该做”的主流正统学术，而马基雅维利所做的其他事情在当时人看来反而是次要的、学术之余的偏门奇作。 然而，步入成年的马基雅维利目睹了自己作品开始被大量印刷制造的过程。面对印刷术的降临，他的第一反应交织着极度兴奋与彻骨惊恐。马基雅维利正好处在作为“作者”这一身份的历史关键转折期：印刷技术已经问世，但现代版权制度尚未诞生。在手抄本时代，世界上根本没有版权的概念。抄写一本厚重的书需要长达六个月极其艰苦的体力劳动，只要听说有人抄了一份自己的书，作者的第一反应通常是：“谢天谢地！又多了一份备份，这本书彻底被大火烧毁的概率终于降低了！” 印刷术彻底颠覆了这一切，马基雅维利成为了人类历史上第一批遭遇“盗印危机”的作家。他震惊地发现，当地的印刷商居然在完全没有知会他、从未同他商讨的情况下，擅自排版印刷了他的作品。更让他崩溃的是，印出来的书页上充斥着无数错别字与琐碎讹误。在保存至今的书信中，能看到马基雅维利陷入了彻底的恐慌：“天啊，所有人都会觉得我是一个蹩脚的学者！书里有那么多细小的错误，但那根本不是我写的，是排字工在排版时弄错的错字！可是读者根本不会知道这点，他们会把账算在我头上，我的学术声誉要彻底毁了！我该怎么办？”当时的社会完全没有版权法规，也没有任何法律救济途径，朋友们在信件往来中也只能无奈建议：“给每一个有头有脸的大人物写信解释吧，告诉他们那些错别字不是你犯的，除此以外我们别无他法。” - **注疏体传统**：文艺复兴学者通过对古典文本（如柏拉图、李维）作注疏来表达颠覆性原创思想，这是学者立足的核心形式。 - **手抄本与印刷本的心态断层**：手抄本时代渴望被复制以防孤本绝版；印刷时代的未经授权排印则引发了作者对文本失真与个人声誉受损的恐慌。 - **排字工的错误**：马基雅维利通信中透露出的焦虑，揭示了第一代印刷时代作家在缺乏版权法律保护时的无助。 --- ### `01:52:45` 审查制度与版权法的奇特同源：宗教裁判所的印刷特许 极其反直觉的是，现代版权制度最初并非诞生于作者权利保护，而是与宗教审查制度同源共生，其真正的历史始作俑者竟是宗教裁判所（Inquisition）。在1515年天主教会出台图书审查政策后（正值马基雅维利生活的时代），教会规定任何文本在付印之前，必须提交给教会授权的官员（如宗教裁判官或主教）通读审核，确认其中没有异端邪说后方可放行。实质上，所有书籍在获得出版许可前，在法律意义上都属于“预先遭禁”状态。 但作为通过这套严苛审查流程的回报，教会赋予该印刷商一项垄断特许：只有完成审查申报流程的那一家印刷商才拥有印刷该书的权利。印刷商随后可以将宗教裁判所出具的审查通过凭证，作为证明自己享有排他性出版垄断权的法律文件，以此去起诉那些盗印或剽窃的人。人类历史上的第一种版权保护，正是宗教裁判所的审查凭证。 这种模式随后引起了天主教世界以外地区的艳羡。例如在英国，民间甚至主动呼吁引入审查机制，商人和印刷商纷纷表示：“我们需要宗教裁判所那样的制度！那太棒了——它既能让印刷商拥有专印垄断权，又能让作者拥有拒绝他人随意付印的权力。”英国后来通过的早期出版许可制度（即现代英美法系及所有英联邦国家版权法的直系祖先），最初正是对宗教裁判所审查特许的拙劣模仿：先取得官方许可，换取市场垄断。直到17世纪上半叶（即马基雅维利去世约一个世纪后），随着出版自由运动的兴起，法律才逐渐剥离了审查的惩戒属性，保留了其赋予作者与印刷商的垄断版权，最终演变成现代版权法。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 现代版权制度的演变历程 accDescr: 展示宗教裁判所的事前审查如何演变成印刷垄断许可，再被英国借鉴并最终蜕变为现代版权法。 subgraph S1["16世纪天主教世界"] A["作者/印刷商提交文稿"] --> B["宗教裁判所事前审查<br/>（排查异端思想）"] B --> C["签发准印许可凭据"] C --> D["获得排他性印刷垄断权<br/>（早期版权原型）"] end subgraph S2["17世纪英国及现代转型"] D --> E["英国模仿审查机制<br/>（以许可换取出版垄断）"] E --> F["出版自由运动推进"] F --> G["剥离思想审查<br/>保留排他性经济版权"] end ``` - **预先违禁制**：1515年后天主教世界的书籍在未获裁判所批准前默认为非法出版物。 - **特许垄断的诱因**：审查凭证成为市场上对抗盗版和剽窃的唯一合法抗辩工具。 - **英美法版权的起源**：英国Stationers' Company等出版特许制度本质上是对天主教异端审查机制的世俗化移植。 --- ### `01:55:00` 去中心化的宗教裁判所：如“无国界医生”般的权力现实 德瓦凯什（Dwarkesh）询问，宗教裁判所究竟有什么动力去替作者维护文本权利？阿达·帕尔默解释，这部分是因为特许垄断能够吸引更多作者和印刷商自愿主动接受审查合作；但更深层的原因在于，现代人对宗教裁判所存在巨大的历史误解。大众往往受教会宣传或影视作品影响，将宗教裁判所想象成一个由梵蒂冈中央高度集权、巨细靡遗掌控一切的单极恐怖怪物，但事实完全相反。 宗教裁判所由一群散落在各个偏远城镇的个体裁判官组成。在交通不便的时代，与罗马梵蒂冈通信一次就需要耗费数周乃至数月，每个裁判官都必须自行决断。更为关键的是，宗教裁判官通常是多明我会的修道士，他们没有丰厚薪俸，没有自己的独立武装警卫，没有关押犯人的专属监狱，甚至连直接逮捕公民的世俗行政权力都不具备。他们必须寄生于当地世俗政府的合作： 1. **资金与设施的匮乏**：裁判官像普通人一样有家庭负担和世故考量，本地人赠送几瓶好酒，就可能换取裁判官在阅读文本时“高抬贵手”； 2. **完全依赖地方政权提供暴力机器**：只有当地政府愿意支持、愿意借调卫兵和牢房时，宗教裁判所才能抓捕审判任何人。如果当地统治者希望借宗教裁判所清除政敌（如西班牙的斐迪南与伊莎贝拉国王为了清洗心存疑虑的犹太人和穆斯林人口，向裁判所砸入巨额资金并配备重兵），宗教裁判所就会变得极其残暴庞大； 3. **地方保护主义下的软弱无能**：如果身处佛罗伦萨这样由美第奇家族统治的公国，情况便截然不同。美第奇大公本人沉迷于费奇诺式的柏拉图灵魂投射魔法，宫廷里全是一帮离经叛道的激进知识分子。当裁判官请求“殿下，我能逮捕此人吗”时，大公只会冷冷回应：“不行，那人是为我干活的，你一根手指都不准碰他。” 帕尔默在此提出了一个看似荒诞却极其贴切的类比：当时的宗教裁判所运行模式类似于现代的“无国界医生”（Doctors Without Borders）。它不是世俗政府本身，而是一个跨国非政府组织，试图在不同地区推行其自认为有益的意识形态目标。地方政府若愿意配合，它就呼风唤雨；地方政府若报以敌意、断绝资金并闭门不纳，宗教裁判所在当地就会陷入形同虚设、近乎完全瘫痪的境地。 - **多明我会修道士的生计**：裁判官依靠修道院微薄补贴与本地人情往来维持生活，并非不食人间烟火的意识形态机器。 - **西班牙宗教裁判所的特殊性**：其骇人恶名源于西班牙王室出于政治目的的主动资助与暴力加持，而非来自罗马教廷的直接驱动。 - **软性抵抗的书信记录**：现存历史档案中有大量裁判官向上级的抱怨信，哀叹某地大公太过宽容自由，包庇异端，导致裁判官束手无策。 --- ### `01:58:30` 庇护网络下的特权泡沫与马基雅维利的性取向 这种完全依附于世俗统治者意愿的执法体系，在文艺复兴时期的意大利制造了无数个“特权庇护泡沫”。只要学者、艺术家或思想家深得地方权贵或大公的庇护，无论其思想在外人看来多么大逆不道、充满异端色彩，宗教裁判所都根本动不了他们分毫。 同样的权力逻辑也主导了当时社会对同性恋（鸡奸罪）的执法。教会法虽然明令禁止同性性行为，但只要当事人置身于强大权势人物的羽翼之下，教会的执法人员就根本不敢造次。帕尔默在此特别谈到了马基雅维利本人的私生活与性取向：从历史档案来看，马基雅维利是一个毫无疑问的“双性恋者”。他一生中既有公开交往的女友，也有作为消遣玩伴的男友；在他留存的文字作品中，既能找到热情洋溢的同性恋情诗，也能读到大量的异性恋情诗，他对两种性别都展现出浓厚且平等的兴致。 马基雅维利身边聚集着许多同性恋学者好友。在现存的一封极具人情味的通信中，马基雅维利正与他的同性恋圈内好友们热烈讨论：当时罗马的一名负责世俗道德执法的官员突然心血来潮，开始严厉扫荡和镇压城内的同性恋行为。这导致他们圈子里那些在罗马从事学术研究的同性恋学者们人人自危，不得不紧急借助权贵庇护与私下联络来规避这场突如其来的整肃风暴。这种特权泡沫下的私密生活，鲜活展现了当时权力、法律与个人自由之间极其微妙的博弈状态。 - **特权泡沫法则**：在文艺复兴意大利，思想异端与禁忌行为的生存空间完全取决于其与世俗庇护人的亲疏关系。 - **马基雅维利的双性恋特质**：传世文献中包含他致男女情人的书信，以及兼具异性恋与同性爱欲主题的诗作。 - **罗马的执法波动**：宗教与道德禁令的执行高度依赖特定执法官员的个人意志，引发同性恋学者社群在庇护网络内的频繁避险。 ### `02:00:00` 赞助庇护制度与审查机制的勾结：版权概念的诞生 在文艺复兴时期的意大利，赞助庇护网络（patronage system）直接决定了个人的生死与学术/艺术自由。当时异端（heresy）与同性恋（homosexuality）面临着高度重合的禁令和由同一套社会权力结构的严厉管辖。帕尔默分享了一个生动的历史轶事：有一帮艺术家朋友争先恐后地想为红衣主教工作，因为在当时的权力结构下，“只要你为红衣主教效力，就没有任何人能动你”。在这帮朋友中，几乎所有人都成功谋得了红衣主教幕僚的差事，唯独剩下一人未能如愿；为了自保免遭同性恋指控，这位失落的艺术家不得不自掏腰包雇用了两名女性性工作者，整天带着性感交际花出入社交场合，以此装出异性恋的表象。在当时的体制下，只要服务于红衣主教或公爵，当事人即便从事极端激进的魔法、激进哲学、激进政治乃至离经叛道的性倾向，世俗或低阶宗教权威也对其束手无策，因为赞助人拥有的更高阶权威足以压制任何调查。 这种庇护关系深刻重塑了早期的图书出版与特许专营权。当时的宗教裁判所（Inquisition）若想在地方立足推行管控，必须极力讨好当地的世俗掌权者。如果一部送审的手稿卷首印有当地重要政治领袖或大公的推荐信，宗教裁判所便会迅速放行。当印刷工坊与作者提出请求，询问能否获得排他性的“垄断印刷许可（monopoly license）”时，像马基雅维利这样的学者与出版商敏锐地意识到可以顺水推舟：“既然你们已经给了出版许可，能否禁止其他所有人印刷？”宗教裁判所也立刻算清了这笔政治账：向特定书商发放独占许可，既能拉拢出版业和知识分子，更能讨好作者背后的政治大佬。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 赞助制度与早期出版垄断许可证的共生关系 accDescr: 展示政治贵族、宗教裁判所与学者出版商之间如何通过献词与专营权形成闭环 subgraph Patrons["政治保护层"] A["世俗统治者与红衣主教<br/>（如美第奇家族）"] end subgraph Church["审查与特许机构"] B["宗教裁判所<br/>（Inquisition）"] end subgraph Authors["创作与出版层"] C["学者与出版印刷商<br/>（如马基雅维利）"] end A -->|"政治庇护与背书"| C C -->|"前言献词与赞颂声望"| A B -->|"讨好地方权贵、放行手稿"| A C -->|"申请独家印刷垄断特权"| B B -->|"发放排他性许可（现代版权雏形）"| C ``` - 美第奇家族批准印刷《君主论》（The Prince）的重要原因之一，在于全书明确题献给了美第奇家族成员并颂扬了其门阀声望，家族希望牢牢掌控成书质量、确保这封关键题献信完整无损地印在每本书的卷首。 - 宗教裁判所通过出让专营特许权来迎合统治家族的意愿，这种世俗虚荣、宗教审查与出版商业利益的合谋，最终孕育出了现代意义上的“版权（copyright）”雏形。 --- ### `02:02:44` 被割裂的双重镜像：爱国志士与“邪恶马基雅维利”的角色剥离 思想史中常常出现一种奇特现象：作者本人真实的言行主张，往往与其在公众文化中演变而成的“思想符号”彻底脱节。马基雅维利正是这一现象的典型受害者。历史上存在两个截然不同的马基雅维利：一个是真实的“爱国者马基雅维利（Machiavelli the Patriot）”，一个为佛罗伦萨呕心沥血的实干家；另一个则是戏剧与通俗文化中的“嗜杀马基雅维利（the murderous Machiavelli）”——在莎士比亚笔下，他化身为魔鬼撒旦的代名词“老尼克（Old Nick，源于 Niccolò Machiavelli）”，《理查三世》中的大反派更是公然将其作为不择手段的效仿榜样。 大众想象中的马基雅维利被定型为一个精于算计、无神论、自私自利且不择手段往上爬的阴谋家。帕尔默尖锐地指出，如果真正通读文本就会发现，《君主论》绝不是教人如何投机钻营的个人成功指南，它根本不配与卡耐基的《人性的弱点》（How to Win Friends and Influence People）放在同一个书架上。该书并非教人“如何夺取权力”，而是教导统治者“在已经建立政权后，如何维持国家稳定并保护平民生命”的治国技术。然而，戏剧化、邪恶化的反派形象对大众而言实在太过刺激，导致真实的作者意图彻底被架空。 - **托马斯·霍布斯（Thomas Hobbes）**：同样经历过这种身份割裂，在英国被妖魔化为“马姆斯伯里的野兽（the beast of Malmesbury）”，其思想被剥离为邪恶专制的象征。 - **巴鲁赫·斯宾诺莎（Baruch Spinoza）**：17世纪著名的激进犹太哲学家，其实际文字充满温情与对人类的关怀，是一位虔诚的一元论（monism）有神论者，认为全宇宙皆是上帝的身体（“你属于神，桌子属于神，摄像机也是神”）。 - **斯宾诺莎被驱逐案**：斯宾诺莎遭遇了犹太教极罕见的破门律（cherem，即犹太版的绝罚断绝关系）。由于该仪式数百年未曾举行，当地犹太社群甚至不得不派人走遍全欧洲寻找唯一知晓该仪轨细节的学者；此事传开后，全欧洲都盛传斯宾诺莎是个连犹太人都无法容忍的“超级头号异端（arch-heretic）”，使斯宾诺莎的符号形象与其真实哲学南辕北辙。 --- ### `02:05:00` 思想地下党的投射与两副面孔的现代启示 在随后的几个世纪里，“马基雅维利”这个虚构出来的反派甚至演变为某种用于猎巫的文化标签。16世纪的西班牙天主教社会在反犹主义狂热中，竟将犹太人描绘为“马基雅维利主义者”，甚至把马基雅维利称为“犹太人的君主”。马基雅维利本人与犹太人毫无瓜葛，但在狂热的天主教西班牙语境下，“马基雅维利式”与“犹太式”成了同义词，共同代指任何暗中侵蚀天主教秩序的“邪恶思想地下党”。 反观当下，当现代人在书架上摆上一本《君主论》，误以为自己正在学习冷酷理性的职场厚黑学与战略晋升之道时，他们其实是在向虚构的文学符号“老尼克”致敬，而不是在面对真实的尼科洛·马基雅维利。真实的作者当年在乡间流放中忍受贫困、放逐，甘愿牺牲财富、名声、上流社交以及与妻子厮守的平凡幸福，仅凭一颗炽热的赤子之心，试图将毕生心血奉献给危难中的祖国。 帕尔默在对谈尾声总结道，比单纯分辨“老尼克”与“爱国者”更有启发性的，是观察人类社会如何对伟大思想进行“双重重影（double image）”的再加工： 1. **作为思想实验角色的马基雅维利**：为我们思考权力政治、自私政客与策略理性提供了极其便利的哲学假想敌与分析工具。 2. **作为现实政治创新者的马基雅维利**：则是人类理解国家构建、现实主义政治与公民共和传统的另一根思想支柱。 社会总是出于自身的实用主义需求，将真实复杂的人物剥离成具有不同工具价值的符号。当你再次从书架上拿下《君主论》翻阅时，请记住：这本书出自一个为了拯救祖国而甘愿放弃一切的流亡者之手。读懂这一点，跃然纸上的将是一个截然不同、震撼人心的马基雅维利。 ## Notable quotes > `05:00` 他曾亲口对我说 — 马基雅维利 > `10:00` 佛罗伦萨共和国将支持你，满足阁下的任何要求，只要你把我们留到最后再吃。 — 马基雅维利 > `10:00` 我原谅你们，你们通过了忠诚考验，一切如初。 — 切萨雷·波吉亚 > `30:00` 请代我向圣座致歉，我无法亲自前来；因为上一次此项重任落在我肩头时，我尚有一位胞弟可以让我托付国政，安心离开。而如今我已再无兄弟，故无法亲身前往。 — “豪华者”洛伦佐·德·美第奇 > `35:10` 重返其奠基之初的本源 — 马基雅维利 > `36:25` 圣父啊，人民要求更多的裙带关系！ — 罗马平民 > `45:00` 这位年轻人是圣托马斯·阿奎那转世，因此你应当录用他。 — 马尔西利奥·费奇诺 > `01:05:00` 恭喜佛罗伦萨，你在地狱里名扬四海！ — 但丁 > `01:15:00` 去那里烂掉 — 美第奇家族 > `01:20:00` 他宁可什么人都不侍奉，也绝不愿浪费自己哪怕一个小时的时间去为佛罗伦萨以外的任何事物效劳。 — 艾达·帕尔默 > `01:22:45` 滚出去！这是一个属于穿长袍的人的地方，而不是穿盔甲的人的地方！ — 阿拉贡国王“博大者”阿方索 > `01:40:00` 但是，基督教的优势在于它是真实的——本章完。 — 马基雅维利 > `01:58:00` 不行，那人是为我干活的，你一根手指都不准碰他。 — 美第奇大公 ## Mentioned Ada Palmer (艾达·帕尔默), Dwarkesh Patel (德瓦尔凯什·帕特尔), Niccolò Machiavelli (尼科洛·马基雅维利), The Prince (《君主论》), Discourses on Livy (《李维史论》), Florentine Histories (《佛罗伦萨史》), Mandragola (《曼陀罗》), Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici (小洛伦佐·德·美第奇), Lorenzo the Magnificent (豪华者洛伦佐·德·美第奇), Medici family (美第奇家族), Pope Leo X (教宗良十世), Pope Sixtus IV (教皇西克斯图斯四世), Pope Innocent VIII (教皇英诺森八世), Pope Julius II (教皇尤利乌斯二世), Pope Clement VII (教皇克莱孟七世), Pope Paul III (教皇保禄三世), Pope Paul IV (教皇保禄四世), Alexander VI (教宗亚历山大六世), Cesare Borgia / Duke Valentino (切萨雷·波吉亚 / 瓦伦蒂诺公爵), Ramiro de Lorqua (雷米罗·德·奥尔科), Girolamo Savonarola (吉罗拉莫·萨沃纳罗拉), Louis XII (法王路易十二), Maximilian I (神圣罗马帝国皇帝马克西米利安一世), Dante Alighieri (但丁), Divine Comedy (《神曲》), Giordano Bruno (乔尔丹诺·布鲁诺), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (乔瓦尼·皮科·德拉·米兰多拉), Marsilio Ficino (马尔西利奥·费奇诺), Saint Julian the Hospitaller (好客者圣朱利安), Saint Francis of Assisi (阿西西的圣方济各), Saint Dominic (圣多明我), Thomas Hobbes (托马斯·霍布斯), Leviathan (《利维坦》), Thomas Paine (托马斯·潘恩), Baruch Spinoza (巴鲁赫·斯宾诺莎), Lucretius (卢克莱修), De Rerum Natura (《物性论》), Livy (李维), Trajan (图拉真), Edward Gibbon (爱德华·吉本), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (《罗马帝国衰亡史》), Alfonso the Magnanimous (阿拉贡国王“博大者”阿方索), Giovanni Pontano (乔瓦尼·蓬塔诺), Annius of Viterbo (维泰博的安尼乌斯), Anthony Grafton (托尼·格拉夫顿), Index Librorum Prohibitorum (《禁书目录》), Inquisition (宗教裁判所), Cursor, Jane Street, Crusoe ## Video description <p>Had Ada Palmer back on – this time to talk about Machiavelli, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of all time.</p><p>Machiavelli cut his teeth as a high-level diplomat for Florence, a position from which he got to closely observe the most important rulers in Europe at the time, including the ones who were on the path to destroying his dearly beloved Florence.</p><p>In 1513 the Medici retook control of Florence and, wrongly suspecting Machiavelli of participating in a coup attempt, fired, tortured, and exiled him.</p><p>Machiavelli could have left exile and worked for any number of different principalities that would have been eager to make use of his talents.</p><p>Instead, he decided to rot in the countryside and compile his career’s lessons about power, politics, and human nature into a book he dedicated to the very man whose new regime had tortured and exiled him, Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici.</p><p>But at least the Medici were in a position to use his insights to defend Florence. Machiavelli the patriot did not want any other hands to touch these books, because those hands, armed further with these lessons, might pose an existential danger to Florence.</p><p>The closest modern analogy, at least as Machiavelli would have seen it, would be Szilard’s letter warning FDR about the possibility of a nuclear fission bomb.</p><p>What were those insights? And how were they inspired by Machiavelli’s dangerous diplomatic missions all across Europe, and his extensive reading of antiquity? Watch this episode with Ada Palmer to find out!</p><p>By the way, Ada is launching a new podcast which I’m very excited about. The first season will be about Machiavelli - a perfect way to dive deeper into the topics we discussed in this episode. Subscribe at <a target="_blank" href="https://beforecast-seven.vercel.app/">Beforecast’s</a> website to be notified of the first episode, subscribe on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/@Beforecast">YouTube</a>, follow her on <a target="_blank" href="https://www.patreon.com/adapalmer">Patreon</a>, and if you want even more Ada, check out her <a target="_blank" href="https://savingtheworldpod.transistor.fm/">FixTheNews</a> Podcast episode, and check out her <a target="_blank" href="https://www.adapalmer.com/">books and more</a>.</p><p>Watch on <a target="_blank" href="https://youtu.be/U1FrhkLQnCI">YouTube</a>; read the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer-2">transcript</a>.</p><p><strong>Sponsors</strong></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://cursor.com/dwarkesh">Cursor</a> recently saved one of my podcast recordings. When a video file from a shoot came out corrupted, I pointed Cursor at it: it recovered the footage on its own, tracking down the right reference file from the file’s metadata and realigning the out-of-sync audio. My whole team now uses Cursor for everyday tasks, not just coding. Get started at<a target="_blank" href="https://cursor.com/dwarkesh"> </a><a target="_blank" href="http://cursor.com/dwarkesh">cursor.com/dwarkesh</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh">Jane Street</a>’s hiring process has been going viral on Twitter lately. The memes are pretty funny, but I wanted to see what their interviews were actually like. So I had Ricson, one of Jane Street’s ML researchers, walk me through a retired puzzle: he gave me an image dataset where 50% of the files had been corrupted – I had to figure out how to recover them. If you’re interested in these sorts of puzzles, you can find Jane Street’s open roles at<a target="_blank" href="https://janestreet.com/dwarkesh"> janestreet.com/dwarkesh</a></p><p>* <a target="_blank" href="https://crusoe.ai/dwarkesh">Crusoe</a> is turning the AI datacenter buildout into an industrial process. At their massive Colorado factory, they assemble Spark units, modular datacenters with power, cooling, and fire suppression built in. They also manufacture specific components in-house to skip the longest lead times. Crusoe has experience running these Spark units on a range of energy sources, including solar and used EV batteries, ensuring they don’t get bottlenecked by grid availability. Learn more at<a target="_blank" href="https://crusoe.ai/dwarkesh"> </a><a target="_blank" href="http://crusoe.ai/dwarkesh">crusoe.ai/dwarkesh</a></p><p>Timestamps</p><p>(00:00:00) – How Florence bargained with Cesare Borgia for survival</p><p>(00:15:08) – Machiavelli’s analytical innovations</p><p>(00:23:58) – Why popes became warlords</p><p>(00:36:13) – Why the common people demanded nepotism</p><p>(00:47:57) – Cesare Borgia brought terror to rulers and justice to the people</p><p>(00:57:55) – Art as a proxy for war</p><p>(01:06:41) – Florence, a city famous in hell</p><p>(01:15:57) – The Prince was a job application to Machiavelli’s torturers</p><p>(01:41:39) – During the Renaissance, original ideas had to be couched in antiquity</p><p>(01:50:44) – Why copyright began with the Inquisition</p><p>(02:02:12) – Machiavelli wasn’t Machiavellian</p> <br/><br/>Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at <a href="https://www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe</a> [Source](https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/202271948/4c92db6bd398d39a8e70cbea4a732f3f.mp3)

[5:00] 马基雅维利: 他曾亲口对我说 [10:00] 马基雅维利: 佛罗伦萨共和国将支持你，满足阁下的任何要求，只要你把我们留到最后再吃。 [10:00] 切萨雷·波吉亚: 我原谅你们，你们通过了忠诚考验，一切如初。 [30:00] “豪华者”洛伦佐·德·美第奇: 请代我向圣座致歉，我无法亲自前来；因为上一次此项重任落在我肩头时，我尚有一位胞弟可以让我托付国政，安心离开。而如今我已再无兄弟，故无法亲身前往。 [35:10] 马基雅维利: 重返其奠基之初的本源 [36:25] 罗马平民: 圣父啊，人民要求更多的裙带关系！ [45:00] 马尔西利奥·费奇诺: 这位年轻人是圣托马斯·阿奎那转世，因此你应当录用他。 [65:00] 但丁: 恭喜佛罗伦萨，你在地狱里名扬四海！ [75:00] 美第奇家族: 去那里烂掉 [80:00] 艾达·帕尔默: 他宁可什么人都不侍奉，也绝不愿浪费自己哪怕一个小时的时间去为佛罗伦萨以外的任何事物效劳。 [82:45] 阿拉贡国王“博大者”阿方索: 滚出去！这是一个属于穿长袍的人的地方，而不是穿盔甲的人的地方！ [100:00] 马基雅维利: 但是，基督教的优势在于它是真实的——本章完。 [118:00] 美第奇大公: 不行，那人是为我干活的，你一根手指都不准碰他。

[5:00] Niccolò Machiavelli (quoted by Ada Palmer): He told me that he had planned for everything... except the possibility that he himself would also be on death's door. [5:00] Niccolò Machiavelli (quoted by Ada Palmer): He told me first person that he had prepared for everything at the event of his father's death except the possibility that he himself would also be incapacitated at the moment. [45:00] Marsilio Ficino (quoted by Ada Palmer): This young man is the reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas, so you should give him a job. [65:00] Ada Palmer: Dante centers him in Paradiso as the ideal Christian ruler. But he wasn't Christian. He was persecuting the Christians. But medieval and Renaissance Europe are very good at having their cake and eating it, too, in terms of getting to pick and choose the best parts of the pagan world and the best part of the Christian world... [69:00] Dante Alighieri: Congratulations Florence, a city famous in hell. [80:00] Ada Palmer: Machiavelli knows that he has the beginnings of a new world of political science. And he will only share that with the government of his country because he wants it to protect his country and he will not serve any other cause. [80:00] Ada Palmer: Machiavelli himself is one of the most selfless men I ever read about in the history of the earth... He would rather serve nothing and no one than give an hour of his time to advancing anything that is not Florence. [105:00] Ada Palmer: Nobody wants original ideas. Original ideas are out of vogue. Original ideas are dead [122:00] Ada Palmer: you are part of God, the table is part of God, the camera is part of God [125:00] Ada Palmer: Machiavelli the character of thought experiment is an important backbone of our society... Machiavelli the actual innovator is a different backbone.

[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. Yes. So he writes The Prince. He dedicates it to Lorenzo de Piero de Medici and gives it to him 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 are things so bad? What is the historical context in which she's writing The Prince? 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. And so it's very common when there's one regime change, where there will 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. And 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 their governments uprooted recently, by the time he's writing the prints, 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 perceives there to be this urgency and this guarantee that there cannot be stability. The other half is the papacy. And 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 And 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. And each one sets norms for the next And 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. And in theory, the pope can appoint anybody to be ruler of that city. And here is a 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 And 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. And 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'll 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 practically every polity in this region has just had the thread 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... [5:00] 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 César 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. So he wants the Medici's basically to not unify Italy, but stabilize Italy at the very least. Exactly. By having conquered enough of a chunk that the papacy fears them and must negotiate with them, as opposed to the papacy being surrounded by small, weakened powers that will constantly be turned over and turned over and turned over. And the Pope now is a Medici, right? At that moment, yes. So it makes it even more plausible. let's lay down a little more historical context so before machiavelli writes the prince he's a sort of bureaucratic diplomat and he meets through his career a lot of these famous figures i want to know what he makes for example of king louis of france of maximilian of germany the holy roman empire i want to know what he made of Cesare Borja Yeah He spends a lot of the prints in fact trying to veil how much more he cares about Cesare Borja than everyone else. It's so interesting. He tries to be balanced. He tries to talk about this example and this example and this example and Valentino and this example. And sometimes he just can't. Right. And there's that incredible magical moment when he's discussing Valentino's fall. In the moment when he has amassed all this power, he successfully conquered almost everything within Italy. And then suddenly both his father, the Pope, and him fall ill at once. And when Machiavelli describes this, and he's saying everything Cesare Borgia did, he did right. He conquered this kingdom. He would have kept it. The only reason he lost it was fortune. And what Machiavelli should say is Valentino had planned for every contingency at his father's death except the possibility that he would also be on death's door. But that's not what Machiavelli says. What Machiavelli says is he told me that he had planned. The first person breaks in. Our historian cannot veil himself anywhere. He cares too much. He told me first person that he had prepared for everything at the event of his father death except the possibility that he himself would also be incapacitated at the moment And it's such a magical moment where the veil between the author and the reader breaks for just that moment. And we're like, oh, yes, all of these others he observed from a distance. but Machiavelli was in the room next to Valentino at Valentino's side through this and had the most incredible life-changing first-person view of this man so unique and charismatic and terrifying that when you read accounts of him they range from this was the most incredible charismatic leader I've ever met to this man was supernaturally charismatic to the degree that he must be literally the antichrist or an incarnation of the angel of death on earth because I have no other explanation of how he could be so persuasive and charismatic. And Machiavelli was in the room. And every so often, you just feel that he's still in the spell of this incredible figure at whose side he had the scariest job in the world, right? Because Machiavelli's job dealing with Cesare Borgia is, it's very clear that the Borgia plan is to conquer the papal states in the middle of Italy And Tuscany Florence dominion is this little notch like a puzzle piece out of the side of the Papal states And anybody with a map looking at it is like you gotta conquer that You just have to conquer this You can't have a kingdom without it. You have to. There is no way to stop it. So what do you do? Machiavelli's advice to his polity is, this time we're not going to succeed in persuaded this conqueror to pass us by. We can't bribe him into doing something else permanently. But we can buy time. and we can absolutely and abjectly swear to do anything he wants, and we can give him our forces, and we can give him our money, and we can pay him and help him conquer the rest of it, and betray our allies, betray Bologna, which Florence had had a 300-year alliance to defend Bologna. And he said, we have to break it. The whole world is broken right now. We have to break every promise and every hereditary alliance we had. we must be at the side of this man. And the only possible surreal mechanism is to win from him through loyalty, through support, and through Machiavelli being at his ear whispering forever, Florence is loyal, Florence is loyal. By that, we buy the boon of Polyphemus, the terrifying promise of the conqueror. I like you, my guest. I'll eat. [10:00] you last. That's the Republic's only hope. And that's Machiavelli's job, is to stand next to the scariest man who has lived in Europe since Frederick Barbarossa and whisper constantly in his ear, the Florentine Republic will support you and will give your grace anything you ask. Just eat us last. Doesn't it contradict what you're saying in the prints about never rise with the help of great powers for even in success you have empowered somebody who is stronger than you and whose mercy you're at i mean this is not florence aiming to rise this is not florence expecting that it will gain anything by this this is florence knowing it will lose and machiavelli is very open about the fact if alexander had lived another year valentino would have finished his conquest and taken florence and taking it at last and it would have been over. But hopes are mortal. And buying time is sometimes the survival mechanism. And so Machiavelli has this incredible firsthand experience of being with Valentino through all of these decisions being with him at the massacre at Senegalia when rumor had reached Valentino that some of his people were terrified of him and plotting to overthrow him And then they were so scared of him they decided to abandon the plot And he heard and he met with them and told them, I forgive you. It's okay. You've renewed your loyalty to me. You've passed the test. I trust you all as well. And then he invites them to the banquet and then massacres them all. The forgiveness is false. The betrayals are punished. there's this amazing letter that's a couple months afterward where Machioli's loved ones are writing from Florence because they've received a letter from him after the massacred Semigallica and they say oh thank god you're alive we had no idea all we heard was that he had massacred a large number of the people who were with him we didn't know if you were alive because it took months in the chaos the postal system had completely break broken down right It took months for them to get word that Machiavelli was still alive. They didn't know whether he had been caught up in the conspiracy. He easily could have been on a list of names of people the conspirators intended to recruit and be gone. So his wife and his loved ones back at home, his children had to wait months to find out whether he too had been slaughtered And it felt to them like a miracle that he hadn But it meant that he watched these incredible deeds of you encounter them you forgive them you renew vows of amity, sacred vows taken in the cathedral, and then you slaughter them at dinner, violating the loss of hospitality, right? That Dante would say, if you do that, you've committed such a grave sin that you're not just regular damned. A devil comes up out of hell and takes your soul out of your body and inhabits you. And that you're actually already in hell, even though your body is still alive on earth, because that's how heinous a sin this is. And yet, it works. And all the rest of Valentino's men are more loyal to him afterward than ever before, and won't even whisper to each other about dissatisfaction, because even the faintest whiff of conspiracy might result in death. so why does Valentino's kingdom for which he did everything right ultimately fall apart because he happens to eat the same thing that gives him food poisoning as his father and happens to be ill at the wrong moment and also the puppet that he manages to get in power Pius the third dies too fast and then he outmaneuvered by Julius if all those things hadn gone wrong in a row the kingdom would have stood and indeed he would have conquered Florence So Machiavelli is constantly reminding us that yes we have all of these things we can try to do We can remember it's better to be feared than loved. We can remember not to be hated. We have power over maximum half of what causes outcomes. The other half is always going to be fortune, right? Because we look at Machiavelli, we know he's the origin of utilitarian thought And that he says we need to evaluate people's deeds based on outcome. But he doesn't just say we need to evaluate their deeds based on outcome. He says we need to evaluate their deeds based on what the most probable outcome was before fortune intervened. And so he says, people look at Valentino Borgia and say, but the Borgias fell. They were feared and then they were hated and then they fell and then their enemies took power and then chiseled their coats of arms off of every surface in Rome. So that to this day, you're walking through Rome and you sit down at a pizzeria and there's a weird scar on the wall and that scar is where the Borgia bowl is no more. Right. And people want to make the moral of that be don't do what the Borgias did. they fell. And Machiavelli's like, no, they did not fall because of their choices. They fell because half of what happens in the world is never in our control. And you can do everything [15:00] right and it's out of your control but we have to evaluate what would have happened and therefore we should imitate them because everything they did was right i think one misconception of a machiavelli that i had because i had not read these books before um is that he says the means don't matter the end matters and there's a virtue ethic sense in which maybe he doesn't think the means matter but like he is way more concerned about the means than i would have thought he thinks the means are incredibly important because the means by which you achieve power determine how stable and how fruitful that power will be right um in the context of military conflicts he says if you achieve some power with the help of mercenaries or with the help of great powers people who become stronger than you as a result of you achieving power that is a very precarious spot to be in but speaking of julius he makes another point that if you achieve your power by lying by breaking oaths by being unfaithful that this is okay because his view is that people will forget that you are not faithful. They will just take you at your word the next time they encounter you. And so it actually a very interesting meditation on by what means can you achieve power that will make that power stable versus not And the fact that he thinks breaking your word is totally fine well it more as long as yeah it even subtler than that because it if you are someone who breaks your word and you break it this way it'll bite you in the ass yes and if you break it these ways it'll be okay yeah because he also does analysis of figures like savonarola uh who would make prophecies and promises and then some of them would happen and some of them wouldn't. And then he would make new ones and sort of correct what he said yesterday. And he handled his manipulation and untruths badly in Machiavelli's analysis in a way that did turn people against him and make him lose power, partly because Savonarola, as a religious demagogue, the core of his power was people believing that he was divinely inspired and that he wouldn't make mistakes and wouldn't err. And so his power base was fragile vis-a-vis untruth. And for him, because of the specific shape of his power, and then the specific way he handled his contradictions, that did hurt him. Whereas if it's somebody like Cesare Borgia, who will make an alliance and work with that ally for a while and then betray them because meanwhile he was such an effective conqueror And he was so scary and everyone was so afraid of him Even when he would betray an ally his other allies would say I gotta be more faithful to him so that the next person to be betrayed isn't me, and try to work hard to be at the good graces of the prince so that I'm not next, as opposed to turning on him because he was so scary. Sivana Rolla was not scary. Sivana Rolla was charismatic. and persuasive, and, you know, had one of these voices that made you, made crowds thrill and women swoon. And decades later, when people asked Michelangelo what Savonarola had been like, when Savonarola had been dead for decades, right, Michelangelo's answer was, I still hear his voice, right? He had one of those charismatic presences that wasn't enough when he started flip-flopping on policy and truth. Whereas Valentino was so scary that he could betray his top general and seize his lands and overthrow his city. And all of his other generals would say, better step even further into lying. So it's not just that lying is okay. It's that lying is sometimes okay if you check these other boxes. And it not if you don So this is even more reinforcement of he zooms in so much on the means And if you do A and B you okay But if you do A and C you not Looking at the minutiae of different ways you can wield power and different reasons people can have to follow you If you're a prince who's decided to invest it in being loved, you have to keep it up or cultivate being feared alongside it. If you've invested heavily in being feared, there are things you can then do that you can't do if you're a prince whose power depends on being loved. And this actually gets so the famous quote in the prince, it is better to be feared than loved. What he's getting at there is I think he's just like very cynical about people's nature. And if people make you a promise, they'll just go back on it. If your power base depends on people's promises and loyalties, as soon as your rule seems tattering, they'll go back on it. Whereas if your rule depends on people just having expectation that if they break their oath to you, they'll be punished, that's much more stable. But his cynicism about, he basically thinks people will act as badly as they are allowed to. I mean, yeah, his whole justification on checks and balances is not dissimilar to the founders in the US and their reason for wanting checks and balances and wanting to put different factions against each other. It's just like, he's just kind of cynical and thinks people [20:00] just act as badly as you allow them to. I mean, on that topic, Machiavelli is the first person that we have ever in the European tradition to suggest that it could be viable for there to be more than one political party in a state at the same time, and that they would compete against each other and sort of vent the society's tension through competition and vie to try to dominate an election and then the next one. This is what we're used to. This is innovative in Machiavelli. Machiavelli talks about how competition within a city, if the parties are kind of stable, he's observing Siena as one of the examples of this, can vent local tensions and allow interior adjustments to who has power. And the norm, the standard attitude toward political parties is if there are two political parties in a polity, it will not be stable until one of those political parties is dead and their heads have been cut off and put on spikes and their houses have been burned down and paved over. That has been Florence's solution to political parties before. Florence massacred its ghibellines and killed all of them and raked salt into the earth where the houses used to be so nothing can grow there Nothing still grows there and then when the black guelphs and the white guelphs split into two sub they immediately started slaughtering each other as well The standard was one party must wipe out the other party for there to be stability And there are comparatively few examples, although Florence's neighbor Siena is one, where political parties managed to not only coexist side by side, but be politically helpful. one element of governance or of being a good prince at the time i didn't appreciate it machia makes a huge point of is how formidable and reputable people consider you to be and so that's relevant both from preventing others from invading you or from extracting concessions from other people so in his diplomatic career he is sent out to a bunch of different foreign polities to basically be like hey is this a serious person so maximilian is trying to extract a bribe from florence basically to not invade florence on its way down to italy and florence says go check out if this guy's real yeah and he has to make some judgment about this person well and and it seems whatever florence has paid these bribes a lot right florence's tactic is is someone invading the area can we bribe them right because paying somebody to not attack you is a much more sure fire thing than preparing to actually fight against them Your family lands get trampled by soldiers You suffer economically So it's an old Florentine tactic. It's not a new thing that Maximilian is threatening to invade Italy and trying to extract a bribe. Florence basically every year is like, OK, who do we need to bribe this year to not invade us? Here's this year's bribing a king budget. To whom does it go? Is Max civilian a serious threat or are we saving this money in case there's a threat from somebody more serious like the king of Naples or the king of France or Milan or the Venetians or something? A couple of weeks ago, Kurser saved the podcast. I was helping some friends record and we shot for several hours. Everything wrapped normally. But when I went to send the footage, one of the video files was corrupted. I tried all the obvious fixes, but I couldn't get anything to work. So I pointed Kurser at it. Kurser uses command line tool called Untrunk to recover the video. Untrunk is pretty easy to use, but it only works if you have a clean reference file from the same camera that produced the corrupted footage. Cursor tracked down a viable reference file without any prompting and it used the file's metadata to make sure that it came from the same camera. Once Untrunk recovered the video I asked Cursor to fix the out audio as well It ran this complicated ffmpeg command that I would have never come up with myself and it just realigned everything You should try using cursor for your daily work My whole team has been using it for ordinary tasks associated with the podcast Go to cursor.com slash spark cash to get started. At this time, the Pope is not just a spiritual leader, but a temporal power. So he's like, him and his son are literally fighting wars against other Catholics, but the other Catholics are fighting them back? Like, what does it mean to be a Catholic who is fighting a war against the Pope? So here is where geographic proximity is everything. Because from the perspective of if you're far from Rome, right, when you're Denmark or Iceland, and the Pope is all the way over there, and the way you interact with him is that occasionally an incredibly impressive papal legate will visit, and there'll be vast pomp and circumstance and the city will rename a street in honor of the fact that somebody sent by the pope has visited. And he has this great power to say yes or no to petitions. And, you know, different countries have been trying to petition for specific things for ages. And the pope's is here to, you know, interview the emperor to judge whether the queen can be queen or not. And it feels like a [25:00] deal, and the Pope is very abstract. It's easy to have a lot of respect for that Pope, because what do you see that Pope do? You see that Pope in pomp and circumstance. You see that Pope make judgments about fates of Popes and Kings. You see that Pope put out papables and edicts that give theological answers to questions. You see that Pope exercise judgment of life or death over people at a distance. He's very abstract. And the difference between one Pope and the next Pope is kind of small from your perspective. You don't see their policy. If you're in Italy, the Pope is that asshole who went to college with your brother and beat him up when they were at college and then, you know, was drunken and irresponsible in middle age and you've been negotiating with him in these other jobs. And you know this jerk, you know his family, you know the other jerks who are also competitors for this. You're allied with him, you're not allowed with him. His ancestors are allies of yours or not allies of yours. He's a specific dude. And you're much more likely to judge a pope based on, he's that guy, right? This is not Pope Julius II. This is Giuliano della Rovere And I judge him based on his uncle who put him in power and the actions of his friends and the actions of the city he from And you know all of his dirty laundry and you are subject to the fact that when he moves into power everyone who's related to him is going to get promoted within Italy. Everybody who's not is going to get removed from Italy. So it's much easier for an Italian to see this pope. And that's actually quite hard to see the papacy. And that's how you have these fascinating wars where even the cities that are hereditarily incredibly loyal to the papacy will sometimes be fighting a war against the papacy. So, all Italy is divided into these two factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines. Theoretically, what these two factions mean is that Guelph powers, Guelph families, Guelph cities, they believe the correct successor to the Roman emperors is the Pope. The Pope is the emperor. He has the right to be the ruler of Italy and indeed of everything that was once Rome's. He is the ultimate political, the ultimate military power, and he is the rightful and only rightful overlord of Italy. The Ghibellines believe that in 800 AD when Charlemagne conquered a bunch of stuff and made the empire that we now refer to as the Holy Roman Empire when the Pope crowned Charlemagne he delegated the political and military side of his authority to that emperor and made himself be the spiritual authority, but the emperor be the political and temporal authority, right? And therefore, the rightful ruler of Italy is the emperor, the successors of Charlemagne. These are the two factions for which these parties fought originally. 300 years ago, these days, what these factions actually mean is, those jerks murdered Uncle Tybalt, and we will never forgive them. So they are the team that is our enemy, and we are this team, and they are that team, and we hate them. And we want to crush them because they want to crush us. Which means that sometimes a pope will be elected who's from a hereditarily Ghibelline family. And the pope will start promoting people from the anti-papal faction. And the pro-papal faction will unite against the pope. Which makes no rational sense. Until we remember that they are serving the pope abstractly So you get multiple situations where there a war between Rome and Florence over the fact that Florence wants to defend papal authority in papal land against the pope itself Because that individual pope is from the anti-papal faction. Do they not believe that he is the vicar of Christ on earth? I mean, it makes sense in a normal political state for you to think, I believe in America, but I don't like the president or something. But like, isn't the Pope supposed to be? Yes and no. Again, when you're far away, yes. When you're close up, you know too much of the dirty laundry of these people. So let me use a fun example. The most passive aggressive letter ever written in the entire history of time, in my opinion. there's a type of ceremony that happens when the new pope is elected, which is the giving of oaths of obedience. A major ambassador from every polity in Christendom comes to Rome, and they wait in line for a long time, and then they give a speech, a long-winded speech about how great the monarch is that they're there to represent, and how vast his power is, blah, blah, blah, blah, and how pious he is and how glad he is, Your Holiness, that you're the Pope now. Congratulations on behalf of my wonderful King. [30:00] You must send like the highest status possible person who can leave your polity without it falling down. You might send a younger son of the king. You might send the Lord Chancellor. In the case of Florence, you're going to send the most prominent citizen you can. So when Pope Sixtus was elected, it was Lorenzo de' Medici himself, not the dedicatee of the prince, the grandfather and namesake of the dedicatee of the prince, who went to deliver this oration of obedience, which means literally prostrating yourself in front of the Pope, literally kissing his feet and giving this oath. Lorenzo did this for Pope Sixus, with whom he was negotiating to try desperately to get a cardinalship for his brother. Pope Sixus instead organized the Pazzi conspiracy to try to butcher the Medici family, killed Lorenzo's brother, killed a number of his allies as well, and attempted to have a coup to take over Florence. When the next pope was elected after Sixtus, Pope Innocent, who was, as everyone knew a puppet of the same faction that Sixtus was from So we go from this very dangerous pope who had tried to wipe out Lorenzo family to a puppet of the same faction Lorenzo sent his son instead of himself to go give this oath And had his son go to deliver the message, apologize to his holiness that I could not come myself, but the last time this duty fell upon me, I had a brother upon whom I could leave the burden of the state in my absence. Since now I have no brother, I cannot come in person. It's a very respectful letter, but it's also very overt about the fact that he does not trust and will not again trust this faction. Right. So they negotiate very carefully how to deal with the fact that the popes have this great spiritual power. But sometimes the popes are acting as horrifically selfish warlords. that's also something which has worsened over time and it's important for us to remember that the papacy becomes gradually more corrupted over time this is because with every generation more people leave donations of wealth to the church a widow who has no son and has property decides to piously leave this to a monastery The church gets wealthier and wealthier As the church gets wealthier with wealth comes power more and more power is in the state. This makes a stronger and stronger incentive for every ambitious family to send their second son to the church. And this goes all the way down, right? We have personal letters of Machiavelli writing to and from relatives of his, where they're debating what is the correct size bribe to offer to buy a priesthood for his little brother Toto. They don't want to offer too big a bribe because it would impoverish the family. They don't want to offer too small a bribe. They've heard that another family that's after this priesthood offered an extra big bribe. That's kind of not fair. How did they respond to being out bribed? They just write about this as the most everyday normal thing in the world. And this is a wealthy merchant prince level family. They are in the top 5% of wealth and power in Florence, but not in the top 1%. But for them, too, it's normal to talk about paying a bribe to get a priesthood. That's just how it works. and every generation sees the church get wealthier and have more power and therefore the incentives to corrupt it are even greater It even becomes a kind of a prisoner dilemma system because if you the Duke and you don manipulate the papacy if you don bribe the Pope if you don work hard to get your brother to be bishop, and your enemies do, you're screwed. So you even see it as defensive. I must manipulate the church. It's the only way my people will be safe. If I don't manipulate the church, my enemies may manipulate the church, and then there's danger. And this happens all the way on the scale of kings, where popes can make your enemy the most powerful bishop in your kingdom, or can deny you the right to marry because inevitably the person you want to marry is a cousin and you're going to need a special dispensation to marry them. And the pope can prevent that and mess with your marriage alliances. You need the pope very desperately. If you're a king, you also need the pope all the way down. And that means bribes and other kinds of incentives make the papacy more corrupt with each generation. So the papacy is worse in everyone's lived experience than it used to be even a few popes ago. And you see every generation for a hundred years say, popes are much worse now than popes used to be when I was young. Right? Everybody says that. Dante says that in 1300. Machiavellis. [35:00] grandparent generation are saying that in 1400. Machiavelli is saying that in 1500. In everybody's lived experience, the popes are getting more secular, more military, and more corrupt over time. It's a gradual accumulation, and it comes to a peak, as such things do, triggering the Reformation, when it becomes so bad that there has to be a massive move against it. And Machiavelli, in an interesting way anticipates this because Machiavelli says all institutions are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed and returned to their foundations or they will collapse under the weight of their corruption. He says he thinks that the papacy has been undergoing this and the Christianity has been undergoing this and that if not for the fact that Saint Francis of Assisi, also to some extent Saint Dominic, a couple centuries before his time, reformed the church and brought in a lot more popular support, Christianity would already have cracked under the weight of its own corruption 200 years before, and that it will need such a restoration again, as any institution needs as city governments need as republics need as corruption accumulates over time One big way in which our world is different from 500 years ago is this the focus on patronage and that being the basis of political power It was much more prominent right So that's something I think would be interesting to understand. Well, it's not that it was just more prominent, but it was the fundamental glue of the society, as opposed to one of several glues of the society. And, you know, patronage, which was also familial and therefore entangled with nepotism was so fundamental that, you know, for example, when Alessandro Farnese was elected Pope Paul III in the middle of the 1500s, he didn't corruptly make one of his kinsmen commander of the papal armies. He instead appointed a really competent, experienced general instead of his own not very competent, illegitimate son. And there were riots in Rome. Your Holiness, the people demand more nepotism. You must appoint your illegitimate son to command your armies because your illegitimate son will never betray you. And we will know we can trust the papal armies not to turn on Rome if the Pope's son is the commander. And we don know that about this other commander He might turn against your holiness And there might be a rift between the Pope and the papal armies if he not somebody that rises and falls with you the way your son does. Therefore, by popular demand, the people want more nepotism because the system depends on it. And that's how you see how the system depends on. There are levels of trust that the patronage system creates because it involves multi-generational entanglement of families where If these families rise, they rise together. If they fall, they fall together, which creates levels of trust that can sustain things like this world where the oath of a soldier is to his commander, not to the polity that he serves. And in modernity, we realize another solution to that is the oath of the soldier is not to the commander. The oath of the soldier is to the constitution or to the country or to the people. But in this period, the oath of the soldier is to the commander, mostly because communications are so slow that the commander has to be able to give speedy field commands. But it means you're creating an army and you're handing it to a man. And if you cannot trust that man then the people will be terrified that there could be a rift between Rome and its own armies or between Rome and its treasurer or between Rome and its other allies Patronage is the glue that makes things work all the way down All the way down to the level of if you need a defense attorney that done through patronage The outcomes of trials are a really great way to see patronage. So we're all familiar with the fact that law codes in the Middle Ages are really cruel, right? And it's like death for everything, death for theft, death for adultery, death for homosexuality, death for setting fire to the prince's beehive, whatever it is. You know, that's the sentence on the books. And then you look at the actual trial records and maybe one in a hundred convictions for that crime actually ends in a capital sentence. And almost all of the other ones end in a fine or a public flogging, but not in the sentence that's on the books. And we say, why and how is that happening? Patronage is the answer. So if it's the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and you're a carpenter and your teenage son gets drunk and he punches somebody in a brawl and breaks the guy's nose in that way that makes him die and accidentally kills a guy in a drunken brawl and your son is now on trial for murder, you're a carpenter. [40:00] therefore have worked for the rich family whose family carpenter you are, right? Let's say it's the Medici family. Whenever they need new pews for the family church or new furniture or repairs for the family gates, they go to you. So you go to them and you say, my son is in danger. He's on trial. Please put in a good word. And your patron has the ability to then influence the judges. And they will put in a good word for you, and then you will get a lighter sentence. This is a sort of an ancestor of what having a character witness is to say, but so-and-so is such a good person, they should have the milder punishment, not the more severe one. But the norm is you're accused of a severe crime, you're put on trial for your life, your patron intervenes, and you get a lighter sentence. And this is how justice is supposed to work. And this is a very severe line that changes in this 18th century with the Enlightenment. Because we now think of proportional justice The sentence for the crime should be this and ideal justice is everyone who is guilty of the crime gets that sentence That is fair It doesn matter who you know It doesn matter whether you rich or poor The sentence should be the same This is the ideal of enlightened justice The ideal of this period justice which is much more shaped by Christianity is the purpose of the trial is the spiritual interior correction of the soul of the sinner. And therefore, the ideal outcome is for them to fear for their life. They're before a terrifying judge who is the earthly representation of God. And they're before him, and they know that they're guilty and they deserve to be thrown into the pits of hell. But miraculously, they are given grace and they are pardoned. And the process of being put on trial, fearing for your life, begging to the patron, and then receiving mercy is supposed to sort of be an earthly preview of the process your soul will undergo when you are before divine judgment, and therefore should make you come out the other end a good person. And the goal of the justice system is the spiritual improvement of the sinner in the hope that they will come out the other end better and more likely to go to heaven. Even when people are being sentenced to death, there are religious organizations who sit with them overnight having a final prayer group and walk with them to the gallows holding their hand and holding a painting of the Virgin Mary in front of their face so that to the very last moment the person who about to be executed is thinking about heaven And the ideal outcome of the execution is that the soul goes to heaven. So, the whole structure of the justice system expects the intervention of a patron who represents the intervention of a patron saint, persuading the judge, who is God, to give you mercy. So, when we see a hundred trials end in 99, the person paid a small fine and one, the person was executed. What that actually means is 99, their patron stepped in and somebody persuaded somebody who put in a good word who got the light sentence and one, that person had fallen out of the patronage network. That person had angered their boss, their protector. That's why it went all the way to being a capital offense. Probably a lot of people listening are familiar with Giordano Bruno, very famous as a martyr for science because he was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. Fewer people know that that was not his first Inquisition trial. He was investigated a number of times by the Inquisition for doing various radical forms of thought The earlier trials had the usual outcome for that kind of trial of he had a patron the rich people that he worked with or for the university was hosting him they put in a good word, he's fine. The Inquisition tells him, be good, and things continue as they are. That time, he had angered the person he worked for. He pissed off his patron. And it's his patron who turns him into the Inquisition and says, this guy is a charlatan. And he promised he could teach me these things that he can't. I don't trust him. He's no good. Throw the book at him. And the reason that trial goes all the way to a capital sentence is that he doesn't have a patriot. He's the 99th case that time. And if he had had a patriot protecting him, despite how radical his stuff was, he would have been okay. And we see that in the trial of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was candidly substantially more radical than Giordano Bruno. But when Pico is on trial, Lorenzo de' Medici and other powerful people really care about Pico and they pull it out all the stops and Lorenzo talks to his brother-in-law who's an Orsini. The Orsini have enormous influence in Rome. They get permission for Pico to be let go and sent home to Lorenzo to sort of live under house arrest under Lorenzo's promise that he'll be good from then on. [45:00] Or Marsilio Ficino, who is this radical Platonist who publishes a book on how to project your soul outside of time and summon angels and arguing for the existence of reincarnation and is very clearly being extremely theologically weird. This is the man who wrote the best letter of recommendation ever written in the history of time. And he was recommending a young scholar for a job with the king of Hungary. And he writes in the recommendation letter, this young man is the reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas. so you should give him a job now that is a letter of recommendation but you're like the reincarnation of saint thomas aquitus huh and the inquisition comes knocking on facino's door and he's like reincarnation and facino's like oh no uh help talk to lorenzo lorenzo talks to his brother cardinal orsini cardinal orsini shuts it down and facino is told maybe lay off talking quite so overtly about the reincarnation. And Fratino says, yes, of course, and I will only teach very pious people how to summon angels and protect their souls out of their bodies. I promise I won't teach it to anybody who will use these powers irresponsibly. And the Inquisition is like okay and goes home because patronage kicked in And patronage is the glue that makes everything work Because you can even stay in a hotel or buy an apple I not kidding Without a patron. Because you arrive at a city. Nobody knows you. You're a stranger. What you have is a letter of recommendation from your patron who's friends with some important person there. You present that at the hotel. That's why they let you stay. Okay, I'm here with Rickson, who is an ML researcher at Jane Street. Rickson, I'm sure you saw that there were many viral memes on Twitter about the hiring process at Jane Street. And so I wanted to see for myself, what is the hiring process at Jane Street actually like? Yeah, so here's one of our retired puzzle questions. Here we've got an image data set, but half of the images in it have been corrupted. But they've been like scrambled in a consistent way. Like if the pixel on the top right got like swapped with the pixel in the middle, like the same swap happened for like all of the images in the second half of the data set. A super naive thing then would just be like training classifier on corrupted versus uncorrupted images. Yeah. So you could have like a learned model of like how the image looks and then like optimize for that. How about this? What if just like recognizing sharp gradients in color or something I think this is like getting to one pretty practical solution It interesting that a problem like this that is so concise to describe can have so many different plausible solutions I think like we not actually really looking for the interviewee to like get the canonical solution It more about like discussing all like the ML possibilities and like seeing if, like, people can, like, predict, like, the failure mode of whatever idea they think is most promising. Yeah, but what is a solution? It turns out, like, a surprisingly effective solution is... For the viewers, you can leave your solutions in the comments. And if this is the kind of puzzle you enjoy, go to jainestreet.com slash thwarkash to check out their open ML positions. Okay, so to tie a couple of threads we're talking about together. The prince is painting a picture of just regime is incredibly unstable. You have to worry about foreign powers. You have to worry about rival factions in your own country. You have to worry about mercenaries. You have to worry about lots of different things. And so any given regime is very unstable. and so what had to happen for things to get more stable basically and we're talking about a couple of the ways in which people owed their loyalties not to the regime but to others within the regime which created instability so in this course on livy machiavelli talks about the roman empire one of the reasons that its fall was um instigated is that these generals who were months away in the frontier fighting these wars because the empire was so big had to amass for the periods of years or in some kind of cases for caesar of course decades the command of so many men who have for decades just basically been listening to this guy tell them what to do who to fight next this is the person who they're loyal to um as opposed to say if the consuls could be giving dictates every single day, then the loyalty could be to the regime in Rome. And same with patronage, if there's not a system of both deterministic justice that we have in the modern world today. So a lot of the prince is dedicated in discourses on Livy on, well, how do you make sure that some family is not pissed off, that their son got killed and wasn't avenged or whatever? And if we just have a reliable criminal justice system, that problem goes away. And same with the welfare state and getting rid of the patronage system. Basically, if you don't have to rely on this family, then this intermediates them and the state can have your loyalty. So it's interesting to connect all these threads together of communication time, impartial justice system, impartial welfare state as being what is required for the regime to have enough legitimacy and then as a result, enough stability to have enough legitimacy. [50:00] to have modern nation states. Yeah. One thing that everyone is surprised by is that when Valentino Borgia, this is that when Cesare Borgia, Valentino is much more what he's called in the period. When Cesare Borgia conquers these cities in central Italy and he goes in and he massacres the ruling family and he works hard to kill every member of them that he can so that there isn't a potential rival claimant to come displace him. And he implements neutral justice because he and his cronies have no side in that city. They aren't connected with one group of families against another. And when they implement justice, they do so neutrally because they aren't interested in the local backstory of factions. And as a result, to everyone's surprise, he moves into a city. He massacres the rulers. He implements an authoritarian regime, and he's incredibly popular and beloved by the people. And everyone says, why are they like this man? He is a cruel, murdering tyrant. And the answer is, for the first time in generations they have had something close to fair justice Meaning it used to be that there was one faction in power and there was another faction out of power which meant in our scenario where a carpenter son gets drunk and kills someone in a broken brawl, if that carpenter's son is the carpenter of the power that's in power, then there will be no justice and there will be no consequences for this murder, maybe the smallest of fines. And if that carpenter works for the families that are out of power, then throw the book at him he'll be executed for that death and there will be no fair justice the outcome of the sentence will be entirely who's in power and out of power and not the fairness of the case but when both of those ruling families have been wiped out and an outside power is here and a homicide takes place the neutral judge hears this neutrally and gives the same answer regardless of whose family's carpenter that is and the people who have lived in generations of there is justice for some and injustice for others suddenly having equitable justice are delighted by this and find that wrongs are finally being punished. The people that they've resented and hated for so long who are in power are finally being punished for the crimes that they commit And this makes Valentino conquering and violent regime incredibly popular with the everyday people of these cities who are therefore willing to sign up for his armies and help defend his conquests and keep them in power and man his fortresses. So Machiavelli and others are startled by this. They had expected that if a conqueror moves in, massacres the rulers of a city, everyone in the city will hate and fear that conqueror. But if the conqueror is feared and not hated because he wiped them out, but then was fair toward the people, then it works. So why would it have been so bad if Valentino took over Florence and he had survived and he would have massacred maybe the ruling regime at the time with the Republic? But I don't know what Machiavelli is especially concerned about, but like the cultural treasures of Florence and everything. So, again, in the discourse, I think the cultural treasures of Florence would potentially have been okay. There's two answers to that. One of them is Maggi is very adamant that if you live such that there is somebody who can have you summarily executed he can walk by you in the street and point at you and say him kill him And it happens Then you are not free In his vocabulary in the text, if you live in a state of where there is an arbitrary power who can have you put to death, you are a slave. and if instead you live in a system where there must be a trial and there must be a process and this must be examined and public right if there is a system then you have liberty that system may be unfair it may be biased it may be in Machiavelli's case the very system that tortured and exiled him but there was a system and he considers that difference to be enormously important so if Valentino conquers Florence, it's not going to be that system anymore. There will be a man who can walk down the street and point at a Florentine citizen and say, kill him, and they will kill him. And will that tyrant be fair? Maybe. Will that tyrant exercise this power? Well, perhaps. Will his successor be worse or better than him? We don't know. We can't predict it's a monarchy. It's vulnerable to good successors and bad successors. But the people of Florence are not free if there exists a man who could say, execute it. [55:00] That meant a lot to Machiavelli. And it meant a lot to the Florentine people. And it's kind of hard for us to see how few liberties and how little franchise they had and yet how much they cared. Right. Florentines are constantly willing to go into the street and risk their lives flying the banner that says Libertas across it, Liberty. And the banner, Libertas, is the coat of arms of the senioria, the Senate, which is selected from the 1% super mega elite, tiny minority of the city that is eligible to be in government. They aren't rioting to defend their right to participate in the republic. They're rioting to defend their boss's boss's right to be in the republic. And yet they care so deeply about it and they consider it fundamentally different from the situation in which there is a man who can walk down the street and point at you and say him, kill him. Right And that tradition of liberty means a lot and would be gone even if the most beneficent tyrant in the world took the city So that half of the answer Can I ask about that Sure real quick so de Piero de Medici takes over is he not that guy So that the second half of the answer So there is a huge difference between when the conqueror is from your city, loves your city, and wants to take care of your city, and when the conqueror is from the outside. because when the Medici take over Florence, they want Florence, and they want Florence to be Florence. And they want all of its beauty and all of its treasures to still exist and be theirs. They would never consider raising important parts of it to the ground. They would never consider threatening the Florentines with, we will destroy your city walls, or we will destroy your cathedral if you rebel. Any outsider would. So Florence looks more like Florence under a Medici duke than Milan looks like Republican Milan under a Wisconsin or Sforza duke than Ferrara, which has no remnants of its republic, does under the Dukes d'Este, who can do anything they want, including murderously gouging each other's eyes out. And the city will never take one step against them So Machiavelli is aware that Florence if it has to fall falling to the Medici is gentlest most volatile perhaps because they aren going to be feared as much as an outside conqueror would be feared, but certainly gentlest, and that you preserve some important rights when you're conquered from inside that you don't when you're conquered from outside so obviously we remember this period producing all these great cultural artifacts all these amazing buildings all this art yeah and then we're talking about the precariousness of the prince the constant wars how they're literally fighting all the time how is there this surplus that is available for all these different projects you write in your book about how the older Lorenzo de Michi spends what would be today because of the expense of you know of building libraries and buying books will be today $30 million to build a library to educate his grandsons. So how is there all the surplus available for education and arts and so forth in a period where everybody's fighting everybody? And if you lose a war, your city will get, if not raised at least the ruling faction will get killed So half of that answer is finance is incredibly profitable And if you the banking center the amount of money that is flowing in is staggering Big wool, the big industry for Floyd's is also incredibly, incredibly wealthy. So in the same way that Harold Ford becomes incredibly rich in a period when a suit of clothing is something you save up for, like buying a car and everybody needs one, you can get very rich that way. So A, there's lots of money. But B, do you remember how it's often said that the biggest impact per dollar for US defense spending is the Fulbright program? Because diplomacy is cheaper than war. And sending a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young graduate student out to a country to enthuse about its culture and make connections and make everyone feel positively, does a lot more to avoid conflict and also get help in conflict than the same amount of spending on the actual army does, right? And the dollar for dollar, diplomacy is cheaper than war. They're using the art to do diplomacy. And so in one sense, if you're not doing the art, you would have to spend more on the war. It's not that the art is being made from a surplus [60:00] of the war. It's, oh no, we can't afford enough armies to actually defend us against France. Even if we spent every penny we have on armies, it would not defend us against France. But we sure can spend it on painting fleur-de-lis all over our seat of government and creating beautiful expensive gifts for the king of France. So when the king of France comes, he will feel like we are friends and we are giving him all of this cultural output. And if we fought him, we would lose. But if we play the culture victory game, that's cheaper yeah and we can try to win we talked about this last time the experience of what it must have been like for a french diplomat to arrive at florence and look at these people he considered to be i don't know no nothing and nothings who are not even descended from the caesars and so forth and they're producing all this stuff one um when when when one goes to visit florence now the interest is in part because these are historical artifacts right because somebody made them 500 years ago but if you're seeing them at the time this would be something either you thought only the romans could have done that we can't do anymore or something that even the romans couldn have done right i mean they high tech then they like when we look at a incredibly impressive skyscraper that taller and more precarious and amazing than a past skyscraper I think that is a sort of underrated aspect of what it must have been like to be a foreign power evaluating Florence at the time Yeah, yeah. We have to remind ourselves that these are high-tech achievements as well as historic achievements. And also that this is a period in which backwards is forwards, which is to say, this is not a period that, like us, thinks of the future as where potential is and that humanity might get better and better over time. The potential of humanity is recapturing Rome. Backwards is forwards. If we can get more and more like that, that'll be better. That's what we aspire to. And they do debate, can we surpass the Romans? Can we make things even better than the Romans? But it's an if. It's a debate. It's not a definitely of course. For us, it's a definitely of course. We're moving forward. We're trying to build bigger and more impressive things. Even for people who are cynical about progress, people will say, yeah, we will be more powerful in the future. We'll be able to do more. We may use it to stab ourselves in the foot, but we will be more powerful in the future. And for them, it's very much, will we ever be as powerful as the Romans were? we don know We can debate it We hope so We aspire to it Will there be another Pax Romana Will there be another universal peace someday Will we ever achieve that again So when we look at something that is like Florence Cathedral or Florence neoclassical buildings we look at it and we know they imitating the past And so we don think of it as cutting edge technology But for them cutting edge technology is imitating the past yeah we talked about last time how both Machiavelli and the other humanista in the different ways they understood virtue were trying to emulate the virtues that made Rome originally great um how much are they going off of just these random myths that Livio or whoever were right down about something that supposedly happened where Brutus killed his own sons or who was that guy who put his hand in a fire to show that the Roman people will be loyal and you should fight us. And how much is it, you know, you look at actual Roman history and it's like incredibly fucked up, right? We were just talking before we started recording about the life of Claudius and the period of the emperors and so forth and surely this must have been known to them that actually... I mean part of it is they zooming in on different emperors and when we want to make an HBO drama we don make it about the kind of boring competent emperors who just do a really good job Our society might be better off if we did Right But you know the dramatic emperors where there lots of stabbing and lots of orgies make for good television tradition but everybody curates our history and often when you're writing the history of your own culture you pick the heroes right and no matter you know you look at a middle school history textbook it's going to celebrate the heroes of that country and if it's trying hard to be unbiased it will also acknowledge the faults but the heroes are going to be in there when they are trying to create a handbook of what was what stands out for them is what's different from their present their president has plenty of tyrants the president has plenty of orgies the president has plenty of massacres the president does not have 70 years of peace so that's what stands out as different right um and i think for us some of the orgies and massacres stand out more because we don't have as many orgies now or at least not publicly that we know about um and when we do expose that our leaders have been involved in uh scandalous orgies we get very upset about it But, you know, to them, they read about all of this and they read about the successes. [65:00] And they read about the stability from Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and they say that is alien to us, that we haven't had, it's so loving, that is what we want to have again. So much so that when Gibbon is writing the history of the fallen decline of the Roman Empire in multiple volumes, but in the late 18th century. In the late 18th century, he says that there's never been a better time for humanity than during the Pax Romana and the five good emperors. Yeah. Well, and to the degree that medieval Europe can't cope with the idea that these good emperors were also pagans and are therefore in hell. And which is where you get this gorgeous legend that Pope Gregory the Great summoned the ghost of Trajan and baptized his ghost so that he can go to heaven. Even though Trajan is a, you know, during the persecution of the Christians emperor, but they just love him so much they can't handle the idea that he would be in hell despite being a great Caesar. So the medieval world it is canon that Emperor Trajan was posthumously baptized so that he could go to heaven because he such a good emperor And Dante centers him in Paradiso as the ideal Christian ruler But he wasn't Christian. He was persecuting the Christians. But this is medieval and Renaissance Europe are very good at having their cake and eating it, too, in terms of getting to pick and choose the best parts of the pagan world and the best part of the Christian world when constructing their imagined antiquity to have both and celebrate both at once. actually so here's something i'm confused about machiavelli makes a point of pointing out cesare borgia's betrayals because of how remarkable they are um for example ramiro de orco yeah so slaying the very deputy that he had tasked with being harsh and as a result bringing peace to a region for that harshness that he had delegated or you know inviting as a jester of goodwill some people who are going to do a revolution against him and then killing them all at the banquet um but should we take the fact that he's making a special point that hey actually take this kind of betrayal or take this kind of deed as something you should consider doing as evidence that this is actually rare at the time um maybe another way to ask the question is to the extent that they are all christians at the time surely they really did believe they going to go to hell if they betray people or if they lie or break their oaths or something right so just as you were saying a second ago about how capital punishment was actually less prominent at the time than we we in retrospect think it to be are these kinds of crazy political intrigues or whatever less common than so two halves to that answer and i'll do the second one first the second one being about the religious one right because they all believe in this religion that says if you do this you're going to go to hell and then they all do this yeah and that's something that this period really wrestles with and everybody is sinning and breaking their rules all the time and you know killing for honor and uh committing uh usury right lending money at interest they're all sinning all the time and they're all doing these things that are against the rules all the time And people in the period do bring that up and say, hey, this is not okay. And this is one of the big focuses of Dante's Commedia. And Dante in it says, look, when you do these things, you will go to hell for them. And he fills his hell with Florentines right And there that wonderful line where he meets yet another group of Florentines and he says congratulations Florence a city famous in hell because he considers his Florentine peers to be particularly hypocritical. And as he goes through, we see Florentines, especially in the sections for usury and for sodomy, but also, you know, heretics and unbelievers, and all through he's encountering his countrymen, including people he himself loves and respects. because Dante is making this painful point of guise. It says that if we do this, we go to hell. I'm going to make a book where that's literally true. And one of the chapters of Inferno that hits extra hard in his period and in ours is Canto 3, where he's encountering the lustful, and we see Paolo and Francesca. Paolo and Francesca, this is a story that was incredibly popular love story at the time. There was a young, beautiful noblewoman who had an older, horrible husband. And while he was away, there was also this wonderful, handsome, young nobleman who visited him and her. And they read the romantic stories about King Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot. And one thing led to another, and they committed adultery together. And then her husband [70:00] Oh, and found them and murdered them both. And everyone loves this story. It is the ubiquitous love story. It's their cultural equivalent to Romeo and Juliet, right? And it's a touchstone story. People sing songs about it. Everyone knows this exciting love tragedy. And he puts them in hell because they were guilty of adultery. And it's really shocking to everyone who has celebrated this love story. And then like, no, if this is true, this is our religion, that this is where they would be. And Dante is very stern and very stern and very unusual and starts a lot of discussion of this question of we're breaking these rules all the time. Should we just take this more seriously than we have? And he says, repent or you will all go to hell, my fellow citizens. So they're worried about that. But another part of it is Christianity as practiced then has a much, much less focus on purity than the Christianity that especially America is used to and also the Protestant-dominated parts of Europe. And there was a big change in Christianity that comes in the course of the Reformation primarily from Calvin Calvinism and then Puritanism which has a greater focus on trying to live an unspotted and pure life And the idea of you know we going to create a community of people who are all going to stick to the rules and live by them And if you are a sinner and have broken these rules, you should be expelled from this community. This is going, you are impure, you are stained. That is not the way Christianity thinks in this period. The assumption is everybody sins all the time. There is no such thing as purity. Everybody sins every five minutes. Everybody is envious. Everybody is lustful. Everybody is slothful. Everybody will make these mistakes. And then you repent of them. And you feel sorry. And you do penance. And you make spiritual progress. And you are forgiven. And then you sin again. Everybody sins. St. Francis of Assisi sins. He was a big focus on himself as a sinner. And was constantly self-actualing, despite being, in many ways, the most virtuous man in all of Europe. But stressing his own sin. so one saint who's super popular in the renaissance who is not very popular today is Saint Julian the hospitaler patron saint of murderers and he is the patron saint of murderers because his legend is sort of an Oedipus like legend that when he was born he was cursed by a witch that when he grew up he would slay his parents and he runs far away hoping that he will never encounter his parents and so not meet them But eventually he feels homesick and comes home and is tricked by the devil into slaughtering his parents And he slaughters his parents and then he spends the rest of his life trying to make up for it. And going on pilgrimage and then dedicating his life to running pilgrim hostels to help others be pilgrims. and he is the patron saint for people who have committed murder and feel really sorry and need to live with it and repent of it and that's not the attitude we have toward murderers right now right our cultural attitude toward murderers is that person is a murderer they should be shunned they should be locked in a box without the key or they should be executed they should be removed from the society there is no turning back from homicide but the renaissance's idea is sometimes you got to commit homicide. And then what's important is that you feel sorry. And you need to have a patron saint whose job it is to be a spiritual mentor for you. He too committed homicide. He committed a worse homicide than you did because he killed his parents. And if he went on a spiritual journey to recover from being a murderer, so can you. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of icons of St Julian all over Renaissance Florence everywhere you go in And you see when you like mm that was commissioned by somebody who committed a homicide and is trying to live with it. This is a society that really thinks about sin as something you do, and then you pay for it afterward. And people like Dante and Sabonarola come to people and say, no, this is not okay. You are perverting these things. No, you cannot put your family's coat of arms all over the inside of a church, turning the church into an advertisement for your banking business when it should be a place of God. That's inappropriate, and no, God will not forgive you for it. And the society says, yeah, well, but God forgives maybe anything if we repent a lot, right? And so it's a complicated, sophisticated hypocrisy that builds up a lot of apparatus to let the society's actions be at odds with its religious precepts to that degree. 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For example, Crusoe has a site in Nevada, powered by Redwood Materials, that runs completely on solar and used EV batteries. They're actually in the process of expanding it, adding in a couple dozen more Spark units from their Colorado facility. So, if you want AI capacity that's not fully dependent on grid availability or string supply chains, you should reach out to Crusoe. Go to crusoe.ai slash twarkash to learn more. Okay, I couldn't get enough of Ada or of Machiavelli, and so there are a few more questions I wanted to ask you. Thanks for hopping on again. Oh, my treat. We didn't talk last time, I think, about the fact that Machiavelli was exiled, and he's writing these books in exile. Maybe you can give a bit of context around how somebody we were talking about his diplomatic career how he ends up in exile and what his plan is once he there Yeah And I mean here we have to start with everybody who anybody in the intellectual tradition lives in exile for a while, right? Dante does, Voltaire does, Rousseau does, Thomas Hobbes does, Machiavelli does. And more importantly, exile is a very common thing in Florence. And isn't the permanence that one expects. In Florence, exile means the people who are in charge of the regime distrust you right now. They want you out of the city. But they are testing your loyalty. They are testing whether you will stay true to them. And you're told not get out of the city like a Roman exile, but go to a specific place. Go to London. Go to Bruges. Go here. Stay there. And we will send you instructions. And then you're expected to act as a kind of unofficial official emissary for the government of Florence while in your exile. And you'll be asked to do diplomatic missions after a while. And they'll say, you know, go talk to this person on our behalf or go deliver this trusted letter. And if you're good and you behave, then after some years of service to the Republic, you'll be recalled. So, it's a sort of a provisional exile. And they pick a specific place to send you. And if you go and are good and do what they say then after a while they consider bringing you home If you don if you leave and you don stay where they said if you run off to work for someone else then okay you not allowed back in Florence anymore. You're an exile at this point. Machiavelli's exile is unusual because they really don't trust him. And so they don't send him to Bruges or London or Barcelona or the Germanys or any number of other places where he actually has political contacts or doesn't. They send him to a middle of nowhere hamlet in the countryside outside of Florence in Tuscany, where there is nobody important and there is nothing to do. And this isn't a go wait for instructions. This is a go rot. And we're testing whether you will faithfully stay and do basically nothing and be forbidden to talk to important people, be in isolation. When that exile is given everybody expects that Machiavelli response will be okay they not giving me even a second chance I going to run off and work for somebody else Because there are a jillion people in Europe who would love to employ a skillful classicist historian with military and diplomatic capacities who has political contacts in Rome and in France and has visited the court of the emperor He could have worked for any number of cardinals He could have gotten a very prestigious diplomatic job in any of a number of a dozen courts A Florentine historian especially is something that you absolutely want to hire to write a history, a flattering history of your own family. And for even a century before this, kings as far away as England had been trying to hire Florentine historians to come write about them. So he could easily do this and this is what is expected. And he doesn't. Because Machiavelli says, no, I'm going to stay and I'm going to rot. And I'm going to write the prints, which is my job application, begging the new regime to bring me back and let me work for them and demonstrating my loyalty. And I'm going to send it to them and only them, them and my immediate friends. I'm not going to share it with anybody else. Because Machiavelli is a patriot and he will not serve any cause that is not his country. No matter whether the pay at a royal court somewhere would be three times what he would ever get at home, that doesn't matter to him. No matter whether this is the regime that just arrested, tortured, and exiled him despite him not having plotted against him, he wants to work for that because Machiavelli fundamentally is possibly one of the most patriotic patriots in Earth's history. And he will faithfully sit in the [80:00] to work for the people who ordered his torture, so long as they will recall him so that he can serve his country. And this connects to the question we always ask about the target audience of the prince, because his other work, his discourses, his histories, his comedic play, those were for public circulation. Those increased his fame. Those made important arguments. His history of Florence joined other important histories of Florence circulating, influencing the way people thought about politics, not the prince. The prince is secret proprietary, the secret sauce of how to maintain power. And he will not let any other power have that, right? It's like a nuclear scientist with diplomatic secrets who is faithful to his country and will not sell out and let those secrets fall into other hands. Machiavelli knows that he has the beginnings of a new world of political science. And he will only share that with the government of his country because he wants it to protect his country and he will not serve any other cause. This is why it's so weirdly ironic to me that the reputation of the word Machiavellian means self Well Machiavelli himself is one of the most selfless men I ever read about in the history of the earth who will give up and sacrifice career diplomacy fame friends the opportunity to even be in a city and have a nice day to rot in the countryside to be faithful to his country And he would rather serve nothing and no one than give an hour of his time to advancing anything that is not Florence. You're making the point that he is advocating a viciousness and a realism and a cynicism, but in service of protecting Florence, not in service of a generic prince of any generic principality. principality. Exactly. And he doesn't let copies of it circulate to anybody but the rulers of Florence and his immediate scholarly, social, intimate circle of friends, people that he's known for decades who are scholar peers who have discussed his ideas with him. That's the audience of the prince during his lifetime. Does he expect that at some point it will be more widely distributed? Is he writing in a way that suggests that? I mean, it is a literary masterpiece as I've only read, obviously, the translation, so I don't know what it's like in the original Italian. But somebody putting in that much literary effort into something that is just supposed to be a very pragmatic manual for a particular person seems a bit weird Well we have to remember this is a moment of transition from the manuscript to the print period, and also therefore an important moment of transition from what makes a written work important and how that written work is important to the career of someone who's written So, it's a normal thing in Machiavelli's youth for a major important scholar like, say, Pontano, one of the greatest scholars of the previous generation, to be hired to write a handbook of princes that will exist in just one copy or three or four copies that are written for a specific prince. So, for example, King Alfonso of Naples, the Spanish king who conquered Naples, Alfonso the Magnanimous, made famous for his vast patronage of arts and letters and for carefully cultivated personal anecdotes like the moment that he was in the middle of fighting a war and a messenger rushed in to his room sweaty and covered with things to interrupt the king's morning time with his scholar friends discussing Plato. And the king turned angrily on the messenger and said get out this is a place for men in togas not for men in armor and refused to listen to the urgent message until he finished his hour of scholarly contemplation of the soul As a result of which he lost that battle but actually won the war And his reputation cultivated by anecdotes like that make him beloved right He will pay a salary five times what the Republic of Florence will pay to hire somebody like Machiavelli. And what does he hire them to do? He has a lot of children, princes and princesses, and he commissions a scholar to write a unique bespoke handbook of how to rule and use power for each of his children. And these exist in manuscript only in one copy or three copies, and the address is the Duchess of Ferrara, who is a daughter of King Alfonso. And that book is never intended to circulate. It's intended to be private guidance for her and for her to perhaps pass on to her sons and daughters. But meanwhile, the author's fame is magnified by being told the special bespoke handbook of princes cultivated secretly for this important princess was written by so-and-so. That's so cool. And letters circulate and let you know that it's happening. So in the same way that a scientist might become famous because we know he's developing cool proprietary technology that only his government has, but we know that it's happening, we have to think of these big... [85:00] as proprietary technology. And in that sense that it's not an unusual thing to write a book with a audience of one or an audience of one and her immediate circle. And this is also one of the moments where handbook of prince also means for women, right? So the title of that book for the princess who becomes Duchess of Ferrara addresses her as a prince and as a handbook of princess, because prince is a gender neutral word at this point. It's, you know, lexically masculine in terms of masculine and ending and feminine endings on the word the same way a table is feminine but prince is used for men and women and even queen elizabeth is prince elizabeth at this period of her of her of her life that is so fascinating because we have trouble wrapping our heads around the idea of writing a book for an audience of one it's just not what a book is to us well that the funny thing is i think we're returning or not returning we are entering a new era well that might be once again possible it already is somewhat true where i think most of the at least half of the words i read on a given day are generated specifically for me and nobody else because of ai and obviously ai is not capable of writing something which i think would be a literary masterpiece that everybody would want to read if they had access to it just yet But eventually it will be And so it interesting to consider that as this knowledge progresses it would bring us back to this era of bespoke scholars dedicated to a particular prince It's sort of important to remember that that never went away. I mean, so two halves of that one. For ages, it's been true that half of the words we read every day are bespoke only for us because they're email. Yeah. Right? They're letters. They're the correspondence back and forth, which has the audience of one, the addressee, and that's the majority of what all of us read and write in our lives. It's also always been the case that in the halls of power, there are book-long things with an audience of one or an audience of five, right? There are historians and other scholars and scientists whose job is to provide that 100-page report on here is the history of Syria to be given to a committee of Congress where these nine senators or these nine congresspeople need the background on what's happening so that they can understand a current events thing, right? And there are historian friends of mine who work for the Department of Defense Intelligence who produce these book-length research projects with an audience of five or an audience of eight or an audience of a couple dozen because it is the bespoke proprietary knowledge needed by government in that moment And sometimes it technological knowledge but just as often it going to be historical knowledge of here are the important rivers where military things are likely to happen, says historian who knows the history of this stuff. Yeah, that actually brings up the question of how many such tracks through history, which are of the quality of the prince, are as original at their time as the prince is and as wonderfully crafted and so on that have been lost to history. And maybe one way to answer this question or think about it is to talk about how the prints itself went into mass publishing. So at some point in 1532, the Medici Pope allows for its publishing, and then 27 years later, then it is censored by that same papacy. And so how does this book that Machiavelli himself did not want out in white circulation end up in white circulation and then stop ending up in white circulation and end up in wide circulation again. Yeah. And it goes in and out and in and out like a lot of important works. So I'll give the zoomed out and then the zoomed in answer to that question. It is often the case that a work which contains radically unusual ideas will drift along being not particularly zoomed in on by society and not widely read until it hits a moment that the new questions being asked in that century or that decade are answered by something in that text And then suddenly everyone will start reading it A different example of this, probably well known to the audience, because everyone here is a cool, smart, learned person. Lucretius' On the Nature of Things De Rerum Natura, which is our best capsule of ancient atomism and the atoms and vacuum theory of matter, right? Which is written in around the BCAD term and drifts along being not very important for ages until the 1600s when we're getting the first ideas of germ theory of disease, very interested in new science, and suddenly it gets 30 print editions and then is all over the place and influences science and is even more influential than in the 19th century when we're interested in atoms and cells, right? And so a book can exist for literally 2,000 years or close to, and then suddenly answer the questions of that decade. Right. So in that sense, the prince will drift along and be not very important for a while. And, you know, why is it first published? It's first published when Machiavelli's still surviving relatives want fame for the family and fame for their beloved now dead kinsmen. Here is a work of his that hasn't been published. [90:00] Yet they ask for permission because this can spread his fame. It's also dedicated to members of the Medici family. So the Medici are like, yeah, we get fame for publishing this thing, too. They don't think as seriously about the power of its contents as its author did. and so it's one more book that can spread the fame both of the Machiavelli family and of the Medici family and it is around and people are like oh that's actually full of fairly scandalous ideas which is how it then ends up on the index as book censorship kicks up as a result of the printing press and you know mini thesis every time there's a new information technology there's a subsequent wave of censorship to try to censor the new technology and a bajillion books get banned all But once Machiavelli's is not a particularly prominent example among this, right, the index of banned books that contains his work that's put out carefully differentiates between the dangerous books by arch heretics and the like slightly dangerous books by meh people. And arch heretics are in all caps. I remember when I was first reading through one of these indexes, I was so excited to flip through and find Machiavelli. And there he was, not in all caps. And I was so angry. I was like, what's wrong with that? He should be in all caps. But all the all caps people are Luther Calvin Zwingli a bajillion Protestant theologians you never heard of All caps archerotic status is reserved for Protestantism in this period Machiavelli doesn catch on until later So he's censored in a wave of censoring like everything, when there's a big censorious wave and then it diminishes and goes up and down. The second zoomed in half of that, if we say Lucretius becomes exciting when people want to know about the germ theory of disease, when does Machiavelli become exciting? Machiavelli becomes exciting first. In the aftermath of the publication of Hobbes' Leviathan, because Hobbes' Leviathan hits European thought like a truck full of bricks and has this incredibly persuasive, gorgeous reasoning that lands you on a terrifying vision of what humanity is and a terrifying vision of what God is that people find very scary but also incredibly persuasive. And it's no exaggeration to say that in the aftermath of publishing Leviathan, there's a 40-year period where the sole goal of Western European philosophy is coming up with a good way to refute Hobbes. And in that moment, they say, okay, Hobbes is using a lot of logics about politics and about history that sound like Machiavelli He doing these utilitarian consequentialist analysis of if we do this there that result He analyzing the origins of government as if there no divinity setting it up, right? He has this man in a state of nature invents government instead of God from on high tells Adam, here is how you should organize the world. And so they say, okay, You know, Hobbes is the monster. Hobbes is Leviathan the Great or the Beast of Malmesbury, as newspapers call him during his lifetime. How do we refute the monster? Let's look at the daddy monster that spawned the baby monster. If we can read Machiavelli and find holes in Machiavelli, maybe we can use those to refute Hobbes. And so Machiavelli is suddenly useful not to people who sympathize with him, but to people who see him as an enemy, but want to use him to try to defeat what to them is the greater enemy. So he surges in popularity at that point. And then a different surge happens actually in the 19th century. And it's not until the 19th century that Michael Bailey's Prince becomes a major global staple that you would put in a great book series. And in the 19th century in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment revolutions right so the American Republic the French Republic the transformations and democratic movements that are happening in lots of other governments people want new ways to think about politics and they want to think about politics in separation of church and state And if you want to think about separation of church and state, which is a new Enlightenment-era value, what do you need? You need an apparatus for thinking about politics and ethics that doesn't depend on God being part of it. And the vast majority of political treatises available to humanity at that point have some sort of entanglement of religion with politics at their root. But Machiavelli doesn't. Machiavelli is this early foundational, what if we think about government in a box without plugging into religion? What if we just think about government operating by itself and its earthly consequences? consequences is incredibly useful in the 19th century for developing a statecraft for separation of church and state. It's also useful for then Italian nationalism to celebrate and claim, hey, we invented separation of church and state. Here's Machiavelli, the first modern man. He's our bid at Italian culture invented modernity via Machiavelli. At the same time that England is saying Francis Bacon is the first modern man because he invented the scientific method. at the same time that France is saying, Rene Descartes is the first modern man because he invented, [95:00] logical reasoning and modern principles of logical deduction. There's a competition in the 19th century, a nationalist one, of different countries that want to claim their cool thinker as the first modern man. And Machiavelli becomes one of Italy's big bids for first modern man because he came up with separation of church and state, a phrase that Machiavelli would not have recognized if he said it to him, but would have thought about for a long time, decided it was cool, and then written letters about. Can I try out a counterthesis just so you can dispel my confusion? Definitely. One reason why Machiavelli might have gained a special significance in the 19th century is that now that you have these republics in the world, there's a question of how you make sure that they are maintained. And that is really the question that at least the first third of the discourses is obsessed with. But one of the ways which says that you do this is by having a religion that people take into very strong consideration. I think he says at some point early in the discourses that the more significant than Romulus in the founding of Rome was Numa or whoever it was that gave the Roman gods and the Roman religion some legitimacy. And then it is this legitimacy and the fear of offending virtues or whatever because you believe in some god that will punish you that motivates people to act in a way that defends a republic he gives the example of sipio after the battle in which hannibal absolutely destroys the um the roman armies and the people are about to flee rome uh as a result because they think the um hannibal's coming and sipio himself with his sword goes down and says swear to our gods that you will stay and defend our homeland And just having them give the oath in that moment is enough to convince them, well, Hannibal can't be worse than the gods, so I have to stay here and defend our republic. It seems like he thinks the religion is super important to the legitimacy of the state. Agreed. And he's thinking about it in a way parallel to the way late 18th century and 19th century figures are also thinking about it. Because we have to separate institution of religion from psychological effect of religion on the populace. The useful exemplar here is Thomas Paine, right? We all know Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Thomas Paine, who does a lot of thinking about the foundation of the institutions of the U.S. And Thomas Paine is a deist and a radical, and he has lots of treatises about how the most destructive force in the world is institutional religion And whether it Catholicism or the Church of England these institutions are giant centuries old millennia conspiracies to control your mind and steal your money and are incredibly pernicious to everything However, he says, religion is vital to citizenship because it is what makes people be good and is what makes people fear laws and want to obey the laws. So, says Thomas Paine, every country must have religion and religious education must be mandatory in schools, but it doesn't matter which religion. Thomas Paine advocated mandatory religion in total indifference to what religion it is, with the idea that fearing God and posthumous punishment is necessary to make a citizen in a practical sense willing to obey law. Notice how that is pain thinking in a utilitarian way about the psychological effects of religion being there, which is very different from the older the state and a state religion are entangled with each other and the state promotes this state religion because it believes it to be true. And we're going to have a Christian nationalist or Catholic nationalist or Roman paganism nationalist, right, religion that advances X against others. So Machiavelli is absolutely thinking about the psychological effects of a religion on the people And he has that wonderful analysis in the discourse of the utility of Roman religion He talks in one really striking and memorable passage about how because Roman religion says that your ghost depends on being remembered right This is out of the Homeric tradition Your ghost only retains its identity to the degree you are still remembered on earth If on earth your name is forgotten, your ghost forgets its name. This is not a your ghost is okay forever like in Christianity. It is a your ghost depends on being honored by your descendants on earth. When you are forgotten, your soul becomes an empty, mindless, wandering shade. Therefore, you have an incredibly strong incentive to be remembered by doing great deeds, especially sacrificing yourself for your country, because then your name will be honored for as long as your country lasts. And Machiavelli says this is one of the big motivators that makes people sacrifice themselves for the state in ancient Rome, because then they're guaranteeing their good afterlife. While Christianity, he points out, says all that matters for a good afterlife is being pious and then ideally like dying, being martyred. You have no incentive to sacrifice yourself for your state. The safety of... [100:00] your afterlife is guaranteed by your interiority, this is going to encourage a citizen to sit in a box and be a monk, not to sign up for the military and defend his country. So, says Machiavelli, Roman religion was much better for patriotism and political stability than Christianity. But, he says at the end of the chapter, Christianity has the advantage of being true, period, end of chapter. And you say, hello, Machiavelli, we know that you have the mandatory mandatory subscript there. But so think about Thomas Paine and Machiavelli in parallel. They're thinking about the utility of religion for forming a citizen, but they're not thinking about, you know, this religion is true. We are doing God's work. We need to craft our state to match the values of our religion, which is what a theocrat would argue. So you have is separation of church and state with the expectation that religiosity will be there. It will affect the people. It will affect the citizenry and their behavior. You need to think about it. You decide whether to cultivate it, but you need to think about it in the same neutral way you think about cultivating literacy skills or math skills in your citizenry. What skills do we want our citizenry to have for them to be well citizens What do we need We need religion and we need good newspapers so that people are up on the news and can vote prudently You are evaluating those things side by side from a utilitarian standpoint Instead of this religion is true, it is the obligation of our government to advance it. And our government expects to receive divine blessings if we advance the correct religion and divine curses if we don't. Radically different way of thinking about religion while still recognizing it as a powerful factor affecting the psychology of the populace. That makes sense. so last episode we were talking about the psychological impact on scholarship of having books be so expensive and having then to meditate on the same copies that are available in one library and maybe Machiavelli is maybe the strongest example of this where maybe through his life we're seeing the impact of the printing press diffusing and making printing cheaper but early on in his life it's still um not been that long since the Gutenberg came up with the first printing press. And as a result, he has... correct this story for me, but his dad has to do months of drudge work indexing Livy in order to get a copy of Livy. Yeah. And Machiavelli himself, in order to get books when... in the infancy of printing, books are scarce and few So for example one of my favorite manuscripts ever that I worked with is a copy of Lucretius that in Machiavelli hand he copied out the entire poem This is in the Vatican Library But what really neat is he copied the text from a printed copy, but as he copied it, integrated into it corrections and improvements of errors in that one taken from a manuscript copy so that what he produced was better than either the printed version or the manuscript version. And then he made his marginal comments as he went. But notice this is somebody who, even though print copies of this book exist, is so much in the manuscript world that he's happy to spend months, probably, copying out and making his own custom improved version of this text that he can then work from. Even though inevitably new print copies will come out in a few years, they may have the very corrections that he's working with, but he isn't going to wait for that. And he's not sure. So he makes his version. And so he's from this moment when print and manuscript are parallel technologies that we're using at the same time. And the very people who are buying the first printed books are also producing manuscripts, imitating those printed books and influenced by those printed books. I want to think about the impact that having this copy of Livy which presumably is one of the very few books that young Machiavelli had access to influences his intellectual development And basically, yeah, we have this mode of scholarship at the time where, you know, why does he spend like two decades writing discourses on Livy? Well, presumably, unlike us, where we can listen to go through an audiobook a week or something or have our Kindle at night that we're reading and so forth. he's just like reading this book again and again and again and is trying to connect it to the events he's seeing in his own life yeah um on his like 10th reread that i feel is very interesting psychologically and understanding how scholarship and intellectual thought must have been different at that time as compared to now i mean you know machiavelli can easily access other books by visiting friends uh by asking to go to the library of his medici patrons when he's working for the medici of his sotorini patrons when he's working for the sotorini but that's different from having it at home and being able to have it at your bedside and look at it at all hours and have this intimacy with it. And it's your father's copy and it's your copy. Another part of that, though, and this is kind of weird for modern people to understand. In the Renaissance, there is so much enthusiasm for antiquity. Antiquity is the cutting edge thing. Antiquity is where it's at. Antiquity is how we're going to [105:00] the chaos of the previous world and have this new world where we're basing everything on ancient Rome. There's going to be peace. There's going to be a golden age. It's all coming from and imitating antiquity. Therefore, if your book is a comment on an ancient, it is going to be way more popular and sell way better and people will care more and think more of you than if your ideas are original. Nobody wants original ideas. Original ideas are out of vogue. Original ideas are dead. All ideas need to be from the ancients. And so, a Renaissance scholar will bend over backwards to pretend that his beautiful original ideas are actually Livy or are actually Plato, or to couch them as a commentary on these things, because that's going to have a way bigger audience and be more popular and taken more seriously than if it's original, right? So, there are points where Giordano Bruno, in his commentaries on Aristotle, claims that Aristotle says things absolutely Aristotle does not, the opposite of what Aristotle says. But if he claims it's Aristotle, people will take it more seriously. The most extreme version of this is the brilliant and fascinating figure of Annius of Viterbo, who Tony Grafton has a great book about. Annius of Viterbo had this radical vision of how he wanted to rethink history and faked ancient texts He made them up And he faked archaeological digs He would secretly bury artifacts and then dig them up to great drama and forged antiquities to create this book that advanced his visionary original idea of ancient history because if he pretended he got it from antiquity, people would take it more seriously than if it was an original book. So Machiavelli's discourses on Livy are his big bid to have a popular, important, prestigious thing because discourses on Livy are a bigger deal and more important and more interesting to everybody and more likely to sell and get attention than a Florentine history or a treatise of original thought on princes who wants that. That's a very niche kind of thing. discourses on Livy. Oh, exciting. We have to have this. And this goes on for the next century. So, for example, huge amounts of radical political thought, including, believe it or not, commentaries on Machiavelli, happen in the footnotes in editions of Seneca and Livy, where the text of Seneca will be, you know, a small square in the middle of the page, and then there will be these masses of footnotes and commentary and huge original moments of political thought for the entirety of the 1600s are going on in wars in footnotes and editions of Seneca But it's not original thought. It's all about Seneca because that was in vogue then. And the vogue of scholarly stuff shifts fast and is very interesting. And this is one of the weird reasons that Renaissance philosophy and Renaissance innovative thought, with the exception of a couple of oddball works like The Prince, gets sort of pushed out of the history of philosophy, especially in the 19th century. Because when you get to the 19th century, the vogue is everything has to be original. The philosopher should be born, you know, his ideas should be born like Athena, fully formed from the head of Zeus. The ideal philosopher lives in a cabin by the raging sea contemplating in the wilderness. And what they want is original treatises. And if you look at a 19th century historian of philosophy, they'll say, you know, in the Renaissance, there was almost no original thought. There was Machiavelli's prince, and there was maybe a little bit of Giovanni Piccadillo Miranda's oration on the dignity of man, parenthesis, we have since proved it's not an oration, and it's not about the dignity of man. and these things are like the few lights in the darkness and everything else in Renaissance philosophy is here a quote from a philosophy department person who actually said this to me the Renaissance is 200 years of people being wrong about Plato And a lot of people look at it and you read it and you pick up Ficino and he like Plato said these things And you like no, Plato totally did not say those things at all. That's absolute gibberish. No, Plato didn't say that. What are you saying, Ficino? And if you think Ficino is what he says he is, a commentary on Plato, then indeed, the Renaissance is 200 years of people being wrong about Plato, being wrong about Livy being wrong about Aristotle. But if you realize that what it is, is their style guide requires original thought to be presented in the form of a commentary on an ancient. What it is, is 200 years of original thought using the ancients as the trellis up which the rose climbs in order to bloom. And when you restore that and realize that and recognize that in order to get at the real Renaissance, you need to not read the goofy outlier works like Machiavelli's prints, which present themselves as original, which is a weird thing to do, but read the commentaries on Livy. That's where the original stuff is hidden, by pretending and claiming and sometimes sincerely convincing themselves that this is the secret coded true meaning of the ancient [110:00] Like Ficino, the translator of Plato, definitely genuinely believes that all of the incredibly original cosmology and magic that he's figured out is secretly coded in Plato. And he's wrong. It's not. It's so adorable that he really, really believes it is. But what it is, is an incredibly original vision of the universe that he got from reading Plato and thinking hard about it and combining it with other things. So he presents it as commentary on Plato, commentary on Diogenes the Areopagite. so that's that's core to why this is a discourse on livy because this is what a scholar is supposed to be doing is a discourse on livy and all the other things machiavelli does are sort of second tier weird things for a scholar to be doing on the side of discourses on livy okay so adult machiavelli is now seeing some of his work start to get mass produced uh what is his reaction to this? At first, excitement, but also horror, because Machiavelli is facing this fascinating moment in the history of being an author when printing has come into being, but there isn't copyright yet. So in the manuscript period, there's no such thing as copyright. And if you find out that someone has made a copy of your book you say oh thank God there another copy of my book that reduces the chances of it being completely destroyed in a fire Making one copy of a book is six months of incredibly difficult labor You're just grateful every time a text is reproduced. But when it comes to printing, then you have this experience, which Machiavelli is one of the first men ever to have, of finding out that a local printer is printing a work of his without ever having asked him, without ever having talked to him. And he looks at it and it's full of typos and minor errors. And he's panicking in these letters and saying, oh, no, everyone's going to think I'm a bad scholar. There are all these little mistakes in the text. They aren't me. They're the compositor having made typos when setting it up. But no one will know that. They'll blame me and it'll destroy my reputation. What do I do? There's nothing I could do because there's no legal process and no legal recourse. Printing has just come into being. And it's neat seeing him and friends writing to each other about like, what can I do about the fact that this printer has printed my book without asking me? There is no law. There is no apparatus. There is no anything. And his friends are like, well, write letters to everybody who matters and tell them that the typos aren't you. That all I can suggest because they don have the idea of authorial copyright yet It going to come in in the next couple decades And the weird thing is how this gets entangled with censorship And copyright and censorship are born together in Machiavelli's world counterintuitively from the Inquisition. Because when the Inquisition begins book censorship after 1515, which is during Machiavelli's lifetime, You know, their policy that the Catholic Church promulgates is before you may print any text, you must take it to an authority licensed by the church to do this, meaning an inquisitor or a bishop, and they must read it and give permission for it to be printed. And this is so that they can make sure there isn't heresy in it. So all books are effectively born pre-banned until you get permission for them to be printed. And in return for this, you get a monopoly license and only the printer that did the process of taking the book through the process can print it. And you may now use the actual Inquisition record of you having gone through censorship as the document to prove that you and only you have the right to print the book. And therefore you can sue people for plagiarizing it or printing an unauthorized edition And so the very first version of copyright is the Inquisition And places outside the Catholic world then like England look at this And there actually popular demand in England for censorship when they say, hey, we need what the Inquisition does, because Inquisition is so cool. They let printers have a monopoly on printing a book, and they let authors deny print permission. We need something like that. And the very first version of what is not yet copyright passed in England, which is, of course, the ancestor of what applies in all Commonwealth nations and in the U.S., was originally an imitation of the position. And it was, okay, you need a license before you can print your thing, and then in return you get Monopoly. Later, when there was freedom of the press push, And by later, I mean this is happening over the course of the first half of the 1600s. So a bit less, but about a century after Machiavelli's death. So it takes a century for all this to get ironed out. The first version of copyright law is them basically saying, okay, well, we're going to keep the copyright half of censorship while getting rid of the censorship half of censorship or changing the censorship half of censorship. But it's all born out of the Inquisition, having met this weird demand that you feel in [115:00] Machiavelli, where he's like, they printed my book. They did a bad job. There's nothing I can do. Help authorities. Give me some way to do something about this. And so that's where you could feel Machiavelli as one of the first generation that needs copyright that will then be born in the aftermath. Fascinating. And what was the Inquisition's incentive to enforce the author's prerogative on the text? Partly the Inquisition does it because that encourages authors to come them. It makes people much more willing to collaborate with their process. But also, think of an individual inquisitor as an individual person who lives in a place and needs to have relationships in that place and needs to have an income and who is not usually getting enough to live on from the Inquisition itself. If you're working for the Inquisition, you're an officer of the Inquisition, you're probably a Dominican monk, you get some support from the monastery, but you have reason to want money and you have family, they want money. You're as pragmatic and self-serving as any other average human. So the fact that people want to have this positive relationship with you, they might gift you some bottles of wine in return for you being extra generous in your reading of their text They also have to negotiate with authorities One thing the Inquisition wants us to think of it as very centralized and very monopolar right The Inquisition the Vatican it controls everything which is completely untrue and is propagandistic The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns, and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican. They're making their own decisions. And for the most part, they don't have their own large amount of funding. They don't have their own officers to jail people. They don't have their own jails. They don't have their own authority to arrest directly. They get all of those from the local government. They collaborate with the local government. Which means if the local government likes them and is pleased by them and is like, oh, the Inquisition, I can use this to scapegoat my enemies, then the local government will drown the Inquisition in funding and give them all the guards and all the incentives they could want. So when we hear about the infamous Spanish Inquisition, which everyone was expecting me to mention, the Spanish Inquisition is infamous because Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain really want to scapegoat the Jewish and Muslim populations that they're anxious about. So they throw money at their Inquisition and really cultivate and make it big. And that's coming from them. It's not coming from Rome. Meanwhile if you in somewhere like Florence where the Duke if it early Medici and Ducal Florence right when this is happening is you know a Medici He in deep with the weird Ficinian platonic soul projection magic people He an intellectual radical descended from intellectual radicals His court is full of intellectual radicals And here you are the Inquisitor and you like your grace can I arrest this guy And he like no that guy works for me You can touch him and you can only arrest as many people as the duke will give you funding for or the local republic will give you funding for so you need to please the local government if you're the inquisitor and we have letters of inquisitors complaining you know this is a really liberal duke he's protecting all of these heretics around him and there's nothing i can do about it because i depend on the local authority for my ability to do stuff so this is a really bizarre comparison But think of the Inquisition operating kind of like Doctors Without Borders. It's not the government. It's an international organization that's set up to try to achieve a goal that it believes is beneficial in different places. But it's only as strong or as weak as the government's willingness to collaborate with it. And if the government collaborates with it it can be enormously powerful in an area and do a lot If the government is hostile to it and starves it of resources and doesn let its people in and insists on pushing it out then you can get bubbles where the Inquisition is nearly impotent. And every time they want to arrest someone, they have to go to the Duke's agents. And if the Duke's agents keep saying no, they can't do anything. What this really creates is bubbles of privileged access, where if you're in with the government, you can be as heretical as you like, and the Inquisition can't touch you. This is also a lot of how homosexuality operates at the time. If you are in the protection of a powerful person, they can prevent the Inquisition or other officers of the church from getting at you. They just won't do it, and they're more powerful than those agents are, so they can't touch you. There's a really neat letter where Machiavelli and some of his gay friends, Machiavelli was, I would say, very definitely solidly bisexual in that this is a man who recreationally had boyfriends and girlfriends throughout his life that he writes to. We have homoerotic poetry, we have heterosexual poetry. He's definitely very excited by both sexes. And he has a lot of gay friends. And he and his gay friends are writing back and forth about how at this particular moment in Rome, one of the agents in charge of Rome's sort of enforcement is really cracking down on homosexuality. And therefore, all of their gay scholarship... [120:00] artist friends are rushing to get jobs working for cardinals. Because if you work for a cardinal, nobody can touch you. And that almost all of their friends have succeeded in getting jobs working for cardinals, except for one. So he has resorted to hiring two female prostitutes to hang out with him all the time and make him seem straight by having him hang out with sexy courtesans to defend himself against charges of homosexuality. Heresy and homosexuality operate very similarly in this period. They're both sort of forbidden by the same things and policed by the same structures. And so if you work for the cardinal or you work for the duke, you can be doing very radical magic, radical philosophy, radical politics, radical sexuality, and nobody in authority can touch you because authority is trumped by a higher authority that is protecting you. This is part of the patronage system. And how does that come back to the Copyright? So the way that comes back to copyright stuff is the Inquisition needs to please local authorities in order to get to operate at all. And so the Inquisition will therefore try to figure out things that will please local authorities And if a book is being presented for publication that has a recommendation letter at the beginning written by an important political figure, the Inquisition will push it through. And when printing presses and authors say, hey, can we have this be a monopoly license? Figures like Machiavelli realize we could ask for, hey, you're giving us permission. Can you deny everyone else permission? The Inquisition immediately realized this is a great way to get publishers on our side, to get authors on our side and to get their bosses on our side because we are protecting the book that is important to the duke because it's dedicated to the duke or it's dedicated to his grandfather. Remember, the Medici give permission to print the prints partly because it's dedicated to a member of the family and it celebrates their fame. They want to be able to control its quality and make sure that it's published in good quality and that it always has that dedicatory letter at the front. They have an incentive to control what we now think up a copyright, the Inquisition wanting to please them has an incentive to give them that control. To close off on, do you have some sense of how to think about why Machiavelli is remembered so differently from not only what he wrote, but why he was writing? So sometimes in the history of thought there are authors who become separated from their work and you have a parallel where there is the actual content of what the person did and said And separately there is the idea of this person In the case of Machiavelli, right, we have Machiavelli the Patriot, Machiavelli who did all this work. And separately, we have Machiavellian, right, the murderous Machiavelli, as Shakespeare calls him, Old Nick, which is a nickname for the devil, but becomes popular because Niccolo Machiavelli, Old Nick, literally a synonym for the devil. And he splits so that the idea of Machiavelli, the Machiavellian villainous figure that, you know, Shakespeare's Richard III invokes as someone he's modeling himself on, is useful to people as a character, as an idea, the idea of the scheming politician who is probably atheistic, definitely self-serving, and who wants nothing but to advance himself in power, which of course isn't the real Machiavelli if you read the work. The real Machiavelli is not about advancing yourself. It's not a manual for getting ahead, right? It shouldn't be shelved next to how to win friends and influence people because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power If you have a government and want it to be stable and protect the people lives do this But the idea of the murderous Machiavelli is very exciting And this happens at other times to other intellectual figures So it happens to Thomas Hobbes in the phase that Thomas Hobbes is the beast of Malmesbury. And the idea of Thomas Hobbes sort of separates. It happens fascinatingly to Spinoza. Spinoza, an important radical Jewish thinker of the later 17th century. And Spinoza is a neat one, because when you actually read Spinoza, he's a lot, he's really warm and sweet, and like Machiavelli, passionate and cares about people. And in his case, he's incredibly pious theist. He's a monist. He believes the entire universe is the body of God. You are part of God. The table is part of God. The camera is part of God. Everything is God. Isn't that great? But a fact about Spinoza, and I know this feels tangential, but it's not. A fact about Spinoza was that he was the first person in ages and ages to be targeted with the Jewish equivalent of excommunication. These sort of ceremonial, your radicalism is too radical, we are expelling you from the community of Jews. Such a rare ceremony that the Jews of his region actually had to send somebody traveling all around Europe to find a Jew who knew the ceremony because it was so incredibly difficult. [125:00] done. And the fact of that spread around, and people had the idea of, ooh, Spinoza must be even more weird and heretical than any heretic, if even the Jews would expel him. And the idea of Spinoza, the arch-heretic, becomes a character. And everyone talks about Spinoza, the arch-heretic, and then you read him, and it's nothing like it. But sometimes the character is useful, right? The idea, the thought experiment figure of Machiavelli, the villain, is useful for our philosophy. And we'd like to talk about what is a Machiavellian self-serving politician? What would they do? And this has a separate life from Machiavelli's real ideas, right? To the degree that all the way through the 16th century, there's these amazing discussions of Machiavellianism in Spain, where they're talking about the Jews as Machiavellian and Machiavelli as the prince of the Jews. And you're like, Machiavelli was in no way a Jew at all. But what they mean by Machiavellian And by Jewish is like somehow the political thought that is undermining our good Catholic Spain, right? And so Jewish and Machiavellian can become synonyms, mad as that is for us, because for them, both of these are labels for the sinister underground of thought. And now we're talking about the sinister underground of thought. The idea of Machiavelli as the villain is itself enchanting and interesting. And as we look at when Machiavelli is invoked in the modern day, when the prince sits on the shelf and it feels like something exciting to buy and to read and to think of as a manual of getting ahead, when having it on your shelf makes it feel like you're participating in the idea of strategic advancement and rationalism that much more Machiavelli the character you know old Nick than it is the Niccolo Machiavelli who faithfully sat in exile willing to give up wealth fame society, the ability to visit his wife, anything in order to serve his country. And to me, I think even more fascinating than looking at either old Nick, the fictitious Machiavellian villain or Machiavelli the patriot, is to look at how did we double image this? And what is the fascinating tendency of our society to take something real, powerful, exciting, intimate, and then say, but we can also make the character, and the character is itself interesting. So if you take away a main message from this with Machiavelli, it's Machiavelli, the character of thought experiment, is an important backbone of our society. We use him as we think about politics. Machiavelli, the actual innovator, is a different backbone of our society and how we think about politics. And if Machiavelli can be two such different things, old Nick and Machiavelli the patriot, so many other things we encounter in life have actually been teased apart by our social utility and made into multiple things which are useful to us in different context so that and if you have the prints on your shelf read it and remember it was written by somebody who was willing to give up anything to serve his country and you'll see a very different Machiavelli come through I think that's an excellent place to close Ada thanks so much for hopping on this was a pleasure as always I hope it won't be the last time I hope so too