More on Borgias and Machiavelli

I can't really write about the Borgia family -- as I did yesterday and as I am about to do again -- without deploying my favorite quotation from The Third Man. Restraint in this matter would do grave violence to my nature.

Harry Lime, the worst racketeer in occupied Vienna, tells an old friend who has gone to a good deal of trouble to track him down, "Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

What were the 30 years of Borgian dominance Harry had in mind? I suppose you might start the clock running in 1481, when Ludovico Sforza took power in the duchy of Milan. The fates of the Borgia and Sforza families were closely intertwined (another member of the Sforza house would later become the first husband of Lucrezia Borgia.)

Skipping a lot and focusing on Florence in particular, let us note that the de facto heads of the republic there, the Medicis, lost their grip after the death of Lorenzo in 1491 and got themselves expelled in 1494. Thereafter began a period of Borgian dominance in that city.

In 1502-03, Cesare put down a conspiracy of the condottieri (literally "contractors," the fickle mercenaries of the day) and one of the leading conspirators, Vitellozzo Vitelli, was led into an ambush and strangled.

In my post yesterday I quoted a passage in which Meyer describes Machiavelli's enthusiastic approval of this way of disposing of Vitelli.

Our original date of reference was 1481. Thirty years on from that date brings us to 1511. Let's cheat a bit and make it 31 years, because that bring us to an important event showing the decline of Borgia power. It was in 1512 that Nicolo Machiavelli lost his job in Florence as head of the citizen militia. He would be arrested, tortured, released, all by the say so of the Medici, who were after a period of exile re-asserting their own control.

After that experience Machiavelli would decide to retire from politics and take up philosophy.

Anyway, from a Sforza ascension to a politician/intellectual's fall from grace, we have identified a just-over-thirty year interval that may well justify Harry Lime's allusion.

All that might perhaps at last have given you some context to understand the quote from Meyer's book that I offered yesterday, and that I'll paste again here:

"Like everyone associated with Florence's post-Medici republic, [Machiavelli] celebrated the liquidation of men as dedicated to the restoration of the old regime as Vitellozzo Vitelli and his henchmen. For him, however, the meaning of what Cesare had done went further. The murders removed any doubt, as far as he was concerned, about Valentino being a man of destiny -- about whether his talents, ambition, strength of will, and sheer ruthless courage made him the leader for which all Italy was unconsciously yearning, the one capable of freeing the peninsula from the barbarians."

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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