Question

Compare and contrast the “political realism” of Machiavelli and Hobbes.

Answer 1

• Machiavelli, who along with Hobbes, helped to generate the tradition of political realism.
• Hobbes was a scholar, whose aim was to put politics onto a scientific footing; he therefore employed a strict logical approach to his work. In contrast, Machiavelli was a man of action; he worked, primarily, as a civil servant of the Florentine Republic. He drew conclusions, having made observations of how people actually behaved rather than the way they ought to behave in a hypothetical and intangible world. It is this difference in methodology, which ultimately underlies the differences in political beliefs of these two people.
• Both thinkers lived through extreme political turmoil during their lives. Thus, both men saw internal political stability as being a necessary condition for any higher goals.
• Machiavelli, in The Discourses, comes across to his readers as a staunch defender of republican principles whereas Hobbes, in Leviathan, saw republicanism as a cause of political instability. Machiavelli praised, even above political stability, the pursuit of glory, the achievement of which was, for him, the highest human good.Hobbes was distrusting of glory-seeking, seeing it as a cause of human misery.
• Machiavelli felt that continued expansion, or the pursuit of empire, was not only a necessary condition for internal political accord but the best way to obtain glory for the ruler, material advantage for the citizenry and to ward off foreign invasion. Hobbes was less enamored with expansion for its own sake because such reckless action was contrary to his first law of nature
• According to Machiavelli, acquiring a kingdom by force is perfectly all right, because the desired end justifies any means necessary to achieve it.
• Hobbes maintains that no one is secure and impenetrable in his anarchic system and people seek a greater standard of living, so he believes that people will be willing to give up their rights to do whatever they wish in favour of a moral system. However, there is no guarantee that if a person behaves morally others will do the same. As a result, people who practise morality, while others don’t, in Hobbes opinion, will become easy prey. He does not believe that people will be forced by social convention to behave morally. Hobbes justifies morality on the basis that is promotes self-interest and survival.
• Machiavelli argued that man had the ability to be good, but he was only good when it was in his own self-interest to do so. My understanding is that Machiavelli realised that men tended to fall into evil. Hobbes’ idea of human nature was consummate with Machiavelli’s, but, since he was writing in the wake of civil war, he placed more emphasis on man being inherently brutal.