The Machiavellian Will

...David R. Carlin, Jr., is a senator and deputy majority leader in the Rhode Island state legislature...

...That was a hard case, after all, and there are worse things in the world than being inconsistent...

...Will, who prefers the grave and dignified conservatism of Burke to the flashy conservatism of Milton Friedman, won't salvage his reputation for consistency at the price of abandoning both and signing up with the most brutal and cynical of all schools of conservatism...

...He has recently begun writing a regular column in these pages...

...This ancient theory — which was no doubt subscribed to by a great many hypocrites and romantics as well as by politicians, philosophers, and jurists of wisdom and integrity — taught that politics, despite providing ample room for the exercise of artistic skills, had to be moral in both its ends and its means...

...Or if not Burke himself, then perhaps Russell Kirk introduced him in The Conservative Mind (1953), which treated Burke as the father of Anglo-American conservatism and devoted more pages to him than to any other of that landmark book's numerous heroes...

...It is most unlikely that Burke, who was the leading spirit behind the impeachment and prosecution of Warren Hastings for judicial murder in India, would approve the strategic slaughter of a couple hundred thousand noncombatants at Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...In a recent reflection on the fortieth anniversary of the first successful nuclear explosion, which took place in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, Will defends the bomb's use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...Be that as it may, Will now seems prepared to send Burke back to England or Ireland or the Middle Ages, wherever it is Will found him...

...For the latter, the efficacy of the event would have been everything...

...DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...

...he has also taught sociology and written frequently for Commonweal and other publications...

...he was a throwback to Cicero...

...The unwritten law reigns supreme over the municipal law...

...True, he had scant patience with the abstract moralism of an English government which was losing an empire in America, and even less patience with the abstract moralism of the righteous makers of the French Revolution...

...Now, this is a bit much, this suggestion that the ill fame nearly five centuries have attached to the author of The Prince and The Discourses arises purely and simply from his being a clear-sighted realist living in a world overpopulated with political romantics and/or hypocrites...

...It is this view Shakespeare did much to popularize when he referred to the founder of modern political science as "the murderous Machiavel" and created our literature's two greatest "Machiavellian" villains, Richard III and Iago...

...Naturally, Will is above such vulgar prejudices — so far above them, however, that he informs us: "bad reputation is the unjust price Machiavelli paid for being an unsentimental moralist in a world addicted to moral evasions...

...Contending — what is no doubt true — that the bomb shortened the war and saved vast numbers of American and Japanese lives, and following this with a defense of Machiavelli against a half-millennium of detraction, he concludes his ethical-historical reflection with a judgment that the bombing of the two Japanese cities was "a deed profoundly Machiavellian and moral...

...Yet in his search for the concrete he never abandoned, as did Machiavelli, the notion that politics is subordinate to a higher law, a law "not made by human hands.'' And this is what makes him, despite his numerous incidental shortcomings, a perennially priceless example for us...

...He was a realist without advocating realpolitik...

...for the former, efficacy would have been only half the story, and the lesser half at that...

...9 August 1985: 423...

...Machiavelli, by contrast, offered a theory of politics purely artistic, free of moral constraints, devoted to success (which he defined as the getting and keeping of power, either by the individual, as in The Prince, or by the state, as in The Discourses), and to economy of means (which involves telling no more lies and doing no more murder than are strictly necessary for getting the job done...

...Burke, though living two-and-a-half centuries after Machiavelli, was a political moralist of the ancient school...

...THE MACHIAVELLIAN WILL INCOMPATIBLE CONSERVATISMS IN A RECENT issue of The New Republic Charles Krauthammer described George Will as a person who "almost single-handedly . . . has injected an entire political tradition, Burkean conservatism, into everyday American political discourse...

...But hard cases make bad political philosophy...

...Let's hope that Mr...

...The suggestion may strike some as odd that Will has brought Burke into American political discourse, since one would have thought that Burke did this himself with his great speeches on the American problem in the 1770s or with his spectacular analyses of the French Revolution two decades later...

...It is certain, on the other hand, that Machiavelli would have given his stamp of .approval to the bombings...

...Between Machiayelli and Burke there is a great gulf fixed, and the person who, like Will, welcomes the great Florentine into his intellectual house will have to throw the even greater Anglo-Irishman out of doors...

...If George Will feels he must, in a fit of inconsistency, abandon his Burkean temper in order to justify the war-ending bombings, so be it...

...There is, to be sure, an old and simplistic view of Machiavelli which regards him not simply as the classic theorist of realpolitik but as one who delights in evil for the sake of evil, a sort of Renaissance forerunner of Hitler, a Marquis de Sade of politics...

...He wasn't an anticipation of Bismarck...

...The reference was to Edmund Burke, andthe point presumably was that Will is a different breed of conservative from the Milton Friedman, quasi-anarchistic breed, which holds that society ought to be a collection of individuals freely pursuing self-interest, restrained only by their own enlightenment plus a few rules of fair play...

...A more accurate impression is given by Lord Acton when he described the prevailing theory of government which Machiavelli and his disciples overthrew: "Laws are made for the public good . . . The public is not to be considered if it is purchased at the expense of an individual...

...he was a moralist without being moralistic...

...Like Burke, Will understands that society — even a society with a limited state and a relatively free enterprise business system — requires that customs, institutions, and values be imposed on its members without first waiting for their consent...