The World of Machiavelli or the World of Benjamin Constant?

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The title of this essay contrasts Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine whom we often claim invented a modern approach to political science, and Benjamin Constant: a native of Lausanne who studied in Scotland and became the foremost champion of liberalism in the French speaking world.

As such, the title is an exercise in anachronism and, so to say, compares apples and peaches: Machiavelli and Constant, three centuries apart one from the other, inhabited different worlds. Machiavelli had a vision of modern statecraft, in the sense that he was – to quote the greatest citizen of Basel ever, Jacob Burckhardt – engaged in the enterprise of building the state “as a work of art”. For Burckhardt, Renaissance cities in Italy, Florence in particular, were the greenhouse of modernity: while some genius artisans were busy in painting and sculpting things which will later be remembered as masterpieces, Machiavelli’s craft was the “construction of a whole political system”.

It is worth noting, not just “passim”, something that Burckhardt remarked about the Renaissance. In that period, he, who invented the very word after all, was the first in seeing the birth of the individual man: the citizen of modernity, so to speak. The individual man has the ambition to be the master of his own destiny. This marks, Burckhardt notes, the beginning of “war as a work of art too”. The outcome of a fight is “no longer regarded as a divine judgment, but as a triumph of personal merit”. This rational treatment of warlike affairs, needless to say, “allowed, under certain circumstances, of [sic] the worst atrocities”.

The name of Machiavelli, however, evokes more than statecraft. When Machiavelli explains what his aims are, he stresses he has no intention of telling stories about «imagined republics and principates”. He wants to present his reader with the “effectual truth of the thing” (verità effettuale della cosa). His attitude is one of realism – hence, what we later called political realism. Realists proclaim that they consider human nature for what it is, the supreme datum of politics.

Men are what they are: ambitious, rivalrous, hateful, dangerous. Men, writes Machiavelli in the Discourses, even “whenever there is no need” for them “to fight, they fight for ambition’s sake”.

Some, in the conservative camp, refer to this as the tragic nature of the human condition. By which they mean that humans are flawed and rich in imperfections.

This produces a distinctive understanding of international affairs. The Machiavellians believe that men prey upon men and states prey upon states. Thinking that men or states can be rescued from their impulses by morality or reason is a vain hope. Humans do not embrace order by themselves, nor can order spring out of chaos: order is something that by nature can only be imposed over people, by coercive means. Order is indeed an artifact.

For the world of Machiavelli, then, I mean a vision of the world in which humans are indeed dangerous to each other, their tendency to become nasty and aggressive cannot be checked by anything other than force, any meaning order needs to be constructed and implemented, by force.

A Voice Against Arbitrary Power

Florence, let alone the Italian peninsula, was a turbulent place in the days of Machiavelli. But so was Europe in the days of Benjamin Constant. Even if you believed in metempsychosis, I would not dare to attempt to convince you that the soul of Machiavelli, some 240 years later, transmigrated in the body of Benjamin Constant. Constant was 22 when the Bastille was stormed. At the time he was in Brunswick, not yet involved in politics. A few years later, he will publish his first essay, when the Directory is in power. Against Terror, Constant claims that if an institution endeavours to establish itself through arbitrary power, it is “suicidal”: it is planting the seeds of its own demise. Arbitrary government is a slippery slope: one arbitrary decisions begets another and a capricious power cannot be effectively contained.

Constant opposes Bonaparte, though he will later be flirting with him in the 100 Days, the brief period after Napoleon attempted to regain power and came back to France from his exile at Elba, only to be utterly defeated at Waterloo. Constant was to live a long life and will be consulted on the wake of the July Monarchy, in 1830. His great project will be what we today call “classical liberalism”.

Constant had no Pollyannaish vision of human nature. His bestseller was not a political essay, but a novel, Adolphe, which is a poignant testimony of introspection and the bittersweet nature of love.

Constant was writing in a time when Utilitarianism was on the rise and the people he tended to agree with, the liberals, made of utility what Machiavellians make of an aggressive human nature: a master key, which opens every door.

Constant thought human nature was complex, nuanced, and that it needed liberty to enable each individual to improve herself. Different than many Enlightenment thinker, he appreciated the role of religion in a person’s search for meaning.

Benjamin Constant wrote much, but he is perhaps most famous for a little conference he gave in 1819, in which he proposed an interpretation of what happened thirty years before. The French revolutionaries have been genuinely enamored with freedom – but that very word, freedom, can rouse confusion. The same term can mean two very different things: political participation, which involves taking part in the activity of governing, or personal independence. The French revolutionaries confused one with the other and ended up giving their country an anachronistic revolution.

Now, in Switzerland political participation is a substantial part of your civic heritage – so, you are in a peculiar situation. But in the rest of the Western countries, Constant could point to a growth in size and population of political communities, which needed “professional” government, while at the same time, in a larger and more interconnected economic system, people had more and different opportunities to make a life for themselves, largely through commerce. This means freedom to choose, as a consumer, and freedom to be chosen, as a businessman, worker, or professional. A commercial society is one in which more people can find relatively easily a job they consider consistent with their own talent and ambition. But is also a society where people may more easily find something that they like or that amuses them, as they dispose of their resource to consume what they desire.

Constant saw Sparta as a “vast monastic barracks” and the modern world as its opposite. In his view, war and commerce had something in common: one and the other were a way in which people tried to get hold of something they wanted. Commerce “is an attempt to get through mutual agreement something that one has given up hope of acquiring through violence”.

Constant saw an “uniform tendency towards peace” because of economic interconnectedness: not only commerce was providing a sweeter alternative to war, but created the possibility for its own expansion, for a wider division of labour, for ever more possibilities for a growing number of people…

This means that for Constantians, if we may call them so, order is not something that needs to be superimposed to people. Humans are inherently needy and greedy; they desire things. For this reason, they were aggressive. But they can also go beyond such a tendency and actually act peacefully. The fact that they choose war or peace will depend, by and large, by the incentives they face.

“Follow the Money”

Why am I telling you all of this, in the context of a conversation on Switzerland and Europe?

One of the oldest disputes among people who care about politics, is about what drives political events. Karl Marx gave a potent answer to that question: economic interest. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Super-structure, Marx thought – by which he meant institutions, the state, the habits and customs of society, religion – merely reflected the forces and relations of production. Hence, “the capitalist state serves as the managing committee of the bourgeoisie”. When the relations of production would evolve, politics will change too.

But Marx himself did not sit by the river, waiting for the dead body of capitalism. He vigorously engaged in journalism, did what he could to change the workers’ movement, propelled his hope with his activism.

It does not take a Marxist to understand the importance of interests in politics. The far more epistemologically modest advice “follow the money” is often a good suggestion, to understand how certain political interventions, how certain laws came about.

Yet it is rare to find somebody who is ready to believe that politics is shaped exclusively by economic interests.

For one thing, even those who have a specific, interest-driven agenda typically frame it in the context of some general interest consideration. That is propaganda, of course, but it also reflects a widespread attitude of considering merely self-interested political action immoral.

Political ideas enter the picture as broad interpretations of what the general interest is about. Somehow we all need them to interpret what we do ourselves see as our own interest. To frame it in the context of what we deem as legitimate and politically plausible, and possible.

Political ideas may enter practical politics as grand programs, as ideological manifestos that sparkle action.

But they may also frame our understanding of the world. They may provide the glasses through which we decipher how things are going, how and why other actors act, and imagine consistently how our own actions may evolve.

I would consider the Machiavellian and the Constantian views as great constellations of ideas about how the world works – before being a specific set of policy prescriptions.

Make Trade, Not War

When we consider the European Union, it seems to me clear than virtually anything that it achieved and that works in it is consistent with a Constantian mindset.

The context is well known.

Though dreams of some version of the “United States of Europe” had circulated, in niche political environments, for quite a few decades, only after World War 2 the European idea gained momentum. The need to foster a European reconciliation after the devastation of the war went hand in hand with the ambition of overcoming the greatest problem of the preceding 70 years: the rivalry between Germany and France.

What was done is exactly what Constant had envisioned. Instead of war, we had commerce. Growing economic interconnectedness could shift the rivalrous attitude of the different states into a more fecund competition at the service of economic progress. Suppose you read the very first lines of the Treaty that established the European Economic Community. In that case, you see that the nation-states which signed it were committing to economic expansion, stability, progress, and a faster improvement in their citizens’ welfare. This could be achieved through growing economic interconnectedness: a wider, international division of labour.

I am far from claiming that this was the only motive of the European founders. Certainly, a few of them thought that a world – and even a continent – of nation-states was a dangerous place, that the latter could but fight for hegemony, and they wanted to overcome the very institution of the nationstate. But this very idea – this dream, perhaps – involved another idea – another dream, perhaps. That of a political, international, economically and culturally integrated community that was not a “State” in a strict sense. Some may have thought to a democratic and republican version of the old Austrian empire. Others may envision a confederate future for Europe, on the lines of Switzerland.

However, they did not think that a nation state should be replicated at the European level, like a bigger version of France, or Italy. This would be a rather Machiavellian thought.

Believing human nature is not just flawed, but constant, and so to say constantly flawed in the same way, Machiavellians tend to believe a fixed institutional toolkit can be of use in very different situations. Europe faced a challenge to peace and security in the 16th and 17th centuries. The universal ethos of Christianity had been superseded by the Reformation, which, combined with the political machinations of local landlords, fueled a new sense of particularism. How was that problem solved? By developing the nation state: an institution that claimed the monopoly of violence in a given territory, and which did away with other institutions competing for the loyalty of the people.

The engine behind state-making, as the late Charles Tilly often emphasized, was war. The concentration of military power under a single direction was eased by fear of an external enemy. Indeed, Machiavelli understood the importance of fear as a great motivator in politics. The prince should better be feared than loved, as fear is a more dependable prop for political institutions.

Liberal Achievements

When the European Economic Community was established, the Soviet Union was a real fact and the European map had been partitioned at Yalta. Yet in Western Europe prevailed something which resembled what we called the Constantian vision.

Great leaders thought war could be overcome if the incentives were set right. The priority of modern policies they assumed to be the citizens’ material welfare and wellbeing. Making of Europe a single economy was their immediate goal.

It is difficult to speak of “Europeanism”, in the sense of the political philosophy of European integration, as a single thing. Many version of it always existed. The more liberal, or free market version, was perhaps not the one ideologically more popular – but it can claim the great successes of the European Union, those realized so far, to it credit.

These are two: the European common market and the single currency. They are, of course, complex political artifacts, in which different ingredients, so to speak, are combined. The European common market was not, alas, simply built around the principle of mutual recognition – but fed, over time, an ever more voracious European bureaucracy. The euro, after a first decade in which it was basically a pan-European version of the German Mark, has embraced discretionary central banking in a way which is perhaps at odds with its own, basic tenets.

Still, if we consider these two great achievements, they were successful, both of them, not because they asked member states to *do* something, or to do more. But because they were based upon the implicit demand of stopping to do things.

The euro was conceived as an attempt to free money from political meddling. Its whole architecture is predicated upon the idea that money should be managed independently by experienced technicians, and not serve the Treasury’s financial needs. You may argue the euro was successful up to a point but this was its basic principle.

The common market survived many threats, the most conspicuous of which was perhaps Covid-19. During a pandemic, it is hardly surprising that states try to raise barriers. But Europe removed internal customs, including physical barriers: they got rid of places in which goods crossing borders were stopped, checked, and taxed. Once again, the thing was hardly done perfectly, and many barriers still exist. But it was a major step forward.

The Constantian spirit came to the surface in the emphasis on trade, commerce, and the expansion of people’s opportunities through progress. But remember also that Constant thought the error of the French revolutionaries was the confusion between the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns. At least in part, the makers of Europe aimed to avoid that confusion and did whatever they could to overcome the modern version of ancient liberty: nationalism, liberty seen as political independence.

Their efforts in that regard were only mildly successful. Most European nations are artificial; they are little older than a century, and they were built by the obliteration of other, more local, sentiments of nationality. Still, the German idea that a nation builds through language was very effective in nation-building everywhere – perhaps with the exception of Switzerland’s happy plurilinguism.

But the European institutions, at least, were by and large loyal to the Constantian spirit. I do understand well that Europe is not very popular in Switzerland, particularly among those who care the most about liberty, here. But I want to defend what we might call the old Europeanism from the new one.

This old Europeanism, the one which made the European Union as we know it now, certainly passed through a paradoxical twist of the Constantian vision. The idea that you could overcome war by commerce opened the door to the idea that you can rely on commerce, for foreign policy purposes.

The EU thought that it could condition, and profoundly so, other states’ behavior, including their business practices, just because it was the biggest player in the world’ trading scene. Hence, it often crafted regulations and, sometimes, tariffs aiming at making other countries to follow its own standards. Our standards are superior, safer, more ethical: by closing our markets to producers that do not comply with those, we are making production better, safer, more ethical all over the world.

A number of European regulation fit this cliché: from REACH for chemicals to the carbon border adjustment mechanism, the EU’s green tariff.

Thirst for Mobilization

Now, however, things are rapidly changing.

The European public opinion tend to maintain that the Constantian vision did not age well, and is back in the Machiavellian framework.

News of what happens everywhere in the world, beginning with what happens in Gaza, testifies to the flawed nature of humanity. Particularly among the educated classes, a new fear of Russian foreign policy activism is creating a sense of insecurity and a thirst for mobilization.

Recent examples are paradoxical but frightening. In a letter sent to regional health agencies, the French Ministry of Health asked hospitals to prepare for a “major (military) engagement” by March 2026. After many years preaching the dematerialization of money and calling us to use credit cards, also for tax surveillance purposes, the European Central Bank has published in its Economic Bulletin a pean to cash, suggesting it to be “a critical component of national crisis preparedness”. If war reaches us, and the electronic payment system somehow crashes, families should have some banknotes at hand, to supply their daily needs.

As I said, political ideas are not merely important as “manifestos”: they are significant as “frameworks”, as they may orient a polity in a direction or another.

The prevalence of the Machiavellian outlook in today’s Europe is never more evident than in the words of Mrs von Der Leyen. In her recent state of the Union address, von Der Leyen spoke very little on matters that are in her domain – I mean legally, constitutionally, in a manner which is consistent with the EU treaties.

On the other hand, she spoke effusively on matters upon which she has no power: to shoot Russian MiGs down, for example, you need weapons to begin with. Weapons are member states’, not the EU’s. But von Der Leyen seemed to believe there is no difference.

In a recent talk, former ECB President Mario Draghi called for “change” in Europe, for steps forward whose magnitude is comparable with the common market and the single currency. But such comparison, pace Draghi, cannot hold.

In those cases, as we saw, member states needed stopping doing something. Making of Europe a single nation state (which is what von Der Leyen and Draghi are pursuing) will require a very different course of action.

Removal of barriers to allow for a bigger market to flourish is consistent with the Constantian vision.

But the making of a confederation a single state requires superimposing an artificial order: something which is consistent with the Machiavellian vision.

The fact that we are now Machiavellians, and not Constantians, is never more evident than in the European dealing of the Russian question. For the twenty years preceding the Ukrainian war, our modus operandi with Russia was thoroughly Constantian: Mrs Merkel and Mr Berlusconi differed in many a thing, but they share the idea that the Russians were to be brought at the table, and the key to do so was trading with them.

Now a day hardly passes by without hard words on Russia being spoken in any European capital with the exception of Budapest. Whatever you think on the Russian-Ukrainian war, if Europe has to claim a part in its end we only have two choices: or we turn ourselves into belligerents and fight with boots on the ground and try to defeat Moscow; or we participate in a peace process, for which we need some leverage.

But if you compare the speeches European politicians give on the matter, you can easily see that, with the exception of Orban, they are unanimous in thinking trade routes with Russia are to be closed, and forever. This is also the approach of prime ministers and presidents of countries which still have a considerable presence in Russia. None of them considers that restoring trade could be a way to help to end the war.

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The prevalence of the Machiavellian mentality, in today’s Europe, signals what is the new approach towards European unification. It is now supposed to happen thanks to the presence of a common enemy, Russia, and because the old ally of most European states, the United States, is now a less of a friend that it used to be.

These circumstances are fueling the hopes for new, massive public spending, which should “rearm” Europe.

So far the new defense spending is happening at the nation state level and it is doubtful that it could happen at the European level any time soon. But it is anyway presented as a first step towards a European army. Such European army is ostensibly needed to counter a common, Eastern threat.

The Machiavellian and Constantian visions are shared by different layers of the chattering and ruling classes, more than by “the people” roughly speaking.

This is to say that it is hard to predict at the moment, to what extent the average Joe actually fear Russian tanks may picnic in the Champs Elysees. The European “rearm” needs technologies, that so far are American technologies, but also people – and they should be European people. A part of the making of states, in Europe, was the military enlisting of vast chunks of the youth. Are we sure, the European youth is up for the task? I mean, not to protest in the streets for Gaza or Kiev, but to get military training, pick a gun up, put their lives at stake?

If that is not the case, the obvious alternative is to contract an army of mercenaries. This could be the deal between Europe and Ukraine, which indeed speedily and convincingly created an efficient army. The European Union opens its arms to Ukraine, it funds it, in turn the Ukrainians watch the Eastern border.

This would not bring the European ruling classes in the position they wish to be, but would provide with an immediate surrogate.

Switzerland Should Stay Watchful

I should confess I may skeptical about the fact that Russia may be a threat for Europe. Yet the Machiavellian vision sees it otherwise.

There are many, understandable reason the Machiavellian view is prevailing over the Constantian one.

In spite of having freed billions of people from poverty, since the financial crisis globalization has been portrayed as a failure.

Immigration has changed people’s perception of the nature of their polities, it reduced the sense of “sameness” that nurtures the civic spirit. It is not the overall number of immigrants that matters, but more the speed in which a society changed, evolved towards multiculturalism, shocking its members.

Covid-19 has left its marks on our political environments, helped in polarizing society, did away with the traditional understanding of right and left.

Finally, the return of Donald Trump in the White House marks a phase in which the language of politics is becoming thoroughly Machiavellian. Older values of international cooperation, peace and fraternity now gave way to a rhetoric which is all mors tua vita mea.

I say rhetoric because I do believe the practice is always a more complex matter. The Constantian vision, as we saw albeit briefly, was also the product of times of crisis. But it resonated strongly in the reality of local and international commerce, and developed strong chains of cooperation and mutual interests that are more difficult to break than most politicians think.

However, the European Union, once a bastion of a worldview proudly other than the Machiavellian, is getting into its Machiavellian phase.

Will it work? It is hard to see, and I suspect (perhaps hope) it won’t.

But this is certainly the dominant feature of the European leadership now. A urge for mobilization, a sense of overwhelming, foreign hostility that it needs to overcome, a desire to superimpose a order which is not there at the moment.

All of this has little respect for the successes of our Constantian past, and we are eager to do away with them. Von der Leyen’s commission has been the most interventionist we can remember – but has done very little in terms of procedures against infractions of the common market, for example.

Europe is not happy to be what it is. It wants to be something different. We may still fashion ourselves as Athenians, but our values are now an excuse to practice more Martial mores.

How will this reflect into our relationship with Switzerland?

If I knew the future, I’d make money on it.

I certainly do not know, but my impression is that pro-european Swiss may revise their views. The fascination for the European Union may have been understandable, so far as it is a big, peaceful trading block. Now it wants to evolve into something different.

I would recommend being more watchful, not less. It is only proper that it sounds like Machiavellian advice.