The Stability of New Principalities in The Prince: A Perspective from Weber
Abstract
Scholars have argued that new princes in Machiavelli's The Prince only have a certain “short-term perspective” and therefore can only rule with no long-term stability. This paper adopts Weber’s conception of domination and legitimacy to illustrate this problem, and the result is that new principalities are ruled directly by the prince with his own army with the help of a charismatic aura, but this kind of rule indeed lacks routinization and stability. To achieve this kind of rule, new princes are required to try their best to downplay the role of administrators and the greats/nobles in rule the state. In the end, this paper proposes three conjectures about Machiavelli’s attitude toward this problem. Either new principalities can acquire new legitimacy by expanding into a territorial country, or new princes can learn from the book of The Prince to keep controlling their army and maintaining their charisma, or he just doesn’t care about stability at all.
References
- Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Political Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975a, pp.177.
- Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. 2d ed. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, Chapter 1.
- J. H. Hexter, “Il Principe and lo stato”, Studies in the Renaissance , Vol.4 (1957), pp.113-38.
- Weber, M. (1994). Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) (P. Lassman, Ed.; R. Speirs, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.314.
- See Alissa Ardito, Machiavelli and the Modern State: The Prince, the Discourses on Livy and the Extended Territorial Republic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. 2d ed. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, Chap 13
- Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. 2d ed. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, Chap 12.
- Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Political Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975a, pp.179.