Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Brief Titles
- Introduction: Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy
- Prologue: Machiavelli's Rapacious Republicanism
- PART I THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTHMEN
- PART II THE MODERATE ENLIGHTENMENT
- 4 Getting Our Bearings: Machiavelli and Hume
- 5 The Machiavellian Spirit of Montesquieu's Liberal Republic
- 6 Benjamin Franklin's “Machiavellian” Civic Virtue
- PART III THE AMERICAN FOUNDING
- Index
6 - Benjamin Franklin's “Machiavellian” Civic Virtue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations and Brief Titles
- Introduction: Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy
- Prologue: Machiavelli's Rapacious Republicanism
- PART I THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTHMEN
- PART II THE MODERATE ENLIGHTENMENT
- 4 Getting Our Bearings: Machiavelli and Hume
- 5 The Machiavellian Spirit of Montesquieu's Liberal Republic
- 6 Benjamin Franklin's “Machiavellian” Civic Virtue
- PART III THE AMERICAN FOUNDING
- Index
Summary
At first glance, it might seem that Benjamin Franklin is the least Machiavellian of the American founders. He abhorred war, though he thought the American Revolutionary War necessary. He despised the classical ideal of heroism insofar as it was wedded to the glories of war. The ideal that he self-consciously proposed to replace it, through his Autobiography and other writings, is unabashedly at peace with commerce, wealth, and creature comforts. His ideal also has strong elements of public service and civic virtue, but this virtue is not understood as heroic or even self-sacrificing. Franklin's virtue seems far indeed from the martial republican virtue that Machiavelli hoped to revive in modernity. Indeed, despite the central role he played in the politics and diplomacy of American independence, Franklin might have been less concerned with politics per se than any of the founders. He devoted his energies as a writer and thinker much more to what we would call social or private affairs.
But by Franklin's day, the influence of Machiavelli was felt in the world of social and private affairs as much as anywhere. That influence, modified by Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, and others, had created a distinctive modern outlook and a distinctly modern world – the grandchild, not the child, of Machiavelli. In statecraft, the moralized Machiavellianism of raison d'état was a reigning doctrine. Machiavelli's bloody and expansive lust for glory had been replaced by more sedate means of serving bodily security and following the promptings of nature.
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- Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy , pp. 143 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005