11 Dec Machiavellianism
Machiavellianism is “the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct”.The word comes from the Italian Renaissance diplomat and writer Niccolò Machiavelli, born in 1469, who wrote Il Principe (The Prince), among other works.
In modern psychology, Machiavellianism is one of the dark triad personalities, characterized by a duplicitous interpersonal style, a cynical disregard for morality and a focus on self-interest and personal gain.
Political thought
In the 16th century, immediately following the publication of The Prince, Machiavellianism was seen as a foreign plague infecting northern European politics, originating in Italy, and having first infected France. It was in this context that the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 in Paris came to be seen as a product of Machiavellianism, a view greatly influenced by the Huguenot Innocent Gentillet, who published his Discours contre Machievel in 1576, which was printed in ten editions in three languages over the next four years.Gentillet held, quite wrongly according to Sydney Anglo, that Machiavelli’s “books [were] held most dear and precious by our Italian and Italionized [sic] courtiers” in France (in the words of his first English translation), and so (in Anglo’s paraphrase) “at the root of France’s present degradation, which has culminated not only in the St Bartholemew massacre but the glee of its perverted admirers”.In fact there is little trace of Machiavelli in French writings before the massacre, not that politicians telegraph their intentions in writing, until Gentillet’s own book, but this concept was seized upon by many contemporaries, and played a crucial part in setting the long-lasting popular concept of Machiavellianism.
The English playwrights William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe were enthusiastic proponents of this view. Shakespeare’s Gloucester, later Richard III, refers to Machiavelli in Henry VI, Part III, for instance:
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
In The Jew of Malta (1589–90) “Machievel” in person speaks the Prologue, claiming not to be dead, but to have possessed the soul of (the Duke of) Guise, “And, now the Guise is dead, is come from France/ To view this land, and frolic with his friends” (Prologue, lines 3–4)Marlowe’s last play, The Massacre at Paris (1593) takes the massacre, and the following years, as its subject, with the Duke of Guise and Catherine de’ Medici both depicted as Machiavellian plotters, bent on evil from the start.
The Anti-Machiavel is an 18th-century essay by Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and patron of Voltaire, rebutting The Prince, and Machiavellianism. It was first published in September 1740, a few months after Frederick became king, and is one of many such works.
Denis Diderot, the French philosopher, viewed Machiavellianism as “an abhorrent type of politics” and the “art of tyranny”.
Psychology
Machiavellianism is also a term that some social, forensic and personality psychologists use to describe a person’s tendency to be unemotional, and therefore able to detach him or herself from conventional morality and hence to deceive and manipulate others. In the 1960s, Richard Christie and Florence L. Geis developed a test for measuring a person’s level of Machiavellianism (sometimes referred to as the Machiavelli test).Their Mach – IV test, a twenty-statement personality survey, became the standard self-assessment tool of Machiavellianism. People scoring high on the scale (high Machs) tend to endorse statements such as, “Never tell anyone the real reason you did something unless it is useful to do so,” (No. 1) but not ones like, “Most people are basically good and kind” (No. 4), “There is no excuse for lying to someone else,” (No. 7) or “Most people who get ahead in the world lead clean, moral lives” (No. 11). Using their scale, Christie and Geis conducted multiple experimental tests that showed that the interpersonal strategies and behavior of “High Machs” and “Low Machs” differ.Their basic results have been widely replicated.Measured on the Mach – IV scale, males are, on average, slightly more Machiavellian than females.
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