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Political Philosophy

Philosophy & The Crown

Vincent Di Norcia on monarchy and stability.

“Hereditary states are much less difficult to hold than new states. If such a ruler is ordinarily diligent and competent his government will always be secure.”
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)

“My first moral maxim was to obey the laws and customs of my country, keeping to the religion in which I was brought up.”
René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637)

Machiavelli is a political philosopher with a sulferous reputation. His comment above, though, reflected his bitter personal experience of warring Italian city states. He wrote The Prince after his decades of dedicated and skillful public service to the Florentine Republic had been rewarded with torture and exile. Perhaps his implicit approval of the relatively stable hereditary monarchies was not surprising. Nor was René Descartes’ support for monarchy, for, as he wrote, his “whole aim was to find security”, and he “prized tranquility over everything” (Discourse p.28; p.54). So he saw support for the legitimate authority of his King as a moral choice. His ‘first moral maxim’ echoed Michel de Montaigne’s support for Henry II in back 1574, when civil war had broken out in France after the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots by Catholics. While Montaigne complained that “the moral laws concerning the duty of each man in himself are hard to frame”, he combined private duty with public reason, including submission to public authority, to write: “It is in justice that kingly virtue mainly consists” (Essays, 1580, p.336). Descartes, who knew Montaigne’s Essays, was certainly influenced by the views of his great predecessor.

Machiavelli, Montaigne & Descartes Contemplating a King by Stephen Lahey

Descartes was born in 1596, a decade after Elizabeth I had had Mary Queen of Scots executed from fear that she would lead a Catholic rebellion. Indeed, through much of her reign, Elizabeth faced threats from powerful enemies, such as the Pope and the King of Spain, who in 1588 attacked with an Armada of 120 ships. A few decades later Europe was troubled by warring princes and religions. Given the ongoing violence resulting from the Protestant reformation and Catholic counter-reformation, it’s not surprising that in 1628 Descartes left war-torn France and moved to the Dutch Republic, perhaps the most tolerant state of the time. There, he said, he could enjoy ‘the fruits of peace’ and pursue his meditations (Discourse, p.30). Descartes formulated moral maxims as part of his project of developing a “practical philosophy of great usefulness in life” (p.46), for he wanted “to lose no chance of benefiting the public if I could” (p.47). Although he focussed on the mastery of nature, his project also reflected his concern to avoid political and religious conflict. So his first moral maxim enjoined obedience to the state, reinforcing his opposition to self-proclaimed legislators and social reformers (Discourse II, p.16f). Instead he supported the Catholic religion and the King of France against violent, revolutionary Protestants.

Descartes’ first moral maxim did not imply support for Plato’s ‘philosopher king’, whom Plato presents in the Republic as a wise, benign dictator. Descartes’ personal experience of a troubled, divided Europe told him that dictatorship, like monarchy, does not always involve such enlightened government. First, both monarchy and tyranny can trigger violent opposition. Secondly, as the historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) famously wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” It is a credible description of one man rule. Consider only a few examples: Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution led to the massacre of millions; Stalin’s purges killed millions of Russians; Hitler’s holocaust led to the slaughter of six million Jews, plus communists, and others… and the US and UK regimes supported Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship of Chile, which involved the killing or false imprisonment of thousands of Chileans, including the murder of Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected President.

Sadly, democracies do sometimes enable dictatorships, usually with unfortunate results. In 1953, for instance, democratic America and Britain sponsored a coup against Iran’s inconvenient Prime Minister Mosaddegh, resulting in autocratic personal rule by the Shah, Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi’s corruption and misrule triggered the revolution of 1979, leading to the current theocracy. The US has also supported coups and revolutions in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Chile, and elsewhere. So democracies as well as monarchies can create violent colonial empires.

Nevertheless, one person rule can work sometimes: such as in Russia under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great; Fidel Castro’s first few years governing Cuba; and China under Deng Xiaoping. Also, some parliamentary democracies are constitutionally limited monarchies; for instance, Canada, Belgium and Australia. In 1936 the British King Edward VIII, who wanted to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson, even abdicated in response to parliamentary pressure. Perhaps the politicians didn’t like that Mrs Simpson was American. Her being a divorcée really shouldn’t have been a constitutional problem, given the history of the British monarchy. Four centuries earlier Henry VIII had six wives: he beheaded two for adultery and treason; two marriages ended in the wives’ natural deaths; and he had his marriages with the two others annulled. (Actually divorcing Catherine of Aragon would have led to war with Spain – a war England might not have won.)

So Montaigne and Descartes had good reasons for supporting France’s king in times of widespread political and religious violence. In sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, peace was more important than democracy. Even so, Descartes left France for open, tolerant Holland, which had just thrown off the monarchical Spanish yoke and was at that time perhaps the freest country in Europe. So Descartes’ action of leaving France, like his resolve to obey the king and oppose social reformers, was politically pragmatic. We would be wise to keep his political astuteness in mind in an era when Russia invades Ukraine; China threatens democratic Taiwan; and armed mobs attempt to overthrow the results of US presidential elections. Clearly, our times are extremely troubled, and not only by dictators and wars: the rule of law itself is under attack. So the wise words of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Descartes unfortunately remain relevant.

Vincent Di Norcia is a retired Laurentian University philosophy professor living in Barrie, Ontario. He can be reached at vdn@dinorcia.net.