Ends and means

Writing my previous piece, Hard truths, shocked me even as I was writing it.

I don't know what my small but loyal cohort of readers must have made of it - and, as I haven't enabled comments, I may never find out - but, while thinking the previously unthinkable was uncomfortable, publishing my conclusions was agonising. If my writing goes down to posterity at all (which I very much doubt) I wouldn't want it to be as the ravings of a crypto-fascist. Nevertheless, I stand by what I wrote and was interested, therefore, to read a piece in Engelsberg Ideas by Jack Dickens entitled Europe's Lost Reason of State.

This came as a revelation to me and I admit I was initially somewhat alarmed to learn that the concept derives from the writings of Machiavelli. (If one is judged by the company one keeps, what does quoting the godfather of the dark arts of Renaissance political philosophy say about one's moral compass?) To quote Dickens: "Reason of State was forged as an idea in the debates launched by the 16th-century Florentine politician and philosopher, Niccolò Machiavelli. In his Discourses (Book III, Chapter 41), Machiavelli asserted the primacy of the state’s interests and survival over the strict demands of Christian morality: ‘where the ultimate decision concerning the safety of one’s country is to be taken, no consideration of what is just or unjust, merciful or cruel, praiseworthy or shameful should be permitted’. Oo er!

That's certainly not what I intended to convey and I was relieved to learn that later philosophers such as the Italian, Giovanni Botero, and Frenchmen, Innocent Gentillet and Jean Bodin, disagreed with Machiavelli's uncompromisingly amoral theory of statecraft, developing the theory of ragion di stado or raison d'état as a more moral alternative. But it was that arch-pragmatist, Cardinal Richelieu, who later formalised the theory during the Thirty Years' War in order to secure France's position against the Holy Roman Empire, even when that meant collaborating with Protestant powers. So Reason of State, in theory and practice, has a long and not necessarily ignoble history.

Modern politicians may need to take note in an increasingly unstable world.

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