Why are we 'governed' so thoroughly, and so poorly?

Machiavelli's answer

While going about my business in the 2020s, I am often reminded of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s rant – truly one of the greatest ever committed to paper – on the subject of being governed:

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

What is interesting about this passage is that it is not so much the indoctrination, fleecing, clubbing, choking, etc., that gets Proudhon’s goat. Those things are bad enough, of course. But what really galls him is that the people doing it are so patently undeserving of occupying any position of authority. It’s one thing to be spied upon, drilled, commanded, abused, ridiculed and so on if the people doing it are paragons of excellence and have an impeccably rational justification for behaving as they do. It is quite another when these ‘creatures’ lack any wisdom or virtue - when they have so self-evidently attained their positions merely through having the right face, the right connections, and the right views, and from jumping through the right hoops and avoiding causing trouble.

This is the position in which we find ourselves in 2023 - our lives administered in ever more minute detail, and in ever more authoritarian ways, by people who have never really achieved much at all beyond playing the system and making the most of the strong hand which they have been dealt by circumstance (well-off parents; good school; good exam grades; good university, and so on). We don’t need to name names: we can all think of a long list of examples of this kind of ‘creature’ and the insolence that they embody in imagining that they have earned any sort of right to impose on society a vision of how to live.

As in many things, this brings us back to Machiavelli. In the greeting to Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai with which he introduces his Discourses, Machiavelli gives some very good general advice: ‘To judge aright,’ he says, ‘One should esteem men because they are generous, not because they have the power to be generous; and in like manner, should admire those who know how to govern a kingdom, not those who, without knowing how, actually govern one.’ Is there more to the matter than this? Political philosophy, and political science, should really boil down to the question of knowing how to actually govern, but so frequently comes down to a whole host of other tangential or immaterial concerns. What Machiavelli makes absolutely clear in this one remark is that there is often a huge gulf in quality between those who occupy positions of authority, and those who should; and ‘knowing how to actually govern’ must by implication be the focus of much more of our attention in determining who should end up being in charge.

Machiavelli’s position - contract to popular myth - was that it was more preferable for the populace to govern than a ‘prince’. This is simply because, as Machiavelli reminds us, ‘all do wrong’. Given the choice between republican rule (meaning self-governing rule by the people) and that of a prince (meaning rule by one man), the response is therefore obvious - individual members of the populace may do wrong but, in doing so, affect little; but when a prince does wrong, the consequences can be extremely grave. Put another way, power is best dispersed as much as possible via the ‘wisdom of crowds’, and concentrated power is best avoided (although there may be exceptional circumstances, such as war, where it is necessary).

Our societies have, it seems, chosen to adopt almost a diametrically opposite position to that advocated by Machiavelli. Our elites increasingly seem to believe that power is best concentrated within a relatively small group of ‘high information’ experts who can be trusted much more than the populace can to make the right decisions. Rather than accepting that ‘all do wrong’, they tend to take the view that actually it is the populace who tend to do wrong and the expert class who do right, and it is therefore best for all concerned if society is run along essentially technocratic lines. Thus we inhabit polities that much more closely resemble principalities than republics - governed by a relatively small ‘princely’ group who make decisions on our behalf.

Why has this happened?

At the centre of Machiavelli’s answer would I think be the concept of virtù, often mistranslated as ‘virtue’, but really more properly understood as something akin to ‘virtuosity’ or excellence. One who has virtù is one who has initiative, toughness, fortitude, discipline and competence - one who, in short, is capable of governing his or her own affairs in most circumstances. For Machiavelli, the ideal circumstance was one in which this quality was widespread among the populace. In such circumstances, where there is a robust citizenry imbued with virtù, society more or less runs itself as a self-governing republic; all it needs is a set of laws of general application in order to keep the peace and it will be self-sustaining. People will in short solve their problems for themselves, or in cooperation with others.

It follows that in circumstances in which the population lacks virtù, it may be appropriate for a ‘prince’ to rule (with the ultimate aim, Machiavelli makes clear, of restoring the conditions of a republic). This is not ideal, but may be necessary; the trite analogy would be the ‘prince-like’ rule of the Allies in occupied Germany after WWII, aimed at allowing virtù to flourish where it had been stamped out.

What Machiavelli does not spell out for the reader, but what I think he must surely have meant to imply, was therefore a theory of the circumstances in which ‘princely rule’ will arise, and particularly how it will emerge in what was previously a republic. In short, this will happen where those who are in positions of authority convince themselves that the population as a whole lacks virtù and that there is therefore a necessity for the experts to take charge. Since the population is incapable of self-government it is thus unfit for republican rule, and therefore the ‘princes’, who themselves alone embody virtù, have to put themselves in the driving seat.

Machiavelli therefore gives us a sensible theory for explaining how republics are corrupted into principalities: it may happen through force or revolution, but it is much more likely to be the case that it takes place when those who are in positions of power and influence decide for themselves that ordinary people lack virtù and that a group of technocrats must call the shots.

Does this not aptly describe our present predicament? A proliferating ‘new elite’ of overqualified, overeducated men and women who were born into relative privelege, did well in good schools and then at university, and who have been told all the way through life how clever and disciplined and wonderful they are, taking it upon themselves to boss around a population comprising people who they consider to be ignorant, stupid and incapable? This basic formula plays out all around us - from the lockdowns to ‘Net Zero’ to sugar taxes to EDI/DEI initiatives. At every turn we are treated as though we lack the necessary virtù, and need a cabal of princes to make sure we do the right thing.

In closing, of course, all that is needed is to connect the dots back to Proudhon. The manner in which we are governed, and its underlying rationale, is increasingly prince-like. It should hardly surprise us, then, that we are so poorly governed. The point bears belabouring: ‘it is beyond question that it is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out; [and] the opposite happens where there is a prince’. Where power is dispersed, good will follow. Where it is concentrated, there will be decline. There is nothing much more to add: those who ‘know how to actually govern’ are we, the people, ourselves, and we should expect bad results when this basic truth is forgotten.