The Prince, understood in modern terms, is a book about management. A prince, of course, differs from a corporate executive in a number of ways, most notably perhaps in that if he fails the prince is likely not just to be dismissed but to have his head cut off. But the similarities are many, too. For the prince and the executive alike the hardest problem is trying to get people to do what he wants them to do and not what they want to do.
Machiavelli views mankind as under the control of two overriding passions, fear and love (or desire). The successful leader balances these two passions, manipulates them, and so controls his followers. In modern terms, the leader must balance the conflicting claims of the carrot and the stick, of reward and punishment. He who only rewards fails to retain the loyalty of his servants/employees; a high salary is not enough by itself to make a worker do his best for you. But threats alone do not avail, either; the organization of the most brutal tyrant is not thereby more efficient—in fact, such institutions are notoriously inefficient.
If the prince must choose between being loved and being feared, Machiavelli says, he should choose to be feared. This was but one of the judgments that led readers to say publicly that they despised this wily Italian, this “Machiavellian” adviser to rulers—while they read him in secret and heeded his advice.
Are such dismissals of Machiavelli fair? Was the author of The Prince himself Machiavellian? I do not think so. He was a sad and lonely man seeking to curry favor with rulers—the Medici—who he may have thought to be even more cynical than they really were. But one basic belief of Machiavelli may justify the disgust that his name evoked throughout the Renaissance—his belief that most men, and women too, are, for the most part, bad: greedy, selfish, untrustworthy, fickle, and as cruel as their circumstances allow them to be. Was Machiavelli right about this? Is it, in short, merely sentimental to say he was wrong? That, finally, is for every reader, indeed every human being, to decide. The decision is one of the most important that people ever make, guiding and directing their relations with other human beings at every turn.
NICOLAUS COPERNICUS
1473–1543
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly
Spheres
The life of Nicolaus Copernicus was very neatly divided into almost equal parts. Of his seventy years, the first half was spent getting educated. For Copernicus this was a very serious business. Born in Poland in 1473, he attended first the University of Cracow, devoting his time to liberal studies but concentrating in mathematics. He then went to Italy where, at the University of Bologna, he completed the course in canon law preparatory to a career in the Church. He gained a doctorate in this subject, but he also studied for four years at the medical school at Padua. When he returned to Poland in 1506 at the age of thirty-three he was not only a humanist learned in Greek, mathematics, and particularly astronomy, but also a jurist and a physician.
The second half of the life of Copernicus was essentially devoted to the writing of a book that would radically change men’s thinking about the order and structure of the world. The book was titled On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and although it existed in its basic parts as early as 1520, Copernicus was reluctant to publish it and did not do so until the very end of his life. Indeed, he died on the very day that an advance copy from the press was delivered to him—May 24, 1543. Many date the beginning of the modern world from that day.
It is important to understand what Copernicus did and also what he did not do. He did not discard the Ptolemaic idea that the planets are carried around their orbits on transparent, crystalline spheres—in other words, that it is the spheres that move, and the planets only because they are attached to the spheres. He did not discard the Ptolemaic idea that the motion of the planetary spheres is both regular and circular—because, as he wrote, “the motion of a sphere is to turn in a circle; by this very act expressing its form, in the most simple body, where beginning and end cannot be discovered or distinguished from one another, while it moves through the same parts in itself.” Nor did he discard the basic Ptolemaic idea that, with the above assumed, it was necessary, in order to “save the appearances,” to suppose many regular circular motions in the heavens rather than a single one for each planetary sphere. In these assumptions and retentions of the Ptolemaic system, Copernicus laid himself open to the corrections of Kepler a half century later.
But Copernicus did not retain all of Ptolemy. He made two extremely important changes. The first was to assume that the Sun and not the Earth was placed at the center of the universe, which is to say that the center of the Sun was the point around which the planets (including the Earth), together with the great sphere of the fixed stars, revolved. The second was to assume that the diurnal movement of the Sun and Moon, of the planets and of the fixed stars, around the Earth—from east to west—was not a movement intrinsic to those bodies (or spheres) but instead only an apparent movement caused by the daily rotation of the Earth on its axis.
Ptolemy had “proved” that the Earth is stationary by stating that if it rotated (as, he admitted, certain of his Greek predecessors had believed), at the great speed necessary to bring it around on itself once a day, then everything would fly off into space and there would be complete chaos in the sea and in the air. But such chaos is not observable, he said, and therefore the Earth does not rotate.
Ptolemy, however, had also held that the sphere of the Fixed Stars was so far away from the Earth that the Earth could be considered, for all practical purposes, as a mere point in relation to the size of that great sphere. This meant, of course, that as rapid as would be the motion of the Earth if it turned on its axis, so much the more rapid would be the motion of the great sphere of the Fixed Stars if the Earth did not turn. Ptolemy, like most men before and after him, believed the crystalline sphere of the Fixed Stars to be somehow divine, so this did not bother him too much. At any rate, he found this enormously rapid motion of the great sphere to be more credible than the rotation of the Earth itself on its own axis.
Copernicus reversed the credibilities. In a brilliant argument at the beginning of On the Revolutions he shows how it is not at all hard to believe that the Earth rotates, for such motion is quite natural and a motion that is natural is not violent and chaotic. What is impossible to believe, said Copernicus, is that the enormous sphere of the Fixed Stars revolves around the Earth at almost unimaginable speed once a day.
These two radical changes made by Copernicus had the effect of greatly simplifying astronomy. To place the Sun and not the Earth at the center of the planetary spheres allowed for great progress in explaining the apparent motions of the planets. The Earth turning on its axis, rather than the universe turning around it, also made sense to thinking minds. But not all minds in Copernicus’s day, or in any day (including our own), were “thinking.” Copernicus’s new suppositions about the heavens contradicted what people had taught and believed for centuries. Worse, they contradicted the conclusions of Aristotle.