Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
The conservative case at its most formidable - against change, in favour of tradition, in favour of hierarchy. He summarises, in a marvelous piece of writing, the case for tradition, and that's an absolutely pure pleasure to read: the language is absolutely glowing with eloquence and passion.
Shall we go on to Machiavelli's The Prince?
This is of course a very, very different thing. If you want a complete contrast with Montaigne then read Machiavelli. Well of course, Machiavelli wrote two great books – the most famous of which was The Prince, a sort of cynical primer for these new people. You see in Italy at the time, the new people, the new warrior princes like the Medici and so on, they were coming to power without any royal tradition behind them. They weren't hereditary princes, they had fought their way to the top - they were the original “man on the white horse”, and they'd fought themselves into positions of absolute power. What Machiavelli was saying to them was, you can't rely on any sense of decency. Kings had divine right; it was easy for them to rule because they had god on their side, and the public was frightened, or in awe of them. But these new princes, they had none of that. They had no veneration so they couldn't behave like gentlemen, they had to behave like ruthless tyrants. I mean Machiavelli would say if you're going to get rid of your opponents don't just get rid of a few, get rid of the whole lot of them. If you get rid of a few, the ones you don't get rid of will be so angry they'll never forgive you, and you'll have made mortal enemies. So make a clean sweep, have no mercy. In Ireland you know we would have simply killed all the Irish. Machiavelli was an advisor to these princes, and this was his, so to speak, his realistic advice to them if they wanted to stay in power: never trust anybody.
And Napoleon spent a long time writing his own notes in the margins of his copy of The Prince. Was there a sense, do you think, in which Napoleon imagined himself as a condottiere?
Well, he certainly came from nowhere didn't he? But then of course he did try and turn himself into a hereditary emperor. I'm sure everybody in that position did or should have read The Prince, but it isn’t at all fashionable nowadays, and it never has been fashionable in this country because we somehow or other have managed to keep a sort of continuous tradition of orderly and civilized, or relatively civilized government, and we never got a wholly new lot of people who didn't benefit by the habits of the people to accept their authority, but we're getting that now. It’s a good point that: we're getting these new people, who absolutely know we don’t trust them an inch, or respect them. I mean a prime minister today is almost in the same position, in that he can't afford to think the public are going to give him a second chance. We're almost reverting to the time when reading Machiavelli might be necessary in English. That would be a thought for today - if Gordon Brown were to start mugging up on his Machiavelli, then he'd have to kill off David Cameron mighty fast.
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Peregrine Worsthorne is a journalist, writer and broadcaster. He was a leader writer and foreign correspondent for the Times from 1948-1953, and was the editor of the Sunday Telegraph from 1985-1991. He contributes to the New Statesman and to the online magazine The First Post. He is the author of The Socialist Myth, 1972, Tricks of Memory, 1993 and In Defence of Aristocracy, 2004.
