The Wars That Made Machiavelli - Ada Palmer
Ada Palmer traces the intellectual lineage from Petrarch's humanist project to Machiavelli's political science. Petrarch believed reading classical texts would instill virtue in leaders, but the catastrophic wars of Machiavelli's era proved this insufficient. Machiavelli responded by proposing an empirical, case-based study of history to identify what actually worked in practice.
Summary
The transcript opens with Petrarch's response to the devastation of the Black Death. Surrounded by loss and tragedy, Petrarch concluded that the core problem of his age was selfish, self-interested leadership. Inspired by Roman figures like Brutus — who famously executed his own sons for treason against the state — Petrarch believed that if leaders could be educated on the same classical texts that shaped Roman virtue, they would absorb the courage, justice, and prudence of the ancients. This became the foundation of the humanist project: filling libraries with Plato, Homer, Cicero, and Livy so that the next generation of princes would be morally transformed by their reading.
However, as Ada Palmer explains, this project ultimately failed in practice. The princes who were raised on Latin and Greek, who could impress scholars with their classical knowledge, went on to fight wars that were even more destructive than those that preceded them. Machiavelli witnessed these conflicts firsthand, having been raised on the very Petrarchan curriculum that was supposed to produce virtuous rulers.
Rather than abandoning the classics entirely, Machiavelli reconceived how they should be used. He proposed what Palmer describes as an early form of political science: instead of reading about virtuous men and hoping moral qualities would transfer through admiration, one should study historical examples comparatively and empirically. By placing five battles near rivers side by side, for instance, a reader could analyze the decisions commanders made and determine which strategies succeeded. This case-based methodology — imitating what worked and avoiding what didn't — is why Machiavelli was regarded by his contemporaries not merely as a philosopher, but as a historian.
Key Insights
- Petrarch argued that selfish leadership was the root cause of his era's suffering, and proposed that immersing future leaders in classical Roman texts would instill the same virtues displayed by figures like Brutus, who executed his own sons to protect the state.
- The humanist educational project failed on its own terms: the princes who received a full classical education in Latin and Greek went on to fight wars even larger and more destructive than those before them, disproving the assumption that reading virtuous men would make virtuous rulers.
- Machiavelli retained his belief in the deep power of the classics despite witnessing the failure of Petrarch's project, but concluded that the libraries were right while the method of using them was wrong.
- Machiavelli proposed using history as a casebook — comparing multiple examples of similar situations side by side to determine which decisions worked and which did not, shifting from moral inspiration to empirical pattern recognition.
- Because of his comparative, evidence-based approach to studying historical examples, Machiavelli was described by his contemporaries as a historian rather than a moral philosopher or political theorist.
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