Harper, Machiavelli and Sparta

Anyone who has paid attention to the Canadian political scene since Stephen Harper became prime minister in 2006 would have noticed the emergence of so-called Spartan ‘virtues’ across the country.  Harper’s own self-discipline and robotic dryness, the government’s austerity measures in the light of a militant drive to balance the budget, the shift towards a rather boisterous – as opposed to ‘fair minded’ - Canadian foreign policy, and the pervasive sense of “war psychology” are all key indicators of a country being remade in a Spartan image.

Where does this picture come from?  The answer is: Machiavelli.

While this is not the place to give a full exposition of Machiavelli’s works, it is clear that there is much that Harper has learned from him: for example, “war psychology” and the problem of “evil” (Machiavelli was tortured as a diplomat in his day).[1]   Machiavelli (and Hobbes) look to the art of politics as a secular “science”, a distinct turn towards realism away from the Church dominated Middle Ages (however, Harper’s own indebtedness to Calvinism is a form of Renaissance revisionism – or “Reform-ation” in the Conservative sense).  Looking to the cycles of history, Machiavelli - and Hobbes again, who is more directly influenced by Copernicus - provide similar explanations for the Conservative Government’s constant campaigning: “all human things are kept in perpetual movement, and can never remain stable, states either naturally rise or decline …”[2]

Writing during the period of the Italian Renaissance, Machiavelli turned the dial back beyond the Middle Ages - and the so-called Dark Ages before them - to the time of the Roman Republic, and then to Sparta.  In fact his admiration of Lycurgus, the legendary law-giver of Sparta, goes unmatched:

Some have had at the very beginning, or soon after, a legislator, who, like Lycurgus with the Lacedaemonians, gave them by a single act all the laws they needed.  Others have owed theirs to chance and to events, and have received their laws at different times, as Rome did.  It is a great good fortune for a republic to have a legislator sufficiently wise to give her laws so regulated that, without the necessity of correcting them, they afford security to those who live under them.  Sparta observed her laws for more than eight hundred years without altering them and without experiencing a single dangerous disturbance.[3]

Here Machiavelli goes to some length to praise Sparta’s (dubious) 800 year history, but there is little mention of Athens in either The Prince (1513) or The Discourses on Livy (1517).  In The Prince Machiavelli does give a quick nod to Theseus, the mythical founder of Athens who “could never have exercised his energy [virtu] if he had not found the Athenians in confusion.”[4]  But there is no mention of Athen’s famous lawgiver Solon (circa. 600 BC), known for his “middle way” policies between the uber-wealthy and the poor.[5]  In fact Machiavelli seems to expunge Solon (and with him Aristotle) from the history books when he writes “a precise middle course cannot be maintained”.[6] Again, these thoughts against the middle - or the alleged golden mean - are later echoed by Hobbes, and Harper.

Harper, the consummate tactician who borders on being an autocrat, is steeped in quintessential Machiavellianism, wrestling with incumbent Fortune by “slicing and dicing” and giving bread away to the voters, not unlike the Romans.  Electoral success (in the light of, for example, the “Fair” Elections Act and the consequent voter suppression of non-desirables) is reduced to nasty Party science (the only science that counts in Canada these days, by the way).  And it was Machiavelli who was inspired by the ‘virtuous’ model of Sparta (vir being Latin for ‘man’, whose potential is (re)discovered in the Renaissance - meanwhile Canadians suffer under the persona-less rule of one, champion of the light-armoured vehicle).  Go figure that Canada is now largely being remodelled according to Renaissance ideas of Sparta generated from conflict-ridden Italy.

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[1] See J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition: from Leonardo to Hegel (New York: Harper, 1975), pp. 28-43.  This blog entry was inspired by Bronowski and Mazlish’s chapter on Machiavelli.  And by the “Harper Government”.  For the reference to “war psychology” see page 38.

[2] Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius in The Prince, 2^nd ed., Robert M. Adams ed. and tr. (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 97.

[3] Ibid., pp. 91,92.

[4] Machiavelli, The Prince, 2^nd. ed., Robert M. Adams ed. and tr. (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 16, 17. 

[5] Paul Cartledge, Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 52, 53. See Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, p. 37.

[6] Machiavelli, Discourses, p. 98.