The Virtue of Necessity
February 20th, 2008by Jesse Barnum
I recently realized a misconception that Americans often have regarding the values of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I was studying The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli, and discovered a discontinuity between what Machiavelli taught and what people commonly believe about their American Ideals.
Many people believe that government exists so that the people under that government can experience and seek the aforementioned values, at least, this is the ideal. The foundation for many of the principles laid out in the American constitution can be readily identified in the teachings of Machiavelli. Machiavelli asserted that in establishing governments, rulers should seek the welfare of the common people and not the wealthy few , because the desires of the common people are better than those of the wealthy. The wealthy desire to oppress, but the common people desire only not to be oppressed. Thus, liberty takes on an important role in the establishment of government, because by this the rulers satisfy the people, establishing peace, stability, and control.
However, Machiavelli was not teaching that liberty was something to be pursued because it was good; rather, he taught that liberty was merely a means and not an end. In fact, the very essence of Machiavelli’s teachings is that people should not act and think in terms of what is good and evil, but they should act and think only in terms of what is necessary and unnecessary. It is upon this teaching that much of the foundation of western thought and politics was established.
The misconception I noted was this; Americans often conceive of liberty and freedom as being good, and that these should be protected and valued because they are good. However, the foundation for our liberty and freedom as seen in Machiavelli denies such lofty sentiments. Liberty and freedom are necessities in political life, and are only good and virtuous in so far as they are necessary.
If someone wants to herald Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as truly good things, and not as mere matters of necessity, then that person needs to discover upon what sort of foundation they can do so. He or she cannot look to the American constitution as the foundation, because the constitution is founded upon the principle that what is necessary is virtuous. The kind of foundation necessary for this must assert that there exists something that is good simply because it is good.