Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer

Ada Palmer · 2h 08m · youtube.com ↗

26 korrents from this recording

Ada Palmer did not write this page.

Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.

0:00:52 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
A government only has legitimacy through long continuity, and once that thread is cut one regime change reliably becomes five.

Their wordsWhen you break that, when you overthrow the ruler, when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a new thing, it doesn't have that same staying power. And so, it's very common when there's one regime change for there to then be five regime changes rapid-fire over and over.

Interesting
3 min later
0:03:25 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The papacy made Italy uniquely unstable in Europe, because each new pope inherited a precedent that he could overthrow any government he liked.

Their wordsAnd soon we have a precedent that every new pope feels he has the authority to knock down every pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope still inherits the idea that the pope is going to overthrow and replace governments. And this creates a unique instability within Italy that no other part of Europe is subject to

Interesting
11 min later
0:14:54 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The moral Machiavelli draws from the Borgias is that we should imitate them: they fell to fortune, not to their choices.

Their wordsThey fell because half of what happens in the world is never in our control. And you can do everything right and it's out of your control, but we have to evaluate what would have happened and therefore we should imitate them, because everything they did was right.

Interesting
2 min later
0:17:04 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Whether breaking your word destroys you depends on the shape of your power: Savonarola’s rested on never erring, so his contradictions ruined him.

Their wordsAnd so his power base was fragile vis-a-vis untruth. And for him because of the specific shape of his power and then the specific way he handled his contradictions, that did hurt him.

Interesting
3 min later
0:20:02 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Machiavelli is the first person in the European tradition to suggest that two political parties could exist in one state at once and be viable.

Their wordsMachiavelli is the first person that we have ever in the European tradition to suggest that it could be viable for there to be more than one political party in a state at the same time.

Interesting
8 min later
0:27:59 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
By Machiavelli's day the Guelph and Ghibelline split had no doctrinal content left in it: it meant only that those people murdered Uncle Tibalt.

Their wordsThese are the two factions for which these parties fought originally. 300 years ago, these days what these factions actually mean is those jerks murdered Uncle Tibalt and we will never forgive them.

Interesting
6 min later
0:33:42 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Corrupting the church was a prisoner's dilemma: a duke who declined to bribe the pope while his enemies bribed him was simply beaten.

Their wordsIt even becomes a kind of a prisoner's dilemma system because if you're the duke and you don't manipulate the papacy, if you don't bribe the pope, if you don't work hard to get your brother to be bishop, and your enemies do, you're screwed.

Interesting
2 min later
0:35:29 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Machiavelli held that every institution is gradually corrupted and must be reformed back to its foundations or collapse under the weight of that corruption.

Their wordsAll institutions are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed and returned to their foundations, or they will collapse under the weight of their corruption.

Interesting
1 min later
0:36:23 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Patronage in Renaissance Italy was not merely more prominent than in our world — it was the fundamental glue of the society rather than one glue among several.

Their wordsWell, it's it's not that it was just more prominent, but it was the fundamental glue of the society as opposed to one of several glues of the society.

Interesting
1 min later
0:37:37 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Romans rioted to demand more nepotism from their pope, because only a man's own son could be trusted not to turn the army against him.

Their wordsTherefore, by popular demand, the people want more nepotism because the system depends on it.

Interesting
2 min later
0:39:16 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Medieval law codes prescribed death for almost everything and almost never delivered it, and the reason is patronage rather than mercy.

Their wordsAnd then you look at the actual trial records, and maybe one in a hundred convictions for that crime actually ends in a capital sentence. And almost all of the other ones end in a fine or a public flogging, but not in the sentence that's on the books.

Interesting
2 min later
0:41:19 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Before the Enlightenment the point of a trial was not proportional justice but the interior spiritual correction of the sinner's soul.

Their wordsThe ideal of this period's justice which is much more shaped by Christianity is the purpose of the trial is the spiritual interior correction of the soul of the sinner.

Interesting
3 min later
0:44:13 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Giordano Bruno went to the stake because he had lost his patron, not because his thought had finally grown too radical.

Their wordsAnd the reason that trial goes all the way to a capital sentence is that he doesn't have a patron. He's the 99th case that time.

Interesting
7 min later
0:51:02 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Cesare Borgia's conquered cities loved him because an outsider with no local faction gave them the first neutral justice they had seen in generations.

Their wordsAnd everyone says, "Why are they liking this man? He is a cruel murdering tyrant." And the answer is for the first time in generations, they have had something close to fair justice.

Interesting
3 min later
0:54:07 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
For Machiavelli a man who can be killed on somebody's word is a slave, and a man protected by a system — however unfair that system is — is free.

Their wordsIf there is a system, then you have liberty. That system may be unfair. It may be biased. It may be, in Machiavelli's case, the very system that tortured and exiled him.

Interesting
6 min later
0:59:49 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Renaissance art was not made out of a surplus left over from war — it was diplomacy, and diplomacy was cheaper than the armies Florence could never afford.

Their wordsThey're using the art to do diplomacy and so in one sense if you're not doing the art you would have to spend more on the war. It's not that the art is being made from a surplus of the war.

Interesting
2 min later
1:01:32 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The Renaissance did not put human potential in the future: backwards was forwards, and the highest thing people could imagine being was Rome again.

Their wordsthis is a period in which backwards is forwards, which is to say this is not a period that like us thinks of the future as where potential is and humanity might get better and better over time. The potential of humanity is recapturing Rome.

Interesting
10 min later
1:11:30 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Renaissance Christianity assumed that nobody was ever pure — everybody sins constantly, repents, and sins again — which is why its hypocrisy looks so strange to us.

Their wordsThe assumption is everybody sins all the time. There is no such thing as purity. Everybody sins every 5 minutes.

Interesting
10 min later
1:21:01 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The word Machiavellian means self-serving, and Machiavelli himself was one of the most selfless men in recorded history.

Their wordsThis is why it's so weirdly ironic to me that the reputation, the word Machiavellian, right, means self-serving. When Machiavelli himself is one of the most selfless men I've ever read about in the history of the earth.

Interesting
7 min later
1:28:28 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
A book of radically unusual ideas drifts unread for centuries until a decade's new questions happen to be answered inside it, and then everyone reads it at once.

Their wordsIt is often the case that a work which contains radically unusual ideas will drift along being not particularly zoomed in on by society and not widely read until it hits a moment that the new questions being asked in that century or that decade are answered by something in that text.

Interesting
2 min later
1:30:27 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Every new information technology is followed by a wave of censorship in which a great many books are banned at once.

Their wordsmini thesis, every time there's a new information technology, there's a subsequent wave of censorship to try to censor the new technology and a bajillion books get banned all at once.

Interesting
3 min later
1:33:07 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Machiavelli's first surge in readership came from people trying to refute Hobbes, not from anybody who agreed with him.

Their wordsAnd so Machiavelli is suddenly useful not to people who sympathize with him but to people who see him as an enemy.

Interesting
16 min later
1:49:23 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The Renaissance is not two hundred years of people being wrong about Plato; it is two hundred years of original thought using the ancients as a trellis.

Their wordsWhat it is is 200 years of original thought using the ancients as the trellis up which the rose climbs in order to bloom.

Interesting
4 min later
1:53:26 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
Copyright was born out of the Inquisition: the record of having passed censorship was the first document proving an exclusive right to print.

Their wordsand you may now use the actual Inquisition record of you having gone through censorship as the document to prove that you and only you have the right to print the book and therefore you can sue people for plagiarizing it or printing an unauthorized edition. And so, the very first version of copyright is the Inquisition.

Interesting
3 min later
1:56:16 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The Inquisition's image as one centralised power is its own propaganda: it was scattered isolated men who could act only as far as a local government would fund them.

Their wordsThe Inquisition, the Vatican, it controls everything, which is completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated towns and it takes weeks or months to even communicate with the Vatican and they're making their own decisions.

Interesting
7 min later
2:03:28 · watch on youtube.com↗

Our reading
The Prince is not a manual for getting ahead: it is a manual for how a government keeps power and protects the lives of its people.

Their wordsIt shouldn't It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.

Interesting