Only Violence Can Defend Freedom | Machiavelli Explained

• Machiavelli’s central political insight, as interpreted by Leo Strauss, is that principles must be violated in order to be actualized — not as hypocrisy, but as necessity. This lecture uses America’s founding and development to illustrate how each of our deepest modern values — equality, freedom, and rule of law — requires its opposite to be established and sustained.
  • The modern right whitewashes founding violence; the left denounces it as proof of moral failure. For Machiavelli, both are deluded because neither acknowledges the real cost of building and maintaining a free society.
  • Machiavelli is not a mere advisor to thugs — he genuinely values equality, freedom, and rule of law. His challenge is that achieving these values demands dirty deeds, and peaceful times make people forget this, producing weak leaders.

Equality Needs Great Men

• Machiavelli is a radical egalitarian, but for unconventional reasons. He breaks from classical political theory (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine) by arguing that the people have good political judgment — not despite their vulgarity, but because of it.

  • The people judge by outcomes, not intentions; by appearance, not essence. They care about what a leader has actually accomplished, not about noble motives or philosophical sophistication. This vulgarity is better suited to political judgment than the “wisdom” of elites, which tends to honor noble losers and martyrs.
  • The people are also less biased than the elites because they are impoverished, numerous, and sluggish. They have no entrenched interests to corrupt their judgment. Elites, by contrast, have so many competing self-interests that even their superior raw judgment becomes unreliable.
  • The people are especially good at maintenance rather than innovation, and at judging particularities rather than generalities. A vivid example from the Second Punic War: when the people of Capua wanted to kill all the senators after a Roman defeat, a magistrate proposed they replace each senator with one of their own. When forced to name specific plebeians, the crowd realized none were qualified — and not a single senator was harmed.
    • This worked only because institutional conditions existed: a state of necessity (war at the doorstep), trusted public channels of communication, and a magistrate who framed the choice in concrete, particular terms rather than abstract questions of justice.

• Machiavelli deeply distrusts the aristocratic class — not the singular ruler, but the oligarchic elite defined by inherited wealth and leisure.

  • Hierarchical societies ignore great talent from lower classes. Machiavelli speaks from personal experience: his militia victory at Pisa was credited to elites who had opposed it; he was vetoed as ambassador to the German emperor in favor of someone “of better birth.”
  • He particularly hates landed gentry who live off generational inheritance. He prefers Venice’s commercial nobility, which is more fluid. Wealth corrupts in two ways: it replaces virtue as what people care about, and it removes the necessity that sharpens judgment.
  • His solution is not to make everyone wealthy but to keep the private poor and the public rich — meaning a strong military. Cincinnatus, the Roman dictator who was farming two and a half acres when called to lead, then returned to his farm after victory, is the ideal. Austerity channels ambition toward martial glory rather than luxury.

• Yet the people cannot govern themselves. Their very qualities — conservatism, sluggishness, decentralized wisdom — make them incapable of innovation and founding.

  • Someone must shape the mud into bricks. The people need a singular leader to break down complex political situations into digestible choices, to establish laws, and to found or refound the state in moments of crisis.
  • “The one founds, the many maintain.” Romulus had to kill Remus — even two is too much to found. But after founding, Romulus set up a senate to share power, because the many maintain what the one has created.
  • This pattern holds in modern startups: the fastest-growing companies (Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, OpenAI) all have a single dominant founder. Co-equal leadership doesn’t work.

Freedom Needs Class Conflict

• Machiavelli’s second major innovation: freedom requires conflict, specifically institutionalized class conflict. Classical theory saw disunion as harmful faction; Machiavelli sees it as productive. “All the laws that are made in favor of freedom arise from their disunion.”

  • The early Roman Republic’s tumults — riots, secessions, shouting matches — between patricians and plebeians were the mechanism that kept Rome free. The greatest achievement was the institutionalization of this conflict through the creation of the tribunes.
    • When the plebeians seceded en masse to the Sacred Mount, threatening to build a second city, the elites relented and created the tribunes — plebeian-only officials with veto power and sacrosanct persons. This did not resolve class conflict but gave it a permanent, legitimate channel.
    • Machiavelli’s ideal is a “Russian nesting doll” state: a patrician state and a plebeian state operating semi-autonomously within one republic, with class-specific institutions.

• Modern America has moved in the wrong direction by making all offices open to everyone and elected by everyone.

  • When the U.S. Senate was originally chosen by state legislatures, the Gilded Age saw blatant corruption — offices being bought. The 17th Amendment made senators directly elected by the people, hoping to reduce corruption. Instead, wealth now dominates through super PACs, donors, think tanks, lobbyists, and media campaigns.
  • Machiavelli scholar John McCormick proposes the opposite: a wealth floor for the Senate and presidency (only the wealthy can vote for or hold those offices) and a wealth ceiling for the House (only the poor can vote for or hold those offices). This would make battle lines clear and force the people to fight for their own interests.
  • Any institution not directly oriented against wealth will be hijacked by it. Identity politics is a case study: after Occupy Wall Street in 2008, progressive energy was channeled away from class conflict toward race and gender, allowing wealth to expand unchecked. By the late 2010s, capital itself became “woke,” with billionaires repositioning themselves as allies of the people.

• Class conflict must be class-based, not party-based. The Roman Republic died when conflict shifted from plebs versus patricians to private feuds between powerful individuals (Caesar, Pompey) who happened to align with class factions but were themselves elites.

  • Machiavelli arms everyone against everyone — advising the people how to scare the elites and the elites how to trick the people — because ambition checking ambition is the mechanism of freedom. This is the origin of that idea later taken up by the American founders.

Law Requires Violence

• Rule of law is paramount for Machiavelli, but it is sustained not by law itself but by violent spectacle. The story of Coriolanus illustrates the distinction he draws between accusations (legal, public) and calumnies (private, violent).

  • Coriolanus, a patrician who tried to starve the plebeians into abolishing the tribunes, was charged and convicted through a public trial. Had the mob simply torn him apart, his friends would have retaliated with their own violence, starting a civil war. The legal process gave the punishment finality and prevented escalation.
  • Machiavelli goes further: even extraordinary actions should be done legally where possible. Rome’s dictatorship was a legal outlet for temporarily holding tyrannical power. “If a citizen is crushed ordinarily, there follows little or no disorder in the republic” — a legal wrong is better than a private right.

• Punishment is not about desert or rehabilitation but about effect: catharsis for the people, fear for the ambitious, and awe for the legal order.

  • “All the deserving need to be punished. Not all who are punished need to be deserving.” What matters is that punishment is excessive and notable — a spectacle that renews the legitimacy of the legal order. Machiavelli notes that every time France killed one of her kings, the legal order was renewed.
  • One spectacle every ten years keeps the republic from becoming corrupt. Without periodic renewal, so many delinquents accumulate that punishment becomes impossible without danger.

• In extraordinary cases — when a state is thoroughly corrupt — founding requires extreme violence. The most infamous example is Cesare Borgia in the Romagna.

  • Borgia installed Ramiro, a ruthless minister, to clean up the lawless region through unrestrained brutality. Once order was restored and civic institutions established, Borgia had Ramiro chopped in half and displayed in the central plaza with the butcher’s block and knife. “The ferocity of this spectacle left the people at once satisfied and stupefied.”
  • Corrupt people cannot be reasoned with — they must be shocked and awed. But the founder must then make clear that this extrajudicial violence is not a precedent for others to imitate.

Conclusion: The Extraordinary Is the Essence of Politics

• The lecturer’s personal response to Machiavelli is the opposite of what Machiavelli intended: rather than being inspired to imitate ruthless founders, he is turned off from political life entirely.

  • Machiavelli’s brilliance is in showing that the ordinary is constitutively dependent on the extraordinary. Even in ordinary times, freedom requires latent class conflict, equality requires great men, and law requires the threat of violent spectacle. The extraordinary is not an exception — it is the essence of politics.
  • “You live free because your ancestors were ruthless. If you want to keep living free, you also got to be ruthless.” Studying one case of Romulus killing Remus tells you more about the nature of founding than studying all the org charts in the S&P 500 combined.

• Machiavelli’s method also laid the groundwork for modern science. His concept of “effectual truth” — truth in the deed, the outcome, the measurable fact — flipped the classical understanding of truth as essence or form.

  • Just as experiments put nature under stress to reveal its hidden truths, extraordinary political moments reveal the truths of human nature that are hidden in ordinary times. Andrew Jackson tells you more about what America is than a Beverly Hills mom driving to Pilates.
  • The same mastery that modern science achieved over the natural world by embracing the vulgar and the extraordinary awaits the prince willing to apply these methods to the social world.