Peter Laubscher

Machiavelli's 'stato' (condition) - in Three Acts Peter Laubscher

The 'Geist' of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and still the Intellectual Industrias' darling concept, the 'new' secular 'metaphysical-ontological' idea-ist religion of World politics, has metamorphosed Machiavelli's condition of the Prince's estate into the pretentious phantom 'State', if not 'World State'. One understands why Figgis was perplexed about how 'commonwealth' became 'state'. This book offers an answer. Bureaucrats, Machiavelli's pochi, in all but name became the ruler-king's government. Intellectuals had to find a term to replace 'king'. 'Government' had yet to assume prominence. The past participle, shared by Italian verbs essere and stare, i.e. stato (been, condition) fitted the bill. Especially since Machiavelli and Guicciardini in the early fifteen hundreds had used it with reference to the ruler's estate. By the closing years of that century Botero, a failed intellect, in an effort to ingratiate himself with the family of Cardinal Borromeo latched on to the by now proscribed works of Machiavelli, although the Vatican had published them posthumously. He had the good fortune to come up with the aperçu 'Ragion di Stato' to characterise Machiavelli's Prince as unchristian and immoral which pleased his Vatican-connections, by largely copying the genius's Prince coming to similar conclusions. Gradually, since the late eighteenth century bureaucrats imperceptibly eased into the seat then in the process of being vacated by (the divine right of) kings to rule as absolute monarchs. The pochi became and are now absolute. The 'deep state' was born. 'The State' gradually turned into representative democracy's ilLegitimate, unaccountable, absolute bureaucratic phantom. Ironically, the fight against the misunderstood evil Machiavelli's 'stato' giving rise to the Hitlerian 'exception' has created virtue-signalling bureaucrat monsters who embrace the 'State' to hide with immunity-impunity behind/under not Botero's Ragion di Stato, but what this book terms 'il velo di Stato', 'the veil of State', 'le voile d'État', 'der Staatsschleier'; perfect cover for the deep state to do as its members please. This links with the overarching hypothesis advanced in the companion volume - Obligationrights, demandrights and zenocracy - why obligations precede and found rights and why the notion that rights found obligations - demandrights - are a nonsense fatal to peaceful politics as today is experienced on America's inner-city streets.