Philosophy & The Crown

Vincent Di Norcia on monarchy and stability.

- Vincent Di Norcia

Machiavelli is a political philosopher with a sulfer-ous reputation. His comment above, though, reflected his bitter personal experience of war-ring Italian city states. He wrote The Prince after his decades of dedicated and skillful public service to the Flo-rentine Republic had been rewarded with torture and exile. Perhaps his implicit approval of the relatively stable hereditary monarchies was not surprising. Nor was René Descartes' sup-port for monarchy, for, as he wrote, his “whole aim was to find security”, and he “prized tranquility over everything” (Discourse p.28; p.54). So he saw support for the legitimate authority of his King as a moral choice. His ‘first moral maxim’ echoed Michel de Montaigne’s support for Henry II in back 1574, when civil war had broken out in France after the 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots by Catholics. While Montaigne complained that “the moral laws concern-ing the duty of each man in himself are hard to frame”, he com-bined private duty with public reason, including submission to public authority, to write: “It is in justice that kingly virtue mainly consists” (Essays, 1580, p.336). Descartes, who knew Montaigne’s Essays, was certainly influenced by the views of his great predecessor.