Explain how Machiavelli’s application of empirical method to human affairs marks an important stage in the evolution of political science. (2014, 20 Marks)
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was the first modern thinker to build a theory of politics from how rulers and peoples actually behave rather than from how they ought to. Grounding The Prince (written 1513, published 1532) and the Discourses on Livy (1531) in history and observation, he moved political inquiry out of moral theology — a founding real, though partial.
The Tradition He Left Behind
Plato‘s philosopher-king reasons downward from the Form of the Good; the medieval mirror-for-princes literature, shaped by St. Thomas Aquinas, judged rulers by Christian virtues and natural law. Politics was a branch of ethics and theology — normative in its questions, deductive in its method.
Elements of His Empirical Method
- Effectual truth over imagination. Chapter XV of The Prince prefers “the real truth of the matter” to imagined republics: a ruler who abandons what is done for what ought to be done secures his ruin. Describing conduct is separated from judging it — the fact–value distinction in embryo.
- History as a laboratory. The dedication rests on “long experience” of present affairs and “continual study of antiquity”. The Discourses treat Roman practice as experiments with known results and reason by paired comparison — Rome against Sparta and Venice (I.5–6), Scipio Africanus against Hannibal (III.21).
- Observation as evidence. Fourteen years of Florentine diplomacy (1498–1512) supplied first-hand data, set on a par with Livy.
- Human nature read from behaviour. Men are “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous” (Chapter XVII). So the ruler never touches subjects’ property — they forget a father’s death sooner than a lost patrimony — lets them prosper, and makes them feel their security depends on him alone.
- The constancy postulate. Because passions are uniform across ages, the past can instruct the present.
- Conditional generalisation and autonomy. Maxims hold under stated circumstances — cruelty “well used” is swift and done once (Chapter VIII) — and success in keeping the stato becomes politics’ own criterion.
Why This Marks a Stage
- The shift from ought to is, and from deduction to induction, reorients the subject; Francis Bacon (The Advancement of Learning, 1605) owned the debt to those “that write what men do, and not what they ought to do”.
- Both the historical approach (explaining institutions through the past) and the behavioural approach (explaining politics through observed conduct) have an ancestor here.
- A lineage follows: Thomas Hobbes‘s science of the passions; Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu‘s comparative The Spirit of the Laws (1748); Max Weber‘s value-free inquiry; the behaviouralism of Charles E. Merriam and David Easton; Hans J. Morgenthau‘s realism. Ernst Cassirer likened his method to Galileo’s.
- Indian echo: Kautilya‘s Arthashastra grounded statecraft in spies’ reports centuries earlier; Rajni Kothari‘s Politics in India (1970) applies the same descriptive temper.
Limits of the Claim
- Not the first empiricist: Aristotle had studied 158 constitutions; Machiavelli revived observation more than invented it.
- George H. Sabine objects that history illustrates conclusions already reached; cases are chosen because they fit, without counting or controls, and the result is an art of government, not a theory of the state.
- The constancy postulate is fragile — Karl Marx saw human nature as “the ensemble of the social relations” (Theses on Feuerbach, 1845).
- Not value-free: stability, glory and Italian unity (Chapter XXVI) steer the analysis; Leo Strauss reads a new morality beneath the realism.
Conclusion
Machiavelli did not make politics a science; he made one conceivable by insisting that political conduct be described before it is judged. That turn from the ideal to the actual is the stage he marks — statistics, surveys and systems theory later supplied the rigour his method implied but lacked.