i must write this down before i forget
I went to a stunning lecture today -- perhaps the most coruscant and lucid I've ever attended -- on Machiavelli, delivered sans notes and with an enviable air of easy erudition by the inimitable Quentin Skinner. never mind that it was at girton, an isolated little pocket of the university squirrelled away about four (thousand) miles northwest out of the main university area. it was worth braving the bone-shattering cold for. and the other forty-odd people in the room thought so too; and in fact, sacrificed halloween parties, dinners, drinks at the pub and £10 for the taxi fare out to girton to watch this thin, animated man deliver his glittering lecture -- all those precise, measured words illuminating Machiavelli and Il Principe in 45 fleeting minutes like no edition of Cliffnotes will do. I want to write the whole lecture down, but not here. here I'll transcribe (from memory, so it's slightly inexact) Professor Skinner's response to a question from the floor, because it made the room laugh:
q: could you, for a moment, assume machiavelli's voice and tell us what he would have to say about the US and british administration and war today?
a: hmm. pause. hmmm. i think he would say that it wasn't necessitato. yes, i think so; the war that the americans and the british have been waging hasn't been necessary, it wasn't an immediate threat. machiavelli has always been deeply against the expense of men and weapons...very much against it, and especially when there's no immediate threat to the prince's state. if it isn't necessitato -- necessary -- to deploy these men and weapons, and the people are the ones paying for it, then the ruler runs a real risk of being hated. and if the people stop fearing the prince and start hating him, then he will lose his status and his power. for machiavelli that's the great political trick -- to be feared without being hated, or at any rate to be feared so much that it doesn't matter if you're hated. machiavelli also thought that there's no long war worth fighting; the best battles are the briefest ones. the romans had a massive, simply massive army, to the effect that their wars simply crushed the enemy, and machiavelli agreed very much with that: if you get into a battle and you find yourself bogged down, don't overstretch your resources, your communications -- just get out.
so i think machiavelli would have quite a lot to say to the british and US administrations about the war; i think he would say, "you shouldn't have done it", and "stop at once".
there's nothing that demonstrates true knowledge of a subject so immediately than the ability to say "he would have said" -- and be absolutely right. (though I wonder if Professor Skinner is also anti-war -- I assume so, but it would be nice to know that he wasn't, which would fully ease my microscopic skepticism that he might be putting words in Machiavelli's mouth).
incidentally, while on my way to the abovementioned lecture, who should roll past me outside trinity college but Stephen Hawking? arguably the greatest physics thinker alive today was wheeled down King's Parade by a witch and a dubious-looking Frankenstein lookalike (presumably because it's Halloween), while I stopped dead in my tracks and gawked, like the intellectual groupie I am, until he disappeared down the cobbled pathway out of sight. it's at moments like these -- the stellar lecture, or Stephen Hawking going to a halloween party -- that I'm like, yep, this is cambridge, and I love it.
off to london for a while.