Foresight and Perspective

Another point to be decided and developed is that of the "double perspective" in political action and state life. There are various levels in which the double perspective can be presented, from the most elementary to the most complex, but they can be reduced theoretically to two fundamental levels, corresponding to the double nature of the Machiavellian Centaur, savage and human, force and consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilisation, the individual stage and the universal stage ("Church" and "State"), agitation and propaganda, tactics and strategy, etc. Some people have reduced the theory of the "double perspective" to something paltry and banal, that is, to nothing but two forms of "immediacy" which follow each other mechanically in time with greater or less "proximity". But it can happen that the more the first "perspective" is "very immediate", very elementary, the more "distant" must be the second (not in time, but as a dialectical relationship), the more complex, elevated; in other words it may happen, as in human life, that the more an individual is constrained to defend his own immediate physical existence, the more he sustains and sees himself from the point of view of all the complex and most elevated values of civilisation and humanity.

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It is certain that to foresee means only to see well the present and the past as movement: to see well, i.e. to identify with exactness the fundamental and permanent elements of the process. But it is absurd to think of a purely "objective" foresight. The person who has foresight in reality has a "programme" that he wants to see triumph, and foresight is precisely an element of this triumph. This only means that foresight must always be either arbitrary and gratuitous or purely tendentious. Moreover, once can say that only to the extent to which the objective aspect of foresight is connected with a programme, does this aspect acquire objectivity: (1) because only passion sharpens the intellect and co-operates in making intuition clearer; (2) because since reality is the result of the application of human will to the society of things (of the worker to the machine), to put aside every voluntary element and calculate only the intervention of other wills as an objective element in the general game is to mutilate reality itself. Only those who strongly want to do it identify the necessary elements for the realisation of their will.

Therefore, to hold that one particular conception of the world and of life has in itself a superior capacity for foresight is a mistake of the crusdest fatuity and superficiality. Certainly a conception of the world is implicit in all foresight and therefore whether this is a disconnected series of arbitrary acts of thought or a rigorous and coherent vision is not without importance, but it acquires importance precisely in the living brain of the person who makes the prophesy and brings it to life with his own strong will. We see this from the prophesies made by so-called "dispassionate" people: they abound in indolence, minute subtleties, conjectural elegances. The existence of a programme to be realised by the "foreseeer" is enough for him to reach the essentials, those elements which, being "organisable", susceptible to be directed or redirected, are in reality alone foreseeable. This conflicts with the common way of considering the problem. It is generally thought that every act of foresight presupposes the determination of regular laws of the same type as the laws of the natural sciences. But just as these laws do not exist in the absolute or mechanical sense which is supposed, so also this view takes no account of the other wills and their application is not "foreseen". Because of this, constructions are made on an arbitrary hypothesis and not on reality.

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"Too much" (and therefore superficial and mechanical) political realism, often leads to the assertion that the man of State must work only within the sphere of "effective reality", not interest himself in "what should be", but only in "what is". This would mean that the man of State must have no perspectives longer than his own nose. This error has led Paolo Treves to see in Guicciardini and not in Machiavelli the "true politician".

It is necessary to distinguish between the scientist of politics and the active politician, as well as between the "diplomat" and the "politician". The diplomat can only move within effective reality, since his specific activity is not that of looking for new equilibriums, but of conserving an existing equilibrium within a certain judicial framework. Thus also the scientist must only move inside effective reality in so far as he is merely a scientist. But Machiavelli is not merely a scientist; he is a partisan, with mighty passions, an active politician, who wants to create new relations of forces and because of this cannot help concerning himself with "what should be", though certainly not in the moralistic sense. The question is not therefore to be put in these terms, it is more complex: the point is, in other words, to see whether "what should be" is an arbitrary or necessary act, concrete will or a hopeless wish, a desire, a yearning for the stars. The active politician is a creator, an awakerer, but he neither creates from nothing nor moves in the turbid void of his own desires and dreams. He bases himself on effective reality, but what is this effective reality? Is it something static and immobile or is it not rather a relationship of forces in continuous movement and change of equilibrium? To apply the will to the creation of a new balance of the really existing and operating forces, basing oneself on that particular force which one considers progressive, giving it the means to triumph, is still to move within the sphere of effective reality, but in order to dominate and overcome it (or contribute to this). "What should be" is therefore concrete, and is moreover the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality; it is the only active history and philosophy, the only politics.

The Savonarola-Machiavelli opposition is not an opposition between what is and what should be (the whole of Russo's paragraph on this point is simply word-show) but between two should-be's, the abstract and cloudy one of Savonarola and the realistic one of Machiavelli, realistic even if it did not become immediate reality, since one cannot expect one individual or one book to change reality but only to interpret it and indicate the possible lines of action. Machiavelli's limits and narrowness consist only in his having been a "private person", a writer, and not the head of a State or an army, who is still a single person but who has at his disposal the forces of the State or an army and not only armies of words. One cannot therefore say that Machiavelli was also an "unarmed prophet": this would be to belittle the spirit. Machiavelli never says that he is thinking of changing, or that he has set himself to change, reality, but only that he is showing concretely how the historical forces ought to have worked in order to be effective.