This chapter takes up the purest way of winning a new state. Not another’s army, not fortune.
His own ability and his own weapons. Machiavelli ranks this kind as the new prince easiest to govern.
The Work of Building a New Order
Machiavelli gives Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus as examples.
Each had to build an order that had never existed before. Nothing, he says, is as dangerous or as uncertain of success as this.
The reason lies in how people react. Everyone who profited under the old order becomes an enemy. There are people who would profit under the new one, but they help only half-heartedly until they are sure it will hold. Law and experience still favour the old order’s side, so caution is only natural.
Nothing Lasts Without Force
So this kind of work succeeds only where it can be forced through by strength, Machiavelli concludes.
You can persuade with words. But words alone cannot hold people in line for good. Once the early heat cools, or once the other side begins to move, an order resting on words alone has no way to hold.
Di qui nacque che tutti li Profeti armati vinsono, e li disarmati rovinarono. (Chapter 6)
Savonarola’s Short Success
Machiavelli gives an example from his own time. The Florentine preacher Savonarola.
He tried to build a new order founded on morals and faith. For a while the people of Florence followed his word. But he had no armed force to protect that order.
The moment people stopped believing him, nothing stood in the way. The new order fell as fast as it had risen.
Today, Pushing Through on Words Alone
There are times you try to bring a new way into an organisation.
Those who profited under the old way oppose it from the start. Those who would profit under the new one do not step forward actively either, not until the outcome is certain. There is no reason to take on risk without conviction.
A change that relies only on the belief that it is right, with no power to carry it through that gap in time, shakes easily at its first crisis.
Machiavelli’s conclusion is cold. Being right is not enough on its own. The force to protect that rightness has to stand alongside it.
So it is worth asking. In the change I am pushing for now, is there something that will hold the words up when they start to waver?