Part front matter for Part IV Philosopher of War

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Car c’est véritablement donner des batailles que de tâcher à vaincre toutes les difficultés et les erreurs qui nous empêchent de parvenir à la connoissance de la vérité, et c’est en perdre une que de recevoir quelque fausse opinion touchant une matière un peu générale et importante.
—René Descartes

The language of war suffuses our speech about persuasion. We talk of deploying arguments, issuing a verbal attack, being defensive, and engaging in polemics. When such speech becomes conscious of itself, there is nothing that keeps it from being employed deliberately and consistently. The thought then arises that physical and intellectual confrontations between human beings may actually be very much like one another, notwithstanding the literally massive fact that one directly involves bodies and the other does not. It is at least clear that polemical writers, like military commanders, have the objective of destroying their enemies’ forces, that is, refuting their enemies’ fundamental contentions so as to rule where their enemies ruled before, namely, in the minds of their readers. In Machiavelli’s case, those readers are less the current than the coming generations. He has allies and rivals in this effort, and all of his operations must be conducted in awareness of differences among key groups. There are the founder-captains of the opposing understanding, be they past, present, or future; also crucial are their conscious followers at various levels of adherence, from lukewarm to hot; and then there is the vast run of men and women who may be unconcerned with the content of the specific arguments but who nonetheless accept their conclusions and hold fast to them for centuries (D 1.58.3).¹ None of this is to say, however, that Machiavelli is engaged in what we would call mere polemics, the attempt to win without respect to the merit of the arguments deployed. Far from it: he is instead counting—or, better, betting—on victory due in large part to the truth of his arguments, which will determine and, in no small part, be determined by the effect they have in the world, both in the minds of human beings and, ultimately, in how and why they go about their day-to-day, material existence.

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