Bhumics Week 8: The Pauper, Part 1
Humans, perhaps uniquely among our animal peers, have the capacity for counterfactual reasoning. An ambitious intellectual looking to worm his way into the current dispensation might whisper to himself:
If I were Machiavelli today, I would dedicate “The Prince” to Donald Trump.
How might I do it? Try as I might, I can’t better the humblebrag with which Nico starts his monograph:
Wishing myself to offer Your Magnificence some token of my devotion to you, I have not found among my belongings anything that I hold more dear or valuable than my knowledge of the conduct of great men, learned through long experience of modern affairs and continual study of ancient history: I have reflected on and examined these matters with great care, and have summarised them in a small volume, which I proffer to Your Magnificence.
Obsequiousness is easy when (all) you need a favor, but Machiavelli was also promising one:
if it is read and pondered diligently, my deep wish will be revealed, namely, that you should achieve that greatness which propitious circumstances and your fine qualities promise.
It’s a difficult needle for an intellectual to thread. Fortunately for me, I am toying with a different counterfactual:
What if Machiavelli had addressed his book to the people and not the prince?
At a different time, I might have even dared to subtitle it 'a Manual of Resistance' but that was before the Resistance was focus grouped into the junkyard of history. No embellishments - I will stick with ' The Pauper.'
Logistics
The Prince has 26 chapters in a book that’s about 80 pages long. The first chapter is a paragraph. The second chapter is two paragraphs. Just FYI, so you don’t import your ideas about chapters from textbooks you were made to read in school and college.
I am using the updated Cambridge translation of the Prince, originally translated by Russell Price and subsequently edited by Quentin Skinner. Each week I will read 3-4 chapters from Machiavelli's prints. My conversion of the Prince into the Pauper will take the form of a three-step trot:
The first step, commentary on the Prince.
Second step, introducing contemporary elements into the commentary.
Third step, use the first two steps to recast the Prince as the Pauper with Machiavelli as our guide.
Notes from Chapters
Machiavelli's first task in his book is to delineate his object of study. He starts by making a distinction between republics and principalities, principalities being those that are ruled by a prince and therefore a hereditary form of rule, while a republic is ruled by citizens, though that could easily be an oligarchy.
He says, and that's because of course he's addressing his book to a Prince in the making, Lorenzo Medici, that he doesn't care so much about republics; he cares about principalities.
I shall not discuss republics, because I have previously treated them at length. I shall consider only principalities, and shall weave together the warps mentioned above, examining how principalities can be governed and maintained.
Over the next couple of chapters, he's goes on to talk about the predicament of someone in Lorenzo Medici's position: how can someone who has newly come to power in a principality hold on to it?
I say, then, that states which are hereditary, and accustomed to the rule of those belonging to the present ruler’s family, are very much less difficult to hold than new states, because it is sufficient not to change the established order, and to deal with any untoward events that may occur; so that, if such a ruler is no more than ordinarily diligent and competent, his government will always be secure, unless some unusually strong force should remove him. And even if that happens, whenever the conqueror encounters difficulties, the former ruler can re-establish himself.
Fortunately, Lorenzo comes from a family that has a long history in Florence. What he says of the Medicis could also be true of the Trumps:
It is certainly true that, after a country that has rebelled has been reconquered a second time, it is less likely to be lost, since the ruler, because of the rebellion, will be more ruthless in consolidating his power, in punishing the guilty, unmasking suspects, and remedying weaknesses in his government.
The Contemporary: Securitization
The positive imagination of globalization, broadly construed, has (at least) three components:
Economic globalization, where there’s one world market with no tariffs etc and each nation competes in that world market based on its comparative advantages.
Political globalization, with liberal democracy playing a hegemonic role.
Cultural globalization, with media, entertainment, cuisines etc spreading from one culture to another.
Let’s call this the ‘Cosmopolitan Globe.’ As Brutus said, I am here not to praise the Cosmopolitanism Globe, but to bury it. Not because I killed it, or even wished it dead, but like many, I found it bleeding its life out on the street. Meanwhile, a different globalization, the second monster of the interregnum, was taking shape in the darkness. I call it ‘The Securitarian Globe’ - a globe driven by an emphasis on security and territory. Still a globe, BTW. We aren’t talking about isolated camps that don’t engage with one another. In the securitarian globe, security-oriented slogans about immigration, about culture, about existential concerns are going to be there in every political conversation from the school board to the UN.
Just as you can order school supplies from China with a click of a button, you might be able to order security concerns from Russia with a click of a button. This is something new, but it's there to stay.
In the rules-based international order, which didn’t last very long, there was a sort of global consensus about how to run the world with a hegemon as the first among equals, but nevertheless an orderly way of running the world, which is both peaceful and conducive to prosperity. Plus forever wars, but I digress…
The opposite of that RBIO is now under way.
Economic globalization isn't going away, and cultural globalization isn't going away either, but to assume that these will be undertaken in a rules-based international society which has agreed on a common platform, that’s an error. We are going to see planetary politics, planetary economics and planetary culture riven with conflict, but that doesn’t make them any less planetary!
That is why we need to read Machiavelli with care, because he saw a new age emerging in which conflict is endemic, and it’s the job of the prince to negotiate these conflicts and stay in power while doing so.
That’s as true of the Pauper as it is of the Prince!
As paupers, we should prepare for a conflict-ridden world. You may fight with your neighbor because of a Facebook post originating in China. More concretely, I can imagine anti-American populist politics emerging in India as a result of deportations and tariffs and other forms of American flex, and simultaneously I can also imagine copycat violence/discrimination against Muslims in India by a Hindu nationalist government that explicitly takes MAGA talking points and turns them into their own.
We cannot paper over these conflicts and sloganeer about fighting for the rights of all, or lament about ‘can’t we all get along.’ We may never get along, but we need to be able to understand how to live on earth with people who have intense differences with us without killing each other wholesale.
There’s a Machiavellian precedent - I learned from Hirschman’s classic “The Passions and the Interests,” that early supporters of Capitalism argued for self-interest as a guarantor against violence, that a nation of traders won’t kill each other or go to war against other nations of traders. Self-interest strikes me as an attractive ideology for the Machiavellian bourgeoisie in the 18th century; not quite the pauper, but not the prince either. The subtitle of Hirschman’s book is “Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph.” Now that it has triumphed, we know that self-interest doesn’t guarantee peace between nations (I am less sure about peace within nations).
What should replace ‘interest’ as the appropriate combination of reason and emotion for our times?
The Pauper’s Position
Just as Machiavelli counseled the prince on maintaining power in turbulent times, we must consider how the pauper--the common citizen--can maintain agency and security in our securitarian globe. The first lesson we can draw from these opening chapters is about understanding the nature of our position. This brings us to our first maxim for the pauper: In a world where security concerns are weaponized from above, build security from below. Consider how local mutual aid networks emerged during the global health crises, or how neighborhood WhatsApp groups in Delhi coordinated oxygen supplies when institutional systems failed. This means:
1. Maintain your hereditary advantages (community bonds, local institutions) while being flexible enough to adapt to new circumstances.
2. Study the patterns of power and resistance to understand when to bend and when to stand firm - witness how Iranian women's resistance has evolved from open protest to subtle everyday acts of defiance.
3. Develop the capacity to navigate multiple conflicts without becoming a permanent partisan in any of them
4. Create systems of mutual support that can withstand the cycles of crisis and control, including local sources of food and energy.
The pauper, unlike the prince, cannot aspire to absolute control. Our goal must be resilience--the ability to maintain essential freedoms and connections even as the ground shifts beneath our feet. We've seen this in action through decentralized protest movements that persist despite crackdowns, from Hong Kong to Latin America. In this, we might find ourselves more suited to the contemporary world than the princes who seek to rule it, for we are already practiced in the art of surviving uncertainty.
The securitarian globe operates through cycles of crisis and response, each reconquest leading to more intensive surveillance and control. Look at how digital ID systems, initially promoted for convenience, have become tools of social control in various nations, or how anti-terrorism laws are being used to suppress environmental activists. As paupers, we may not be able to prevent these cycles, but we can prepare for them. Just as a prince must be "diligent and competent" to maintain hereditary rule, we must be extraordinarily diligent in maintaining our autonomous spaces and communities. In our securitarian globe, where conflicts can be ordered with a click of a button, the pauper's primary challenge is maintaining autonomy while avoiding destruction.
We must balance multiple identities and loyalties, much like a leader managing various challenges. While traditional liberal thinking suggests we can simply embrace all our identities equally - whether national, ethnic, or racial - today's complex world demands a more active approach. We need to deliberately develop these different identities, acknowledge their conflicts, and skillfully manage the tensions between them.
The most crucial insight for the pauper comes from Machiavelli's approach to studying power itself. He offers his knowledge of "the conduct of great men, learned through long experience of modern affairs and continual study of ancient history." Our task is similar but inverted: we must study not just the conduct of the powerful, but the historical successes and failures of popular resistance and adaptation. The pauper's manual must be a guide to surviving and thriving under various forms of power, not just opposing them.