This lecture explores Machiavelli’s argument in The Prince and Discourses on Livy that conquest is spiritually and politically necessary for a healthy state, contrasting expansionary republics like Rome and America with stable ones like Sparta and Switzerland, detailing the Roman mode of conquest through fraud and integration, and concluding with a critique of how to adapt these insights to a nuclear, technological age where classical geopolitical conquest is impossible.
Why Conquest: Internal Spiritual Health
Peace and luxury breed moral decadence; danger and necessity are the cure.
Without necessity, people become “effeminate” — soft, incompetent, and self-righteous, mistaking weakness for humanity and humility.
Professions of goodness untethered from power signal decay; the decadent believe goodness stands alone, while the realistic know good must be protected by power.
Example: Chicago’s free speech culture stems from surrounding violence forcing sobriety; defund-the-police ideas collapse when physical danger is immediate.
Example: Tolkien’s Gandalf (“You shall not pass”) wields power to defend good; modern Gandalf (“I am good”) reflects a generation that thinks moral declaration suffices.
Example: Early-stage startups develop meritocratic, ruthless cultures because economic necessity compels virtuous action; stability brings bloat and diversity-hiring luxuries.
Necessity compels virtuous action — circumstances that limit vision to only effective, ordering acts (Machiavellian virtù).
Wise rulers inject artificial necessity (harsh laws, burned boats, aggressive growth) when natural necessity fades, as Sparta did in fertile land.
Two diseases of stability: division (internal fighting over a fixed pie) and effeminacy (moralizing weakness).
Conquest injects necessity, purging both diseases and making the state’s inner life healthy.
Why Conquest: External Competition
The choice between stability and expansion is a false dichotomy; human affairs are always in motion — the opposite of conquering is not stability but being conquered.
Stable powers are more likely to lose conflicts; fortune favors the expanding.
Even if a stable power wins, it ruins itself: Sparta’s victory over Athens forced it into empire, corrupting its austerity and draining resources with garrisons.
A state ordered for stability cannot manage expansion; its institutions, mores, and habits are incompatible with ruling diverse subjects.
America absorbs diversity, manages territories, extracts resources — it would not have to change its nature to rule; Switzerland would crumble.
Machiavelli sides with expansion because it puts the state in the driver’s seat: you decide when to war; stable powers are wared upon.
Mitigations exist (Sparta’s harsh laws, limited leagues), but the fundamental asymmetry remains.
Why Conquest: Failure in Success
A republic ordered for self-preservation that is forced to expand loses its foundations and comes to ruin sooner.
Sparta’s Peloponnesian League worked defensively; victory over Athens brought wealth, garrisons, and corruption — the very success destroyed it.
Policies good for stability are fatal for expansion and vice versa; a family business cannot grow like a startup.
Winning conflicts is a great danger for stable powers; they lack the demographic, institutional, and cultural capacity to integrate conquests.
How to Conquer: Three Modes
Machiavelli identifies three modes: Tuscan (leagues of equals), Spartan (direct subjects), Roman (junior partners → subjects).
The Roman mode is superior; it combines the ease of the Tuscan start with the power of the Spartan end, using fraud as its key art.
How to Conquer: Tuscan League Mode
Leagues invite states as equal partners; rulers sit on a committee, interests barely injured, acquisition easy and non-violent.
Limitation: leagues lack offensive impulse; each ruler risks men for 1/16th of the spoils — committees maintain, they do not create.
Leagues expand defensively until safe, then turn mercenary or commercial (like Switzerland); they choose stability with its attendant decay.
The UN exemplifies league incentives: it only ever urges restraint, never impetuous conquest.
How to Conquer: Spartan Subject Mode
Direct subjugation harms everyone’s interests; easiest if the target is a principality sharing your culture (kill the ruler and rivals).
If the target is a free republic with foreign customs, the only secure possession is ruin — destroy or disperse the people, or they will rebel in liberty’s name.
The Prince is bloody because it advises subjugating new states; this mode drains resources, requires permanent garrisons, and breeds generals with private loyalties stronger than the state.
Brutal wars create necessity for the enemy (they fight to the death) and drain the conqueror; incompatible with infinite expansion.
How to Conquer: Roman Fraud
Rome began with the Tuscan mode but made partners junior — they kept laws and elites but followed Rome’s lead in war.
Junior partners conquered further nations (Spartan mode) at their own cost; subjects were loyal to Rome (Roman banner, Roman governors).
Once Rome had enough power, it betrayed its junior partners and made them subjects too.
“Force alone is never enough; fraud alone is quite enough” — fraud is more humane and efficient than force.
Chapter title: “To use fraud in managing war is a glorious thing” — it avoids the bloodshed of pure force.
How to Conquer: Roman People
Infinite conquest requires a massive army, requiring a massive, integrated population.
Rome absorbed allies, subjects, and granted citizenship to those sharing its love of freedom — open but hyper-selective on values.
Unlike Sparta (closed) or the modern West (undiscerning), Rome never went halfway: benefit lavishly or eliminate completely.
Groups with serious grievances were demolished, dispersed, or colonized so they could never rebel by arms or counsel.
This replenished Rome’s army and citizenry continuously, unlike Sparta’s draining garrisons.
How to Conquer: Roman Resources
Rome used colonists/settlers on frontiers — free, self-supporting vanguards instead of paid standing garrisons.
Spoils of war went to the public treasury, not private hands — keep the public rich, the private poor to avoid corruption.
Wars were prosecuted quickly; early on, soldiers were unpaid, living on spoils — speed kept costs down and prevented generals from building private loyalties.
Rome trusted generals fully but shortened their tenure; Fabius disobeyed the Senate to win in a dark forest, and was honored because he, on the ground, knew the particularities the Senate could not.
Rome’s “unit economics” of conquest: each acquisition replenished people and money more than it expended.
Conquest in Modernity: Critique and Adaptation
Technology makes stability impossible: AI, genetic engineering, and unknown future legislation prevent freezing laws like Heraclitus or Sparta.
Classical geopolitical conquest is impossible: nukes make great-power war mutually assured destruction — cooperation or annihilation is the new necessity.
Dilemma: expansion is the only way, but the classical mode is lost.
First adaptation: inject artificial necessity — harsh laws, tough schooling, unalleviated economic pressure, jobs resembling early-stage founders not welfare recipients.
Sparta preserved virtue in stability through harsh laws; modernity must do the same without physical war.
Second adaptation: find new domains of expansion that avoid nuclear war — technology (pushing nature’s limits) and commerce (buying companies, not vassals).
Machiavelli dismissed artillery and saw commerce as corrupting; but modernity may have inverted his categories — the least effeminate domain now may be the most effeminate then.
Like Fabius in the dark Tuscan forest, we are far from home in modernity, given the goal to protect the fatherland but ordered not to proceed by the old texts; we must violate the order to satisfy the goal, marching against Machiavelli as Fabius marched against the Senate.
