On mastery without ascent — perfection as a state against perfection as a path.

I. The School of the Centaur

Machiavelli chose the emblem himself. Wishing to teach what a ruler must learn, he reaches in the eighteenth chapter of The Prince for the old fable of the tutor of princes: Achilles and the great ones of antiquity, he reminds us, were sent to be raised by Chiron the centaur, half man and half beast, and the meaning of the fable is that a prince must know how to put on both natures. He is entirely explicit about which half the education concerns. “There are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts” — and because the first is so often not enough, the prince must study the second. He must be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves. It is one of the most honest sentences in political philosophy, and its honesty is the door this essay walks through: the art of The Prince announces itself, in its author’s own metaphor, as the perfection of the bestial half of the centaur.

For five centuries the indictment against that art has been moral. Cardinal Pole, within a generation of the book, declared it written by Satan’s finger; Rome set it on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559; the Elizabethan stage found the name so serviceable that it minted a stock villain from it, and Marlowe could send “Machevill” himself out to speak a prologue. The charge, in every age, is wickedness. I want to bring a different and, I believe, a more damaging charge — one that begins by granting the art everything. Grant that it works; grant that it can be mastered; grant a man who has practised it to the very summit of proficiency. My claim concerns what that summit is: that Machiavellianism, perfected, achieves the maximum proficiency available to an animal, and that this perfection lies on another axis entirely from the perfection of a man. The perfected Machiavellian has not climbed badly. He has not climbed at all.

II. A Proficiency Older Than Us

The strongest evidence for this is not philosophical at all, and it arrived from an unexpected quarter: a zoo in the Netherlands. Through the late 1970s the primatologist Frans de Waal watched the chimpanzee colony at Arnhem conduct a struggle for power that ran on for four years — coalitions assembled and dissolved, favours banked and called in at the decisive hour, grooming dispensed like patronage, the strong isolated by alliances of the ambitious. He knew exactly what he was looking at, and titled his book Chimpanzee Politics. The discipline then went further than he had: when Byrne and Whiten gathered the evidence that primate intelligence had evolved under the pressure of precisely this social manoeuvring, the name that stuck to the whole faculty was “Machiavellian intelligence”. Science, asked to name the peak of animal social cognition, reached for the Florentine’s — and found that it fitted without alteration.

Savour what that means. Every move in the beast’s half of the prince’s curriculum — the alliance of convenience, the timely defection, the managed appearance, force held in reserve behind charm — exists complete in a creature with whom one cannot discuss a single sentence of ethics. The skill set does not begin where humanity begins; it is finished before humanity starts. So let the aspiring Machiavellian be congratulated on his choice of summit — not the illuminated man, but the perfect ape. He has enrolled, at considerable cost to his soul, in the one academy where a chimpanzee already holds the chair, and every examination he passes with distinction has been passed before him, without books, in the trees. When this essay speaks of “maximum animal proficiency”, it does so with perfect courtesy: nothing is alleged here that science has not already notarised. The paperwork was drawn up long ago, and the faculty filed — under the master’s own name — among the accomplishments of the higher primates.

Nor is the game even won the way the manual promises. When Axelrod ran his celebrated tournaments — strategies submitted as computer programs, each playing every other at the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, round upon round — the programs that prospered were the nice ones: never the first to defect, quick to retaliate, quick again to forgive. The predators, built to exploit, finished down the table. The reason is the one commodity the fox cannot counterfeit twice, and game theory states it with unsentimental precision. In a single encounter betrayal is the winning move: played once, the dilemma vindicates the fox. But let the same players meet again and again, with no certain last meeting, and the arithmetic inverts — every defection is priced into the opponent’s next move, cheating becomes a loan against oneself collected with interest, and steady reciprocity compounds like capital under the long shadow of the future. Nothing in the players has improved; only the structure has changed, and the structure alone is enough to make trustworthiness the rational strategy. In repeated dealings reputation is an asset and deception a one-shot weapon; the long game quietly repossesses everything the short con acquired. This is the mathematical form of an old observation, for what is law but reciprocity made permanent — the standing guarantee that every game will be repeated and every defection answered? Durable orders are built out of exactly that — the very way of contesting that chapter eighteen sets aside as insufficient. The way “proper to men” turns out to be the one that scales.

Psychology, for its part, tried to bottle the type. Christie and Geis distilled a questionnaire from Machiavelli’s texts in 1970 and called its high scorers high Machs; half a century of research followed, and its most consistent finding is that such people test as measurably poor in precisely the empathy on which wisdom does its work. But the bottle leaks, and the leaks are more instructive than the contents. The scale’s structure has proved unstable; it overlaps the psychopathy measures so heavily that many psychologists doubt it captures anything of its own; and where the theory demands a patient, long-horizon strategist, the instrument keeps catching impulsives who cannot plan — a gap wide enough that the whole construct has had to be rebuilt from the ground up. The perfected beast, it seems, is rare even among those who aspire to the condition. And one irony is worth carrying forward: the trait does not describe the historical Machiavelli’s counsel at all, which was never an injunction to be wicked, but to learn how to be not good, and to use or withhold that learning as necessity commands — calibration, not cruelty. For the real doctrine we must return to the books; and first to a book far older than his.

III. The Starved Man

Plato drew the diagram nineteen centuries in advance. In the ninth book of the Republic, wanting to show what injustice does to the one who profits by it, Socrates builds an image of the soul: a many-headed beast, ringed with the heads of creatures tame and wild; a lion; and a man — the three sealed inside a single human skin, so that from outside one sees only the man. Justice and injustice then become a question of husbandry. The unjust man is he who feasts the beast and the lion and starves the man within, until the starved thing is dragged wherever the strong things lead; the just man is a farmer of himself, who feeds the tame heads, prunes the wild ones, and makes the lion the man’s ally rather than his rival.

Now set Machiavelli’s menagerie beside Plato’s. The fox is there; the lion is there; the training of both is superb. And the man is missing. Not denied — nothing in The Prince argues against the inner man, which would at least be to acknowledge him — simply unaddressed, as a curriculum can omit a subject without once naming it. Machiavelli’s soul is Plato’s with the third figure deleted, and the deletion is the doctrine. Chapter by chapter the beast is exercised, and no chapter feeds the man. The book is a manual of the very husbandry Socrates called injustice, composed with no apparent awareness that anyone was starving on the premises.

Aristotle supplies the analytic seal. There is a capacity he calls deinotes — cleverness, the power to hit whatever mark one has proposed. If the mark is noble, the cleverness is praiseworthy; if base, the same power is mere knavery; the capacity itself is indifferent, a vehicle with no opinion about destinations. Practical wisdom, phronesis, is not that capacity, though it cannot exist without it: wisdom is what cleverness becomes only when the ends themselves are right, and the ends are set not by cleverness but by character. The consequence is exacting. Cleverness is a necessary part of wisdom — Aristotle is clear that the wise man cannot do without it — but it is a part that confers no progress of itself, the way a rung is necessary to a ladder and yet, lying in a pile, is no height at all. What cleverness can never supply is the setting of the ends; and without the ends, its accumulation is stockpiling, not climbing. A man may grow more cunning by the year for fifty years and stand, at the end, exactly as far from wisdom as on the day he began — further, Plato would say, since the beast has been feasting the whole while.

And Machiavelli’s own text confesses the missing axis. He never quite wrote the sentence that is chained to his name; “the end justifies the means” appears nowhere in the book. What chapter eighteen actually says is colder and stranger: in the actions of princes, where there is no court of appeal, “one judges by the result”. But which results are worth having? On this the doctrine is silent, and the silence closes into a circle — success validates the means, and the means were chosen because they succeed. Nowhere is there a criterion for the ends themselves, a way of asking success at what, and for the sake of what — the one question whose answer could have redeemed the whole apparatus. The deficit of the art is not its cruelty. It is that the art cannot even formulate the question by which it would be measured.

IV. The Counsel for the Defence

Fairness now demands the strongest possible advocate, because much of what the centuries have hurled at Machiavelli strikes a doctrine he did not hold. The historians of the Cambridge School — Skinner, Pocock — have shown how much of the caricature dissolves when The Prince is read beside the Discourses, where the same man stands revealed as a republican: a theorist of free institutions, civic vigilance and the vivere libero, for whom the health of a commonwealth outranks the glory of any prince. Rousseau went further and called The Prince the book of republicans — a warning to peoples wearing the costume of advice to tyrants, teaching kings in appearance and the people in earnest — and Spinoza, who judged its author to be plainly on the side of freedom, suspected the very same design: perhaps the shrewdest of Florentines had written down what masters do precisely so that a free multitude would think twice before entrusting its welfare to one man. And Isaiah Berlin, in the deepest of the defences, argued that Machiavelli’s real discovery was not that morality is false but that there are two of them — the pagan ethic of courage, vigour, discipline and public achievement, and the Christian ethic of mercy, charity and forgiveness — genuinely incommensurable, so that a man must choose; and Machiavelli scandalised Christendom merely by choosing the older one aloud.

Let the concessions be real. Courage, discipline, the founding of republics, the jealous defence of liberty — these are not animal excellences, and the lazy version of my argument dies here, as it should. But watch what survives, because it is the whole point. Even the best Machiavelli — the republican, the warner, the tragic pluralist — offers a perfection of arrangements, never a discipline of the agent. The Discourses would perfect the city’s institutions; The Prince would perfect the ruler’s grip on the state and on fortune. Mastery of institutions, mastery of circumstance, mastery of appearance — for it is very necessary, says chapter eighteen, to appear to have the good qualities, whatever one privately is. The interior of the man doing the gripping is instrumentally interesting and otherwise invisible; the old quarrel between veritas and persona is settled here by summary judgement, in favour of the mask. Nowhere in either book — and this is a description, not an accusation — is there a page on what the practice of this art does to its practitioner, nor a hint that the practitioner is himself a thing that could be perfected.

One concept remains that might rescue him, and honesty requires calling it to the stand. Virtù — not the civic kind now, but the personal quality Machiavelli everywhere demands of his prince — is no arrangement but an attribute of the agent: boldness, vigour, judgement of the times, the capacity to stand against fortune and seize the occasion. Here, if anywhere, is his candidate for a perfection of the man himself. But watch how the candidate behaves under examination. Its measure is entirely outward — virtù is weighed in provinces held and occasions taken, never in what its exercise makes of its possessor; it is agent-quality as weapon, not as end. And when the twenty-fifth chapter confronts the one test that would demand genuine self-transformation — the changing of the times — Machiavelli concedes the case. Men fail, he admits, because a man “cannot deviate from what nature inclines him to do”; the cautious man, “when it is time to turn adventurous, does not know how to do it”. The adaptability his doctrine requires is, by his own admission, unteachable — and, tellingly, he nowhere tries to teach it. No exercises, no education, no regimen: where Plato prescribes decades of formation and Aristotle a lifetime of habituation, The Prince offers only the observation that fortune favours whoever happens to suit the hour. Virtù, examined, is a fixed endowment — talent to be spent, not a path to be walked — one more perfection as a state, filed on the beast’s side of the scales. The best witness for the defence testifies, in the end, for the prosecution.

And so the emblem turns in its owner’s hand. Machiavelli reached for Chiron as a licence: the tutor was half beast, therefore learn the beast. But he chose, of all possible beasts, the one the myths remember as the great exception. Homer calls Chiron the most righteous of the centaurs; while his kin ran to savagery he was the fostered pupil of Apollo, the teacher of Asclepius in medicine and of Achilles in music and the tending of wounds — the one centaur in whom the man had mastered the animal. That is what he was for; that is why the princes were sent to him. The centaur’s lesson was never that the man should study the beast’s arts. It was that the beast can be brought under the man’s — that the double nature is a thing to be harmonised upward. Machiavelli took the anatomy and discarded the biography, and enrolled his prince in the wrong half of the school.

V. The Two Ladders

In 1486, a generation before The Prince, another Italian had contemplated the same double creature and drawn the opposite conclusion. Man, says Pico della Mirandola in the Oration on the Dignity of Man, is the one being to whom the Creator assigned no fixed nature and no settled rank: set at the world’s midpoint, free to descend into the brutish forms below or to be reborn, by his own reason’s election, into “the higher forms, which are divine”. Between Pico and Machiavelli stands little but a few decades and the entire orientation of a soul. They agree on the anthropology — man is the unfixed animal, the creature on a ladder. They differ only in the direction of travel; and the argument of this essay is that the differing is everything, because the two directions are not rival routes to a single summit. They are different axes, and excellence along one purchases nothing along the other.

Rousseau, much later, gave the climbing faculty its name. What separates man from the animals, he argued in the Discourse on Inequality, is not reason as such but perfectibilité — the capacity for self-perfection. The animal is finished: it remains through its life what its nature made it, complete, and in that completeness closed. Man alone is unfinished, and his unfinishedness is his entire distinction. Rousseau, to his credit, refused to make the faculty a compliment — he thought it had carried us into corruption at least as often as upward, which is only Pico’s ladder read downhill — but on the central point he stands with the whole tradition: to be a man is to be perfectible, and to be perfectible is to have one’s perfection always ahead, a path and not a state.

And where does the upward path point? On this the tradition speaks with one voice, and it is far more literal than modern ears expect. Plato names the destination in the Theaetetus without a trace of embarrassment: the aim of the philosophic life is to become like the god, so far as that is possible — and the qualifier belongs to the doctrine, for the divine is not a rung a man finally occupies but the direction in which his ladder runs. Aristotle, so sober elsewhere, refuses the proverb that mortals should think mortal thoughts, and commands us instead to make ourselves immortal so far as we can, straining every nerve to live by the best thing in us — an element small in bulk, he concedes, and surpassing everything in power. The Christian East compressed the whole programme into a single scandalous sentence — God became man so that man might become god — and Pico’s rebirth into “the higher forms, which are divine” merely restates, in Renaissance dress, what pagan and Christian had each already confessed. Beneath all four lies one thought, and it is the thought this essay has been circling. The beast is complete as a full stop is complete: closed, because nothing remains that it could become. The divine is complete as plenitude is complete: closed, because nothing remains that it could lack. And man hangs between the two completions — poorer than the beast in finish, richer than the beast in direction — his perfectibility being nothing other than the distance between them, felt from within as a summons upward.

Here the title of this essay closes like a pair of scales. Perfection as a state is available to the beast, and Machiavellianism is its instruction manual: the fox brought to full cunning, the lion to full terror, the grip on fortune trained to its maximum — a perfection that terminates, as every capacity does whose whole ambition is to serve. Perfection as a path is available only to the man, and about it the manual has not one word. Illumination — call it what each tradition calls it: the Good, eudaimonia, the feeding of the inner man, the rebirth into the higher forms — is not a bonus awarded for sufficient cunning, as though the fox, grown clever enough, would one morning wake luminous. It is motion on the other axis. However high the beast’s hill, it is not the lower slope of the mountain; and the perfected Machiavellian stands at the summit of a thing that has a summit, mistaking it for progress on the thing that does not.

That, finally, is the deficit the moralists’ thunder always missed. The Machiavellian is not damned; he is stationary — a creature who received the one endowment no beast possesses, the capacity to become, and spent it becoming what any chimpanzee at Arnhem already is, superbly. He took the single coin that buys ascent and paid it out, deal by clever deal, at the foot of the ladder. The beast in him is finished, in both senses of the word. The man in him was never begun — and of the two, only the man could still begin. For the myths never record that Chiron’s school closed. They record only that it was the human half of the centaur that held the chalk.

The Perfected Beast and the Perfectible Man

On mastery without ascent — perfection as a state against perfection as a path.

Achraf SOLTANI — August 14, 2026