Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Exactly, and he doesn’t let copies of it circulate to anybody but the rulers of Florence and his immediate scholarly, social, intimate circle of friends, people that he’s known for decades who are scholar peers who have discussed his ideas with him. That’s the audience of The Prince during his lifetime. Does he expect that at some point it will be more widely distributed? Is he writing in a way that suggests that? It is a literary masterpiece as well. I’ve only read, obviously, the translation, so I don’t know what it’s like in the original Italian. But somebody putting in that much literary effort into something that is just supposed to be a very pragmatic manual for a particular person seems a bit weird. We have to remember this is a moment of transition from the manuscript to the print period, and also therefore an important moment of transition in what makes a written work important and how that written work is important to the career of someone who’s written it. It’s a normal thing in Machiavelli’s youth for a major important scholar like, say, Pontano, one of the greatest scholars of the previous generation, to be hired to write a handbook of princes that will exist in just one copy or three or four copies that are written for a specific prince. For example, you have King Alfonso of Naples, the Spanish king who conquered Naples, Alfonso the Magnanimous, made famous for his vast patronage of arts and letters and for carefully cultivated personal anecdotes. There’s a moment when he was in the middle of fighting a war and a messenger rushed into his room, sweaty and covered with things, to interrupt the king’s morning time with his scholar friends discussing Plato. The king turned angrily on the messenger and said, “Get out. This is a place for men in togas, not for men in armor,” and refused to listen to the urgent message until he’d finished his hour of scholarly contemplation of the soul. As a result of which, he lost that battle but actually won the war. His reputation cultivated by anecdotes like that make him beloved. He will pay a salary five times what the Republic of Florence will pay to hire somebody like Machiavelli. What does he hire them to do? He has a lot of children, princes and princesses, and he commissions a scholar to write a unique bespoke handbook of how to rule and use power for each of his children. These exist in manuscript only in one copy or three copies, and the addressee is the Duchess of Ferrara, who is a daughter of King Alfonso. That book is never intended to circulate. It’s intended to be private guidance for her and for her to perhaps pass on to her sons and daughters. Meanwhile, the author’s fame is magnified by being told the special bespoke handbook of princes cultivated secretly for this important princess was written by so and so. That’s so cool, and letters circulate and let you know that it’s happening. In the same way that a scientist might become famous because we know he’s developing cool proprietary technology that only his government has, but we know that it’s happening, we have to think of these books as proprietary technology. In that sense, it’s not an unusual thing to write a book with an audience of one, or an audience of one and her immediate circle. This is also one of the moments where the handbook of princes also means for women. The title of that book for the princess who becomes Duchess of Ferrara addresses her as a prince, because prince is a gender-neutral word at this point. It’s lexically masculine in terms of ending, the same way a table is feminine, but prince is used for men and women. Even Queen Elizabeth is Prince Elizabeth at this period of her life.…

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