Ada Palmer: commitment

Transcript context

…How do we know that he wasn’t just trying to get back into power? The answer is you read his personal letters. You read the way he talks about love of his country, and you read the way he talks to his friends. You read the letters he wrote when he discusses writing The Prince, and you read the comments he exchanges with the other friends that he shared it with. His other works—his comic play, which was a big hit, his history of Florence, which was well known at the time—those he published and circulated. The Prince he kept in very close private circles, circulating it only with trusted, intimate friends, and then the copy that he sends in to Florence. Yes, it’s a job application: “Please bring me back. I will work for you. I will be loyal. I support my city more than any particular iteration of my city. I support my country more than any particular regime or group that might be in power. Whatever is in power in my city, I will be faithful to it. ” You see him expressing that in lots of different ways. When in The Prince he says you can and should do all of these ruthless things to keep power, we have to remember that the end justifies the means when the end is the survival of your country. It’s not that the end, in general, justifies the means. Machiavelli feels very strongly that regime changes bring civil violence, and civil violence sheds blood. He has seen the streets of his city run with blood before. He thinks that even life under a tyrant is better than life in a civil war, which is usually not life at all, given the massacre of the people and external conquest that are likely as a result of another regime change. So he says, “Don’t push for regime change. Even if the regime is tyrannical, more people will survive by sticking with the tyrant than by changing the regime.” I want to talk about the printing press. One thing I didn’t realize before reading your book is that not only does Gutenberg go bankrupt after making the most significant invention of a millennia, but his apprentices also go bankrupt. This is at a time when people like Cosimo are willing to pay on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per book. So with the guy who invents a way to make this way cheaper, how is this possible?…

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