The Machiavelli Hidden Behind Beautiful Legitimacy

“You were driving at 65 kilometers per hour. The limit is 60.”
The driver, startled, tries to explain.
“I was taking my child to the hospital. If I hadn’t acted quickly, something much worse could have happened.”
The officer responds,
“Rules are rules. Circumstances are not taken into account.”

In this short scene, two different worlds collide.
Procedure cares only about whether the rule was followed.
Substance cares about what was right in that particular situation.
And the two sides cannot understand each other’s language.

Society tells us, at least on the surface, that legitimacy comes from procedural fairness and moral substance.
Yet in a strange way, the reality of power and the operation of systems do not follow this pattern.
Some other principle seems to be working in a deeper place.

At that point we encounter the figure hidden behind the “beautiful decoration.”
His name is Machiavelli.

Traditional society understands legitimacy as being composed of two axes.

The first is procedural legitimacy.
Did one follow the law.
Were rules applied fairly.
Were the same standards applied to everyone.
This is the world of procedure.

The second is substantive legitimacy.
Is the outcome just.
Is it morally right.
Does it protect the vulnerable.
Does it contribute to the common good.
This is the world of substance.

We are trained in school, in the media, and in the courtroom to evaluate legitimacy through these two axes.
So when someone does something wrong, people say things like:
“There is a procedural flaw.”
“This is substantively unjust.”
“The form is correct, but the substance is wrong.”

With these two axes, we believe we can fully explain what legitimacy is.
That is fine up to this point.
The problem emerges afterward.

Machiavelli cannot be captured by this two-dimensional map of procedural and substantive legitimacy.

What he describes is the well-known idea of “the fox and the lion.”
A ruler must know how to make use of the nature of beasts, and in particular must imitate both the fox and the lion.
The lion is unable to detect traps and falls into them easily, while the fox cannot drive away wolves.
Therefore, the ruler must become a fox to recognize traps and a lion to frighten wolves.

A ruler must not keep his promises when doing so harms him or when the reason for making the promise has disappeared.
Human beings are wicked and do not keep their promises to the ruler, so the ruler should not be bound by the promises he made to them.

The argument sounds strange.
Yet at the same time it makes sense.
It means that a ruler must not be consistent.
In fact, inconsistency is the ruler’s form of consistency.
According to procedural legitimacy, a figure like the Machiavellian ruler is both legitimate and not legitimate at the same time.

And when the ruler behaves in this way, the outcome will not consistently be morally good, nor will it reliably protect the weak or contribute to the common good.
Machiavelli considers completely different elements.
He focuses on the distribution of force, the continuity of effectiveness, the ability to respond to situations, which he calls virtu, and above all the survival of the state.

He gives concrete examples, such as how Cesare Borgia used deception to obtain troops and gain the support of the people.
Machiavelli regards this as a successful case.

What he sees can be summarized simply as the “sustainability of a state’s survival.”
Yet, oddly enough, he does not argue that this survival must last forever.
He even says that a ruler may be removed by the people.
So the state must survive, but at the same time it must not survive in certain moments.

What, then, do the substantive and procedural forms of legitimacy that we believe in actually mean.
These concepts appear in the examinations required to become a lawyer, courts use them to hand down judgments, and people accept them as true.

If so, was Machiavelli from five hundred years ago forgotten simply because of the unnecessary complexity of his ideas, and did the easily understood notion of morality win a total victory.
Even today, a very small number of people continue to use Machiavelli as one of their most important references.
Most people, however, do not think deeply about his arguments.
A statement like “both is and is not at the same time” is too difficult to understand within a flat way of thinking.

Perhaps only a few people think about these things at any depth.
And perhaps the strangest idea of all is the belief that the way the world actually works and the way we understand it operate according to the same principles.