The Politics of Advice: Addressing Princes

My aim in this intervention is to focus on Machiavelli’s strategy for gaining the attention of his Prince as part of a broader consideration of the question of the ‘politics of advice giving’ as a process fraught with perils and contradictions. In the more recent scholarship on Machiavelli’s most famous tract, increasing attention has been paid to the rhetorical nature of his text as part of an attempt to understand its argumentative underpinning. Variously read through the prisms of epideictic praise and blame and deliberative ‘to do or not to do’, the moral implications of his advice are seen to reside in either the Ciceronian exhortation to virtue (which Machiavelli re-describes in quite radical terms) or in the moral injunction to secure security prior to honour as found within the amoral precepts of the Ad Herennium. However, to date little attention within such rhetorical studies has been given to the position of the advice giver to the advisee despite that fact that classical rhetorical theory was very alive to the manner in which situational context conditioned the mode of address.