Stop being nice

stop being nice

Convincing argument, but I won't be swayed.

nice guys finish last didn't you know

shut up, nerd

Surely it's better to be loved AND feared, than just feared?

i prefer to be nice or not, depending on what is more advantageous to me.

loved OR feared*

You had maybe a year tops where people loved you Joe, and that's because the patriotic war was going on.

That's entirely wrong. Stalin was precisely feared and loved by different (and sometimes same) people throughout his rule. The peak of his popularity was, of course, post-war years.

Come back when you've actually read Machiavelli.

For people who have; how come you don't see more of his class-based analysis to history recognized? Everyone always goes Marx this, Marx that, but classes struggling in interest based politics is found all over Discourses on Livy; and quite honestly, Machiavelli's analysis and predictions hold up a hell of a lot better than Marx's.

Don't use mercenaries

loved AND feared

That was what Machiavelli wrote.

Is "The Prince" worth a read?

Give me a tl;dr, I haven't read Livy yet.

not that marxists ignore Mac

Yeah, considering it’s basically what most of modern politics is based off of.

I argue with OP, not Machiavelli. That's the irony of it.

Well, it's not :ivy, it's Machiavelli's commentary on Livy, and it's *mostly* concerned with how the Republic eventually collapsed as a political unit to be replaced by the Empire.

To go into that, he does a lot of class-based anaylsis. Unlike Marx though, Machiavelli uses a social based and somewhat tautological definition of a class, namely that a class is a group of people who have the same set of material interests from a given action of the political unit. So things like the urban poor and the rural poor are different classes, the former is often more interested in their polity being embarking on massive trade exchanges, while the latter benefits less from it and more often being involved in primary resource production is often hurt by it; thus the two are different classes.

As classes often have different interests, they will necessarily clash to an extent, but escalation into full out civil war along class lines almost invariably means that they all are worse off, so stable states tend to create a government, choose a sovereign or a quasi-sovereign with similar powers, whose main job is to help navigate these clashes, and come up and enforce with compromises that everyone can more or less live with.

His main thesis (although I use the term loosely, it's not really structured the way a modern academic work is), is that Rome as a Republic stayed stable through time and the inevitable class clashes by having individual leaders (usually consuls) who were able to ram through the latest bit of power-shifting between the major classes of the Republic, guys like the senatorial class, the urban poor, the rural poor, the various Socii, etc. Sometimes one wins a round, sometimes another, but they all played the game, and as long as they were doing so, they all could live together, and the system kept ticking.

1/2

Then, eventually, a guy named Gaius Marius comes along. And to face the problem of HIS day (an external one, an invasion by people from what is now Germany), he reforms the army; and the army was the main glue that held things together, all the different classes needed each other to function in a state where everyone provided their own weapons and training to fight, and none of the individual classes could field a force that was capable of protecting the republic on its own. Marius throws that whole system out and replaces it with a professional, state-funded army. While this is great in some respects, crushing the Cimbrii and the Teutones, increasing force projection and recruitment base, etc, it creates a brand new class that wasn't there before: The professional soldier. And nobody really knew how to deal with this class, especially since at least in the short term, it could in fact defeat all the others combined on the field of battle, and use that military hegemony to force the others to support it.

Without any real constraint in place, it became only a matter of time before military leaders were the real power in the Republic, and direct military rule replaced it, and then we lose the Republic and have the Empire, with the CIC as Imperator.
It's okay, but honestly, Discourses on Livy and Discourses on the provision of money, and his various "Portraits", as well as the Florentine Histories are all much better works.

stop being honest
stop sparing people that potentially might not like you
stop falling for "honor" meme, your greatest priority is well being of your nation

Yes. It's actually a fairly easy read and is really interesting even if you're not planning on becoming a ruler.

How the fuck did anyone take this shit seriously?

Because conflicting factional interests being a thing is not something anyone ever denied or even just doubted. People sperg about Marx because of his reduction of conflicting factions to labour and capital, and his autistic insistence that EVERY conflict is a class conflict.