The Anti Machiavel,
penned by the future Frederick the Great, is a refutation of Machiavelli’s The Prince that lays out a very
different vision of the ideal ruler. It
is not a brilliantly written work, but it is a rare opportunity to delve into the mind of
an hereditary ruler preparing for, and thinking deeply about, kingship. Fredrick himself was by any measure one of
the most successful monarchs ever to live, most especially in international and
military strategy, and as such his opinion, even prior to his rule, is not that
of an outsider to the game of power.
Frederick’s early life was regimented by the will of his
father, Frederick William, whose iron character in some ways approached
Machiavelli’s ideal ruler. It may well
have been in reaction to close experience of such a man that Frederick wrote
his treatise. Frederick and his father
often clashed; the son was of an artistic and philosophical temperament that
would give birth to one of Europe’s few genuine philosopher kings, while the
father wanted to recreate in his son the hard-headed martinet that he himself
was. The father’s very public abuse of
his son culminated in the latter attempting a failed escape to England.
The treatise was distributed and popularised by
Voltaire. While it may seem incongruous
for the strategist who, partly through military aggression and political device,
would turn a small state surrounded by great powers into an equal of the great
Hapsburg Empire, to speak about the qualities of a virtuous ruler, the rupture
between theory and practice is intriguingly localised. Frederick took and held exactly the land that
was key to ending the Austrian domination that had plagued his father’s reign
and securing his frontier against the Russians, and after that, spent less of
his reign at war than any of his contemporaries.
Domestically, he strove to be the philosopher king that he
describes in many ways. He promulgated
only one image of himself, and that depicted a worn old man. He appeared before his troops in plain
officer’s uniform, and consistently led from the front, often sharing the
dangers of his men- his uniform is preserved and shows the stains and scars of
field life. He never presented himself
as other than a common man, and, true to his philosophy, this only endeared him
to his subjects. He was a patron of the
arts and the philosophes, and a talented amateur composer in his own
right. More than this, he promulgated a
complete legal code for the first time, setting up the expectation of
consistent justice, abolishing torture, and, for the first time, subordinating
the crown and government to a sovereign state through particular legal obligations. He improved the educational system and
elevated religious toleration to active accommodation, uniting a German world
that had suffered the brunt of religious wars.
Fredrick also concerned himself with actively shaping the economy, both
for military purposes and for the general welfare of his subjects.
In Frederick, we have a highly educated, cultured,
benevolent ruler, military genius (Napoleon considered him to be the greatest
tactician of all time), and devilishly clever international operator (for
example, among the many tactics that led up to the partition of Poland, he
introduced debased counterfeit currency to the Polish economy). He was not perfect, and certainly ruthless in
foreign policy. He did what was
necessary for Prussia to survive in an era of consolidating nation-states. He will certainly go down as a minor villain
in Polish history. Nevertheless, within all
his territories, he began to succeed in bridging the gap of imagination between
moral rule and utility, in a way that few before him had ever attempted. The attempt of a man who both of the
intellectual and artistic elite of his time, and, from the first weeks of his
reign, an ambitious military commander, to resolve from these seemingly
disparate extremes a form of leadership that unites pragmatism and moral
benevolence, is one of the more fascinating episodes in the history of
strategy.
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