Machiavelli claims that a political leader should act in his own interests and : “should therefore have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other thing for his study, but war and its organization structure” (Machiavelli, 87). The problem of power is reduced, in the real world, to the control of specific acts of particular powers. It is not one problem but many problems; for there is no one abuse of power, there are only abuses, various in form and often markedly different in degree. Our quest, then, is the quest for solutions to the problems generated by the multiple abuses of power. Now of such abuses a necessary distinction must be drawn between those abuses associated with the acquisition of power and those resulting from the way in which that power, once acquired, is exercised. In the first instance, the fundamental abuse is the usurpation of the legal authority itself, the acquisition of power by unconstitutional or wrongful means. The election and presidential campaign of Barack Obama shows that he is one of those political leaders who really want to change the course of political relations and introduce high ideals.
To speak of justice or of the unwarranted deprivation of rights is to raise certain difficulties, for these are clearly matters of disputation, and they are likely to remain so. Rights, for Obama, have most commonly been held to be those claims assured to men by the political system under which they live or by the moral code to which they give or ought to give their allegiance. These two sources of rights are not necessarily connected. They may, in fact, be intrinsically opposed. I suppose that leaders of modern democratic politics are not immune from real politics and Machiavelli’s challenge still they try to pursue interests of their nation-states (Eccleshall, et. al 2003). The rule of the people remains but a partial rule. The excesses of the minority, he thought, would easily be curbed by the power of the majority, exercised through regular vote. Whatever intrinsic limitations there may be in the application of the idea of majority rule, a democratic system should at least not interpose any additional obstacles of its own (Eccleshall et al 2003).
The purpose for which political power is rendered responsible could be achieved only by the countervailing force of another power–perhaps a labor union, perhaps the government. If we turn to the government, its power is all too likely to prevail, but only at the cost of increasing the extent and degree of power in the hands of political officials. To increase a grant of power is not necessarily to abandon it, or even, in a particular situation, to make its control more difficult. On the contrary, in any given situation this may be the indispensable and thoroughly safe means to correct an evident injustice. In real politics, It does carry with it certain dangers that always attend an undue concentration of power, and it does not escape the limitations we have already noted with respect to the principle of responsibility in American democracy. Hence, so far as the control of power is concerned, this much in any case is clear: the principle of “political” responsibility–or the limitation of the principle of responsibility to political government–does not (in the American democracy at any rate) adequately curb the abuses of nongovernmental powers. There are some abuses of power that, by the very nature of things, the principle of responsibility cannot by itself render easily amenable to control.
In sum, Obama and his ideals are based on moral principles and obligations aimed to increase participation of the majority in governance. Still, there are others that, by the institutional arrangements of the American political system, or by the time willing acquiescence of the governed, we do not –and perhaps do not want to–control.
Works Cited
Eccleshall, R. et. al. Political Ideologies: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2003.
Machiavelli, N. The Prince. Bantam Classics, 1984.