The sovereign’s mask performed irrationality, coercive bargaining, and the ethics of silence in the theory of sovereign power: a philosophical and jurimetric inquiry into the madman doctrine from Machiavelli to Schelling

Abstract

The Inverted Premise Classical political theory begins, almost without exception, from the premise that the sovereign’s strength is measured by command of himself before command of others. Aristotle’s account of the statesman, the Stoic ideal of the ruler governed by reason, and the mirror-for-princes literature of the medieval period converge on a single image: the good ruler is the self-possessed ruler. Disorder in the prince’s soul, on this view, precedes and produces disorder in the state. This book is about the doctrine that inverts that premise. It argues—following a line of thought that surfaces explicitly in Niccolò Machiavelli, finds its starkest theoretical statement in Thomas Hobbes, and receives its rigorous modern formulation in Thomas Schelling’s bargaining theory— that under specific structural conditions, the appearance of a ruler’s unreason is not a failure of statecraft but among its most efficient instruments. Call this the madman doctrine: the strategic cultivation of perceived unpredictability as a means of extracting compliance that calm, calculated communication cannot extract at the same price. The madman doctrine is not the claim that irrational rulers sometimes prevail. That claim is trivially true and theoretically uninteresting: chance favours the unpredictable as it favours anyone, some of the time. The doctrine this book examines is narrower and more unsettling — that a rational actor, reasoning correctly about their interests, can conclude that appearing irrational is the optimal strategy, and that audiences are structurally incapable of fully discounting that appearance, because the cost of being wrong about it is asymmetric