Chapter 17

Chapter seventeen ranks rulers, and the ranking is the book's most quoted political statement.

The best is one whose existence is barely noticed. Next comes one who is loved and praised. Then one who is feared. Then one who is despised.

The placement of the second is the interesting one. A ruler who is loved and praised is doing well by any ordinary measure, and the chapter puts him second, below one who is not noticed at all. The reason is implied rather than stated: being loved requires being visible, being visible requires acting conspicuously, and conspicuous action is exactly what chapters two, three and twenty-nine identify as the source of the problems it is meant to solve.

The chapter adds a line about trust that works in both directions: where trust is insufficient, there is a want of trust. A ruler who does not trust the people will not be trusted by them, and the shortfall is self-inflicted.

The scheme is descriptive rather than aspirational in one important respect. It assumes there will be a ruler. Nothing in the book proposes doing without one, and its political chapters are addressed to whoever is in charge rather than to anyone seeking to remove them. That has made it usable by rulers as well as by their critics, which is a large part of its reception history.

The last line of chapter seventeen is its point: when the work is finished and the business done, the people all say it happened of itself.

The phrase rendered of itself is one of the book's key terms, usually given as spontaneous or self-so, and it appears at the end of chapter twenty-five, where the way itself takes its rule from what is so of itself. Applying it to a population's account of its own affairs is a considerable claim. The best government is one that produces, in the governed, the accurate impression that they were not governed.

Whether the impression is accurate is left ambiguous, and the ambiguity is worth sitting with rather than resolving. On one reading the ruler genuinely did very little, and the people are right. On another he did a great deal and did it invisibly, and the people are mistaken in a way he arranged. The first is a philosophy of restraint; the second is a technique of management, and the book has been read both ways by people with very different aims.

The chapter's preceding line points slightly toward the second: the ruler is described as careful and sparing with words, which is a description of someone exercising judgement rather than of someone absent.

That unresolved edge runs through the whole political section of the book and is why chapters like thirty-six and sixty-five have been read as statecraft of a distinctly hard kind.