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THE RENAISSANCE CITY-STATE
It has been said that ‘one of the most essential factors separating Renaissance from later philosophy [is] its fully international character, based on the use of Latin as an almost universal language of scholarship’, not divided by modern linguistic or national boundaries.1 Yet this period is precisely the age in which territorial states, defined by national boundaries, were becoming the dominant political force in Western Europe. It is certainly true that these states were not the homeland of the cultural phenomenon called by convention the Renaissance (a convention often questioned by historians these days); but this international culture was born in an even more particularistic setting, the Italian city-states most fiercely attached to their local autonomy.
The poet and scholar Petrarch, who, for his recovery of ancient classics and his Latin writings, is often called the ‘father of humanism’, or even of the Renaissance itself, is also, by virtue of his Italian poetry, considered one of the principal founders of a national language and literature. His revival of antiquity appealed not only to philosophers but to princes, emperors and popes who were keen to invoke Italy’s glorious past for their own political purposes. ‘Humanism’ would become the discourse of thinkers who have come to be called ‘civic humanists’, in defence of civic liberty and of their city-states’ autonomy. Yet the Renaissance would flourish as the city-states were in decline, and civic humanism would reach its pinnacle when the political independence and economic prosperity of the major city-states were most severely threatened by a new world order of ‘national’ states.
Whether we call this period the ‘Renaissance’ or something else, the dichotomy of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ cannot help us very much to understand these paradoxes. It is far more trouble than it is worth to determine whether civic humanism – if it exists at all as a distinct and coherent body of thought (about which more in a moment) – partakes of the ancient because it resists the trend towards large territorial or national states and because it adopts an ancient Greco-Roman discourse, or whether it is more modern than ancient because it supports the principles of civic liberty against monarchical or feudal rule. Nor, for that matter, is it particularly useful to describe this cultural form as transitional, or even as a synthesis of contradictions. We can, and clearly should, take note of the discourses available to thinkers; but we can better understand the particular ways in which political theorists chose to exploit them not by locating them along some abstract continuum from ancient to modern but by situating them in very specific historical processes.
Renaissance City States
The medieval city-states of northern Italy (which were discussed in the first volume of this history) represented an exception to the Western feudal model of seigneurial domination. Landed aristocracies certainly existed and in some city-states continued to play a prominent role; but urban concentrations which had survived the collapse of the Roman Empire, together with landholding patterns that preserved a free peasantry in contrast to the serfdom that had emerged elsewhere, produced a distinctive configuration: more or less autonomous city-states, governed by urban elites, often – as in the case of Florence – exercising what has been described as a collective lordship over the surrounding countryside, the contado. Some developed into prosperous commercial centres, serving a fragmented feudal Europe as trading links, providing goods to landed aristocracies and offering financial services to kings and popes.
But, if these city-states departed from seigneurial patterns of lordship, they had their own forms of parcellized sovereignty. The civic communes were always fairly loose associations of patrician families, factions, parties and corporate entities with their own liberties, organizations, jurisdictions and powers. In the Middle Ages, they were also battlegrounds for larger temporal authorities. In particular, they were caught up in struggles between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, which conducted their rivalries through the medium of factions within the civic commune – most notably, the infamous battles between Guelf (papal) and Ghibelline (imperial) factions, which typically, though not always, coincided with divisions between merchant classes and landed signori. These self-governing cities were, on the whole, oligarchies; and even when more effective republican governments came to power, they never succeeded in overcoming their internal fragmentation. Still later, even the most centralized Renaissance kingdoms continued to be divided by party, privilege and competing jurisdictions. For all the talk of civic humanism, the civic order never marked out a clearly defined public sphere detached from private corporate powers of various kinds.
Nor did the commercial activities of the civic communes mark a significant departure from feudal economic patterns. Their commercial success depended not, in the capitalist manner, on cost-effective production and enhanced labour productivity, in a market driven by price competition, but rather on ‘extra-economic’ factors, that is to say, factors external to the ‘economic’ transactions of production and exchange: not just the quality of goods but political power, monopoly privileges, sophisticated financial techniques, and military force. In external trade, which was the most lucrative economic activity for a major commercial centre like Venice, success clearly depended on military power and a symbiotic connection between commerce and war. Venice’s command of east–west trade required control of eastern Mediterranean sea routes, no less than rivers and mountain passes on the Italian mainland. To maintain that control, the Venetians developed a powerful military force, which itself became a marketable commodity, as Venice offered military aid to other powers – notably the Byzantine Empire – in exchange for commercial privileges and rights to trading posts.2
In general, economic rivalries took the form of power struggles among merchants, cities or states over direct control of markets; and city-states were constantly at war with one another. The major centres such as Florence and Venice consolidated their commercial dominance by forcibly incorporating their less powerful neighbours into larger city-states. It is certainly true that Venice, and even more Florence, traded in commodities produced in their own cities, such as Florentine textiles; and great merchant dynasties did invest in production. But substantial wealth and power depended on command of trading networks, which in turn depended not simply on the quality or price of goods produced at home but on superiority in controlling and negotiating markets, to say nothing of dynastic connections, patronage, personal networks among patrician families, and leading positions in ruling oligarchies.
Even where, as in Florence, wealth was heavily invested in production, it was no less dependent on ‘extra-economic’ factors, not least on office in the city-state’s administration. The career of the Medici speaks volumes: they began in the wool trade, then moved on to achieve their greatest wealth, with the help of family connections and personal networks among the Florentine patriciate, not as producers but as bankers to European princes and popes. Three Medici themselves became popes. The dynasty finally reached the summit of its ambition as effectively rulers of the Florentine republic, leaving the wool trade far behind.
In Renaissance Florence, in other words, political and economic power were inextricably connected in the feudal manner; and this was true not only for city elites. The guilds that organized the wool trade and other occupations were principal players not only in the economic sphere, protecting the interests of their members and sheltering them from competition, but also in the political domain. The guilds themselves had autonomous corporate powers, governed by charters and systems of rules that had the force of law. It may even be misleading to speak of citizenship in the republic, since active membership in the civic community did not reside in individuals but in these corporate entities.
Internal conflicts in the city-states were shaped by this unity of political and economic power. Economic rivalries among merchant families could never simply take the form of competition in the marketplace but were always political rivalries at the same time. The pursuit of high office and the dominance of any family depended on its standing in a complex network of patrons and clients, inevitably embroiled in factional struggles, often with support from foreign powers. It has even been suggested that this helps to explain the remarkable cultural richness of these city-states and their patronage of the arts, creating not only great wealth but a climate of competitive achievement and conspicuous consumption – especially in times and places where, as in the Florentine republic, artisanal guilds played a major political role.
In Venice, which remained an oligarchy even when ostensibly ruled by one man, the Doge, it was largely a matter of rivalry among noble families. In Florence, other strains and conflicts were also at work. Patrician family connections or membership in major guilds afforded the only consistent access to the political sphere; and political battles throughout the history of Florence often revolved around the political standing of lesser guilds. There were constant struggles over access to the political domain among signori, rich merchants and guildsmen, as well as between major and lesser guilds. Outside the guilds, the popolo minuto, the ‘little people’ or labouring classes, including large numbers of skilled and unskilled workers in the wool trade, were completely excluded from the political sphere, except for one brief democratic moment, the Revolt of the Ciompi in 1378, one of the most famous incidents in Florentine history. The ciompi rebels briefly seized control of the government and then, with support from some members of the minor guilds, obtained guild privileges, which meant access to the political domain – only to lose it soon thereafter when the popolo grasso, their wealthy ‘fat’ compatriots, now with the help of the minor guilds, deprived them of guild and political privileges.
This episode would long remain, for better or worse, a vivid memory in the consciousness of the republic, not least for Machiavelli; and it illustrates most dramatically the distinctiveness of the civic domain in the Italian city-states. When, just three years later, the English peasant revolt erupted, its leader, Wat Tyler, is reported to have said, ‘No lord should have lordship save civilly’, and all men should be equal but the king. He was advocating not the peasant’s access to the civic domain but rather certain rights of property against the claims of lords and, perhaps, access to common-law courts to protect those property rights. The contrasts between this English case and the Revolt of the Ciompi are striking. For English peasants the issue is lordship, not citizenship; but, while the Italian case may seem in this respect less ‘feudal’, it is distinctive not because it presages some modern principle of individual autonomy and citizenship. The issue for the ciompi, no less than for the English peasantry, is the exclusive extra-economic powers and privileges, or ‘politically constituted property’, of their superiors. We might even be tempted to say that the English assertion of property rights against the claims of lordship have more in common with modern conceptions of citizenship than do the demands of Florentine labouring classes for a share in corporate privileges.
What singles out the Italian case, and what helps to explain the particularities of Renaissance Italian political thought, is that ‘politically constituted property’ is indeed political – that is to say, the extra-economic rights and privileges upon which economic power rests derive from the civic community, depending not on individual powers of lordship but on membership in the civic corporation. Social conflicts play themselves out on the civic terrain, not only in open struggle or organized rebellion but in the daily transactions of civic life, in an urban setting where all contenders, as individuals and as collective entities, are always face to face as citizens or aspirants to civic status. The inextricable connection between economic power and ‘extra-economic’ force means that economic rivalries, or social conflicts over property and inequalities of wealth, are inseparably struggles over civic power, always on the brink of open war.
‘Civic Humanism’ and Machiavelli
This very particular configuration of the civic domain produced distinctive traditions of political ideas. The designation ‘civic humanism’ to describe the main currents has become conventional among many historians of political thought. For the German historian Hans Baron, who coined the phrase, ‘civic humanism’ was a specifically Florentine conjunction of cultural humanism, with its educational ambitions, and the city republic’s defence of civic liberty against imperial domination. This, in his view, marked a decisive break from medieval religion and feudal hierarchy, towards modern ideals of political liberty, economic progress, secularism and intellectual creativity. Although he would, over several decades, develop and modify his views on civic humanism – and would later be more inclined than he was at first to include Machiavelli in that tradition – his original intention in identifying this historic rupture was not only historiographical but also political. He was seeking to promote a conception of modernity as the advance of human autonomy, at a time when, in Weimar Germany, such ideas were under threat from anti-democratic strains of German nationalism.
Baron’s idea would later find its way into the anglophone academy, adapted to various Anglo-American ‘republican’ traditions (the most notable example being John Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moment’). Recent scholarship has, nonetheless, tended to correct Baron’s exaggeration of the rupture between medieval and Renaissance political thought. More attention has been given to the continuities between scholasticism and humanism, indeed their coexistence and revival in the later Renaissance. Yet these corrections have failed to dispel the notion that ‘republican’ political theory, especially in its humanist mode, somehow points us towards the modern world. We shall in subsequent chapters raise questions about the very idea of ‘republicanism’, especially in its application to seventeenth-century English thinkers; but, for the moment, it is enough to say that, even if we acknowledge the existence of something like a ‘civic humanist’ tradition, it is profoundly misleading to characterize the political ideas of the Italian Renaissance – and of Machiavelli in particular – as a breakthrough to modernity. The very characteristics that give a ‘modern’ appearance to ideas like Machiavelli’s are rooted in a dying political form that would soon give way to ‘modern’ states. These states would generate their own political predicaments, together with modes of discourse designed to confront them in ways that ‘civic humanist’ or ‘republican’ ideas were unable to do.
There are, to be sure, significant differences between Machiavelli and, say, Marsilius of Padua two centuries before.3 These differences can even be characterized, without too much exaggeration, as having something to do with the contrasts between scholasticism and humanism. But much depends on whether we define those differences as products of transformations in language and discourse or place our emphasis on social relations and historical processes. It may be true that civic humanism had introduced a new language of politics, quite different from that of medieval scholasticism. It may even be true that Machiavelli belongs to the humanist tradition in a way that Marsilius did not. Yet both political thinkers were deeply rooted in the Italian city-state; and the differences between them have as much to do with changes in the circumstances of the city-states as they do with transformations in discourse.
The differences between Marsilius and Machiavelli also have to do with their differing relations to the social conflicts of their day. Marsilius was preoccupied not with the survival or autonomy of city-states but the factional struggles between papal and imperial parties. It can even be argued (as was done in the first volume of this study) that his defence of imperial power was driven less by fear of the papacy and its threats to civil peace than by his support for great aristocratic families like the Visconti of Milan and the della Scalas of Verona, who had strong imperial (Ghibelline) loyalties (as was typical among the landed nobility) and in whose service Marsilius worked. This allegiance to signorial power is masked by interpretations of Marsilius’s doctrine that treat him as a forerunner of modern republicanism, which also obscure the immediate issues confronting this late medieval thinker.
For Marsilius the problem, in the medieval manner, was a complex network of competing jurisdictions. When he outlined his idea of a single unitary jurisdiction, the civic corporation, he was certainly departing from the medieval norm of parcellized sovereignty; but he was by that means quite consciously supporting one claim to temporal authority against another, not so much the civic commune against all other jurisdictions but the Empire against the papacy, and Ghibelline signori against their civic rivals. He showed no concern for the threat to civic unity and jurisdiction posed by the feudal powers of the landed nobility, while his notion of a single unitary civic corporation represented a clear challenge to autonomous guilds and their anti-signorial powers. His notion of one undivided civic corporation simply trumped the claims of lesser corporate bodies.
Machiavelli’s Florence presented different problems, and his responses to them were shaped by different allegiances, perhaps more truly republican and certainly less inclined to the interests of the signori. The very survival of the city-state as anything like an autonomous entity was indeed at stake; and the immediate challenge was coming not from various fragmented jurisdictions, or from struggles between papal and imperial authorities, or between the civic factions they sustained, but from increasingly centralized and expanding states. The most powerful external forces were now rising territorial monarchies like France and Spain; and internal disorders in Florence were shaped by this new political reality.
The Italian city-states had already suffered from the general European crises, famine and plague of the fourteenth century. But even in good times their prosperity and success had depended on the fragmented governance of European feudalism and could not long survive the rise of strong territorial states. In constant rivalry and often open war with one another, the Italians were especially vulnerable to the territorial ambitions of the European monarchies. The role of commercial centres such as Venice and Florence as indispensable trading links in feudal Europe declined as feudal fragmentation gave way to centralized state powers, sustained by military superiority and the commercial advantages of imperial expansion.
By the fifteenth century, Venice and Florence stood almost alone as independent city-states. The Ottoman Empire deprived Venice of its dominance in east–west trade, capturing Constantinople in 1453, while European monarchies challenged both the political independence and the economic prosperity of the remaining city-states. Portugal extended its commercial reach to India, Spain gained access to the wealth of the New World, and France invaded Italy in 1494. Economic stagnation, social unrest and political upheaval in the city republics were immensely aggravated by years of war following the French invasion, as France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire battled for control of Italian territory – even while culture flourished in the city-states at the very moment of decline, when wealthy patrons of the arts, now more rentiers than entrepreneurs, engaged in ever more passionate conspicuous consumption.
It was the military disasters facing Italy, in 1494, and the political instability associated with them, that more than anything else concentrated the minds of Italian political thinkers, particularly in Florence. They were forced to reflect not only on the conditions of civic success and decline but also on the fundamental human traits that encouraged or impeded them. Niccolò Machiavelli’s generation was formed in this context, and its shadow looms over everything he wrote. He was born in 1469, the son of a distinguished lawyer, at a time when republican government had given way to Medici rule. Although of moderate means, his family seems to have belonged to a long line of Florentine notables. Machiavelli, who received a classic humanist education, began his career of public service as a clerk in 1494, the very year of the French invasion and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, and would go on to serve the restored Florentine republic in various civil, diplomatic and military functions from 1498 to 1512.
When the Medici returned, Machiavelli was thrown out of office. In 1513, accused of conspiracy against the Medici, he was imprisoned and tortured. On his release, expelled from the centre of power, he retreated to the countryside outside Florence, where, as he would famously write in a wistful letter to his friend Vettori, he whiled away the time in idle rural pursuits all day and
When evening comes I return home and go into my study, and at the door I take off my daytime dress covered in mud and dirt, and put on royal and curial robes; and then decently attired I enter the courts of the ancients, where affectionately greeted by them, I partake of that food which is mine alone and for which I was born; where I am not ashamed to talk with them and inquire the reasons of their actions; and they out of their human kindness answer me, and for four hours at a stretch I feel no worry of any kind; I forget all my troubles, I am not afraid of poverty or of death. I give myself up entirely to them. And because Dante says that understanding does not constitute knowledge unless it is retained in the memory, I have written down what I have learned from their conversation and composed a short work de Principatibus4
And so he produced his most famous work, The Prince, though it was published only later, in 1532. His advice to princes has been variously described – for instance, as an effort to ingratiate himself with the Medici, in an attempt to revive his career; or even as a coded message to opponents of the Medici, and others like them, exposing their methods of obtaining and retaining power. Whatever his intentions, Machiavelli remained confined to his rural retreat, where he also wrote the Discourses, which more clearly expressed his republican convictions. The Medici would eventually call again on his services, but his later career was less notable for his official duties than for his work in other fields, such as his great History of Florence and his play La Mandragola. He died in 1527.
The rising monarchical states, and the French monarchy in particular, would figure prominently in the formation of Machiavelli’s political thought. He was sent several times on diplomatic missions to the court of Louis XII to enlist the aid of France in various battles on Italian territory, not least the rivalry between Florence and Pisa, or to ensure that Florence would not be implicated in territorial wars among the European monarchies. His early missions inspired a growing conviction that Florence should free itself of dependence on foreign powers by mobilizing its own citizen army, in sharp contrast to the Italian tradition of mercenary soldiers. Machiavelli supervised the formation of the Florentine army in the restored republic, which won a famous victory against Pisa in 1509; and a strong commitment to citizen militias would lie at the heart of his political thought. When Spain supported the Medici in their efforts to recover their power in Florence, the republic turned for help again to France, to no avail – with dramatic consequences for Machiavelli’s career. Whatever else he may have intended when he wrote The Prince, one bitter inspiration may have been Louis XII’s betrayal of the Florentine republic. Machiavelli would invoke the example of the French king as a primary lesson to princes not for his successes so much as for his failures, which, in Machiavelli’s eyes, had brought such tragedy to Italy.
European territorial monarchies, then, would always be in Machiavelli’s line of sight as he elaborated his political ideas. In the conclusion to The Prince, with its passionate call for the liberation of Italy from the ‘barbarians’, his main target is patently obvious. Yet it would be a mistake to interpret this call for a strong and united Italian defence against expanding territorial states as a demand for the unification of Italy – or even its north-central regions – into a ‘modern’ nation state like France. These developing territorial states were already becoming the dominant force in Europe, but for Machiavelli they represented not so much models to be emulated as external threats to be resisted. He does, to be sure, cite France as the best monarchy, for its lawfulness and apparently for its suppression of the nobility. But it cannot be said that he sheds much light on the nature of the rising monarchies. He can speak of the French king in terms hardly different from those he uses to describe the infamous Cesare Borgia. Machiavelli remained rooted in the city-state of Florence. Although he certainly shared his city’s expansionist ambitions and would have welcomed an extension of Florentine rule over its neighbours, of the kind the republic had enjoyed in its more prosperous days, he retained a firm commitment to the city-republic. Visible even in The Prince, this is the very essence of the Discourses.
Machiavelli was deeply rooted in the civic corporation; and the very particular force of his ‘modern’ approach to political ‘science’ derives from his attachment to the independent city-state at a very specific historical moment. Conditions were very different from what they had been in Italian city-states when his great predecessor, Marsilius of Padua, devised his theory of the civic corporation. It is the threat to the very survival of the city-state that gives Machiavelli’s political thought its particular edge. Renaissance conceptions of human autonomy and civic liberty may seem to presage modernity even while reviving ancient ideas; but the ‘modern’ sensibility attributed to Machiavelli derives from a particularly archaic feature of the Italian city-state, the characteristic blend of civic and military values that sustained it.
In Machiavelli’s political works, as distinct from his history of Florence, there is no evidence that the context in which he was writing was one of the great commercial centres of Europe. Commercial values are nowhere visible, and commercial activity barely figures at all. Yet the spirit of his work is very much the spirit of the Italian commercial city, the city-republic in which a commercial economy existed under a highly militarized urban rule, armed to withstand external threats, to dominate the contado, to defeat commercial rivals and extend the city-state’s commercial supremacy, in what might be called an urban and commercial feudalism.
Political and economic power, as we have already observed, were inextricably conjoined in the commercial republics, which in this respect had more in common with medieval social forms than with modern capitalism. Governed by collectives of urban elites, whose political and economic rivalries were never far from violent struggle, these cities relied on armed force not only to dominate their neighbouring territories but to defeat commercial rivals and expand their own supremacy in trade. Even conflicts between rich and poor, or between the popolo minuto and popolo grasso, had the character of power struggles always on the verge of violence. In the late fifteenth century, the immediate threats from foreign powers, which also exacerbated internal conflicts, added a particular urgency to military questions. In these circumstances, Machiavelli was not alone to see the civic domain in military terms.
It was not unusual to ascribe the success of commercial republics to the warrior mentality of urban elites, nor to blame commercial decline on a loss of martial spirit. Republicans who decried the corruptions of Medici rule were likely to share the view of Machiavelli’s friend and critic Francesco Guicciardini, that ‘the Medici family, like all narrow regimes, always tried to prevent arms being possessed by the citizens and to extinguish all their virility. For this reason we have become very effeminate, and we also lack the courageousness of our forefathers.’5 This assessment might be shared by all kinds of republicans, whether they subscribed to a less restrictive republican citizenry, a governo largo, as Machiavelli did, or, like Guicciardini, to a governo stretto, a republic in which the aristocracy played a more important role. It may even be possible to say that a certain martial spirit, as much as any other quality, sets civic humanism apart from scholastic philosophy.
The humanists are noted above all else for reviving the literature of classical antiquity, both Greek and Latin; but in civic humanism there is no mistaking an inclination towards Rome. The novelties of humanistic discourse, in contrast to the scholastic tradition, are akin to the Roman departures from Greek philosophy, the characteristically Roman interest in the active life, in rhetoric and ethics for its own sake, less systematically grounded in theories of the cosmos, metaphysics or psychology. If Aristotle was the prophet of scholasticism, in civic humanist discourse he was displaced, or at least supplemented, by Cicero, whom Petrarch called ‘the great genius’ of antiquity. Aristotle may have been no less attached to the life of the polis than to the life of the mind; but Cicero, the consummate politician and orator, spoke more directly to the spirit of republican activism. It is Cicero who was likely to be invoked to counter Christian, and especially Augustinian, fatalism about the possibilities of human excellence and action in attaining a good life in this world; and it is Cicero who guided republican views on the education needed to achieve that excellence, especially the skills of rhetoric so vital to the active public life.
But the Roman example meant something else, too. When Aristotle spelled out his classic characterization of man as a political animal, and his theory of the polis as the terrain of human excellence, he was not concerned to defend the city-state from external threats to its very survival. The polis, after the Macedonian conquest, was already effectively dead as an independent political form. But the philosopher embraced, and even served, the Macedonian hegemony; and he envisioned a new life for the polis under imperial rule, in keeping with Alexander’s distinctive mode of imperial governance, through the medium of local aristocracies in ostensibly self-governing municipalities. Macedonian hegemony had the added advantage, for Aristotle, of supplanting radical Athenian democracy, enhancing the power of the aristocracy against unbridled rule by the demos. This delicate balance of class power required the suppression of social strife, especially the conflicts between rich and poor, the philosopher’s main practical concern. The ideal Athenian citizen, then, governed by Macedonian agents under the watchful eye of imperial garrisons, was not a man of struggle or of military virtues.
The Roman case could hardly be more different. The republic was itself an imperial power, whose conquests had created a huge territorial empire with what would become the largest military force the world had ever known. While Roman thinkers such as Cicero were no less committed than Aristotle to a ‘mixed’ constitution in which the common people were subordinate to aristocracy, in Cicero’s Rome the civic culture was at heart a military ethic. Against the background of the threat to Florentine autonomy, it was this above all that spoke to Machiavelli, who took the civic humanist idea of ‘virility’, or virtù, to the limits of its martial spirit.
The Prince
In his most famous, not to say notorious, work, The Prince, Machiavelli lays out his ‘Machiavellian’ challenge to any conception of political power that invokes moral principles to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. There is, evidently, no such thing as rightful authority, and power is to be maintained by any means necessary. How far Machiavelli meant to push this principle remains a matter of dispute. Whatever his motivations, whether he was seeking the approval of the Medici or was simply driven by a bitter sense of irony in his exile from politics, commentators who regard him as a ‘realist’ are no doubt closer to the truth than those who treat him as the emblematic advocate of political evil. There is, at any rate, no mistaking the differences between The Prince and the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy, which almost certainly expresses Machiavelli’s own disposition more precisely, displaying a preference for republican government that requires him to make the kinds of judgments about good government that he refuses in The Prince.
Much has been written about Machiavelli’s relation to, and divergences from, the civic humanist tradition; and, more specifically, about where to situate The Prince within a genre familiar to his contemporaries: humanist advice-books to princes. For Machiavelli, as for other writers in the genre, writes Quentin Skinner, ‘the prince’s basic aim, we learn in a phrase that echoes through Il Principe, must be mantenere lo stato, to maintain his power and existing frame of government. As well as keeping the peace, however, a true prince must at the same time seek “to establish such a form of government as will bring honour to himself and benefit the whole body of his subjects”’.6
Where Machiavelli significantly and famously departs from other humanists, as Skinner observes in his account of what it means to mantenere lo stato, is in his insistence that the willingness to use force is essential to good princely government, in contrast to the conventional humanist distinction between virtus or manliness, and vis, that is, brute force, and in his dissent from humanist accounts of princely virtues, which require both the highest standards of personal morality and a strict adherence to principles of justice.7 But this departure may have less to do with differing views about how best to maintain what Skinner calls ‘the existing frame of government’ than with Machiavelli’s concentration on external military threats, which puts war at the centre of his doctrine.
What Machiavelli means when he speaks – as he so often does – of lo stato remains a subject of scholarly debate. Yet again, the issue turns on whether he has in mind a ‘modern’ concept of the state as an impersonal legal and political order, or a pre-modern idea of political authority as a personal possession or dominium, or something in between and ‘transitional’. There is still much of the pre-modern personal in Machiavelli’s stato, with its emphasis on the personal power and honour of the prince. But if there is also an element of the impersonal, it may have less to do with a ‘modern’ conception of the state than with Machiavelli’s military preoccupations and the threats that loom from without.
In The Prince Machiavelli tells us that
A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline . . . there is nothing proportionate between the armed and the unarmed; and it is not reasonable that he who is armed should yield obedience willingly to him who is unarmed, or that the unarmed man should be secure among armed servants . . . He ought never, therefore, to have out of his thoughts this subject of war, and in peace he should addict himself more to its exercise than in war. (XIV)
Machiavelli’s military model goes beyond the art of war. In The Prince he not only identifies war as the prince’s main concern. His conceptions of leadership, political morality, and the conditions for sustaining a successful civic order are at bottom the conditions of a successful military power. Ideally, in his view, this is best achieved by a difficult balance between ruthless leadership and popular support, a capacity for cruelty and frequent departures from conventional morality, combined with an ability to mobilize the loyalties of the rank and file. The fact that Machiavelli has no use for a traditional military aristocracy and that his ideal military organization is a citizens’ militia makes the conditions of success even more exacting – and, as becomes clearer in the Discourses, at this point his views on military success become inseparable from his republicanism.
Machiavelli’s views on religion are also a subject of controversy, not least because, especially in the Discourses, he suggests that conventional Christianity has had the effect of weakening the manly vigour, the virtù, required for the active civic life. Yet his attitude has much in common with that of other humanists in his challenge not to Christian faith in general but to scholastic Christian fatalism, which requires submission to the blind power of fate and fortune and views the frivolous goods of this world – wealth, power, honour, fame and glory – as useless and unworthy of pursuit. Again like other humanists, he challenges these beliefs not by denying that much of human life is determined by circumstances beyond our control – the dictates of fortuna – but by emphasizing the scope of human action within the limits imposed on us by fate or fortune or God’s will. Fortuna can be a friend to the man of virtù, instead of a pitiless enemy beyond the reach of human capacities and action. Every civic order will, to be sure, inevitably decline; and then a new order will have to be founded, which will make even greater demands on virtù. On this score, too, Machiavelli is not so distant from other humanists. Where he departs from humanist conventions is in his insistence that virtù may run counter to conventional morality; that political stability is possible despite – or even because of – humanity’s most stubborn defects; and that men of virtù must often commit acts of violence, especially in the foundation of new states.
Machiavelli’s views on the conditions for the creation and maintenance of a successful civic order depend, of course, on certain convictions about the possibilities available to human action; and his military principles are supported by more fundamental assumptions about history and human nature. He never precisely spells out his conception of human nature, though he certainly assumes the worst by emphasizing the insatiable desires of human beings, their short-sightedness and envy, even their general untrustworthiness. But the important point for him is that, because human nature remains essentially immutable, we can learn from historical experience, imitating successful actions while avoiding those that have failed. Human beings can adapt to varying circumstances. They can indeed, up to a point, shape those circumstances and, in so doing, shape themselves; and the very qualities that seem to militate against stability and social order can be channelled to positive ends.
Machiavelli’s military model of political order, then, encompasses his most familiar ‘Machiavellian’ strictures on the necessity of force and violence in creating and sustaining the body politic; the importance of fear in the maintenance of leadership (it is best, of course, for a leader to be both loved and feared, but if he has to choose, fear must prevail); the need for ruthless treatment of one’s adversaries, even if that means violating the most cherished principles of conventional morality; and so on.
The opposition of the armed and the unarmed lies at the very heart of Machiavelli’s political theory. In The Prince, one of his principal criticisms is levelled against a man who was also one of the most famous leaders of the Florentine republic, Girolamo Savonarola. A Dominican friar, preacher and prophet, Savonarola led Florence when the Medici were expelled in 1494; but, says Machiavelli, he was an ‘unarmed prophet’, in sharp contrast to others who had founded a new order but who, unlike the prophet unarmed, were able to maintain their positions: ‘armed prophets’ such as Moses or leaders like Cyrus, Theseus and Romulus. The whole of Machiavelli’s political theory is in many ways directed at the failings of the unarmed prophet.
Savonarola had predicted the French invasion, placing the blame on the corruption and decadence of Florence in the era of Medici rule. He began, in fact, by predicting the downfall of the city, doomed by the will of God as punishment for its own sins; but he would go on to extol the Florentine republic, which would, he declared, restore itself by banishing moral corruption. When the Medici fled and the French withdrew, the preacher’s credibility was vastly enhanced, and his vision of an incorruptible Christian republic held sway for a few years, finding its most emblematic moment in a ‘bonfire of the vanities’. Since his attacks on moral corruption included the clergy, he had powerful enemies in the Church. Having lost the support of the Florentine people who had tired of his moralistic rule, he was excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI and executed in 1498.
Savonarola’s defence of the republic was essentially scholastic in its mode of argumentation. Humanistic speculations about human autonomy and excellence, while certainly not alien to Christianity, were less congenial to the preacher’s uncompromising convictions about the primacy of divine will. While he extolled republican liberties, they were to be preserved not by struggle but by banishing corruption and suppressing conflict within the civic order. After his execution his followers, who remained a significant political force in Florence, would prefer the example of aristocratic Venice ruled by its Great Council, or of Florence in the era of governo stretto, the restricted civic order that governed the republic on the eve of Medici rule and was advocated by the Florentine aristocracy.
On these scores, Machiavelli disagreed with Savonarola and his supporters on every count. There has been much debate about Machiavelli’s attitude towards Savonarola. Some commentators have suggested that he respected the preacher as much as he condemned him; and he certainly does praise him, for instance in the Discourses. But Machiavelli’s doctrine of struggle, conflict and military prowess is in direct antithesis to the ‘unarmed prophet’, in opposition to Christian fatalism and the invocation of God’s will as responses to disasters like the French invasion.
The Discourses
Machiavelli’s conviction that every state will eventually decline suggests, on the face of it, that he shares the views so typical of his contemporaries and predecessors about the cyclical processes of history and the inevitable decline of even the most stable and powerful political order, however well endowed with virtù their leaders may be. In the Discourses he also – at least pro forma – draws on his ancient predecessors, especially Polybius, in outlining the different forms of government and the conditions of their rise and decline. But it soon becomes clear that he has something else in mind. He tells us that others who have written about such matters have said that there are three principal forms of government: principality or monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Moreover, he continues, they have said that there are actually six, three good forms and three bad, each good form having a tendency to degenerate into a pernicious variant: principality can easily become tyranny, as aristocracy can readily become oligarchy, and democracy anarchy. Machiavelli then ascribes to the classics the view that all six forms are actually pernicious, the ‘bad’ because they are bad in themselves and the ‘good’ because they can so easily corrupt. To avoid the inevitable evils of these basic forms, he tells us, classical writers tend to opt for a mixed constitution.
Machiavelli goes through the motions of summing up the early history of Rome as a process of transition from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy. But it soon emerges that he differs fundamentally from his predecessors, because he is addressing a rather different problem. He is not primarily concerned with the forms of constitution as defined by the ancients. He is interested in the forms of state that immediately affect his own time and place: above all the city-republics of Italy, governed by civic bodies that range from the oligarchic to the more inclusive, though never democratic, as well as (up to a point) the rising monarchies, such as France or Spain, by which the city-states are threatened. He offers – without systematically spelling it out – a classification different from the ancient one, a simple opposition between principalities and republics, the latter either democratic or aristocratic; and his principal objective in exploring these two forms is even more specific: to consider the conditions for maintaining liberty. That, when all is said and done, is the main theme of the Discourses. In this respect, it already asks questions different from those that concerned Plato in his account of political rise and decline, or even Polybius, whose idea of the ‘mixed constitution’ Machiavelli appears to adopt. But, if his concerns with republican liberty have more in common with his contemporary civic humanists than with ancient ideas on political cycles, he makes an observation that sets him on a rather different path; and in retrospect, it also sheds light on The Prince.
Describing the cycle of rise and decline, he writes:
This, then, is the cycle through which all commonwealths pass, whether they govern themselves or are governed. But rarely do they return to the same form of government, for there can scarce be a state of such vitality that it can undergo often such changes and yet remain in being. What usually happens is that, while in a state of commotion in which it lacks both counsel and strength, a state becomes subject to a neighbouring and better organized state. Were it not so, a commonwealth might go on for ever passing through these governmental transitions. (I.2.13)
This observation is not simply a prelude to the remarks that follow it about the advantages of a constitution that can claim to combine – as did the Roman republic – the three major forms, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, in a way that enhances stability. On this score, Machiavelli appears to have much in common with other advocates of a ‘mixed’ constitution. At the same time, he departs from convention by insisting that, in Rome, ‘it was friction between the plebs and the senate that brought this perfection about’. He departs from the classic view of the mixed constitution as a mode of consolidating oligarchic rule. In the context of Florentine politics, he has little use for the nobility. While he is no democrat, he prefers governo largo to governo stretto; and, given a choice between democracy and oligarchy, his preference would seem to be democracy.
Yet his comments suggest that he is less concerned with classifying governments, or with the internal conditions that preserve or destroy particular forms of government, or with the mechanisms of transition from one form to another, than with the maintenance of the commonwealth itself and above all its capacity to resist threats from without. The cycles of governmental change could, for better or worse, go on forever, were they not cut short by conquest. The fundamental criterion of political stability is not the quality or duration of any specific political form but the capacity of the state, whatever its form, to withstand external military threats.
This is not to say that Machiavelli is interested only in military readiness and not in the general conditions of a stable civic order or the well-being of the people; but, even when he departs from the amorality of The Prince, his preoccupation with external threats colours everything he says about political success. In the Discourses he remains concerned with the survival of states in the face of foreign invasions, and he is as direct and uncompromising as ever in his advocacy, when necessary, of violence and deception. Here, too, domestic conflicts are conceived in terms not very different from wars between states. But now he extends his analysis beyond the most basic conditions of mantenere lo stato against external threats; and his demands are more exacting than in The Prince, because the issue is no longer mere survival, or even the preservation of the state’s liberty from external domination, but also the preservation of civic liberty within the state. This requires more than the absence of tyranny. The fundamental condition is still the city-state’s autonomy, its freedom from foreign conquests and, not least, from dependence on foreign powers; but there is more at stake. While he certainly discusses the conditions for maintaining principalities, his chief concern is the foundation and preservation of a free republic.
It is, nonetheless, striking how much of the Discourses is devoted to military matters, and how much his preference for republican governments itself is cast in military terms. Republican liberty may be good in itself, but popular government also generally gives rise to more reliable armies and to better soldiers – even if they must submit themselves to leadership. It could even be said that, for Machiavelli, what makes a republic on the whole a better bet than princely government is that it tends, as Roman history so clearly demonstrates, to produce a more effective fighting force.
It is here that Machiavelli’s military preoccupations merge with his republicanism. His military ideal, the citizen’s militia, certainly requires leadership, but it is leadership that can inspire loyalty and love among the rank and file. Ordinary soldiers cannot simply be obedient cannon fodder but must enjoy the respect of their leaders and must themselves partake of military virtues. While a mercenary army is typically led by a traditional military aristocracy, a citizen’s militia requires the subordination of the aristocracy to the larger civic community. When Machiavelli extols the benefits of social conflict, untypically for his time and in sharp contrast, for instance, to Aristotelian principles, he has in mind not simply its effects in maintaining the militant spirit of the citizens but also the necessity of constant struggle to keep the aristocracy in check. On this score he departs even from Cicero, who shared Aristotle’s predisposition to aristocratic dominance and the kind of social harmony required to sustain it.
Yet even if Machiavelli’s preference for republican liberty is in large part shaped by a conviction that it produces better armies, the military cast of his arguments is not just a matter of defending against external threats. If he were simply writing about the art of war – as he does in his book of that name, which he regarded as his greatest achievement – his characteristic ‘Machiavellian’ principles would be less startling than they are when applied to the daily transactions of politics. What he has to say about violence and deception would hardly seem alien to a military strategist. Nor would his insistence on the need to adapt oneself to the times and to existing circumstances – which commentators have singled out as a particularly significant departure from the standard views of his contemporaries and predecessors, who measured politics against some universal moral standard. The advocacy of deception and the necessity of adapting to changing conditions were, after all, central to one of the earliest masterpieces of military literature: The Art of War, attributed to Sun Tzu in China in the sixth century BC. What is new in Machiavelli is the application of these military principles to politics; and this is rooted in the very specific conditions of Renaissance Florence.
The military model of politics belongs to the essence of the Discourses no less than to that of The Prince. Maintaining a republic, he insists, requires ruthless leadership, which is prepared to violate conventional morality – as his friend and mentor, Piero Soderini, failed to do when he led the Florentine republic, with, as Machiavelli tells us, disastrous results. But understanding Machiavelli’s preoccupation here with domestic liberty and order demands something more, a closer look at the conditions of civic disorder and decline. In his History of Florence, he recounts at some length the story of the ciompi rebellion, presenting it as a turning-point in the history of his city, the culmination of its endless factional and social conflicts. In a speech attributed to a ciompi militant, he sums up in the most dramatic terms what is at stake. Just as the economic rivalries of the urban patriciate played themselves out in political factions, so, too, did the economic grievances of the urban poor over inadequate remuneration for their labours turn into conflict over guild privileges and then a struggle for political power. Power struggles of this kind all too readily took on the character of war:
[O]ur opponents are disunited and rich; their disunion will give us the victory, and their riches, when they have become ours, will support us. Be not deceived about that antiquity of blood by which they exalt themselves above us; for all men having had one common origin, are all equally ancient, and nature has made us all after one fashion. Strip us naked, and we shall all be found alike. Dress us in their clothing, and they in ours, we shall appear noble, they ignoble – for poverty and riches make all the difference . . . [A]ll who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavour to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty . . . Therefore we must use force when the opportunity offers; and fortune cannot present us one more favourable than the present, when the citizens are still disunited, the Signory doubtful, and the magistrates terrified; for we may easily conquer them before they can come to any settled arrangement. By this means we shall either obtain the entire government of the city, or so large a share of it, as to be forgiven past errors, and have sufficient authority to threaten the city with a renewal of them at some future time. (III.3)
This dramatically captures the realities of Florentine politics and, perhaps more than any other passage in Machiavelli’s writings, starkly sums up his understanding of the problems his political theory is meant to confront. He is not here advocating the violence proposed in the speech, but he sees how and why things have come to this pass. He even suggests that it was inevitable and, in the circumstances, preferable to what the signori had done. Yet in the Discourses a bloody outcome like this is precisely what he sets out to avoid in his recommendations for a successful republican order – that it be, at the same time, an effective military force.
The balance at which he aims is difficult. Civic liberty requires that the aristocracy be kept in check and that the people have some role in politics. Military success, which is far more likely to be achieved by a citizens’ militia than by untrustworthy nobles and their mercenary armies, also depends on some kind of equilibrium among the social classes; and this requires some degree of civil strife, a fruitful tension between people and patriciate. The problem is that civil strife can always descend into outright war. It was the Romans who, at least for a time in the days of the republic’s imperial expansion, struck the right balance. They built their empire not by simple oligarchic rule and the suppression of the common people – as in ancient Sparta or in Venice. They found a middle way between oligarchy and democracy by giving the people a voice through the tribunate, which institutionalized and channelled social strife. Contrary to all conventional opinion, which condemns the quarrels between the nobles and the plebs, says Machiavelli, it was those very quarrels that preserved Roman liberty.
If Machiavelli seems to be a political ‘scientist’ or even a political ‘realist’ avant la lettre, these qualities have more to do with his grounding in the political realities of his city-state, with its military civic culture and the immediate dangers it confronted, than with any modern conception of the state or some affinity to scientific methods.8 His military model of politics conformed to the realities of domestic politics in Florence, where political rivals and factions were always on the verge of war, no less than to the threats that faced his city from without. More than other civic humanists, he proceeded unambiguously on the premise that the object of war, foreign or domestic, is to win, in conformity with moral principles if possible but with cruel violence, deceit and stratagem if not. Machiavelli’s military model was, in the context of Florentine realities and the culture of civic humanism, a relatively small change of perspective; but it was enough to shift the focus away from the just political order or the virtuous prince to the means of seizing and maintaining power, pure and simple. Especially when cast in Machiavelli’s vivid and uncompromising prose, that seemed a shocking innovation.
It is, then, precisely his commitment to a practically defunct political form that produced what many commentators have interpreted as Machiavelli’s most ‘modern’ political ideas. His views on governance, on how to achieve and maintain power, on relations among citizens and even between princes and their subjects, are steeped in the conditions of the city-state. It is the city-state that for Machiavelli defines the political terrain. This affects his military model of politics, which gives his political theory the aura of ‘realism’ that to some commentators seems distinctly modern; but it also produces a conception of civic liberty that gives his ideas a flavour in some ways more familiar to modern audiences than political ideas emanating from the rising territorial monarchies that would shape the new world order of modern nation states.
In the classics of sixteenth-century French political thought, for example, the political domain is not a civic community, a community of citizens. It is a contested terrain among various competing jurisdictions: the monarchy, the nobility, local magistrates and various corporate bodies. When Jean Bodin outlined an argument in favour of an ‘absolutist’ monarchy and devised a theory of sovereignty that has been called a landmark in the evolution of the modern state, he was addressing the position of the monarchy in relation to various corporate powers with varying degrees of autonomy. Even the anti-absolutist arguments of, say, the Huguenot resistance tracts, had little to do with the rights and powers of citizens. Instead, when they asserted the rights of the ‘people’ against the centralizing monarchy, they were asserting not the rights of citizens but the autonomous powers of various office-holders, ‘lesser’ magistrates, the provincial nobility, urban corporations and other corporate powers.
In England, which had long before become the most effective centralized administration in Europe, corporate powers were weaker than in France; and even at moments of the greatest tension between monarch and nobility, from Magna Carta to the Civil War, the issue was not jurisdictional disputes of the kind that defined the political terrain in France. Yet the political sphere was typically conceived as a partnership of Crown and Parliament, and the English were slow to formulate the tensions between these two partners in terms of popular sovereignty. We shall return to the peculiarities of England in a later chapter and to the radical ideas that challenged the prevailing wisdom; but for now it suffices to say that, even when royalists and parliamentarians came to blows, the English were, for their own distinctive reasons, disinclined to conceptualize a political domain defined by the rights and powers of citizens as distinct from the rights and powers of Parliament. Even ‘republicans’, as we shall see, did not always make clear that citizenship meant something more than the right to be (actually or ‘virtually’) represented by Parliament – which did not necessarily entail the right to vote for it.
By contrast, the Renaissance city-republics extended corporate principles and corporate autonomy to the civic community as a whole; and this produced something more ostensibly akin to modern ideas of popular sovereignty, the sovereignty of citizens, in contrast to the discourse of territorial monarchies. We are, in today’s liberal democracies, accustomed to thinking of citizens’ rights as a hallmark of a truly modern politics. That, among other things, is what allows some commentators to identify ‘civic humanism’ or even Renaissance ‘republicanism’ as a window to the modern world. But it may be misleading to describe membership in the civic corporation in medieval and Renaissance Italy as ‘citizenship’, since it vests political rights in corporate bodies and not individual citizens, while the republican discourse has less to do with the advent of the ‘modern’ state (unless it is as a threat to the survival of city-republics) than with the distinctive unity of civic, commercial and military principles in a political form that would not survive modernity.
