This static quality of man’s character led Machiavelli toward an empirical science of politics, even though his primitive conception of it was far different from any such modem understanding. His emphasis upon a constant human nature yielded two important conclusions. First, it led him to a conception of the past generally held in the Renaissance, a view of human history as a vast reservoir of models and guides. Second, and perhaps more important, it led him to an identification of politics with conflict and to a most original belief that social conflict of a certain kind was a positive force within a political organization. This insight moved him to examine in some detail and from a fresh perspective the related but subordinate problems of political corruption, factions, and conspiracies.
HISTORY AND THE DOCTRINE OF IMITATION IN MACHIAVELLI
Every major work by Machiavelli and many of his minor writings underscore his faith in the didactic potential of exemplary models from ancient or contemporary history. In The Prince (VII) he compares men to prudent archers who aim at targets beyond their reach in order to strike those within their range. In the introduction to the first book of The Discourses he indignantly describes how Italians of his day valued a broken piece of sculpture from the past as a model for their own works of art but ignored the more practical benefits of imitating the ancients in their political institutions. Unlike post-Enlightenment political theorists, whose works often reflect at least an implicit belief in progress, Machiavelli believes that history progresses not in a forward or unilinear direction but in a circle or a cycle. Since he locates the standard of excellence in the past and asserts that the present must attempt to conform to the past rather than striving to surpass it, the only positive direction for political change is back to beginnings—rebirth, regeneration, renewal; in short, a renaissance of past virtues. Thus, the most revolutionary social thinker of the sixteenth century was, paradoxically, obsessed with returning present practice to an ancient norm.
By turning to the past, Renaissance men could learn from it and might avoid common errors, thereby profiting from the positive examples provided by ancient historians or contemporary observation. Machiavelli’s hope, best expressed in The Art of War (VII), is that the artistic and cultural Renaissance, which he believed was directly linked to a rebirth of classical forms, themes, and values in the plastic arts and literature, might be extended to the more practical realm of political affairs: “I would not have you be afraid or dismayed for this province of Italy, for it seems it was born to revive dead things, as we have seen in its poetry, painting, and sculpture.”
From our own perspective, locating perfection in a distant past seems to present the political leader with a pessimistic, hopeless situation. We are so accustomed to the belief in progress implicit in a number of widely held social theories prevalent in our era that we view any denial of this hope with some suspicion and as a constraint upon practical action. But the educated reader of Machiavelli’s day, still dazzled by the majesty of a classical civilization yet only dimly understood, and intimidated by what he considered to be the obvious superiority of the ancients in various fields—notably political theory, law, history, and philosophy—viewed Machiavelli’s nostalgia for the classical past with hope and a sense of liberation rather than despair. Although the Romans were almost impossible to surpass, nevertheless they too were men and their nature was similar to that of contemporary man. Modem Italians could thus create a government modeled after the ancients; they likewise enjoyed a measure of free will and were to some extent the masters of their destinies. No longer was it necessary for a divine Providence or a blind Fortune to control human history. The state, in Burckhardt’s classic formulation, could finally become a work of art, the product of conscious human planning, reasoning, and action on a purely secular level. All of these notions were implicit in Machiavelli’s view of history and imitation, and his contemporaries immediately grasped the implications of these liberating ideas. In fact, Machiavelli’s metaphor for the ruler in several important passages of The Prince is that of the architect, the physician, or the artist. The state is variously compared to a building with solid foundations designed by a master builder, a patient whose illness must be diagnosed properly by a skilled and prudent physician; or a work of art which must be given aesthetic form by a sensitive artist in order to transform it from an amorphous material state into a pleasing structure. First and foremost, therefore, in his emphasis upon human nature and his interest in the didactic value of human history, Machiavelli uses his revolutionary political theory to return politics to the realm of the possible and the state to the hand of man.
POLITICS AS CONFLICT
Machiavelli’s belief in a constant, immutable human nature led him to develop an original view of social conflict as the essence of political behavior. In all his works, political activity is more often characterized by motion, conflict, and dynamic or violent change than by stasis, cooperation, and a rigid social structure. Several important assumptions underlie this belief. First, his view of human nature as naturally acquisitive and insatiable in its desires is followed by a second, less explicit, premise about economic life. While human desires are defined as insatiable, fortuna prohibits men from possessing sufficient virtù or ability to obtain all of what they desire. In effect, there is a universal principle of economic scarcity in operation in the world, and man’s hopes simply outrun the potential of this world’s goods. There is not enough material wealth to satisfy the boundless human desire to acquire more wealth. When such an acquisitive, aggressive human nature is combined with severely restricted resources, political conflict is the inevitable result. Such conflict is not seen as an abnormal state of affairs, nor is the goal of political theory defined as the search for a body politic which has abolished social struggle. Conspiracies, invasions, wars, and all manner of internal or external violence are natural phenomena in Machiavelli’s political universe and are not defined as aberrations from a stable norm.
But the mere recognition of the existence of conflict in society is insufficient grounds for establishing the originality of Machiavelli’s views. The truly original conception, in this regard, was Machiavelli’s belief that such conflict might, in fact, produce beneficial results in a properly organized government controlled by stable political institutions. Renaissance thinkers seemed to agree that the burden of classical authority had demonstrated the inherent instability of a republican form of government and often used this tradition to criticize the concept of self-government, thereby praising the rule of princes or kings as a more stable system. Rather than avoiding this issue by offering his reader a utopian vision of a republic (such as More’s Utopia), the kind of states “that have never been seen nor known to exist in reality,” as he puts it in The Prince (XV), Machiavelli moved to refute the traditional claim that republican government was inherently undesirable because of its instability. In The Discourses he presented a view of the cycle of governments—the three good forms of states: principality, aristocracy, and democracy; and their three corrupt counterparts: tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy—which he found in the writings of a number of earlier classical theorists. For him, however, “all the forms of government listed are defective: the three good ones because of the brevity of their lives, and the three bad ones because of their inherent harmfulness” (Discourses, I, ii). As a result, he aligns himself with classical theorists advocating a mixed form of government as the most stable.
But political stability, in Machiavelli’s view, is not achieved by the absence of conflict or by a static social structure where no change or movement is permitted. On the contrary, a healthy body politic is one characterized by social friction and conflict. In the Roman republic, the best historical example of a self-governing republic founded upon the principle of mixed government, it was precisely the social friction between the plebeians and the aristocrats of the senate that contributed to the city’s greatness and its liberty. Machiavelli’s interpretation of these conflicts moved him to propose a mo
del for political stability based upon a dynamic equilibrium between political forces rather than upon their suppression in order to create a false stability. This led him to a closer examination, in The Discourses, of the problem of civic stability, political corruption, and the creation of institutions to regulate such social conflict, and resulted in a related analysis of a typical modern republic in The History of Florence.
While a modern reader may be able to assimilate Machiavelli’s conception of social conflict to contemporary political theory with little difficulty, a corollary of his views on internal conflicts may not be quite as acceptable. For Machiavelli also affirms that there exist two types of republics: static states ruled by the nobles (Venice, ancient Sparta) and others in which the protection of liberty has been placed in the hands of the plebeians. Moreover, he believes that the republics of Venice or Sparta were satisfied with relatively limited external expansion, while the Roman republic became an imperial power precisely because the internal struggles between the plebeians and the nobles created a powerful populace which was required to further Roman foreign policy but which could not be docilely managed when peacetime returned. Machiavelli is clearly not a pacifist, and just as he accepts what to many readers is an intolerable level of violence within the state’s borders (particularly in the form of conspiracies against institutions or individuals holding power), he also assumes the inevitability of war between sovereign states and, indeed, praises those republics, such as Rome, which are well adapted to this natural condition. In Machiavelli’s view of both domestic and foreign affairs, as well as in his conception of the political hero, armed conflict will often determine the ablest, most versatile government or ruler, and he has little sympathy for the governments which do not defend themselves with resolution and foresight or rulers who prefer a policy of temporizing to one of decisive action. The place of military affairs in his political theory is, therefore, fundamental.
POLITICS AND WARFARE
In all Machiavelli’s works, military strength is a decisive criterion in the evaluation of a state’s independence. In The Prince (X), for example, the strength of a principality is primarily measured by the ruler’s military self-sufficiency and his ability to field an army against any of his potential enemies. In both a principality and a republic, moreover, good laws and good armies provide the “principal foundations,” but it seems clear that Machiavelli gives priority to arms over laws “since there cannot exist good laws where there are no good armies, and where there are good armies there must be good laws” (The Prince, XII). In general, as we already know, Machiavelli blames the ruinous condition of Italian political affairs upon the institution of mercenary troops, and he always admired those governments (ancient Rome or Sparta, the Swiss of his own day) which defended their freedom with armies of free citizens. His interest in military matters was primarily a practical one, for he could see no reason to establish civilian institutions without first guaranteeing their protection from internal or external enemies: “Good institutions without military backing undergo the same sort of disorder as the rooms of a splendid and regal palace which, adorned with gems and gold but without a roof, have nothing to protect them from the rain” (The Art of War, preface).
Machiavelli also posited a necessary link between the existence of a free, republican form of government and a citizens’ militia. He believed that an army composed of the prince’s subjects or the republic’s citizens had political as well as military advantages. In both kinds of governments, such an army could serve as an educational force by instilling the values of the citizenry in its young men, and its victories would naturally become a source of legitimate civic pride. But most important, such a military force in a republic might act as a bulwark against the growth and implementation of tyrannical power. Since Machiavelli viewed military power as the foundation of civil society, military adventures abroad might also encourage the growth of useful civic virtues in the state’s citizens and might test the strength of the state’s political institutions. His belief in a necessary link between a militia of citizen-soldiers and a republican form of government is one of the most influential of Machiavelli’s ideas. It was to be repeated in many republican works written in subsequent periods to justify the revolutions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, France, and America; the antipathy to standing professional armies and the preference for a militia of citizen-soldiers found in early America may be seen as one of Machiavelli’s most enduring legacies to the practice and theory of republicanism.
It is also a mark of Machiavelli’s belief in the importance of this military role that, of the many individual political models he analyzes in his collected works, a large number of them are soldiers—Castruccio Castracani, Cesare Borgia, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, Fabius Maximus, Scipio Africanus. Even Moses and Pope Julius II, both normally considered to be religious figures, are esteemed by Machiavelli for their secular skills as leaders of men in predominantly military situations (the exodus from Egypt, the wars organized by Julius to expel foreigners from Italy and to consolidate the church’s temporal power in central Italy).
CORRUPTION AND CIVIC STABILITY
Once the state’s independence (regardless of its particular republican or monarchical form) is guaranteed by military power, Machiavelli turns his attention to more complex matters. First among these concerns in The Discourses, his most comprehensive work, is an analysis of the manner in which a republican form of government might counteract the ubiquitous cycle which would inevitably corrupt its foundations and its first principles. Since The Prince’s purpose, as we have seen, was a limited one, it gave relatively little attention to governmental institutions, except for the army and the ruler’s closest advisers. Its individualistic bias, with its concentration upon a single protagonist, the “new” prince, is not abandoned in The Discourses but incorporated into the search for stable institutions. Virtù, the key term of The Prince, is now supplanted in the commentary on Livy by the word ordini, meaning institutions, constitutions, and, in general, organization of various aspects of the state. The man of virtù is still necessary, for only a single man’s actions can found a new republic or principality or reform completely its corrupted ordini (Discourses, I, ix). In The Discourses, Machiavelli’s problem becomes how to move from individual virtù to social ordini, how to institutionalize the ability of a government’s creator or founder so that it can defend itself from civic corruption and inevitable destruction.
The sources of corruption are many. One can be found in the lack of a sense of religion. Machiavelli views pagan religions as secular institutions providing the state with a defense by guaranteeing the observance of oaths and by instilling courage in the citizenry. In ancient Rome religion was an instrumentum regni, a means of political control. But the Christian faith, according to Machiavelli, has glorified humility rather than courage or bold actions; furthermore, the Roman church’s moral corruption and quest for secular power has rendered it unfit to act as the moral arbiter of Italy’s citizens.
Another obvious cause of corruption is the concentration of excessive wealth, excessive power, or both in the hands of a few individuals. It is his opinion that governments are more secure when the commonwealth is rich while its members remain relatively poor. In this regard, Machiavelli considers civilization itself a corrupting influence. He believes that relatively backward nations of his own times (such as Germany and Switzerland) can provide a more fertile ground for the growth of republican virtue than can the jaded citizenry of the many inordinately cultivated Italian city-states. As he puts it in The Discourses (I, xi): “Anyone wishing to establish a republic in our present day would find it easier to do so among mountaineers where there is no culture than among men who are accustomed to living in cities where culture is corrupt; in like manner, a sculptor can more easily carve a beautiful statue out of a rough piece of marble than he can from one poorly blocked out by someone else.” Machiavelli’s picture of Italy is thus not a pretty one. Alm
ost everywhere he looks, when the governments in the Italian peninsula are compared to that of republican Rome, he perceives political corruption in a variety of forms. The only optimistic note he sounds more than once is his assertion that Italy’s rulers are the ultimate source of this state of affairs. Italy’s peoples, if properly governed, still possess a potential for civic renewal.
Machiavelli’s works focus upon two republics separated by centuries and by vastly different institutions: the relatively uncorrupted republic of Rome (the primary subject of The Discourses) and the corrupt republic of Florence (analyzed at length in The History of Florence). In chapter 1, book III of this history Machiavelli explicitly compares the two cities. The key distinction between their governments is not between stability and political conflict (for we have already seen that Machiavelli regarded the class struggles in republican Rome as a healthy, beneficial phenomenon); it is rather Florence’s type of internal struggles as compared to those of Rome. In the ideal republican era Machiavelli praises in Rome (the three-hundred-year period from the Tarquins to the Gracchi), Rome’s conflicts were between the plebeians and the aristocrats and were carried on without factions, sects, or partisans. Factions or sects arise when a private citizen acquires excessive power, influence, or wealth through private means and employs it for private ends. The people he rallies to his support become partisans rather than citizens working toward the common good and for public ends. Political factions favor the interest of restricted groups of individuals and destroy the very bedrock of the polis, the sense of a shared community of values and goals accepted by all citizens. Factions promote the concentration of power and wealth, two major sources of political corruption, and rarely contribute to the general welfare of the state.
The Portable Machiavelli Page 3