## 1. Biography



Relatively little is known for certain about Machiavelli's early
life in comparison with many important figures of the Italian
Renaissance (the following section draws on Capponi 2010; Vivanti
2013; Celenza 2015; Lee 2020) He was born 3 May 1469 in Florence and
at a young age became a pupil of a renowned Latin teacher, Paolo da
Ronciglione. It is speculated that he attended the University of
Florence, and even a cursory glance at his corpus reveals that he
received an excellent humanist education. It is only with his entrance
into public view, with his appointment in 1498 as the Second
Chancellor of the Republic of Florence, however, that we begin to
acquire a full and accurate picture of his life. For the next fourteen
years, Machiavelli engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity on
behalf of Florence, traveling to the major centers of Italy as well as
to the royal court of France and to the imperial curia of
Maximilian.



Florence had been under a republican government since 1494, when the
leading Medici family and its supporters had been driven from power.
After four years under Savonarola's leadership (and eventual
downfall), the Florentine Republic sought more stable government and
reformed its institutions accordingly. During this time, Machiavelli
entered public service and thrived under the patronage of the
city's *gonfaloniere* (or chief administrator) for life,
Piero Soderini, who was elected to that position in 1502. In his
official capacities, Machiavelli travelled considerably, producing a
large body of dispatches (known as the *Legations*) reporting
on events across Europe. He also composed personal correspondence,
poetic works, and short political analyses (Nederman 2023). In 1512,
however, with the assistance of Spanish and papal troops, the Medici
defeated the republic's civic militia (which Machiavelli had
organized) and dissolved its government. Machiavelli was a direct
victim of the regime change: he was immediately dismissed from office
and, when he was (wrongly) suspected of conspiring against the Medici,
was imprisoned and tortured for several weeks in early 1513. His
retirement thereafter to his family farm outside of Florence afforded
the occasion and the impetus for him to turn to intellectual
pursuits.



The first of his writings in a more reflective vein was also
ultimately the one most commonly associated with his name, *The
Prince*. Penned at the end of 1513 (and perhaps early 1514), but
only published posthumously in 1532, *The Prince* was composed
in haste by an author who, among other things, sought to regain his
status in Florentine political affairs. (Many of his colleagues in the
previous republican government were quickly rehabilitated and returned
to service under the Medici.) Originally written for presentation to
Giuliano de'Medici (who may well have appreciated it), the
dedication was changed, upon Giuliano's death, to Lorenzo
de'Medici (the Younger), who almost certainly did not read it
when it came into his hands in 1516.



Meanwhile, Machiavelli's retirement from politics led him to
other literary activities. He wrote verse, plays, and short prose,
authored a study of *The Art of War* (published in 1521), and
produced biographical and historical sketches. Most importantly, he
composed his other major contribution to political thought, the
*Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy*, an exposition of
the principles of republican rule masquerading as a commentary on the
work of the famous historian of the Roman Republic. Unlike *The
Prince*, the *Discourses* was written over a long period of
time (commencing perhaps in 1514 or 1515 and completed in 1518 or
1519, although again only published posthumously in 1531). The book
may have been shaped by informal discussions attended by Machiavelli
among some of the leading Florentine intellectual and political
figures under the sponsorship of Cosimo Rucellai.



Near the end of his life, and probably as a result of the aid of
well-connected friends whom he never stopped badgering for
intervention, Machiavelli began to return to the favor of the Medici
family. In 1520, he was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio
de'Medici to compose a history of Florence (the so-called
*Florentine Histories*), an assignment completed in 1525 and
presented to the Cardinal, who had since ascended to the papal throne
as Clement VII, in Rome. Other small tasks were forthcoming from the
Medici government, but before the opportunity arose for him to return
fully to public life, he died on 21 June 1527.


## 2. *The Prince*: Analyzing Power



Traditionally, political philosophers of the past posited a special
relationship between moral goodness and legitimate authority. Many
authors (especially those who composed mirror-of-princes books or
royal advice books during the Middle Ages and Renaissance) believed
that the use of political power was only rightful if it was exercised
by a ruler whose personal moral character was strictly virtuous. Thus
rulers were counseled that if they wanted to succeed--that is, if
they desired a long and peaceful reign and aimed to pass their office
down to their heirs--they must be sure to behave in accordance
with conventional ethical standards, that is, the virtues and piety.
In a sense, it was thought that rulers did well when they did good;
they earned the right to be obeyed and respected on account of their
moral and religious rectitude (see Briggs and Nederman 2022).



Machiavelli criticized at length precisely this moralistic view of
authority in his best-known treatise, *The Prince*. For
Machiavelli, there is no moral basis on which to judge the difference
between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. Rather, authority
and power are essentially coequal: whoever has power has the right to
command; but goodness does not ensure power and the ruler has no more
authority on account of being good. Thus, in direct opposition to
morally derived theories of politics, Machiavelli says that the only
real concern in politics is the acquisition and maintenance of power
(although he talks less about power *per se* than about
"maintaining the state"). In this sense, Machiavelli
presents a trenchant criticism of the concept of authority by arguing
that the notion of legitimate rights of rulership adds nothing to the
actual possession of power. *The Prince* purports to reflect
the self-conscious political realism of an author who is fully
aware--on the basis of direct experience in the service of the
Florentine government--that goodness and right are not sufficient
to win and maintain political supremacy. Machiavelli thus seeks to
learn and teach the rules of political power. For him, it necessary
for any successful ruler to know how to use power effectively. Only by
means of its proper application, Machiavelli believes, can individuals
be brought to obey and will the ruler be able to maintain the state in
safety and security.



Machiavelli's political theory, then, excludes issues of moral
authority and legitimacy from consideration in the discussion of
political decision-making and political judgment. Nowhere does this
come out more clearly than in his treatment of the relationship
between law and force. Machiavelli acknowledges that good laws and
good arms constitute the dual foundations of a well-ordered political
system. But he immediately adds that since coercion creates legality,
he will concentrate his attention on force. He says, "Since
there cannot be good laws without good arms, I will not consider laws
but speak of arms" (*Prince* CW 47). In other words,
valid law rests entirely upon the threat of coercive force; authority
is impossible for Machiavelli as a right apart from the power to
enforce it. Machiavelli is led to conclude that fear is always
preferable to affection in subjects, just as violence and deception
are superior to legality in effectively controlling them. He observes
that



> 
> one can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal,
> insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit....
> Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break
> whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread
> of punishment that never passes. (*Prince* CW 62; translation
> revised)
> 



As a result, Machiavelli cannot really be said to have a theory of
obligation separate from the imposition of power; people obey only
because they fear the consequences of not doing so, whether the loss
of life or of privileges. And of course, power alone cannot bind one,
inasmuch as obligation is voluntary and assumes that one can
meaningfully do otherwise. Someone can choose not to obey only if he
possesses the power to resist the ruler or is prepared to risk the
consequences of the state's superiority of coercive force.



Machiavelli's argument in *The Prince* is thus designed
to demonstrate that politics can only properly be defined in terms of
the effective employment of coercive power, what Yes Winter (2018) has
termed "the orders of violence." Authority as a right to
command has no independent status. He substantiates this assertion by
reference to the observable realities--historical and
contemporary--of political affairs and public life as well as by
arguments revealing the self-interested tendencies of all human
conduct. For Machiavelli it is meaningless and futile to speak of any
claim to the authority to command detached from the possession of
superior political power. The ruler who lives by his supposed rights
alone will surely wither and die by those same rights, because in the
rough-and-tumble of political conflict those who prefer power to
authority are more likely to succeed. Without exception the authority
of states and their laws will never be acknowledged when they are not
supported by a show of power which renders obedience inescapable.


## 3. Power, *Virtu*, and Fortune



Machiavelli presents to his readers a vision of political rule
allegedly purged of extraneous moralizing influences and fully aware
of the foundations of politics in the effective exercise of power. The
methods for achieving obedience are varied and depend heavily upon the
foresight that the prince exercises. Hence, the successful ruler needs
special training. The term that best captures Machiavelli's
vision of skill that must be learned in order to engage successfully
in power politics is *virtu*. While the Italian word
would normally be translated into English as "virtue", and
would ordinarily convey the conventional connotation of moral
goodness, Machiavelli obviously means something very different when he
refers to the *virtu* of the prince. In particular,
Machiavelli employs the concept of *virtu* to refer to
the range of personal qualities that the prince will find it necessary
to acquire in order to "maintain his state" and to
"achieve great things", the two standard markers of power
for him. This makes it brutally clear there can be no equivalence
between the conventional virtues and Machiavellian
*virtu*. Machiavelli's sense of what it is to be a
person of *virtu* can thus be summarized by his
recommendation that the prince above all else must possess a
"flexible disposition". That ruler is best suited for
office, on Machiavelli's account, who is capable of varying
her/his conduct from good to evil and back again "as fortune and
circumstances dictate" (*Prince* CW 66; see Nederman and
Bogiaris 2018).



Not coincidentally, Machiavelli also uses the term
*virtu* in his book *The Art of War* in order to
describe the strategic prowess of the general who adapts to different
battlefield conditions as the situation dictates. Machiavelli sees
politics to be a sort of a battlefield on a different scale. Hence,
the prince just like the general needs to be in possession of
*virtu*, that is, to know which strategies and
techniques are appropriate to what particular circumstances (Wood
1967). Thus, *virtu* winds up being closely connected to
Machiavelli's notion of the power. The ruler of
*virtu* is bound to be competent in the application of
power; to possess *virtu* is indeed to have mastered all
the rules connected with the effective application of power.
*Virtu* is to power politics what conventional virtue is
to those thinkers who suppose that moral goodness is sufficient to be
a legitimate ruler: it is the touchstone of political efficacy.



What is the conceptual link between *virtu* and the
effective exercise of power for Machiavelli? The answer lies with
another central Machiavellian concept, *Fortuna* (usually
translated as "fortune"). *Fortuna* is the enemy of
political order, the ultimate threat to the safety and security of the
state. Machiavelli's use of the concept has been widely debated
without a very satisfactory resolution. Suffice it to say that, as
with *virtu*, *Fortuna* is employed by him in a
distinctive way. Where conventional representations treated
*Fortuna* as a mostly benign, if fickle, goddess, who is the
source of human goods as well as evils, Machiavelli's fortune is
a malevolent and uncompromising fount of human misery, affliction, and
disaster. While human *Fortuna* may be responsible for such
success as human beings achieve, no man can act effectively when
directly opposed by the Goddess (*Discourses* CW
407-408).



Machiavelli's most famous discussion of *Fortuna* occurs
in Chapter 25 of *The Prince*, in which he proposes two
analogies for understanding the human situation in the face of events.
Initially, he asserts that fortune resembles



> 
> one of our destructive rivers which, when it is angry, turns the
> plains into lakes, throws down the trees and buildings, takes earth
> from one spot, puts it in another; everyone flees before the flood;
> everyone yields to its fury and nowhere can repel it.
> 



Yet the furor of a raging river does not mean that its depredations
are beyond human control: before the rains come, it is possible to
take precautions to divert the worst consequences of the natural
elements. "The same things happen about *Fortuna*",
Machiavelli observes,



> 
> She shows her power where *virtu* and wisdom do not
> prepare to resist her and directs her fury where she knows that no
> dykes or embankments are ready to hold her. (*Prince* CW 90)
> 



Fortune may be resisted by human beings, but only in those
circumstances where "*virtu* and wisdom"
have already prepared for her inevitable arrival.



Machiavelli reinforces the association of *Fortuna* with the
blind strength of nature by explaining that political success depends
upon appreciation of the operational principles of *Fortuna*.
His own experience has taught him that



> 
> it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because *Fortuna*
> is a woman and it is necessary, in order to keep her under, to beat
> and maul her.
> 



In other words, *Fortuna* demands a violent response of those
who would control her. "She more often lets herself be overcome
by men using such methods than by those who proceed coldly",
Machiavelli continues, "therefore always, like a woman, she is
the friend of young men, because they are less cautious, more
spirited, and with more boldness master her" (*Prince* CW
92). The wanton behavior of *Fortuna* demands an aggressive,
even violent response, lest she take advantage of those men who are
too retiring or "effeminate" to dominate her.



Machiavelli's remarks point toward several salient conclusions
about *Fortuna* and her place in his intellectual universe.
Throughout his corpus, *Fortuna* is depicted as a primal source
of violence (especially as directed against humanity) and as
antithetical to reason. Thus, Machiavelli realizes that only
preparation to pose an extreme response to the vicissitudes of
*Fortuna* will ensure victory against her. This is what
*virtu* provides: the ability to respond to fortune at
any time and in any way that is necessary.


## 4. Morality, Religion, and Politics



These basic building blocks of Machiavelli's thought have
induced considerable controversy among his readers going back to the
sixteenth century, when he was denounced as an apostle of the Devil,
but also was read and applied sympathetically by authors (and
politicians) enunciating the doctrine of "reason of state"
(Meinecke 1924 [1957]). The main source of dispute concerned
Machiavelli's attitude toward conventional moral and religious
standards of human conduct, mainly in connection with *The
Prince*. For many, his teaching endorses immoralism or, at least,
amoralism. The most extreme versions of this reading find Machiavelli
to be a "teacher of evil", in the famous words of Leo
Strauss (1958: 9-10), on the grounds that he counsels leaders to
avoid the common values of justice, mercy, temperance, wisdom, and
love of their people in preference to the use of cruelty, violence,
fear, and deception. A more moderate school of thought, associated
with Benedetto Croce (1925), views Machiavelli as simply a
"realist" or a "pragmatist" advocating the
suspension of commonplace ethics in matters of politics. Moral values
have no place in the sorts of decisions that political leaders must
make, and it is a category error of the gravest sort to think
otherwise. Perhaps the mildest version of the amoral hypothesis has
been proposed by Quentin Skinner (1978), who claims that the
ruler's commission of acts deemed vicious by convention is a
"last best" option. Concentrating on the claim in *The
Prince* that a head of state ought to do good if he can but must
be prepared to commit evil if he must (*Prince* CW 58), Skinner
argues that Machiavelli prefers conformity to moral virtue *ceteris
paribus*.



Disinterest in ethical concerns also permeates the claim, popular in
the early- and mid-twentieth century, that Machiavelli simply adopts
the stance of a scientist--a kind of "Galileo of
politics"--in distinguishing between the
"facts" of political life and the "values" of
moral judgment (Olschki 1945; Cassirer 1946; Prezzolini 1954 [1967]).
He is thereby set into the context of the scientific revolution more
generally. The point of Machiavellian "science" is not to
distinguish between "just" and "unjust" forms
of government, but to explain how politicians deploy power for their
own gain. Thus, Machiavelli rises to the mantle of the founder of
"modern" political science, in contrast with
Aristotle's classical norm-laden vision of a political science
of virtue. More recently, the Machiavelli-as-scientist interpretation
has largely gone out of favor (Viroli 1998 1-3), although some
have recently found merit in a revised version of the thesis (e.g.,
Dyer and Nederman 2016).



Other of Machiavelli's readers have found no taint of immorality
or amoralism in his thought whatsoever. Jean-Jacques Rousseau long ago
held that the real lesson of *The Prince* is to teach the
people the truth about how princes behave and thus to expose, rather
than celebrate, the immorality at the core of one-man rule (quoted in
Connell 2005, 178). Various versions of this thesis have been
disseminated more recently. Some scholars, such as Garrett Mattingly
(1958), have pronounced Machiavelli the supreme satirist, pointing out
the foibles of princes and their advisors. The fact that Machiavelli
later wrote biting popular stage comedies is cited as evidence in
support of his strong satirical bent. Thus, we should take nothing
Machiavelli says about moral conduct at face value, but instead should
understand his remarks as sharply humorous commentary on public
affairs. Alternatively, Mary Deitz (1986) asserts that
Machiavelli's agenda was driven by a desire to
"trap" the prince by offering carefully crafted advice
(such as arming the people) designed to undo the ruler if taken
seriously and followed.



A similar range of opinions exists in connection with
Machiavelli's attitude toward religion in general, and
Christianity in particular. Machiavelli was no friend of the
institutionalized Christian Church as he knew it. The
*Discourses* makes clear that conventional Christianity saps
from human beings the vigor required for active civil life (CW
228-229, 330-331). And *The Prince* speaks with
equal parts disdain and admiration about the contemporary condition of
the Church and its Pope (CW 29, 44-46, 65, 91-92). Many
scholars have taken such evidence to indicate that Machiavelli was
himself profoundly anti-Christian, preferring the pagan civil
religions of ancient societies such as Rome, which he regarded to be
more suitable for a city endowed with *virtu*. Anthony
Parel (1992) argues that Machiavelli's cosmos, governed by the
movements of the stars and the balance of the humors, takes on an
essentially pagan and pre-Christian cast. For others, Machiavelli may
best be described as a man of conventional, if unenthusiastic, piety,
prepared to bow to the externalities of worship but not deeply devoted
in either soul or mind to the tenets of Christian faith. A few
dissenting voices, most notably Sebastian de Grazia (1989) and
Maurizio Viroli (2006 [2010]), have attempted to rescue
Machiavelli's reputation from those who view him as hostile or
indifferent to Christianity. Grazia demonstrates how central biblical
themes run throughout Machiavelli's writings, finding there a
coherent conception of a divinely centered and ordered cosmos in which
other forces ("the heavens", "fortune", and
the like) are subsumed under a divine will and plan. Cary Nederman
extends and systematizes Grazia's insights by showing how such
central Christian theological doctrines as grace, free will and prayer
form important elements of Machiavelli's conceptual framework
(2009: 28-49; Nederman and Lahoud 2023). Viroli considers, by
contrast, the historical attitudes toward the Christian religion as
manifested in the Florentine republic of Machiavelli's day.


## 5. The State and the Prince: Language and Concepts



Machiavelli has also been credited (most recently by Skinner 1978)
with formulating for the first time the "modern concept of the
state", understood in the broadly Weberian sense of an
impersonal form of rule possessing a monopoly of coercive authority
within a fixed territorial boundaries. Certainly, the term *lo
stato* appears widely in Machiavelli's writings, especially
in *The Prince*, in connection with the acquisition and
application of power in a coercive sense, which renders its meaning
distinct from the Latin term *status* (condition or station)
from which it is derived. Moreover, scholars cite Machiavelli's
influence in shaping the early modern debates surrounding
"reason of state"--the doctrine that the good of the
state itself takes precedence over all other considerations, whether
morality or the good of citizens--as evidence that he was
received by his near-contemporaries as a theorist of the state
(Meineke 1924 [1957]). Machiavelli's name and doctrines were
widely invoked to justify the priority of the interests of the state
in the age of absolutism.



Yet, as Harvey Mansfield (1996) has shown, a careful reading of
Machiavelli's use of *lo stato* in *The Prince*
and elsewhere does not support this interpretation.
Machiavelli's "state" remains a personal patrimony,
a possession more in line with the medieval conception of
*dominium* as the foundation of rule. (*Dominium* is a
Latin term that may be translated with equal force as "private
property" and as "political dominion".) Thus, the
"state" is literally owned by whichever prince happens to
have control of it. Moreover, the character of governance is
determined by the personal qualities and traits of the
ruler--hence, Machiavelli's emphasis on
*virtu* as indispensable for the prince's success.
These aspects of the deployment of *lo stato* in *The
Prince* mitigate against the "modernity" of his idea.
Machiavelli is at best a transitional figure in the process by which
the language of the state emerged in early modern Europe, as Mansfield
concludes.



Another factor that must be kept in mind when evaluating the general
applicability of Machiavelli's theory in *The Prince*
stems from the very situation in which his prince of
*virtu* operates. Such a ruler comes to power not by
dynastic inheritance or on the back of popular support, but purely as
a result of his own initiative, skill, talent, and/or strength (all
words that are English equivalents for *virtu*,
dependent upon where it occurs in the text). Thus, the Machiavellian
prince can count on no pre-existing structures of legitimation, as
discussed above. In order to "maintain his state", then,
he can only rely upon his own fount of personal characteristics to
direct the use of power and establish his claim on rulership. This is
a precarious position, since Machiavelli insists that the throes of
fortune and the conspiracies of other men render the prince constantly
vulnerable to the loss of his state. The idea of a stable
constitutional regime that reflects the tenor of modern political
thought (and practice) is nowhere to be seen in Machiavelli's
conception of princely government.



Indeed, one might wonder whether Machiavelli, for all of his alleged
realism, actually believed that a prince of complete
*virtu* could in fact exist. He sometimes seems to
imagine that a successful prince would have to develop a psychology
entirely different from that known hitherto to mankind, inasmuch as
this "new" prince is



> 
> prepared to vary his conduct as the winds of fortune and changing
> circumstances constrain him and ... not deviate from right
> conduct if possible, but be capable of entering upon the path of
> wrongdoing when this becomes necessary. (MP 62)
> 



This flexibility yields the core of the "practical" advice
that Machiavelli offers to the ruler seeking to maintain his state:
exclude no course of action out of hand, but be ready always to
perform whatever acts are required by political circumstance.



Yet Machiavelli himself apparently harbored severe doubts about
whether human beings were psychologically capable of generating such
flexible dispositions within themselves. In spite of the great number
of his historical examples, Machiavelli can point in *The
Prince* to no single ruler who evinced the sort of variable
*virtu* that he deems necessary for the complete control
of fortune. Rather, his case studies of successful rulers repeatedly
point to the situation of a prince whose characteristics suited his
times but whose consistency of conduct (as in the case of Pope Julius
II) "would have brought about his downfall" if
circumstances had changed (*Prince* CW 92). Even the Emperor
Severus, whose techniques Machiavelli lauds, succeeded because he
employed "the courses of action that are necessary for
establishing himself in power"; he is not, however, to be
imitated universally (*Prince* CW 73). Machiavelli's
evaluation of the chances for creating a new, psychologically flexible
type of character is extremely guarded, and tends to be worded in
conditional form and in the subjective mood: "If it were
possible to change one's nature to suit the times and
circumstances, one would always be successful" (*Prince*
CW 91, translation revised). Such observations must make us wonder
whether Machiavelli's advice that princes acquire dispositions
which vary according to circumstance was so "practical"
(even in his own mind) as he had asserted.


## 6. The *Discourses on Livy*: Liberty and Conflict



While *The Prince* is doubtless the most widely read of his
works, the *Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy* perhaps
most honestly expresses Machiavelli's personal political beliefs
and commitments, in particular, his republican sympathies. The
*Discourses* certainly draw upon the same reservoir of language
and concepts that flowed into *The Prince*, but the former
treatise leads us to draw conclusions quite different from--many
scholars have said contradictory to--the latter. In particular,
across the two works, Machiavelli consistently and clearly
distinguishes between a minimal and a full conception of
"political" or "civil" order, and thus
constructs a hierarchy of ends within his general account of communal
life. A minimal constitutional order is one in which subjects live
securely (*vivere* *sicuro*), ruled by a strong
government which holds in check the aspirations of both nobility
(*grandi*) and people (*Popolo*), but is in turn
balanced by other legal and institutional mechanisms. In a fully
constitutional regime, however, the goal of the political order is the
freedom of the community (*vivere* *libero*), created by
the active participation of, and contention between, the nobility and
the people (Pedulla 2011 [2018]). As Quentin Skinner (2002,
189-212) has argued, liberty forms a value that anchors
Machiavelli's political theory and guides his evaluations of the
worthiness of different types of regimes. Only in a republic, for
which Machiavelli expresses a distinct preference, may this goal be
attained.



Machiavelli adopted this position on both pragmatic and principled
grounds. During his career as a secretary and diplomat in the
Florentine republic, he came to acquire vast experience of the inner
workings of French government, which became his model for the
"secure" (but not free) polity. Although Machiavelli makes
relatively little comment about the French monarchy in *The
Prince*, he devotes a great deal of attention to France in the
*Discourses*.



Why would Machiavelli effusively praise (let alone even analyze) a
hereditary monarchy in a work supposedly designed to promote the
superiority of republics? The answer stems from Machiavelli's
aim to contrast the best-case scenario of a monarchic regime with the
institutions and organization of a republic. Even the most excellent
monarchy, in Machiavelli's view, lacks certain salient qualities
that are endemic to properly constituted republican government and
that make the latter constitution more desirable than the former.



Machiavelli asserts that the greatest virtue of the French kingdom and
its king is the dedication to law. "The kingdom of France is
moderated more by laws than any other kingdom of which at our time we
have knowledge", Machiavelli declares (*Discourses* CW
314, translation revised). The explanation for this situation
Machiavelli refers to the function of the Parlement. "The
kingdom of France", he states,



> 
> lives under laws and orders more than any other kingdom. These laws
> and orders are maintained by Parlements, notably that of Paris: by it
> they are renewed any time it acts against a prince of the kingdom or
> in its sentences condemns the king. And up to now it has maintained
> itself by having been a persistent executor against that nobility.
> (*Discourses* CW 422, translation revised)
> 



These passages of the *Discourses* suggest that Machiavelli has
great admiration for the institutional arrangements that obtain in
France (Nederman 2023: 52-55). Specifically, the French king and
the nobles, whose power is such that they would be able to oppress the
populace, are checked by the laws of the realm which are enforced by
the independent authority of the Parlement. Thus, opportunities for
unbridled tyrannical conduct are largely eliminated, rendering the
monarchy temperate and "civil".



Yet such a regime, no matter how well ordered and law-abiding, remains
incompatible with *vivere* *libero*. Discussing the
ability of a monarch to meet the people's wish for liberty,
Machiavelli comments that



> 
> as far as the ... popular desire of recovering their liberty, the
> prince, not being able to satisfy them, must examine what the reasons
> are that make them desire being free. (*Discourses* CW 237).
> 



He concludes that a few individuals want freedom simply in order to
command others; these, he believes, are of sufficiently small number
that they can either be eradicated or bought off with honors. By
contrast, the vast majority of people confuse liberty with security,
imagining that the former is identical to the latter: "But all
the others, who are infinite, desire liberty in order to live securely
(*vivere* *sicuro*)" (*Discourses* CW 237).
Although the king cannot give such liberty to the masses, he can
provide the security that they crave:



> 
> As for the rest, for whom it is enough to live securely
> (*vivere* *sicuro*), they are easily satisfied by making
> orders and laws that, along with the power of the king, comprehend
> everyone's security. And once a prince does this, and the people
> see that he never breaks such laws, they will shortly begin to live
> securely (*vivere* *sicuro*) and contentedly
> (*Discourses* CW 237).
> 



Machiavelli then applies this general principle directly to the case
of France, remarking that



> 
> the people live securely (*vivere* *sicuro*) for no
> other reason than that its kings are bound to infinite laws in which
> the security of all their people is comprehended. (*Discourses*
> CW 237)
> 



The law-abiding character of the French regime ensures security, but
that security, while desirable, ought never to be confused with
liberty. This is the limit of monarchic rule: even the best kingdom
can do no better than to guarantee to its people tranquil and orderly
government.



Machiavelli holds that one of the consequences of such *vivere*
*sicuro* is the disarmament of the people. He comments that
regardless of "how great his kingdom is", the king of
France "lives as a tributary" to foreign mercenaries.



> 
> This all comes from having disarmed his people and having preferred
> ... to enjoy the immediate profit of being able to plunder the
> people and of avoiding an imaginary rather than a real danger, instead
> of doing things that would assure them and make their states
> perpetually happy. This disorder, if it produces some quiet times, is
> in time the cause of straitened circumstances, damage and irreparable
> ruin (*Discourses* CW 410).
> 



A state that makes security a priority cannot afford to arm its
populace, for fear that the masses will employ their weapons against
the nobility (or perhaps the crown). Yet at the same time, such a
regime is weakened irredeemably, since it must depend upon foreigners
to fight on its behalf. In this sense, any government that takes
*vivere* *sicuro* as its goal generates a passive and
impotent populace as an inescapable result. By definition, such a
society can never be free in Machiavelli's sense of
*vivere* *libero*, and hence is only minimally, rather
than completely, political or civil.



Confirmation of this interpretation of the limits of monarchy for
Machiavelli may be found in his further discussion of the disarmament
of the people, and its effects, in *The Art of War*. Addressing
the question of whether a citizen army is to be preferred to a
mercenary one, he insists that the liberty of a state is contingent
upon the military preparedness of its subjects. Acknowledging that
"the king [of France] has disarmed his people in order to be
able to command them more easily", Machiavelli still concludes
"that such a policy is ... a defect in that kingdom, for
failure to attend to this matter is the one thing that makes her
weak" (*Art* CW 584, 586-587). In his view,
whatever benefits may accrue to a state by denying a military role to
the people are of less importance than the absence of liberty that
necessarily accompanies such disarmament. The problem is not merely
that the ruler of a disarmed nation is in thrall to the military
prowess of foreigners. More crucially, Machiavelli believes, a
weapons-bearing citizen militia remains the ultimate assurance that
neither the government nor some usurper will tyrannize the populace:
"So Rome was free four hundred years and was armed; Sparta,
eight hundred; many other cities have been unarmed and free less than
forty years" (*Art* CW 585). Machiavelli is confident
that citizens will always fight for their liberty--against
internal as well as external oppressors. Indeed, this is precisely why
successive French monarchs have left their people disarmed: they
sought to maintain public security and order, which for them meant the
elimination of any opportunities for their subjects to wield arms. The
French regime, because it seeks security above all else (for the
people as well as for their rulers), cannot permit what Machiavelli
takes to be a primary means of promoting liberty.



The case of disarmament is an illustration of a larger difference
between minimally constitutional systems such as France and fully
political communities such as the Roman Republic, namely, the status
of the classes within the society. In France, the people are entirely
passive and the nobility is largely dependent upon the king, according
to Machiavelli's own observations. By contrast, in a fully
developed republic such as Rome's, where the actualization of
liberty is paramount, both the people and the nobility take an active
(and sometimes clashing) role in self-government (McCormick 2011;
Holman 2018). The liberty of the whole, for Machiavelli, depends upon
the liberty of its component parts. In his famous discussion of this
subject in the *Discourses*, he remarks,



> 
> To me those who condemn the tumults between the Nobles and the Plebs
> seem to be caviling at the very thing that was the primary cause of
> Rome's retention of liberty.... And they do not realize
> that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of
> the people and that of the great men, and that all legislation
> favoring liberty is brought about by their dissension
> (*Discourses* CW 202-203).
> 



Machiavelli knows that he is adopting an unusual perspective here,
since customarily the blame for the collapse of the Roman Republic has
been assigned to warring factions that eventually ripped it apart. But
Machiavelli holds that precisely the same conflicts generated a
"creative tension" that was the source of Roman liberty.
For "those very tumults that so many inconsiderately
condemn" directly generated the good laws of Rome and the
virtuous conduct of its citizens (*Discourses* CW 202).
Hence,



> 
> Enmities between the people and the Senate should, therefore, be
> looked upon as an inconvenience which it is necessary to put up with
> in order to arrive at the greatness of Rome. (*Discourses* CW
> 211)
> 



Machiavelli thinks that other republican models (such as those adopted
by Sparta or Venice) will produce weaker and less successful political
systems, ones that are either stagnant or prone to decay when
circumstances change.


## 7. Popular Liberty and Popular Speech



Machiavelli evinces particular confidence in the capacity of the
people to contribute to the promotion of communal liberty. In the
*Discourses*, he ascribes to the masses a quite extensive
competence to judge and act for the public good in various settings,
explicitly contrasting the "prudence and stability" of
ordinary citizens with the unsound discretion of the prince. Simply
stated, "A people is more prudent, more stable, and of better
judgment than a prince" (*Discourses* CW 316). This is
not an arbitrary expression of personal preference on
Machiavelli's part. He maintains that the people are more
concerned about, and more willing to defend, liberty than either
princes or nobles (*Discourses* CW 204-205). Where the
latter confuse their liberty with their ability to dominate and
control the *popolo*, the masses are more concerned with
protecting themselves against oppression and consider themselves
"free" when they are not abused by the more powerful or
threatened with such abuse (*Discourses* CW 203). In turn, when
they fear the onset of such oppression, ordinary citizens are more
inclined to object and to defend the common liberty. Such an active
role for the people, while necessary for the maintenance of vital
public liberty, is fundamentally antithetical to the hierarchical
structure of subordination-and-rule on which monarchic *vivere*
*sicuro* rests. The preconditions of *vivere*
*libero* simply do not favor the security that is the aim of
constitutional monarchy.



One of the main reasons that security and liberty remain, in the end,
incompatible for Machiavelli--and that the latter is to be
preferred--may surely be traced to the "rhetorical"
character of his republicanism. Machiavelli clearly views speech as
the method most appropriate to the resolution of conflict in the
republican public sphere; throughout the *Discourses*, debate
is elevated as the best means for the people to determine the wisest
course of action and the most qualified leaders. The tradition of
classical rhetoric, with which he was evidently familiar, directly
associated public speaking with contention: the proper application of
speech in the realms of forensic and deliberative genres of rhetoric
is an adversarial setting, with each speaker seeking to convince his
audience of the validity of his own position and the unworthiness of
his opponents'. This theme was taken up, in turn, by late
medieval Italian practitioners and theorists of rhetoric, who
emphasized that the subject matter of the art was *lite*
(conflict). Thus, Machiavelli's insistence upon contention as a
prerequisite of liberty also reflects his rhetorical predilections
(Viroli 1998). By contrast, monarchic regimes--even the most
secure monarchies such as France--exclude or limit public
discourse, thereby placing themselves at a distinct disadvantage. It
is far easier to convince a single ruler to undertake a disastrous or
ill-conceived course of action than a multitude of people. The
apparent "tumult" induced by the uncertain liberty of
public discussion eventually renders more likely a decision conducive
to the common good than does the closed conversation of the royal
court.



This connects to the claim in the *Discourses* that the popular
elements within the community form the best safeguard of civic liberty
as well as the most reliable source of decision-making about the
public good. Machiavelli's praise for the role of the people in
securing the republic is supported by his confidence in the generally
illuminating effects of public speech upon the citizen body. Near the
beginning of the first *Discourses*, he notes that some may
object to the extensive freedom enjoyed by the Roman people to
assemble, to protest, and to veto laws and policies. But he responds
that the Romans were able to



> 
> maintain liberty and order because of the people's ability to
> discern the common good when it was shown to them. At times when
> ordinary Roman citizens wrongly supposed that a law or institution was
> designed to oppress them, they could be persuaded that their beliefs
> are mistaken ... [through] the remedy of assemblies, in which
> some man of influence gets up and makes a speech showing them how they
> are deceiving themselves. And as Tully says, the people, although they
> may be ignorant, can grasp the truth, and yield easily when told what
> is true by a trustworthy man (*Discourses* CW 203).
> 



The reference to Tully, that is, Cicero (one of the few in the
*Discourses*) confirms that Machiavelli has in mind here a key
feature of classical republicanism: the competence of the people to
respond to and support the words of the gifted orator when he speaks
truly about the public welfare.



Machiavelli returns to this theme and treats it more extensively at
the end of the first *Discourse*. In a chapter intended to
demonstrate the superiority of popular over princely government, he
argues that the people are well ordered, and hence "prudent,
stable and grateful", so long as room is made for public speech
and deliberation within the community. Citing the formula *vox*
*populi, vox dei*, Machiavelli insists that



> 
> public opinion is remarkably accurate in its prognostications....
> With regard to its judgment, when two speakers of equal skill are
> heard advocating different alternatives, very rarely does one find the
> people failing to adopt the better view or incapable of appreciating
> the truth of what it hears (*Discourses* CW 316).
> 



Not only are the people competent to discern the best course of action
when orators lay out competing plans, but they are in fact better
qualified to make decisions, in Machiavelli's view, than are
princes. For example,



> 
> the people can never be persuaded that it is good to appoint to an
> office a man of infamous or corrupt habits, whereas a prince may
> easily and in a vast variety of ways be persuaded to do this.
> (*Discourses* CW 316)
> 



Likewise, should the people depart from the law-abiding path, they may
readily be convinced to restore order:



> 
> For an uncontrolled and tumultuous people can be spoken to by a good
> man and easily led back into a good way. But no one can speak to a
> wicked prince, and the only remedy is steel.... To cure the
> malady of the people words are enough. (*Discourses* CW 317)
> 



The contrast Machiavelli draws is stark. The republic governed by
words and persuasion--in sum, ruled by public speech--is
almost sure to realize the common good of its citizens; and even
should it err, recourse is always open to further discourse.
Non-republican regimes, because they exclude or limit discursive
practices, ultimately rest upon coercive domination and can only be
corrected by violent means.


## 8. The Character of Republican Leaders



Machiavelli's arguments in favor of republican regimes also
appeal to his skeptical stance toward the acquisition of
*virtu* by any single individual, and hence the
implication that a truly stable principality may never be attainable.
The effect of the Machiavellian dichotomy between the need for
flexibility and the inescapable constancy of character is to
demonstrate an inherent practical limitation in single-ruler regimes.
For the reader is readily led to the conclusion that, just because
human conduct is rooted in a firm and invariant character, the rule of
a single man is intrinsically unstable and precarious. In the
*Discourses*, Machiavelli provides a psychological case that
the realities of human character tend to favor a republic over a
principality, since the former "is better able to adapt itself
to diverse circumstances than a prince owing to the diversity found
among its citizens" (*Discourses* CW 253).



Machiavelli illustrates this claim by reference to the evolution of
Roman military strategy against Hannibal. After the first flush of the
Carthaginian general's victories in Italy, the circumstances of
the Roman required a circumspect and cautious leader who would not
commit the legions to aggressive military action for which they were
not prepared. Such leadership emerged in the person of Fabius Maximus,
"a general who by his slowness and his caution held the enemy at
bay. Nor could he have met with circumstances more suited to his
ways" (*Discourses* CW 452). Yet when a more offensive
stance was demanded to defeat Hannibal, the Roman Republic was able to
turn to the leadership of Scipio, whose personal qualities were more
fitted to the times. Neither Fabius nor Scipio was able to escape
"his ways and habits" (*Discourses* CW 452), but
the fact that Rome could call on each at the appropriate moment
suggests to Machiavelli an inherent strength of the republican
system.



> 
> If Fabius had been king of Rome, he might easily have lost this war,
> since he was incapable of altering his methods according as
> circumstance changed. Since, however, he was born in a republic where
> there were diverse citizens with diverse dispositions, it came about
> that, just as it had a Fabius, who was the best man to keep the war
> going when circumstances required it, so later it had a Scipio at a
> time suited to its victorious consummation (*Discourses* CW
> 452).
> 



Changing events require flexibility of response, and since it is
psychologically implausible for human character to change with the
times, the republic offers a viable alternative: people of different
qualities fit different exigencies. The diversity characteristic of
civic regimes, which was so reviled by Machiavelli's
predecessors, proves to be an abiding advantage of republics over
principalities.



This does not mean that Machiavelli's confidence in the capacity
of republican government to redress the political shortcomings of
human character was unbridled. After all, he gives us no real
indication of how republics manage to identify and authorize the
leaders whose qualities are suited to the circumstances. It is one
thing to observe that such variability has occurred within republics,
quite another to demonstrate that this is a necessary or essential
feature of the republican system. At best, then, Machiavelli offers us
a kind of empirical generalization, the theoretical foundations of
which he leaves unexplored. And the *Discourses* points out
that republics have their own intrinsic limitation in regard to the
flexibility of response needed to conquer fortune. For just as with
individual human beings, it is difficult (if not impossible) to change
their personal characteristics, so



institutions in republics do not change with the times ... but
change very slowly because it is more painful to change them since it
is necessary to wait until the whole republic is in a state of
upheaval; and for this it is not enough that one man alone should
change his own procedure. (*Discourses* CW 453)



If the downfall of principalities is the fixed structure of human
character, then the failing of republics is a devotion to the
perpetuation of institutional arrangements whose time has passed.
Whether it is any more plausible to hold out hope for the creation of
more responsive republican institutions than to demand flexibility in
the personal qualities of princes is not directly examined by the
*Discourses*.



Machiavelli thus seems to adhere to a genuinely republican position.
But how are we to square this with his statements in *The
Prince*? It is tempting to dismiss *The Prince* as an
inauthentic expression of Machiavelli's "real" views
and preferences, written over a short period in order to prove his
political value to the returned Medici masters of Florence. (This is
contrasted with the lengthy composition process of the
*Discourses*.) Yet Machiavelli never repudiated *The
Prince*, and indeed refers to it in the *Discourses* in a
way that suggests he viewed the former as a companion to the latter.
Although there has been much debate about whether Machiavelli was
truly a friend of princes and tyrants or of republics, and hence
whether we should dismiss one or another facet of his writing as
ancillary or peripheral, the questions seems irresolvable. Mark
Hulliung's suggestion that "both" Machiavellis need
to be lent equal weight thus enjoys a certain plausibility (Hulliung
1983).


## 9. Machiavelli's Place in Western Thought



What is "modern" or "original" in
Machiavelli's thought? What is Machiavelli's
"place" in the history of Western ideas? The body of
literature debating this question, especially in connection with
*The Prince* and *Discourses*, has grown to truly
staggering proportions. John Pocock (1975), for example, has traced
the diffusion of Machiavelli's republican thought throughout the
so-called Atlantic world and, specifically, into the ideas that guided
the framers of the American constitution. Paul Rahe (2008) argues for
a similar set of influences, but with an intellectual substance and
significance different from Pocock. For Pocock, Machiavelli's
republicanism is of a civic humanist variety whose roots are to be
found in classical antiquity; for Rahe, Machiavelli's
republicanism is entirely novel and modern. The
"neo-Roman" thinkers (most prominently, Pettit, Skinner
and Viroli) appropriate Machiavelli as a source of their principle of
"freedom as non-domination", while he has also been put to
work in the defense of democratic precepts and values (McCormick
2011). Likewise, cases have been made for Machiavelli's
political morality, his conception of the state, his religious views,
and many other features of his work as the distinctive basis for the
originality of his contribution.



Yet few firm conclusions have emerged within scholarship. (The
unsettled state of play in current research on Machiavelli is well
represented in Johnston et al. 2017.) One plausible explanation for
the inability to resolve these issues of "modernity" and
"originality" is that Machiavelli was in a sense trapped
between innovation and tradition, between *via antiqua* and
*via moderna* (to adopt the usage of Janet Coleman 1995), in a
way that generated internal conceptual tensions within his thought as
a whole and even within individual texts (Nederman 2009). This
historical ambiguity permits scholars to make equally convincing cases
for contradictory claims about his fundamental stance without
appearing to commit egregious violence to his doctrines. This point
differs from the accusation made by certain scholars that Machiavelli
was fundamentally inconsistent (see Black 2022) or simply driven by
"local" agendas (Celenza 2015). Rather, salient features
of the distinctively Machiavellian approach to politics should be
credited to an incongruity between historical circumstance and
intellectual possibility. What makes Machiavelli a troubling yet
stimulating thinker is that, in his attempt to draw different
conclusions from the commonplace expectations of his audience, he
still incorporated important features of precisely the conventions he
was challenging. In spite of his repeated assertion of his own
originality (for instance, *Prince* CW 10, 57-58), his
careful attention to preexisting traditions meant that he was never
fully able to escape his intellectual confines. Thus, Machiavelli
ought not really to be classified as either purely an
"ancient" or a "modern", but instead deserves
to be located in the interstices between the two (a point recently
underscored by Pedulla 2023, for whom "Machiavelli
resembles the mythical Janus, the Roman god of openings and ending
..." [xi]).