Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

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