Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

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