Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

Machiavelli’s preoccupation here with domestic liberty and order demands something more, a closer look at the conditions of civic disorder and decline. In his History of Florence, he recounts at some length the story of the ciompi rebellion, presenting it as a turning-point in the history of his city, the culmination of its endless factional and social conflicts. In a speech attributed to a ciompi militant, he sums up in the most dramatic terms what is at stake. Just as the economic rivalries of the urban patriciate played themselves out in political factions, so, too, did the economic grievances of the urban poor over inadequate remuneration for their labours turn into conflict over guild privileges and then a struggle for political power. Power struggles of this kind all too readily took on the character of war:

      [O]ur opponents are disunited and rich; their disunion will give us the victory, and their riches, when they have become ours, will support us. Be not deceived about that antiquity of blood by which they exalt themselves above us; for all men having had one common origin, are all equally ancient, and nature has made us all after one fashion. Strip us naked, and we shall all be found alike. Dress us in their clothing, and they in ours, we shall appear noble, they ignoble – for poverty and riches make all the difference . . . [A]ll who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavour to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty . . . Therefore we must use force when the opportunity offers; and fortune cannot present us one more favourable than the present, when the citizens are still disunited, the Signory doubtful, and the magistrates terrified; for we may easily conquer them before they can come to any settled arrangement. By this means we shall either obtain the entire government of the city, or so large a share of it, as to be forgiven past errors, and have sufficient authority to threaten the city with a renewal of them at some future time. (III.3)

      This dramatically captures the realities of Florentine politics and, perhaps more than any other passage in Machiavelli’s writings, starkly sums up his understanding of the problems his political theory is meant to confront. He is not here advocating the violence proposed in the speech, but he sees how and why things have come to this pass. He even suggests that it was inevitable and, in the circumstances, preferable to what the signori had done. Yet in the Discourses a bloody outcome like this is precisely what he sets out to avoid in his recommendations for a successful republican order – that it be, at the same time, an effective military force.

      The balance at which he aims is difficult. Civic liberty requires that the aristocracy be kept in check and that the people have some role in politics. Military success, which is far more likely to be achieved by a citizens’ militia than by untrustworthy nobles and their mercenary armies, also depends on some kind of equilibrium among the social classes; and this requires some degree of civil strife, a fruitful tension between people and patriciate. The problem is that civil strife can always descend into outright war. It was the Romans who, at least for a time in the days of the republic’s imperial expansion, struck the right balance. They built their empire not by simple oligarchic rule and the suppression of the common people – as in ancient Sparta or in Venice. They found a middle way between oligarchy and democracy by giving the people a voice through the tribunate, which institutionalized and channelled social strife. Contrary to all conventional opinion, which condemns the quarrels between the nobles and the plebs, says Machiavelli, it was those very quarrels that preserved Roman liberty.

      If Machiavelli seems to be a political ‘scientist’ or even a political ‘realist’ avant la lettre, these qualities have more to do with his grounding in the political realities of his city-state, with its military civic culture and the immediate dangers it confronted, than with any modern conception of the state or some affinity to scientific methods.8 His military model of politics conformed to the realities of domestic politics in Florence, where political rivals and factions were always on the verge of war, no less than to the threats that faced his city from without. More than other civic humanists, he proceeded unambiguously on the premise that the object of war, foreign or domestic, is to win, in conformity with moral principles if possible but with cruel violence, deceit and stratagem if not. Machiavelli’s military model was, in the context of Florentine realities and the culture of civic humanism, a relatively small change of perspective; but it was enough to shift the focus away from the just political order or the virtuous prince to the means of seizing and maintaining power, pure and simple. Especially when cast in Machiavelli’s vivid and uncompromising prose, that seemed a shocking innovation.

      It is, then, precisely his commitment to a practically defunct political form that produced what many commentators have interpreted as Machiavelli’s most ‘modern’ political ideas. His views on governance, on how to achieve and maintain power, on relations among citizens and even between princes and their subjects, are steeped in the conditions of the city-state. It is the city-state that for Machiavelli defines the political terrain. This affects his military model of politics, which gives his political theory the aura of ‘realism’ that to some commentators seems distinctly modern; but it also produces a conception of civic liberty that gives his ideas a flavour in some ways more familiar to modern audiences than political ideas emanating from the rising territorial monarchies that would shape the new world order of modern nation states.

      In the classics of sixteenth-century French political thought, for example, the political domain is not a civic community, a community of citizens. It is a contested terrain among various competing jurisdictions: the monarchy, the nobility, local magistrates and various corporate bodies. When Jean Bodin outlined an argument in favour of an ‘absolutist’ monarchy and devised a theory of sovereignty that has been called a landmark in the evolution of the modern state, he was addressing the position of the monarchy in relation to various corporate powers with varying degrees of autonomy. Even the anti-absolutist arguments of, say, the Huguenot resistance tracts, had little to do with the rights and powers of citizens. Instead, when they asserted the rights of the ‘people’ against the centralizing monarchy, they were asserting not the rights of citizens but the autonomous powers of various office-holders, ‘lesser’ magistrates, the provincial nobility, urban corporations and other corporate powers.

      In England, which had long before become the most effective centralized administration in Europe, corporate powers were weaker than in France; and even at moments of the greatest tension between monarch and nobility, from Magna Carta to the Civil War, the issue was not jurisdictional disputes of the kind that defined the political terrain in France. Yet the political sphere was typically conceived as a partnership of Crown and Parliament, and the English were slow to formulate the tensions between these two partners in terms of popular sovereignty. We shall return to the peculiarities of England in a later chapter and to the radical ideas that challenged the prevailing wisdom; but for now it suffices to say that, even when royalists and parliamentarians came to blows, the English were, for their own distinctive reasons, disinclined to conceptualize a political domain defined by the rights and powers of citizens as distinct from the rights and powers of Parliament. Even ‘republicans’, as we shall see, did not always make clear that citizenship meant something more than the right to be (actually or ‘virtually’) represented by Parliament – which did not necessarily entail the right to vote for it.

      By contrast, the Renaissance city-republics extended corporate principles and corporate autonomy to the civic community as a whole; and this produced something more ostensibly akin to modern ideas of popular sovereignty, the sovereignty of citizens, in contrast to the discourse of territorial monarchies. We are, in today’s liberal democracies, accustomed to thinking of citizens’ rights as a hallmark of a truly modern politics. That, among other things, is what allows some commentators to identify ‘civic humanism’ or even Renaissance ‘republicanism’ as a window to the modern world. But it may be misleading to describe membership in the civic corporation in medieval and Renaissance Italy as ‘citizenship’, since it vests political rights in corporate bodies and not individual citizens, while the republican discourse has less to do with the advent of the ‘modern’ state (unless it is as a threat to the survival of city-republics) than with the distinctive unity of civic, commercial and military principles in a political form that would not survive modernity.