Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood

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      When the Medici returned, Machiavelli was thrown out of office. In 1513, accused of conspiracy against the Medici, he was imprisoned and tortured. On his release, expelled from the centre of power, he retreated to the countryside outside Florence, where, as he would famously write in a wistful letter to his friend Vettori, he whiled away the time in idle rural pursuits all day and

      When evening comes I return home and go into my study, and at the door I take off my daytime dress covered in mud and dirt, and put on royal and curial robes; and then decently attired I enter the courts of the ancients, where affectionately greeted by them, I partake of that food which is mine alone and for which I was born; where I am not ashamed to talk with them and inquire the reasons of their actions; and they out of their human kindness answer me, and for four hours at a stretch I feel no worry of any kind; I forget all my troubles, I am not afraid of poverty or of death. I give myself up entirely to them. And because Dante says that understanding does not constitute knowledge unless it is retained in the memory, I have written down what I have learned from their conversation and composed a short work de Principatibus4

      And so he produced his most famous work, The Prince, though it was published only later, in 1532. His advice to princes has been variously described – for instance, as an effort to ingratiate himself with the Medici, in an attempt to revive his career; or even as a coded message to opponents of the Medici, and others like them, exposing their methods of obtaining and retaining power. Whatever his intentions, Machiavelli remained confined to his rural retreat, where he also wrote the Discourses, which more clearly expressed his republican convictions. The Medici would eventually call again on his services, but his later career was less notable for his official duties than for his work in other fields, such as his great History of Florence and his play La Mandragola. He died in 1527.

      The rising monarchical states, and the French monarchy in particular, would figure prominently in the formation of Machiavelli’s political thought. He was sent several times on diplomatic missions to the court of Louis XII to enlist the aid of France in various battles on Italian territory, not least the rivalry between Florence and Pisa, or to ensure that Florence would not be implicated in territorial wars among the European monarchies. His early missions inspired a growing conviction that Florence should free itself of dependence on foreign powers by mobilizing its own citizen army, in sharp contrast to the Italian tradition of mercenary soldiers. Machiavelli supervised the formation of the Florentine army in the restored republic, which won a famous victory against Pisa in 1509; and a strong commitment to citizen militias would lie at the heart of his political thought. When Spain supported the Medici in their efforts to recover their power in Florence, the republic turned for help again to France, to no avail – with dramatic consequences for Machiavelli’s career. Whatever else he may have intended when he wrote The Prince, one bitter inspiration may have been Louis XII’s betrayal of the Florentine republic. Machiavelli would invoke the example of the French king as a primary lesson to princes not for his successes so much as for his failures, which, in Machiavelli’s eyes, had brought such tragedy to Italy.

      European territorial monarchies, then, would always be in Machiavelli’s line of sight as he elaborated his political ideas. In the conclusion to The Prince, with its passionate call for the liberation of Italy from the ‘barbarians’, his main target is patently obvious. Yet it would be a mistake 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 СКАЧАТЬ