Niccolo Machiavelli · Politics
Beyond the cynic of <em>The Prince</em> lies a passionate republican who praised liberty, popular government, and even the value of political conflict.
Most people know only The Prince. But Machiavelli’s longer and, he may have thought, more important work is the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy - a sprawling study of the Roman Republic. And its Machiavelli looks startlingly different: not an advisor to tyrants but a fervent republican, who believed that the best and freest form of government is not princely rule at all but a republic, in which the people govern themselves. This is the ‘other Machiavelli,’ and he loved liberty.
Machiavelli’s most original republican idea overturns an ancient assumption. Classical thinkers prized civic harmony and feared internal conflict as a disease. Machiavelli, studying Rome, drew the opposite lesson: the constant tumults and quarrels between the common people (the plebs) and the nobles were not Rome’s weakness but the very source of its liberty and greatness. The conflict forced the creation of laws and institutions - like the tribunes of the people - that protected the many from the few. Far from destroying the republic, the productive friction between classes kept either from dominating, and so kept Rome free.
The republican Machiavelli is no naïve optimist about self-government; he is acutely, even anxiously, aware that liberty is fragile and that republics decay. His central concern in the Discourses is the problem of corruption - not merely financial corruption, but the deeper political corruption in which citizens lose their civic virtue, their willingness to put the common good above private interest, to participate actively in public life, to defend their own freedom. A republic, for Machiavelli, depends utterly on the virtù of its citizenry: on a people public-spirited, vigilant, and willing to fight for their liberty. When that civic virtue decays - when citizens grow soft, selfish, apathetic, content to pursue private wealth and leave public affairs to others - the republic rots from within, and liberty is lost, usually to an ambitious individual who seizes the power an apathetic people no longer bothers to guard.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned there are ‘two Machiavellis.’ Explain the republican Machiavelli of the Discourses and how he can be reconciled with the author of The Prince, in your own words.
Leads to James Madison.
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