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.
Machiavelli’s proposed remedy is striking and influential: republics must periodically be renewed by being brought back to their founding principles. Over time, he argues, the original spirit and institutions that made a republic free become diluted, corrupted, forgotten; periodically, through some shock, some reforming leader, or some return to the strict observance of founding laws and examples, the republic must be dragged back to its origins, its civic virtue rekindled, its corruptions purged - or it will slide into ruin. This is a profound and sober insight into the dynamics of free societies: that liberty is not a permanent achievement but a perishable condition requiring constant maintenance, vigilance, and renewal; that free institutions decay if the civic spirit that sustains them is allowed to wither; and that every generation must, in a sense, re-found its freedom rather than simply inheriting it. It connects Machiavelli to the deep republican tradition - the conviction that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that a free people must actively maintain its freedom or lose it, and that the gravest threat to a republic is often not external conquest but internal corruption: the slow decay of the civic virtue on which self-government depends. The author of The Prince turns out to be, in the Discourses, one of history’s great theorists of how free societies keep - and lose - their freedom.
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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