Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
however well endowed with virtù their leaders may be. In the Discourses he also – at least pro forma – draws on his ancient predecessors, especially Polybius, in outlining the different forms of government and the conditions of their rise and decline. But it soon becomes clear that he has something else in mind. He tells us that others who have written about such matters have said that there are three principal forms of government: principality or monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Moreover, he continues, they have said that there are actually six, three good forms and three bad, each good form having a tendency to degenerate into a pernicious variant: principality can easily become tyranny, as aristocracy can readily become oligarchy, and democracy anarchy. Machiavelli then ascribes to the classics the view that all six forms are actually pernicious, the ‘bad’ because they are bad in themselves and the ‘good’ because they can so easily corrupt. To avoid the inevitable evils of these basic forms, he tells us, classical writers tend to opt for a mixed constitution.
Machiavelli goes through the motions of summing up the early history of Rome as a process of transition from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy. But it soon emerges that he differs fundamentally from his predecessors, because he is addressing a rather different problem. He is not primarily concerned with the forms of constitution as defined by the ancients. He is interested in the forms of state that immediately affect his own time and place: above all the city-republics of Italy, governed by civic bodies that range from the oligarchic to the more inclusive, though never democratic, as well as (up to a point) the rising monarchies, such as France or Spain, by which the city-states are threatened. He offers – without systematically spelling it out – a classification different from the ancient one, a simple opposition between principalities and republics, the latter either democratic or aristocratic; and his principal objective in exploring these two forms is even more specific: to consider the conditions for maintaining liberty. That, when all is said and done, is the main theme of the Discourses. In this respect, it already asks questions different from those that concerned Plato in his account of political rise and decline, or even Polybius, whose idea of the ‘mixed constitution’ Machiavelli appears to adopt. But, if his concerns with republican liberty have more in common with his contemporary civic humanists than with ancient ideas on political cycles, he makes an observation that sets him on a rather different path; and in retrospect, it also sheds light on The Prince.
Describing the cycle of rise and decline, he writes:
This, then, is the cycle through which all commonwealths pass, whether they govern themselves or are governed. But rarely do they return to the same form of government, for there can scarce be a state of such vitality that it can undergo often such changes and yet remain in being. What usually happens is that, while in a state of commotion in which it lacks both counsel and strength, a state becomes subject to a neighbouring and better organized state. Were it not so, a commonwealth might go on for ever passing through these governmental transitions. (I.2.13)
This observation is not simply a prelude to the remarks that follow it about the advantages of a constitution that can claim to combine – as did the Roman republic – the three major forms, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, in a way that enhances stability. On this score, Machiavelli appears to have much in common with other advocates of a ‘mixed’ constitution. At the same time, he departs from convention by insisting that, in Rome, ‘it was friction between the plebs and the senate that brought this perfection about’. He departs from the classic view of the mixed constitution as a mode of consolidating oligarchic rule. In the context of Florentine politics, he has little use for the nobility. While he is no democrat, he prefers governo largo to governo stretto; and, given a choice between democracy and oligarchy, his preference would seem to be democracy.
Yet his comments suggest that he is less concerned with classifying governments, or with the internal conditions that preserve or destroy particular forms of government, or with the mechanisms of transition from one form to another, than with the maintenance of the commonwealth itself and above all its capacity to resist threats from without. The cycles of governmental change could, for better or worse, go on forever, were they not cut short by conquest. The fundamental criterion of political stability is not the quality or duration of any specific political form but the capacity of the state, whatever its form, to withstand external military threats.
This is not to say that Machiavelli is interested only in military readiness and not in the general conditions of a stable civic order or the well-being of the people; but, even when he departs from the amorality of The Prince, his preoccupation with external threats colours everything he says about political success. In the Discourses he remains concerned with the survival of states in the face of foreign invasions, and he is as direct and uncompromising as ever in his advocacy, when necessary, of violence and deception. Here, too, domestic conflicts are conceived in terms not very different from wars between states. But now he extends his analysis beyond the most basic conditions of mantenere lo stato against external threats; and his demands are more exacting than in The Prince, because the issue is no longer mere survival, or even the preservation of the state’s liberty from external domination, but also the preservation of civic liberty within the state. This requires more than the absence of tyranny. The fundamental condition is still the city-state’s autonomy, its freedom from foreign conquests and, not least, from dependence on foreign powers; but there is more at stake. While he certainly discusses the conditions for maintaining principalities, his chief concern is the foundation and preservation of a free republic.
It is, nonetheless, striking how much of the Discourses is devoted to military matters, and how much his preference for republican governments itself is cast in military terms. Republican liberty may be good in itself, but popular government also generally gives rise to more reliable armies and to better soldiers – even if they must submit themselves to leadership. It could even be said that, for Machiavelli, what makes a republic on the whole a better bet than princely government is that it tends, as Roman history so clearly demonstrates, to produce a more effective fighting force.
It is here that Machiavelli’s military preoccupations merge with his republicanism. His military ideal, the citizen’s militia, certainly requires leadership, but it is leadership that can inspire loyalty and love among the rank and file. Ordinary soldiers cannot simply be obedient cannon fodder but must enjoy the respect of their leaders and must themselves partake of military virtues. While a mercenary army is typically led by a traditional military aristocracy, a citizen’s militia requires the subordination of the aristocracy to the larger civic community. When Machiavelli extols the benefits of social conflict, untypically for his time and in sharp contrast, for instance, to Aristotelian principles, he has in mind not simply its effects in maintaining the militant spirit of the citizens but also the necessity of constant struggle to keep the aristocracy in check. On this score he departs even from Cicero, who shared Aristotle’s predisposition to aristocratic dominance and the kind of social harmony required to sustain it.
Yet even if Machiavelli’s preference for republican liberty is in large part shaped by a conviction that it produces better armies, the military cast of his arguments is not just a matter of defending against external threats. If he were simply writing about the art of war – as he does in his book of that name, which he regarded as his greatest achievement – his characteristic ‘Machiavellian’ principles would be less startling than they are when applied to the daily transactions of politics. What he has to say about violence and deception would hardly seem alien to a military strategist. Nor would his insistence on the need to adapt oneself to the times and to existing circumstances – which commentators have singled out as a particularly significant departure from the standard views of his contemporaries and predecessors, who measured politics against some universal moral standard. The advocacy of deception and the necessity of adapting to changing conditions were, after all, central to one of the earliest masterpieces of military literature: The Art of War, attributed to Sun Tzu in China in the sixth century BC. What is new in Machiavelli is the application of these military principles to politics; and this is rooted in the very specific conditions of Renaissance Florence.
The military model of politics belongs to the essence of the Discourses no less than to that of The Prince. Maintaining a republic, he insists, requires ruthless leadership, which is prepared to violate conventional morality – as his friend and mentor, Piero Soderini, failed to do when he led the