struggle or organized rebellion but in the daily transactions of civic life, in an urban setting where all contenders, as individuals and as collective entities, are always face to face as citizens or aspirants to civic status. The inextricable connection between economic power and ‘extra-economic’ force means that economic rivalries, or social conflicts over property and inequalities of wealth, are inseparably struggles over civic power, always on the brink of open war.
‘Civic Humanism’ and Machiavelli
This very particular configuration of the civic domain produced distinctive traditions of political ideas. The designation ‘civic humanism’ to describe the main currents has become conventional among many historians of political thought. For the German historian Hans Baron, who coined the phrase, ‘civic humanism’ was a specifically Florentine conjunction of cultural humanism, with its educational ambitions, and the city republic’s defence of civic liberty against imperial domination. This, in his view, marked a decisive break from medieval religion and feudal hierarchy, towards modern ideals of political liberty, economic progress, secularism and intellectual creativity. Although he would, over several decades, develop and modify his views on civic humanism – and would later be more inclined than he was at first to include Machiavelli in that tradition – his original intention in identifying this historic rupture was not only historiographical but also political. He was seeking to promote a conception of modernity as the advance of human autonomy, at a time when, in Weimar Germany, such ideas were under threat from anti-democratic strains of German nationalism.
Baron’s idea would later find its way into the anglophone academy, adapted to various Anglo-American ‘republican’ traditions (the most notable example being John Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moment’). Recent scholarship has, nonetheless, tended to correct Baron’s exaggeration of the rupture between medieval and Renaissance political thought. More attention has been given to the continuities between scholasticism and humanism, indeed their coexistence and revival in the later Renaissance. Yet these corrections have failed to dispel the notion that ‘republican’ political theory, especially in its humanist mode, somehow points us towards the modern world. We shall in subsequent chapters raise questions about the very idea of ‘republicanism’, especially in its application to seventeenth-century English thinkers; but, for the moment, it is enough to say that, even if we acknowledge the existence of something like a ‘civic humanist’ tradition, it is profoundly misleading to characterize the political ideas of the Italian Renaissance – and of Machiavelli in particular – as a breakthrough to modernity. The very characteristics that give a ‘modern’ appearance to ideas like Machiavelli’s are rooted in a dying political form that would soon give way to ‘modern’ states. These states would generate their own political predicaments, together with modes of discourse designed to confront them in ways that ‘civic humanist’ or ‘republican’ ideas were unable to do.
There are, to be sure, significant differences between Machiavelli and, say, Marsilius of Padua two centuries before.3 These differences can even be characterized, without too much exaggeration, as having something to do with the contrasts between scholasticism and humanism. But much depends on whether we define those differences as products of transformations in language and discourse or place our emphasis on social relations and historical processes. It may be true that civic humanism had introduced a new language of politics, quite different from that of medieval scholasticism. It may even be true that Machiavelli belongs to the humanist tradition in a way that Marsilius did not. Yet both political thinkers were deeply rooted in the Italian city-state; and the differences between them have as much to do with changes in the circumstances of the city-states as they do with transformations in discourse.
The differences between Marsilius and Machiavelli also have to do with their differing relations to the social conflicts of their day. Marsilius was preoccupied not with the survival or autonomy of city-states but the factional struggles between papal and imperial parties. It can even be argued (as was done in the first volume of this study) that his defence of imperial power was driven less by fear of the papacy and its threats to civil peace than by his support for great aristocratic families like the Visconti of Milan and the della Scalas of Verona, who had strong imperial (Ghibelline) loyalties (as was typical among the landed nobility) and in whose service Marsilius worked. This allegiance to signorial power is masked by interpretations of Marsilius’s doctrine that treat him as a forerunner of modern republicanism, which also obscure the immediate issues confronting this late medieval thinker.
For Marsilius the problem, in the medieval manner, was a complex network of competing jurisdictions. When he outlined his idea of a single unitary jurisdiction, the civic corporation, he was certainly departing from the medieval norm of parcellized sovereignty; but he was by that means quite consciously supporting one claim to temporal authority against another, not so much the civic commune against all other jurisdictions but the Empire against the papacy, and Ghibelline signori against their civic rivals. He showed no concern for the threat to civic unity and jurisdiction posed by the feudal powers of the landed nobility, while his notion of a single unitary civic corporation represented a clear challenge to autonomous guilds and their anti-signorial powers. His notion of one undivided civic corporation simply trumped the claims of lesser corporate bodies.
Machiavelli’s Florence presented different problems, and his responses to them were shaped by different allegiances, perhaps more truly republican and certainly less inclined to the interests of the signori. The very survival of the city-state as anything like an autonomous entity was indeed at stake; and the immediate challenge was coming not from various fragmented jurisdictions, or from struggles between papal and imperial authorities, or between the civic factions they sustained, but from increasingly centralized and expanding states. The most powerful external forces were now rising territorial monarchies like France and Spain; and internal disorders in Florence were shaped by this new political reality.
The Italian city-states had already suffered from the general European crises, famine and plague of the fourteenth century. But even in good times their prosperity and success had depended on the fragmented governance of European feudalism and could not long survive the rise of strong territorial states. In constant rivalry and often open war with one another, the Italians were especially vulnerable to the territorial ambitions of the European monarchies. The role of commercial centres such as Venice and Florence as indispensable trading links in feudal Europe declined as feudal fragmentation gave way to centralized state powers, sustained by military superiority and the commercial advantages of imperial expansion.
By the fifteenth century, Venice and Florence stood almost alone as independent city-states. The Ottoman Empire deprived Venice of its dominance in east–west trade, capturing Constantinople in 1453, while European monarchies challenged both the political independence and the economic prosperity of the remaining city-states. Portugal extended its commercial reach to India, Spain gained access to the wealth of the New World, and France invaded Italy in 1494. Economic stagnation, social unrest and political upheaval in the city republics were immensely aggravated by years of war following the French invasion, as France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire battled for control of Italian territory – even while culture flourished in the city-states at the very moment of decline, when wealthy patrons of the arts, now more rentiers than entrepreneurs, engaged in ever more passionate conspicuous consumption.
It was the military disasters facing Italy, in 1494, and the political instability associated with them, that more than anything else concentrated the minds of Italian political thinkers, particularly in Florence. They were forced to reflect not only on the conditions of civic success and decline but also on the fundamental human traits that encouraged or impeded them. Niccolò Machiavelli’s generation was formed in this context, and its shadow looms over everything he wrote. He was born in 1469, the son of a distinguished lawyer, at a time when republican government had given way to Medici rule. Although of moderate means, his family seems to have belonged to a long line of Florentine notables. Machiavelli, who received a classic humanist education, began his career of public service as a clerk in 1494, the very year of the French invasion and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, and would go on
