Christian, and especially Augustinian, fatalism about the possibilities of human excellence and action in attaining a good life in this world; and it is Cicero who guided republican views on the education needed to achieve that excellence, especially the skills of rhetoric so vital to the active public life.
But the Roman example meant something else, too. When Aristotle spelled out his classic characterization of man as a political animal, and his theory of the polis as the terrain of human excellence, he was not concerned to defend the city-state from external threats to its very survival. The polis, after the Macedonian conquest, was already effectively dead as an independent political form. But the philosopher embraced, and even served, the Macedonian hegemony; and he envisioned a new life for the polis under imperial rule, in keeping with Alexander’s distinctive mode of imperial governance, through the medium of local aristocracies in ostensibly self-governing municipalities. Macedonian hegemony had the added advantage, for Aristotle, of supplanting radical Athenian democracy, enhancing the power of the aristocracy against unbridled rule by the demos. This delicate balance of class power required the suppression of social strife, especially the conflicts between rich and poor, the philosopher’s main practical concern. The ideal Athenian citizen, then, governed by Macedonian agents under the watchful eye of imperial garrisons, was not a man of struggle or of military virtues.
The Roman case could hardly be more different. The republic was itself an imperial power, whose conquests had created a huge territorial empire with what would become the largest military force the world had ever known. While Roman thinkers such as Cicero were no less committed than Aristotle to a ‘mixed’ constitution in which the common people were subordinate to aristocracy, in Cicero’s Rome the civic culture was at heart a military ethic. Against the background of the threat to Florentine autonomy, it was this above all that spoke to Machiavelli, who took the civic humanist idea of ‘virility’, or virtù, to the limits of its martial spirit.
The Prince
In his most famous, not to say notorious, work, The Prince, Machiavelli lays out his ‘Machiavellian’ challenge to any conception of political power that invokes moral principles to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of power. There is, evidently, no such thing as rightful authority, and power is to be maintained by any means necessary. How far Machiavelli meant to push this principle remains a matter of dispute. Whatever his motivations, whether he was seeking the approval of the Medici or was simply driven by a bitter sense of irony in his exile from politics, commentators who regard him as a ‘realist’ are no doubt closer to the truth than those who treat him as the emblematic advocate of political evil. There is, at any rate, no mistaking the differences between The Prince and the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy, which almost certainly expresses Machiavelli’s own disposition more precisely, displaying a preference for republican government that requires him to make the kinds of judgments about good government that he refuses in The Prince.
Much has been written about Machiavelli’s relation to, and divergences from, the civic humanist tradition; and, more specifically, about where to situate The Prince within a genre familiar to his contemporaries: humanist advice-books to princes. For Machiavelli, as for other writers in the genre, writes Quentin Skinner, ‘the prince’s basic aim, we learn in a phrase that echoes through Il Principe, must be mantenere lo stato, to maintain his power and existing frame of government. As well as keeping the peace, however, a true prince must at the same time seek “to establish such a form of government as will bring honour to himself and benefit the whole body of his subjects”’.6
Where Machiavelli significantly and famously departs from other humanists, as Skinner observes in his account of what it means to mantenere lo stato, is in his insistence that the willingness to use force is essential to good princely government, in contrast to the conventional humanist distinction between virtus or manliness, and vis, that is, brute force, and in his dissent from humanist accounts of princely virtues, which require both the highest standards of personal morality and a strict adherence to principles of justice.7 But this departure may have less to do with differing views about how best to maintain what Skinner calls ‘the existing frame of government’ than with Machiavelli’s concentration on external military threats, which puts war at the centre of his doctrine.
What Machiavelli means when he speaks – as he so often does – of lo stato remains a subject of scholarly debate. Yet again, the issue turns on whether he has in mind a ‘modern’ concept of the state as an impersonal legal and political order, or a pre-modern idea of political authority as a personal possession or dominium, or something in between and ‘transitional’. There is still much of the pre-modern personal in Machiavelli’s stato, with its emphasis on the personal power and honour of the prince. But if there is also an element of the impersonal, it may have less to do with a ‘modern’ conception of the state than with Machiavelli’s military preoccupations and the threats that loom from without.
In The Prince Machiavelli tells us that
A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline . . . there is nothing proportionate between the armed and the unarmed; and it is not reasonable that he who is armed should yield obedience willingly to him who is unarmed, or that the unarmed man should be secure among armed servants . . . He ought never, therefore, to have out of his thoughts this subject of war, and in peace he should addict himself more to its exercise than in war. (XIV)
Machiavelli’s military model goes beyond the art of war. In The Prince he not only identifies war as the prince’s main concern. His conceptions of leadership, political morality, and the conditions for sustaining a successful civic order are at bottom the conditions of a successful military power. Ideally, in his view, this is best achieved by a difficult balance between ruthless leadership and popular support, a capacity for cruelty and frequent departures from conventional morality, combined with an ability to mobilize the loyalties of the rank and file. The fact that Machiavelli has no use for a traditional military aristocracy and that his ideal military organization is a citizens’ militia makes the conditions of success even more exacting – and, as becomes clearer in the Discourses, at this point his views on military success become inseparable from his republicanism.
Machiavelli’s views on religion are also a subject of controversy, not least because, especially in the Discourses, he suggests that conventional Christianity has had the effect of weakening the manly vigour, the virtù, required for the active civic life. Yet his attitude has much in common with that of other humanists in his challenge not to Christian faith in general but to scholastic Christian fatalism, which requires submission to the blind power of fate and fortune and views the frivolous goods of this world – wealth, power, honour, fame and glory – as useless and unworthy of pursuit. Again like other humanists, he challenges these beliefs not by denying that much of human life is determined by circumstances beyond our control – the dictates of fortuna – but by emphasizing the scope of human action within the limits imposed on us by fate or fortune or God’s will. Fortuna can be a friend to the man of virtù, instead of a pitiless enemy beyond the reach of human capacities and action. Every civic order will, to be sure, inevitably decline; and then a new order will have to be founded, which will make even greater demands on virtù. On this score, too, Machiavelli is not so distant from other humanists. Where he departs from humanist conventions is in his insistence that virtù may run counter to conventional morality; that political stability is possible despite – or even because of – humanity’s most stubborn defects; and that men of virtù must often commit acts of violence, especially in the foundation of new states.
Machiavelli’s views on the conditions for the creation and maintenance of a successful civic order depend, of course, on certain convictions about the possibilities available to human action; and his military principles are supported by more fundamental assumptions about history and human nature. He never precisely spells out his conception of human nature, though he certainly assumes the worst by emphasizing the insatiable desires of human beings, their short-sightedness and envy, even their general untrustworthiness.
