immutable, we can learn from historical experience, imitating successful actions while avoiding those that have failed. Human beings can adapt to varying circumstances. They can indeed, up to a point, shape those circumstances and, in so doing, shape themselves; and the very qualities that seem to militate against stability and social order can be channelled to positive ends.
Machiavelli’s military model of political order, then, encompasses his most familiar ‘Machiavellian’ strictures on the necessity of force and violence in creating and sustaining the body politic; the importance of fear in the maintenance of leadership (it is best, of course, for a leader to be both loved and feared, but if he has to choose, fear must prevail); the need for ruthless treatment of one’s adversaries, even if that means violating the most cherished principles of conventional morality; and so on.
The opposition of the armed and the unarmed lies at the very heart of Machiavelli’s political theory. In The Prince, one of his principal criticisms is levelled against a man who was also one of the most famous leaders of the Florentine republic, Girolamo Savonarola. A Dominican friar, preacher and prophet, Savonarola led Florence when the Medici were expelled in 1494; but, says Machiavelli, he was an ‘unarmed prophet’, in sharp contrast to others who had founded a new order but who, unlike the prophet unarmed, were able to maintain their positions: ‘armed prophets’ such as Moses or leaders like Cyrus, Theseus and Romulus. The whole of Machiavelli’s political theory is in many ways directed at the failings of the unarmed prophet.
Savonarola had predicted the French invasion, placing the blame on the corruption and decadence of Florence in the era of Medici rule. He began, in fact, by predicting the downfall of the city, doomed by the will of God as punishment for its own sins; but he would go on to extol the Florentine republic, which would, he declared, restore itself by banishing moral corruption. When the Medici fled and the French withdrew, the preacher’s credibility was vastly enhanced, and his vision of an incorruptible Christian republic held sway for a few years, finding its most emblematic moment in a ‘bonfire of the vanities’. Since his attacks on moral corruption included the clergy, he had powerful enemies in the Church. Having lost the support of the Florentine people who had tired of his moralistic rule, he was excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI and executed in 1498.
Savonarola’s defence of the republic was essentially scholastic in its mode of argumentation. Humanistic speculations about human autonomy and excellence, while certainly not alien to Christianity, were less congenial to the preacher’s uncompromising convictions about the primacy of divine will. While he extolled republican liberties, they were to be preserved not by struggle but by banishing corruption and suppressing conflict within the civic order. After his execution his followers, who remained a significant political force in Florence, would prefer the example of aristocratic Venice ruled by its Great Council, or of Florence in the era of governo stretto, the restricted civic order that governed the republic on the eve of Medici rule and was advocated by the Florentine aristocracy.
On these scores, Machiavelli disagreed with Savonarola and his supporters on every count. There has been much debate about Machiavelli’s attitude towards Savonarola. Some commentators have suggested that he respected the preacher as much as he condemned him; and he certainly does praise him, for instance in the Discourses. But Machiavelli’s doctrine of struggle, conflict and military prowess is in direct antithesis to the ‘unarmed prophet’, in opposition to Christian fatalism and the invocation of God’s will as responses to disasters like the French invasion.
The Discourses
Machiavelli’s conviction that every state will eventually decline suggests, on the face of it, that he shares the views so typical of his contemporaries and predecessors about the cyclical processes of history and the inevitable decline of even the most stable and powerful political order, 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
