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 Florentine republic, with, as Machiavelli tells us, disastrous results. But understanding Machiavelli’s preoccupation here with domestic liberty and order demands something more, a closer look at the conditions of civic disorder and decline. In his History of Florence, he recounts at some length the story of the ciompi rebellion, presenting it as a turning-point in the history of his city, the culmination of its endless factional and social conflicts. In a speech attributed to a ciompi militant, he sums up in the most dramatic terms what is at stake. Just as the economic rivalries of the urban patriciate played themselves out in political factions, so, too, did the economic grievances of the urban poor over inadequate remuneration for their labours turn into conflict over guild privileges and then a struggle for political power. Power struggles of this kind all too readily took on the character of war:
[O]ur opponents are disunited and rich; their disunion will give us the victory, and their riches, when they have become ours, will support us. Be not deceived about that antiquity of blood by which they exalt themselves above us; for all men having had one common origin, are all equally ancient, and nature has made us all after one fashion. Strip us naked, and we shall all be found alike. Dress us in their clothing, and they in ours, we shall appear noble, they ignoble – for poverty and riches make all the difference . . . [A]ll who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavour to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty . . . Therefore we must use force when the opportunity offers; and fortune cannot present us one more favourable than the present, when the citizens are still disunited, the Signory doubtful, and the magistrates terrified; for we may easily conquer them before they can come to any settled arrangement. By this means we shall either obtain the entire government of the city, or so large a share of it, as to be forgiven past errors, and have sufficient authority to threaten the city with a renewal of them at some future time. (III.3)
This dramatically captures the realities of Florentine politics and, perhaps more than any other passage in Machiavelli’s writings, starkly sums up his understanding of the problems his political theory is meant to confront. He is not here advocating the violence proposed in the speech, but he sees how and why things have come to this pass. He even suggests that it was inevitable and, in the circumstances, preferable to what the signori had done. Yet in the Discourses a bloody outcome like this is precisely what he sets out to avoid in his recommendations for a successful republican order – that it be, at the same time, an effective military force.
The balance at which he aims is difficult. Civic liberty requires that the aristocracy be kept in check and that the people have some role in politics. Military success, which is far more likely to be achieved by a citizens’ militia than by untrustworthy nobles and their mercenary armies, also depends on some kind of equilibrium among the social classes; and this requires some degree of civil strife, a fruitful tension between people and patriciate. The problem is that civil strife can always descend into outright war. It was the Romans who, at least for a time in the days of the republic’s imperial expansion, struck the right balance. They built their empire not by simple oligarchic rule and the suppression of the common people – as in ancient Sparta or in Venice. They found a middle way between oligarchy and democracy by giving the people a voice through the tribunate, which institutionalized and channelled social strife. Contrary to all conventional opinion, which condemns the quarrels between the nobles and the plebs, says Machiavelli, it was those very quarrels that preserved Roman liberty.
If Machiavelli seems to be a political ‘scientist’ or even a political ‘realist’ avant la lettre, these qualities have more to do with his grounding in the political realities of his city-state, with its military civic culture and the immediate dangers it confronted, than with any modern conception of the state or some affinity to scientific methods.8 His military model of politics conformed to the realities of domestic politics in Florence, where political rivals and factions were always on the verge of war, no less than to the threats that faced his city from without. More than other civic
