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The Many and the Few: On Machiavelli's “Democratic Moment”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2012

Ryan Balot  and
Stephen Trochimchuk
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Abstract

Through an extended critical engagement with John P. McCormick's Machiavellian Democracy, this paper aims to shed light on Machiavelli's account of relations among the many and the few in the Discourses on Livy. While we agree with McCormick that Machiavelli should not be too quickly subsumed within the republican tradition, as interpreted by the “Cambridge School,” we reject the idea that Machiavelli's central thrust is prodemocratic. By focusing on the structure and logic of Machiavelli's arguments, we show that Machiavelli was critical of the capacities of ordinary citizens to govern themselves. As a result, Machiavelli emphasized and endorsed continuous elite intervention in the political life of the mixed regime, even as he paid due attention to the people's participation in a political regime with appropriate laws and institutions. Machiavelli's political theory, as embodied in the Discourses on Livy, challenges the transparency and equality that contemporary egalitarians and democrats embrace.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 74 , Issue 4 , Fall 2012 , pp. 559 - 588
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2012

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References

1 McCormick, John P., Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), viiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar. McCormick's book represents the culmination of his long-standing effort to represent Machiavelli as a democrat. It is based on earlier articles: McCormick, John P., “Machiavellian Democracy: Controlling Elites with Ferocious Populism,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 2 (2001): 297–314CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCormick, John P., “Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School's ‘Guicciardinian Moments,’” Political Theory 31, no. 5 (2003): 615–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McCormick, John P., “Machiavelli's Political Trials and the ‘Free Way of Life,’” Political Theory 35, no. 4 (2007): 385–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar emphasized the Aristotelian roots of the republican tradition; the Roman or Ciceronian origins of that tradition have been stressed by Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Viroli, Maurizio, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 16.

4 Ibid.

5 McCormick, “Machiavelli against Republicanism,” 617.

6 McCormick, “Machiavellian Democracy,” 298.

7 Monoson, S. Sara, Plato's Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Euben, J. P., “Reading Democracy: Socratic Dialogues and the Political Education of Democratic Citizens,” in Dēmokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Ober, Josiah and Hedrick, Charles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 327–59Google Scholar.

8 Frank, Jill, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

9 Flathman, Richard, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality, and Chastened Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)Google Scholar.

10 See also Vatter, Miguel E., Between Form and Event: Machiavelli's Theory of Political Freedom (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Vatter's reading of Machiavelli, like McCormick's, radically prioritizes the role of the people in the Discourses. However, whereas McCormick emphasizes the specific institutions that empower the people to engage in civic affairs, Vatter stresses the negative, contestatory role of the people against all institutionalized forms of rule. According to Vatter, the republic is for Machiavelli neither political form nor political substance. Rather, it represents a historical event grounded in the people's demand for an-arche or “no-rule” (127). Vatter insists that for Machiavelli “a free political life happens only because of the resistance of the people, as bearers of the desire for freedom, to the heteronomous imposition of the law and order of the state” (109).

11 Parenthetical references may be assumed to be to the Discourses, unless otherwise indicated. Translations are from Machiavelli, Niccolò, Discourses on Livy, trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. and Tarcov, Nathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, unless otherwise indicated.

12 We do not address the issue of imperialism fully in the present paper; our focus will remain on the question of Rome's internal politics, and specifically on the relationship between leaders and people as Machiavelli presents it. On the links between empire and liberty, McCormick argues that Machiavelli is trying to “entice” his “young patrician addressees” “with a republican model that entails empire so as to encourage them to accept more egalitarian and participatory politics at home. With the carrot of glory and the stick of necessity, Machiavelli compels his dedicatees to pursue empire, and in the process leverages a more populist domestic politics, a Machiavellian democracy, out of them” (Machiavellian Democracy, 59). Our view, by contrast, is that Machiavelli's interest in popular participation was instrumental, in that popular engagement proved useful for making Rome's citizen-soldiers feel that they had a stake in the city's successful imperialism. If this is correct, then Machiavelli's motivation for wanting to involve the citizenry in politics could not be said to grow out of any democratic enthusiasms or commitments. For the idea that Machiavelli prized liberty as a means to empire, greatness, and glory, rather than as an end in itself, see also Coby, J. Patrick, Machiavelli's Romans: Liberty and Greatness in the “Discourses on Livy” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), 261–68Google Scholar, citing especially II.pref.–II.2; and cf. Connell, William J., “Machiavelli on Growth as an End,” in Historians and Ideologues: Essays in Honor of Donald R. Kelley, ed. Grafton, A. T. and Salmon, J. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 259–77Google Scholar. This subject, however, goes beyond the scope of our present paper.

13 McCormick's attention to the tribunate is novel and important, for example, but even this anti-elite institution was susceptible of control by members of the nobility: in discussing the Agrarian laws, for example, Machiavelli shows that the nobles resisted the law by temporizing with it, “either by leading an army out, or by having the tribune who proposed it opposed by another tribune” (1.37).

14 In raising these concerns, and throughout the following essay, we have been influenced by the work of Leo Strauss: see especially his Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 44–45, 126–31, 259–61, 263–65, 287–88Google Scholar. But we do not wholeheartedly or uncritically endorse Strauss's reading of Machiavelli. Most importantly, we do not find that any appeal to esotericism is necessary to defend the views we advance in this paper.

15 Kalyvas, Andreas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 77; on Aristotle, Locke, and Condorcet, see ibid., 89–90.

17 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 129.

18 Compare the remarks of Coby: “The argument is less a brief for democracy than an encomium to the rule of law, for any regime is improved by having its rulers ‘shackled’ by law. Plus the comparison of people and princes obscures the fact that in a republic the people is joined and guided by the great” (Machiavelli's Romans, 256). Coby effectively undermines Machiavelli's comparison of the people's voice to the voice of God (1.58.3), by reminding readers that “forecasting the future is the business of airy intelligences—that is, of some ill-defined part of the spiritual hierarchy of popular religion” (256–57).

19 On this point, see Fischer, Markus, “Prologue: Machiavelli's Rapacious Republicanism,” in Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy, ed. Rahe, Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), liiGoogle Scholar.

20 This “teachable moment” closely resembles what anthropologists have long called a “ritual of reversal.” Ordinary norms and practices are suspended for a time, and a topsy-turvy world is established. When instability or disintegration ensues, conventional norms are thereby reinforced and made to appear natural and inevitable. See, for example, Bamberger, Joan, “The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist and Lamphere, Louise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 263–80Google Scholar.

21 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 77.

22 Ibid., 72.

23 Ibid., 70.

24 This is what McCormick seems to suggest at Machiavellian Democracy, 59: “The grandi might be heartened by the elite manipulation of the plebeians as both citizens and soldiers that Machiavelli describes throughout the Discourses, but peoples might learn how to resist such manipulation precisely on the basis of Machiavelli's descriptions.” We would make two points about this idea. First, it is true that peoples might learn about the mechanics of manipulation based on Machiavelli's descriptions. But this sort of education of the people is not Machiavelli's goal, as we argue in the text. Second, McCormick acknowledges in this sentence that Machiavelli pays attention to elite manipulation throughout the Discourses; but his particular interpretations of key passages do not correspond to this acknowledgment, and it is with these particular interpretations that we mean to engage.

25 The translation is from Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. de Sélincourt, Aubrey (London: Penguin, 1971)Google Scholar.

26 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 72.

27 Cf. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 128–31.

28 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 83–84.

29 Beiner, Ronald, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. With Beiner's fine interpretation, one might compare Hulliung, Mark, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, 45: “Roman religious belief was unique in being self-consciously constructed by the elite for popular consumption, and is possibly the greatest single tribute to the creative powers of leadership.” For other careful examinations of civil religion in Machiavelli, see Sullivan, Vickie B., Machiavelli's Three Romes: Religion, Human Liberty, and Politics Reformed (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr., Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 69–79Google Scholar. For other views more favorable to a Christian-friendly Machiavelli, see Colish, Marcia L., “Republicanism, Religion, and Machiavelli's Savonarolan Moment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 4 (1999): 597–616CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with extensive bibliography; and Nederman, Cary J., “Grace, Fortune, God, and Free Will in Machiavelli's Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 4 (1999): 617–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which emphasizes “divine ordination” and Machiavelli's dependence on medieval theological ideas. For a view that, on the contrary, stresses the modernity of Machiavellian virtù, an ontology of disorder, and the promotion of desire satisfaction, see Newell, W. R., “How Original Is Machiavelli? A Consideration of Skinner's Interpretation of Virtue and Fortune,” Political Theory 15, no. 4 (1987): 612–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 85.

31 On the tribunes’ mistaken appropriation of consular power, see 1.39.2 with our discussion below; on the distinction between religion used domestically and abroad in 1.13, see Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders, 75.

32 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 85, 90, 96, citing 1.39, 1.60.

33 Ibid., 96, citing 1.39; cf. 90.

34 Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders, 126.

35 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 85.

36 Livy, History of Rome, trans. Foster, B. O., vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919)Google Scholar.

37 To McCormick, Coriolanus's story indicates that “Machiavelli's … ultimate objective concerning political trials may not be, first and foremost, the preservation of patrician lives, but, in certain instances, quite the contrary”: reading this episode with that of Cosimo de’ Medici (1.33), McCormick suggests that, according to Machiavelli, offenders should perhaps be executed rather than “exiled or permitted to flee” (Machiavellian Democracy, 126). Our point is not that Machiavelli views trials as a way to save patrician lives, but only that trials may not be just to individuals or, in their consequences, as helpful to republics as Coriolanus's story initially seems to imply.

38 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 77.

39 Perhaps the case of Manlius Capitolinus qualifies to some extent: the people changed from being a defender of Manlius to his judge and condemned him to death for his calumnies (3.8.1; cf. 1.24.2, 1.58.1–2, 3.1.3). However, it was the tribunes who brought Manlius forward for judgment (3.8.1); and the Senate had previously “created a dictator to inquire into the case and to check the impetuosity of Manlius” (1.8.1; cf. 1.24.2). We do not see the people standing forward in order to debate the case and to give reasons one way or another.

40 By contrast, McCormick himself shows more interest in the workings of the Roman assemblies, in statements such as the following: “Machiavelli's suggestion that the people gathered in assemblies recognize the truth in public speeches and make correct decisions on that basis implies that they are capable of choosing the better arguments among proposals, whether submitted by the consuls in the noble-dominated comitia centuriata, or by the tribunes in the concilium plebis and the comitia tributa, and those proposed by either sets of magistrates in the contiones” (Machiavellian Democracy, 77).

41 Ibid., 78, 74.

42 See, for example, McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 4: “Generalizing from his own studies and experiences, Machiavelli argues that an unquenchable appetite for oppression drives the grandi's efforts to accumulate wealth, monopolize offices, and gain renown within republics (D I.5; P 9),” with ibid., 23–26, 44–47, 50, 60, 92, 96, 128, 181.

43 On these points, see the important discussion of Fischer, “Prologue,” liii–lvi.

44 McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, 74. Cf. ibid., 45, where McCormick uses 3.34 to suggest that “a noble's speech might be contested publicly by a plebeian.” This may have been legally possible at Rome, but Machiavelli's examples do not emphasize that plebeians will publicly and usefully contest the speech of nobles—on the contrary.

45 The idea that extraordinary actions help the republic to function well in ordinary ways is a central claim of Mansfield, Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders.

46 On Machiavelli's emphasis on flexibility, see especially Mansfield, Harvey C. Jr., Machiavelli's Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36–38Google Scholar.