Machiavelli's Principio: Political Renewal and Innovation in the Discourses on Livy (Proofs) (original) (raw)
Related papers
DYNAMIC POLITICS: NECESSITY, FOUNDING, AND (RE)FOUNDING IN MACHIAVELLI'S DISCOURSES ON LIVY
Abstract This dissertation is an attempt to recast the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy in a far more radical light than it has been previously understood. Rather than trying to overcome fortune, I argue that Machiavelli was encouraging political actors to embrace it by embracing the force which fortune generates: necessity. Along with this orientation towards fortune and necessity, Machiavelli also was engaging in an additional subversive project: the systematic undermining of the conventional republican wisdom of his predecessors and his contemporaries. On a practical level, the necessity central to Machiavelli’s thought is that of “founding,” of beginning a political order. But I argue that Machiavelli dramatically reinvents this term, because for him there is no such thing as a world without a prior political history and culture upon which to found. Instead, he shows us that there can only be what I have termed “(re)founding,” that is, a process of creating a new order from that which was prior to it, utilizing the logic of prior (re)foundings in light of novel circumstances. These novelties, produced by fortune, generate new necessities—particularly fear—that can compel human beings to act. What Machiavelli teaches is how to utilize these unruly, chaotic necessities—some “natural,” some “situational,” and some “artificial”—as opportunities to (re)create political order. This runs contrary to the standard interpretation of political history that seeks to find a solid “founding” of a political community, and Machiavelli systematically undermines any notion of a pure, one-time beginning. By illustrating the similarities and differences in Machiavelli’s presentation of Rome’s several (re)foundings, I also show how, in contrast to conventional conceptions of necessity which view it as a restriction, Machiavelli shows how it is more than mere constraint, but how on the very basis of such constraint it can be liberating, challenging the notion that constraint and freedom are necessarily antithetical. Machiavelli reinterprets the history of Rome from the standpoint of necessity and shows how, by embracing and utilizing it, Rome’s dynamism might be (re)created for others daring enough to try.
Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict —Edited volume, Introduction
University of Chicago Press, 2017
More than five hundred years after Machiavelli wrote The Prince, his landmark treatise on the pragmatic application of power remains a pivot point for debates on political thought. While scholars continue to investigate interpretations of The Prince in different contexts throughout history, from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento and Italian unification, other fruitful lines of research explore how Machiavelli’s ideas about power and leadership can further our understanding of contemporary political circumstances. With Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict, David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara have brought together the most recent research on The Prince, with contributions from many of the leading scholars of Machiavelli, including Quentin Skinner, Harvey Mansfield, Erica Benner, John McCormick, and Giovanni Giorgini. Organized into four sections, the book focuses first on Machiavelli’s place in the history of political thought: Is he the last of the ancients or the creator of a new, distinctly modern conception of politics? And what might the answer to this question reveal about the impact of these disparate traditions on the founding of modern political philosophy? The second section contrasts current understandings of Machiavelli’s view of virtues in The Prince. The relationship between political leaders, popular power, and liberty is another perennial problem in studies of Machiavelli, and the third section develops several claims about that relationship. Finally, the fourth section explores the legacy of Machiavelli within the republican tradition of political thought and his relevance to enduring political issues. Introduction
A Discourse on Niccolo Machiavelli
In Machiavelli’s works he discusses the history and downfalls of different governments, he offers an early model of the social contract theory and he offers policy prescriptions oh the authority of power and also the liberty of people. Niccolo Machiavelli is most popular for writing “The Prince” this book is shorter than his more complete work “Discourses on Livy”. These two projects were almost written simultaneously (Machiavelli pausing Discourses to finish The Prince) and both were finished within a few years of each other with sometimes contradictory claims and themes. In both of these works he presents excellent theories on government and the individual, in this paper I will look at both of these works of literature in the context of Machiavelli’s life, analyzing his theories and presenting practical applications for his larger concepts.
“Corruption, Virtue and Republic in Machiavelli’s Work”
South-East European Journal of Political Science, vol. I/2004, 2013
In this article we examine the relationship between Machiavelli’s thought and the notion of corruption, starting from the multiple meanings thereof. It appears in the first instance that the Florentine Secretary proposes a definition rather “civic” than “deontological” of corruption; in this respect he is in tune with the tradition of republican thought and more precisely he argues using a paradigm of neo-Roman civic virtue. Yet far from sticking to this type of analysis, Machiavelli also seems responsive to the games of the underlying interests of politics, and especially in his The Florentine History; and if he calls for the citizens’ vigilance, he invites his reader to understand the ongoing role of charismatic influence. These two dimensions blur the usual lines and lead to qualify his doctrine of “heterodox republicanism”
Working Paper, 2023
In 1516, Niccolo Machiavelli, the advisor of tyrants already infamous for The Prince, joined a circle of humanist literati who met on the outskirts of Florence in the gardens of the Rucellai family. They called themselves the Orti Oricellari, and their discussions focused on classical republican texts-Cicero, Titus Livy, and others-and the applicability of Roman lessons to contemporary politics. Indeed, reports of participants in the Orti confirm that the primary concern of these learned men was the sustenance of precious liberties in fragile republican states, such as their recently toppled Florentine Republic. It was in this circle of learning that Machiavelli was drawn back towards the humanist pursuits which had formed the core of his own education, before he had entered the world of power politics as a Florentine emissary at the courts of some of Italy's great and terrible autocratic rulers. And it was because of these discussions that the bloody political realism which dripped from the pages of The Prince took on a new character, infused with a renewed love for liberty, and became the humanistic, republican doctrines of his Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy. Yet, the standard scholarly interpretations of Machiavelli's two most famous works link them inseparably, as two sides of one coin, even going so far as to suppose that these two tracts with such different political ends were written at the same time, in 1513. Machiavelli is seen either as the "murderous Machiavel" of The Prince and his republicanism is discounted, or he is seen as the truly patriotic republican of the Discourses who regrettably erred (or wrote ironically, or deviously) when advising tyrants. But I have pursued another vein of interpretation here: there is credible textual and historical evidence that Machiavelli's Discourses were written later than The Prince, in a time when he was under the sway of the Orti and of classical thought. Furthermore, there is historical evidence that Machiavelli's humanist, republican thought did deepen as his years outside of government service passed. Jumping off from these textual and historical starting points, one can begin to see that Machiavelli's different views in his two main works are evidence of a true, growing concern for liberty. Nevertheless, despite the influence of the Orti, Machiavelli's liberty was not precisely that of his humanist, republican contemporaries. I argue that Machiavelli's republicanism has eluded explanation by historicist interpreters (who write histories of political thought by showing how a thinker fits within a "paradigm" of thought which was active in his time) precisely because he found the answers to his political preoccupations (and found intellectual kin to his realist politics) in Roman political thinkers, not necessarily in his interlocutors in the Rucellai gardens. Machiavelli's institutional thought as well as his psychology of founders, rulers, and citizens alike was deeply touched by the Romans on whom he discoursed. One cannot, then, understand Machiavelli without understanding Roman republican thought: he was engaged in recovering a Roman republican conception of liberty which was very different from the paradigms of liberty current in his own times (and most certainly different from the liberty of our times). As evidence of this claim, I argue here for a "Development Thesis" which traces Machiavelli's change from a power politician's negative view of the capacity of the subject for autonomy (befitting Machiavelli in 1513), to a politically-realistic, yet humanistically-informed view of the same capacity in the citizen (a role Machiavelli had embraced by 1516).
Niccoló Machiavelli's Political Thought: Amoral or Ultra Moral? Some Reflections
This revisionist paper seeks to place the controversial but popular Machiavellism in its historical perspective. Based on a careful reading of his writings, most importantly, his Il Principe, this study reassesses the implicit and explicit connotation of his arguments in his counsel to the rulers. Far from being a notorious upholder of the principle “means justifying ends” the author of this infamous booklet emerges as genuine nationalist and a supporter of a strong, pragmatic, and cautious but shrewd ruler who is neither a heedless militant and avaricious predator against his neighbors nor an upholder of dysfunctional morality and nonviolence. Standing squarely between his medieval forbears and the leading thinkers of the Early Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli appears as one of the most influential heralds of modern political thought.