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Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. Pocock, J. Walzer, M. Powell, J. Rahe, P. Skinner, Q. Warburton, N. Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing. E-IR is an independent non-profit publisher run by an all volunteer team.
Your donations allow us to invest in new open access titles and pay our bandwidth bills to ensure we keep our existing titles free to view. Any amount, in any currency, is appreciated. Many thanks! Donations are voluntary and not required to download the e-book - your link to download is below. The Discourses makes clear that conventional Christianity saps from human beings the vigor required for active civil life CW —, — And The Prince speaks with equal parts disdain and admiration about the contemporary condition of the Church and its Pope CW 29, 44—46, 65, 91— Anthony Parel argues that Machiavelli's cosmos, governed by the movements of the stars and the balance of the humors, takes on an essentially pagan and pre-Christian cast.
For others, Machiavelli may best be described as a man of conventional, if unenthusiastic, piety, prepared to bow to the externalities of worship but not deeply devoted in either soul or mind to the tenets of Christian faith.
A few dissenting voices, most notably Sebastian de Grazia and Maurizio Viroli [] , have attempted to rescue Machiavelli's reputation from those who view him as hostile or indifferent to Christianity. Cary Nederman 28—49 extends and systematizes Grazia's insights by showing how such central Christian theological doctrines as grace and free will form important elements of Machiavelli's conceptual structure. Viroli considers, by contrast, the historical attitudes toward the Christian religion as manifested in the Florentine republic of Machiavelli's day.
Certainly, the term lo stato appears widely in Machiavelli's writings, especially in The Prince , in connection with the acquisition and application of power in a coercive sense, which renders its meaning distinct from the Latin term status condition or station from which it is derived.
Machiavelli's name and doctrines were widely invoked to justify the priority of the interests of the state in the age of absolutism. Yet, as Harvey Mansfield has shown, a careful reading of Machiavelli's use of lo stato in The Prince and elsewhere does not support this interpretation.
Machiavelli is at best a transitional figure in the process by which the language of the state emerged in early modern Europe, as Mansfield concludes. Thus, the Machiavellian prince can count on no pre-existing structures of legitimation, as discussed above.
This is a precarious position, since Machiavelli insists that the throes of fortune and the conspiracies of other men render the prince constantly vulnerable to the loss of his state. The idea of a stable constitutional regime that reflects the tenor of modern political thought and practice is nowhere to be seen in Machiavelli's conception of princely government.
MP Yet Machiavelli himself apparently harbored severe doubts about whether human beings were psychologically capable of generating such flexible dispositions within themselves.
While The Prince is doubtless the most widely read of his works, the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy perhaps most honestly expresses Machiavelli's personal political beliefs and commitments, in particular, his republican sympathies. The Discourses certainly draw upon the same reservoir of language and concepts that flowed into The Prince , but the former treatise leads us to draw conclusions quite different from—many scholars have said contradictory to—the latter.
A minimal constitutional order is one in which subjects live securely vivere sicuro , ruled by a strong government which holds in check the aspirations of both nobility and people, but is in turn balanced by other legal and institutional mechanisms.
In a fully constitutional regime, however, the goal of the political order is the freedom of the community vivere libero , created by the active participation of, and contention between, the nobility and the people. As Quentin Skinner , — has argued, liberty forms a value that anchors Machiavelli's political theory and guides his evaluations of the worthiness of different types of regimes. Only in a republic, for which Machiavelli expresses a distinct preference, may this goal be attained.
Machiavelli adopted this position on both pragmatic and principled grounds. Although Machiavelli makes relatively little comment about the French monarchy in The Prince , he devotes a great deal of attention to France in the Discourses. Why would Machiavelli effusively praise let alone even analyze a hereditary monarchy in a work supposedly designed to promote the superiority of republics?
The answer stems from Machiavelli's aim to contrast the best case scenario of a monarchic regime with the institutions and organization of a republic. Even the most excellent monarchy, in Machiavelli's view, lacks certain salient qualities that are endemic to properly constituted republican government and that make the latter constitution more desirable than the former.
Machiavelli asserts that the greatest virtue of the French kingdom and its king is the dedication to law. The explanation for this situation Machiavelli refers to the function of the Parlement. These laws and orders are maintained by Parlements, notably that of Paris: by it they are renewed any time it acts against a prince of the kingdom or in its sentences condemns the king.
And up to now it has maintained itself by having been a persistent executor against that nobility. Discourses CW , translation revised. These passages of the Discourses seem to suggest that Machiavelli has great admiration for the institutional arrangements that obtain in France. Specifically, the French king and the nobles, whose power is such that they would be able to oppress the populace, are checked by the laws of the realm which are enforced by the independent authority of the Parlement.
Yet such a regime, no matter how well ordered and law-abiding, remains incompatible with vivere libero. Discussing the ability of a monarch to meet the people's wish for liberty, Machiavelli comments that. Discourses CW He concludes that a few individuals want freedom simply in order to command others; these, he believes, are of sufficiently small number that they can either be eradicated or bought off with honors.
Although the king cannot give such liberty to the masses, he can provide the security that they crave:. As for the rest, for whom it is enough to live securely vivere sicuro , they are easily satisfied by making orders and laws that, along with the power of the king, comprehend everyone's security. And once a prince does this, and the people see that he never breaks such laws, they will shortly begin to live securely vivere sicuro and contentedly Discourses CW The law-abiding character of the French regime ensures security, but that security, while desirable, ought never to be confused with liberty.
This is the limit of monarchic rule: even the best kingdom can do no better than to guarantee to its people tranquil and orderly government. Machiavelli holds that one of the consequences of such vivere sicuro is the disarmament of the people.
This all comes from having disarmed his people and having preferred … to enjoy the immediate profit of being able to plunder the people and of avoiding an imaginary rather than a real danger, instead of doing things that would assure them and make their states perpetually happy.
This disorder, if it produces some quiet times, is in time the cause of straitened circumstances, damage and irreparable ruin Discourses CW A state that makes security a priority cannot afford to arm its populace, for fear that the masses will employ their weapons against the nobility or perhaps the crown.
Yet at the same time, such a regime is weakened irredeemably, since it must depend upon foreigners to fight on its behalf. In this sense, any government that takes vivere sicuro as its goal generates a passive and impotent populace as an inescapable result. By definition, such a society can never be free in Machiavelli's sense of vivere libero , and hence is only minimally, rather than completely, political or civil. Confirmation of this interpretation of the limits of monarchy for Machiavelli may be found in his further discussion of the disarmament of the people, and its effects, in The Art of War.
Addressing the question of whether a citizen army is to be preferred to a mercenary one, he insists that the liberty of a state is contingent upon the military preparedness of its subjects.
In his view, whatever benefits may accrue to a state by denying a military role to the people are of less importance than the absence of liberty that necessarily accompanies such disarmament. The problem is not merely that the ruler of a disarmed nation is in thrall to the military prowess of foreigners. Machiavelli is confident that citizens will always fight for their liberty—against internal as well as external oppressors.
Indeed, this is precisely why successive French monarchs have left their people disarmed: they sought to maintain public security and order, which for them meant the elimination of any opportunities for their subjects to wield arms.
The French regime, because it seeks security above all else for the people as well as for their rulers , cannot permit what Machiavelli takes to be a primary means of promoting liberty.
The case of disarmament is an illustration of a larger difference between minimally constitutional systems such as France and fully political communities such as the Roman Republic, namely, the status of the classes within the society.
In France, the people are entirely passive and the nobility is largely dependent upon the king, according to Machiavelli's own observations. By contrast, in a fully developed republic such as Rome's, where the actualization of liberty is paramount, both the people and the nobility take an active and sometimes clashing role in self-government McCormick ; Holman The liberty of the whole, for Machiavelli, depends upon the liberty of its component parts.
In his famous discussion of this subject in the Discourses , he remarks,. To me those who condemn the tumults between the Nobles and the Plebs seem to be caviling at the very thing that was the primary cause of Rome's retention of liberty…. And they do not realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the people and that of the great men, and that all legislation favoring liberty is brought about by their dissension Discourses CW — Machiavelli knows that he is adopting an unusual perspective here, since customarily the blame for the collapse of the Roman Republic has been assigned to warring factions that eventually ripped it apart.
Enmities between the people and the Senate should, therefore, be looked upon as an inconvenience which it is necessary to put up with in order to arrive at the greatness of Rome. Machiavelli thinks that other republican models such as those adopted by Sparta or Venice will produce weaker and less successful political systems, ones that are either stagnant or prone to decay when circumstances change.
Machiavelli evinces particular confidence in the capacity of the people to contribute to the promotion of communal liberty. This is not an arbitrary expression of personal preference on Machiavelli's part. He maintains that the people are more concerned about, and more willing to defend, liberty than either princes or nobles Discourses CW — In contrast to Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli insisted that an imaginary ideal society is not a model by which a prince should orient himself.
During the first generations after Machiavelli, his main influence was in non-Republican governments. A copy was also possessed by the Catholic king and emperor Charles V. Modern materialist philosophy developed in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, starting in the generations after Machiavelli.
Scholars have argued that Machiavelli was a major indirect and direct influence upon the political thinking of the Founding Fathers of the United States due to his overwhelming favoritism of republicanism and the republic type of government. Hamilton learned from Machiavelli about the importance of foreign policy for domestic policy, but may have broken from him regarding how rapacious a republic needed to be in order to survive.
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