Machiavelli, Niccolò

MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ. - Writer and politician, b. 3 May 1469 in Florence, d. there 22 June 1527.

I. LIFE AND WORKS

The label of "Florentine Secretary," traditionally assigned to M., corresponded in fact to a position of secondary importance in the administration of the Florentine Republic, which M. assumed in June 1498 as secretary of the Signoria, with the task of presiding over the second chancery and of serving, from 14 July, the Ten of Balla. Nevertheless, to the modest office assigned to him, M., of no common birth (the Maclavellorum familia, proud of priors and gonfaloniers, would trace back to the 11th century), and certainly nourished on classical studies (it is doubtful, however, that he knew Greek), adapted himself with scruple and indeed with an intimate technician's curiosity.

Varied and of varied nature were the journeys and the assignments entrusted to him by the Florentine government: to Appiano IV lord of Piombino; in 1499 to Caterina Sforza Riario; in 1500 to Louis XII, in France, where he would return in 1510 and in 1514; in 1501 to Pistoia and to Arezzo; in 1502 to Cesare Borgia, the Valentino; in 1503 to Rome to Alexander III; in 1505 to the Mugello to carry out the enlistments; in 1506, in the retinue of the Pontiff, in Latium, in Umbria, in the Marches and Romagna; in 1507 to Germany, the author of instructions to Francesco Vettori, envoy to the emperor Maximilian; and, under the Medici, sporadically now in northern Italy now in central Italy. Connected to these services are, precisely, those discourses, reports, accounts that constitute at one and the same time office work and documents of his experience (Discorso fatto al magistrato dei Dieci sopra le cose di Pisa, 1499; Del modo di trattare i popoli della Val di Chiana ribellati; Descrizione del modo tenuto dal duca Valentino nella ammazzare Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, il Signor Pagolo e il duca di Gravina Orsini; Parole sopra la provvisione del danai; Rapporto di cose della Magna, 1508 — then, in '12, reworked —; Ritratti delle cose di Francia, etc.). Writings which today offer as many elements for reconstructing his thought, alongside the greatest and most famous works, the fruit of disinterested solitary meditations, the Principe, the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, the Istorie fiorentine, the Arte della guerra. As for the other, and no less vivid, aspect of M., the literary one (the Mandragola, a milestone in the history of Italian theater, performed in 1520 in Rome and in 1522 in Venice, the Clisia, the Satire, the Vita di Castruccio, capitoli, various discourses), it constitutes, so to speak, the otium of a spirit which, even in artistic expression and in the very taste for the facade, reveals that propensity, denounced in the political sphere, to grasp, in their essentiality, attitudes of a daily reality.

Without doubt, the experience acquired in political offices, associated with the knowledge of history, and, moreover, the very agitated phases of Florentine and personal life, served to furnish the materials of thought later elaborated in the forced leisure of S. Casciano. A time, certainly, white-hot, that of M.: Florence passes from the carefree season of Lorenzo the Magnificent to the severe admonitions of Savonarola; there follow the local wars against Pisa, against a rebelled Arezzo, etc., the republican regime (1502). The return of the Medici meant, for M., removal from every office, confinement for a year and, in 1513, trial and torture on suspicion — soon eliminated — of participation in the conspiracy of Boscoli and Capponi. Further political events kept Florence continually agitated, in relation to the struggles between Charles V king of Spain and Francis I king of France, and culminated with the sack of Rome in 1527, down to the new fall of the Medici in that year and the resurgence of the Republic. In vain M. hoped to be employed again (in his place, instead, a certain Francesco Tarugi was preferred) and with this last inclusion the life of M. concludes, in that calamitous year, in anguished solitude.

An age of travails and ferment, of changes of course, of heated discussions with a local or international background (M. was part of that congregation of learned spirits gathering in the gardens of the Rucellai house: "Orti Oricellati"), of magnanimous ideals: to which corresponds, in M., the effort to find, in the succession of conspiracies, some platform or other of thought and action. As for his private life, it is known that it was laborious, substantially honest and of a family type (in 1502 he had married Marietta Corsini, by whom he had five children), mortified by economic constraints.

The period of M.'s true and proper historico-political meditation begins in the retirement of S. Casciano, a small family property, where he can alternate the company of rough country folk with the meditation of the ancient masters: a double instruction that will sustain him in the contemporary compilation of the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio and of the Principe. This treatise was composed under the title De principatibus, between July and Dec. 1513, while he was working on the Discorsi, presumably with a view to the creation of a Medicean State, at the initiative of Leo X; and, although to the Principe a celebrity that may be called secularly uninterrupted has been reserved by preference, without doubt the two works form a block, as an inseparable commitment of thought: a sort of intellectual revenge on the part of a spirit which, mortified in its aspiration to an otherwise positive political affirmation, can only and finally grant itself the free and supreme satisfaction of "reasoning about the State."

In the Principe, a brief treatise in twenty-six chapters, the genesis and structure of States of an autocratic type are studied ("what a principality is, of what kinds they are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost"), with rapid and incisive argumentation on specific themes (virtue and fortune; the conduct of the ruler with regard to his adherents, soldiers, confederates, etc.); but princes, especially of new acquisition, seen essentially in function of the vigilant initiative of the lord, exclusive maker and judge of the conquest and maintenance of the political order. A political order which, as such, will episodically fix the content and the limits of the "wisdom" or "prudence" of the prince (presupposed as legibus statusis): who will be able to act with assurance to innovate or conserve his dominion, employing, as a shrewd vir, that virtus which will mean essentially active volition, sagacious profit from opportune occasions, employment of means suited to the end, overcoming of adverse fortune; relying, in short, on the image of the Centaur ("a prince must know how to use well the beast and the man": ch. 17), and regulating himself now on the "lion" now on the "fox." The measure of action is the positivity of the result: this counts, at the cost of being feared more than loved (ch. 17), at the cost of failing to keep sworn pacts (ch. 18); action, insofar as it realizes a concrete and superindividual political end, is redeemed by an autonomous morality, which demands that for the fatherland one may lose one's soul.

Taken by itself, that is, independently of the Discourses, the Prince can provide the various interpreters with a common starting point: that relating to a sick society which the energetic "virtue" of the autocrat is committed to healing by whatever means: a prejudicial corruptio, capable of being disciplined by means of an unprejudiced commitment that may even depart from morality, either in order to set it aside permanently (as insufficient to govern the political world) or provisionally, without an a priori disavowal of the higher ethical values, whether as such or as values that are also political. There remains, therefore, the problem concerning whether or not one may discern in the Prince a conscious affirmation of the autonomy of politics, or, as has been said, the affirmation of a politics which, as such, that is, "true" (crowned by the positive success that "benefits" the State), would already be in itself high morality.

In the Discourses (in three books), dedicated to Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, the "long practice and continuous lesson of the things of the world" (Proemio) would seem to offer M. more serene visions, in the consideration of political organisms naturally accustomed to liberty. Strong in his conviction regarding the perpetual reproduction of human motions, M. immersed himself in the reading of Livy, examining this or that moment, attitude, problem peculiar to the life of republics: the example of the Roman Republic serving him as an instructive paradigm, with its internal motions, with its military experiments, with its agrarian laws, with its recourse to religion, with its founding of colonies, with its successes and with its corruptions and disturbances: so many themes of analysis and commentary, aiming, no less than in the Prince, and indeed more methodically, at the scientific systematization of historical-political casuistry.

What is the relationship between the Prince and the Discourses? There are those who have referred the Prince to a program of militant politics, responding to the needs of the age, and the Discourses to an educational program extraneous to contingency: on the one hand "sensible politics," on the other "reflected politics," the two texts being reconciled in the spirit of the author, who would be, yes, a politician, but also an educator, situated in time and beyond time. In short, in the Prince the ideal of the "State-Individual" and in the Discourses the ideal of the "State-Regime"; there the "State-Force," here the "State-Civilization": this last appearing, however, the only lasting one, so that the author, having to choose between Romulus and Numa, would choose Numa (Russo).

Not, of course, that, beyond mere technique, there does not often flash, between the lines of the rigid historico-naturalistic lesson, the writer's personal yearning, a breath of humane and honest feeling, but, on close inspection, this yearning appears severely watched over by the obligation of critical detachment, as though the author sensed that sentiment is not a scientific measure and may even veil the limpidity of objective vision. A valid measure proves to be, rather, that experience (see again per experience...), which is the opposite of passion. Only that, experience having no limit — as he himself realized, because of the continuous variability of historical situations (sects, languages, accidents) — there follows bitterly, in the end, the vanity of any theorizing that goes beyond the bare indication of certain generic constant tendencies of humanity.

Political life and moral life prove in M. to be split or only casually linked; so that those allusions of the Discourses to "liberty," "people," "civil life," in which some have wished to discern elements to be set against the authoritarian outlook of the Prince, prove in the end maimed and barren. The "liberty" envisaged by the Discourses is not active and creative, nor does it spring from any recognition of individual morality. Citizens are always seen in function of subjects, of the prince or of the laws, disciplined by a sort of superior force, or at least settled into arrangements suited to their nature without any real possibility of a ius actione civitatis. Indeed, in the Art of War (a work that completes, even in the author's intention, the Prince and the Discourses), while national militias are advocated, recommended in the other two books, it is not wished that these militias be voluntary, that is, one does not hope that from these citizens, warmed by intimate love of country, the spontaneity of sacrifice may arise; it is required that citizens become clean only at the command of the prince. Volunteers, says M., "are not among the best, indeed they are among the worst of a province." It falls to authority to demand this other form of contribution, of service, on the part of citizens, in whom, therefore, political sentiment has not, nor ought to have, autonomy of source and initiative. Further. See in the Art of War the lapidary statement of political necessity: "To compel citizens to love one another, to live without factions, to value the private less than the public." Civic love, social duty are envisaged in function of a coercion from above. And from above must also come that education in which M. trusts, but which is by no means an autonomous conquest of the individual, as Humanism had likewise recommended.

Ideally connected to the Art of War and to the principal trilogy is that Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520), where, through the romanticized figure of the famous condottiere, the praise of the active life is reaffirmed ("God is a lover of strong men"), placed at the service of a civic commitment.

In the Florentine Histories (suggested to him by Cardinal Giuliano de' Medici in 1519, but officially commissioned from him on 8 Nov. 1520 by the Florentine and Pisan Studio, with an annual subsidy of 100 florins for two years; and of which he was able to present the first eight books to Clement VII in 1525), M. reveals his most genuine inclinations: a scientific-pedagogical curiosity about political events, the sifting of historical materials, love of his land and of Italy, a taste for artistic representation.

The narrative extends in broad outline from the fall of the Roman Empire up to 1434, and then, more expansively, up to 1492: the author's intention, which remained interrupted, would have been to continue the history of events "both Italian and Florentine" up to his own days. Although in these Histories — which M. undertook with fervor, declaring himself unsatisfied with the previous labors of others — it is today possible to note various defects (inaccuracies, appropriations, etc.), nevertheless the documentary interest remains conspicuous, also for the purposes of illuminating the author's character: that going to the core of facts; that appreciation of success as success ("those who win, in whatever way they win, never reap shame from it," III, 12); that seeing order assured above all by the "virtue of one who maintains it," because it "happens rarely," "by good fortune" (IV, 1), that the humors of citizens maintain themselves by their own force; a crude concept of the human tendency to faction, to disunion, to discord, despite the eternal fascination of banners and myths, such as peace and liberty; M. does indeed note "how vigorous is the name of liberty, which no force subdues, no time consumes, and no merit counterbalances" (II, 24), without his perceiving, or accepting, the concept of liberty as the conscious moral sphere of the subject, itself the creator of authority.

Further evidence of M.'s tenacious interest in political matters is provided by other marginal writings: such as the Discorsi sopra il riformare lo Stato di Firenze (composed in 1519), in which M. devises a constitution, seeking to reconcile the (theoretical) existence of a republic with the retention of power in the hands of a ruling class (the Medici); as well as pages of lesser importance, in which, in any case, M.'s effort to start from (concrete) reality, and to shape the forms of thought within it, is always visible.

A mischievous taste for seizing upon the petty (albeit conventional) aspects of an unscrupulous reality is found in M. as a playwright. Although his first theatrical exercise, Le Maschere (now lost), dates from 1504, the Mandragola, perhaps performed in 1520 in Rome, certainly in 1522 in Venice, and the Cilizia, performed in Florence in 1525, belong — like the Alma d'oro, a composition in verse, assigned to around 1517 — to the period of forced leisure, when he strove (Prologo alla Mandragola) "con questi van pensieri — Fare el suo triste tempo più soave."

In these stage fictions, as in other compositions (the various Capitoli: Di fortuna, Dell'ambizione, Dell'occasione; the Decennale; the Novella di Belfagor arcidiavolo), there finds, so to speak, direct outlet that literary vocation of M. which in his political writings and in his vigorous letters attains, at a stroke, resounding results of artistic effect; and one should note the representational vivacity placed at the service of the thesis upheld in the Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua, in which he, Niccolò, rebukes Dante, his opposing interlocutor, celebrating against the latter the value of the Florentine character of the language.

II. VARYING FORTUNE OF THE MACHIAVELLI

M., though he was able to see his comedies performed, did not live to see the printing of the works to which his fame is enduringly linked. The first editions are from 1531 (Rome, Blado) and 1532 (Florence, Giunta). But the manuscript of the Prince must have had an immediately successful circulation, if the singular case (not yet clarified) could arise of the insertion of materials corresponding to those of the Prince into the De regnandi peritia (published in Naples in 1523, therefore during M.'s lifetime) of the well-known philosopher Agostino Nifo da Sessa.

The very earliest public denunciations of M.'s dangerousness issue indeed from a single ecclesiastical platform, but from different countries: Librium illum inveni, scriptum ab hoste humani generis, or rather Satanæ digito scriptum, proclaims Reginald Pole (Apologia ad Carolum V Cœs., XXVIII-XXXV). As an impurus scriptor atque nefarius, M. is pointed out by Girolamo Osorio in his De nobilitate civili et christiana (Lisbon 1542, III). And the denunciation of Ambrogio Catalino (Enarrationes, etc., De libris a Christiano detestandis et a Christianismo penitus eliminandis [Rome 1552]) sounds like a true and proper accusation.

But apart from such denunciations, there is proof of the unofficial incrimination of M.'s work in 1549, in what Busini wrote to Varchi: "Here all the works of our M. are not forbidden and prohibited from being sold." In 1559, M. appears in the Index of Paul IV, among the auctores quorum libri et scripta omnia prohibentur; a condemnation confirmed by the Tridentine Index of 1566 (among the librorum prohibitorum auctores primae classis), and then further maintained, despite certain attempts at discrimination of the work, once it had been expurgated.

Nor do the censures come only from the Catholic side, and for essentially religious reasons: also from the Protestant camp. In France, the Calvinist Innocent Gentillet, in his Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un royaume, contre N. M. le florentin (Lausanne 1576), Du Plessis Mornay (under the pseudonym of Stephanus Junius Brutus) in the combative Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1577), the Huguenot François de la Noue (Discours politiques et militaires, 1587) and others, give rise to a whole campaign against M. (a good polemical pretext against the politics of Queen Catherine de' Medici was that she was a fellow citizen of M.): an anti-Machiavellian wave, which would soon spread to England and other countries, and would cause the words machiavellista, machiavellismo, machiavellisazio to enter henceforth into the common political vocabulary.

It would be lengthy to list the authors, Italian and foreign, who from the last decades of the sixteenth century onward hurled themselves against M. From Botero to Ribadameyra (Princeps christianus adversus N. M., etc.), from Possevino to Bozio (author of various polemics: De robore bellico... adversus M., Rome 1593; De Italiae Statu... adversus M., ibid. 1595; De ruinis gentium... adversus impios politicos, Rome 1596), from Campanella to very many others, the series is dense of those who, occasionally or deliberately, in Latin or in the vernacular, hurl themselves against a doctrine that evidently already counted hidden or open sectatores. The accusations against this doctrine are various: absence of scientific basis, depreciation of religious values, alteration of historical truth, moral corruption, political inadequacy, going so far as to arrive, at the end of the seventeenth century, at a grotesque Saggio sulla sciocchezza di N. M. by the Lucchese Father Gian Lorenzo Lucchesini (Rome 1697).

Nevertheless, at the same time, though less visibly, M. received varied esteem. While one may note the unconscious utilization of his mental attitudes on the part of the very confuters, the sporadic and independent defenses have their own meaning, now concealed now discovered, which range, to cite no others, from the respectful consideration of an Anonymous Sicilian to the well-known Apologia (1615) of Gaspare Scioppio. For Scioppio, M. would be an unmasker of tyrannies; a thesis (Campanella would oppose it in the Atheismus triumphatus), which, already hinted at in a certain sense by Cardinal Pole himself, who had reportedly heard said, in Florence, that M.'s intention was anti-tyrannical, would later be maintained also by Alberico Gentili (for whom M. is a laudator democratiae), by Bacon of Verulam (De aug. scient., III), and would later be proclaimed by Foscolo in the Sepolcri.

Only toward the end of the seventeenth century would M. be judged with a less acrimonious spirit. According to P. M. Doria (La vita civile, Augusta 1710, p. 7), M. would not at all have counseled the use of malicious reason of state; on the contrary, he would have imparted the most sound and virtuous precepts to princes and peoples; M.'s fault is only "in treating, as he has done, the various kinds of tyrannies with the same indifference with which just principalities must be treated, prescribing rules and norms of government for all... In short, M. is an open pharmacopoeia for all recipes." A beginning of more pacified weighings, which allow, in certain critics, alongside the obligatory censure, an appreciation already significantly uncovered (for Tiraboschi, M. "showed himself to be one of the most profound and most expert politicians who ever lived, and the Discourses are full of most just reflections, which reveal the rare genius of the one who wrote them," Storia della letterat. ital., VII, Florence 1809, p. 581). An appreciation which, in the same eighteenth century, already assumes a precise connotation with the De Nicolao Machiavello of Gian Federico Christ (Leipzig 1731), with the Missus thesium Machiavellisticarum of C. F. Feuerlein (1742), with Rousseau, echoing Gentili's thesis concerning the presumed unmasking, carried out by M., of the evil arts of princes, in favor of the republican ideal. Writings, however, less well known than the Antimachiavel of Frederick of Prussia, with a preface by Voltaire (Commentaires politiques et historiques sur le traité du Prince de M. et sur l'Anti-Machiavel de Frédéric II), a violent indictment, retracing, at bottom, the traditional censures, and nonetheless later invalidated by the suspicion of insincerity.

With the nineteenth century one may say the period of the true and proper evaluation of M. begins. From Foscolo's vindication, through hymns and illuminations (G. Ferrari, De Sanctis, etc.), M. is hailed as the herald of national ideals, until, from the last decades of the nineteenth century onward, there come ever denser analyses, investigations, critical clarifications, among which the labors of Tommasini (v. bibl.) and Villari (v. bibl.) stand out conspicuously. Recent criticism, which takes its starting point from Croce's considerations on M. as an assertor of the autonomy of politics, debating and judging in various senses the questions raised by a more attentive and patient and coordinated reading of M.'s work, pursues, in Italy and abroad, the not easy labor of interpretation and systematization, reaffirming, in any case, the topicality and importance of the themes that it proposes and imposes upon the meditation of scholars.

Rodolfo De Mattei