MACHIAVELLI, NICCOLÒ

I. LIFE AND WORKS

His travels and assignments entrusted by the Florentine government were varied and of different kinds: 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 1514; in 1501 to Pistoia and Arezzo; in 1502 to Cesare Borgia, the Duke Valentino; in 1503 to Rome to Alexander VI; in 1505 to the Mugello to oversee conscriptions; in 1506, accompanying the Pope, through Lazio, Umbria, the Marches, and Romagna; in 1507 to Germany, bearing instructions to Francesco Vettori, envoy to Emperor Maximilian; and, under the Medici, sporadically either in northern or central Italy. Connected with these services are those discourses, reports, and memoranda that constitute, at once, official works and documents of his experience (Discourse on the Affairs of Pisa, delivered to the Magistracy of the Ten, 1499; On the Way to Deal with the Rebellious People of the Val di Chiana; Description of the Way the Duke Valentino Dealt with the Killing of Vitellozzo Vitelli, Oliverotto da Fermo, Signor Pagolo, and the Duke of Gravina Orsini; Words on the Provision of Damages; Report on the Affairs of Germany, 1508 — later reworked in 1512 — Portraits of French Affairs, etc.). These writings, which today offer as many elements for reconstructing his thought, stand alongside his major and most famous works, the fruit of solitary, disinterested reflections: *The Prince*, *Discourses on the First Decade of Livy*, *Florentine Histories*, and *The Art of War*. As for the other, no less vivid, literary aspect of Machiavelli — *The Mandrake*, a milestone in the history of Italian theater, performed in Rome in 1520 and in Venice in 1522; *Clizia*; the *Satires*; the *Life of Castruccio*; chapters and various discourses — it constitutes, so to speak, the finest expression of a spirit that, even in artistic expression and in the very taste for wit, reveals that propensity, denounced in his political writings, to grasp, in their essentials, the attitudes of everyday reality.

Undoubtedly, the experience gained in political offices, combined with his knowledge of history — and, moreover, the very turbulent phases of Florentine and personal life — furnished the materials of thought that he later elaborated during his enforced stays in Sant’Andrea in Percussina. That was certainly a fiery period for Machiavelli: Florence passed from the carefree season of Lorenzo the Magnificent to the stern admonitions of Savonarola; followed by local wars against Pisa, against rebellious Arezzo, etc., and the republican regime (1502). The return of the Medici meant for Machiavelli his removal from every office, a year’s exile, and, in 1513, trial and torture on suspicion — soon dispelled — of involvement in the Boscoli-Capponi conspiracy. Subsequent political events kept Florence in constant turmoil, in relation to the struggles between Charles V of Spain and Francis I of France, culminating in the Sack of Rome in 1527, down to the new fall of the Medici that same year and the revival of the Republic. In vain did Machiavelli hope to be reinstated (instead, Francesco Tarugi was preferred), and with this final disappointment his life ended that calamitous year, in anguished solitude.

An age of travail and ferment, of shifts in direction, of heated debates with local or international scope (Machiavelli belonged to that circle of learned men gathered in the gardens of the Rucellai palace: the “Orti Oricellari”), of lofty ideals: to which corresponds, in Machiavelli, the effort to find, amid the succession of conspiracies, some sort of platform for thought and action. As for his private life, it is known to have been laborious, essentially honest, and of a family man’s sort (in 1502 he had married Marietta Corsini, by whom he had five children), burdened by financial hardship.

The period of Machiavelli’s true historical-political reflection began during his retreat to Sant’Andrea in Percussina, a small family property where he could alternate the company of rough peasants with meditation on the ancient masters: a dual instruction that would sustain him in the concurrent composition of the *Discourses on the First Decade of Livy* and *The Prince*. This treatise was composed under the title *De Principatibus* between July and December 1513, while he was working on the *Discourses*, presumably with a view to the creation of a Medici state at the instigation of Leo X; and although *The Prince* has been accorded a fame that may be said to be uninterruptedly secular, the two works undoubtedly form a single intellectual commitment: a kind of intellectual revenge on the part of a spirit that, frustrated in its aspiration to something else, constitutes, so to speak, a political alternative, and can finally allow itself the free and supreme satisfaction of “reasoning about the state.”

In *The Prince*, a brief treatise in twenty-six chapters, the genesis and structure of autocratic states are examined (“what a principality is, of what kinds it is, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost”), with rapid and incisive arguments on specific themes (virtue and fortune; the conduct of the ruler toward his adherents, soldiers, allies, etc.); but principalities, above all newly acquired ones, are seen essentially in terms of the vigilant initiative of the lord, the sole architect and judge of conquest and the maintenance of political order. Political order, as such, explicitly defines the content and limits of the prince’s “wisdom” or “prudence” (presupposing the prince as legibus solutus): he will be able to act with confidence to innovate or preserve his dominion, employing, as a prudent man, that *virtus* which essentially signifies active volition, shrewd exploitation of favorable opportunities, use of means suited to the end, and overcoming adverse fortune; in short, relying on the image of the Centaur (“a prince must know well how to use both beast and man”: ch. 17), and regulating himself now as the “lion” and now as the “fox.” The measure of action is the positivity of the result: that is what counts, even at the cost of being feared rather than loved (ch. 17), even at the cost of breaking sworn oaths (ch. 18); action, as the realization of 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 in itself, that is, independently of the Discourses, The Prince can provide different interpreters with a common starting point: that relating to a sick society which the energetic “virtue” of the autocrat is engaged in healing in any case—pre-existing corruption, liable to discipline through an unscrupulous commitment that may derogate from morality, either by permanently setting it aside (as inadequate to govern the political world) or provisionally, without an a priori repudiation of higher ethical values, whether as such or as political values as well. The problem therefore remains as to whether or not The Prince contains a conscious affirmation of the autonomy of politics, or, as has been said, an affirmation of politics as such, that is, “true” politics (crowned by positive success that “benefits” the State), which would in itself already constitute high morality.

In the Discourses (in three books), dedicated to Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, the “long practice and continuous lesson of worldly affairs” (Preface) would seem to offer Machiavelli more measured visions, in considering political organisms naturally accustomed to freedom. Firm in his conviction regarding the perpetual recurrence of human actions, Machiavelli immersed himself in the reading of Livy, examining this or that moment, attitude, or peculiar problem in the life of republics: the example of the Roman Republic, with its internal movements, its military experiments, its agrarian laws, its recourse to religion, its founding of colonies, its successes and its corruptions or disturbances, serving him as an instructive paradigm. These were all themes for analysis and commentary, aiming, no less than in The Prince and indeed more systematically, at the scientific systematization of historical-political casuistry.

What is the relationship between The Prince and the Discourses? Some have referred The Prince to a program of militant politics, responding to the exigencies of the time, and the Discourses to an educational program extraneous to contingency: on the one hand “sensitive politics,” on the other “reflective politics,” reconciling the two texts in the spirit of the author, who would be both a politician and an educator, situated in time and beyond time. In short, in The Prince the ideal of the “State-as-Individual,” and in the Discourses the ideal of the “State-as-Regime”; here the “State-as-Force,” there the “State-as-Civilization”: though the latter appears to be the only enduring one, so much so that the author, having to choose between Romulus and Numa, would choose Numa (Russo).

Not, of course, that beyond mere technique, a personal yearning of the writer does not often flash between the lines of the rigid historical-naturalistic lesson—a breath of human and honest feeling. But, on closer inspection, this yearning appears severely guarded by the obligation of critical detachment, almost as if the author sensed that feeling is not a dead scientific tool and may indeed cloud the clarity of objective vision. Rather, a valid measure for him is that experience (“one still sees by experience...”) which is the opposite of passion. Yet, since experience has no limit—as he himself realized, given the continual variability of historical situations (sects, languages, accidents)—bitterly there follows, 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 result in Machiavelli as only accidentally linked; so that ultimately those allusions in the Discourses to freedom, “the people,” and “civil life,” in which elements have been seen as opposed to the authoritarian perspective of The Prince, remain barren and desolate. The freedom envisaged in the Discourses is not active and creative, nor does it spring from any recognition of individual morality. Citizens are not always seen in the function of subjects of the prince or of the laws, disciplined by a kind of superior force, or at least settled into institutions suited to their nature without any true possibility of an ius activae civitatis. Indeed, in The Art of War (a work that, even in the author’s intention, completes The Prince and the Discourses), when national militias—recommended in the other two books—are organized, it is not hoped that these militias will be voluntary; it is not expected that from these citizens, stirred by an inner love of country, will come a spontaneity of sacrifice. It is demanded that citizens become soldiers only by command of the prince. Volunteers, says Machiavelli, are not the best; indeed, they are the worst in a province. It is for authority to claim this other form of service from citizens, in whom, therefore, political feeling has neither autonomy of source nor of initiative. Again, consider 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 public more than the private.” Civic love and social duty are envisaged in function of coercion from above. And from above must also come that education in which Machiavelli trusts, but which is by no means an autonomous conquest of the individual, as Humanism had recommended.

Ideally connected to The Art of War and to the principal trilogy is the Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520), in which, through the romanticized figure of the famous condottiere, the praise of active life (“God is a lover of strong men”) put to the service of civil commitment is reaffirmed.

In the Florentine Histories (suggested to him by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici in 1519, but officially commissioned on 8 November 1520 by the Florentine and Pisan Studium, with an annual grant of 100 florins for two years; and of which he could present the first eight books to Clement VII in 1525), Machiavelli reveals his most genuine inclinations: a scientific-pedagogical curiosity about political events, a rigorous treatment of historical materials, love for his homeland and for Italy, and a taste for artistic representation.

The narrative extends in broad outline from the fall of the Roman Empire to 1434, and then, more fully, to 1492. The author’s intention, left unfinished, would have been to continue the history of “both Italian and Florentine” events up to his own day. Although these Histories—undertaken by Machiavelli with enthusiasm, as he declared himself dissatisfied with the previous efforts of others—today reveal various flaws (inaccuracies, appropriations, etc.), nonetheless their documentary interest remains considerable, even for the imaginative grasp of the author’s style: that going to the core of facts; that appreciation of success as success (“those who win, however they win, never incur shame”), III, 12); that seeing order secured above all by the “virtue of one who maintains it,” because “it rarely happens,” “by good fortune” (IV, 1), that civic humors maintain themselves by their own force; the stark concept of human tendency toward faction, disunion, and discord, despite the eternal allure of symbols and myths such as peace and freedom. Machiavelli does indeed note “how strong is the name of liberty, which human force cannot subdue, time cannot consume, and merit cannot counterbalance” (II, 24), without, however, perceiving or accepting the concept of liberty as the conscious moral sphere of the subject, itself creative of authority.

Further evidence of Machiavelli’s tenacious interest in political matters are other marginal writings: such as the Discourse on Remodeling the State of Florence (composed in 1519), where Machiavelli designs a constitution, seeking to reconcile the (theoretical) existence of a republic with the holding of power in the hands of a ruling class (the Medici); as well as pages of lesser importance, in which, however, the effort of Machiavelli to start from reality (concrete) and in it shape the forms of thought is always visible.

A mischievous taste for picking out (albeit conventional) details of an unscrupulous reality is found in the dramatist M. Although his first stage work, *Le Maschere* (now lost), dates from 1504, *La Mandragola*, perhaps performed in Rome in 1520 and certainly in Venice in 1522, and *Clizia*, performed in Florence in 1525, belong—as does the verse comedy *L’Asino d’oro*, assigned to around 1517—to the period of enforced leisure, when he strives (Prologue to *La Mandragola*) «con questi van pensieri / fare il 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*), one might say that the literary vocation of M. finds direct outlet, a vocation that in his political writings and verse letters achieves, effortlessly, striking artistic effects. Note the vivid representational power deployed in the service of the thesis advanced in the *Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua*, where he, Niccolò, rebuts Dante, his adversary interlocutor, extolling against the latter the value of Florentine linguistic purity.

II. VARIOUS FORTUNES OF M

The earliest public denunciations of M.’s dangerousness emanate from a single ecclesiastical platform but from different lands: «Librum illum inveni, scriptum ab hoste humani generis, immo Satanae digito scriptum», proclaimed Reginald Pole (*Apologia ad Carolum V Caes.*, XXVIII–XXXV). As an *impurus scriptor atque nefarius*, M. is singled out by Girolamo Osorio in his *De nobilitate civili et christiana* (Lisbon 1542, III). A veritable indictment is sounded by Ambrogio Catarino (*Enarrationes*, etc., *De libris a Christiano detestandis et a Christianismo penitus eliminandis* [Rome 1552]).

Apart from these denunciations, proof of the unofficial censure of M.’s works is found in 1549 in what Busini wrote to Varchi: «Here they do not forbid or prohibit the sale of all the works of our M.» In 1559, M. appears in Paul IV’s *Index*, among *auctores quorum libri et scripta omnia prohibentur*; a condemnation confirmed by the Tridentine Index of 1566 (among *librorum prohibitorum auctores* of the first class), and thereafter maintained, despite occasional attempts to distinguish his works once purged.

Yet the censures were not confined to the Catholic side or to essentially religious motives; they also came 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 Stephanus Junius Brutus) in his *Vindiciae contra tyrannos* (1577), the Huguenot François de la Noue (*Discours politiques et militaires*, 1587), and others launched a full-scale campaign against M. (a convenient polemical pretext against the politics of Queen Catherine de’ Medici being that she was his fellow citizen): an anti-Machiavellian wave that soon spread to England and other countries, so that the words *machiavellista*, *machiavellismo*, *machiavellico* entered the common political vocabulary.

It would be lengthy to list the authors, Italian and foreign, who from the late sixteenth century onward assailed M. From Botero to Ribadeneira (*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.*, 1615; *De ruinis gentium... adversus impios politicos*, Rome 1596), from Campanella to countless others, the series is dense of those who, occasionally or deliberately, in Latin or the vernacular, assailed a doctrine that clearly already counted secret or open adherents. The accusations against this doctrine vary: lack of scientific basis, depreciation of religious values, distortion of historical truth, moral corruption, political inadequacy, culminating by the end of the seventeenth century in a grotesque *Saggio sulla sciocchezza di N. M.* by the Lucchese Father Gian Lorenzo Lucchesini (Rome 1697).

Nevertheless, simultaneously though less visibly, M. enjoyed varying esteem. While one may note the unconscious appropriation of his mental attitudes by his very detractors, sporadic and independent defenses—now cautious, now open—carry their own significance, ranging, to cite no others, from the respectful consideration of an Anonymous Sicilian to the noted *Apologia* (1615) of Gaspar Scioppius. For Scioppius, M. would be an unmasker of tyrannies; the view that Campanella would oppose in the *Atheismus triumphatus*—a view already hinted at by Cardinal Pole, who is said to have heard in Florence that M.’s intention was anti-tyrannical—would later be upheld by Alberico Gentili (for whom M. is a *laudator democratiae*), by Francis Bacon (*De augmentis scientiarum*, 1611), and would be proclaimed later by Foscolo in the *Sepolcri*.

Only toward the end of the seventeenth century was M. judged with less acrimony. According to P. M. Doria (*La vita civile*, Augsburg 1710, p. 7), M. would not at all have counseled the use of cunning statecraft; on the contrary, he would have imparted the soundest and most virtuous precepts to princes and peoples; M.’s fault lies merely in treating, as he did, all kinds of tyranny with the same indifference that just princes must show, prescribing rules and norms of government for all... In short, M. is an open pharmacopeia of every prescription. Enveloped in calmer assessments, which allow among certain critics, alongside obligatory censure, an already significantly open appreciation (for Tiraboschi, M. proved one of the deepest and most experienced political thinkers ever to live, and the *Discourses* are full of perfectly justified reflections revealing the rare genius of their author, *Storia della letteratura ital.*, VII, Florence 1809, p. 581). An appreciation that, in the same eighteenth century, takes on a precise character with Gian Federico Christ’s *De Nicolao Machiavello* (Leipzig 1731), with C. F. Feuerlein’s *Muscipula thesium Machiavellicarum* (1742), and with Rousseau, echoing Gentillet’s thesis that M. had unmasked the wicked arts of princes in favor of the republican ideal. Yet these writings are less well known than Frederick the Great’s *Antimachiavel*, prefaced by Voltaire (*Commentaires politiques et historiques sur le traité du Prince de M. et sur l’Anti-Machiavel de Frédéric II*), a violent indictment that ultimately recapitulates traditional censures and is later undermined by suspicions of insincerity.

With the nineteenth century, one may say that the period of true and proper evaluation of MACHIAVELLI began. From Ugo Foscolo’s vindication, through hymns and elucidations (Giuseppe Ferrari, Francesco De Sanctis, etc.), Machiavelli is hailed as the herald of national ideals, until, from the last decades of the nineteenth century onward, increasingly dense analyses, investigations, and critical refinements appear, among which the notable labors of Tommasini (v. BIBLICA) and Villari (v. BIBLICA) stand out. Recent criticism, which takes its cue from Croce’s considerations on Machiavelli as an advocate of the autonomy of politics, debates and judges in various ways the issues raised by a more attentive, patient, and coordinated reading of Machiavelli’s work, pursuing—both in Italy and abroad—the arduous task of interpretation and systematization, while reaffirming, in any case, the timeliness and importance of the themes he proposes and imposes upon the reflection of scholars.