Miguel Vatter

Republics Are a Species

of State: Machiavelli and
the Genealogy of the
Modern State
INTRODUCTION: GENEALOGIES OF THE STATE AND THE
CRISIS OF THE MODERN STATE
Today it has become a commonplace to assert that the sovereignty of
the modern state is eroding and, indeed, may be on its way to extinction.
In the age of global capitalism, the state finds it ever more difficult to
dig itself out of fiscal and financial crises. At the same time, neoliberal
models of governance and new forms of global constitutionalism are
clamoring for the state to scale down or give up its Leviathan-like power
and authority. Much current political theorizing gives the impression
that today we face a simple choice with regard to the state: either we
adopt the brave new world of neoliberal and cosmopolitan anti-statism
(governance), or we rally behind the Hobbesian idea of the state
(sovereignty). This choice is an unfortunate one, but it need not be a
forced choice.
The precariousness of the once all-mighty state, signaled by the
emergence of new constitutional vocabulary such as failed state or
regime change, is the context within which one should place new
genealogies of the modern state, most famously in the late work of
Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner (Foucault 2009, 2010; Skinner
2009). Hegel remarked that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Is it only

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because we sense that the state as we have known it in modern European public law may be dying out that we are once again interested
in its meaning? Genealogies show that what we take to be a unitary
political concept (like modern state or liberal democracy) and perhaps a destiny, in fact is nothing more than a contingent assemblage
of traits and vocabularies. The point of such genealogies is to reveal
the roads not taken, the alternatives that lost out for contingent reasons, not because the dominant conceptions were more legitimate or
necessary than the others.
In this article I wish to discuss Machiavellis idea of stato in The
Prince in this genealogical light. I shall argue that in this treatise on
principalities Machiavelli sets the groundwork for a republican conception of the state that emerged only much later, in the Atlantic revolutions of North and South America, France and Haiti. The recent
Arab Spring revolts show how difficult it is to move from a successful
popular uprising against an oligarchical regime to the establishment
of a republican state. Maybe The Prince still withholds useful pointers
on how to chart a path through the Scylla of neoliberal antistatism
and the Charybdis of absolute sovereignty.
For many theorists and historians of political ideas, the expression republican state poses a conceptual conundrum insofar as republic and republicanism refer us to the classical world of Athens
and Rome, where politics was the activity of a free demos or populus
and lacked the impersonal and representative conception of the
modern state. On the other hand, the term state in the expression
republican state is conceived within the long tradition of modern
European public law as a juridical person that stands over and apart
from the people, and is neutral or tolerant vis--vis the interested
pursuits of its subjects, protecting their right to exercise life choices as
long as they respect those of others.
That the terms republic and state should be hard to think
together, and in some respects appear to exclude each other, is entirely due to the success of Hobbes conception of the state (see Skinner 2009 and Duso 2003, and for a discussion of these interpretations,

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see Vatter 2010). It was Hobbes who denied that a people could be
free independently of the artificial person of the sovereign. Hobbes
claimed that the only existence a people could have was the one given
to it in the form of the juridical person of the state. On this Hobbesian
view, apart and against this artificial person of the state, there could
be no free people but only individuals pursuing their own particular
interests within a civil society thanks to the security provided by the
state. Obviously, this conception of the state could not have been the
one that inspired, first, the Atlantic republican revolutions, and then,
by way of the Russian Revolution, all subsequent establishment of republics in the postcolonial period (see, in this respect, the still valid
thesis of Pocock 1975). Unlike the Hobbesian idea of the state, modern
republican theory holds open the possibility that a preexisting people
gives itself the form of a state in order to achieve a revolutionary goal:
that no part of society, no estate, should be in a position to rule over
others. The republican state represents the conditions of no-rule or
nondomination of a free people. My claim is that Machiavellis The
Prince was the first text in which this conjunction of ancient republic
and modern state was shown to be possible.

MODERN REVOLUTIONS AND THE COINCIDENCE OF

REPUBLIC AND TYRANNY
During most of the last century, it was assumed as a basic axiom that The
Prince had set the basis for, if not invented, the modern concept of the state,
as it would later be canonically defined by Max Weber for political science:
the modern state is an institutional association of rule
(Herrschaftsverband) which has successfully established the
monopoly of physical violence as a means of rule within
a territory, for which purpose it unites in the hands of its
leaders the material means of operation, having expropriated all those functionaries of estates who previously had
command over these things in their own right, and has put
itself, in the person of its highest embodiment, in their
place (Weber 2000, 316).

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Machiavellis principe seemed to be the prototype of Webers political

entrepreneur, who expropriated and centralized in the person of its
highest embodiment the means and allegiances of the estates into
the new form of state. Theres nothing suprising in this since Weber
formulated his definition no doubt with Machiavellis treatise in mind,
and the secondary literature has shown that many of the features that
Weber attributes to the modern state are undoubtedly to be found in
the way the term stato is used in The Prince.1 However, Webers definition
does not explain the plurivocity of the term state found therein: how
does the modern state relate to estates as well as to the person of its
highest embodiment? And, furthermore, what if any relation does this
state, as an association of rule or domination (Herrschaft), have to the
republican ideal of freedom as nondomination?
Weber understood the construction of the modern state as part
of a process that changed the meaning and reality of politics in modernity. This process consisted in the identification of an entire people
with a state. Throughout the medieval period, the state effectively
referred only to that part or estate of the city or republic that ruled
over the others. At some point during the late Renaissance, however,
the term state began to acquire an entirely new meaning, referring
to a new reality, namely, that a people as a whole undertook to govern
itself in order that no one part (or estate) of society could be said
to rule over any other parts. Thus, in some general way, the modern
state emerges within a revolutionary process as an agent for establishing conditions of no-rule, to employ Hannah Arendts expression, or
conditions of nondomination, to employ Philip Pettits more recent
vocabulary (Arendt 1990; Pettit 2012). It is not coincidental that Weber
gives his canonical definition of the state precisely in that section of
the lecture Politics as a Vocation in which he is trying to delineate
a major new shift in the meaning of politics that he saw happening in
the Russian Revolution, the intention of which was to expropriate
the modern state or prince, as original expropriator of the estates, and
thus return power back to the people (here, specifically, in the form
of the soviets).

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Indeed, all great modern revolutions entail a change of state,

what Machiavelli refers to as mutazione di stato, and the ancients called
metabole politeion. The important question, though, concerns which
meaning(s) of state is being toppled and which meaning(s) (re-)instated
in such revolutionary changes. The point is best illustrated by considering the change of state that took place with the French Revolution. In
his pamphlet entitled What is the Third Estate? Sieys argued that a part of
society which had previously been called the third estate (tiers tat) in
reality stood for the whole nation (2003). As a consequence, Sieys affirmed that this tiers tat deserved a state (tat) of its own, represented
by the assembly of all French people. This new state, because it was to
be the property of the entire French people, should be called, in all propriety and perhaps for the first time, a true republic. In proposing this
change of state that moves the tiers tat into the position of tat and thus
expropriates the tat from the king (one recalls Louis XIVs absolutist
formula, Ltat cest moi), the first and second tats (the nobility and the
clergy) were excluded from forming a state: henceforth, neither monarchy nor aristocracy would be considered legitimate forms of state. The
only legitimate state is the one formed by the tiers tat. However, such a
state represents all Frenchmen and not just les miserables. Thus, the
only legitimate state was a republican state.
If one translates this complex example of a modern change
of state or metabole politeion back into the vocabulary of classical republicanism, then one would not err if one concluded that Sieys was
advocating the coincidence of tyranny with republic: a coincidence
of opposites that would have been, for classical republicans, hardly
fathomable. Indeed, what the tiers tat does is tyrannical because it
excludes some parts or estates of society (tats) from ever forming a
state (tat). However, from the perspective of the French revolutionaries, this exclusion was merely the consequence of a far more basic
inclusion: noblemen and clergy, just like any other citizens, would
simply become part of the French nation, equally represented by the
assembly of the people, and with the same right to one vote for each
person as any other citoyen.2

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There is a further, paradoxical twist to the story. As is well

known, the French revolutionaries dressed themselves in Roman garb,
and this despite having overturned entirely the main idea behind the
ancient doctrine of forms of government. Was this moment of historical repetition a farce, an illusion? I think not. Speaking in the idiom of
classical republicanism, one can say that this revolutionary moment
of tyranny is instrumental in founding a politeia or res publica, much in
the same senses of the term found in Aristotle and in Cicero. In the
Politics, after all, Aristotle notoriously employs the term politeia in two
different ways: first, in a generic sense to mean constitution or regime, and second, in a specific sense, where politeia names that specific form of government corresponding to the virtuous rule of the
people or many (which, in the case of the French Revolution, would
correspond to the state established by the tiers tat). Similarly, what
the French Revolution called republic could also claim to refer to
Ciceros understanding of res publica, since by giving back the state to
the third estate, what were the French revolutionaries doing if not
realizing Scipios definition, in On the Commonwealth, that res publica
. . . populi res est (that is, the government of public affairs is the business
of the people)?
My thesis is that the kind of conjunction of ancient republicanism with modern state that one finds in Sieys, but also in Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, became thinkable thanks to Machiavellis
The Prince, more specifically in the idea expressed in the first sentence
of the treatise: All states, all dominions that have had and do have
command over men, have been and are either republics or principalities (2005, chap. 1). By claiming that a republic is a species of state,
and then by proceeding to argue, over the 26 chapters of the book,
that such a state can be achieved only by expropriating the power
of estates through the exclusionary qua inclusionary logic I identified above, Machiavelli opened the path to conceive of republics in the
modern, revolutionary way while, at the same time, he made it possible to give this modern state back to the people and, in this sense,
remain faithful to ancient republican intuitions. With each iteration,

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modern republican revolutions become progressively more inclusive

of peoples, as they become progressively more exclusive of estates
where estates refers to the Roman law sense of statu hominum, namely, the division of one humanity into the estates of the free and those
of the enslaved, of priestly and lay, of husbands and wives, of adults
and of children, and so on. The linchpin of Machiavellis logic lies in
the coincidence of opposites, of a tyrannical moment with a republican moment. This coincidence takes place in the very construction
of the idea of lo stato, whose features are shared both by republics and
principalities and, more important, allow for certain traits of one to
pass into the other and vice versa.3 Without such a mutual contamination of republic and principality, it would be impossible to effect the
inclusive exclusion of estates that characterizes any modern, democratic revolutionary political process.
To illustrate my hypothesis, in the next three sections I shall
discuss three different constellations in which republic, species,
and state have come together in the history of western political
thought. My intention is to show the new way in which Machiavelli
weaves these three roots of the modern concept of state in The Prince,
as expressed in his famous definition of republics as a species of state.
During the twentieth century, positivist political science lost interest
in the theory of constitutional forms that classical and medieval political theory bequeathed the moderns. This loss may have impaired
its capacity for the accurate analysis of current political phenomena.
For if the exercise of genealogy shows anything, it is that subtle shifts
in the meaning of constitutional terms like republic or state have
momentous political consequences.

THE ANCIENT ROOT OF THE MODERN STATE:

STATE AS STATUS REI PUBLICAE
Two Harvard intellectual historians have recently coined a new term for
the kind of modern, revolutionary concept of the state that I discussed
above in relation to Sieys: they have claimed that modern republicanism and its new ideal of political freedom as nondomination is an exclu-

Republics Are a Species of State223

sivist republicanism not found previously in the classical tradition of

republicanism represented by Aristotle and Cicero (Hankins 2010; Nelson
2010). James Hankins and Eric Nelson suggest that the republican political logic exemplified by Sieys is the product of a new, religiously based
fanaticism that sees the republic as the only legitimate species of state
and rejects all principalities as illegitimate.4 For these two Harvard historians, the originary meaning of republic (politeia, res publica) in the Greek
and Roman traditions is pluralistic because it recognizes monarchies
as being species of republics. Only at the dawn of modernity does republicanism become simultaneously democratic and exclusivist.
Hankins situates the crucial, epochal difference between ancient
and modern republicanism in the different ways that Cicero translates
Aristotles notion of politeia compared to Leonardo Brunis humanist
translation of the same notion in the fifteenth century. Cicero translates
politeia by res publica and, according to Hankins, this means that Cicero
preserves the equal validity of the three species of politeia (monarchy,
aristocracy, and politeia as a virtuous form of democracy) found in Aristotles Politics. On this account, the traditional Roman understanding
of republic has no privileged connection to democratic or popular government. It was only thanks to Brunis translation of the genus res publica by one of its species, namely, politeia as a good form of democracy,
that republics came to mean governments by a plurality of persons
and were opposed to princely governments ruled by one only (Hankins
2010, 453). For Hankins, Machiavellis opening sentence of The Prince
popularizes this modern usage of republic and thus was instrumental to the later polarization of constitutional and absolutist governments in the early modern periodand ultimately, two centuries later,
to the classing of monarchy as an illegitimate form of government
(454). If we accept Hankinss thesis, we would have to acknowledge that
Machiavelli and his republican followers simply invented their own
Roman tradition. Neo-Roman republicanism, to employ Skinners
term for modern republicanism, would be all neo and zero Roman.
Hankins hypothesis that, for the Romans, monarchies are species of republics, hangs essentially on a few passages in Ciceros On

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the Commonwealth where a distinction is made between good and bad

royal republics (Cicero 1999). In III 47 Scipio, the protagonist of the
dialogue, distinguishes between a just king (he mentions Romulus and
Numa) and a tyrant, and speaks of a monarchic form of commonwealth or regali re publica as opposed to populari rei publicae, giving
praise for both. Hankinss reading of the passage assumes that the
Latin expression status designates something like the form of government of a people, which can be royal [regali] or popular [populari], and
thus he surmises that for Cicero a republic could also be a governed by
a monarch, as one of its species.
However, it is doubtful that the Roman term status can be connected in this way to the institutions of government. In Roman legal
and political usage status refers to the condition of the res publica or
to the state of the peoples affairs and not to the body of magistrates
that runs (gerere) these affairs.5 The expression status rei Romanae found
in Digest 1.1.1.2 refers to the condition of the affairs of the Roman
people; the term status does not refer to what in the medieval period
is designated as regimen or form of government. We still employ the
term state in this archaic Roman sense, as when the President of the
United States gives his speech on the State of the Union or when we
say that such and such a thing embodies the state of the art: in neither usage is there any reference to the species of government.
The fundamental Roman political idea behind the concept of
status, correctly rendered by Cicero among others, is that the peoples
law, in the first place, and the peoples magistrates whose office is to
implement these laws, in the second, is what preserves the condition,
the well-being, the status of the Roman republic: there is no government (regimen) of the republic in the sense of something that is found
above and beyond the welfare of the Roman citizens.6 To ask after
the status of the Roman republic means to ask whether the affairs of
the people are being run in the best manner, whether the condition
of the public life is healthy. The expression status does not designate
those charged with running these affairsthat is, the form or species of
government.

Republics Are a Species of State225

Hence, in the above passage cited by Hankins as evidence of

ancient republican pluralism, Cicero is not saying that a monarchy
is a species of republic. He is merely saying that the affairs of the Roman people can also find themselves in a good condition when the
people are led (mostly into battle) by an able king in conjunction with
the counsels of the Senate,7 and not only when these affairs are run by
the conjoined authority of the Senate (auctoritas in senatu) and the assemblies of the people (potestas in populi), as happened after the expulsion of the Tarquin dynasty. In other words, Ciceros point is that the
republic always belongs to the populus no matter whether it is a regali
or populari rei publicae, no matter whether the affairs of the people are
overseen by a single monarch or by a majority of citizens. The monarchies and aristocracies of the early modern period, against which
modern republicanism fights its battles by excluding their claims
to legitimacy, have nothing in common with Ciceros so-called royal
republic. These modern monarchies and aristocracies do not require
at all the consensus of an armed people to their laws, as in Rome. Most
important, as I discuss below, in these modern monarchies, the kingly
estate absorbs the republic or body of the people, in a sense that would
have been entirely unthinkable in Rome, where at best one can say
that the kingly function is absorbed by the republic or body of the
people in the form of the dual consulate.
But, if Machiavellis notion of stato does not come from the Roman idea of status rei publicae, then what did Machiavelli seek and find
in the Roman conception of politics? In a recent article, Peter Stacey
suggests that behind Machiavellis claim that a republic is a stato libero
(a free state) lies a more primordial conception of the state in terms
of a corpo misto or mixed political body.8 This is a point that is well
taken, since in both Aristotle and Cicero the constitutional terminology is overwhelmingly dedicated to describe the political character
of an autarchic people or body politic, and only rarely does it develop
terminology apt to describe the independent existence of institutions
through which this people is governed.

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In Aristotle, politeia, which is usually translated into English as

constitution, derives from a verb, politeuein, which means to be a
citizen or to participate in political activity. The term politeia therefore denotes more a common form of life than a form of government.
Aristotle places emphasis on the common form of life, the bios politikos,
which characterizes human beings as a species of political animals,
zoon politikon (for Aristotle, bees and ants are other species of political animals). From this perspective, Ciceros translation of politeia by
res publica is less an attempt to apply the Greek typology of forms of
government to the Roman constitution and much more an attempt to
bring together the idea of politeia as a common form of life with the
Roman idea of a people as a function of the consent they give to be
ruled by laws of their own making. This idea of politeia or res publica as
a form of free life is preserved by Machiavelli in his conception of a vivere politico, which is characterized by the law before which citizens are
equal (in Greek isonomia; in Latin equus ius); and, still more important,
by a continuous social struggle to attain such equality under law. The
Roman people do not own the republic as a private person owns
property. The case is instead the opposite: the affairs of the people
remain in the hands of the people when orders and laws are set up
that keep any group of citizens from managing what are collective affairs. Machiavelli understood this point well when he highlighted the
function of veto powers in the Roman constitution (on this point see
Vatter 2000 and Raimondi 2013).
Understood in this light, Brunis translation of Aristotles typologies of constitutions was an attempt to recapture the fluidity of Aristotelian politeuein and render the idea of state less as a static form
of government and more as a temporal process of living politically. After
all, as Baron and Pocock have correctly pointed out, Brunis innovation
was primarily a historiographical, not a politicotheoretical one (Baron
1988). What Machiavelli discovers, over and above the historicization
of political form already found in Bruni, is that the purity of political form dissolves into the currents of historical becoming due to the

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causal role played by social conflicts, above all by the fundamental

conflict between the people who desire to be neither commanded
nor oppressed by the great and the great who desire both to command and to oppress the people. That is why in chapter 9 of The Prince
Machiavelli says that the unfolding of social conflict always gives rise
to one of three species of government: principality, liberty, or license.
These refer to the government by one, to the government by many, and
to the government by none. But with this typology, Machiavelli is no
longer operating within the semantic space of the Roman idea of status
but has shifted into the semantic space of the medieval conception of
status as regime, or specie politia, which I address in what follows.

THE MEDIEVAL ROOT OF THE MODERN STATE:

STATE AS SPECIE POLITIA
In the literature on Machiavellis constitutional terminology there exists
a widespread claim that in Machiavelli stato is always the state of someone, and it refers to the domination (dominio, signoria, imperio) exerted by
that person or group over the rest. Mansfield and Skinner, for instance,
both agree that when Machiavelli speaks as if the stato were a possession
of the prince, he falls behind the distinctively modern idea of the State
as form of public power separate from both the ruler and the ruled,
and constituting supreme political authority within a certain defined
territory (Mansfield 1996, 2812). On this account, Machiavellis stato
translates the idea of status as specie politia, referring to the form of political regime of a community. In the medieval period, and particularly
in the Italian communal tradition, city governments sought to distinguish their state or regimen politicum from the kind of monarchical rule
or regimen regale exercised by both empire and church. For Aquinas, a
monarchical regime is one in which he who governs the city has plenariam potestatem, full or absolute powers, whereas a political regime is one
in which those who govern the city have their powers limited by the
laws of the city (Mager 1968, 416ff).
In his genealogy of the modern state, Wolfgang Mager calls
this identity of state with political regime the republican root of

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the modern idea of state, although it should perhaps best be called

the Aristotelian root since it refers to the Aristotelian identification
of constitution (politeia) with governing part (politeuma); that is, it
refers to those who hold the supreme magistracy in a city. Thus, in
his commentary on the Politics, Aquinas says that for Aristotle politeia (in the generic sense of state) refers to whatever estate occupies
the highest instance of rule (maximum principatum) so as to impose a
form of government on all others. If the estate of the people rules or
is prince, then the state or republic becomes popular; if the estate
of the nobles or of the rich manages to rule or is prince, then the
state or republic becomes oligarchic, and so on (Aquinas 2007, cited in
Mager 1968, 418 fn.1).
Aquinass terminology clarifies an important point: that the
medieval idea of status as regimen politicum, although supposedly republican, in reality designates what could be more appropriately
termed a civil principality. The so-called republic (politia) is always
already a form (specie) of domination exerted by whatever part happens
to be prince.10 The princely function is the primordial political
function in the idea of state as regime. At the same time this regime
is also civil in the sense that whichever part functions as princeps is
obligated by the laws of the community, which are of different kinds:
divine, natural, and civil or common laws. By collapsing the state onto
the regime, the laws that are supposed to regulate the exercise of power do not issue from a politically unified people. That is the reason the
government or regime of this people is always inherently partisan
and thus takes up a princely form.
In The Prince Machiavelli will try to subvert this medieval idea
of state as regime by proposing his own conception of the civil principality. He conceives of a new prince whose exemplar is an idealized Cesare Borgia, whose function is the establishment of the political
unity of a people rather than the reflection of the might of one or the
other estate. This people, in turn, he conceives along neo-Roman lines
in the sense of a people that understands its political life (vivere politico)
in terms of the social struggle for equal law and sees as its enemy

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whoever seeks to deny it this equality. But in order for Machiavelli to

achieve this overturning of the medieval identity of state with regime,
he had to recover an entirely different meaning for the term of stato,
no longer tied to the power of the estates in society, but rather linked
to the regimen regale and its princely expropriation of estates. Where
does this other meaning of stato come from?

THE MODERN ROOT OF THE MODERN STATE:

STATE AS STATUS REGALIS
The received thesisaccording to which the modern state entails a
depersonalization of the state that takes it away from the possession
of the princeneeds to be carefully analyzed. It is true, of course, that
there is a depersonalization of the state insofar as the stato attempts to
emancipate itself from the medieval sense of regimen, which, as I just
showed, is partisan and ref lects the attempts to rule by the various
estates in the political body. However, the question remains open as to
what other root of the concept of state is relied upon in the construction of the impersonal modern state. I follow the interesting hypothesis proposed by Mager, according to whom the modern stato has a third
root, apart from the Roman and the medieval one, which derives from
the Renaissance conception of a royal status, or status regalis. It is this
root that allows the stato to free itself from its dependency on the estates
and allows it to represent itself as the political unity of a people. Thus,
paradoxically, the impersonality of the modern state requires a massive
personalization of office, the effects of which I analyze in what follows.
My hypothesis is that Machiavellis distinction between republic
and principality as species of stato is not the application of the medieval
idea of regimen as specie politia, but rests on his creative appropriation of
the idea of status regalis. In this way, the distinction between republic
and principality in Machiavelli refers to whether the body of the people
can become sovereign (this is the case for a republic) or whether the
head of the principality can give itself a people (this is the case of
a civil principality). Machiavellis operation in The Prince, therefore,
consists in rephrasing the Roman reliance of politics on the people

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more specifically, on the orders of its popular armyand on the social

conflict around equality as source of law, within the new vocabulary
of status regalis. It is this conjunction of Roman republican vocabulary
with the much more recent vocabulary of modern monarchic regimes
that leads to the modern idea that a people gives itself the form of a
state or becomes a state, in the way exemplified in Sieyss pamphlet.
Mager argues that in the expression status regalis, the conception of status has no relation to the Roman public law understanding
of status as status rei publicae, which as I have said, refers to the condition of the Roman political body or people. Nor does it have a relation to the Aristotelian root of status as specie politia prevalent in the
medieval period, which is dependent on the desire to rule of any given
estate. Instead, Mager claims that the root of status regalis derives from
Roman private law, namely, from the law of persons and its foundational
idea of a human status or statu hominum (Digest I, 5). Unlike in the expression of public law discussed above, status refers here to the role of
a head in a group (family, city, church) as a dominus (as in the father
of the family).
We have before us an entirely different idea of species of
state: we are not referring to a specie politia, a species or form of government, but instead to a species or form of human being or person.
An example is the office of the pope as head of the clerical status, much
like the emperor is head of the lay status. Magers claim is that, during
the late medieval and early modern period, this idea of a human or
personal status is linked with the Roman law idea of dignitates or honors attached to public offices. The new category of status regalis gives a
public function or office to the head of a group: the personal has
become political. With the status regalis we have a personalization of office, or, perhaps better, the officialization of personal status, in a new
synthesis between ideas of public officium, honor, dignitas coming from
imperial Rome and ideas of private status regalis, pontificalis, ducalis that
have a feudal origin.
Mager shows that this monarchic root of the modern state
first emerges in the young monarchies of Spain, France, and England,

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where there occurs a transition from the nonpublic person of a nobleman, with all of his belongings (wealth, family, servers, followers),
to the public idea of office and dignity as a king of a national territory (Mager 1968, 4389). Anyone who has read Machiavellis The Prince
knows that these new kings of Spain and France figure crucially in the
thinking of the Florentine secretary of state. After all, in chapter 3
Machiavelli wants to teach the French king a lesson in his arte dello stato by castigating him for not following the Roman Republican military
orders in his conquests. In chapter 21 Machiavelli refers to Ferdinand
of Aragon, the present king of Spain as an exemplar of what a prince
should do to be thought outstanding. These new monarchies are the
background against which he constructs his own conception of a new
civil principality.
If Mager is correct about status regalis, then there would be two
hypotheses as to how a category of Roman private law is given a new
public law usage at the start of modernity. On the hypothesis put
forward by Skinner and Stacey, neo-Roman republican thinkers like
Machiavelli would have applied the distinction coming from the law of
persons between the status of a freeman and the status of a slave to the
public law distinction between forms of government, so that republics correspond to free states and principalities to unfree or enslaved states. On
Magers hypothesis, instead, the transfer of Roman private law categories to the sphere of public law does take place in early modernity, but
in relation to the construction of a status regalis, the state of the monarch, and not in relation to the discourse on republican freedom as
nondomination. On the first hypothesis, Machiavellis civil principality has no positive function whatsoever to play in the establishment
of a republican state. On the second hypothesis, on the other hand,
things look different: The Prince turns out to offer a revolutionary usage of the personalization of power in status regalis for the construction
of a depersonalized public idea of a republican state. Rousseaus quip in
The Social Contract that Machiavellis treatise is a secret handbook for
republicans would in this way receive an entirely new meaning. But
how does this work?

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Mager is careful to point out that while the personal status of the
king becomes public, and as a condition for this passage, there must
obtain a moment of depersonalization in which the new status regalis
is separated from the physical body of the king and gets attached to
the political body of the people. Thus, status regalis or regnum comes to
stand in for the res publica. This transition is registered already in the
dualistic reading of potestas found in Aquinas when he distinguishes
a regimen politicum from a regimen regale. The difference between them
is that in the regimen politicum it is the body of the people that gives
power to some representatives or delegates (their head), whereas in
the regimen regale it is the head of the king (status regalis) that obtains
the body of the people.11
In the status regalis the king becomes head of the entire body (of
the republic), and is no longer just a part of the body (an estate) that
rises to government (the king is no longer just one of many noblemen selected to be king). Mager illustrates this shift by analyzing the
idea of status regalis in Gerson, who writes in 1413 (100 years before
Machiavellis The Prince) about the kings three forms of life: physical,
political, and spiritual. By the kings political life is meant a king who
is united with his subjects by one law, as head is to body, such that the
interests of the head become identical to those of the body. In this unity of the civil life of the king with the life of the community is found
the beginning of the modern impersonal state: here the laws of the
king become the laws of the land, and we have the fundamentally
modern idea that the king or sovereign, as representative of the entire
people, becomes the sole source of public law. This idea is opposed to
the medieval conception of a body of public laws (all of them originating anywhere but in the will of the monarch) keeping the kings power
under a yoke. Thus, with the idea of status regalis one has another kind
of reunification of regnum with res publica, the mirror opposite of that
found in Aquinas: with the status regalis the republic is represented
by the principality, whereas with status as specie politia the principality
is embodied by the republic.

Republics Are a Species of State233

MACHIAVELLIS CIVIL PRINCIPALITY AND MODERN

REPUBLICANISM
How does Machiavellis The Prince weave together these three roots of the
modern state? Machiavellis Roman conception of the political life of
a body without head, found throughout the Discourses on Livy, is a direct
critique to the sacralization of the kings two bodies that is found in
the modern divine right monarchies. Likewise, his insistence at the
start of The Prince that the use of violence can extirpate a whole dynasty
is intended to show the ludicrous idea of a second immortal body of
the king. However, this does not mean that Machiavelli has no use for
the new conception of principality as status regalis. In The Prince chapters
8 and 9, Machiavelli develops an original discourse on the figure he calls
civil principality. I would argue that this constitutional form takes up
the status regalis insofar as the civil prince needs to become the head
of a free and armed people if he is going to found a stato that lasts in time
and is not dependent on his own person. Mager also argues that traces
of this other root of stato can be found in The Prince, where it does not
refer, subjectively, to the form of rule exercised by one person in power
but, objectively, to the whole that is ruled by one head: state as regnum or
res publica embodied by the prince. Magers example is found in chapter 2
of The Prince, when Machiavelli writes: I say therefore that in states that
are hereditary and accustomed to the lineage of their prince there are
many fewer difficulties in maintaining them. Mager claims that here
stati does not mean rule of prince, but refers to the unity of head and
body, the ruled as unity under a head, as principality, as objective status
regalis (Mager 1968, 445).
I think that the account of the civil principality in chapters
8 and 9 gives a much clearer example of the objective conception
of the state in Machiavelli. Within the narrow confines of chapter 9
Machiavelli moves between the three roots of stato that I have discussed so far. The Roman sense of stato as referring to the primacy of
a people, of a body politic, with respect to the form of its government, or head, is clearly visible when Machiavelli argues against the
widespread oligarchic belief that he who builds on the people builds

234social research

on mud. To the contrary, a wise (civil) prince will always build on

the people and do everything that is needed to have his people as a
friend (The Prince, chap. 9). The same thesis is defended innumerable
times in The Discourses on Livy. The modern state needs to be founded on
the universality of the people.
But it would be a mistake to believe, as the prevalent view has
it, that Machiavelli is talking here of a regime based on the popular
estate, of the status popularis, to use Brunis expression. The proof is
that chapter 9 moves on to defend a second thesis, which is that a civil
prince has to ascend from a civil to an absolute order.12 By civil order Machiavelli refers to the fact that this principality, when viewed
as a function of how the prince acquires his dominion, is an elective
one and remains civil as long as the prince sticks to the preestablished orders of the city, which have been determined, more or less
consensually, by the different estates of the city, represented by the
different magistracies of the city. Thus, with respect to the manner of
acquiring power, the civil principality fits with the second root of
stato as a specie politia, an estate-based regime.
But the novelty of this chapter is that Machiavelli advocates
for a civil prince who is willing to break free from its dependency on
these estates; that is, on the oligarchic factions that ruled over communal life in Italian city-states for centuries, and which Machiavelli
will accuse, in Florentine Histories, of having ruined the cities that they
have governed, having made them incapable of rising to the level of
the Roman Republic. What Machiavelli means is that the oligarchical
estates have made it impossible to construct a veritable state of the
people, a modern republic. Only in this context does it make sense
to argue, as he does at the end of chapter 9, that the civil princein
order to maintain his stato, here in the sense of regime or rulewill
necessarily have to ascend from a civil status to an absolute status.
The latter idea of status does not refer to a specie politia but to the status
regalis. Machiavelli hints as much by opposing the civil status to the
absolute status in a veiled citation to the lex regia, which contains
the famous phrase concerning the legibus solutus condition of a prince.

Republics Are a Species of State235

Now, in the lex regia the prince is absolved from the civil laws
only because the (Roman) people passed its potestas entirely into the
princely hands. Machiavelli thus argues that a prince will need to become absolute (and in so doing break off the yoke of the customary
laws) if he wants to keep the magistrates from taking the state away
from a prince. Only by expropriating the political power and authority of the estates, to use Webers language, will the new prince
be able to maintain the citizens in need of his state and of himself.
Here the very dualism between objective state and subjective
prince characteristic of the status regalis appears clearly in Machiavellis language.
The way I understand Machiavellis point in chapter 9 is as
follows. Throughout The Prince, and climaxing in chapters 1214,
Machiavelli argues that a modern stato needs to be republican in the
sense that it must find its sole support on a free, because armed, people. But in The Prince he also argues that a free people, in turn, stand
in need of a modern stato whose personal embodimentthe new
princefights for their interests as a whole (and not for the interests
of the particular estates). In this sense, a modern republic is characterized by its being a species of stato, the meaning of which Machiavelli
derives, partially, from the more or less recent creation (in the fourteenth century) of the idea of a modern princely or royal estate (status regalis). This hypothesis accounts for the expression employed by
Machiavelli in chapter 9: in need of his state and of himself. The
princely or royal estate is attained by expropriating the means and
authority of the lower estates (the magistrates mentioned in chapter 9), by the civil prince ascending to an absolute, legibus solutus condition (status). Thus, what is radically novel in Machiavellis The Prince is
the attempt to place the status regalis to an antimonarchic purpose and
build the concept of a republican state that will come to fruition only
later in the Atlantic revolutions.
What significance does this genealogical exercise and this reading of The Prince have for contemporary political thought? According
to Skinner, if we reflect on what I have been calling the absolutist

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and populist theories, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are
nowadays of exclusively historical interest. If we turn, however, to
the fictional theory [of Hobbes], we come upon a way of thinking that
ought never to have been set aside (Skinner 2009, 3612). From this
judgment it would seem to follow that all modern republican thinkers
subsequent to Hobbes, starting with Spinoza, through Rousseau, Jefferson, and Madison, and on to Sieys and Kant, have been captured
by the Hobbesian construction of sovereignty and lie under its spell.
But on this view a new paradox emerges: whereas there is a clear distinction between a republican and a Hobbesian idea of freedom, there
appears to be no republican idea of the state that can counter-balance
the Hobbesian one.
The dualistic approach to the question of the modern state advocated by Skinner, according to which states divide into republics,
which are free, and principalities, which are unfree, makes it difficult
to conceive a republican state because, as Machiavelli teaches, such a
state is necessarily related to a personal embodiment (to use Webers
phrase) in the form of a prince. Contrariwise, by adopting the genealogy I have proposed, one can think the coincidence of opposites
between republican freedom and tyranny (which I have discussed
under the rubric of the ascent of a civil prince to an absolute status
regalis), and in that way give republicanism not only its own conception
of freedom as nondomination, but also its own conception of a nonHobbesian, republican state. Machiavellis revolutionary intervention
in The Prince kept the status regalis from being the exclusive preserve of
modern absolutism (in the thought of Bodin and Hobbes), and opened
its use for modern republicanism (in the figures of Spinoza, Rousseau,
Jefferson, Sieys, and Kant). By seeing the continued vitality of the different roots of the modern state in the modern republican tradition
we may still be able to counteract the ravages of neoliberal antistatism
without having recourse to the Hobbesian, antirepublican idea of the
state as fictional person.

Republics Are a Species of State237

NOTES

1. See here the latest treatment of the question, Note intorno al termine
stato in Machiavelli in Vivanti (2008, 196226). Vivanti recapitulates the result of the research on Machiavellis constitutional terminology of last century, all of it essentially assuming that Machiavelli
understood the state in these Weberian terms. These treatments
are not genealogical ones. They boil down to the claim that by stato
Machiavelli refers to regime or government; persons who govern; and
territory over which a regime governs.
2. I have discussed the logic of exclusion and inclusion with respect to
radical republicanism in Vatter (2012). For another interpretation of
tyrannical tendencies in Machiavellis democratic discourse, see
McCormick (2011).
3. Mansfield is generally correct in pointing out that for Machiavelli
principalities are as much states as are republics, (1996, 294).
However, this does not mean that a republic is the stato of a certain
group as a principality is the stato of the prince (293), as I show below.
4. Hankins situates the claim that monarchies are not republics and
hence are illegitimate with Milton (Hobbes still called monarchy a
form of republic or commonwealth): the political thinkers of the
Enlightenment had forgotten that their exclusivist republicanism had
had its origins in a godly republic of seventeenth-century fanatics
(475), referring to Miltons use of the model of the Hebrew Republic.
5. See the evidence brought out by Mager (1968). For a different interpretation of status in the Digest and its role in the origin of the modern
idea of state, see Post (1964). I believe that Posts genealogy is useful
to understand the origins of public reason as standard for legitimate government, but Magers genealogy is useful to understand the
origins of the modern state. On why the two should not be collapsed,
see Vatter (2008).
6. This is the meaning of Ciceros definition of the res publica as res populi
(III 43), where the people is a function of the bond of law or agreement or association of the group (unum vinculum iuris . . consensus ac
societas coetus, quod est populus) (III 43).

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7. One should not forget, as Machiavelli emphasizes repeatedly, that

Romulus needed to remain alone in power (and thus killed Remus)
only in order to set up a Senate, on whose counsel he proceeded to rule
his people (Machiavelli 1996, Book I, chap. 9). Kings were never absolute in Rome; they never ruled alone.
8. I find myself in sympathy with Stacey (2013), who argues that
Machiavelli is innovative also in the doctrine of state, and not only
in the doctrine of government, but on different grounds than those
adduced by Stacey.
9. The idea is that the constitution (politeia) is determined by that part
which dominates (or is prince); hence, the expressions like politia
democratica or politia aristocratica or respublica popularis, paucorum,
optimatum. Aquinas translates the three good forms of political or
constitutional government as: monarchy equals regnum, potestas regia;
politeia (as good rule by many, or by soldiers) equals res publica; and the
corruption of republic in narrow sense equals popularis status.
10. In his genealogy, Skinner also makes the point that modern monarchies rely on the belief that a political body forms a political unity
or state only in and through its head, namely, through the kingly
estate (32728). For modern monarchies, without kingly head there
is no state or political body. Contrariwise, for the medieval populist
conception of the state or regimen politicum the body of the people is
both anterior to and, collectively speaking, superior to its head
(the magistrates, of which one may be a king) (33739).
11. This thesis has given rise to a large secondary literature especially in
the Italian and French scholarship. I refer here in particular to the
polemic between Paul Larivaille and Gennaro Sasso on the civil principality.
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