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CONSTITUTING FREEDOM
Constituting Freedom
Machiavelli and Florence
FABIO RAIMONDI
Original Edition
L’ordinamento della libertà. Machiavelli e Firenze
(Verona: ombre corte, 2013)
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/11/2017, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
First published in Italian © Ombre Corte 2013
English translation © Fabio Raimondi 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
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address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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To Tommaso and Filippo
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/11/2017, SPi
Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Aims 1
A Republican Machiavelli 1
Machiavelli and Political Modernity 3
The Contemporary Relevance of Machiavelli 5
The Conceptual Scheme of Machiavellian Discourse 6
1. Corruption and Inequality 9
1.1. The Problem 9
1.2. Two Ways 14
1.3. The Aporia of the Principality 17
1.4. A ‘Well-Ordered Republic’ and the Transmission of Virtue 21
1.5. The Dictatorship: the ‘Kingly Hand’ of the Republic 24
1.6. Free and Servile Beginnings 27
2. Tumults and the Birth of Florence 32
2.1. The Beginning of Florence in Discourses 32
2.2. The Origins and Naming of Florence in the Histories 35
2.3. The Instability of Florence 39
2.4. The Virtue of the Florentines and the Humours 42
2.5. Freedom and Tumults 48
2.6. The Paradigm of Florence 51
3. Political History of the Florentine Institutions 54
3.1. The Struggles Between the Nobles and the Division of the
People (1215–98) 54
3.2. The Struggles Between the Nobles and the Popolo Grasso:
the Duke of Athens and the Ciompi’s Tumult (1298–1353) 62
3.3. The Struggles Between the Popolo Grasso and the Popolo
Minuto: the ‘Humours of the Parts’ (1353–93) 71
3.4. From the Oligarchic Republic (1393–1434) to the Medicean
Principality (1434–92) 80
4. Constituting Freedom 93
4.1. The Republic (1494–1512) 93
4.2. The Return of the Medici 103
4.3. Recapitulation 109
viii Contents
4.4. The Discursus 112
4.5. The Minuta 124
4.6. A Provisional Appraisal 129
Bibliography 138
Index 151
What tumult’s in the heavens?
William Shakespeare, I Henry VI
Populi tumultus libertatis recuperandae saepe occasio fuit
John Milton, Commonplace Book
Acknowledgements
This book represents the first stage of a journey begun many years ago, along
which I have been lucky enough to encounter numerous specialists on
Machiavelli and benefit from the views and advice of many colleagues and
friends. As I reach the end of this first stretch of my analysis of some of the
key issues in Machiavelli’s political thought, I would first like to thank the
members of the Study Group on Political Concepts of the University of Padua,
directed by Professor Giuseppe Duso, with whom I have enjoyed exchanges
illuminated by a genuine passion for research and from whom I have learned a
great deal. I am also grateful to the participants in the Machiavelli seminars
held at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Urbino from 2002 to
2006, under the friendly guidance of Professor Augusto Illuminati.
Of the many people with whom I have had the opportunity to discuss
Machiavelli and related matters in these years, I want to address a special
thanks to: Alessandro Arienzo, Jérémie Barthas, Gianfranco Borrelli, Filippo
Del Lucchese, Alberto Fabris, Fabio Frosini, Marco Geuna, Vittorio Morfino,
Andrea Polegato, Luca Sartorello, Merio Scattola (in memoriam), and Giorgio
Scichilone. More generally, my research also owes much to long discussions
with Giso Amendola, Gennaro Avallone, Andrea Bardin, Luca Basso, Michele
Basso, Adone Brandalise, Maurizio Merlo, Mario Piccinini, Gaetano Rametta,
and Antonino Scalone.
I wish to thank Anna Maria Lazzarino Del Grosso, Gennaro Maria Barbuto,
Maurizio Ricciardi, Domenico Taranto, Stefano Visentin, and the anonymous
readers at Oxford University Press for having the patience to read this text and
for offering me such valuable advice. I would also like to extend my most
heartfelt gratitude to John P. McCormick for the interest he has shown in my
work and, not least, for his availability and kindness. I must, of course, mention
Professor Annibale Elia, director of the Department of Political, Social, and
Communication Sciences of the University of Salerno, who immediately
believed in and supported this translation, together with all my colleagues in
the department. I also thank Matthew Armistead, whose professionalism and
willingness have made the translation project pleasant and profitable, and,
finally, Dominic Byatt and all his colleagues, whose patience created the condi-
tions for the publication of this book.
Last but not least, my loving thanks to Silvia for her wonderful ‘wandering
causes’.
Despite all the help I have received, I would like to stress that the respon-
sibility for the end result is mine alone.
Abbreviations
Machiavelli’s works
AW or Art The Art of War (Dell’arte della guerra)
CWNM The Complete Works of Niccolò Machiavelli
D or Discourses Discourses on Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio)
DRGF or Discursus Discourse on Remodelling the Government of Florence (Discursus
florentinarum rerum post mortem iunioris Laurentii Medices)
EN Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolò Machiavelli
FH or Histories Florentine Histories (Istorie fiorentine)
L The Letters of Machiavelli: A Selection
LCS Legazioni. Commissarie. Scritti di governo
Let. Lettere
M or Minuta Minuta di provvisione per la Riforma dello Stato di Firenze
MCW Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others
P or Prince The Prince (De principatibus or Il principe)
S or Summary Sommario delle cose della città di Lucca
Notes
Fiorini Notes to Machiavelli, Niccolò. Istorie fiorentine (libri I–III).
V. Fiorini (ed.). Florence: Sansoni, 1962 [anastatic reprint of the
first edition, 1894]
Gaeta Notes to Let.
Inglese/D Notes to Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discorsi sopra la prima deca di
Tito Livio. G. Inglese (ed.). Milan: Rizzoli, 2011
Inglese/P Notes to Machiavelli, Niccolò. Il principe. G. Inglese (ed.).
Turin: Einaudi, 2013
Montevecchi Notes to Machiavelli, Niccolò. Istorie fiorentine e altre opere
storiche e politiche. A. Montevecchi (ed.), in Opere. Turin: Utet,
1971, vol. II
Rinaldi Notes to Machiavelli, Niccolò. De principatibus and Discorsi
sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. R. Rinaldi (ed.), in Opere.
Turin: Utet, 1999, vol. I
Introduction
AIMS
The intention of this book is not to tackle, even if this were possible, all of the
perennial problems of Machiavellian thought. More modestly, it aims to
provide an initial response, in a schematic but hopefully sufficiently articulated
form, to a central question that Machiavelli raised in the Discourses on Livy:
‘in what mode a free state, if there is one, can be maintained in corrupt cities;
or, if there is not, in what mode to order it’.1 I provide an answer to this
question by means of a selective examination of certain aspects of Machia-
velli’s work rather than through an exhaustive study. My effort will, I hope,
help prepare the way for deeper research in the future aimed at exposing the
backbone of Machiavelli’s conceptual path. In assessing the perspectives of the
Prince, the Discourses, and the Histories I will also reflect on the Discursus and
the Minuta, two short writings of 1520–22 that offer valuable insights into
Machiavelli’s major works.
Before beginning the analysis of his texts, however, I believe it is appropriate
to provide some general guidelines on my reading of Machiavelli.
A REPUBLICAN MACHIAVELLI
Contrary to the assumption that Machiavelli was ‘to all intents [a] Medicean’,2
I will affirm the notion of an essentially republican Machiavelli, ‘militant’ not
only ante rem perditas.3
1
D I.18, 49.
2
See, amongst others, Bausi (2005), 179, 311; Martelli (2009), 36, 45; Butters (2010). I am
citing only a few key works from the immense bibliography on Machiavelli, without pretence of
completion.
3
See Guidi (2009) and (2016), in which Machiavelli’s concern with safeguarding the repub-
lican ‘constitution’ (ordinamento) of Florence, even after the return of the Medici, emerges
clearly. The term ‘constitution’ is not used here in the modern sense—see McIlwain (1947)—but
2 Constituting Freedom
For Machiavelli the republic ‘is a specific form of regime’ that coincides with
the opening of the Great Council, ‘experienced personally’ in the period in
which he served as its secretary. It implies both ‘a collective order dependant
on the participation of a large part of the population of a city’, that was a
‘bringer of freedom’, and ‘a business of customs’ (in a political rather than a
moral sense) that called for an examination ‘of the political competence of the
people, aimed at understanding if they could be considered to form a capable
political subject’.4 However, it is not only this: Machiavelli had in mind a new
type of republic, which did not resemble that of the frequently criticized period
of 1494–1512 because it would have to have been built on an idea of a mixture
of different kinds of mixed government (like that of Venice, for example). This
idea will be explained in particular in Chapter 4, Sections 4.4 and 4.6. In the
end, Machiavelli’s republic represents a very specific way of life, typically
Florentine, that is preferable to any other, namely the ‘free and civil way of
life’ (vivere libero e civile), the significance of which will be made clear in what
follows (see in particular, Chapter 1, Section 1.6 and Chapter 4, Section 4.5).
The theory I propose is that working for the Medici (something that
Machiavelli had wanted to do from 1512 and that he eventually achieved
only in 1520) did not mean having to accept their political perspective, and
that Machiavelli was therefore always a republican, even in the Prince (see
Chapter 1, Section 1.3). The presence of the Medici in Florence after their
return in 1512 was impossible to ignore, and the question facing Machiavelli
was therefore how to re-establish the city as a republic despite the fact that
the power of the Medici was set against this. The fact that the Medici were
both an obstacle and an opportunity is not something that Machiavelli kept
hidden, and for him coming to terms with them meant convincing them that
any principality would be unable to survive without transforming itself into
a republic. And if the Medici represented one of the aspects of the problem
that Machiavelli wished to resolve, the solution involved their overthrow, as
emerges clearly in the Discursus and the Minuta (see Chapter 4, Sections
4.4–4.6).
Machiavelli’s undertaking had always been to reform and regenerate Flor-
ence in a republican form after the return of the Medici. Even the scheme
presented in Chapter XXVI of the Prince—that of making Italy a united
political entity—which does not appear again in subsequent Machiavellian
works, must be seen as an attempt to institute, preserve, and perhaps even to
sharing the analogy of how medicine relates to the physical constitution as the sum of the
characteristics (and their relations) that form the body: as a way of life and not in a merely legal
sense. Politically, the reference is to the sum of laws and orders (ordini)—for an initial
reconstruction, see Whitfield (1955)—that, in addition to customs (habits, traditions, language,
religion, etc.), defines the specific way of life of a city. In this sense, ‘corruption’ acts as a
complement to ‘constitution’: see Vasoli (2001), 349, n. 35.
4
Ménissier (2006), 152–8.
Introduction 3
extend to the whole peninsula the republican freedom typical of Florence.5
This freedom was no longer the Florentina libertas of the humanist civitas of
the commune,6 nor the freedom to be found in the French kingdom, among
the Swiss, or in certain German free cities, to say nothing of the kingdoms of
Spain and England, the German Empire, and the Papal State.7
My reading distances itself from the interpretations which, from the Italian
Risorgimento to Gramsci8 and beyond—one thinks, amongst others, of
Althusser9—have placed Machiavelli’s ideas in both the setting of modern
sovereignty and of the nation state. This formulation is still widespread today
even in the most diligent historiography, and is fraught with dangerous
misinterpretations.10 In fact, the concept of ‘sovereignty’ arose only in the
seventeenth century, by way of the Reason of State and anti-Machiavellianism,
originating from the conception of a political science based on the natural
sciences and in particular on the Galilean method (as we can see in the works
of Hobbes and Spinoza).11 For its part, the concept of the ‘nation state’ only
emerged after the French Revolution.12
5
In contrast to Ardito, according to whom Machiavelli’s political aim is to establish a
‘territorial state’, in other words a state in the modern sense, albeit one that would make use
of premodern republican institutions, in other words a state with both ‘a prince on the outside
and a republic on the inside’: see Ardito (2015), 7–8.
6
See Baron (1966).
7
Here I will discuss freedom as a ‘free and civil way of life’. For an overwiew on the
philosophical analysis of the concept of freedom in Machiavelli, also in relation to liberty, see
Colish (1971).
8 9
See Gramsci (1991). See Althusser (1999), and Raimondi (2011).
10
See, for example, Mansfield (1983); Miglio (2011), 196–213, who interpreted Machiavelli
using Hobbes’s categories.
11
A different approach, which nevertheless intends to distance itself clearly from Machiavelli,
was formulated by Bodin as an attempt to keep together the rank-based structure of society and
an unprecedented ‘concentration of power in the hands of the sovereign’ (Scattola, 1999, 62–3),
who then made the intermediary magistrates participants of his power by investing them with
an ‘imperium legitimum’ (Lazzarino Del Grosso, 2007).
12
I refer the reader to the research conducted by the Study Group on Political Concepts of the
University of Padua, in particular to Duso (1987a) and (1999), from which I distance myself
because I believe that political modernity cannot simply be reduced to the Hobbesian device. The
Hobbesian State (in order to distinguish it from the ‘state’ that Machiavelli discusses, I will
henceforth use the capital S) bases its theoretical and practical support on the ‘pact’ because
through this Hobbes wants to ‘construct ex novo the political form, through the power of reason
endowed with geometric clarity’. The ‘sovereignty’ derived from this is the modern form of
‘power’ that takes control of the ‘monopoly of physical force’, and ‘acts within the law and is
legitimate because it is founded on the will of everyone’. This ‘irresistible’ power, the product of
individuals’ renunciation of their jus in omnia (in other words, their ‘right to resistance’), thus
finds itself unrestricted by the law: Duso (1987b), 7–39. If in Hobbes the pactum unionis is one
4 Constituting Freedom
I believe instead that Machiavelli should be positioned quite far from any
Hobbesian state-centric perspective13 because he continued to theorize the
survival of Florence as a republic,14 and the realization of this required a new
political and institutional transformation: ‘a path as yet untrodden by any-
one’15 that echoed the De rerum natura transcribed in his youth.16
It does not at all follow from this that Machiavelli was anti-modern or pre-
modern, as many from Foucault17 to Esposito18 have argued. Modernity, in
fact, cannot be reduced either to a device that entails a relationship between
pact and sovereignty or to the nation state; modernity is not monolithic and
sovereignty is not its synecdoche. Insisting that the Hobbesian device repre-
sents all of modernity is a historical fallacy because it is only one of its facets,
albeit perhaps the one which has most asserted itself despite its intrinsic
aporia.19 Prior to the Weberian polytheism of values, modernity—of which
there is only one—was characterized by the infinity of principles. These
principles, whose philosophical matrix is the atomism from which even
Hobbes starts, but to neutralize it,20 enabled the construction of infinite
forms of order (not only political). Such forms were sometimes incompatible
with each other but, in every case, were never reducible to a single principle,
even if—or perhaps because of this—the inclination towards unity was the
dynamic that most defined it.
The modernity of Machiavelli’s thought, thanks in part to the contribution
of Lucretius’s atomism,21 lies in the assertion ‘that not all ultimate values are
necessarily compatible with one another’ and that there is ‘more than one
system of values, with no criterion common to the systems whereby a rational
choice can be made between them’.22 This is a characteristic that drew
criticism from various traditionalists such as Strauss and Arendt.23
Machiavellian thought is modern both in the political sphere and in phil-
osophy. To make a brief early mention, one need only recall that, according to
and the same as the pactum subjectionis, in Machiavelli there is an entirely different thought
process at work, but not one that is necessarily anti-modern.
13 14 15
Ricciardi (1999), 37–8. Frosini (2001–2), 174. D I, preface, 5.
16 17
Lucretius, IV, 1–2, and also I, 928–9. See Foucault (2009).
18
Esposito (2012), 45–58.
19
See Raimondi (2005a). It has certainly not been overlooked that the stylization of mod-
ernity through the silhouette of the Hobbesian logical device does not only indicate a lack of
understanding of the methodology of the sciences, but also feeds the suspicion of a specific
political goal: that of attacking modernity in order to try to destroy it in the name of a
postmodern illusion or of a nostalgia for an imaginary premodern period, which is the perspec-
tive in which a presumed naturalism in the political and social order and in its founding values
is effective.
20
See Bardin (2014).
21
See most recently: Del Lucchese (2002), 50–67; Morfino (2006), 67–110; Rahe (2007);
Brown (2010), 68–87 and (2015); Duvernoy (2010), 121–6; Roecklein (2012).
22
Berlin (1980), 71 and in greater depth, 69–75.
23
See Strauss (1958) and Castaldo (2008), 63–130.
Introduction 5
Machiavelli, ‘politics is not natural for man, despite being indispensable to
him’.24 Moreover, his conception of freedom as effect of the constitution
(ordinamento) implies that it is not ‘a natural or supernatural thing’ but rather
something artificial originating only with and within the ‘city’,25 as a practice
inscribed in the free and civil way of life: the constitution alone is the condition
of freedom.
24 25 26
Ion (2006), 94. Dejardin (2004), 67. See Najemy (2006).
27
The former are defined by wealth and birth, while the latter also by their political weight in
the city: the ‘government of aristocrats (ottimati)’, for example, is that of the ‘Consuls’: Mini
(1593), 120–1 and then that of the ‘Senate’: Mecatti (1755), 608–9.
28
For example, Negri (1999), 37–96.
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