TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION WE Have Translated Machiavelli's Title
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION WE have translated Machiavelli's title for this work as Florentine Histories rather than the more usual, and less accurate, History of Florence. This choice accords with our general inclination to literalness in translation, but it is also intended to indicate a specific doubt as to whether Machia- velli is writing "history" as we know it in the Florentine Histories. Machiavelli's work does resemble a present-day history book in certain respects. It selects an object of narration, Florence; it describes a particular period, from the origins of the city to the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492; and it presents a problem or theme, the causes of the remarkable hatreds and divisions within Florence. But it is not a history of Florence in the sense we are accustomed to, which requires that Florence have or have had a history. Machiavelli does not use the word istoria to refer to an object of study; he uses it to mean only the study itself. Whereas for us history is both the object of study and the study itself, for Machiavelli history is a study, apparently, of something other than history. Thus, when he speaks of "our history" or "my history," he refers to a study or an inquiry that he also calls "my narrations" or "my description" or "my undertaking" (see the Letter dedicatory). And since he does not have in mind history as an object, he can say "Florentine histories" in the plural if he wishes, contrary to usage today, which admits that many histories of Florence have been written but denies that Florence could have had more than one history. Further contrary to current practice, Machiavelli does not speak of "historiography": for him, history is historiography. Machiavelli's usage of the word "history," therefore, is enough to make us doubt that the Florentine Histories is history as we know it. But perhaps history as we know it would never have allowed us to suppose otherwise. History as we know it, in the sense of an object as well as a study, em- braces Machiavelli in a context that could not fail to differ profoundly from our context, from our history. His historical context includes both the facts of his time, which would have influenced his writing of history, and the historiography characteristic of his time, together with the con- ception of history underlying those historiographic methods. To begin with the latter, we find humanist historians (as well as chron- iclers) preceding Machiavelli who titled their works histories in the plural, above all, Leonardi Bruni's Historiae Florentini Populi. More important, Vll TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION their histories incorporate certain features that do not appear in today's history books: the division of the history into books with general, non- historical introductions; invented speeches presented as if they were ac- tual speeches taken down verbatim or paraphrased; and the presentation of a political history so much to the neglect of economic, cultural, social, and intellectual history as to imply that political history is the chief or even the only history. Machiavelli's adoption of these conventions of hu- manist historiography suggests that his conception of history and even of historical context differs from ours. In the Preface, Machiavelli says that his purpose in this work is "to write down the things done at home and abroad [or, inside and outside] by the Florentine people." In the first book, as he says in the Preface, he narrates "all the unforeseen events in Italy following upon the decline of the Roman Empire up to 1434." He shows how Italy from the time of the barbarian invasions "came to be under those powers that governed it" in 1434. Florence had its origin earlier than the barbarian invasions, we learn in n 2, at the time when the Roman Republic was dissolving; but we would say, and Machiavelli seems to mean, that his first book sets Flor- ence "in context." The difficulty is that he calls this context "our universal treatise" (11 2). Although the first book appears to be merely a narration of events in Italy, Machiavelli invests it with a significance more than his- torical. Also, each of the following seven books begins with a chapter that discusses some general topic nonhistorically: colonies, natural enmities between men of the people and the nobles, liberty and license, the natural cycle of order and disorder, the advantage of victory in war, the difference between divisions with "sects" and those without them, and conspiracies. To be sure, Machiavelli typically contrasts the ancients and the moderns in each regard in a way that might seem historical, but he does so to ex- plain the superior virtue of the ancients, not merely to adduce a difference in historical context. In the broad sweep of his outlook, and in his attention both to the rise and fall of states and to their internal divisions, Machiavelli is alive to the fact of "historical change," as we would say. But he interprets it differ- ently. For him, historical change is either the motion of nature—not per- haps random but not intended by men—or the order and ordering ("or- ders and modes" in the Preface and vm 29) that men intend. Since nature's motions do not make men feel safe or grateful, they appear to men as "fortune," sometimes good and sometimes bad but never reliable. Be- cause nature looks to us like fortune, it is in effect reducible to fortune. Instead of the classical opposition, first discerned by philosophers, be- tween nature as unchanging and fortune as fickle, Machiavelli adopts the popular attitude, as he sees it, that neither nature nor fortune can be viii TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION trusted. And since human order made by human virtue is designed to overcome this sense of lack of support, and to create reliable principles and states, the context of history must be understood as a contest between virtue and fortune. Possibly this contest may be won definitively by vir- tue, that is, at some historical time. But the contest itself, because it ex- plains history, is not historical and will not be decided by history. If the contest between virtue and fortune is the context of history, then the con- text of history is not history. That is why the word "history" for Machi- avelli means a study or an inquiry and does not refer to history as an object. To vaunt the worth of his history, Machiavelli makes a statement in the Preface that we would regard today as unhistorical, but one that fits the practices of humanist historiography. "And if every example of a republic is moving," he says, "those which one reads concerning one's own are much more so and much more useful; and if in any other republic were there ever notable divisions, those of Florence are most notable. ."He offers a practical and a theoretical inducement to his readers, neither of which resembles a question of historical interest in our regard. A histo- rian, for us, is supposed to be above concern for "one's own" and would not admit to choosing a topic for its utility to his own country. Yet he is not so abstracted from historical fact as to believe that his topic is a mere "example" out of some general category, whose selection must be justi- fied by a theoretical interest, say, in republics. If Florence is merely an example of a republic, then it is hard to find a boundary between the Florentine Histories and Machiavelli's apparently more theoretical works, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy—that is, between history and polit- ical science. True, the Florentine Histories is devoted mainly to a republic, not to both republics and principalities as a work of political science might require. But the Discourses on Livy is also devoted mainly to a re- public (the Roman), and The Prince is mainly about principalities. More important, the reader soon discovers that the Florentine republic, whose leaders are frequently called "princes" by Machiavelli and which is once referred to as a principality (i 26), shares many of the institutions and much of the behavior of principalities. It is no wonder that many scholars have sought to find Machiavelli's political science in his Florentine Histo- ries: it is left quite visible in the beginning chapters of its books and in many pungent judgments throughout. In vm 1 Machiavelli refers his readers to the Discourses on Livy for a longer discussion of conspiracies, not for a more abstract or scientific one. Thus Machiavelli, as author of the Florentine Histories and in common with humanist historians, has two different but not exclusive motives— practical and theoretical—the first of which seems to us beneath history IX TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION and the second above it. From this double motive for history, Machia- velli's concentration on the political can be derived. Historians today, rightly doubting that politics can explain all human activities, are drawn beyond political history to establish and investigate social, economic, cul- tural, and intellectual history. Confident that history exists as an object, they look for another kind of history if the dominant one seems unsatis- factory. But for Machiavelli, as we have seen, history is not an object; rather, the object of history is the contest between virtue and nature or fortune. To go beyond or beneath political history is to leave the realm of what we can do with "our own arms" and to enter that of nature or for- tune, where we seem powerless. Machiavelli would want to know from the modern historian whether social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history could come under human control, that is, under politics.