Machiavelli's Republicanisms: Society, Discord and the Politics of Equilibrium in the Florentine Histories
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Machiavelli’s Republicanisms: Society, Discord and the Politics of Equilibrium in the Florentine Histories by Mauricio Suchowlansky A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science University of Toronto © Copyright by Mauricio Suchowlansky 2015 Machiavelli’s Republicanisms: Society, Discord and the Politics of Equilibrium in the Florentine Histories Mauricio Suchowlansky Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science University of Toronto 2015 Abstract The purpose of this project is to show that Niccolò Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories (1520-24), represents a departure from earlier Machiavellian conceptions of liberty, power and authority toward an attraction to Venice, collective structures of power and constitutional mechanisms to create stability. In this later writing, which Anglo-American scholarship has largely overlooked, we see a republicanism built on different conceptual and theoretical foundations than the Roman model introduced in Machiavelli’s most famous republican treatise, the Discourses on Livy (1513-17). This transformation indicates Machiavelli’s rejection of the assumptions of classical republicanism and marks a crucial transition in his own analysis of power and authority. Contrary to received wisdom, I demonstrate that in the Histories and other key post-1520 works, we can observe Machiavelli's rapprochement to the Venetian style of “institutional virtù” and his consequent éloignement from the Roman model of civil discord and popular “guardianship of liberty.” In a word, while the Florentine Histories confirms that Machiavelli was a devoted republican thinker, it also shows that his preference for a collective form of self-government underwent some integral alterations from the earlier political works – with the late Machiavelli coming increasingly closer to the Venetian form of republicanism advocated by his intellectual contemporaries. ii Acknowledgments This dissertation could not have been completed had it not been for the constant support and encouragement of my colleagues and friends in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Ozlem Aslan, Larissa Atkison, Rob Ballingall, Kiran Banerjee, Jeff Bercuson, Lindsay Mahon Rathnam, Andrew McDougall, Matthieu Mondou, Abe Nasirzadeh, Emma Planinc, Lincoln Rathnam, Igor Shoikhedbrod, Abe Singer and Craig Smith, among many others, deserve credit for this dissertation. I am also grateful to the political theory community in the Department of Political Science, including Ed Andrew, Joe Carens, Simone Chambers, Peggy Kohn, Jenny Nedelsky, Melissa Williams, the members of my dissertation committee – Ryan Balot, Ronnie Beiner, Daniel Lee, and Rebecca Kingston – as well as the organizers of the Political Theory Research Workshop, where I first presented the main ideas of the project back in 2012. I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the members of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies community, including Konrad Eisenbichler, Ethan Matt Kavaler, Lynne Magnusson, Natalie Oeltjen, all Corbet, Robson and Graduate Assistants and, most especially of all, Olga Pugliese, whose enduring faith in this project made it possible. Beyond the UofT community, I am deeply grateful to Robert Black, Stefan Dolgert, Eric Ghosh, Mark Jurdjevic, John P. McCormick, John Najemy and Miguel Vatter, whose constant criticism and inspiration have played an important part in the development of this dissertation. Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank my friends and my family. Above all, I dedicate this work to my partner Veronique and my daughter Nina, who have tolerated with Stoic patience my absent-mindedness and my constant preoccupation for Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. iii Table of Contents 1. Introduction: Society, Discord and the Politics of Equilibrium 1.1. Introduction 1.2. Society, Discord and Venice in the Discourses on Livy (1513-17) 2. From Inequality to ‘Wonderful Equality:’ Society and Discord in the Florentine Histories 3.1. Introduction 3.2. Prolegomenon: Florentine Histories III.1 3.3. Society and Discord in the Florentine Histories 3.4. Conclusion 3. Machiavelli’s ‘Institutional’ History of Florence 3.1. Introduction 3.2. The Constitution of the Primo Popolo and the Possibility of New Ordini 3.3. From the Priorates to the Ordinances of Justice: the ‘Naturalness’ of Conflict 3.4. The Albizzi and the Medici (1393-1492): Institutional Failure and Factional Advantage 3.5. Conclusion 4. Machiavelli and Venice: Virtue, Commerce and the Path Toward a Modello Nuovo 4.1. Introduction 4.2. Venice in the Florentine Histories: Ordine e Potenza 4.3. Florentine Histories VIII.29: Venice and Genoa 4.4. The Summary of the Affairs of the City of Lucca: Lucca and Venice 4.5. Conclusion 5. Machiavelli’s Nuovi Modi di Governi: His Texts on Constitutional Reform (1520-22) 5.1. Introduction 5.2. The Discourse on Florentine Affairs of 1520-21 5.3. The Memorandum to Cardinal Giulio and the Draft of a Law of 1521-2 5.4. Conclusion 6. Conclusion: Machiavelli’s Republicanisms Bibliography iv 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Society, Discord and the “Politics of Equilibrium” 1 Machiavelli and Republicanism(s) For decades now, political philosophers and policy makers alike have wrestled to find appropriate normative and prescriptive answers to one of the most vexing problems in contemporary liberal societies: if social and political life is increasingly defined as the pursuit of individual interests, is the ideal of a community with collective objectives under threat?1 In other words, if the problem that dominates politics and society is the satisfaction of interests, how ought one to define a sense of a common life? More important still, if social and political identity is to be understood as the expression of what is particular to any individual, group or class, then, what is most glaringly absent is some form of commonality capable of countering the potential corrosiveness and destructiveness inherent to an interest-ridden conception of life.2 This lack of a communal sense of identity suggests that, whenever private actions and desires dominate whatever is left of an extensive civil life, the members of a community’s acts ought to be seen as their constant attempt to enlarge their immunity from any form of interference, to expand their protection from any form of political obligation or constraint. The most common rejoinder to public objectives and participation thus suggests that the individual’s freedom of action, will or choice is incompatible, 1 See, for instance, Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents: American in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 159-254. 2 This sense of drama and anxiety, especially in relation to seventeenth and eighteenth-century political thought, is nowhere better deployed than in Hobbes’ famous chapters XVII and XXI of Leviathan. Hobbes conveys the absence of a political and communal natural character in human beings, suggesting that society itself is the by-product of the particular interests and anxieties of its individual members. It is on the basis of this considerations that Hobbes provides the quintessential definition of liberty as the absence of impediments, “Liberty, or Freedome, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition,” and “opposition” means nothing else but “externall Impediments of motion.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117-21 and 145. 2 or rather constrained by, the existence of any such participatory obligations.3 As Hobbes puts it, in spite of have “written on the turrets of the city of Lucca in great characters, at this day, the word LIBERTAS,” the Lucchese were to be free as long as they could curb civic demands and commitments and maximize their “immunity from the service of the commonwealth.”4 For Hobbes, then, the libertas of the citizen of Lucca did not pertain to a sphere of membership to the republic, but to its individual members’ juridical realm of action and will of choice. Inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli, recent scholars have attempted to retrieve a forgotten or lost form of communal life, one which empowers common citizens to publicly contest and engage in political affairs in order to defend both their individual liberty and the collective good of the community, at once.5 Machiavelli, they further contend, is to be seen as a, if not the, quintessential figure in the rediscovery of this civic ideal, one that dates back to ancient republican Rome – and which is, as a result, labeled “neo-Roman.”6 Heavily drawing on Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, these oft-called 3 On this theme, see Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 166-217; Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982); with regard to the republican critique of liberalism or “instrumental republicanism,” see Alan Patten, “The Republican Critique of Liberalism,” British Journal of Political Science 26(1) (1996): 25-44. 4 Hobbes, Leviathan, 149. 5 The literature on the theme of Machiavelli’s indebtedness to an ancient ideal of political life is arguably vast. See, for instance, J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian