Politics in Apocalyptic Times: Machiavelli’s Savonarolan Moment Alison McQueen ([email protected]) Forthcoming, Journal of Politics Abstract: This article accounts for the surprising final chapter of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince by situating it in the context of the apocalyptic fervor that gripped Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. In Florence, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was at the center of this enthusiastic movement. The final chapter of The Prince, the article suggests, is an apocalyptic exhortation that reiterates Savonarola’s message in secular terms. Machiavelli gravitates toward this apocalyptic solution because he has failed to render the apparent contingency of the political world intelligible by containing it with analytical categories, ordering it with general rules, or analogizing it with metaphors for fortune. Offering evidence of the failure of The Prince to deliver on these epistemological aspirations, the paper argues that that the work’s concluding chapter amounts to a final attempt to render the variability and contingency of the city’s political situation intelligible by fashioning it into an apocalyptic story with which Florentines would have been intimately familiar. Keywords: Machiavelli, Savonarola, apocalypticism, The Prince. 1 To know the virtù of an Italian spirit is was necessary that Italy be reduced to the condition in which she is at present, which is more enslaved than the Hebrews, more servile than the Persians, more dispersed than the Athenians, without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, pillaged, and having endured ruin of every sort…One may see how she prays to God to send her someone to redeem her from these barbarous cruelties and insults (Machiavelli [1513] 1998, 102). Introduction: The Puzzle of Machiavelli’s Exhortation For both new and familiar readers of Niccolò Machiavelli, the final chapter of The Prince comes as a surprise. This “Exhortation to Save Italy and to Free Her From the Barbarians,” apparently directed at one of the Medici, announces a God-given opportunity to heal Italy’s wounds and deliver her from a period of unprecedented suffering. Should he recognize this moment as an occasion for the exercise of his rare virtù, Italy’s redeemer will be rewarded with “obstinate faith,” piety, and tears (Machiavelli [1513] 1998, 105).1 Both the content of this promise and its religious and poetic expression make it difficult to ignore. Yet its relationship to the remainder of The Prince is deeply puzzling. The surprise of the final chapter, particularly for an earlier generation of interpreters, results from the apparent contrast between the pragmatic, scientific, and amoral advice of the first twenty-five chapters and the idealistic and fervently hopeful rhetoric of the Exhortation (Gilbert 1939, 483; Cassirer 1946, 143-4; Strauss 1958, 73-81; Chabod 1960, 21-7, 145-7; Prezzolini 1967, 116-7; Baron 1991, 84-5; Wolin 2004, 182-3). Felix Gilbert goes so far as to suggest that there is nothing in the preceding parts of the work that prepares the reader for its final chapter (Gilbert 1939, 483). 1 Rather than translating virtù as “virtue” and virtuoso as “virtuous,” as Mansfield does in this translation, this article renders the words in their original Italian. 2 Perhaps the thing for which the reader is least prepared is the uncharacteristic effusion of religious language. As Leo Strauss rightly notes, Machiavelli “mentions God as often [in the Exhortation] as in all other chapters of The Prince taken together. He refers to the liberator of Italy as an Italian ‘spirit’; he describes the liberation of Italy as a divine redemption and he suggests its resemblance to the resurrection of the dead depicted by Ezekiel; he alludes to miracles wrought by God in Italy” (1959, 73). What is more, Machiavelli’s shift from an analytical to a theological register threatens to distract the reader from the final chapter’s disturbing silence about the difficulties and obstacles that Italy’s redeemer must overcome (Strauss 1958, 73, 77; Lefort 2012, 200). Given Machiavelli’s earlier pessimism about human nature, his insistence on the challenge of maintaining stable princely rule in former republics, and his warnings about dependence on fortune, the hopes expressed in the Exhortation seem extraordinary and unaccountable. Some of Machiavelli’s most careful interpreters have had remarkably little to say about the final chapter (Pocock 1975; Skinner 1981; Skinner 1988; Skinner 1998). Those explanations that have been offered tend to fall into one of two groups. The first group acknowledges a disjunction between the final chapter and the rest of the text, and then seeks to account for this shift. Interpretations in this group take multiple forms, but tend to see the textual disjunction as either a rhetorical choice or the result of the timing of the work’s composition. Let us begin with the rhetorical explanations. A popular nineteenth-century interpretation subject to occasional contemporary resurrections sees the Exhortation as an impassioned call for national unification (e.g. von Ranke 1874, 171-2; Burd 1891, 23-27; Meinecke 1962, 25-48; Langton and Dietz 1987, 1283).2 On this account, the final chapter’s passionate rhetoric is the key to the purpose of the Prince—the unification of Italy. The first twenty-five chapters pursue this goal by outlining the techniques of power politics necessary to achieve it, while the Exhortation offers an emotional appeal toward the 2 Gilbert (1954) provides a more nuanced assessment of the place of nationalism in the final chapter. 3 same end. The disjuncture is the product of a shift in style and tone, but not in aims. This view is subject to a variety of substantive objections. For instance, it has difficulty wrestling with the fact that Machiavelli seems far more focused on Italy’s liberation from foreign invaders than he is on Italian unification. The latter concern is never mentioned explicitly (Baron 1991, 86). An even more serious stumbling block is the fact that Machiavelli formulates the advice of the first twenty-five chapters as general rules that are as accessible to Italy as they are to its enemies. His analysis of the errors made by Louis XII in the king’s Italian campaign, for example, could be used as easily by those wanting to divide and subjugate Italy as it could by those who wanted to unify and free it (Cassirer 1946, 143; Baron 1991, 86). This seems like strange decision for a writer whose ultimate goal is Italian unification. Another cluster of interpretations in this vein center on the timing of The Prince’s composition. They argue that the Exhortation is a late and hasty addition that was written in response to political conditions that arose after the rest of the work was completed (Bertelli 1960, 109-110; Baron 1991; Jaeckel 1996; Martelli 1979, 230-250; Martelli 1982; see also the responses by Chabod 1960, 34-6, n. 2; Sasso 1988; Najemy 1993, 177-84). While they tend to focus on different details of Florentine and Italian politics and posit dates of final composition ranging from 1515 to 1518, the most powerful explanations in this group rest on the premise that Machiavelli could not have mustered the redemptive optimism of the final chapter in the dark and uncertain political circumstances that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Florentine republic and the return of the Medici in 1512 (Martelli 1979, 230-250; Martelli 1982). However, this reading fits uncomfortably with Machiavelli’s own claim that the best opportunity for a redemptive intervention is when Italy is at its most devastated, “without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, pillaged, and having endured ruin of every sort” (Machiavelli [1513], 102). This would seem to make the period shortly after the upheavals of 1512 a more likely time for Machiavelli to have issued his 4 Exhortation than the comparative calm of the subsequent years of Medici rule (Sasso 1988; Najemy 1993, 177-84).3 A second set of interpreters argues that there is in fact no disjuncture between the Exhortation and the rest of the text when the work is understood correctly. On this account, the mistake that many in the first group make is to assume that the first twenty-five chapters are the product of a detached and proto-social scientific realism, in contrast to which the final chapter appears unaccountably overwrought. The problem disappears when we properly understand the nature of Machiavelli’s project. For instance, Maurizio Viroli (1998, 73-80; 2010, 122-3; 2014, 4-22) argues that Machiavelli structures The Prince according to the rules of classical rhetoric. The Exhortation is the work’s peroration, an attempt to appeal to its readers through pathos and to rouse them to political action. Indeed, “far from being a disjointed, unsuccessful alteration of the mode of the text, it is a splendid, necessary, and perfectly connected conclusion of a text like The Prince, if we understand what sort of text The Prince is” (Viroli 1998, 74). Viroli’s argument offers a strong explanation of the tone and style of the final chapter. However, it fits less well with the structure of the rest of the work; one searches with difficulty for the narratio or refutatio that Viroli’s explanation requires The Prince to contain.4 Garrett Mattingly (1958, 491) and Mary Dietz (1986, 795-6) also account for the final chapter by arguing that the rest of The Prince is not the realist or scientific work that many readers take it to be. Appealing to Machiavelli’s admitted preference for republican government and his private evaluation of the political competence of the Medici, Mattingly argues that The Prince is a 3 1512 not only saw the Medici return to power with the aid of the Pope and a Spanish army; it also saw the unusually bloody Battle of Ravenna, which was won by the French, the subsequent descent of the Swiss into Italy, and the expulsion of the French by the Swiss and the Venetians.