Tempering the Grandi’s Appetite to Oppress

THE DEDICATION AND INTENTION OF MACHIAVELLI’S DISCOURSES

John P. McCormick

ONE OF THE MOST anxiously posed questions in the history of political thought is: What was Machiavelli’s intention in writing The Prince?¹ Was it to advise a prince, or undo him; to encourage tyranny or more subtly moderate it?² Quite appropriately, interpreters begin to answer this question by focusing on the book’s dedicatee, Lorenzo de’ Medici. They then proceed to read The Prince in light of how Lorenzo specifically, or a young prince more generally, might receive, understand, and potentially act upon the book’s advice. However, few scholars ask the same question, certainly with comparable urgency, of Machiavelli’s greatest work, Discourses on Titus Livy’s First Decade.³ It’s largely taken for granted that the purpose of The Discourses is self-evident—to promote republics—and that its immediate audience is obvious—two young friends with republican sympathies.⁴ Since Machiavelli dedicates The Discourses to friends from his literary circle, the Orti Oricellari, who supposedly share his political predilections, the book is assumed to be a more straightforward and less artful work than The Prince. In other words, one need not ponder too deeply the relationship between the book’s declared audience and its content.

In this essay, I examine the issue of The Discourses’ dedicatees a little more closely to draw out what might be one of Machiavelli’s hitherto unacknowledged intentions. Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti are not simply “friends” or “republicans.” They are young men of considerable wealth and good name who, on the basis of lineage, education, and talent, would expect to hold positions of prominence within their polity. Defined in terms of the “appetite” that pursues and acquires such economic advantage and political privilege, and viewed from the perspective of their social subordinates, Rucellai and Buondelmonti are what Machiavelli calls grandi: members of a class driven by the “humor” to oppress. Like interpreters who detect a rhetorical strategy in The Prince, through which Machiavelli’s advice manipulates a prince into tempering or even jeopardizing his dominion over the people, I discern a similar strategy in The Discourses with respect to the grandi’s domination of the people. While Machiavelli dedicates neither work to the people, I would argue that both are very much intended for the people; each book is intended to alleviate the people’s oppression by their two most persistently malicious political antagonists: respectively, a tyrant and the oligarchs; the one and the few.

Here, I read the first six chapters of The Discourses from the perspective of young grandi like Cosimo and Zanobi. In doing so, I seek to open the possibility that Machiavelli uses a hypothetically reconstructed Roman republic to moderate the people’s eternal oppressors in all regimes that are not principalities. He attempts to convince the grandi that the best republic is one in which they maximize the material and immaterial benefits they gain from political preeminence in such regimes, and protect themselves from the deleterious results of their own appetite to dominate. Machiavelli advises the grandi, against their natural and learned inclinations, to render themselves more accountable to an armed and politically empowered common citizenry. If followed, however, this advice might eventually make the grandi even more extensively and substantively accountable to the people than Machiavelli lets on. The Florentine’s subsequent examples of how the Roman grandi use religion, electoral fraud, and unnecessary wars to manipulate the people may expose, more than serve, grandi interests and machinations.

In the opening chapters of The Discourses, Machiavelli establishes the parameters of a political bargain, and ultimately maneuvers his dedicatees into accepting its terms: the grandi constrain their appetite for complete domination of the people at home, granting the latter institutions like the tribunate and practices such as public accusations so that the people may serve as the regime’s “guard of liberty”; in return, the young grandi gain the opportunity for increased riches and eternal fame through the pursuit of empire, that is, domination of countless others abroad and even, in the long run, domination of mortality. On this reading, whether Machiavelli really anticipates or even hopes that the grandi make good on this opportunity remains an open question. Roman-style imperialism may be only one of several military options for Machiavelli, and given its role in the republic’s collapse, perhaps not the most preferable.

A proper understanding of the dedicatees’ identity and what it stands for may allow readers of The Discourses to adopt the appropriate perspective when confronting the book’s immediate surface. By asking, first and foremost, how the work’s declared audience might interpret it, the grandi perspective of the dedicatees provides a hermeneutic key with which readers might unlock the often less than transparent significance of Machiavelli’s arguments, assertions, and judgments. Admittedly, this mode of procedure entails considerable speculation: although I try to ground my assumptions historically and with the best textual support I can muster, in many instances I will be compelled to guess how Machiavelli thinks his immediate audience will react to specific passages.⁵ Ultimately, I suggest that a proper understanding of Machiavelli’s stated audience in The Discourses highlights the work’s less-than-obvious purpose—the control of elites in a popular government.

It is now widely assumed that Machiavelli writes disingenuously when he flatters Lorenzo in the dedication of The Prince. After all, the Medici had dismissed, imprisoned, and tortured Machiavelli after the collapse of the Florentine republic that he served for over a dozen years. But he’s taken to be straightforwardly honest in the dedication of The Discourses when he flatters Buondelmonti and Rucellai. He tells them that although they are not princes, they deserve to be. In the language of The Discourses (e.g., I.12, II.2), this primarily means that they should be leading citizens—magistrates, captains, senators—in a republic rather than, as they presently are, the subjects of an individual prince. Notwithstanding the perhaps unusual use of “princes” plural, this sentiment is not inconsistent with a “republican” understanding of the work, since a republic can be defined as a regime where not one, but more than one, actually governs.⁶

Some might assume more generally that the book’s specific addressees are simply private citizens, or just common people, as opposed to the royal dedicatee of The Prince. But this easy association of the dedicatees with “the people,” and hence republicanism with popular government per se, falls prey to an undifferentiated notion of republicanism, as well as to an historically uninformed understanding of who Buondelmonti and Rucellai actually were, and, even more significantly, what social type they might represent.⁷ The Discourses is dedicated neither to a single prince—a prince proper—nor to the people, or even to men of the people (popolari): Buondelmonti and Rucellai are young nobles—ottimati in the parlance of the day, grandi in Machiavelli’s general usage (P 9; D I.4).⁸ Both come from families with long traditions of influence and command in Florence, and, more pertinently, with well-known biases against any republic that is not a governo stretto, that is, a polity within which only the very few, most wealthy citizens rule. The Rucellai and Buondelmonti families were staunch opponents of both the governo largo, or more widely participatory republic, within which Friar Savonarola was influential, and the republic under Piero Soderini’s chief magistracy that succeeded it. The latter bitterly disappointed them by not fully purging what they considered to be the popular excesses of its predecessor.⁹ And yet the class background and social perspective that was Rucellai’s and Buondelmonti’s political patrimony is generally ignored in the political theory literature that presents them as “humanists and literati,” “republican sympathizers,” patriots, and, overwhelmingly, just “friends” of Machiavelli.¹⁰

As a close and valuable aid to Soderini, and as a “new man” recruited to public service from outside the ranks of the ottimati, Machiavelli was certainly not considered a “friend” by this earlier generation of Florentine elites, the elders of his dedicatees in The Discourses. On this basis we might conclude that Machiavelli not only understands the nature of individual princes, as he suggests in the dedication to The Prince—having observed firsthand the actions of kings, queens, popes, and warlords on his diplomatic missions for the Florentine republic, and having experienced firsthand the attentions of a Medici prince upon that republic’s collapse.¹¹ In addition, Machiavelli may have valuable insight into the nature of grandi from firsthand experience. The Florentine ottimati did not resort to violence against Machiavelli, but he certainly endured their constant disdain and derision.¹² While Machiavelli came from a family with an old name, he was not of suitably high birth or sufficient wealth to vote on, or stand for, the highest offices in the republic.¹³ And he owed entirely to the patronage of Soderini the diplomatic, secretarial, and military posts usually inaccessible to people of lower social station. Of course, the grandi accustomed to a monopoly on these posts were not terribly pleased with this state of affairs, and are documented as having spit their poison at Machiavelli on a regular basis.¹⁴

Yet despite good reasons for resenting and mistrusting the wealthy and the well-born in general, some of Machiavelli’s best friends in particular were ottimati; most famously, Francesco Vettori and Francesco Guicciardini.¹⁵ More importantly, for our purposes, so were Buondelmonti and Rucellai—even if the relationship between the young nobles and the wry, erudite political veteran was far from perfectly symmetrical: the underborn and unemployed Machiavelli was in debt to one of them, or likely both, financially.¹⁶ Yet it is intellectual credit, not monetary reimbursement, that Machiavelli returns to Zanobi and Cosimo in the dedication of The Discourses. Machiavelli thanks his “friends” for having “forced” him to write what he would not have written otherwise. Apparently, excited by Machiavelli’s discussions of politics and history at their reading group, the young grandi insisted that he discourse on the topic in writing. And Machiavelli dutifully submits to these friends who command.¹⁷

So, unlike The Prince, The Discourses, according to its dedication, was actively solicited by its dedicatees, who happen to be the author’s social superiors and intimate friends. And since the young grandi to whom Machiavelli dedicates The Discourses are also humanist intellectuals, members of a scholarly circle, they presumably will not scoff at a book on politics that takes a scholarly form. They might even welcome a book that presents itself as a long commentary on a classical text—a book with the full title, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio.¹⁸ Indeed, ottimati, whether in or out of power, differ from a prince because they can afford to take a bit more time and effort cultivating themselves. Zanobi and Cosimo, like most members of their class, probably do not expect to justify their claims to preeminence with force alone; they probably have some pretensions about really being “the best” citizens. Fortunately for them, both political inactivity under a principality and the political division of labor entailed by grandi domination allow young nobles the time to study and improve themselves. So the full title and academic form of Machiavelli’s work might attract rather than discourage young grandi seeking to justify themselves through education.¹⁹

This analysis points up the fact that unlike a prince, grandi, when in power, “collegially” share the load of ruling among themselves. There is a name for such a regime. Nevertheless, just as “tyrant” is never mentioned in The Prince, “oligarchy” is rather scarce in The Discourses. In the first three chapters of the latter, Machiavelli refers to those of status, wealth, and command interchangeably as optimates (ottimati),²⁰ nobles (nobili), the few (pochi), the powerful (potenti), and, in a Roman context, the senate (senato). In accord with the apparently “classical mood” set by Machiavelli’s title, his prologue and his ostensible fidelity to Polybius’s cycle of regimes, in I.2 he seems to abide by a distinction between good and bad kinds of nobility; he distinguishes between rule by optimates and rule by merely “the few.”

In fact, young ottimati would be quite flattered by association with the following description of their class, largely derived, but for the significant reference to their wealth,²¹ from Polybius: a group who surpassed all others “in generosity, greatness of spirit, riches, and nobility. . . . [who] governed themselves according to the laws ordered by them, placing the common utility before their own advantage; and . . . preserved both public and private things with the highest diligence” (I.2). In the quasi-Polybian cycle of regime transformation, this class of “the powerful” is obeyed and revered by “the multitude” during the elimination of tyranny and the establishment of a noble-governed republic. But, according to Machiavelli’s narrative, the heirs of “the powerful” in the next generation respect neither civility nor the multitude’s property and women. As a result, a government of optimates is corrupted into a regime dominated by the few, and so they provoke a democratic revolution that is itself, as nobles are inclined to expect, destined to degenerate into “license.”

Heartened or perhaps confirmed in their expectations by an approximation of the classical distinction between aristocracy and oligarchy, Cosimo and Zanobi might not be disturbed by mention of the Roman nobility’s “insolence” toward the end of I.2. This is, after all, just one particular group of ottimati, not nobles in general, who, as Machiavelli has shown in his apparently faithful rehashing of Polybius, are good, basically. However, they might be surprised that Machiavelli attributes the creation of the tribunes, a magistracy of the Roman plebs, to the insolence of the nobility rather than to the ambitions of the common people—ottimati being inclined to assume that the people agitate spontaneously and unprovoked to take all or part of their political power. The dedicatees are likely even more surprised that Machiavelli promises to show how conflict or disunion between the senate and the plebs made the Roman republic “perfect” (I.2).

Machiavelli still refrains from offering a categorical assessment of the dedicatees as a class at the start of I.3, focusing instead on humanity in general: for political purposes, it must be assumed that “all men [uomini] are bad,” and that they are ready to vent their malignant spirit as soon as they have a free opportunity to do so. But the immediate example of such malignant evil is the Roman senate and nobility, who concealed their hatred for the plebs during the reign of the Tarquin principality, but “offended them in all the modes they could” once the monarchy was abolished. This “insolence” and the “confusions, noises and dangers of scandals that arose” as a result of the plebs’ reaction to it, led to the creation of the tribunes by the two parties, “for the security of the plebs” (I.3).²² It is important to note that, so far, this is still just an isolated case of preemptively “bad” nobility; and secondly, the “accidents,” referred to in the chapter’s heading, that emerged in the conflict between the plebs and senate are rather mild (confusions, noises, threat of scandal).

The most casual familiarity with classical writings would suggest that the few are inclined to fear that they will be targeted for expropriation, ostracism, and even violence as a result of conflict with the common people; the example of democratic Athens serving as the chief source of their anxiety.²³ Yet Machiavelli shows here and in the next chapter that as “wild” as tumults became, they never really harmed the Roman nobles: public shouting, street demonstrations, and popular evacuation of the city are frightening to those who only read about them (I.5); and later he claims that the extreme measures taken by the Athenian populace against their elite were perhaps justifiable responses to the experience of tyranny (I.28). Even this early in The Discourses it is clear that Machiavelli is teaching Cosimo and Zanobi about the people’s nature as well as about their own; in fact, the two lessons seem to be inseparable. But at this point in the text he is more forthcoming about the nature of the people and about the character of the tumults between them and the ottimati than he is about the nature of the latter.

Chapter 4 is devoted to the disunion or tumults that made Rome “free and powerful,” tumults criticized by “many,” that is, the unnamed classical sources that Machiavelli previously appeared to be following. These authors, taking on the nobles’ perspective, pine for an orderly people and blame the latter for civil discord.²⁴ Why aren’t they sensible enough to submit quietly to rule by their betters? But the people themselves are not the cause of tumults in Rome, according to Machiavelli. There are two causes of tumults, two seemingly irreconcilable appetites: “in every republic are two diverse humors, that of the people and that of the great, and all the laws that are made in favor of freedom arise from their disunion” (I.4). Here is the first appearance of Machiavelli’s universal category for the nobles: the grandi, or “the great.”We can assume that “grandi” is his general category on the basis of his judgment that they exist “in every republic,” and by cross-referencing this passage to the sociology of “every city” in The Prince (P 9).²⁵ There Machiavelli tells a prince that success depends on establishing his authority with the correct humor of the two, while here free play between the great and the people generates laws that insure liberty.²⁶ In The Prince, Machiavelli immediately defines the substance of the grandi’s humor or appetite; while in The Discourses he postpones that declaration—even if it’s already intimated by particular examples throughout the initial chapters—until the next chapter, I.5.

It may well be that Machiavelli assumes, at this point, that his young dedicatees care more about their welfare in the hypothetical tumultuous contest between themselves and the people than about “the truth” of their own nature. And so Machiavelli assures them with even more specific examples than he proffered in the previous chapter: he insists that exiles, fines, and killings were kept to an absolute minimum in tumultuous Rome, and were spread out over three hundred years (I.4). Moreover, the humor of the people, now revealed, is merely not to be oppressed, and they act rambunctiously only when they are oppressed in actuality or when they become suspicious of being oppressed. Hence “the desires of free peoples are rarely pernicious to freedom.” Machiavelli cajoles his dedicatees further by insisting that the plebs respond only reactively or passively in most cases anyway. In accord with their nature, the people refrain from doing something instead of actively doing something: in response to actual oppression, they exit the city or fail to enroll for military service.²⁷ When the people fear being oppressed, they can be convinced otherwise by a good man, a man of faith, presumably a noble,²⁸ in deliberative assemblies, the concioni. Later Machiavelli will state, perhaps against actual Roman practice, that “any citizen at all” could speak in a concione (III.34), hence suggesting that a noble’s speech might be contested publicly by a pleb.²⁹ He does not open this possibility to his young grandi audience at this juncture, preferring instead to concur with Cicero’s seemingly authoritative judgment that the people are ignorant—but not so ignorant as to be incapable of “truth” or of recognizing a man worthy of trust; for Cicero, this would certainly mean a member of the ottimati.

However, returning to the exiles, fines, and blood mentioned above, since they are a little more worrisome to a noble than the confusions, noises, and scandals mentioned earlier: even if these costs are kept to a minimum, they may be too exorbitant for a grandi audience to accept unless they are guaranteed a disproportionate reward in return for their risk. (Of course, the chapter leaves open the option that Cosimo and Zanobi simply choose not to oppress the people, or never give the latter cause to worry about the possibility of oppression. Why that course of action would never even occur to the grandi is not revealed until the next chapter, I.5.) Hence, the most intriguing sentence in this section of I.4 is the prospect offered in exchange for allowing the people to express themselves politically, and for tolerating the tumults that necessarily ensue therefrom: cities that do, like Rome, may “avail themselves of the people in important things.” The title of the chapter would suggest that these important things pertain to “liberty,” which remains undefined, and “power,” which may have something to do with, on the one hand, what Rome is most famous for and, on the other, the people’s proximity to military matters mentioned in this section.

Machiavelli repeats “the great” as his term for the oligarchic component “in every republic” in I.5. Etymologically, “grandi” or “the great” ought not to be a displeasing appellation for the dedicatees, affiliated as it is with, for instance, grandeur (grandiosità ), or, a word that will take on considerable import quite soon, greatness (grandezza). It’s perhaps not as gratifying a label as “aristocrats,” yet not so disparaging as “oligarchs.” But beyond pleasant names, Machiavelli substantively defines the grandi, and later in the chapter the nobles, by the appetite or humor that drives them to acquire the riches, recognition, and power that they hold, and want more of—the “great desire to dominate.” On the other hand, the “ignobles,” the people, “only desire not to be dominated” (emphasis added). As opposed to classical historians and philosophers, in his general definition Machiavelli no longer professes to define the great in terms of moral probity or meritorious accomplishment. These are the very qualities that young nobles tend to think (or pretend) that they possess, and would like to develop further. These are the very qualities that might have initially seduced the young grandi into tackling such a daunting scholarly tome as The Discourses. By chapter 5 of the work, however, they discover that they are defined simply by their appetite to make others bend to their will. The insolence that seemed to be extraneous to the nature of the grandi is now defined as its core.³⁰

Thus, since Machiavelli’s stated addressees have requested this work, since they have intellectual aspirations, and since they are his friends, perhaps he can be more honest after all about his beliefs and intentions in The Discourses than he is vis-à -vis his dedicatee in The Prince. Even if he must ease them along in the way suggested here, Machiavelli does not permanently hide from his immediate audience what he thinks of them as a class or social type. What is a temporary stratagem in The Discourses, is the dominant one in The Prince: there Machiavelli never speaks directly on the nature of princes; instead demonstrating by example or, as he did with respect to the grandi in I.3, through generalizations about the nature of “men” (e.g., P 15, title).³¹ However, after I.3, Machiavelli speaks more frankly about the political nature of his immediate audience, especially in I.5 of The Discourses. We do not know whether Zanobi and Cosimo yet recognize themselves in Machiavelli’s depiction of the grandi as those with the appetite to oppress. Nonetheless, Machiavelli’s straightforward presentation invites them to be honest about it rather than to be ashamed or embarrassed by it. It’s just a fact, a natural fact. The instruction, already in progress, will be that they should obey that appetite more prudently so as to satisfy it better, although we don’t yet know exactly how.

Chapter 5 also deals with the “guard of freedom” and with what humor those constituting (founding? reforming?) a republic should place it, the people’s or the great’s. Before delving into this issue, it might be helpful to speculate what Machiavelli means by freedom, or “a free way of life,” since he invokes but still does not define it here. What might freedom mean to his dedicatees? We learn in this chapter that they have the appetite to oppress. What are the conditions of possibility for them to act freely, with liberty, on this appetite? First off, we should assume, their regime must be independent of another regime—it cannot be a client or subject state, a satellite or a colony. In such circumstances the prince or princes of a foreign regime would circumscribe the extent to which the grandi will oppress their own people. The same can be said for a domestic prince, who, as Machiavelli demonstrates elsewhere, cannot be secure if he allows the grandi free rein to satisfy their appetites (P 9; D I.16). Certainly, submission to the reinstalled Medici principality must frustrate the desire of these young grandi to compete freely for public offices, and exercise the command, reap the rewards, and gain the prestige that accompanies them.

So grandi are “free” in the absence of an imperial or princely authority, and, in fact, this is their definition of a republic, an autonomous regime without a single prince. More specifically, given the inclinations of their recent ancestors mentioned above, and based, just for instance, on Guicciardini’s depiction of young ottimati in his political writings,³² we can guess that Buondelmonti and Rucellai think of a republic as a regime where members of the “best families” circulate political offices among themselves. They are free vis-à -vis the people in such a regime by exercising command over the latter through these offices, and by refusing to share such offices with them. The general citizenry might select which of the nobility hold office at any particular time—election being, after all, an aristocratic institution.³³ But the people will not exert any further control on them. Certainly, the highest offices would not be open to anyone outside of these “better families.”

Machiavelli points out in I.5 that Sparta and Venice were republics that placed the guard of liberty with the nobles; in other words, they reserved all magistracies for the grandi and entirely excluded the people from political participation. Conventional wisdom among the ottimati in Florence insisted that Sparta and, most especially, Venice were the best republics due to their tranquility and longevity.³⁴ Certainly, Sparta and Venice satisfy the young grandi’s definition of liberty: exercising offices on their own terms over the people rather than the terms of a foreign or domestic prince, let alone the people’s terms. This is precisely the kind of oligarchic republic that was nearly instituted in Florence when the Medici were expelled in 1494. That is, until Savonarola and Soderini made it more populist in their own different ways: over and against the wishes of the ottimati, Savonarola insisted on establishing an assembly of all the citizens, the Great Council; Soderini retained the Council and, as mentioned above, offered ministerial posts to nonnoble, “new men,” like Machiavelli.

Machiavelli concedes the longevity of Sparta’s and Venice’s “freedom” in I.5. But emphasizing the fact that he is speaking in his own voice on behalf of Rome (“I say”), Machiavelli makes a normative and descriptive argument for granting the guard of liberty to the people. The ignobles desire not to be dominated and so, “having a greater will to live free,” have less appetite to usurp or seize liberty. But if Machiavelli’s case in the previous two chapters regarding the trustworthy motives of the people has not convinced the ever suspicious grandi, Machiavelli resorts to necessity: the plebs neither want to usurp liberty nor have the ability to do so. Notable commentators suggest that this move effectively undermines the argument for offering liberty’s guardianship to the plebs, since those who cannot usurp or seize something successfully cannot guard it adequately. But is this so? First of all, if by usurpation, one means simply “overthrow,” then the people can usurp liberty through either license or Caesarism. The grandi know this, and The Discourses bears it out at various points. In this regard, it is conceivable that the popular force that is necessary—perhaps insufficient, yet not inconsiderable—to kill all the nobles, or raise up a Caesar to keep the latter at bay, could be enlisted and ordered to defend freedom. And since Machiavelli emphasizes that the people’s desires are “rarely pernicious” to liberty, then the grandi to some extent have it in their own power to forestall the emergence of circumstances where it is pernicious, where the people would want to usurp liberty. A consistent theme of The Discourses is that the people never resort to an attempted usurpation of liberty without first being provoked to do so by the great.

Secondly, even if liberty remains undefined by Machiavelli, clearly it is not a physical object: the people could guard liberty within a republican context without being able to “seize” it, since seizing it is tantamount to extinguishing it. If they resort to either anarchy or tyranny, the people themselves lose the conditions of liberty. The grandi need to be convinced that the people are capable of calculating the following “truth”: they will never usurp liberty (overthrow the nobles) when their freedom from noble oppression is greater than the almost nonexistent liberty they would enjoy under conditions of license or tyranny. In light of this, it’s not illogical for Machiavelli to assert that “since they are not able to seize it, they do not permit others to seize it,” within the confines of republican politics. How do the people prevent the grandi from seizing liberty? They do so through an ensemble of pleb-enabling and noble-constraining institutions, practices, and behaviors that constitute the political concessions that Machiavelli extracts from the grandi over the course of Book I of The Discourses, not all of which are enumerated by chapter 5: the examples of pleb collective action mentioned above; the institution of the tribunes; practices such as accusations; deliberative and legislative assemblies; eligibility to stand for noble-dominated magistracies; and—most painfully for the grandi, as it turns out (I.37)—claims on their property as well.³⁵ In addition, of course, there are the ultimate threats of license and Caesarism to keep the grandi in line.

After making his personal case for Rome as a republic, and for the people as worthy guards of liberty, a speech in which, according to Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Machiavelli plays the role of a plebeian magistrate, a tribune even,³⁶ Machiavelli relinquishes the floor to an unnamed party, first singular, then possibly plural (“he . . . says,” “they give as examples”). This spokesman makes the case against Rome and for a noble-entrusted guardianship of liberty. Although taken by a few scholars to be Machiavelli’s true opinion, the views expressed by this grandi spokesman amount to little more than the typical “self-aggrandizing pleb” interpretation of Roman history found in Livy before, and in Montesquieu after, Machiavelli,³⁷ and prevalent among ottimati like Guicciardini in his own day. The speaker or speakers contesting Roman republicanism and the popular guardianship of liberty assert that both the “powerful” and the plebs have aggressive ambitions; the former seek to wield “a stick” and the latter are driven by a “restless spirit” to badger the nobility.³⁸ In fact, they insist that nobles’ ambitions may have limits, while the people’s, on the contrary, are insatiable, restless, and furious. Yet those who seek so desperately and quickly to subvert Machiavelli’s adoption of the popular cause in this chapter miss something terribly important about this little disputation or minidialogue. The noble spokesmen’s claim regarding the grandi amounts to an unwitting confession; their claim against the people will be exposed as a calumny.

The spokesmen for the grandi admit in an unqualified fashion the fact that the nobles seek to hold the guard of liberty, that is, exclusive or predominant political power, as a “stick in their hand.” In other words, they want office and honors to command and oppress others—literally and figuratively, to beat them. The noble spokesmen, whose perspective would be very close to, in fact, perhaps identical to, that of the two dedicatees, make no pretense of justifying a monopoly of power in the grandi’s hands on the grounds that they are “the best,” or because they “deserve” it. Through this admission by the noble spokesman or spokesmen, Machiavelli may signal that one or both of his dedicatees have been instructed successfully in the indisputable fact of their nature: it is constituted by an appetite to dominate, period. If there is anything more than a self-serving justification for noble guardianship in this speech, it would be the claim that if given “this stick,” the grandi will have their ambitions satisfied “more,” but not completely; and they will be given “cause” to be “more” contented, but not necessarily content. In this veiled threat, the powerful offer to disrupt a free way of life less if given a weapon by which they can deprive all the other citizens of liberty, but, by their own words, there is no guarantee at all that this will be sufficient for their oppressive appetite. In the case of popular guardianship, on the contrary, there seems to exist the possibility that liberty can be shared, that each class’s definition of liberty can be partially satisfied, while there is no such possibility for anyone but the grandi to be “free” when they guard liberty.³⁹

The noble spokesman would like to divert us from drawing that conclusion, which is why he makes a half-hearted attempt to argue that the grandi appetite to oppress may have limits, that it might be satisfied or contented. It is also why he slanders the desires of the people, declaring them to be precisely the opposite of what Machiavelli stated (i.e., the people have only the desire not to be dominated) even before he donned, sincerely or not, plebeian or Ciompian rags in his speech on their behalf. The grandi spokesman or spokesmen inflate popular desires to a magnitude even greater than the aggressive ambitions they concede that the nobles harbor. They even render the nobles vulnerable vis-à-vis popular encroachment: The spokesman conjures up the “restless spirit of the plebs” that supposedly causes the nobles to become so desperate that they behave even worse than they might already otherwise. It is the people who make the nobles oppressive, not vice versa! If the plebs are granted any authority at all, as a result of their restlessness and “fury” they will always demand more, just as they did in Rome: from the tribunes, to one consul, then to both of them; from the praetors to the censors to a proto Caesar like Marius. They accuse the people of using men like Marius, as if a stick, “to beat down the nobility,” and hence of accelerating the destruction of the republic.⁴⁰

Yet, if the grandi’s appetite to oppress is not easily contented, as their spokesmen admit, then a politically included people, a people charged with protecting liberty like the Roman plebs, would be forced by necessity to escalate their attempts to contain them in order to prevent the nobles from seizing liberty altogether. To protect liberty, even their disproportionately low share in it, the people will have to acquire more power at the grandi’s expense. In two chapters, at the conclusion of this one (I.5) and in I.37, after engaging in complicated evaluations of the people’s ambition to protect themselves from domination versus the grandi’s ambition to dominate them, Machiavelli indicts the latter as the more dangerous ambition because it is preemptive and provocative.

In any case, aside from the partisanship implied by the perspective of the pleb magistrate that he adopts at the start of this dispute—or perhaps because of it—Machiavelli at its conclusion does not decide for one side or the other, Rome’s popular guardianship or Sparta’s/Venice’s noble guardianship. The grandi may reveal that they want to dominate, but they will never admit that the people do not want the same, an admission that might necessitate that the nobles relinquish to them the guardianship of liberty. Rather than make such a concession of their own free will, they dissemble, deflect, and feign vulnerability (“we’re both the same; they’re worse; okay, we want a stick to beat others; no, they want the stick; it’s they who threaten us with sticks!”). Clearly, the grandi will not cede any power to the people out of the goodness of their hearts or on the basis of sound reason. And while Machiavelli seems willing to leave the dispute a tie, he suddenly resorts to an almost unannounced criterion to break the stalemate: the prospect of empire. Machiavelli states rather matter-of-factly that Rome is the model of an imperial republic, while Venice and Sparta are the models for self-contained republics, and the decision for one or the other depends on whether or not empire is desired. After tossing this little bomb into the laps of those whom he’s just maneuvered into the admission that they want to oppress, and promising them that he will elaborate on this tantalizing prospect further in the next chapter, Machiavelli concludes I.5 with an examination of who is more hurtful to a republic: those who seek to maintain honors and offices they’ve acquired or those who seek to acquire what they do not have.

Yet one is tempted to wonder whether a grandi reader can bear to stay with Machiavelli’s narrative here, endure what portends to be an abstract discussion without proper nouns for social groups (“that which,” on the one hand, versus “that which,” on the other hand; “those who,” on the one hand, as opposed to “those who,” on the other), and wait patiently for a promised elaboration of the imperial/self-contained republic issue “in the following chapter.” Having promised to settle, only a page away, a dispute that has obviously vexed them, having confirmed their appetites, and having raised a delectable new way by which they might attempt to gratify them, does Machiavelli expect the grandi to control themselves? Even those grandi who have a traditionalist preference not to pursue empire might have a compelling interest in confronting this issue sooner rather than later; after all, their preference, their appetite for a monopoly on the offices of command, still hangs in the balance. But any grandi who did in fact skip ahead would miss the historical playing-out of the dispute that was just concluded, but not settled. A dispute in deeds, so to speak, follows the recent dispute in words. After invoking empire and pointing in the direction of the next chapter, in the final section of I.5, Machiavelli narrates an episode from the Roman republic. He begins with the same declaration, “I say,” that initiated the recent dispute, indicating either another partisan affirmation or his own, as opposed to Livy’s, historical authority over the episode—or perhaps both.⁴¹

According to Machiavelli, with the authority of the people, a plebeian magistrate—a dictator in fact—inquired after those who might be attempting to gain the chief magistracies through “ambition and extraordinary modes,” an investigation that elicits an insidious response from the nobility. In other words, someone speaking on behalf of the plebs is inquiring into and exposing the nature of the grandi, namely, their ambition to hold the lion’s share of offices by any means necessary. While the investigation was targeting “whoever” might be seeking power ambitiously or extraordinarily, the nobles “out” themselves, for it “appeared to them” that they were the objects of the inquiry. Why would that be the case if they weren’t in fact “contriving” in such a fashion? The nobles react to the investigation by turning the tables on the plebs, alleging that the latter in general and the pleb magistrate in particular were seeking offices with ambitious intent and through extraordinary means, charging that they are too deficient in “blood and virtue” (birth and wealth?) to ascend to them in an ordinary fashion. It is not we the nobles but they the ignobles and the men they raise up who behave in an ambitious and usurping manner! (One might wonder how the pleb was made dictator in the first place if he were so lacking in virtue, the cooperation of the senate and consuls being necessary for appointment to dictator.)

Nevertheless, this case of charge/countercharge should sound familiar to anyone who did not abruptly depart this chapter for the new territory of the next. Furthermore, Machiavelli tells us, the charges “spread” by the nobles against the people and their spokesman are so strong—apparently many believe them—that the pleb dictator calls a concione and appeals to the people to decide whether the nobility’s claims are truthful accusations or slanderous calumnies. There ensues a great debate on whether those without power who attempt to acquire it or those holding power that is already acquired are more dangerous to a republic. The people subsequently absolve the pleb magistrate, and Machiavelli apparently approves, since he makes the following case, as if he were a participant (he seems to place himself “there”). Those who already have are more dangerous than those who seek to acquire, because the nobility bring greater resources and ambitions to bear in the conflicts between the two, and they actually instigate the people to want to acquire in the first place:

Since they possess much, they are able to make an alteration with greater power and greater motive. And there is still this besides: that their incorrect and ambitious behavior inflames in the breasts of whoever does not possess the wish to possess so as to avenge themselves against them by despoiling them or to be able themselves to enter into those riches and those honors that they see being used badly by others. (I.5)

This description of those “who have” confirms the obverse of Machiavelli’s description of the people or ignobles in the previous chapter: just as there he asserted that the people had less desire and less ability to usurp liberty, here he shows that the nobles have both greater ambition and greater ability to usurp liberty.

Indeed, the Roman example bears this out: the nobility’s motivation and resources in spreading calumnies through the city effectively put a halt to the pleb dictator’s investigation of their designs and machinations, so much so that he resigns his post. Indeed, Machiavelli could not settle the debate between himself and the grandi spokesmen one page before because of their power, both over him individually and over everyone else generally. Perhaps the grandi were stymied temporarily in their permanent conspiracy to secure magistracies and honors for themselves extraordinarily, but they are not punished for doing so.⁴² Yet how do we interpret the fact that this pleb magistrate is absolved by a judgment of the people, and that the nobles are thereby effectively censured, formally or informally, by the same? The ambitious motives of the grandi are confirmed, even if their acting on such motives is not punished. But why are the people allowed to pass judgment in a case to which they are party? Should we be surprised that they exonerate their partisan who was making a case for them in the first place? Is this fair? Well, it could be, since Machiavelli later demonstrates that the people are capable of deciding against someone they favor, and who seems to favor them: they sentence Manlius to death (I.24). So, the result in such cases is not a foregone conclusion. Recall Machiavelli’s claim that the people are not so ignorant as to misjudge a good man, one worthy of faith, in a concione. But in politics, isn’t every case one in which the people are an interested party, in fact, the interested party, since their vulnerability puts them at disproportionate risk of misery and injury as a result of every “alteration”? Hence, is it not appropriate that the people assume a predominant role in judging these cases? Yet historically the rhetoric of philosophers and the power of the grandi have combined to suppress the people’s attempt to play such a role, granting it instead to the grandi themselves.

Returning to the chapter: what are we to make of this pleb spokesman who once held an important office, was forced to relinquish it, but in the end is affirmed by the people? And who exactly makes up this concione that deliberates on the respective threats posed by the people and the great; this deliberative assembly into which Machiavelli has converted the entire conclusion of I.5? The answer might be: any of we readers who are uninterested in empire, or at least not so excited or vexed by the prospect of it that we cannot resist departing in pursuit of it. In other words, everyone except the grandi might make up this concione, which may be why, in their absence, we are free to decide for the people and the people’s spokesman, and against the grandi. The latter’s resources and ambition usually militate against such a hearing and outcome. The dispute in words earlier in the chapter could not be settled by the people’s spokesman; he cannot force such a conclusion on the grandi, who are too strong and resourceful. It must be settled by a seemingly external authority, by empire. In the next chapter, I.6, empire may motivate the grandi in a way that appeals by a pleb spokesman or magistrate cannot. But here, at the very end of I.5, the dispute in fact has been settled by appeal to the people in a gathering from which the grandi might be excluded.⁴³

Yet empire has not been absent from the context of our concione in I.5: Machiavelli tells us that the whole controversy began because the pleb dictator was initially appointed to look into conspiracies against Rome being conducted in a rival/subject city, Capua. Presumably, the dictator “followed the money” from external to internal conspiracies. One implication of this is that grandi who govern an imperial republic make themselves vulnerable to pleb attempts at exposing their ambition and scuttling their designs for more pervasive command at home. Grandi who enlist the people in military enterprises may not completely control them in domestic ones. In the next chapter, I.6, when certain minds might be clouded by prospect of empire, Machiavelli mentions that a people enlisted in war cannot be managed in any way the grandi happen to desire. While circumstances where the grandi are excluded completely from political activity are impossible in a republic, empire provides circumstances where the grandi’s activity within a republic can be scrutinized and at least temporarily halted.

This dispute in action, unlike the previous one in words, does not end in a stalemate of judgment, but it does end in a political stalemate. The senate, the nobility as a whole, is indicted but not punished. To be sure, it is a political truth that the status quo ante always favors the grandi. But, with empire as the wedge with which the people can enter political life, might they learn such that they alter the equilibrium of class power more toward themselves in the future? Can they render the grandi’s management of them more conducive to their own rather than the grandi’s benefit? In both disputes, Machiavelli, like (or as) a pleb magistrate, has exposed the grandi’s ambition and resources. Can he teach the people how to serve as guard of liberty against both? We cannot answer that question at this textual juncture as Cosimo and Zanobi await us as we approach the start of chapter 6, and they are not accustomed to be kept waiting. Right now, they are eager to resume their position of perspectival primacy within the work.

Of the entire Discourses, I.6 is one of the most closely studied chapters, and I don’t intend to add anything to the many excellent existing analyses. ⁴⁴ Scholars point out the numerous problems with Machiavelli’s comparison of Sparta/Venice and Rome, of self-contained and imperial republics, and his ultimate choice for imperial Rome. Sparta and Venice were not so weak as Machiavelli claims: they were not so free of tumult, nor were their “foundations” destroyed by their inability to keep territory they gained when they did expand. Moreover, his description of Spartan and Venetian political institutions seems flawed and woefully incomplete. As for the endorsement of Roman imperialism, in light of the rest of The Discourses, the decline of the republic can be attributed partly but definitively to aspects of its imperial expansion: in particular, the prolongation of military commands. This is not even to mention Machiavelli’s emphasis on Rome’s elimination of liberty in virtuous cities throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Many commentators, on the basis of solid evidence and serious interpretation, conclude that the shortcomings and inconsistencies in Machiavelli’s analysis can be attributed to his ultimately unjustifiable preference for the unleashing of human appetite as such, or for the pursuit of greatness in history. On this view, Machiavelli subordinates liberty to the necessity of acquisition and/or a normative preference for greatness.⁴⁵

Does this most puzzling chapter, I.6, look any different when read from the perspective of the grandi dedicatees? At first blush, the chapter disappoints those who turn to it for an immediate discussion of republican imperialism: empire is mentioned in neither the chapter heading nor in the first two, rather long, paragraphs. It’s referred to obliquely in Machiavelli’s observation that the Venetian grandi or “gentlemen” did not put the populace “to work in things in which they could seize authority.” This refers back to both the opposite kind of city that makes use of the people “in important things,” mentioned before and, for those who read it, the conclusion of the previous chapter, which illustrates how the people and their magistrates might insinuate themselves into domestic politics through military and diplomatic affairs. In addition, empire, or lack thereof, is pertinent to Machiavelli’s discussion, in these passages, of Sparta’s resistance to growth. Rather than empire, the chapter continues to investigate the issue of populist versus oligarchic republics—Rome versus Venice/Sparta—but this time from a different angle: whether the “great effects” (effetti grandi) produced in Rome could be achieved without the controversies, tumults, and enmities between the people and the senate that produced them.

But what are the great effects presented to the great at this point? The laws that foster “liberty” mentioned earlier? Or the “power” mentioned in the title of the previous chapter and the empire invoked in the penultimate paragraph of it? Much to the frustration of the imperially curious, Machiavelli seems to be treating liberty as the great effect, mentioning both Rome’s “free way of life” and Sparta/Venice, who were “free for a long while without enmities and tumults” (I.6). But it seems strange to associate tumults with freedom by pointing out that tumults caused the ruin of Rome’s free way of life after the time of the Gracchi. This is their great effect? Machiavelli invokes the “time of” the Gracchi rather than the brothers themselves, since he shows later, in the midst of an apparent indictment of the Gracchi, that it was grandi ambition and senatorial avarice more than the brothers’ purported demagoguery that set in motion the republic’s decline (I.37). He may reproach their method there, but he does not besmirch the Gracchi cause. Yet this issue of grandi oppression and popular responses to it relates directly to the issue of great effects without tumult. How did the Venetian and Spartan grandi exclude the people politically so as to avoid tumult yet restrain themselves from oppressing them so thoroughly that the people neither revolted nor resorted to demagogues?

One could say that the domestic politics of Sparta and Venice appear to be fantasies from a Machiavellian standpoint: in both cities there are nobles who do not oppress the people, either of their own volition (Venice) or because of a kingly separation of the nobles from the plebs (Sparta). Thus, the grandi are free to govern but not oppress. But according to their nature, as Machiavelli defines it previously, can the grandi really be “free” while observing such a distinction? The people, for their part, seem to exist in what is their natural state in both cities: absent oppression by the nobles, they seek neither counteroppression against them nor any part in governing. But on closer inspection, there seems to be a way of governing the people that actually is oppression, oppression that merely goes uncontested: the Venetian people apparently never experienced liberty, and hence it is not that they are unoppressed, but rather that they don’t know how to contest grandi governance cum oppression “because nothing had been taken away from them.” But people who experience a modicum of liberty under a prince-senate competition, as in early Rome, or under a governo largo, as in Florence, will not refrain from challenging grandi domination once they’ve lost it (cf., P 5).

Machiavelli mentions numerous factors that prevent the emergence of tumults in the Spartan case: insulation from foreigners, a small population, equality of conditions, and limits on growth. Two others are the role of monarchy and the status of rank in Sparta. With respect to the latter, Machiavelli observes that the ranks of the city (gradi della città ) were spread among few citizens and kept at a distance from the plebs. But what kind of rank, which entails both distinction and command, can be kept far away from its subordinates so as to go unnoticed? What kind of grades, gradations, distinctions matter without palpable comparison and contrast? Subordinates must observe rank, see it, in order to acknowledge it as superior if the appetite for prestige in its holder is to be at all satisfied; and subordinates must experience rank, feel it, if its holder’s appetite to order others about can begin to be satisfied. Could such unrecognized ranks satisfy the grandi? The answer may be moot in the Spartan context, where a king or kings, “put down in the middle of the nobility,” defend the plebs from grandi-generated injury. I would suggest that a regime with such a watered-down exercise of rank, and with a nobility so constrained by monarchy, is not a republic at all, but rather a principality. The upshot of all of this is that Venice is an unrealizable republican model for grandi who wish to dominate a regime in which the people already have enjoyed a modicum of liberty in the past, and Sparta would be an undesirable republican model because it is a trifle too reminiscent of the kind of principality to which the grandi dedicatees already submit. Therefore, Machiavelli has thoroughly discredited the Florentine ottimati’s two paragons of republicanism on the basis of criteria derived precisely from their own preferences.

But Machiavelli already may have diverted the attention of his grandi audience away from Spartan and Venetian liberty, that is, mere oppression of the people within their own republic, or at least problematized it, with the introduction of empire. Having described the (unattainable and unsatisfying) liberty of the grandi in Venice and Sparta, Machiavelli proposes that Rome could have avoided tumult only if it imitated the other two by, respectively, not arming the people and not admitting (“opening the way for”) foreigners. But in doing both, Rome strengthened the plebs by, literally, putting sticks in their hands and by swelling their numbers. Had it not done so, Machiavelli avers, appealing perhaps to two different kinds of grandi, it would not have come to greatness, on the one hand, and it would have been weak, on the other. This passage establishes the strategy pursued in the rest of the chapter: grandi who are willing to forsake some domination of their own citizens for the greater oppression of others abroad and the greater wealth and fame that accompanies such exploits will cede some domestic political role to the people. Grandi who still cling to a definition of liberty whereby they wholly exclude the people from politics and exercise domination over them will be made to fear that such a republic is inherently weak, and hence in danger of being annexed by another regime, an eventuality that would curtail the grandi’s domestic “liberty.”

The latter term does not appear in the balance of the chapter, but its realization may yet be Machiavelli’s main objective: he entices the grandi to compromise their notion of liberty (the monopoly on “a political way of life” at home) through appeals to the greatness or necessity of expansion, and in so doing, bargains for the people an unnamed and undefined new kind of liberty: a larger role in politics than they had been granted previously in republics; one in which they protect themselves from grandi oppression, and protect the whole regime from the collapse that grandi domination portends. On reflection then, the comparison of the liberty practiced and guarded in Sparta and Venice, on the one hand, and Rome, on the other, may have been inappropriate from the start, since they are qualitatively different in important respects. When liberty is conceived as independence from other regimes, the two models are the same; when it is conceived as the play of domestic forces, they are different in kind. Yet Machiavelli conducted the comparison as if “liberty” in both cases were equivalent, adding the element of empire, to induce the grandi to tolerate a transition from the one kind of liberty to the other.

Machiavelli’s choice for Rome, his “belief,” as he professes repeatedly at the climax of I.6, in the imperial republican model rules out the possibility of a militarily strong and nonexpansive republic. Why might we have cause to doubt his profession of faith in this respect? Well, he uses as the examples of “weak” republics, those with a “weak foundation,” Sparta and Venice, republics with the greatest longevity ever recorded. Perhaps their internal liberty pales in comparison with Rome’s, but their stability and longevity is incompatible with weakness. Maybe they did not rise to the level of Roman grandezza, but they did not lack for renown. What about the claim that the human condition, the rise and fall of worldly events, necessarily requires expansion or loss? At the conclusion of a highly rhetorical reasoning over self-containment versus expansion, after insisting that necessity will compel a republic to expand, Machiavelli remarks in conclusion: “if indeed necessity brings [a republic] to expand . . .” (I.6; emphasis added). This is a curiously hesitant way for Machiavelli to discuss a topic like necessity, a topic that he treats so emphatically elsewhere (e.g., I.1).

But given the history of republics, most of which look more like Sparta or Venice than Rome, and based on the political prejudices of the Florentine ottimati discussed above, it’s safe to say that all or most of the grandi will not be seduced by the promise of imperial glory into tolerating popular inclusion and tumults “as inconveniences necessary to arrive at Roman greatness.” Therefore, besides the carrot of glory or greatness, the stick of necessity, the fear that weakness will lead to regime collapse, is required to encourage grandi to accept such inconveniences.⁴⁶ At the end of the chapter, Machiavelli reminds his audience what those inconveniences are: a tribunate that enables the people to guard liberty, and provision for accusation (which he introduces) by which any citizen, but especially the tribunes, could bring other citizens to account. So besides being opposed by the plebs and the their tribunes, the grandi are now encouraged to allow themselves to be indicted for specific instances of usurping liberty.

Thus, while appetite and greatness play no small role in The Discourses, I would suggest that they are inducements that Machiavelli uses to motivate a grandi audience to pursue empire, not for its own sake, but as a mechanism by which they permit greater popular participation in politics. The Roman model promises more liberty for citizens at home, but diminution of it for republics abroad. The Spartan/Venetian model promises virtually no liberty for most citizens at home, but it does not, for the most part, threaten republics abroad. Machiavelli is quite possibly ambivalent about both, on the one hand, maximum longevity without popular liberty, and, on the other, maximum expansion that destroys liberty elsewhere and corrupts it at home. But he explicitly endorses the model that portends the latter, because it, and not the former model to which his dedicatees would already be inclined before undertaking The Discourses, encourages popular inclusion.⁴⁷

Expanded popular participation not only improves the lot of common citizens by enabling the people to contest and contain grandi ambition, that is, the practice of liberty, but also helps both grandi and people by better ensuring the longevity of regimes, longevity endangered by the grandi desire to oppress. The grandi must not be allowed to oppress the people so thoroughly that they jeopardize the very regime structure that makes satisfaction of their appetite possible. After all, in The Discourses Machiavelli insists that the oppressive appetite of the grandi is the most serious threat to a republic, just as in The Prince he states it is a threat to a principality. Republics are usually ruined because the grandi empower a prince to help them dominate the people when laws and institutions are no longer sufficient to this end (I.16). Or they are ruined because the people enlist a prince, foreign or domestic, to protect them from the grandi when laws and institutions no longer do so (I.7). Either way, the fault lies with the oppressive nature of the grandi. In case they miss it, to emphasize his point to Cosimo and Zanobi, Machiavelli frequently insists that young nobles (e.g., I.46), in particular, have trouble being satisfied in this desire to dominate the people.

Unfortunately, I can pursue this line of analysis no further within the space at my disposal. If I had the opportunity, I would elaborate on the following themes in the balance of Machiavelli’s discourses on the Roman republic: (1) the restoration and preservation of liberty entailed by the grandi’s elimination of principality; (2) the rewards of riches and fame that result from the grandi’s command of an armed populace in the pursuit of empire; and (3) the prospect that the grandi will continue to hold a virtual monopoly on the chief magistracies (even if the people compete with them for such offices) and will continue to maintain the dominant influence on the policies of a republic. In brief, apropos (1) and (2): The Discourses suggest that tyrannicide, and the inclusion of the people in military and political affairs, increase the wealth and fame of young grandi more than does either an alliance between a prince and the grandi against the people, or a simple governo stretto—both of which had been the political preferences of the Florentine ottimati, who had either colluded with various Medici princes or sought a narrow oligarchy in the city.⁴⁸

Junius Brutus is immortal for eliminating the tyranny of princes proper in Rome, and for sharply curtailing the tyranny of young princes plural within the republic (I.17, III.3). Brutus decides that the patrimony of liberty is more valuable than progeny with power. Moreover, Machiavelli establishes as exemplary the exploits of subsequent Roman magistrates and captains. Great men like Scipio Africanus (III.21), Cincinnatus (III.24, 25), Fabius Maximus (III.49), and Manlius Torquatus (III.34) gained far more fame than any individuals produced by the Spartan or Venetian republics. Yet Machiavelli suggests that the ferocious participation of the plebs in war and politics makes possible both territorial conquest and glorious nobles. A popular army is the vehicle the Roman grandi ride to imperial success; and the tribunes, the accusations, and the popular assemblies are the domestic institutions that curb uncontrolled grandi oppression of the people—and, in fact, generally channel their will to dominate into something approximating civically salutary leadership (e.g., I.3, I.18, I.44, III.11).⁴⁹

Regarding (3) above: Machiavelli may assuage his grandi audience’s fears that popular inclusion means their own exclusion from places of prominence within a republic. After all, Machiavelli shows quite explicitly how the senate, noble magistrates, and great captains manipulated the people through religion (I.13–15), electoral fraud (I.47, 48), physical appearance as opposed to reasonably persuasive words (I.54), the prosecution of unnecessary wars (I.37), and so on. The question is whether these are genuine instructions to the grandi, or whether, so plainly stated in the vernacular, these are clear guidelines for the people to avoid being manipulated. Who is less likely to know about the methods just described? There are, of course, indictments of the people throughout The Discourses, as well—usually focused on the limited capacities of the people rather than any threat to good order that they may pose (e.g., I.44). It would be useful to gauge whether these criticisms are as severe and substantive as those directed toward the grandi—especially in light of similar evaluations over the course of Western political thought. Moreover, it would be imperative to consider whether some of Machiavelli’s criticisms of the people, especially those implied in his apparent praise of them in I.58—“The Multitude Is Wiser and More Constant Than a Prince”—were meant to be understood by, and useful to, a grandi audience at all.

Machiavelli provides examples of grandi manipulation of the people that would be obvious to both the grandi and the people who would read about them. There are also examples perhaps too oblique to be recognized or understood by either grandi or peoples. Thus, Machiavelli makes many arguments that were perhaps intended for neither a grandi nor a popular audience; they are intended for, let’s say, a philosophic audience. Should we assume that Machiavelli knew that the philosophically inclined who would best locate and identify these passages, if not always the full status and import of the latter, would in fact be servants of the grandi, rather than of the people? Could Machiavelli have anticipated that the only readers capable of nearly intuiting his deepest teachings, or who were best trained to do so, would be partisanly oligarchic in orientation? After the political-philosophic revolution that he initiated, could he conceive that those best equipped to understand him would be those most concerned with reestablishing the alliance between philosophy and oligarchy that he attempted to shatter? Machiavelli’s textual sovereignty and spiritual conquest may have met its limit at precisely the point where the modern relationship between philosophy and politics remained thoroughly senatorial rather than becoming tribunate in any substantive way. I venture to guess that he couldn’t have predicted that his “philosophic” audience would be overwhelmingly senatorial, as opposed to tribunate, in orientation. Such interpreters of Machiavelli might assume or pretend that they maintain a philosophic position above those of both the great and the vulgar. But they may have overlooked the decidedly oligarchic perspective of the dedicatees of The Discourses, and the implications that it may have for the full meaning of the work, precisely because their own perspective is in many ways identical to it, sharing many of the same political prejudices.