THE MEDICEAN RESTORATION
B) Machiavelli’s Il Principe
MACHIAVELLI, beginning work on Il Principe in 1512, does not in this treatise consider innovation from the aspect of its impact on citizenship; that topic is reserved for his work on republics. That is to say, he identifies himself neither with the ottimati, struggling to retain their character as a citizen elite, nor with those—Alamanni in 1516 would group them with the Savonarolans—who demanded the restoration of the Council and widespread participazione. Il Principe is not a work of ideology, in the sense that it cannot be identified as expressing the outlook of a group. It is rather an analytic study of innovation and its consequences; but within that character, it proceeds straight to the analysis of the ultimate problem raised by both innovation and the decay of citizenship. This was the problem of fortuna, to which Guicciardini and the lesser ottimati had not yet addressed themselves, perhaps because the assumption that they belonged to an elite was still strong enough to carry the implication that they were relatively secure. Machiavelli led too vulnerable an existence to make any such assumptions concerning himself; but the theoretical exploration into which he was led was not inconsistent with the optimate intellectual position. If politics be thought of as the art of dealing with the contingent event, it is the art of dealing with fortuna as the force which directs such events and thus symbolizes pure, uncontrolled, and unlegitimated contingency. In proportion as the political system ceases to be a universal and is seen as a particular, it becomes difficult for it to do this. The republic can dominate fortuna only by integrating its citizens in a self-sufficient universitas, but this in turn depends on the freely participating and morally assenting citizen. The decay of citizenship leads to the decline of the republic and the ascendancy of fortuna; when this is brought about by innovation—the uncontrolled act having uncontrolled consequences in time—the point is underlined. Machiavelli’s treatment of the “new prince”—the ruler as innovator—therefore isolates him from the desire of ottimati and others to continue acting as citizens, and considers him and those he rules as acting solely in their relations with fortuna. The confrontation of citizenship itself with fortuna is a topic reserved for the Discorsi.
A further point which can never be too often made is that the problem of fortuna is a problem in virtue. To every thinker in the Boethian tradition, virtus was that by which the good man imposed form on his fortuna. Civic humanism, identifying the good man with the citizen, politicized virtue and rendered it dependent on the virtue of others. If virtus could only exist where citizens associated in pursuit of a res publica, then the politeia or constitution—Aristotle’s functionally differentiated structure of participation—became practically identical with virtue itself. If the good man could practice his virtue only within a frame of citizenship, the collapse of such a frame, whether through violent innovation or through the creeping dependence of some upon others, corrupted the virtue of the powerful as well as the powerless; the tyrant could not be a good man because he had no fellow citizens. But at this point the ability of the republic to sustain itself against internal and external shocks—fortuna as the symbol of contingency—became identical with virtus as the Roman antithesis to fortuna. The virtue of the citizens was the stability of the politeia, and vice versa; politically and morally, the vivere civile was the only defense against the ascendancy of fortuna, and the necessary prerequisite of virtue in the individual. What Machiavelli is doing, in the most notorious passages of Il Principe, is reverting to the formal implementation of the Roman definition and asking whether there is any virtù by which the innovator, self-isolated from moral society, can impose form upon his fortuna and whether there will be any moral quality in such a virtù or in the political consequences which can be imagined as flowing from its exercise. Since the problem only exists as the result of innovation, which is a political act, its exploration must be conducted in terms of further political action.
This study adopts a formal and analytical approach to Il Principe, which is not a formal or analytical treatise; it seeks to bring out certain of its implications by relating them to two schemes of ideas, the one rehearsing the modes of cognizing and acting upon the particular which appear to have been available in medieval and Renaissance political thought, the other detailing humanist and Florentine thought on the relation of citizenship, virtue, and fortuna. Any analytical approach must of necessity be limited to its own methodology, and there will be aspects of Machiavelli’s thought in Il Principe not dealt with here. But so many works have attempted to interpret this classic either by plunging directly into such elusive problems as Machiavelli’s moral outlook and his state of mind as he contemplated Florence and Italy in 1512, or by a purely textual exegesis not directed to previously specified problems, that there may be room for an exegesis conducted in terms of the heuristic models used in this book.1
Viewed in this way, then, Il Principe becomes a typology of innovators and their relations with fortuna. A classificatory approach is adopted at the outset and runs through key chapters of the book. All governments are either republics or monarchies; all monarchies (or principalities) are either hereditary or new. The latter are either totally new or a mixture of hereditary and newly acquired territories. Acquired territories have been accustomed either to liberty or to the rule of another prince; their new ruler has acquired them either by the armed force of others or by his own, either by fortuna or by virtù.
This typically Machiavellian rattle of antitheses, concluding with the word most crucial in the entire treatise, makes up the whole of chapter 1.2 The vital distinction, which the next chapter further explores, is that between the hereditary prince (principe naturale)3 and the new. The former, Machiavelli explains, enjoys traditional legitimacy; the inhabitants are assuefatti to his sangue, used to being ruled by persons of his line and name, and the weight of use and custom on his side is such that as long as he observes ancestral conventions, he can only lose his stato if some extraordinary accident befalls him; and if his supplanter makes any slip or suffers any mischance, he will probably regain his position. In short, he is legitimized by custom and tradition, he is relatively invulnerable to fortuna, and he has little need of extraordinary virtù.4 These propositions follow one from another, and in each case the reverse is true of the new prince. Machiavelli, then, is employing ancient usage as the antithesis of fortuna and virtù; it is when the first is lacking that the relations between the second and third become crucial. We see at once that we are still in the conceptual world of medieval politics insofar as it is still impossible to conceive of legitimacy without tradition and ancient usage, but moving out of it fast insofar as Machiavelli is prepared to examine the nature of rule where legitimacy is lacking. It should further be emphasized that a fully developed transalpine monarchy of Machiavelli’s day had more to legitimize it than ancient usage alone: it could claim to represent a universal order, moral, sacred, and rational; in addition to the people being anciently accustomed to its rule, it could derive legitimacy from the body of ancient customary law which it administered in its jurisdictio; and it could claim to exercise a perhaps providentially directed set of skills in its gubernaculum. Machiavelli does not paint a portrait in depth of such a trebly legitimized system of rule, though we know from his observations on French monarchy5 that he was familiar with many of its features. The only instance of hereditary rule in this chapter of Il Principe is Italian, that of the Este of Ferrara,6 and he indicates that such families are merely successful usurpers who have maintained themselves through enough generations for the original innovation to be forgotten.7 It is a long stride from the Este to—let us say—the anointed Capetians; yet even the Este are posed antithetically to the “new prince.” We now know that Il Principe is not a handbook for the use of kings—highly interesting though some of them found it—or a treatise on “absolute monarchy.” An absolute monarch like Fortescue’s king ruling regaliter tantum was defined by his relation to a body of law which was part of the complex scheme of his own legitimation; the “new prince” lacked legitimacy altogether and consequently was not what we mean by a king. A king was not new, and could deny that he was the child of fortune—except on the occasions when he acquired a territory to which he had no previous title; Ferdinand of Aragon is Machiavelli’s example here.
Il Principe is a study of the “new prince”—we know this from Machiavelli’s correspondence as well as from internal evidence—or rather of that class of political innovators to which he belongs. The newness of his rule means that he has performed an innovation, overthrowing or replacing some form of government which preceded him. In doing this he must have injured many people, who are not reconciled to his rule, while those who welcomed his arrival now expect more from him than he is able to provide.8 The situation is that analyzed by contemporary ottimati in the specifically Florentine context: because some are alienated and others unsatisfied, society is atomized into a chaos of unreconciled and conflicting wills, the ruler lacks legitimacy, and citizenship is not possible. Machiavelli, however, conducts his analysis neither in the specific context of Florence nor with regard to the specific problem of citizenship; his concern is solely with the relations between the innovator and fortune. For this reason it is never possible to say exactly how far Il Principe is intended to illuminate the problems faced by the restored Medici in their government of Florence. There is some evidence for the view that it was meant to advise Giuliano and Lorenzo on the acquisition of dominions elsewhere in Italy, but in doing this the Medici would differ little from other princely families. What was peculiar to them was the former nature and the history of their power in Florence, and it was partly in analyzing this that Guicciardini, Vettori, and Alamanni were led to ascribe to the restored Medici some of the characteristics of the principe nuovo. But where they specified, in varying degrees of detail, the exact historical changes that had constituted this innovation, Machiavelli in Il Principe starts from innovation as an abstract principle; and the specific case that most closely resembles that of the Medicean ruler—the case of a citizen who becomes a prince by the support of a party of his fellow citizens—is considered in chapter IX carefully, it is true, but without special emphasis, as one among a gallery of types of “new prince.” Il Principe, formally anatomized, would seem to be a theoretical treatise, inspired by a specific situation but not directed at it. We must return to the themes of the innovator and his fortune.
Innovation, the overthrow of an established system, opens the door to fortune because it offends some and disturbs all, creating a situation in which they have not yet had time to grow accustomed to the new order. Usage is the only alternative to fortune; in republican theory we would investigate the prospects of a vivere civile being restored, but Il Principe is not concerned with republics or primarily with citizenship. The prince’s new subjects are not accustomed to him, and consequently he does not have the assurance of their loyalty: “… one change always leaves the way open for the initiation of another.”9 He is contrasted with the hereditary prince, and so must be thought of as striving to attain the stability of the latter, whose family have maintained themselves for so long that the injuries and disappointments of the original innovation are forgotten and—as the term principe naturale implies—obedience to them has become part of the inherited “second nature” of the people. But how is the new prince to do this? How, we might ask though Machiavelli does not, did the hereditary prince’s ancestors bring it off? Merely allowing time to elapse will not suffice, since the situation may change suddenly. Here as elsewhere in his writings, Machiavelli is intensely scornful of the advice, often given by contemporaries, to temporize and “enjoy the advantages of delay.”10 In a situation not prestabilized, so that nobody knew what time might bring, temporization was the least appropriate of strategies.
The new prince, therefore, required exceptional and extraordinary qualities, standing outside the norm defined by the case of the principe naturale. These qualities might be termed virtù, that by which form was imposed on the matter of fortuna, but since form and matter must be appropriate to one another it followed that the innovator’s exposure to fortune, being extraordinary, must be met by extraordinary virtù. Machiavelli proceeded on the assumption that situations dominated by fortune were not uniformly chaotic; there were strategic variations in them, and various strategies which virtù might consequently adopt. He had prepared the ground for this assumption in two ways. First, by defining innovation as the destruction of a previously existing legitimatory system, he had established that previous systems might vary and the prince’s new subjects react variously to their loss. Former citizens of a republic would be harder to accustom to his rule than former subjects of another prince, since in the one case established norms of behavior must be transformed and in the second they need only be transferred.11 Secondly, he had distinguished between several modes of innovation. The prince might have acquired his position through his own arms or those of supporters; he might owe it to his own abilities or to sheer good luck. When Machiavelli uses virtù and fortuna to denote the second of these antitheses, he is not using them with absolute precision. Since it was almost unthinkable that a man should acquire power without displaying some virtù of his own, there was always a sense in which virtù was the instrument of the innovation which exposed him to fortuna; but on the other hand virtù continued to mean that by which fortune was controlled, and the essential distinction lay between an innovator having means of his own to stay where he was and one continuing in dependence on whatever had put him there. At this point the second antithesis opened to include the first, and virtù took on the double meaning of the instruments of power, such as arms, and the personal qualities needed to wield those instruments.
In two ways, therefore, the nature and circumstances of the innovation operated to vary the problem which the innovator confronted. The more he could transfer to himself the habitual legitimacy enjoyed by his predecessor, the less he was exposed to the naked confrontation of virtù and fortuna, and the less urgent his need of virtù (in either of its meanings) became. The more his innovation had rendered him dependent on circumstances and people outside his immediate control, the greater his exposure to fortuna and his need of virtù to emancipate him. His need of virtù might then vary along two scales, and since his position on either of these was determined by empirically determined circumstances, the actions strategically necessary and the qualities of mind required to take them—the two together constituting virtù—might similarly vary. It was therefore possible to construct a typology of innovations, of ways in which the innovator was vulnerable and of forms of virtù by which this vulnerability might be countered. The control case was that of the hereditary prince, in whom vulnerability and the need for virtù were at a minimum.
The analysis of innovation is carried out in the first third of Il Principe and supplies a key to the pattern of at least that part of the book. Chapters III to V deal with the relation between the new prince’s power and the customary structure of the society over which he has acquired it; chapters VI to IX with the degrees to which innovation renders him dependent on fortune. To complete the conspectus which this approach to Il Principe suggests, we may observe that chapters XII to XIV deal with the prince’s military strength and XV to XXI with his personal conduct in relation to his subjects; this is the section chiefly concerned with what came to be known as Machiavellian morality. In XXIV and XXV Machiavelli returns to his main theme and confronts the new prince once again with the hereditary prince and with fortuna, and the concluding chapter XXVI is the famous and problematic “exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians.” Il Principe does not take the form of a systematic exhaustion of categories, but there are patterns discernible in it, of which this is one.
The insecurity of political innovation, as we have seen, springs from the fact that it injures some and unsettles all, while creating a situation to which they have not yet had time to grow accustomed. Perhaps the key to the thought of Il Principe is Machiavelli’s perception that behavior in such situations is partly predictable, so that strategies for acting in them may be devised; his great originality is that of a student of delegitimized politics. But to the extent that structures of accustomed behavior survive the prince’s acquisition of the territory, the discussion of human behavior outside such structures must be postponed and the question is how these will affect the prince’s power and authority. In chapters III to V, Machiavelli examines aspects of this question, and the emphasis throughout is on the idea of the accustomed. If the prince’s new territory is added to one in which he is already established—the word is antico, which suggests that here he is not a “new prince” at all—if the two territories are of the same nationality (provincia) and language, and above all if the new is already accustomed to princely rule, then his task is at its easiest; he has only to see that the previous ruling family is extinct and to make no alterations in the province’s laws and taxes, and everything which operated to legitimize his predecessors will operate to legitimize him. Furthermore, the similarity in customary structure and language between his old dominions and his new will lead to their rapidly becoming tutto un corpo.12 Machiavelli does not particularize how this union will be effected, and we should not expect him to; he is dealing with the new principality at the point where it most closely resembles the hereditary monarchy, and he is presenting the latter in its most simply traditional form, as a community united by a body of common customs, which include allegiance to a given lineage. If nothing but the lineage is changed, the structure of tradition will facilitate a new allegiance; and such a community will easily blend with one of similar customs. But if a prince acquires a territory differing from his old in language, laws, and customs he will need great good fortune and great industry to keep it, and one of the best techniques is to go and live there himself. Machiavelli does not tell us whether this implies the prince’s acculturation to the usages of his new subjects, or what will be happening in his old lands meanwhile; he proceeds rather quickly to consider how the prince should deal with the situation rendered inherently unstable by his new acquisitions.13 A further assumption which has been made hitherto is that the traditional society’s former loyalty was to a single ruling family. In chapter IV Machiavelli points out this limitation by considering the case where traditional loyalty is shared between a monarch and a large number of feudal lords (baroni), constituting so many local foci of hereditary allegiance. Here the principle of inertia does not hold; since there will always be malcontents among the barons, it is easy enough to dethrone the monarch by fomenting rebellions, but after a new ruler has taken possession he will find, first, that the usual consequences of innovation apply—his supporters will be unreliable and his enemies inveterate; second, that each baronial family enjoys the continuing loyalty of its subjects; third, that the baroni are too numerous to be exterminated. The Romans were never secure in a province while its old nobility survived, since merely by existing these kept alive the memory of a former state of things; and they contrived to outlast the provincial nobilities—Machiavelli seems to indicate—only because they monopolized power in the known world.14
In all this it is noteworthy that Machiavelli seems to be presupposing an entirely traditional form of society, one based upon custom to the exclusion of the relations between citizens that formed the ground-work of the Aristotelian polis. In chapter V, however, he proceeds to say that just as a territory with customs of its own is harder to hold than one whose customs are easily assimilable, so a city accustomed to liberty and the use of its own laws is hardest to hold of all. It may be held by the establishment of an oligarchy dependent on external support, but the only certain method is to destroy it; and the reason is that the memory of its former liberties, which can never serve to legitimize the new prince, is extraordinarily tenacious. Once again Machiavelli’s emphasis is on usage; nothing else seems capable of providing legitimacy, and the innovator’s problem is always that his subjects are not used to him and are used to something of which he has deprived them. But in this case something more than use and custom is at work: “… in republics there is greater hatred and more desire for vengeance; the memory of their ancient liberty does not and cannot leave them in peace.”15 Time is here inoperative. We are reminded here of Guicciardini’s doctrine that civic freedom had become part of the second nature of the Florentines, and this chapter is one in which Machiavelli may be adverting to the character of restored Medici government, though formally at least the case is one of a former republic being added to the territories of an external ruler. But the real question is why the usage of liberty is so hard to shake off, so impossible to forget. The answer seems to be that when men are used to obeying a ruler, they do not have to alter their natures in order to obey someone else; but the experience of citizenship, especially if prolonged over several generations, sets an indelible mark upon their natures, so that they must indeed become new men if they are to learn willing obedience to a prince. Unlike Lodovico Alamanni, Machiavelli does not seem to think this transformation can be effected; indeed, it is essential to his whole theory of fortune that men cannot change their natures, except perhaps at the infinitely slow rate indicated by the concept of custom. And at the back of our minds must lurk the possibility that even for Machiavelli, men who have been citizens have known the realization of their true natures or prima forma.
By now the new prince has entered the domain of contingency; the time he is living in is shaped by human behavior as it is when men are no longer guided by structures of habitual legitimacy. He is therefore vulnerable to fortune, but it is perhaps the central assertion of Il Principe that the time-realm he now inhabits is not wholly unpredictable or unmanageable. It is a Hobbesian world in which men pursue their own ends without regard to any structure of law; that they do so is partly the innovator’s own doing, that he inhabits this world is almost wholly so; and that by which they pursue their ends is power, so defined that each man’s power constitutes a threat to every other’s. The second half of chapter III is the first essay in that strategic analysis of the delegitimized world of the power-seekers which, as has always been recognized, brings Machiavelli’s thought into sharpest focus; and it is here that we hear for the first time the assertion that the prime necessity of strategic behavior is action. The alternative to action is delay and temporization, and once time has become the domain of pure contingency it is impossible to temporize because there can be no secure assumptions about what time will bring; or rather, the only assumption must be that, unless acted upon, it will bring change to one’s disadvantage. One has power, and others have not; the only change that can come is that others will gain power, to the loss of one’s own. The Romans knew that war is not to be avoided, and always chose to fight their enemies now rather than later.16 What Machiavelli would have said of modern deterrent strategies of “buying time” we can only guess; perhaps that they make sense only as a collusive strategy between powers aiming to stabilize and legitimize their relations. In the simpler but sufficiently terrible world of the Renaissance he could afford to see the prince as launched on a career of the indefinite maximization of his power, with no more final question to be asked than what would become of him if he should achieve universal empire—and Il Principe does not ask that question.
Strategy is the science of the behavior of actors defined by the power they possess; and the strategic world inhabited by the prince as acquisitor of power is best understood in terms of his relations with his fellow princes. But these relations are external to the subsystems, command of which gives each prince his power; and the relations between individuals seen as composing (or decomposing) separate political societies are the subject of an analysis for which “strategic” is not a sufficiently comprehensive word. It is here that we enter fully into the question of the relations between an individual’s virtù and his fortuna, which is always a moral and a psychological, as well as a simply strategic problem. Chapter VI and its successors are dedicated to the role of virtù in acquiring and holding new dominions,17 and Machiavelli enters the realm of moral ambiguity by the single step of defining virtù as an innovative force. It is not merely that by which men control their fortunes in a delegitimized world; it may also be that by which men innovate and so delegitimize their worlds, and we shall see in a moment that it may even be that which imposes legitimacy on a world which has never known it. The only constant semantic association is now that between virtù and innovation, the latter being considered rather as an act than as a previously accomplished fact, and virtù is preeminently that by which the individual is rendered outstanding in the context of innovation and in the role of innovator. Since innovation continues to raise ethical problems, this use of the word virtù does not deny its association with ethics, but it employs the word to define the situations within which the ethical problems arise.
In chapter VI the prince is internal rather than external to the society over which he acquires power; we are not now concerned with a prince adding to his dominions, but with a private individual who becomes a prince. This, says Machiavelli, presupposes either virtù or fortuna;18 but it is clear that the relation between the two is more than simply antithetical. On the one hand virtù is that by which we innovate, and so let loose sequences of contingency beyond our prediction or control so that we become prey to fortuna; on the other hand, virtù is that internal to ourselves by which we resist fortuna and impose upon her patterns of order, which may even become patterns of moral order. This seems to be the heart of the Machiavellian ambiguities. It explains why innovation is supremely difficult, being formally self-destructive; and it explains why there is incompatibility between action—and so between politics defined in terms of action rather than tradition—and moral order. The politicization of virtue had arrived at the discovery of a politicized version of original sin.
Within the central ambiguity, it was possible to isolate the antithetical relation between virtù and fortuna; and Machiavelli’s thought was now concentrated upon it. The more the individual relies upon his virtù the less he need rely upon his fortuna and—since fortuna is by definition unreliable—the safer he is. But if virtù is that by which we acquire power, the ideal type we are now seeking is the individual who acquires it wholly by the exercise of his personal qualities and not at all as the result of contingencies and circumstances outside himself. This explains why we must examine the acquisition of power by one who is a private individual and not a power-wielder at the moment of acquiring it; but to do so does not exhaust the difficulties. The career of any individual in a given society is conditioned by the particular circumstances of that society, which, not being of his making, are part of his fortuna. But to find an individual unconditioned by social membership is next to impossible; he must be Aristotle’s “beast or god.” The quasi-solution is given by Machiavelli’s declaration that the ideal type (li piú eccellenti) of those who have become princes through their own virtù and not by fortuna is to be found in “Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus and their like.”19 These are the classical legislators in the strictest possible sense of state-founders (Lycurgus and Solon, who might be termed reformers rather than creators, are not named); the divine or divinely aided beings who could create societies because their virtù was such that it did not need the social frame which was the precondition of virtue in ordinary men; gods with (at least in such figures as Theseus and Romulus) a little of the beast about them. But Machiavelli has introduced the legislators for a reason peculiarly his own. If we examine their lives and actions, he says,
it will not appear that they owed anything to fortune except opportunity (l’occasione), which gave them matter into which to introduce whatever form they thought good; without the opportunity their virtù would have been wasted, and without virtù the opportunity would have been in vain. It was then necessary that Moses should find the people of Israel slaves in Egypt and oppressed by the Egyptians, so that they were disposed to follow him in order to escape from servitude. It was necessary that Romulus should take no root in Alba and should be exposed at his birth, in order that he become king of Rome and founder of that nation. It was necessary that Cyrus find the Persians ill content with the rule of the Medes, and the Medes soft and effeminate through long peace. Theseus could not have displayed his virtù if he had not found the Athenians dispersed.20
A comparison of Machiavelli’s poems on Fortuna and Occasione will show how far he had blended these two symbolic figures with one another. His insistence that Fortuna is a woman who can be temporarily mastered if you do not hesitate with her21 is reinforced by his presentation of the classical figure of Occasione as a woman with a forelock by which she can be seized from before but tonsured so that she cannot be taken by the short hairs behind;22 and the language addressed to either daemon could be appropriately used to the other. But the antithesis of form and matter tells us even more about the meaning of this passage. It is the function of the legislator to impose the form of politeia—the constitution—upon the matter of politeuma, the citizen body; and it is the function of virtù to impose form upon fortuna. But when the subject is innovation, there is a pressing danger that virtù may deliver itself into fortuna’s power, and therefore the ideal type of innovator is he who depends as little as possible on circumstances beyond his control. The more the innovator is thought of as subverting and replacing a previously existing structure of custom and legitimacy, the more he will have to cope with the contingencies of suddenly disoriented behavior and the greater will be his exposure to fortuna. To attain the ideal type, therefore, we must suppose a situation in which the matter has no form, and above all no previously existing form, but what the innovator gives it; and the innovator must be a legislator. It was therefore a logical necessity that each hero should find his people in a condition of total anomie; since if the matter had had any vestige of form, that would have detracted from his virtu’s total independence of fortuna.
It is difficult to imagine so ideal a situation in concrete terms. Apart from the problem of envisaging a specific society in a totally anomic condition, the more we insist that there is nothing for the legislator to replace the less can there be anything for him to build upon; and we face the problem of finding any terms in which to describe what he does or how he does it. The legislator has such virtù that his command of occasione is absolute and he has unconditioned ability to dictate form to matter; but he has now become a species of demiurge, able to actualize all potentialities by a single creative command, and very much above the level of ordinary humanity. One of the classical legislators of course stands apart from the others.
Of Moses one ought not to speak, since he was no more than an executor of commands given him by God; still, he should be admired if only for that grace (grazia) which made him worthy to speak with God. But if we consider Cyrus and others who have acquired or founded kingdoms, we shall find them all admirable; and if we consider their particular actions and laws, they will not appear different from those of Moses, although he had so great an instructor.23
Machiavelli’s language is irritatingly orthodox. It was only by God that a chaos of particulars (matter) could be commanded into a whole (form), and it was only by divine grace and instruction that an individual could be authorized to do this. The impious thoughts probably24 hinted at above arose only because it was difficult to explain how pagan legislators could have done their work without furnishing an explanation which would account just as well for Moses; but the impulse to assimilate the prophet to the categories of “legislator” and “innovator” was not irreligious in its origin. The problem of innovation was such that the divine authorization and inspiration enjoyed by the prophet furnished one—but only one—of the acceptable answers. We have seen that Guicciardini employed the word grazia in connection with Lycurgus, and that his allusion to the Spartan legislator was such as to assimilate him to Savonarola. Our analysis of chapter VI of Il Principe is approaching Machiavelli’s allusion to Savonarola as typifying the “unarmed prophet” who invariably fails where the “armed prophets” succeed;25 but this observation has to be studied in the light of Machiavelli’s identification of the prophet and the legislator. Both are attempting a task beyond normal human powers, and both require more than normal virtù; we must not say that divine inspiration is being lowered to the level of realpolitik without adding that realpolitik is being raised to the level of divine inspiration, and that Machiavelli may have been a pagan but was not a philosophe. Moses was an armed prophet, but need have been no less a prophet for his use of the sword. The prophet requires arms because, as an innovator, he must not be dependent on the contingent goodwill of others, and must therefore possess the means of compelling men when they cease to believe in him. It would be perfectly orthodox to contend that God provided Moses with a divinely authorized message, but did not provide that the Israelites would invariably obey him, and that the prophet’s dealings with the stiff-necked by means of the secular sword26 were authorized as part of his inspiration.
Prophets, whether true or false, require the sword because they are innovators. It is essential to realize that chapter VI is an analysis of innovation, and that Moses and Savonarola have both come into it because the legislator is part of the definition of the ideal type of innovator and the prophet part of the definition of the ideal type of legislator. The most that Machiavelli is saying is that the prophet’s inspiration and mission do not deliver him from the political context created by innovation and that he must continue to use the secular arm for reasons inherent in that context, which make it the appropriate weapon for use there. (He may also be hinting that the same constraints apply to the Lord God of Israel if he chooses—as he does choose—to act upon a particular nation in its history.) Innovation is the theme. It is the most difficult and dangerous of human enterprises for reasons which we already know. It makes enemies who are fervent because they know what they have lost, and friends who are lukewarm because they do not yet know what they have gained, not having yet had enough experience of it: precisely the problem of the fleshpots of Egypt. For this reason the innovator is delivered, on disadvantageous terms, to the contingencies of human behavior: to fortuna. That by which he confronts fortuna is to be found within him, except in the one case where he receives direct divine inspiration, and is to be termed his virtù—except where it must be described as grazia. Since it was also his virtù (where it was not his inspiration) which made him an innovator and exposed him to fortuna, we must seek for that virtù which involves the minimum of dependence on fortuna. The ideal and extreme case of the innovator whose initial virtù was unconditioned by external circumstance is found in the category of legislators and prophets; yet the greatest genius or most inspired prophet operates only by inducing men to follow him and is exposed to fortuna unless he has means to ensure that they continue to do so—means which Machiavelli can only characterize in terms of the sword, so that virtù, which could not have manifested itself without occasione, cannot maintain itself without an external instrument for coercing men’s wills. Subject to these limitations, we have succeeded in defining the virtù which involves the minimum dependence on fortuna.
At this stage in the analysis, it must be evident that the category “innovator” has substituted itself for the category “new prince,” in the sense that it is more comprehensive and capable of greater theoretical precision. Il Principe continues to be about new princes, but the new prince belongs to the class of innovators, to which legislators and prophets also belong; and they have characteristics which the new prince does not possess, while those characteristics which they share with him are those which all members of the class of innovators have in common. Each innovator is specifically located, within the class of innovators, by the degree and quality of his virtù’s dependence or independence with respect to fortuna. The legislator and prophet constitute the extreme limiting case of minimum dependence, and the greatest precision which we can now give to the term “new prince” is to make it inclusive of all those innovators who fall short of minimum dependence.
Chapters VII to IX, it may be said, constitute an exploration of the category “innovator,” still in terms of the virtù-fortuna polarity, with attention to those new princes who lack the superhuman virtù of legislators and prophets. Since the last-named are considered independent of fortuna, chapter VII opens by positing the case of the new prince who owes his position wholly to it.27 But while it is possible to imagine a man becoming a prince by sheer luck while having absolutely no virtù of his own, the exercise is of little theoretical interest. Something would happen to him so quickly that it hardly matters what it would be. Moreover, since virtù and fortuna are not mutually exclusive terms, the amount of luck a man has bears no necessary relation to his personal abilities. It is therefore possible to consider the case of a man unusually indebted to fortuna while possessing unusual ability with which to counteract his dependence: one
of so great virtù that he can promptly take steps to preserve what fortuna has thrown into his lap, and lay after becoming a prince those foundations which others lay in anticipation of it.28
This is the context in which we are introduced to Cesare Borgia. Machiavelli was notoriously fascinated by this figure; and so much has been written on the assumption that he is the hero of Il Principe, and that its main themes are all to be understood by reference to his role, that it is desirable to define the exact status which he occupies in the book. If we apply the virtù-fortuna criterion, it defines his position as that of one among a number of ideal types, all located along a spectrum of degrees to which virtù is independent of fortuna. The legislator’s virtù endows him with almost complete independence, but in Cesare we see combined the maximum virtù with the maximum dependence on fortune. He is presented as a man of extraordinary ability who got his chance only because his father happened to become pope, and whose virtù was displayed in the efforts he made to establish his power in the Romagna on an independent basis before his father should happen to die.29 Alexander VI’s election, clearly, was the occasione for Cesare’s virtù to manifest itself, but the case is quite different from that of the seizure of occasione by the legislator. When that happens, we are told, the legislator owes nothing to fortuna except the occasione; his virtù is all within himself, and we are left with the image of extraordinary personal creativity imprinting itself on circumstance as on a tabula rasa, so that the contingent world becomes the inert matter on which virtù imposes form. But Cesare’s seizure of occasione merely made of him a rider on the wheel; he entered a situation in which he owed much to fortuna that might at any moment be taken away, and this dependence on fortuna endured while he endeavored by his virtù to establish a power independent of the wheel’s next turn.
Cesare’s position differs formally from that of the legislator in that his virtù and his fortuna are not in a simple inverse relation. Because the legislator’s virtù is superhuman, fortuna has no power over him; Cesare’s virtù is only human—he is related to the legislator somewhat as the Aristotelian “man of practical wisdom” is to the Platonic philosopher-king—and is seen in his struggle to escape the power which fortuna exercises. Not only this, but in addition Cesare occupies a somewhat specialized position in the gallery of innovators. When we were told in chapter VI that innovation was the most difficult and dangerous of all things to accomplish,30 the innovator’s exposure to fortuna was derived from the fact that his innovation disturbed all human relationships and alienated some individuals more violently than it attracted others. But that is not the point with Cesare. The measure of his dependence on fortuna is not the uncertainty of the Romagna’s reactions to his rule, but the uncertainty of Alexander VI’s tenure of life. It is true that the measure of his virtù is the excellence which Machiavelli ascribes to his military and other techniques of assuring that his power in the Romagna will survive Alexander’s death, but in fact it remains wholly dependent on papal and curial politics and Machiavelli was unable to assert convincingly that it does not.31 Fortuna has become externalized; what happens in the Romagna is dependent on what happens elsewhere, and is not the simple consequence of the impact of Cesare’s innovation on the Romagna’s accustomed life. Nor do we hear very much about the character of Romagnuol society before Cesare went there, and this is not because we are to see Cesare as potentially the Theseus of the Romagna and the Romagnuoli as the inert matter to which he might have given form; his relation to fortuna is not that of the legislator.
If Cesare is not a legislator, it may be that—as Machiavelli indeed avers—he is the ideal type which every new prince in his (carefully defined) category should follow.32 But from this we should have to deduce, contrary to some interpreters of Machiavelli, that the new prince is not a potential legislator, and that the legislator is an ideal type situated at one extreme of the category of innovators, of which genus the new prince is a species. Not only is the legislator’s virtù related to fortuna in a way utterly different from that of the new prince; he is performing an innovation of a different order. He finds his materia—the people he is to mold—in a condition so anomic that his virtù needs only a sword to impose form upon it; very little is said of the previous structure of accustomed behavior which other innovators displace. Moreover, in imposing form upon matter he is the founder of a political order: Cyrus, Theseus and Romulus founded kingdoms, Lycurgus a polity and Moses a nation in covenant with God. The word stato—normally employed by Machiavelli and Guicciardini to mean “rule by some over others”—does not appear to denote what the legislator brings into being, a highly viable political community, stabilized by his virtù and (at least if it is a republic) by the virtù of its citizens; a kingdom is stabilized by use and inheritance. By contrast, the new prince does not find matter lacking all form; he takes possession of a society already stabilized by customs of its own, and his task—relatively hard or easy according as it is used to liberty or obedience—is to replace this “second nature” with another. The function of his virtù is not to impose prima forma (in the phrase used by Savonarola and Guicciardini) but to disturb old forms and change them into new. The old form being rooted in custom and “second nature,” his innovation disorients men’s behavior patterns and this exposes him to fortuna. What he is seen to establish is stato, a limited form of government only partly legitimized, only partly rooted in customs and “second nature” new to the people; and to get past this stage would require virtù of a kind the more extraordinary because it would not be identical with the virtù of the legislator.
J. H. Hexter has pointed out33 that the phrase most frequently used by Machiavelli to describe the purposes of the new prince is mantenere lo stato, and that this carries short-term implications; it seems to mean little more than to maintain himself in the position of power and insecurity which innovation has brought him. On this view, the prince is not to look so far ahead as to hope to achieve for his stato either the near-immortality achieved by the creation of the legislator or the legitimacy achieved by use and inheritance in the hereditary principality. Stato means that one’s eye is always upon immediate dangers; virtù is that by which one resists them, not that by which one is emancipated from the need to fear them. The new prince does not hope to transform the conditions of his political existence, or look to a time when he will be anything but a parvenu. If virtù and fortuna should happily go together, his line may last long enough to achieve the habitual stability of the Este of Ferrara, who are legitimized to the point where they have little need of virtù. Meanwhile, in the short view, there is virtù: the virtù of Philopoemon the Achaean, who never took a walk without planning a campaign.34 Virtù is in the present, and for the future it begets glory. The virtù of the legislator is quite different; it builds nations to last.
This interpretation seems to be borne out if we consider the preceptive as opposed to the analytical chapters of Il Principe: after those which explore the category of innovators, those which isolate the new prince and tell him what to do. The transition from one to the other comes about two chapters after the profile of Cesare Borgia. The dominant themes do indeed appear concerned with the prince’s techniques for rendering himself safe against immediate threats. He inhabits a world of competitors, and so we return to the theme of inter-princely relationships in which his chief need is an army and the skill to use it. There is perhaps the question, given Machiavelli’s intense concern with the Florentine militia tradition and his belief that only a civic militia could render a citizen body capable of maintaining its liberty, whether he did not have in mind that the prince’s command of the army was a means of transforming his relations with those he governed. We recall Vettori’s advice that the Medici should arm the contado against the city, Alamanni’s that young aristocrats should become captains in the prince’s guard. But if this was in Machiavelli’s mind, he did not follow it out in detail. The military chapters of Il Principe (XII-XIV) passionately assert the inferiority of mercenary and auxiliary troops to those who are “one’s own” (proprie), but the social relationship between the prince and “his” soldiers is not explored, except for one sentence in which it is observed that they consist either of subjects (sudditi), citizens (cittadini), or one’s own dependents (creati, creatures, those raised up by one).35 This is suggestive, but it is not enough to substantiate a theory. Machiavelli’s great explorations of the politics of military organization, in the Discorsi and the Arte della Guerra, presuppose the republic as the political norm.
If the military chapters on the whole depict arms as a weapon against short-term dangers, the famous chapters (XV-XIX) on the morality of princely behavior adopt a similar perspective. Here it is simply assumed that by the fact of his own innovation, the prince inhabits a context in which human behavior is only partly legitimized and only partly subjected to the rules of morality. Consequently, the intelligence of the prince—his virtù—includes the skill necessary to know when it is possible to act as if the rules of morality (whose validity in itself is nowhere denied) were in force and to be relied on as governing the behavior of others, and when it is not. Formally, this has reference to a specific political context, that which is the result of innovation; if it is possible to detect moments at which Machiavelli speaks as if it had reference to all political contexts whatsoever, the reason may be that he had adopted a short-term perspective in which the consequences of innovation were not expected to be lived down, and that this had enabled him to see that all political situations were in part the products of innovation and contest for power, and that the short-term perspective never ceased altogether to be valid. But further consequences follow. The prince’s moral and social, like his military and diplomatic behavior, was carried on in a context dominated by fortuna, in which time brought with it good things and bad indifferently, and the greater part by far of his virtù was his ability to discern what time was bringing and what strategies were required to cope with it. Discussion of whether the prince should obey moral law therefore becomes discussion of when he should obey it,36 and this in turn blends into discussion of whether it is better to be loved or feared, to be audacious or prudent. The answer is always the same. The essence of virtù is to know which of these paired courses is appropriate to the moment; but other things being equal, the better course is always the more aggressive and dramatic—to be audacious, to act so as to be feared. To be loved takes time.
We know that it is in the long-term context—the eternity of reason, the antiquity of custom—that legitimation resides. Since by his own act the innovator inhabits a delegitimized context, where fortuna rules and human behavior is not to be relied on, he is obliged to take the short view and continue to act—and in that sense, to innovate. In a very precise sense, then, action is virtù; when the world is unstabilized and the unexpected a constant threat, to act—to do things not contained within the structures of legitimacy—was to impose form upon fortuna. Aggression was the better part of value. It is this, and not the erotic fantasies to which Machiavelli was admittedly given, that lies behind his repeated descriptions of fortuna as a woman who could be taken by force but would destroy you if you did not—the words should be weighed carefully—act in time.
But the virtù of action did not legitimate its environment. The forms it imposed existed only for a short time, whereas those of the legislator aimed at secular immortality. In the concluding group of chapters (XXIV-XXVI), it is true, Machiavelli opens by declaring that the virtù of the new prince will
make him appear ancient, and render him swiftly more secure and established than if he were established from of old. For a new prince is always more observed in his actions than a hereditary one, and when these are seen to be virtuous he wins men over far more and they become more bound to him than to the ancient blood. For men are more taken by things present than by things past, and when they find themselves well off in the present, they enjoy it and ask no more; they will even undertake to defend him, so long as he does not fail of himself in other respects. And so he will have the double glory of having founded a new principate and adorned and strengthened it with good laws, good arms, and good examples; as he will have double shame who was born a prince and has lost it through lack of prudence.37
But this is not a declaration that the new prince can found a system more durably institutionalized and legitimized than by use and tradition, so much as a declaration that men in the world of innovation live in the present. Given a world which they see and experience as action and fluctuation rather than as tradition and legitimacy, their feelings about the present are bound to be the stronger; action is more exciting than custom, it holds the attention and stirs up the emotions. In the present, the new prince can outshine the hereditary and evoke more loyalty; his virtù—functioning where rational and traditional authority are both absent—is a kind of charisma. But if we ask whether the charisma has been institutionalized, we must move from the short view to the long, and Machiavelli will not be moving with us; just as Il Principe does not inform us what is meant by “good laws, good arms and good examples,” for which we must wait till the Discorsi. The examples he gives of hereditary rulers who have lost their states do not conform to the pattern laid down in chapter II, because the individuals he names were clearly not fortified by the habitual loyalty of their subjects.38 As for the spectacular virtuosi of the new principates, if there is one thing certain about them it is that they continue to exist in fortune’s world. In chapter XXV Machiavelli returns to the themes of how far men may hope to resist fortuna, and whether audacity or caution is the best means of dealing with her. In a crucial passage he lays down that sometimes one and sometimes the other is appropriate strategy; but men are audacious or cautious by nature, and so succeed or fail according to the times they have the fortune to live in. A man may have succeeded by either strategy,
but if time and circumstances change he will be ruined, because he does not change his mode of procedure. No man is found so prudent as to be able to adapt himself to this, either because he cannot deviate from that to which his nature disposes him, or else because having always prospered by walking in one path, he cannot persuade himself that it is well to leave it; and therefore the cautious man, when it is time to act suddenly, does not know how to do so and is consequently ruined; for if one could change one’s nature with time and circumstances, fortune would never change.39
Machiavelli is saying that our second nature, the product of use and wont—he does not revert to the concept of fantasia employed in his letter to Soderini40—is acquired as we become habituated to acting audaciously or cautiously. No virtù can so completely dominate fortuna as to ensure that the same strategy remains always appropriate; and what is more important still, no virtù of this order gives men power to change their own natures, or consequently to act “in time.” If the prince cannot change his own acquired second nature, it does not seem that he can change those of his subjects. The legislator and prophet impose something of the kind on the anomic personalities they come to rule; but the new prince finds men habituated to a certain vivere and must, if he is to legitimize his power, habituate them to another. This his virtù does not seem capable of doing, least of all when they have been habituated to the usages of civic liberty which Machiavelli describes as ineradicable. Lodovico Alamanni, writing a few years after 1513, and possibly after reading Il Principe and reflecting on its limitations, thought he knew a way of doing even this. But the new prince as a type of innovator can only be said to transform the conditions of political existence if we mean that he transposes them into a context of innovation and fortune, where only the short view has validity. The only two agencies so far known to be capable of creating a context of stability were custom, which established second nature, and grace (or the superhuman virtù of the legislator), which established prima forma. Since legislators established highly stable republics, we must turn to Machiavelli’s republican theory to know what he thought about the stabilization of political life; and, it should seem, we are forced in the same direction by the effort to solve the riddle of chapter XXVI. Il Principe concludes with a passionate “exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians.” This is addressed to a “new prince,” and the question has consequently been how far the preceding chapters are to be seen as leading up to and progressively delineating the portrait of this liberating hero. But on the assumption used here—that Il Principe does not present a single rounded portrait, but a gallery of specimen types of innovator—the question must rather be to which subcategory, or combination of them, the liberator belongs. Rhetorically, it seems that he is a legislator: Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus are invoked once more, and we are told that the Italians are as prostrate as the Hebrews, Persians, and Athenians were in their generations, so that the virtù d’uno spirito italiano can be displayed in the imposition of form upon matter, as fully as were those of the ancient liberators.41 But are we to understand that the anomie of Italians has reached the point where the virtù of a legislator will owe nothing to fortuna except occasione? Machiavelli was a Florentine, and knew perfectly well that there were republics and principi naturali to be met with, the acquired or natural characteristics of whose subjects would complicate the liberator’s task. Italy was not inert matter to be organized into form, though he says it is; he had himself worked against Cesare Borgia’s intended regno in the Romagna. The other thing we are told about the hero of chapter XXVI is that he is to be a military organizer, whose tactical principles will revive virtù militare and (in Petrarch’s phrase) antico valore.42 It has been hinted that there are ways in which military virtù can be associated with—can perhaps be the foundation of—civic virtù, but we have not yet learned what they are; and the language of this chapter seems to preclude the possibility that the liberator can stop short of restoring both kinds of virtue to Italy. If he does less he will be a “new prince” at a low level, a victim of fortuna obliged to live in the present; if he is to be a figure of the magnitude of Moses, Romulus, and Theseus, the army he trains must evolve into a people. Machiavelli admired military leaders—Borgia early in his career, Giovanni delle Bande Nere in his later years—and in the idealized Fabrizio Colonna of the Arte della Guerra he hinted that a condottiere might in theory become a legislator. But a mere hegemon does not reach men’s civic personalities. In the Discorsi sopra … Tito Livio we meet both the military leader who founds a republic, and the republic itself as hegemon.
1 For an earlier statement of this interpretation, see the author’s “Custom and Grace, Form and Matter: An Approach to Machiavelli’s Concept of Innovation,” in Martin Fleisher (ed.), Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (New York: Atheneum, 1972), pp. 153-74.
2 Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere (a cura di Mario Bonfantini; Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore; vol. 29 in series La Letteratura Italiana: Storia e Testi, undated but 1954), hereafter cited as Opere, p. 5: “Tutti gli stati, tutti e dominii che hanno avuto e hanno imperio sopra li uomini, sono stati e sono o republiche o principati. E’ principati sono: o ereditarii, de’ quali el sangue del loro signore ne sia suto lungo tempo principe, o e’ sono nuovi. E’ nuovi, o e’ sono nuovi tutti, come fu Milano a Francesco Sforza, o e’ sono come membri aggiunti allo stato ereditario del principe che li acquista, come è el regno di Napoli al re di Spagna. Sono questi dominii cosí acquistati, o consueti a vivere sotto uno principe o usi ad essere liberi; e acquistonsi o con le armi d’altri o con le proprie, o per fortuna o per virtù.”
3 Chapter II is entitled “Of Hereditary Principalities” in both the Latin and the Italian chapter headings, as in chapter I; but the alternative term first appears in the second paragraph: “Perché el principe naturale ha minori cagioni e minore necessità di offendere.…”
4 Opere, p. 5: “… se tale principe è di ordinaria industria, sempre si manterrà nel suo stato se non è una estraordinaria ed eccessiva forza che ne lo privi …” Compare Discorsi, III, V, where it is made clear that a hereditary prince need fear losing his throne only if he systematically disregards the ancient customs of his people.
5 Ritratto delle Cose di Francia, in Opere, pp. 471-86. In “Niccolò Machiavelli politologo,” published in Gilmore, ed., Studies in Machiavelli, Nicola Matteucci has juxtaposed his observations on the monarchy of France with his studies of the Roman republic, and has supposed that these represent Machiavelli’s two most admired forms of government. This striking interpretation is characterized as “strutturale e non evolutivo” (Gilmore, p. 211).
6 Opere, p. 6, and Bonfantini’s note, in which he objects that the Este dukes were not lacking in virtù.
7 Ibid.: “E nella antiquità e continuazione del dominio sono spente le memorie e le cagioni delle innovazioni: perché sempre una mutazione lascia lo addentellato per la edificazione dell’altra.” It looks as if the memorie are themselves cagioni.
8 Ibid.: “… in modo che tu hai inimici tutti quelli che hai offesi in occupare quello principato, e non ti puoi mantenere amici quelli che vi ti hanno messo, per non li potere satisfare in quel modo che si erano presupposto …”
9 See n. 7 above.
10 The principe naturale, however, can afford “non preterire l’ordine de’ sua [suoi] antenati, e dipoi temporeggiare con gli accidenti,” Opere, p. 5. See Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, p. 33, for this theme in the speech of the pratiche.
11 Chapter III (Opere, p. 7): “… basta avere spenta la linea del principe che li dominava, perché nelle altre cose, mantenendosi loro le condizioni vecchie e non vi essendo disformità di costumi, gli uomini si vivono quietamente …” Chapter V (Opere, p. 18): “Ma quando le città o le provincie sono use a vivere sotto uno principe, e quel sangue sia spento, sendo da uno canto usi ad obedire, dall’altro non avendo el principe vecchio, farne uno infra loro non si accordano, vivere liberi non sanno …” This chapter also deals with the problem of the former republic; see below, n. 15.
12 Chapter III (Opere, p. 8).
13 Ibid.; the point is that the prince should be readily available to remedy the disorders caused by his officials.
14 Opere, p. 16: “Di qui nacquono le spesse rebellioni di Spagna, di Francia e di Grecia da’ Romani, per li spessi principati che erano in quelli stati; de’ quali mentre duro la memoria, sempre ne furono e Romani incerti di quella possessione; ma spenta la memoria di quelli, con la potenzia e diuturnità dello imperio ne diventorono securi possessori.”
15 Opere, p. 17: “E chi diviene patrone di una città consueta a vivere libera e non la disfaccia, aspetti di essere disfatto da quella: perché sempre ha per refugio nella rebellione el nome della libertà e gli ordini antiqui suoi; li quali né per la lunghezza de’ tempi né per benefizii mai si dimenticano. E per cosa che si faccia o si provegga, se non si disuniscono o dissipano gli abitatori, e’ non sdimenticano quel nome né quelli ordini, e subito in ogni accidente vi ricorrono: come fé’ Pisa dopo cento anni che l’era suta posta in servitù da’ Fiorentini.”
P. 18: “Ma nelle republiche e maggiore vita, maggiore odio, piú desiderio di vendetta; né li lascia né può lasciare riposare la memoria della antiqua libertà: tale che la piú secura via e spegnerle o abitarvi.” There seems no discussion of how living there will help.
16 Opere, p. 10: “Però e’ Romani vedendo discosto gli inconvenienti vi rimediorno sempre, e non li lasciorno mai seguire per fuggire una guerra, perché sapevono che la guerra non si leva ma si differisce a vantaggio di altri.… Né piacque mai loro quello che tutto dì è in bocca de’ savii de’ nostri tempi, di godere el benefìzio del tempo, ma si bene quello della virtù e prudenzia loro: perché el tempo si caccia innanzi ogni cosa, e può condurre seco bene come male e male come bene.”
17 Opere, p. 18: “De principatibus novis qui armis propriis et virtute acquiruntur.”
18 Ibid.: “… questo evento, di diventare di privato principe, presuppone o virtù o fortuna …”
19 Opere, pp. 18-19.
20 Opere, p. 19. “Ed esaminando le azioni e vita loro, non si vede che quelli avessino altro dalla fortuna che l’occasione; la quale dette loro materia a potere introdurvi drento quella forma parse loro: e sanza quella occasione la virtù dello animo loro si sarebbe spenta, e sanza quella virtù la occasione sarebbe venuta invano.
“Era dunque necessario a Moise trovare el populo d’Isdrael, in Egitto, stiavo e oppresso dalli Egizii, acciò che quelli per uscire di servitù si disponessino a seguirlo. Conveniva che Romulo non capissi in Alba, fussi stato esposto al nascere, a volere che diventassi re di Roma e fondatore di quella patria. Bisognava che Ciro trovassi e’ Persi malcontenti dello imperio de’ Medi, e li Medi molli ed effeminati per la lunga pace. Non posseva Teseo dimostrare la sua virtù se non trovava li Ateniesi dispersi. Queste occasioni pertanto feciono questi uomini felici, e la eccellente virtù loro fece quella occasione essere conosciuta: donde la lora patria ne fu nobilitata e divento felicissima.”
21 Capitolo della Fortuna, lines 10-15:
Perché questa volubil creatura
Spesso si suole oppor con maggior forza
Dove piú forza vede aver natura.
Sua naturai potenza ognuno sforza;
E il regno suo è sempre violento
Se virtù eccessiva non lo ammorza.
Lines 124-26:
Però si vuol lei prender per sua stella;
E quanto a noi è possibile, ognora
Accomodarsi al variar di quella.
22 Capitolo dell’Occasione, lines 10-15:
Li sparsi mia capei dinanti io tengo:
con essi mi ricuopro il petto e’I volto
perch’un non mi conosca quando io vengo.
Drieto dal capo ogni capei m’è tolto,
onde invan s’affatica un, se gli avviene
ch’i’ l’abbi trapassato o s’i’ mi volto.
23 Opere, p. 19: “E benché di Moise non si debba ragionare, sendo suto uno mero esecutore delle cose che li erano ordinate di Dio, tamen debbe essere ammirato solum per quella grazia che lo faceva degno di parlare con Dio. Ma consideriamo Ciro e li altri che hanno acquistato o fondato regni: li troverrete tutti mirabili. E se si considerarranno le azioni e ordini loro particulari, parranno non discrepanti da quelli di Moise, che ebbe si gran precettore. Ed esaminando le azioni e vita loro …,” etc., as quoted in n. 20 above.
24 But not certainly; it could always be argued—and James Harrington was to do so—that the works of grace and wisdom might prove identical. See below, ch. XI.
25 Opere, p. 20: “È necessario pertanto, volendo discorrere bene questa parte, esaminare se questi innovatori stanno per loro medesimi o se dependano da altri; cioè, se per condurre l’opera loro bisogna che preghino o vero possono forzare. Nel primo caso capitano sempre male e non conducano cosa alcuna; ma quando dependano da loro proprii e possono forzare, allora è che rare volte periclitano. Di qui nacque che tutti e’ profeti armati vinsono, e gli disarmati ruinorno. Perché oltra alle cose dette, la natura de’ populi è varia; ed è facile a persuadere loro una cosa, ma è difficile fermarli in quella persuasione. E però conviene essere ordinato in modo che quando e’ non credano piú, si possa fare credere loro per forza.
“Moise, Ciro, Teseo e Romulo non arebbono possuto fare osservare loro lungamente le loro costituzioni se fussino stati disarmati; come ne’ nostri tempi intervenne a fra’ Ieronimo Savonarola, il quale ruinò ne’ suoi ordini nuovi come la moltitudine cominciò a non credergli, e lui non aveva modo a tenere fermi quelli che avevano creduto, né a far credere e’ discredenti.”
26 Exodus 32:26-28: “Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, Who is on the Lord’s side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” See Michael Walzer, “Exodus 32 and the Theory of Holy War: The History of a Citation,” Harvard Theological Review 61, no. 1 (January 1968), 1-14, for a history of the exegesis of this text.
27 Opere, p. 21: “Coloro e’ quali solamente per fortuna diventano di privati principi.…”
28 Opere, p. 22: “… di tanta virtù che quello la fortuna ha messo loro in grembo e’ sappino subito prepararsi a conservarlo, e quali fondamenti che gli altri hanno fatti avanti che diventino principi, gli faccino poi.”
29 Ibid.: “… acquistò lo stato con la fortuna del padre, e con quella lo perde; nonostante che per lui si usassi ogni opera e facessi tutte quelle cose che per uno prudente e virtuoso uomo si dovea fare per mettere le barbe sua in quelli stati che l’arme e fortuna d’altri gli aveva concessi.”
30 Opere, pp. 19-20.
31 Opere, p. 26: “E che e’ fondamenti sua fussino buoni, si vidde: che la Romagna lo aspettò piú di uno mese …” His success is measured by his mastery of the short term.
32 Opere, p. 27: “… anzi mi pare, come ho fatto, di preporlo imitabile a tutti coloro che per fortuna e con l’armi d’altri sono ascesi allo imperio.”
33 “Il Principe and lo stato,” Studies in the Renaissance 4 (1957), 113-38; now included in The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (New York: Basic Books, 1972). Cf. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, pp. 326-30.
34 Opere, pp. 48-49.
35 Opere, p. 47: “E l’arme proprie son quelle che sono composte o di sudditi o di cittadini o di creati tua: tutte l’altre sono o mercenarie o ausiliarie. E il modo a ordinare l’arme proprie sarà facile a trovare se si discorrerà gli ordini de’ quattro sopra nominati da me [i.e., Cesare Borgia, Hiero of Syracuse, David of Israel, and Charles VII of France], e se si vedrà come Filippo, padre di Alessandro Magno, e come molte republiche e principi si sono armati e ordinati: a’ quali ordini io al tutto mi rimetto.”
36 The fox knows this better than the lion does (ch. XVIII).
37 Opere, p. 78: “Le cose suprascritte, osservate prudentemente, fanno parere uno nuovo antico, e lo rendono subito piú securo e piú fermo nello stato che se vi fussi antiquato drento. Perché uno principe nuovo e molto piú osservato nelle sua azioni che uno ereditario; e quando le sono conosciute virtuose, pigliano molto piú li uomini e molto piú gli obligano che il sangue antico. Perché li uomini sono molto piú presi dalle cose presenti che dalle passate, e quando nelle presenti truovono il bene, vi si godono e non cercono altro; anzi piglieranno ogni difesa per lui, quando non manchi nelle altre cose a se medesimo. E cosí ara duplicata gloria di avere dato principio a uno principato nuovo, e ornatolo e corroboratolo di buone leggi, di buone arme e di buoni esempli: come quello ha duplicata vergogna che, nato principe, lo ha per sua poca prudenzia perduto.”
38 Ibid.: “… come il re di Napoli, duca di Milano e altri, si troverrà in loro: prima uno commune defetto quanto alle arme per le cagioni che di sopra a lungo si sono discorse; dipoi si vedrà alcuno di loro, o che arà avuto inimici e’ populi o, se arà avuto el populo amico, non si sarà sapputo assicurare de’ grandi.…”
39 Opere, p. 81: “Da questo ancora depende la variazione del bene, perché, se uno che si governa con respetti e pazienzia, e’ tempi e le cose girono in modo che il governo suo sia buono, e viene felicitando; ma se li tempi e le cose si mutano, e’ rovina, perché non muta modo di procedere. Ne si truova uomo si prudente che si sappi accomodare a questo; sì perché non si può deviare da quello a che la natura lo inclina, sì etiam perché, avendo sempre uno prosperato camminando per una via, non si può persuadere partirsi da quella. E però l’uomo respettivo, quando egli è tempo di venire allo impeto, non lo sa fare; donde e’ rovina: che se si mutassi di natura con li tempi e con le cose, non si muterebbe fortuna.”
40 Above, ch. IV, n. 23.
41 Opere, p. 83: “Considerato adunque tutte le cose di sopra discorse, e pensando meco medesimo se al presente in Italia correvono tempi da onorare uno nuovo principe, e se ci era materia che dessi occasione a uno prudente e virtuoso di introdurvi forma che facessi onore a lui e bene alla università delli uomini di quella, mi pare concorrino tante cose in benefizio di uno principe nuovo che io non so qual mai tempo fussi piú atto a questo. E se, come io dissi, era necessario volendo vedere la virtù di Moise che il populo d’Isdrael fussi stiavo in Egitto, e a conoscere la grandezza dello animo di Ciro ch’e’ Persi fussino oppressi da’ Medi, e la eccellenzia di Teseo che li Ateniesi fussino dispersi; cosí al presente, volendo conoscere la virtù di uno spirito italiano, era necessario che la Italia si riducessi nel termine che ella è di presente, e che la fussi piú stiava che gli Ebrei, piú serva ch’e Persi, piú dispersa che gli Ateniesi, sanza capo, sanza ordine, battuta, spogliata, lacera, corsa, e avesse sopportato d’ogni sorte ruina.”
42 Opere, pp. 84-85: “E non è maraviglia se alcuno de’ prenominati Italiani non ha possuto fare quello che si può sperare facci la illustre Casa Vostra, e se in tante revoluzioni d’Italia e in tanti maneggi di guerra e’ pare sempre che in quella la virtù militare sia spenta. Questa nasce che gli ordini antiqui di essa non erano buoni e non ci è suto alcuno che abbi saputo trovare de’ nuovi: e veruna cosa fa tanto onore a uno uomo che di nuovo surga, quanto fa le nuove legge e li nuovi ordini trovati da lui. Queste cose, quando sono bene fondate e abbino in loro grandezza, lo fanno reverendo e mirabile: e in Italia non manca materia da introdurvi ogni forma.… Volendo dunque la illustre Casa Vostra seguitare quelli eccellenti uomini che redimerno le provincie loro, è necessario innanzi a tutte le altre cose, come vero fondamento d’ogni impresa, provedersi d’arme proprie: perche non si può avere nè piú fidi nè piú veri né migliori soldati.… E necessario pertanto prepararsi a queste arme, per potere con la virtù italica defendersi dalli esterni.”