CHAPTER VIII

ROME AND VENICE

B) Guicciardini’s Dialogo and the Problem of Aristocratic Prudence

UNLIKE THE WRITINGS of Machiavelli, those of Guicciardini are always specifically related to the context of Florentine politics and lack the older man’s theoretical and speculative freedom. This is an index not merely to Guicciardini’s greater concern with the actual and the practicable, but also to his aristocratic conservatism. The specific and particular world, almost by definition, could be known and controlled only with a considerable admixture of experience, and at the heart of Guicciardini’s thinking we shall always find the image of the ottimati as a politically experienced inner ring who could govern because they knew by experience the city they had to deal with, and because they knew by experience that they could not do too much with it. Yet there could be no greater mistake than to treat Guicciardini as the mere mouthpiece of his class; if he regarded the ottimati as the keystone of the governing structure, he had no illusions whatever about the way they would behave if allowed to monopolize power and office. The minimum which he allows to the other political classes—even if he generally allows them no more than that minimum—is the role of providing the structure within which the virtues of the aristocracy, namely practical experience and the pursuit of honor, may remain uncorrupt and efficacious.

It follows also from his determination to anchor his thought within the context of an actual historical Florence that the highly abstract universal concepts, easy to discern in Il Principe and the Discorsi, do not meet the eye in the Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze.1 Fortune and innovation, matter and form, are not the objects of regular allusion and it is not easy to uncover their implicit presence; the degree of abstraction is less than that dictated by Machiavelli’s decision to deal with republics and principalities, innovation and corruption, as general topics and does not call for the same degree of categorization. Guicciardini indeed liked to profess a certain contempt for speculative soning. The principal speaker of the Dialogo is one who has learned politics by experience, without studying either philosophy or history, though he does not deny the role of history in making the experience of the dead available to those who lack it among the living; and he does not mean that the lessons of experience are incapable of organized exposition. We must avoid at all costs the pitfall of supposing that thought centered on the concept of experience lacks a conceptual structure, to understand which is to understand the thought. Experience itself is a concept as well as an irreducible reality, and this book is largely concerned with a conceptual structure in which the notions of experience and prudence played a prominent and revealing part. Guicciardini’s treatment of these and related ideas tells us much about his conceptions of political knowledge and action, and so about his version of what is usually called political theory. We examine his thought by examining its theoretical structure, first in the Dialogo, where it is still possible to imagine Florence possessing an institutional organization in which experience could do its proper work, and later in the Ricordi, where the historical structure of Florence has collapsed and experience is left to function in a world not unlike that of Machiavelli’s Prince.

The Dialogo is the last of Guicciardini’s discorsi on Florentine government: the last, that is, of a series of works, commencing with the Discorso di Logrogno in 1512, in which he thought it possible to make normative recommendations for a stable political structure to be established at Florence.2 Felix Gilbert and Vittorio De Caprariis have studied the evolution of his thought dalla politica alla storia, to use the latter’s title:³ from an attempt to establish the conditions necessary for a stable political life to a conviction that human existence could only be depicted in the streams of fortuna-directed change; and it is significant that the Dialogo is set at a point in the past history of Florentine politics, one moreover to which Guicciardini had already averred there could be no returning. It takes place in 1494, shortly after the overthrow of the Medici; there is significant mention of Savonarola, but the focus lies on the problems of the ottimati as participants in the revolution. The speakers are three younger ottimati—Piero Capponi, Paolantonio Soderini, and Guicciardini’s father Piero—who to varying degrees support the expulsion of the Medici as conducive to libertà, and an older man, Bernardo del Nero, Guicciardini’s mouthpiece, who tends to regret the overthrow of the ruling family but is prepared to consider what can be made of a regime founded on the Consiglio Grande. We know that Guicciardini held the establishment of the Council to have worked such changes in Florentine politics that there could be no return to Medicean rule as it had been before 1494; and he also held that the role of the ottimati in restoring the Medici and overthrowing the Council in 1512 meant that the former were now bound irrevocably to that family and would never again have the chance to help set up a republic based on their exclusion. The whole dialogue therefore takes place at a moment of opportunity which is gone forever; and as if to rub this point in further, Guicciardini chose in Bernardo del Nero a principal interlocutor who had been illegally put to death by the Savonarolan regime—one, moreover, whose personality he had analyzed with detachment in his earlier historical writings.4 Time and a worsening world separate Guicciardini from the scene of his dialogue, at once emphasizing and diminishing its ideal character; he does not write its recommendations in the expectation that they will be carried out.

In Guicciardini’s version of the year 1494, then, three friends call on Bernardo del Nero and begin to discuss with him whether the recent mutazione dello stato will prove beneficial or not. Bernardo bleakly observes that he has found by experience that all mutazioni are for the worse, but Soderini asks whether there may not be such a thing as change from a bad form of government to a good, or from a good to a better.⁵ In reply, Bernardo begins, half ironically, by going back to a point at which Savonarola had once found himself: is it not the teaching of philosophers, in particular Marsilio Ficino, that among the three species of government that of the one is better than that of the few or the many? Guicciardini causes his father Piero to reply, on the grounds that he was once Ficino’s pupil and that Capponi has no learning except a little astrology; there is some sort of joke against political philosophers going on here, which we must be careful not to interpret too coarsely.6 Piero says apologetically that, as everybody knows, it is a commonplace of political theory that there is a good and a bad form of each of the three species, and that the rule of one man is best only when all three are good. The question is whether it has come about “by the choice or the free will of the governed,” “according to their will and natural propensities (naturale),” or by force, faction or usurpation,” according to the appetite of the ruling element (secondo lo appetito di che prevale).” Piero seems to be leaving room for elective and hereditary succession, and to be running together the unjust acquisition of power and its unjust exercise. He remarks that the rule of one is the best when good, but the worst when bad—a Savonarolan dictum—and further that since it is easiest for one man to impose his will on the public, it is the likeliest to become bad. If one were creating a new government and considering the possibility of monarchy, one would have to ask whether the prospect of good outweighed the risks of evil.⁷

All this is indeed commonplace; but Guicciardini has begun to exploit the ambiguities of the word naturale. Applied to a form of government, it might mean “elective,” “hereditary,” or simply “suited to the character and propensities of the governed,” and Guicciardini is about to steer a course through its ambiguities of such a kind as to involve rejection both of the idea that one form is inherently better than any other, and of the Savonarolan doctrine that the historically conditioned “nature” of the Florentines requires a regime of wide popular participation. In reply to Piero, he makes Bernardo agree that a ruler whose position is naturale or based on elezione e voluntà has no need to commit evil deeds unless ignorance or his own mala natura move him thereto, whereas one whose rule is originally violent or grounded in usurpation is often obliged to do things to preserve it that offend his own moral nature, as was repeatedly seen in the cases of Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici.8 But now we have distinguished between the location of power, the legitimacy of its acquisition, the moral personality of the ruler, and—by implication—the inherited characteristics of the governed; and since all these are denoted by different applications of words like natura and naturale, it is evident that no form of government is by nature good or bad, and that we must look for other criteria. If we imagine a legitimate prince ruling unjustly and a usurper ruling justly, or—since Capponi objects that the latter is impossible to imagine—that they both rule unjustly, it becomes plain that it is the effects (effetti) of a particular government and not its origins or defining circumstances (the output, so to speak, and not the input) that we use to evaluate it.⁹

Bernardo goes on to argue that if we are discussing forms of government in the abstract, we must certainly say that a voluntary origin is preferable to a violent one, since its natura does not carry the necessità of further violence in the future. But when we come to particular cases and to governments actually in being, we must proceed empirically: we must observe how they are working and evaluate their effects by obvious standards of morality and utility, before presuming to rank one of them before the others.¹⁰ But this raises an evident difficulty when we are discussing mutazione, the replacement of an old government by a new. The effects of the former may be observed, those of the latter may only be predicted;11 and we may add, in criticism of Guicciardini’s argument, that the origins of the former may be discounted, whereas those of the latter must be taken into account in the act of prediction itself. Bernardo has now to explain the nature and methods of prediction in politics. He explains to his interlocutors that as he has lived a very long time in Florence, been immersed in the city’s affairs both as actor and observer, and talked often with men of great experience, he thinks he has enough knowledge of the nature (natura; several times repeated) of the people, the citizens, and the city as a whole (universalmente) to be able to predict well enough the effects of every constitution (modo di vivere). He may go wrong in matters of detail (particulari), but in general statements (universali) and in all matters of substance he hopes to make few mistakes.¹² Where he does err, he can be corrected by the younger men, who may lack his age and experience but have read diligently, as he has not, in the histories of many nations and have been able to converse with the dead where he has spoken only with the living. The lessons of history will reinforce those of experience, because everything that is has been and everything that has been will be again. The only difficulty is to recognize it and to avoid the error of taking it for something new; in this pursuit Bernardo and his interlocutors must go hand in hand, and he leaves it unclear whether the qualities of mind needed to recognize the recurrent and predict its effects can be acquired by education or only through experience.13

The argument is clearly pragmatic and loaded in favor of conservatism. Forms of government can be studied and evaluated only in action and in actuality, and the question has arisen how even this can be done—and whether such a procedure does not necessarily favor the existing, or even the recent, constitution. By admitting historical knowledge to an apparent equality with the knowledge based on experience, Guicciardini has avoided giving the existing an inherent superiority over the nonexisting, but he is already well on the way toward his later position that the lessons of history are, though not inapplicable, extremely difficult to apply. But there is another way in which the pragmatic argument contains conservative implications. If we are to evaluate constitutions solely by their results, we shall presumably use the same set of values as criteria in all cases; but it is perfectly well known that different forms of government give priority to different values, so that we cannot proceed pragmatically unless we standardize our values in advance. At this stage in the Dialogo, Soderini puts forward what we have seen to be a cardinal assumption of Florentine thought after 1494-1512: that a vivere libero is natural to Florence, because a desire for liberty is in that city an appetito universale, engraven in men’s hearts as it is on their walls and banners. Since philosophers will agree that, of the three forms of government, that is best which is most natural to the people whom it is to govern, the case for the inherent superiority of popular rule at Florence seems to be made in advance.¹⁴

This contention, given the assumption on which it rests, seems as fully anchored in the concrete and the particulare as Guicciardini could desire. But he makes Bernardo give a double reply: that even a form of government rooted in the nature of the people, though clearly preferable in theory, may in specific cases produce harmful effects; and that the purpose of libertà is not to ensure the participation of everyone at all levels of government, but to ensure the conservation of the rule of law and the common good (the verb conservare is used twice in the same sentence), an aim which may be better achieved under the rule of one man than in other ways.15 The latter argument is secondary to the former, which incidentally suggests the question how we can predict harmful effects from a government visibly rooted in the nature of the people; but by introducing it, Guicciardini has redefined libertà to suit his own values. What Soderini means, and Guicciardini has himself argued as recently as 1516,¹⁶ is that the experience of the Consiglio Grande has given (or is giving) the Florentine popolo a taste of direct personal participation in government which has changed them, so that things in the city cannot be the same again. Now this argument is rejected,¹⁷ and there is being conveyed a value judgment as to the proper meaning of the term libertà. It is seen to have two meanings: it denotes a state of affairs in which every citizen participates as fully as possible in decision-making, and it denotes one in which laws, not men, are supreme and the individual receives his social benefits from impersonal public authority and not at the hands of individuals. Machiavelli had used equalità in a somewhat similar sense. These two definitions are not logically identical, and Guicciardini is implicitly denying that they have anything to do with one another; but it was commonly argued that the former state of affairs was the best (radicals held the only) guarantee of the latter, and if Bernardo was to contend that the many could enjoy libertà in the sense of legality and impersonality where they were excluded from libertà in the sense of participazione, he had (irrespective of the question whether they could be denied participazione having once known it) to show how such a state of things could be rendered permanent. This, needless to say, became the problem of preventing corruption in the limited group which enjoyed power while excluding others from it.

Bernardo’s interlocutors next explain that at the time of Piero de’ Medici’s expulsion from the city, they had no intention of setting up a government so broadly based as that of the Consiglio Grande, but that their hand was forced by Savonarola. He replies that in that case they should be deeply obliged to the Friar, because experience has shown (ha insegnato la esperienzia de’ tempi passati) and will always show (cosí sempre mostrerrà la esperienzia) that there can be nothing less stable at Florence than a government monopolized by a few; it invariably falls after a while and power passes to the one or the many18—more probably to the latter, since one man to make himself supreme needs prudence, wealth, reputation, much time, and an indefinite succession of favorable circumstances, a combination so unlikely to be enjoyed by a single person that there has only been one Cosimo de’ Medici in Florentine history (words which may well have taunted their author in later life).¹⁹ The rule of a few is rendered unstable by the nature of the Florentines, which is to love equality and resent the superiority of others. Consequently, the few are divided by their ambition, and since those who are not of the inner ring (ognuno che non è nel cerchio) hate them for their power, they are destroyed by their refusal to support one another.20

In this argument Guicciardini is adopting the criterion of the natura dello universale which he has rejected a little earlier, and is using it in unexpected ways. The idea that the “second nature” of the Florentines made them restless, egalitarian, and desirous of sharing in the public authority had appeared in his and others’ writings before the composition of the Dialogo; but it had usually been ascribed to the many and made part of the case for a vivere popolare, since the qualities that made the individual anxious for a share in power were also those that made him refuse to accept dependence on others, the characteristic which remained central to Guicciardini’s definition of libertà. In this passage, however, the “nature of the Florentines” is indeed ascribed to the many (those who are “not of the circle”), but it is much more prominently a characteristic of the few. The “circle” of ambitious men compete for leadership, and their “natural love of equality” becomes the refusal of the losers to accept the predominance of the winners. It can be calculated by reason (ragione) and shown by esperienzia that the odds against a regime of this kind proving stable are of the order of twenty to one.²¹ Not only are equalità and libertà being depicted as tending to self-destruction; the same harsh light is being thrown on that ambizione and pursuit of onore which Guicciardini in earlier writings had thought the characteristic of the ottimati which made them anxious to serve liberty by playing on the public stage the role of great servants of the public good. Everything in the “nature of the Florentines” which tends to intensify political individuality is being depicted as a characteristic of the few rather than the many; and the rhetoric at this stage depicts all such characteristics as politically disruptive.

But the ambivalences of Guicciardini’s attitude toward the ottimati ensure that the dialogue form is used to present a number of points of view. In what follows, Capponi and Soderini present the case against Medicean rule, of the sort overthrown in 1494, in terms of an ideal of liberty which becomes more and more visibly aristocratic. Capponi denounces as tyranny the essentially manipulative nature of this government, in which actions nominally performed within a code of public laws and approved values were actually evaluated according to the interests of an informal ruling group, and the same conduct might be approved in one whom they considered a friend and condemned in one whom they considered an enemy;22 one had to find out what one was really meant to do, adds Soderini, by observing the unspoken hints which Lorenzo excelled at giving.²³ Soderini further attacks Bernardo’s distinction between governments good by nature and governments which produce good effects by pointing out that to deny the natural and laudable propensities of mankind is to produce bad effects by definition, and vice versa.²⁴ When he says that men by nature desire liberty and hate slavery (servitù), however, Soderini proves to mean something which appears to the full only in men of unusually high spirit and talent: namely, the desire to perform actions which are, and are seen to be, excellent because they are to the public good. Liberty is the freedom to perform these actions; slavery is the state of having them evaluated, permitted or prevented by particular men according to the latter’s idea of what suits their interests—of knowing that one’s actions, “which ought in reason to be free and to depend on nothing but oneself and the good of the country, must be regulated by the wills of others whether just or capricious.”25

Soderini proceeds to define what makes us behave in this way as virtù.

And if the principal object of those who have rightfully governed cities, the principal care of philosophers and others who have written of civic life, has been to give them such a foundation as will encourage the virtues, excellence of character and honourable deeds, how much should we condemn and detest a government in which the greatest pains are taken to root out all generosity and all virtue! I speak of those virtues by which men prepare themselves to perform actions excellent because beneficial to the republic.…

And so I say again that whenever the government is not legitimate on the grounds that it honours virtue, but tends to tyranny whether fierce or tolerant, one ought at whatever sacrifice of property or prosperity to seek after any other form of rule; for no government can be more abominable and pernicious than one which seeks to destroy virtue and prevent its subjects from attaining, I will not say greatness, but any degree of glory attained through nobility of character and generosity of mind.²⁶

What distinguishes the arguments of Soderini from those of modern theorists of “participatory democracy” and “repressive tolerance” is that whereas the biases of the latter are populist, those of the former are explicitly aristocratic. Those who take as their aim the ideal of virtù—stated here less as the imposition of form upon fortuna, which is not a key idea of the Dialogo, than as life, liberty, and the pursuit of excellence in moral autonomy—are, practically by definition, the few, and in earlier writings Guicciardini has clearly indicated just how small a number they may be. Nevertheless, tyrants hate and fear them, since it is the aim of the tyrant to bring everything into dependence on himself; Soderini says he need not tell his hearers who he has in mind.27 He concluded this part of his discourse by observing that, as is usual with stati stretti, the Medici have been at pains to disarm the citizens, thus depriving them of their virilità and of the vigore de animo which belonged to their ancestors. One has only to consider the difference between those who make war with their own arms and those who do it by means of mercenaries; the Swiss, fierce and warlike when they appear in Italy, live in liberty, under law, and at peace when in their own homes.²⁸ Here the rhetoric of the civic militia tradition appears in a context which suggests, as was certainly not the case in Machiavelli’s Discorsi, that liberty, civic virtue, and political individuality are essentially the ideals of an elite.

Bernardo’s reply to this statement of the civic humanist position is long and diffuse; the conversation in which it is worked out forms the remainder of Book I of the Dialogo. It is not only lengthy but complex, and many of its shafts are indirectly aimed. As we have already seen him doing, Bernardo attempts to identify liberty in Soderini’s sense with the display of ambition, and the desire to perform noble actions with the lust to dominate others; and he makes the interesting suggestion that the performance of public services does not necessitate a regime of libertà, since what is to be served is the patria, “which embraces so much that is good, so much that is sweet, that even those who are subject to princes are lovers of country and have many times been known to put themselves in danger for its sake.”²⁹

Where Soderini has defined liberty in terms of virtù and participazione, Bernardo reverts to one of Guicciardini’s earlier definitions of the term: liberty is that state of things in which we are beholden to the law for what is our own, and not to the power or personality of particular men. In its implied stress on the moral and political autonomy of the individual, this is of course a civic humanist ideal; but, in comparison with the Discorso di Logrogno, there is the all-important difference that the ideal of participatory virtù is now being, as it were, subtracted from the definition of liberty and set in opposition to it. Liberty defined as the rule of law might very well be endangered by the compulsive and competitive magnanimity which Soderini has praised so highly,30 and a man might enjoy his own under the law with minimal or even with no participation in decision-making on his own part or anybody else’s. It could be said that Guicciardini is here developing a negative as opposed to a positive concept of liberty, making it the freedom from other men’s ascendancy rather than the freedom to develop positive human capacities and qualities; and with this change in definition goes a change in the values which he is setting before the eyes of the ottimati. Two codes of value are now visible, both representing poles of Guicciardini’s own personality: on the one hand, the ideal of excellence displayed in public action; on the other, that esperienzia and prudenzia which only an elite has time to acquire. Throughout his life Guicciardini felt the tension between ambition and caution, and it is fascinating to observe how he moves in the opposite direction to Machiavelli when faced with the choice between audacity and prudence. Where the Discorsi had opted for the armed popular state and depicted virtù as the dynamic spirit of the armed many, Bernardo in the Dialogo is allowed to dismiss—as we shall see—Soderini’s revival of the civic militia tradition and to reject as far as possible his idealization of virtù. But the virtù in question is a property of the few, not the many. In its place—or rather in the place of that ambition and thirst for onore which he had once praised—Guicciardini makes Bernardo, in a concluding passage of Book I, exhort his optimate hearers to recognize that the city of Florence is old and hard to reform, and that the natural course of senescence in states has more power than human ragione or prudenzia.³¹

All that he says is addressed to the ottimati, but Guicciardini’s aristocratic bias is expressed rather in his having regarded the ottimati as the only people worth talking to or about, than in his having crudely ascribed to them—as he never did—every political virtue or legitimate claim to power. Bernardo’s refutation of Soderini takes the form of a defense of the Medici against Soderini’s more embittered charges, and this in turn becomes a critique of the Consiglio Grande and the participation of the many in certain types of decision-making.32 But the target is rather the few, considered as the authors of the popular constitution of 1494, than the many. It is as if the ottimati, dissatisfied by their alliance with the Medici, had set up an alliance with the popolo instead, and as if Bernardo were asking them how much they had really gained by the change. But this challenge implicitly raises the question of optimate values. The justification of the 1494 regime, set forth by Soderini and by Guicciardini in his own person when he wrote the Discorso di Logrogno, was stated in terms of virtù, of that conspicuous excellence which the ottimati displayed before an appreciative popolo. To attack that regime involved both recommending the ideal of caution in place of that of virtù and casting doubt on the many’s ability to recognize virtù when they saw it; the attack on the many, however, was not an exaltation of the few but a criticism of their values. Once we realize that in Guicciardini’s mind the ideal of virtù was coming to stand less for the pursuit of excellence than for an unhealthy competition for preeminence, we can understand better his unswerving insistence that a governo stretto, in which the ottimati monopolized power, would be a disaster for Florence. If the elite were really to conduct a competition in excellence, they needed the popolo (or the Medici) as audience and judges; but if what they were competing for was really power and ascendancy, they needed the popolo (or the Medici) to limit the competition by limiting the power. At the same time, Guicciardini recommended to his order a less competitive code of values. He may have thought the ottimati the only people worth criticizing, but he criticized them no less pertinaciously for all that.

Bernardo’s defense of the Medicean regime and his critique of popular unwisdom are therefore, on this interpretation, to be read as stating the case for the Medici and against the popolo, or Consiglio Grande, as allies of the ottimati. His criticisms are directed against the belief, which Guicciardini had himself expressed in earlier writings, that the many are good judges of their superiors, able to recognize qualities which they themselves lack, and so fit to be trusted with the selection of the few to hold office. Once the distinguishing quality of the leader ceases to be virtù and becomes esperienzia, this belief becomes less plausible, since esperienzia is an acquired characteristic which can be evaluated only by those who have acquired some of it themselves; and since a republic is not a customary but a policy-making community, there is little opportunity for the many to acquire experience of what only governors do—a form of experience whose expression is not custom but prudence. This is the point of Bernardo’s assertion that they are incapacitated for this sort of judgment by an outlook limited to “their businesses and their shops”;33 lack of leisure would not prevent their recognizing virtù as a quality of the personality, nearly so certainly as it would prevent their acquiring knowledge of affairs or the ability to understand what those who possessed such knowledge were doing. However, Bernardo is prepared to agree with Soderini that the Florentine popolo under the constitution of 1494, like that of Venice, may choose its officeholders tolerably well so long as it retains the technique of election by majority vote—on the vexed question of which Guicciardini had written two discorsi; but, Bernardo darkly adds, one cannot tell how long this sensible procedure will last. Soderini is left to maintain that no form of government can be made perfect at the beginning, but may learn by experience to confirm and improve its good qualities.³⁴ He is in short hoping that the popolo will learn by experience to retain a method of election assumed to favor the political elite, and Guicciardini is presumably appealing to the optimate belief that there had been too much selection of officeholders by lot.

But Bernardo is mainly concerned to defend the pre-1494 Medici against Soderini’s charge that they had repressed virtù by advancing to office only those whom they considered safely dependent. He does this by conceding most of the accusation and proceeding to argue that a government of this kind is nevertheless superior to a popular regime—a debating strategy very likely to mask a shift in values and assumptions. Certainly, he says, the Medici advanced those they considered safe and kept down those they considered dangerous, but it does not follow, as Soderini suggested, that they regarded all virtù as potentially dangerous to them. The qualities of the political elite are wisdom and enterprise; it is possible to be wise (savio) without being enterprising (animoso), and it is possible to be both without becoming a threat to the established order (inquieto).35 The Medici were able to draw these distinctions the better because they already possessed preeminent power; this gave them the experience with which to judge men and the security in which to exercise their judgment.³⁶ There are two causes of error in judgment of this kind: ignorance and jealousy (malignità). Ignorance, which is preeminently the fault of popular assemblies, is the more dangerous of the two in its effects because by its nature it is without limits, whereas jealousy ceases with the removal of the individual who is its object.³⁷

Guicciardini is allowing Bernardo to beg the question. Soderini had defined Medicean rule as a tyranny, and had very clearly stated the classic view that the jealousy of the tyrant is without limits, since he regards everything not subject to his power as a threat to it, and fears especially the virtù—the innate moral quality—of every other individual. In defense of malignità, Bernardo says that men are by nature inclined to the good and that anyone who preferred evil to good would be rather a beast than a man.³⁸ It was of course the classic contention that the tyrant was precisely such a beast, but Bernardo is here exploiting the assumption—to which Soderini has been made to assent—that Medicean rule was a tyranny of a peculiar kind, mansueto rather than fiero, operating by manipulating men’s good qualities rather than by seeking to destroy them. But a “moderate tyranny” is almost a contradiction in terms, and Bernardo’s rhetoric is tending to empty the term “tyranny” of much of its meaning. The Medici subjected the good in men to their wills by using it; but in order to use it they must have known it and been able to evaluate it, and to go on using it they must have been able to refrain from destroying it. Reason in them cannot have been overthrown by fear and appetite to the extent to which it was in the typical tyrant; and the weakness of human nature, by which its natural love of the good is so easily overthrown, cannot have been inherently more pronounced in them than in any other class of rulers.

This leads Bernardo, at the end of his argument in Book I, to deny that Medicean rule was doomed by its nature to degeneration and corruption. It operated by utilizing the qualities of the ottimati and had therefore to leave them intact; and this necessity acted as a freno, a bridle or limitation, on any tendency of the ruling will to run to excess. Furthermore, the ottimati could not be of service to the Medici unless they acted as autonomous beings, that is to say freely; and Medicean rule, though it was a tyranny in the sense that everything was done in accordance with their will, was never conducted like uno stato di uno principe assoluto, in which the sovereignty of the ruling will is institutionalized and visible. The appearances and the image (le dimostrazioni e la immagine) were always those of free government.39 To take away the image would have been to take away the life and the soul of the city; because this was not done (and only a madman would have done it) the Medici ruled a city stronger for the circumstance that it was governed by a mixture of love and force, rather than by naked violence.⁴⁰ Love, after all, is a self-moved activity; the weight of the words used by Guicciardini tells against the view that he wished to represent Florentines as governed by illusion. There must have been something real about a liberty, the need to respect which was a real limitation on Medicean power. But in defending the Medici against the charge of tyranny, Guicciardini has in fact represented their government as something to be distinguished from a principato assoluto—that is to say, though he does not use the term, a mixed monarchy. We are approaching the doctrine of French and English kingship when we learn that Medicean power was limited by the obligation to consult and respect the chief men and magistrates of the city—not to share power with them in any formal sense. This obligation is not very unlike that to respect the forms of republican government, which kept Medicean rule a monarchy in disguise.

Bernardo’s argument, however, is still directed toward recommending the Medicean system to the ottimati, and is consequently as much aristocratic as monarchic in character. It departs furthest from the Aristotelian or Polybian doctrine of the coordination of distinct powers in its thrust toward the view that a man or group of men in supreme authority are fitted and enabled by that supremacy to perform all the functions of power, and do not need the support of any coordinate intelligence; but it falls short of a theory of sovereignty in its refusal to locate supreme power in either one or a few. It is noteworthy that Bernardo’s discussion of the role of the ottimati under Medicean rule is perfectly compatible with the assumption that their supreme value is virtù, whereas there is another aspect of his argument which rests entirely on the concept of prudence and in which the distinction between monarchy and aristocracy is far less pronounced. This is the section in which he assails the participation of the Consiglio Grande in decisions on external policy (cose di fuora).41

Here the train of thought carries us directly back to concepts of the particular event, of intelligence, number, and time, such as we have repeatedly seen to be basic to this aspect of Renaissance thinking. Affairs of external policy, we are told, have no regularity or certain course, but vary every day with the happenings of the world, so that our thinking about them must be largely a matter of conjecture. The smallest cause can have the greatest effect, and identical causes have effects of the greatest diversity. “So it is necessary that the governors of states should be men of prudence, vigilantly attentive to the smallest accident, and weighing every possible consequence in order to obviate at the beginning, and eliminate as far as possible, the power of chance and fortune.”⁴²

There could be no clearer statement of Guicciardini’s refusal to enter into that world of virtù that so fascinated Machiavelli. Virtù as audacity, the dynamic and perhaps creative power of a prince or a people in arms, sought to dominate fortune rather than eliminate it; Machiavelli found this characteristic in the innovator of genius and in the equation of citizen and warrior. But Guicciardini is identifying (if not replacing) virtù with prudence, the steersman’s or doctor’s power to observe events and accommodate oneself to them, rather than seeking to shape or determine them; his is a politics of maneuver rather than of action. It calls for the maximum degree of information and deliberation compatible with the unrelenting and unpredictable speed of events, and the case against popular control of external policy is that the many cannot achieve this. One man or a few, Bernardo says, have the time and the application to acquire this intuitive sense for affairs and to translate it into action. An assembly of many men has not;43 but it is not quite clear whether the reasons for this are quantitative or qualitative. On the one hand it is indicated that a problem, knowledge of which has to be diffused among many men, is unlikely to be studied and inwardly digested, and that decisions which require the concurrence of many minds will be too slow in the making or the alteration. On the other hand there is language which suggests that an assembly of many will be an assembly of individuals each intent on his private affairs, and consequently lacking the leisure in which experience, prudence, and an understanding of power politics can alone be acquired; Bernardo even suggests that the many are especially corruptible because, as private individuals, they do not regard the common good as their own, whereas a single ruler thinks of the common good as his own property.⁴⁴ At all events, an assembly cannot develop the deliberative and intuitive knowledge which an understanding of power politics requires, and so can never attain continuity of policy; but the powers with whom they must conduct their relations will for the most part be governed by princes, who do have durable conceptions of their own interests and so can understand and work with one another, but who will consequently refuse to enter upon relations with democracies that do not know their own minds.45

For the same reason, princes can usually deal with mercenary captains and soldiers, but these are the natural enemies of popular governments. A prince regards war as a normal activity and his relations with mercenaries are durable; but a democracy makes war only when it must, employs mercenaries only as an emergency measure and tries to get rid of them, if possible unpaid, as soon as the emergency is over.⁴⁶ It is useless, adds Bernardo, to allege the success of the Romans in conducting war and foreign policy under a popular government, since it is possible to deny that their military success was related to their governmental structure. Since the latter was full of discord and confusion, it cannot have contributed to their virtù in war, which was in any case as great under the kings as under libertà. The Roman military system was not the consequence of popular government, but contributed two things to its success. In the first place, it enabled the Romans to rely wholly on their own power and so to do without that vigilanzia e diligenzia sottile necessary to those who must rely on diplomacy amid the power of others. In the second, it placed control of war and policy in the hands of the consuls, experienced military men who looked on war as the source of their civic greatness and even as a profession (bottega). We cannot imitate the Romans unless we can duplicate the conditions of their civic life.⁴⁷

Whether or not Guicciardini was aware of the content of Machiavelli’s Discorsi or of the debates in the Orti Oricellari, his argument can only be read as forming an antithesis to what Machiavelli had to say. It is to be observed that he takes for granted the impossibility of duplicating Roman conditions, that is, of making military training and discipline part of the civic personality of every Florentine citizen. In Book II Bernardo is made to deplore the decline of the civic militia, but to argue that it is now too late to bring it back;48 he does not, however, argue that it would be bad to restore it on the grounds that this would mean conceding too much power to the people. Guicciardini merely assumes that Florence cannot exert dominant military strength, but must exist by diplomatic subtlety in a world of princes and condottieri; and he remarks at a later point that if the Romans had employed mercenaries and so had had to live “as unarmed cities do,” by means of wit rather than arms, their form of government would have ruined them in a very few years.⁴⁹ Intelligence of this order is possible only to one or a few, and the form of government in a città disarmata must conform to that. But once again, Guicciardini is not singing the praises of the ottimati so much as telling them to change their values. In setting up a constitution in which the Consiglio Grande has such power, they were relying on virtù in Soderini’s sense; that the military and diplomatic condition of the city forbids their relying on virtù in Machiavelli’s philo-Roman sense is one more reason why the quality required of them should be seen as prudence. Bernardo remarks that the architects of the 1494 constitution meant well, but could not know how their experiments would turn out:

nor is this any wonder, since none of them had seen the city free or managed the humours of free men; and those who have studied liberty in books have not observed and digested its peculiarities as have those who know it by experience, which teaches us many things that learning and innate intelligence never impart.50

They should also have considered that the city of Florence is already old, and that such cities are very hard to reform or to prevent from reverting to their former harmful usages.⁵¹ Guicciardini does not mention here the reforming legislator whom Machiavelli had depicted as having so inhumanly hard a task in the like circumstances; there was little point in doing so where his main concern was to enjoin prudence and caution upon the ottimati, and this is a moment at which Bernardo adjures his hearers to fling away ambition and be content with what is possible. They might have done better not to overthrow the Medici, but having done so they must learn to live with the consequences.

But if we read Book I simply as recommending the abandonment of virtù in favor of prudence or of the civic ideal in favor of the quasi-monarchical authority of a ruling group, we shall be little prepared for what is to follow in Book II. Here Bernardo is invited to state his conception of the best form of government attainable for Florence in post-1494 circumstances; and he does so in terms of a complex distribution of authority between a gonfaloniere, a senate, and a Consiglio Grande, in which Venice is consciously copied as the best example ever to have existed of a constitution uniting the three forms of government. The tone is classical and humanist throughout. Bernardo displays an erudition in ancient and modern history hard to reconcile with his earlier disclaimers of learning; he mentions with respect—though, significantly, he does not feel able to adopt—the ideal of a civic militia; and, most perplexing of all, he accepts as a postulate that one of the criteria for judging any form of government is its success at encouraging virtù in a sense fundamentally indistinguishable from Soderini’s. A drastic shift in perspective would seem to have occurred.

To Vittorio De Caprariis, one of the most penetrating of Guicciardini’s modern analysts, it seemed inescapable that Book II was pointless, an unprofitable excursion into the realms of the ideal and (like the Ricordi) of no use or value to the student of his thought’s real development.52 But De Caprariis was a brilliant expositor of the tradition of Crocean historicism; he was exclusively concerned to study Guicciardini’s transition dalla politica alla storia, from devising stable constitutional schemes for Florence to the realization, expressed in the great history of his later years, that the civic lives of Florentines and all other Italians now existed in a current of profound historical change which was hardly any longer of their own making. De Caprariis was Crocean enough to feel that human self-knowledge was essentially historical knowledge, and awaited only the rise of intellects strong enough to realize that man’s life was led in history and nowhere else; and he experienced an evident impatience when Guicciardini seemed to turn aside after advancing so rapidly on the road to that discovery. It was also—and rightly—an essential part of his argument that Guicciardini’s realization that the ottimati now existed solely in their history was based upon the realization that their fortunes had become irretrievably bound to those of the Medici; and therefore he had stressed those passages of Book I which depict the Medici and the ottimati as jointly exercising a supreme and self-moderating power, interpreting them as constituting a wholesale abandonment of the Aristotelian-Polybian tradition. This left him unable to accept the revival of that tradition and of the ottimati’s position within it, which forms the theme of Book n. He accordingly accused the second half of the Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze of the deadly sin of unhistoric “abstractness” (astrattezza) and denied it any significance whatever.

But such thinking is itself unhistorical. Men like Guicciardini are not so naive as to engage at length in merely conventional writing unless the convention itself has some high degree of significance for them; and the problem is to find out what it was. At about the time when Guicciardini was writing the Dialogo, Machiavelli composed the Discorso delle cose fiorentine dopo la morte di Lorenzo, in which he genuinely seemed to believe that the ecclesiastics now heading the Medici family—Pope Leo X and the future Pope Clement VII—not being themselves permitted to found hereditary princedoms, might be content with a constitutional settlement at Florence in which the family was secured by a kind of hereditary lien on the role of the One in a government very much of the Venetian pattern. It is conventional to ascribe to Machiavelli a streak of idealism which Guicciardini lacked, and we may agree with De Caprariis⁵³ that though Guicciardini would have happily enough seen the Medici exercise the effective power in his imaginary constitution, he did not expect to see them institute it. Since 1512 it had been his belief that though the Medici needed the ottimati to legitimate and stabilize their rule, the objective necessities of power did not render them dependent on optimate support, but rather the reverse. There was a moral necessity, but political necessity did not support it. Consequently we may see Guicciardini, writing the Dialogo in 1520 and 1521, as facing the dilemma which Joseph Levenson has described as that between “value” and “history”;54 what ought to be is not what is going to happen, but nonetheless it requires to be affirmed. In these circumstances, to affirm one’s values is not an act of unreal abstraction, but precisely a moral necessity. If the ottimati and the city were not going to get what their natures required them to enjoy, the only way to evaluate what they were going to get was to study in depth what they ought to have had. There is room within this dichotomy for that duality of values which Guicciardini always sensed when he thought about his own order. In the world as it was after 1512—or after 1494—the pursuit of ambizione, onore, and virtù might be most dangerous and inappropriate behavior for the ottimati to display; but in the world as their own values and nature required that it should be, virtù in this sense must be given freedom to develop. It was therefore permissible to describe a vivere in many ways founded on aristocratic virtù, as a means to evaluating—and therefore to understanding—a world in which the aristocratic strategy must be prudence. We shall see that the last-named concept is never out of reach all through Book II, and that a return to the historical world is made toward its conclusion.

The way to interpret the remainder of the Dialogo, then, is to observe how the dialogue between virtù and prudence gives rise to what were to become key ideas in the tradition of republican constitutionalism: a generalization which will support the thesis that many of the roots of that tradition were in Aristotelian politics considered as a “science of virtue.” As with Machiavelli’s Discorsi, we are in a conceptual world related to, but not dependent on, such formalized theories of mixed government as the Polybian cyclical scheme, and one of the main differences which distinguish the two Florentines from their ancient masters is the special emphasis which the former give to the related themes of arms and civic virtue. Book II of Guicciardini’s work opens with a reexamination of the concept of virtù, and an early point raised by the interlocutors is the possibility of reviving at Florence the tradition of a citizen militia. Capponi contends that a popular government will do better than Bernardo has suggested at maintaining the city’s power over surrounding territories, because it will attract to this end the active enthusiasm of more citizens than will a governo stretto, especially should the citizenry be rearmed.55 Bernardo—somewhat surprisingly if we are to hear in his voice the immediate tones of Francesco Guicciardini—agrees without much sign of skepticism, though it is characteristic of him that he does not use the argument that personal military service heightens the individual’s personal virtù, and that his two reasons for thinking a citizen army beneficial to popular government are first, that it enables such a city to defeat its enemies despite the internal disorders to which it will be prone, and second, that the potenzia e virtù resulting will do much to nullify the weaknesses of popular government, because an armed state has less need of the vigilanzia and industria which only the few can provide.⁵⁶ The association between an armed people and virtù can never quite be eliminated and Bernardo thinks that the abandonment of the civic militia, if it did not originate in popular persecution of the nobility—a class of military leaders—was the work of faction leaders who felt their power safer when the people were disarmed and too much engrossed in business to care for risking their persons.⁵⁷ Harmful as the results have been, he does not see much hope of restoring the militia; to alter the habits and values of the people would take many years of good government, during which (a glance at 1512) the risks of relying on an imperfectly restored militia would be too great.⁵⁸

In the world as it is, the city is disarmed and requires the rule of prudent men; in a world dominated by theoretical values, a civic milizia might be the basis of civic virtù. But though Guicciardini will allow that a citizen army may make popular government strong and successful, he will not accept the thesis that the strongest and most successful form of government is a popular one because it generates a citizen army. Bernardo repeats at this stage his earlier contention that Roman military discipline owed nothing to the popular form of government; it was established by the kings and merely continued by the republic, and in those days every city in Italy armed its people.59 It is hard to think of the argument he is seeking to repudiate without expressing it in the terms of Machiavelli’s Discorsi, and this impression is heightened when the problem of Rome is reexamined at the end of Book II. In a lengthy discussion,⁶⁰ which seems to take place after the main business of the dialogue is concluded, Piero Guicciardini is made to take up the question of the connections between disorder in the early republic and the arming of the people. Since the Romans had buona milizia, he says, they must have had buoni ordini; since they had grandissima virtù, they must have had buona educazione and hence buone leggi. The struggles between the orders looked more alarming than they were and brought no fundamental disorder.⁶¹ The senate, being greatly outnumbered by the people, could either leave them unarmed at the price of military weakness or make enough concessions to their umori to ensure their military and political support.⁶² No doubt it would have been better to have the people armed but not tumultuous, but nothing in the social world is so perfect that it lacks some accompanying evil.63 Disorder at Rome therefore arose more from the nature of things than from any specific defect in the constitution, and the tribunate, a series of devices intended to protect the people against the senate, contained this disorder so effectively that Bernardo might well have included something of the kind in his ideal constitution.⁶⁴

It is very difficult to believe that Guicciardini was unacquainted with Machiavelli’s Discorsi when he completed the Dialogo; but the arguments which he puts in the mouth of his father, and has Bernardo refute, are essentially those of Machiavelli whether he knew this or not. It is important to grasp clearly just what he aimed to refute: first, that the struggle between the orders was the necessary consequence of arming the people; second, that the tribunate was the means of containing this struggle; third, that Roman military prowess forms an argument in favor of the popular element in government. Bernardo’s first contention is that the turbulence of the plebeians was not the simple consequence of the assertiveness of men in arms, but arose from specific defects in the social order. The patricians formed a distinctive hereditary class who monopolized all honors and offices and formally excluded plebeians from these; and they treated the latter with arrogance and oppressiveness, especially in matters of debt. Under the kings all these conditions obtained, and the people were enrolled in the army; yet there were no overt conflicts. The reason is that the kings used their supreme magistracy to protect the plebeians against the aristocracy, and promoted significant numbers of plebeians into the senatorial order; but when they were overthrown the leading plebeians saw all magistracies closed to them by their class enemies and the plebe bassa saw their only protector taken away. Conflict occurred as the latter supported the former in their struggle to force themselves into office. The city was still young, however, and fortune favorable inasmuch as the evils in this state of affairs were observed in time for their cure to become apparent; the patricians steadily if reluctantly gave way—it was again fortunate that they were so few—and opened more and more magistracies to plebeian leaders, and in proportion as this happened the plebe bassa showed themselves content that others should enjoy magistracy so long as they were protected in their lives and goods. In proportion also, the tribunate ceased to be a significant office; and the conclusion to be drawn is that the whole struggle, including the necessity for tribunes, could have been avoided from the beginning if magistracies had been awarded without distinction between patricians and plebeians. There was no causal relation between the arming of the people and the existence of enmities between the orders.65

As for Roman military virtù, this is not to be taken as proving that the ordini and leggi under which it flourished were good because the cause of it. The causes of Roman military success, says Bernardo, were costumi—love of glory, love of the patria; and he explains these by reference to historical rather than institutional causes. The city was poor and surrounded by enemies; when these were defeated and incorporated in an empire which brought wealth and luxury with it, corruption ensued and inordinate vices flourished under the best of laws.⁶⁶

It is clear that Guicciardini felt that military virtù and a civic militia might exist without a popular government and brought more to the latter than they derived from it. But he does not go to the length of arguing that a civic militia should be avoided because it necessitates the follies of popular government; indeed, his argument is formally incompatible with this position. He is against popular government at Florence because the city cannot be armed; he argues, not that it should not be armed on normative grounds, but that it cannot be armed on historical grounds. This must sooner or later carry us back into the realm of prudence. But the debate about virtù is far from being at its end. Guicciardini’s critique of the patrician order indicates that his aristocratic preferences were compatible with a firm rejection of any legally or institutionally stretto class monopolizing office. He was not (in his writings at least) an oligarch and had no interest whatever in an order of nobility; his elitist model of government is at every point in the analysis a competitive meritocracy, in which those possessing virtù—whatever role social position may play in affording the opportunity to develop it—acquire and maintain political ascendancy by publicly displaying that quality, which can only be acquired and displayed in civic and political action.67 The only other role for the Florentine ottimati was that of collaborators with the Medici, and even this state of affairs was one in which the Medici replaced the popolo as judges of the display of virtù, more than it was one in which the nature of virtù was fundamentally modified. If virtù was not ascriptive, but had to be acquired, displayed and recognized, there must be a certain openness about the political system founded upon it.

As we probe the nature of virtù, moreover, it becomes clear that such a political system places magnificence among its central values. Following the discussion of the militia early in Book II, Soderini is allowed to restate the case for virtù as he sees it. In reply to Bernardo’s earlier arguments, he maintains that it is not a sufficient definition of libertà that each man is able to enjoy his own under law, without owing it to any powerful protector or fearing any powerful oppressor. This is essentially a private ideal, he says, and is not conducive enough to a sense of the res publica. Soderini is arguing for a government of libertà and virtù, that is to say one in which the unusually talented few are allowed to satisfy their thirst for onore, which can be attained only by the performance in public of outstanding deeds beneficial to the patria and the public good; his liberty is that of the elite to develop their virtù to the full; and it is in this statement of his case that we realize how far virtù and onore have become identified. It is necessary, he goes on, to consider honor, magnificence and majesty and to rate generosità and amplitudine above utilità alone. It may be that cities were founded to conserve the security and convenience (commodità) of individuals, but for the very reason that these are private ends, cities cannot endure unless their citizens and rulers aim to make them magnificent and illustrious and to acquire for themselves the reputation among other peoples of being generosi, ingegnosi, virtuosi e prudenti (the last two epithets especially catch the reader’s eye). In private men we admire humility, frugality and modesty, but in public affairs the desirable qualities are generosity, magnificence and splendor.68 Not only is onore the end of libertà; it is shame and dishonor that are particularly to be dreaded in losing it, especially in the case of a city which is publicly committed to liberty ed ha fatta questa professione.

This is plainly an extreme case of that honor-centered scheme of values which many would consider characteristic of “Renaissance man.” It should not be forgotten, however, that even here onore is a form of civic virtù; it is attained in serving the common good, and in pursuing it and its concomitant values above all others, we are proclaiming the supremacy of the common good. What is noteworthy is that republican and patriotic values are being expressed in the form of ego-serving ideals like honor, reputation, and generosity, rather than in the distributive, social, and far more traditional ideal of justice. It is also observable that Soderini thinks of the supremacy of libertà, onore, and virtù rather as historically conditioned and determined by human choice than as natural to political man from the beginning. Referring to Bernardo’s contention that in evaluating any form of government one should examine the effects it produces and not whether libertà is one of its formal components, he observes that this may be true when a city is being established for the first time, but that when a city is committed to liberty to the point where it can be said that freedom has become part of its nature (naturale is the noun used, not natura), to lose liberty by force is utterly intolerable;69 as Bernardo himself has observed in another context, it is to lose the city’s soul. Here we are back at the key contention of Florentine libertarianism, that whatever is the best form of government in theory, a high level of participation in government is natural to Florence; but as always, it is “second” or “acquired” nature that is meant.

Soderini’s admission that liberty is a product of Florentine history links his thinking with Bernardo’s. When he asks the latter to expound his conception of the best form of government for Florence, Bernardo is enabled not only to accept the invitation—which in Book I he would have turned aside—but to go far toward including Soderini’s ideal of liberty, by stressing that what is under discussion is not the best form of government in the abstract—presumably monarchy—which could only be considered in the context of a city being founded for the first time, but the best form for Florence as she is: that is, for a city which has “made profession” of liberty to the point where the exclusive rule of one or a few could only be imposed by force. To escape the ensuing evils, which would be at their worst in the case of oligarchy, the best hope is offered by popular government; in theory the worst of the tolerable forms, it is proprio and naturale to Florence and involves least imposition by violence. Further, if we were devising a popular government for a new city, we could rely on the teachings of philosophy and the lessons of recorded history, but since we are concerned with a city actually existing, we must take into account “the nature, the quality, the circumstances (considerazione), the inclinations and, to express all these terms in a single word, the humours (umori—Montesquieu might have said esprit) of the city and the citizens.” Knowledge of these umori is not gained through the study of history in the bookish sense. Guicciardini here employs his favorite analogy of the physician who, though freer than the statesman since he can give the patient whatever medicines he chooses, nevertheless administers only those which are both good for the disease and such as the patient’s body can tolerate, “given its complexion and other attributes.”70 It is not stated how the physician acquires his knowledge of complessione and accidenti, but one suspects that this is through practical experience.

The doctrine of accidents enables Bernardo to accept Soderini’s scheme of values as part of the world with which he has to deal. The Florence of actuality is characterized by an acquired second nature, a tissue of accidents built up through experience, use, and tradition, which can only empirically be known. This accidental fabric has come to embody the values to which Soderini makes appeal—equalità, libertà, onore, and virtù; and Bernardo, who in Book I had tended to dismiss them in favor of a rigorous inspection of the predictable consequences of specific governmental arrangements, is now prepared to admit them as facts, that is as values which Florentines cannot afford (being what they are) not to acknowledge, and even to acknowledge them himself as values, with the proviso that it is only the need to study Florentine actuality which compels him to do so. His attitude to values, then, is empirical; he is consenting to erect a scheme of government based on civic virtù because it is prudent to acknowledge the facts of Florentine nature, of which a commitment to virtù is one.

Guicciardini is not now locating the ottimati and their values in the highly specific context created by the events of 1494 and 1512, but in that created by usage and tradition, in which accidents accumulate and second nature is acquired. This much may be conceded to De Caprariis’s opinion that at this point he fell short of a rigorous historicism; but it can be argued in reply that the context he employed was the appropriate one for presenting optimate values in a historical setting, and that once this had been done the constitution depicted in Book II of the Dialogo became somewhat less abstract and unreal than De Caprariis seems to have believed—though we shall find that Guicciardini did not, indeed, think it likely to be historically realized. In Book I the ottimati were offered the choice between onore considered as a species of civic virtù, and a prudence which might well involve recognition that in the actual world the civic framework and its values had been destroyed by Medicean rule. In Book II existing optimate values are to be paramount; it is recognized that they are libertà, onore, and virtù; and an attempt is to be made to discover the constitutional structure which these values necessitate. But Bernardo has begun by establishing that they are less intrinsic than given, part of the actual world which prudence must acknowledge, and he has committed the ottimati as well as himself to this recognition. They must acknowledge that ambizione and the thirst for onore are part of their temporal natures, that they require to be satisfied but at the same time to be kept in check; the exercise of prudence may be the highest form of the display of virtù, and it may entail acceptance of a scheme of government in which the pursuit of onore is limited by the power of others. As against this, however, such a scheme may ensure that the exercise of prudence is identical with that free pursuit of excellence which is the essence of libertà and virtù.

Meanwhile, that part of the argument in which Florence is contrasted, as a città disarmata, with Machiavellian Rome serves to establish that the conduct of external relations in a world not determined by Florentine power is the most important single activity of government, and that this requires the constant exercise of vigilanzia e diligenzia sottile. Only an experienced few can develop and display this quality, and the problem of constitution-making is largely a matter of reconciling their control of affairs with the maintenance of liberty.

It is difficult to find the right medicine, because it must be of such a kind that in curing the stomach one does not injure the head; that is, one must be careful not to alter the substance of popular government, which is liberty, or, in taking important decisions away from those incompetent to make them, to give so much authority to particular persons as to risk setting up some kind of tyranny.71

Since the external world is nonmoral, this problem may appear as one of reconciling facts with values, the brute necessities of survival with the need for moral relations within the city. Guicciardini is known for his skepticism and realism, and we may quite properly see it in this light. But Book II of the Dialogo is essentially value-oriented, and the reconciliation of leadership with liberty is a value problem on both sides of the equation. In exercising leadership and control the elite are displaying a virtue, which is prudence, and they are also pursuing values characteristically theirs, which are onore and virtù. At this level prudence and virtù have become identical, so that the choice between them has disappeared. But we have repeatedly seen that onore and virtù are civic qualities which require a civic and public setting for their development. The point of Soderini’s emulative conception of virtù, which Bernardo is now able to adopt, is that it brings about the identification of aristocratic with popular government; since virtù is onore, a public and popular audience is required to acclaim it and give it meaning. The few exist only in the many’s sight. This must be so, since their special excellence, like any other secular and republican virtue, is liable to self-corruption if suffered to exist in isolation. If the recognition of virtù was left to the few who possess and seek to display it, the result could only be disastrous competition (ambizione) or corrupt connivance and wheeler-dealing (intelligenza). For virtù to be recognized purely for what it is—for the recognition to be unflawed by extraneous or private considerations—for the elite to be truly free to develop it—recognition must be a public act performed by a public authority. Leaving aside the possibility, not further considered in Book II, that this authority might be a quasi-monarchical Medicean government, the remaining alternative is the Consiglio Grande. Meritocracy necessitates a measure of democracy. The libertà of the few is to have their virtù acknowledged by the res publica; the libertà of the many is to ensure that this acknowledgment is truly public and the rule of virtù and onore a true one.

A complex polity, or “mixed government,” is required both by the need to balance libertà against prudence (the stomach against the head), and by the nature of libertà itself. In both formulations it is essential that the popular assembly be prevented from trying to exercise itself those virtues and functions whose exercise it oversees and guarantees in the few; and it is no less essential that the few be prevented from setting up an oligarchy, that is from monopolizing those virtues and functions within a rigidly closed governo stretto. In his theoretical constitution, therefore, Bernardo has two overriding, and interlocking, purposes: to confine the Consiglio Grande to those functions which are essential to the maintenance of liberty, and to ensure that participation in the governing elite, which discharges all other functions, is determined solely by the public display of virtù. These aims necessitate a great deal of careful differentiation and distribution of powers, and it is striking to observe how nearly Guicciardini agreed that they had been attained in the Venetian model.

The Consiglio has three essential functions.72 By its existence alone it provides every person capable of holding office, that is to say every member of the city—Guicciardini does not revive the proposal, made in the Discorso di Logrogno, to enlarge the Consiglio by adding persons not capable of office—with access to decision and opportunity of office; this is to ensure that equality which is the prime foundation of liberty. In theory, the governing elite was to be an open meritocracy; no prior qualifications of wealth or birth were to be laid down, and promotion to office was to rest solely on one’s fellows’ opinion of one’s merits. As a corollary, then, the Consiglio must fill all or nearly all the offices and magistracies of the city; the aim here is to ensure that no magistrate is indebted to any individual (privato) or clique (setta) for his office. The point is less that the people or many as a distinct group should have power to choose the government they want, than that the process of recognizing fitness for office should be conducted as publicly and as impersonally as possible. The people do not exercise sovereignty so much as ensure that the res publica (here a remote fore-runner of the general will) is the choosing agency, and we enter upon no discussion of the qualities of mind that enable them to recognize virtù in others. These qualities, however, do not disappear, for Guicciardini continues to prefer election of magistrates by vote (le più fave) to the wholly impersonal machinery of sortition. Men are unequal in merit, and only the reasoning mind is capable of choosing its superior.

The third function which, in order to ensure the protection of liberty, is to be left in the Consiglio’s hands is that of “making new laws and altering old.” It is a temptation to refer to this as “the legislative power” and to see its inclusion here as a rudimentary attempt at a definition of sovereignty. But we must be quite clear as to just what this legislative function is. The leggi or provisioni of which Guicciardini speaks are essentially what Machiavelli calls ordini: those fundamental ordinances which give the polity its form by determining the distribution of the several political functions or powers. They must be kept in the hands of the Consiglio, first, to ensure that the determination of the city’s form is untouched by particular interests or pressures; secondly, because a free government can be altered only by laws or by arms, and if we render impossible any mutazione by means of law, other devices will prevent mutazione by armed force. In other words, the Consiglio’s function is less to legislate than to prevent legislation, which is still thought of largely as the determination of political form—a task which should be done once and then left unaltered. Nonetheless, there is implicit here the notion of some continuous activity of “making new laws and altering old,” which may bring about mutazione if improperly exercised, but can presumably be properly exercised so that it does not. Guicciardini does not define this permissible legislation for us, but since he did not believe that the form of a city could be perfectly established once and for all,73 it is likeliest that he thought of it as the correction of earlier deficiencies and the rounding out of first principles in the light of further experience. But he does tell us how it is to be carried on. The Consiglio is assumed incapable of initiating legislation—only in consigli più stretti is there the prudence which can cognize specific defects and remedies—and is excluded from all deliberazione, all framing and discussing of proposed legislation. It retains only the bare power of approvazione, of accepting or vetoing the proposals laid before it by smaller deliberative bodies. Significantly, Guicciardini does not examine here, as he had in the Discorso di Logrogno, the nature of the cognitive intellect which makes the many capable of evaluating what they cannot initiate or verbalize. If he had, he would no doubt have reproduced the Aristotelian doctrine of the cumulative judgment of the many, but it is more noteworthy that he did not and that, in place of their knowing what was best for themselves, he stressed once more their function of universalizing decision, of ensuring that it was free from corrupting particular interests. The role of the many was less to assert the will of the non-elite than to maximize the impersonality of government; and, with many more extreme exponents of the mito di Venezia, we wonder whether a machine might not be devised to do this more efficiently.

Guicciardini, however, shows no desire to see this done. He remains (in this respect) a civic humanist: the essence of his governmental ideal is that the elite shall display virtù before the eyes of the non-elite. It is for this reason that the deliberazioni of the few require the approvazione of the many, and he is strongly opposed to any attempt by the former to trespass on the province of the latter. He repeats from the Discorso di Logrogno⁷⁴ his condemnation of existing Florentine procedure, whereby new laws are proposed in the Consiglio, but must pass through a tangle of committees on their way to approval; this practice, he says, is plainly oligarchical, a device of existing power-holders to expose all possible reforms to destructive intervention by their confederates (sette). The correct procedure is to have new legislation initiated and discussed only in open senate, accepted or rejected only in open Council.75 Guicciardini’s assumptions are in a sense rationalist; he affirms that reason and virtue are most likely to prevail where there is unrestricted access to decision, and though the functional differentiation between elite and non-elite must be maintained, there comes a point where limiting the size of councils serves only to give undue weight to particular and sinister interests. The idea that the self-determination of the elite must be a public and open process is even more pronounced when he deals with election than when he deals with legislation.

Since Florentine politics were not conceived of as those of a jurisdictional society, legislation—the alteration of substantive law by sovereign will—did not seem as important to theorists as in the politics of a northern monarchy, and we already know that Machiavelli and Guicciardini regarded the management of external affairs as the most momentous single function of government. Since affairs of this kind were in constant daily change, they made the greatest demand on the prudenzia of the decision-makers, and it was therefore important both that their direction should be in the hands of a few and that these few should combine the greatest experience of such affairs with the maximum opportunity of enlarging that experience. The selection of magistrates to compose the political elite was very largely a matter of appointing men to deal with external affairs, and at this point there arose a clash of desiderata. On the one hand, the principles of equalità and libertà required that all citizens should have the maximum opportunity of office, which suggested—as it had to the framers of the constitution of 1494—that all magistracies should rotate as rapidly as possible; on the other, those of esperienzia and prudenzia required that magistrates should remain in office long enough to acquire experience and put it to use. Yet there was the danger that they would come to regard their offices as their own and behave corruptly and tyrannically. Guicciardini now argues that the Venetians have hit upon the best solution of this dilemma, in electing their doge for life, thus ensuring the benefits of his experience, but seeing to it that his authority is kept from becoming dangerous by requiring the constant concurrence of others to make it effective.⁷⁶ He proposes to adopt the Dogeship to Florentine conditions in the form of a gonfalonierate for life, instead of for very short terms as in the 1494 constitution; but this will necessitate changes in the signoria, the executive board with whom the gonfaloniere is required to work. At present membership of the signoria rotates very rapidly; every citizen wants his turn and the board is filled with men who understand what is happening so little that even a short-term gonfaloniere can do much as he likes with them. To develop a long-term signoria to balance a gonfaloniere for life would probably prove too difficult, and the best course may be to downgrade the signoria altogether, leaving the gonfaloniere to share power with a senate and its daily presidium, the “ten of war.” He is to be permanent chairman of the latter, possessing no formal powers but relying on his personality and experience to bring him authority.77

The senate is to be the central organ and the embodiment of the elite of virtù. Guicciardini observes that it is a problem in constitutional theory whether membership in a senate should be for life or for a limited term. The ancients opted for life; the Venetians rotate membership so rapidly that the pregati, as they call the equivalent body, are always largely made up of the same individuals. It makes relatively little difference which model we adopt.⁷⁸ The technical problem is that of combining the maximum continuity and therefore concentration of experience with the maximum expectation of eventual membership in the part of the aspiring, and if we have a large enough senate vacancies through death will occur often enough to give everyone the hope of election some day if he deserves it. Guicciardini prefers a senate elected for life for the same reasons as make him favor life tenure for the gonfalonierate: it ensures maximum concentration of experience, and it enables men to hope that their virtù will carry them to an office so secure that they need never fear, or feel indebted to, any other individual. In the case of the senate, as well, he seems to prefer election for life to rapid rotation because the individual will be the more certain that he owes his membership to public recognition, and not to the random operations of constitutional machinery. It is also suggested that Florentines, being more restless and ambitious than Venetians, are less willing to wait for their turns;⁷⁹ better therefore to create as large a senate as possible—150 instead of the 80 of 1494—and bring in the maximum number of aspirants on a permanent basis.

As the letter and spirit of this scheme emerge, more attention seems to be paid to the mobilization of virtù and the prevention of corruption than to ensuring the ascendancy of prudence; and the first two aims seem to require, in ways that the third does not, that the competition to have one’s virtù recognized be an open one. When Piero Guicciardini asks whether a doge or gonfaloniere for life is not better suited to Venice than to Florence, since the former is an aristocratic and the latter a popular republic, Bernardo replies that there is no essential difference between the two. In each city there is a grand council made up of the whole citizen body, that is of all who have the right to hold office; if it is harder for incomers to secure that right at Venice, the difference is one of ordini only and does not amount to one in the spezie del governo. What is important is that within each citizen body—the popolo of Florence, the gentiluomini of Venice—there is formal equality of access to office; “they make no distinctions of wealth or lineage, as is done where optimates rule,” and the Venetian system is as popular as the Florentine, the Florentine as optimate as the Venetian.80 In each system, we are to understand, the ruling elite emerge solely through the display of the necessary qualities and the recognition and choice of their fellows.

If there is a difference of substance between Venice and Florence, it lies not in the formal commitment of either city to the principle of equality, but in that greater restlessness and ambition which marks the Florentine personality in the pursuit of onore. Bernardo treats this characteristic with highly Aristotelian ambivalence. On the one hand it is desirable that men should be ambitious for that onore which can be won only by serving the res publica and to exclude ambition, so that they are content with mere security, is no longer the pragmatic realism of Book I, but an unattainable Platonic ideal. On the other, it is dangerous that ambizione should reach a point where honor is desired for its own sake, since the private good will now be set above the public good and men will soon become capable of doing anything whatever to get and retain it. However, men have this appetite, whether it is to be praised or condemned, and the political theorist must take account of it.81 Nor should a free government need to fear the ambition of its citizens; if properly directed it should lead to the emergence not merely of a governing elite, but of those three or four highly exceptional men on whose virtù, at any one time, nearly everything depends.⁸²

The proper direction of this laudabile o dannabile ambition takes several forms. In the first place, one must ensure that no office carries so much power that it is not limited by the power of some other; this is why the gonfaloniere is to share executive authority with the “ten” and the senate, and the senate to share legislative power with the Consiglio. This will not only keep the corrupt magistrate harmless, but actually prevent his corruption by reminding him constantly that what he has and is he shares with the public. In the second place, there must be offices of honor sufficiently numerous and graded, and changing hands often enough, to ensure that nobody is without hope of promotion according to the merit he displays. In Bernardo’s ideal system, these gradi begin with election to the senate for life, rise through the various magistracies which senators may assume and culminate with the supreme office of the gonfalonierate.83 But in the third place, it must be made plain at every point that office is the reward of public recognition of virtù and can never be owed to the private favor of individuals or cliques.⁸⁴

Bernardo’s determination to ensure the last of these drives him to several proposals designed to open up the system, at some points going well beyond the confines of the Venetian paradigm. When the senate elects persons to those offices which are not in the gift of the Consiglio Grande, it is to be afforced either by a variety of lesser magistrates not otherwise of its body, or else by one hundred commissioners elected by the Consiglio and sitting with the senate for this purpose only. The aim here is to prevent the senate from becoming a closed corporation, by reminding its members that they must still take account of those whose good opinion put them in the senate originally, and to break up the sette and intelligenzie which will otherwise form within its body.⁸⁵ Deliberation, as opposed to election, is to be rigorously confined to the life membership of the senate, but all debate is to take place in open and plenary sessions and the gonfaloniere, in his capacity as president, is to ensure that as many speak as possible, notably the reluctant, the inexperienced, and the relatively unknown.⁸⁶ Guicciardini is balancing the hierarchical principle that the most experienced should take the lead against the egalitarian principle that the elite must be reinforced by giving the greatest number opportunity to acquire experience and develop virtù; he is also not unaware that cliques and corruption could arise if the same individuals took the lead all the time. But a reputation as an intelligent commentator in debate, he says, will bring a man more esteem than a two-months tenure of the gonfalonierate, even if he never holds office at all; and if this is the accepted road to office and advancement, crooked means will not be used.87

Guicciardini’s antipathy to private alliances and relationships in politics, and his belief in countering these by wide public participation, are most clearly stated in his discussion of the mode of electing the gonfaloniere. Here he holds the Venetians to have made a mistake: anxious to avoid the extremes of popular ignorance and optimate ambitions and rivalries, they have set up an elaborate machinery of indirect election and drawn ballots, designed to produce at the end of the process forty-one men to choose the doge, whose names could not possibly have been predicted at the beginning, so that no intrigues or canvassing can occur. But all this is beside the point. Either the fortyone will be nobodies, in which case they will be ignorant and inexperienced; or they will be men of substance, with interests, alliances, and ambitions of their own, in which case their choice will be predetermined by private considerations. In practice the latter is what happens; a knowledgeable observer of Venetian politics can usually predict who will be doge once he knows the names of the forty-one, because he will know their dependenzie. It is true that even so they will elect one of the five or six best qualified citizens, but corruption has not been sufficiently eliminated.⁸⁸

Here we return to basic principles. Every city consists of a many and a few, a popolo and a senato, and the normal road to power and influence lies through alliance with one or the other. Guicciardini now develops a somewhat Polybian argument;⁸⁹ it may be legitimate enough to defend people against senate or senate against people, but the nature of man is insatiable and we pass imperceptibly from defending our own to claiming what is another’s.⁹⁰ Either strategy in the end produces harmful results, but it is easy in principle so to arrange matters that the aspirant to office must be acceptable to both parties. Let the senate meet and choose persons by lot to draw up a panel of forty or fifty candidates. The three of these who receive the most votes—irrespective of whether one has an absolute majority or not—must be voted on by the Consiglio Grande on another day, and if one has an absolute majority, let him be gonfaloniere; if not, let three other finalists be selected and the process repeated until a victor emerges. The participation of the senate ensures that the final candidates are men of standing; that of the people ensures that the final outcome is not determined by intra-elite rivalries. Each contributes to ensure that the merit of the individual is recognized as publicly and impersonally as possible.91

Guicciardini, it is clear, is not an uncritical follower of the mito di Venezia, but he has Bernardo conclude his constitutional exposition with a conventional panegyric on the best form of government known to all time; he has already praised it—with the qualification per una città disarmata—on the grounds of its centuries-old stability,⁹² and here he even more conventionally adds that it combines the merits, while avoiding the disadvantages, of rule by the one, the few, and the many.⁹³ But this is not the real scaffolding of his thought on the subject of Venice. A fully Polybian theory would assert that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy had each its peculiar merit, or virtù, but that each tended to self-corruption in isolation; a true mixed government would employ each virtù to check the degeneration of the others, and in fully developed versions of the mito, as we shall see, it was usually added that the Venetians had achieved this by mechanical and self-perpetuating devices. Guicciardini set little store by these last, in comparison with the open recruitment of an elite of virtù; and it is his use of that key term that distinguishes his thought from schematic Polybianism. He does not attribute a separate virtù to each of the three forms, because he uses the word in such a way as to define it as a quality of the elite or few. We have repeatedly seen that the many are essential to his scheme, and they do not function in it without exercising some form of intelligence and judgment which is their own and not that of the elite. But Guicciardini nowhere tells us what it is or defines it as a virtù; the function of his many is to be a context for the few, and when in the passage under scrutiny he states that the chief good of popular government is “the conservation of liberty,” he instantly adds “the authority of the laws and the security of every man”94—moving down the scale toward that private and nonparticipatory definition of liberty set out in Book I. Nor has the one—the gonfaloniere or doge—any virtù of his own distinguishable from the esperienzia, prudenzia, and honorable ambition of the few; he is simply the culmination of the elitist edifice.

Guicciardini does not idealize Venice as a synthesis of different forms of virtù because, at bottom, he recognizes only one, and since this is an attribute of the few, the roles of the one and the many must remain ancillary. Machiavelli had departed even further from the Polybian-Venetian paradigm because he saw virtù as the attribute of the armed many; Guicciardini’s skepticism about this reading of Roman history is of less importance than his regretful conviction that the Florentine militia was beyond revival. But in terms both of historical reality and of preferred values, his conception of virtù was aristocratic. The problem then was to prevent the corruption and decay of the few, specifically of the Florentine ottimati. The one and the many provided the structure in which the virtù of the few—more prudent and less dynamic than Machiavellian virtù—might continue to be autonomously directed toward the common good; but since they did not exercise virtù specifically their own, we are not being shown a Polybian structure in which the polity is a combination of different forms of virtù and its stability is ensured by their checking each other from degeneration. The Dialogo is not a treatise on how the mixed government may remain stable in a world where degeneration is the norm, or on how virtù may act to prevent the ascendance of fortuna. Guicciardini was too directly concerned with the historic dilemma of the Florentine ottimati to engage in so theoretical an inquiry; he knew that the alternative to a successful vivere civile was not some generalized form of cyclical decay, but the reestablishment of Medicean rule in a new and less advantageous relationship to the optimate class. It can however be shown that the supremacy of fortune is, in some ultimate sense, one of the poles within which his highly individual thought developed.

Bernardo concludes by remarking that as far back as can be read in Florentine history, the city has never enjoyed good government; there has been either the tyranny of one (as under the Medici), the insolent and self-destructive domination of the few, the license of the multitude, or the supreme irrationality of oligarchy and mob rule in conjunction. “Unless chance (sorte) or the mercy of God give us grace (grazia) to arrive at some such form of government as this, we must fear the same evils as have come about in the past.”95 Soderini asks what hope there is that this will ever happen, and Bernardo’s reply is a disquisition on the ways in which good governments are founded.⁹⁶ They come about either by force or by persuasion. A prince possessing absolute power may decide to lay it down and institute a republic. In theory this will be very easy, as none can resist him and a people passing suddenly from tyranny to liberty will think themselves in paradise and repose infinite faith in him; they will see, says Guicciardini in language which recalls Machiavelli’s treatment of the ideal legislator, that fortune has played no part in his decision, but that all depends upon his virtù to a degree which makes the latter more than human.⁹⁷ In the real world, however, the exercise of absolute power will either have created such hatreds that he dare not lay it down or (more probably) will have so far corrupted his character that he will not really want to (Augustus is the example here).⁹⁸ A private citizen may seek supreme power in order to reform the city, as did Lycurgus, but the same considerations apply; force and power tend to be self-perpetuating.⁹⁹ There remains persuasion, by which is evidently meant a collective decision by the citizens to set up good government; but for this to come about they must have had sufficient experience to know both the evils of bad government and the remedies for it, and must have suffered misfortunes great enough to teach them without either destroying them or driving them into violent conflicts and extreme causes. If the 1494 constitution should miscarry, there will be a move for a stato stretto but—Guicciardini is exercising hindsight here—a likelier outcome is a gonfaloniere with increased powers.100 All will then depend on his character and position; Guicciardini’s readers know that what is to come is the ineffective rule of Piero Soderini, but Bernardo says there is a slim chance that a strong and wise gonfaloniere, especially if appointed for life, will institute a constitution truly of the Venetian pattern.¹⁰¹

The explicit conclusion is that Florence in 1494 is still too much at the mercy of fortune to allow much hope of a stabilized republic.¹⁰² It seems also to be implied, at least to some extent, that such a republic is the only alternative to the rule of fortune; Guicciardini, we know, believes that its power over its own citizens is the only form of power not radically violent or unjust. But the realm of fortune is not—in theory it could but need not be—one of totally random and unpredictable happenings. Since 1513 Guicciardini had been anatomizing what was in fact emerging out of the failure of republican government—a restored Medicean system in which the intense hostility of the popolo, deprived of their Consiglio Grande, rendered the Medici more suspicious and the ottimati less able to act as an independent counter-weight to them. He now has Bernardo conclude the main theme of the Dialogo—Roman history and some other topics are still to be discussed—by expatiating on this possibility, after which he reminds Soderini, Capponi, and Piero Guicciardini that though they will doubtless endeavor to reform the republic, they may not succeed. Success in any political enterprise is a matter of tempo and occasione, and the times cannot be said to be propitious. If the times are against one, circumstances may arise in which the only strategy is to temporize and conform, since the attempt to innovate may bring about worse evils yet.103

With this we return from the realm of value into that of history, or, to use the terminology we have found most effective in interpreting Guicciardini, from that of virtù into that of prudence. In the ideal republic prudence appeared as a form of virtù, that is, of morally free and unforced civic behavior. But it could always bear the meaning of doing the best one could with what one could not help getting; and in this sense it might be the appropriate conduct for a world in which the republican experiment had collapsed and the ottimati found themselves allied not with the popolo, among whom they could display virtù if they were ever accepted as natural leaders, but with the Medici on terms which could never again be those that had obtained before 1494. Guicciardini never failed to emphasize that the revolution of that year had been a mutazione, an innovazione, after which everything was changed and the future was hard to predict or to control. The rhetoric for depicting such consequences was the rhetoric of fortune; and the quality we have been calling prudence might therefore appear preeminently the quality of intellect and personality with which the intelligent aristocrat sought to govern himself and others, in the world of fortuna.

When Guicciardini wrote the Dialogo, it still seemed worthwhile to devise a civic setting in which virtù and prudence could function together and develop to the full. The world of fortuna and prudence in naked confrontation does not appear in his writings until the Ricordi of 1528 and 1530, because only then did he face the full reality of optimate isolation between Medici and popolo. These were the years of the last republic and the Great Siege, in which an increasingly revolutionary popular government drove out the ottimati—including Guicciardini himself—and defied the Medici in ways which ensured that the latter could return only as absolute princes. At the end of the Siege, Guicciardini was to react by helping the Medici reimpose themselves and by engaging personally in their savage purge of the defeated popular leaders;104 but during its course he employed his enforced leisure by completing a critique of Machiavelli’s Discorsi and a collection of aphorisms in which we clearly see the world as it then appeared to him. A dominant—perhaps the overmastering—theme of these Ricordi is the extraordinary difficulty of applying intelligence to the world of events in the form of personal or political action. When all the books have been read, the lessons learned, and the conclusions digested—Guicciardini never for a moment suggests that these preliminaries do not have to be gone through—there remains the problem of converting thought into action;¹⁰⁵ and even when experience has brought an accidental knowledge of particulars that natural intelligence cannot provide,¹⁰⁶ that problem remains, lying beyond any conceivable systematization of knowledge, as the problem of judging time, of determining the moment to act, and the considerations relevant to both the moment and the action.¹⁰⁷ It is easy to see that the fool may fail to understand what is happening; Guicciardini sees that the very intelligent man may overreact to what he sees happening,¹⁰⁸ so that he imagines it to be happening faster and more completely than it is.109 Where Machiavelli had thought it better to act than to temporize, since time was likely to worsen one’s position, Guicciardini can see the strength of the case for temporization, since nothing can worsen one’s position more than one’s own ill-considered actions. But both men are clear that the domain of imperfectly predictable happenings—Guicciardini salutes Aristotle for laying it down that there can be no determined truth about future contingencies¹¹⁰—is the domain of fortuna. All the ricordi which are relevant to this problem should be read as the counterpart to chapter XXV of Il Principe and to those chapters of the Discorsi which deal with the problems of action in a society which has begun to be corrupt.

On several occasions in the Ricordi—echoing passages in the Dialogo and in the Considerations on Machiavelli’s Discourses which Guicciardini wrote about this period—there appear criticisms of Machiavelli’s treatment of Roman history, a recurrent theme of which is the naivete of supposing that one can imitate Roman examples under very different conditions.¹¹¹ Around this there has sprung up a literature which contrasts Machiavelli’s supposedly idealistic belief in historical parallels and recurrences with Guicciardini’s supposedly more realistic understanding that no two situations are exactly alike and that one must play them by ear rather than by the book.¹¹² But it is possible that this contrast has been overstated. Both men lived in a conceptual world where fortuna was held to be both unpredictable and recurrent; Guicciardini declares in both final drafts of the Ricordi that everything recurs, though it does not look the same and is very hard to recognize;113 and Machiavelli knew well enough that the lessons of history were difficult to apply and that this was part of the whole problem of action in time. There is little separating them here but emphasis and temperament. The important difference between the two men is not a question of historical sophistication, but lies in the fact that Machiavelli used the term virtù to denote the creative power of action to shape events, whereas Guicciardini had little faith in this power and did not use the term virtù to describe it. Both men found virtù used to denote behavior constitutive of a system of morality in action; but Machiavelli’s most daring intellectual step was to retain the term to denote aspects of the individual’s behavior in the domain of war outside the city and after the civic universe had collapsed, and Guicciardini employed it only with reference to the civic setting. Il Principe and the Ricordi both depict the individual in the post-civic world; but Machiavelli’s individual is a ruler seeking to shape events through virtù in the sense of audacity, Guicciardini’s a patrician seeking to adapt himself to events through prudence. Both men hold that audacity and prudence are appropriate in different circumstances, that these circumstances are brought to us by fortuna, and that it is exceedingly difficult for the individual to tell what they require.

If we compare the two writers’ thoughts on the civic and republican framework, we find that their conceptions of virtù can be further differentiated in relation to their thought about arms and war. From Il Principe, where virtù appears as limited but real creative power, Machiavelli went on to complete the Discorsi and the Arte della Guerra, concerned with the armed popular state where the foundation of civic was military virtù and the republic could tame its environment by arms. Before he wrote the Ricordi, Guicciardini had completed the Dialogo, in which he considered and rejected the Roman paradigm and settled for the città disarmata, where the essential skill was that of adaptation to the environment through prudence. Consequently, virtù had no meaning for him outside the civic setting, where it was identical with prudence; and when the republic and its virtù had vanished together, prudence remained the instrument of the post-civic individual.114 The only alternative remaining—our basic model informs us—was faith, reposed in providence or prophecy, as operations of grace: that faith which Savonarolans were still placing in the messianic destiny of Florence. Guicciardini inserts in the Ricordi an analysis of the faith which moves mountains, considered as a purely unreasonable persistence in the teeth of circumstances; capable, if raised to a sufficient height of exaltation, of doing the work of virtù, triumphing over contingencies and shaping them in ways which no reasonable observer could have predicted. It is faith of this order which has nerved the Florentines to defy the armies of pope and emperor together for more than seven months, and the faith in question is reposed in the prophecies of Savonarola.¹¹⁵ It is also indicated that this faith is a madness, which consists in trusting oneself wholly to fortuna.¹¹⁶

But the thought of Guicciardini diverges from that of Machiavelli at the point where each man assesses the role of armed virtù and of arms themselves as a cause of virtù: a problem closer to the ultimate concerns of Western political thought than has always been understood. Guicciardini was as well aware of the nonmoral element in politics as Machiavelli, but he employed virtù only as a compendium for the values of civic humanism. Machiavelli was as well aware of those values as Guicciardini, but he held them to be contingent on a people’s ability to control its environment by arms, which he called its virtù. Guicciardini—the greater realist, perhaps, in his assessment of Florentine military capacity—was able, in choosing Venice as typical of the città disarmata, to develop the image of a society in which those values were realized in purity; Book II of the Dialogo is a statement of the civic ideal such as Machiavelli never attempted. The role of Venice was to be paradigmatic for civic humanism, and below the level at which the Venetian image was a myth of Polybian stability, it furnished paradigms for the conversion of classical political values into actual or nearly actual political arrangements. The writings of Donato Giannotti, like those of Guicciardini himself, show us the paradigms in action as conceptual tools; those of Gasparo Contarini show us the symbolic development of the myth.

1 The text used here is that of Palmarocchi’s Dialogo e Discorsi (D. e D.), pp. 3-174; see above, ch. V, n. 12.

² D. e D., p. 6: “Come se la volontà ed el desiderio degli uomini non potessi essere diverso dalla considerazione o discorso delle cose, o come se da questo ragionamento apparissi quale di dua governi male ordinati e corrotti mi dispiacessi manco; se già la necessità non mi costrignessi a biasimare manco quello di che s’ha piú speranza potersi riordinare.”

³ See above, ch. V, n. 10.

⁴ Domandi ed. (above, ch. V, n. 9), pp. 134-35.

⁵ D. e D., p. 8: “[Bernardo:] … in tanto tempo che io ho, ho veduto per esperienzia che le mutazioni fanno piú danno alla città che utile, di che vi potrei molti esempli allegare …

“[Soderini:] Si forse, quando le sono di quella sorte che sono state l’altre de’ tempi vostri, le quali si debbono mutazioni da uomo a uomo, o come meglio avete detto voi, alterazione che mutazioni di stati … questo ultimo, nel quale solo a’ dì vostro si è fatta mutazione di una specie di governo a un’ altro. E quando questo accade, e si muti di una specie cattiva in una buona, o d’una buona in una migliore, io non so perché la mutazione non sia utile …”

⁶ D. e D., pp. 11-12: note also Bernardo’s remark (p. 11): “… esperienzia della quale nessuno di voi manca, avendo già piú e piú anni sono, atteso alle cose dello stato; ed oltre a questo ed el naturale buono, avete davantaggio le lettere con le quali avete potuto imparare da’ morti gli accidenti di molte età; dove io non ho potuto conversare se non co’vivi, né vedere altre cose che de’ miei tempi.” For a relationship of some sort between Ficino and the elder Guicciardini, see Carlo Dionisotti, “Machiavelli letterato,” in Gilmore, ed., Studies on Machiavelli, p. 110.

⁷ D. e D., pp. 12-13: “[Piero:] È vera cosa che di questi tre reggimenti, quando sono buoni, el migliore è quello di uno, ma difficilmente può essere buono se è fatta piú per la forza o per fazione o per qualche usurpazione, che per elezione o volontà libera de’ sudditi; e di questa sorte non si può negare che non fussi quello de’ Medici, come quasi sono tutti oggidì e’ domini di uno, che el piú delle volte non sono secondo la volontà o el naturale de’ sudditi, ma secondo lo appetito di chi prevale; e però siamo fuora del caso de’ filosofi, che mai approvorono reggimento di specie simigliante. Potrei ancora dire, secondo e’ medesimi filosofi, che el governo di uno, quando è buono, è el migliore de’ tutti, ma quando è cattivo è el peggio.… e quale fussi migliore sorte di una città che nascessi ora e che si avessi a ordinare el governo suo, o che fussi ordinate in uno governo di uno, o in governo di molti [?]”

⁸ D. e D., p. 14: “E quella distinzione che ha fatta Piero, tra el governo di uno quando è naturale e per elezione e voluntà de’ sudditi, ed uno governo usurpato e che ha del violento, ha anche in sé ragione capace agli idioti, perché che domina amorevolmente e con contentezza de’ sudditi, se non lo muove la ignoranzia o la mala natura sua, non ha causa alcuna che lo sforzi a fare altro che bene. E questo non interviene a chi tiene lo stato con violenzia, perché per conservarlo e per assicurarsi da’ sospetti, gli bisogna molte volte fare delle cose che egli medesimo non vorrebbe e che gli dispiacciono, come io so che spesso fece Cosimo, e … Lorenzo qualche volta lagrimando e a dispetto suo fece deliberazione … contrarie alla natura sua …”

⁹ D. e D., pp. 14-15: “Questa diversità adunche tra l’uno governo e l’altro non procede perché la spezie del governo in sè faccia buono o cattivo quello che fussi d’altra condizione, ma perché secondo la diversità de’ governi, bisogna tenerli con mezzi diversi.… dico che a volere fare giudicio tra governo e governo, non debbiamo considerare tanto di che spezie siano, quanto gli effetti loro, e dire quello essere migliore governo o manco cattivo, che fa migliori e manco cattivi effetti. Verbigrazia, se uno che ha lo stato violento governassi meglio e con piú utilità de’ sudditi, che non facessi un altro che lo avessi naturale e voluntario, non diremo noi che quella città stessi meglio e fussi meglio governata?”

¹⁰ D. e D., pp. 15-16: “Però ogni volta che sanza venire a particulari, si ragiona quale governo è migliore, o uno violento o uno volontario, risponderei subito essere migliore el volontario, perché cosí ci promette la sua natura e cosí abbiamo in dubio a presummere, avendo l’uno quasi sempre seco necessità di fare qualche volta male, l’altro non avendo mai cagione di fare altro che bene. Ma quando si viene a’ particulari ed a’ governi che sono in essere … io non guarderei tanto di che spezie siano questi governi, quanto io arei rispetto a porre mente dove si fa migliori effetti e dove meglio siano governati gli uomini, dove piú si osservino le leggi, dove si faccia migliore giustizia e dove si abbia piú dispetto al bene di tutti, distinguendo a ciascheduno secondo el grado suo.”

¹¹ Ibid.: “… considerata la natura sua e la natura della città e di questo popolo, possiamo immaginarci che effetti producerà …” and thè objection of Piero Guicciardini.

¹² D. e D., pp. 16-17: “… la lunga età che io ho, e lo avere molte volte veduto travagliare questa città nelle cose di drento, e quello che spesso ho udito ragionare de’ tempi passati da uomini antichi e savi, massime da Cosimo, da Neri di Gino e dalli altri vecchi dello stato, mi hanno dato oramai tanta notizia della natura di questo popolo e de’ cittadini ed universalmente di tutto la città, che io credo potermi immaginare assai di presso che effetti potrà portare seco ciascuno modo di vivere. Né voglio mi sia imputato a arroganzia, se essendo io vecchissimo, ed avendo sempre atteso alle cose di drento e quasi non mai a quelle di fuora, fo qualche professione d’intenderle; la quale è di questa sorte, che io credo che facilmente molti particulari potrebbono variare dalla opinione mia, ma negli universali ed in tutte le cose di sustanzia spero ingannarmi poco.”

¹³ D. e D., p. 17: “E dove mi ingannassi io, potrete facilmente supplire voi, perche avendo voi letto moltissimo istorie di varie nazioni antiche e moderne, sono certo le avete anche considerate e fattovene uno abito, che con esso non vi sarà difficile el fare giudizio del futuro; perché el mondo è condizionato in modo che tutto quello che è al presente è stato sotto diversi nomi in diversi tempi e diversi luoghi altre volte. E cosí tutto quello che è stato per el passato, parte è al presente, parte sarà in altri tempi ed ogni dì ritorna in essere, ma sotto varie coperte e vari colori, in modo che chi non ha l’occhio molto buono, lo piglia per nuovo e non lo ricognosce; ma chi ha la vista acuta e che sa applicare e distinguere caso de caso, e considerare quali siano le diversità sustanziali e quali quelle che importano manco, facilmente lo ricognoscer[à], e co’ calculi e misura delle cose passate sa calculare e misurare assai del futuro. In modo che senza dubio procedendo noi tutti insieme cosí, erreremo poco in questi discorsi e potremo pronosticare molto di quello che abbia a succedere in questo nuovo modo di vivere.”

¹⁴ D. e D., p. 18: “… uno vivere libero, quale se negli altri luoghi è buono, è ottimo nella nostra città dove è naturale e secondo lo appetito universale; perché in Firenze non è manco scolpita ne’ cuori degli uomini la libertà, che sia scritta nelle nostre mure e bandiere. E però credo che e’ politici, ancora che ordinariamente ponghino tre gradi di governi, di uno, di pochi e di molti, non neghino però che el migliore che possi avere una città sia quello che è el suo naturale. Però io non so come in termini tanto sproporzionati si potrà procedere colla regola vostra, e come potremo mai dire che el governo della libertà, che a Firenze come ognuno sa è naturalissimo, non sia migliore che qualunche altro che ci si possa introdurre.”

¹⁵ Ibid.: “… parlando in genere, tu mi confesserai che uno governo di libertà non è di necessità migliore che gli altri. E’ vostri filosofi, o come tu dicesti ora politici, ne sono ahondante testimoni, che ordinariamente appruovano piú la autorità di uno quando è buono, che la libertà di una città; e ragionevolmente, perché chi introdusse la libertà non ebbe per suo fine che ognuno si intromettersi nel governore, ma lo intento suo fu perché si conservassino le leggi ed el bene commune, el quale, quando uno governa bene, si conserva meglio sotto lui che in altro governo.”

¹⁶ Above, ch. 5, n. 69.

¹⁷ D. e D., pp. 18-19: “E quella ragione in che tu hai fatto fondamento grande, di essere la libertà naturale in Firenze, non contradice alle cose dette prima, perché el filosofo ed ognuno che abbia giudicio, dimandato in genere, risponderà che el migliore governo che si possa mettere in una città sia el suo naturale.… Ma se venendo agli individui, si vedessi che uno vivere libero, ancora che naturale di una città, per qualche cagione particulare non facessi buoni effetti, allora né e’ filosofi vostri né alcuno che fussi savio, lo proporrebbono a un altro vivere, anzi loderebbono piú ogni altro governo che portassi seco maggiori beni.”

¹⁸ D. e D., p. 20: “… voi abbiate uno obligo grande a questo frate … Ma io sono di ferma opinione, e cosí sempre mostrerrà la esperienzia, che a Firenze sia necessario o che el governo sia in mano di uno solo, o che venga totalmente in mano del popolo; ed ogni modo di mezzo sarà pieno di confusione ed ogni dì tumultuerà. Questo me lo ha insegnato la esperienzia de’ tempi passati, ne’ quali tutti, quando lo stato è venuto in mano di pochi cittadini … finalmente in breve spazio di tempo lo stato uscito di mano di quelli pochi, o si è ristretto in uno solo o è ritornato alla larghezza …”

¹⁹ D. e D., pp. 21-22: “Bisogna che a fare questo effetto concorrino in uno medesimo, il che è cosa rarissima, prudenzia, tesoro e riputazione; e quando bene tante qualità concorressino tutte in uno, è necessario siano aiutate da lunghezza di tempo e da infinite occasioni, in modo che è quasi impossibile che tante cose a tante opportunità si accumulino tutte in uno medesimo; e però poi in fine non è mai stato in Firenze piú che uno Cosimo.”

²⁰ D. e D., p. 21: “A Firenze li uomini amano naturalmente la equalità e però si accordano mal volentieri a avere e ricognoscere altri per superiore; ed inoltre e’ cervelli nostri hanno per sua proprietà lo essere appetitosi ed inquieti, e questa secondo ragione fa che quelli pochi che hanno lo stato in mano sono discordi e disuniti.… Ed el non amare gli altri la superiorità di alcuno, fa che a ogni occasione che venga, vanno in terra; perché dispiacendo naturalmente a Firenze a ognuno che non è nel cerchio la grandezza d’altri, è impossible che la durí se la non ha uno fondamento ed una spalla che la sostenga. E come vi può essere questa spalla e questo fondamento, se coloro che reggono non sono d’accordo?” Cf. Ricordi, C 212.

²¹ D. e D., p. 24: “… se e’ si ha a arguire dalla ragione, si doverà credere a venti per uno el contrario; se dalla esperienzia, el medesimo.”

²² D. e D., pp. 27-28: “E che sdegno, anzi disperazione crediamo noi che si generassi nelli animi degli altri, quando vedevano che quello che in loro era peccato mortale si trattava in una sorte di uomini come veniale; che l’uno era trattato come figliuolo della patria, l’altro come figliastro? E quanto era inumana e tirannica quella parola con la quale pareva loro scaricare, anzi per dire meglio ingannare la conscienza, a che già era venuta come in proverbio: che negli stati si avevano a giudicare gli inimici con rigore e li amici con favore; come se la giustizia ammetta queste distinzioni e come se la si dipinga con le bilancie di dua sorte, l’una da posare le cose delli inimici, l’altra quelle degli amici!”

²³ D. e D., p. 35: “E che misera … avere a interpretare la voluntà di chi vuole essere inteso a’ cenni! In che, come ognuno sa, Lorenzo preme sopra tutti gli uomini.”

²⁴ D. e D., p. 34: “Però non so come Bernardo potra aguagliare el vivere di simili stati al governo populare, nel quale quando bene gli effetti non fussino migliori che quegli della tirannide, l’uno è secondo lo appetito naturale di tutti gli uomini che hanno per natura lo appetire la libertà, l’altro è direttamente contrario, avendo ognuno in orrore la servitù; donde eziandio con disavantaggio si debbe preporre quello che satisfa piú alla naturalità, che el contrario. E questa ragione è generale in tutti gli uomini, perché ordinariamente gli istinti naturali sono in ognuno.”

²⁵ Ibid.: “… le azioni loro, che arebbono ragionevolmente a essere libere nè avere dependenzia da altri che da sé medesimo e dal bene della patria, bisogna che si regolino secondo la arbitrio di altri, o sia giusto o sia a beneplacito …”

²⁶ D. e D., p. 35: “Adunche se el primo obietto di coloro che hanno retto legitimamente le città, se la principale fatica de’ filosofi e di tutti quegli che hanno scritto del vivere civile, è stata di mettervi quella instituzione che produca le virtù ed eccellenzia di ingegno e di opere generose, quanto sarà da biasimare e detestare uno governo, dove per contrario si fa estrema diligenzia di spegnere ogni generosità ed ogni virtù! Parlo di quelle virtù con le quali gli uomini si fanno atti alle azioni eccellenti, che sono quelle che fanno beneficio alla republica …

“Però io replico di nuovo che ogni volta che el governo non sia legitimo, perché allora la virtù è onorate, ma abbia del tirannico o fiero o mansueto, che con ogni disavantaggio ed incommodità di roba o di altra prosperità, si debbe cercare ogni altro vivere; perché nessuno governo può essere piú vituperoso e piú pernizioso che quello che cerca di spegnere la virtú ed impedisce a chi vi vive drento, venire, io non dico a grandezza, ma a grado alcuno di gloria, mediante la nobilità dello ingegno e la generosità dello animo.”

²⁷ D. e D., pp. 34-35: “… gli bisogna andare nascondendo la sua virtù, perché al tiranno dispiaciono tutti gli spiriti eccelsi, ogni potenzia eminente, massime quando procede da virtù, perché la può manco battere; e questo fa qualche per invidia, perché vuole essere lui singulare, spesso per timore, del quale per l’ordinario è sempre pieno. Non voglio applicare queste parole a particulare alcuno, ma voi sapete tutti che io non le dico senza proposito.”

²⁸ D. e D., pp. 35-36: “… la casa de’ Medici, come fanno tutti gli stati stretti, attese sempre a cavare l’arme di mano a’ cittadini e spegnere tutta la virilità che avevano; donde siamo diventati molto effeminati, né abbiamo quello vigore di animo che avevano gli avoli nostri; e questo quanto sia di danno a una republica lo può giudicare chi ha considerato che differenzia sia a fare le guerre con le arme proprie, a farle con le arme mercennarie … E che questo sia facile lo dimostrano le antiche republiche e se ne vede oggi qualche vestigio in questi svizzeri, che ora cominciano a farsi conoscere in Italia; e’ quali ancor che siano feroci ed armigeri quanto si vede, intendo che in casa loro vivono in libertà, sotto le leggi ed in somma pace.”

²⁹ D. e D., p. 39: “Si può dire piú tosto che questi simili abbino fatto per amore della patria che della libertà; la patria abbraccia in se tanti beni, tanti effetti dolci, che eziandio quegli che vivono sotto e’ principi amano la patria, e se ne sono trovati molti che per lei si sono messi a pericolo.”

³⁰ D. e D., pp. 45-46: “… faccendo differenzia da uno che è savio e non animoso, a uno che è savio, animoso a non inquieto, e da questo a chi ha ingegno ed animo ed inquietudine.”

³¹ D. e D., pp. 81-82: “Quando le città sono vecchie, si riformano difficilmente, e riformate, perdono presto la sua buona instituzione e sempre sanno de’ suoi primi abiti cattivi; di che, oltre alle ragioni che si potrebbono assegnare, potete pigliare lo esemplo di molte republiche antiche, le quali se nel suo nascere, o almanco nella sua giovanezza, non hanno avuto sorte di pigliare buona forma di governo, ha durato fatica invano chi ve la ha voluta mettere tardi; anzi quelle che sono use a essere bene governate, se una volta smarriscono la strada e vengono in qualche calamità e confusione, non tornano mai perfettamente al suo antico buono essere. È cosí el naturale corso delle cose umane, e come solete dire voi altri, del fato, che ha bene spesso piú forza che la ragione o prudenzia degli uomini.”

³² See in general D. e D., pp. 42-47.

³³ D. e D., p. 43: “… fondato … in sugli esercizi ed in sulle botteghe …”

³⁴ D. e D., p. 47: “… non solo ne’ governi, ma nelle arti, nelle scienzie ed in ogni altra cosa, non furono mai perfetti ne’ principi, ma si va aggiungendo alla giornata secondo che insegna la esperienzia.”

³⁵ Above, n. 30.

³⁶ D. e D., pp. 44-46.

³⁷ D. e D., pp. 46, 55.

³⁸ D. e D., p. 55: “Quanto alla malignità, io vi dico che per natura tutti gli uomini sono inclinati al bene, né è nessuno a chi risulti interesse pari dal male come dal bene, che per natura non gli piaccia piú el bene; e se pure si ne truova qualcuno, che sono rarissimi, meritano essere chiamati piú presto bestie che uomini, poi che mancono di quella inclinazione che è naturale quasi a tutti gli uomini.”

³⁹ D. e D., p. 77: “Lo stato de’ Medici, ancora che, come io ho detto, fussi una tirannide e che loro fussino interamente padroni, perché ogni cosa si faceva secondo la loro voluntà, nondimanco non era venuto su come uno stato di uno principe assoluto, ma accompagnato co’ modi della libertà e della civilità, perché ogni cosa si governava sotto nome di republica e col mezzo de’ magistrati, e’ quali se bene disponevano quanto gli era ordinato, pure le dimostrazioni e la immagine era che el governo fussi libero; e come si cercava di satisfare alla moltitudine de’ cittadini con la distribuzione degli uffici, cosí bisognava satisfacessino a’ principali dello stato non solo con le dignità principali, ma ancora col fare maneggiare a loro le cose importanti, e però di tutto si facevano consulte publiche e private.”

⁴⁰ D. e D., pp. 77-78: “E però nessuno de’ Medici, se non fussi publico pazzo, arebbe mai fatto questo, perché potevano conservare la autorità sua, sanza fare uno passo che gli avessi a inimicare ognuno, e bisognava che, facendolo, pensassino o uscire di Firenze a ogni piccola occasione che venissi, o aversi a ridurre tutti in su le arme ed in su la forza; cosa che e’ tiranni non debbono mai fare, se non per necessità, di volere fondarsi tutti in su la violenzia, quando hanno modo di mantenersi col mescolare lo amore e la forza. Aggiugnesi che chi togliessi alla nostra la sua civilità ed immagine di libertà, e riducessila a forma di principato, gli torebbe la anima sua, la vita sua e la indebolirebbe e conquasserebbe al possibile; e quanto è piú debole e manco vale la città, tanto viene a essere piú debole e manco valere che né è padrone; e cosí se e’ Medici avessino preso el principato assoluto, arebbono diminiuto e non cresciuto la sua potenzia e riputazione.”

⁴¹ D. e D., pp. 60-65.

⁴² D. e D., pp. 60-61: “Perché le cose di questa sorte non hanno regola certa ne corso determinato, anzi hanno ogni dì variazione secondo gli andamenti del mondo, e le deliberazioni che se ne hanno a fare, si hanno quasi sempre a fondare in su le conietture, e da uno piccolo moto dependono el piú delle volte importanze di grandissime cose, e da’ principi che a pena paiano considerabili nascono spesso effetti ponderosissimi. Però è necessario che chi governa gli stati sia bene prudente, vigili attentissimamente ogni minimo accidente, e pesato bene tutto quello che ne possi succedere, si ingegni sopra tutto di ovviare a’ principi ed escludere quanto si può la potestà del caso e della fortuna.”

⁴³ D. e D., p. 61: “Questo è proprio di uno governo dove la autorità è in uno solo o in pochi, perché hanno el tempo, hanno la diligenzia, hanno la mente volta tutta a questi pensiere, e quando cognoscono el bisogno, hanno facultà di provedere secondo la natura delle cose; che tutto è alieno da uno governo di moltitudine, perché e’ molti non pensono, non attendono, non veggono e non cognoscono se non quando le cose sono ridotte in luogo che sono manifeste a ognuno, ed allora quello che da principio si sarebbe proveduto sicuramente e con poco fatica e spesa, non si può poi ricorreggere se non con grandissime difficultà e pericoli, e con spese intollerabili.”

⁴⁴ D. e D., p. 65: “Dove hanno a deliberare molti è el pericolo della corruttela, perché essendo uomini private e che non hanno el caso commune per suo proprio, possono essere corrotti dalle promesse e doni de’ principi … questi non si ha a temere da uno, perché essendo padrone di quello stato, non si lascerà mai comperare per dare via o per disordinare quello che reputa suo.”

⁴⁵ D. e D., pp. 63-64: “… Queste coniunzione continuate si fanno difficilmente con uno popolo, perché non essendo sempre e’ medesimi uomini che governono, e però potendosi variare e’ pareri ed e’ fini secondo la diversità delle persone, uno principe che non vede potere fare fondamento fermo con questi modi di governo, né sa con chi si avere a intendere o stabilire, non vi pone speranza né si ristrigne teco, disegnando che ne’ bisogni o nelle occasioni tue tu ti vaglia sì poco di lui come lui spera potersi valere di te.”

⁴⁶ D. e D., p. 65: “Sanza che, molto manco si possono confidare de’ capitani e de’ soldati, che possa fare uno solo, perché tra’ soldati mercennari ed e’ populi è una inimicizia quasi naturale: questi se ne servono nella guerra, perché non possono fare altro; fatta la pace non gli remuneranno, anzi gli scacciano e gli perseguitano, pure che possino farlo; quegli altri, cognoscendo non servire a nessuno, o pensano tenere la guerra lunga per cavare piú lungamente profitto dalla sua necessità, o voltono lo animo a gratificarsi col principe suo inimico; o almeno gli servono freddamente …”

⁴⁷ D. e D., p. 68: “Né mi allegate in contrario lo esemplo de’ romani, che benché avessino el governo libero e largo, acquistano tanto imperio; perché … a me non pare che el modo del governo di Roma fussi di qualità da fondare tanta grandezza; perché era composto in modo da partorire molte discordi e tumulti, tanto che se non avessi supplito la virtù delle arme, che fu tra loro vivissima ed ordinatissima, credo certo che non arebbono fatto progresso grande.… e dove si fa el fondamento in sulle arme proprie, massime eccellenti ed efficaci come erano le loro, si può intermettere quella vigilanzia e diligenzia sottile che è necessaria a chi si regge in su le pratiche ed aggiramenti. Né avevano allora e’ capi della città a durare fatica a persuadere al popolo … perché erano uomini militari, e che non sapevano vivere sanza guerra, che era la bottega donde cavavano ricchezze, onori e riputazione. Però non si può regolare secondo questi esempli chi non ha le cose con le condizione e qualità che avevano loro.”

⁴⁸ D. e D., pp. 90-93.

⁴⁹ D. e D., p. 155: “Se avessino guerreggiato con le arme mercennarie ed in consequenzia avuto a valersi come fanno le città disarmate, della sollecitudine, della diligenzia, del vegghiare minutamente le cose, della industria e delle girandole, non dubbitate che vivendo drento come facevano, pochi anni la arebbono rovinata.”

⁵⁰ D. e D., p. 81: “Chi ha ordinato queste cose ha avuto buoni fini, ma non ha avertito particularmente a tutto quello che bisognava; né me ne maraviglio, perché non vive nessuno che abbi mai veduto la città libera, né che abbi maneggiato gli umori della libertà, e chi gli ha imparati in su’ libri non ha osservato tutti e’ particulari e gustatigli, come che gli cognosce per esperienzia, la quale in fatto aggiugne a molte cose dove la scienzia ed el giudicio naturale solo non arriva.”

⁵¹ Above, ch. V, n. 10.

⁵² De Caprariis, pp. 78-82.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 71.

⁵⁴ Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953 and 1959), introduction.

⁵⁵ D. e D., pp. 89-90.

⁵⁶ D. e D., p. 90: “Che lo essere armati di arme vostre fussi non solo utile ed el modo di conservarvi, ma ancora el cammino di pervenire a grandezza eccessiva, è cosa tanto manifesta che non accade provarla, e ve lo mostrano gli esempli delle antiche republiche e della vostra ancora, che mentre che fu armata, benché piena di parte e di mille disordini, dette sempre delle busse a’ nostri vicini e gettò e’ fondamenti del dominio che noi abbiamo, mantenendosi secondo e’ tempi e condizione di allora, in sicurtà e riputazione grandissima. E la potenzia e virtù che vi darebbono le arme vostre quando fussino bene ordinate, non solo sarebbe contrapeso pari a’ disordini che io temo che abbi a recare questa larghezza, ma di gran lunga gli avanzerebbe, perché chi ha le arme in mano non è necessitato reggersi tanto in su la vigilanzia ed in su la industria delle pratiche.”

⁵⁷ D. e D., pp. 90-91: “La cagione di questa mutazione bisogna che nascessi o dalla oppressione che fece el popolo a’ nobili, e’ quali avevano grado e riputazione assai nella milizia, o pure ordinariamente dagli altri che tennono per e’ tempi lo stato, parendo loro poterlo meglio tenere se la città era disarmata, o da comminciare el popolo a darsi troppo alle mercatantie ed alle arte e piacere piú e’ guadagni per e’ quali non si mittava in pericolo la persona.”

⁵⁸ D. e D., p. 92.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ D. e D., pp. 148-58.

⁶¹ D. e D., p. 148: “… ponendo quello fondamento che nessuno nega né può negare, che la milizia sua fussi buona, bisogna confessare che la città avessi buoni ordini, altrimenti non sarebbe stato possibile che avessi buona disciplina militare. Dimostrasi ancora perché non solo nella milizia ma in tutte le altre cose laudabili ebbe quella città infiniti esempli di grandissima virtù, e’ quali non sarebbono stati se la educazione non vi fussi stata buona, né la educazione può essere buona dove le leggi non sono buone e bene osservate, e dove sia questo, non si può dire che l’ordine del governo sia cattivo. Dunche ne seguita che quegli tumulti tra e’ padri e la plebe, tra e’ consuli ed e’ tribuni, erano piú spaventosi in dimostrazione che in effetti, e quella confusione che nasceva non disordinava le cose sustanziali della republica.”

Compare Machiavelli, Discorsi, 1, 4 (Opere, p. 102): “Né si può chiamare in alcun modo con ragione una republica inordinata, dove sieno tanti esempli di virtù, perché li buoni esempli nascano dalla buona educazione, la buona educazione dalle buone leggi, e le buone leggi da quelli tumulti che molti inconsideramente dannano; perche chi esaminerà bene il fine d’essi, non troverrà ch’egli abbiano partorito alcuno esilio o violenza in disfavore del commune bene, ma leggi e ordini in beneficio della publica libertà.”

⁶² D. e D., pp. 148-49: “Di poi essendo el numero del senato piccolo, quello del popolo grandissimo, bisogna che e’ romani si disponessino o a non servire del popolo nelle guerre, il che arebbe tolto loro la occasione di fare quello grande imperio, o volendo potere maneggiarlo, gli comportassino qualche cosa e lasciassingli sfogare gli umori suoi, che non tendevono a altro che a difendersi dalla oppressione de’ piú potenti ed a guardare la libertà commune.”

Cf. Machiavelli, loc. cit.: “… le quali cose tutte spaventano non che altro chi legge; dico come ogni città debbe avere i suoi modi con i quali il popolo possa sfogare l’ambizione sua, e massime quelle città che nelle cose importanti si vogliono valere del popolo.… E i desiderii d’ popoli liberi rade volte sono perniziosi alla libertà, perché e’ nascono o da essere oppressi, o da suspizione di avere ad essere oppressi.”

⁶³ D. e D., pp. 148-49: “Né negano che se si fussi potuto trovare uno mezzo che sanza avere el popolo tumultuoso si fussino potuti valere di lui alla guerra, sarebbe stato meglio; ma perché nelle cose umane è impossibile che una cosa sia el tutto buona sanza portare seco qualche mali, è da chiamare buono tutto quello che sanza comparazione ha in se piú bene che male.”

Cf. Machiavelli, Discorsi, I, 6 (Opere, pp. 107-8): “Ed in tutte le cose umane si vede questo, chi le esaminerà bene, che non si può mai cancellare uno inconveniente, che non ne surga un altro. Pertanto se tu vuoi fare uno popolo numeroso ed armato, per poter fare un grande imperio, la fai di qualità che tu non lo puoi maneggiare a tuo modo; se tu lo mantieni o piccolo o disarmato per poter maneggiarlo, se tu acquisti dominio, non lo puoi tenere, o ei diventa si vile che tu sei preda di qualunque ti assalta, e però in ogni nostra deliberazione si debbe considerare dove sono meno inconvenienti, e pigliare quello per migliore partito, perché tutto netto, tutto sanza sospetto non si truova mai.”

⁶⁴ D. e D., pp. 148-49.

⁶⁵ D. e D., pp. 150-53. That Guicciardini, while contravening the interpretations of the Discorsi, is operating within a very similar conceptual scheme, is shown by the following passage (p. 153): “E certo se voi leggete le antiche istorie, io non credo che voi troviate mai o rarissime volte che una città in una ordinazione medesima sia stata ordinata perfettamente; ma ha avuto qualche principio non perfetto, e nel processo del tempo si è scoperto quando uno disordine quando un altro, che si è avuto a correggere. Però si può dire con verità che a ordinare una bella republica non basta mai la prudenzia degli uomini, ma bisogna sia accompagnata dalla buona fortuna di quella città, la quale consiste che e’ disordini che scuopre la giornata ed esperienzia si scuoprino in tempo ed in modo e con tale occasione che si corregghino.”

⁶⁶ D. e D., p. 157: “Né io ho biasimato el governo romano in tutti gli ordini suoi anzi oltre al laudare la disciplina militare, laudo e’ costumi loro che furono ammirabili e santi, lo appetito che ebbono della vera gloria, e lo amore ardentissimo della patria, e molte virtù che furono in quella città piú che mai in alcuna altra. Le quali cose non si disordinorono per la mala disposizione del governo nelle parti dette di sopra, perché le sedizioni non vennono a quegli estremi che disordinano tutti e’ beni delle città, ed el vivere di quella età non era corrotto come sono stati e’ tempi sequenti massime sendo la città povera e circundata di inimici che non gli lasciava scorrere alle delizie ed a’ piaceri; in modo che io credo che non tanto le legge buone, quanto la natura degli uomini e la severità di quegli antichi tempi … producessino quelle virtù e quelli costumi tanto notabili e la conservassino lungamente sincera da ogni corruzione di vizi. Vedete che ne’ tempi sequenti la città fu sempre meglio ordinata di legge ed era unita e concorde, e pure gli uomini andorono imbastardendo, e quelle virtù eccellente si convertirono in vizi enormi, e’ quali non nascono dalle discordie della città, ma dalle ricchezze, dalle grandezze degli imperi e dalle sicurtà.”

⁶⁷ D. e D., p. 93: “[Soderini:] E quegli ingegni piú elevati che sentono piú che gli altri el gusto della vera gloria ed onore, aranno occasione e libertà di dimostrare ed esercitare piú le sue virtù. Di che io tengo conto non per satisfare o fomentare la ambizione loro, ma per benefìcio della città, la quale … si troverrà che sempre si regge in su la virtù di pochi, perché pochi sono capaci di impresa si alta, che sono quegli che la natura ha dotati di piú ingegno e giudicio che gli altri.… la gloria ed onore vero … consiste totalmente in fare opere generose e laudabili in beneficio ed esaltazione della sua patria ed utilità degli altri cittadini, non perdonando né a fatica né a pericolo.”

⁶⁸ D. e D., pp. 94-95: “… al bene essere di una città si abbi a considerare non solo che la sia governata giustamente e sanza oppressione di persona ed in modo che gli uomini godino el suo con sicurtà, ma ancora che la abbia uno governo tale che gli dia dignità e splendore: perché el pensare solo allo utile ed a godersi sicuramente el suo, è piú presto cosa privata che conveniente a uno publico, nel quale si debbe … considerare piú quella generosità ed amplitudine che la utilità. Perché se bene le città furono instituite principalmente per sicurtà … la commodità che ricerca la vita umana, nondimeno si appartiene pensare … in modo che gli abitatori acquistino … riputazione e fama di essere generosi, ingegnosi, virtuosi e prudenti; perché el fine solo della sicurtà e delle commodità è conveniente a’ privati considerandogli a uno per uno, ma piú basso e piú abietto assai di quello che debbe essere alla nobilità di una congregazione.… Però dicono gli scrittori che ne’ privati si lauda la umilità, la parsimonia, la modestia, ma nella cose publiche si considera la generosità, la magnificenzia e lo splendore.”

⁶⁹ Ibid.: “Dunche quando voi dite che chi ha trattato de’ buoni governi non ha avuto questo obietto che le città siano libere, ma pensato a quello che fa migliori effetti … io crederrei che questo fussi vero, quando da principio si edifica o instituisce una città.… Ma quando una città e già stato in libertà ed ha fatta questa professione, in modo che si può dire che el naturale suo sia di essere libera, allora ogni volta che la si riduce sotto el governo di uno, non per sua voluntà o elezione, ma violentata … questo non può accadere sanza scurare assai el nome suo ed infamarla appresso agli altri.”

⁷⁰ D. e D., pp. 97-99; especially p. 99: “… non abbiamo a cercare di uno governo immaginato … ma considerato la natura, la qualità, le considerazioni, la inclinazione, e per strignere tutte queste cose in una parola, gli umori, della città e de’ cittadini, cercare di uno governo che non siamo sanza speranza che pure si potessi persuadere ed introducere, e che introdotto, si potessi secondo el gusto nostro comportare e conservare, seguitando in questo lo esemplo de’ medici che, se bene sono piú liberi che non siamo noi, perché agli infermi possono dare tutte le medicine che pare loro, non gli danno però tutte quelle che in se sono buone e lodate, ma quelle che lo infermo secondo la complessione sua ed altri accidenti è atto a sopportare.”

⁷¹ D. e D., p. 101: “… è difficile trovare el medicina appropriata, perché bisogna sia in modo che medicando lo stomaco non si offenda el capo, cioè provedervi di sorte che non si alteri la sustanzialità del governo populare che è la libertà, e che per levare le deliberazioni di momento di mano di chi non le intende, non si dia tanta autorità a alcuno particulare, che si caggia o si avii in una spezie di tirannide.”

⁷² For this and the following paragraph, see D. e D., pp. 102-103.

⁷³ See above, ch. V, nn. 17, 18, 44, 48.

⁷⁴ See above, ch. V, nn. 30, 31.

⁷⁵ D. e D., pp. 124-25.

⁷⁶ D. e D., pp. 103-104: “Però a me pare che a questo punto abbino proviso meglio e’ viniziani che facessi mai forse alcuna republica, con lo eleggere uno doge perpetuo, el quale è legato dagli ordini loro in modo che non è pericoloso alla libertà, e nondimanco, per stare quivi fermo né avere altra cura che questa, ha pensiero alle cose, è informato delle cose, e se bene non ha autorità di deliberarle, perché questo sarebbe pericoloso alla libertà, vi è pure uno capo a che riferirle e che sempre a’ tempi suoi le propone e le indirizza.”

⁷⁷ D. e D., pp. 104, 113-14.

⁷⁸ D. e D., p. 115.

⁷⁹ D. e D., p. 116: “Ma questa misura ed ordine che ha partorito in loro la lunga continuazione del governo è forse la natura de’ loro cervelli piú quieta, non si potrebbe sperare in noi di qui a molti anni; e se noi facessimo questo consiglio per sei mesi o per uno anno, se ne troverrebbono bene spesso esclusi tutti quelli che sarebbe necessario che vi fussino.”

⁸⁰ D. e D., p. 106: “E se bene ha nome diverso da quello che vogliamo fare noi, perché si chiama governo di gentiluomini ed el nostro si chiamerà di popolo, non per questo è di spezie diversa, perché non è altro che uno governo nel quale intervengono universalmente tutti quegli che sono abili agli uffici, né vi si fa distinzione o per ricchezza o per stiatte, come si fa quando governano gli ottimati, ma sono ammessi equalmente tutti a ogni cosa, e di numero sono molti e forse piú che siano e’ nostri; e se la plebe non vi participa, la non participe anche a noi, perche infiniti artefici, abitatori nuovi ed altri simili, non entrano nel nostro consiglio. Ed ancora che a Vinezia gli inabili sono abilitati con piú difficultà agli uffici che non si fa a noi, questo non nasce perché la spezie del governo sia diversa, ma perché in una spezie medesimi hanno ordini diversi … e però se noi chiamassimo gentiluomini e’ nostri, e questo nome appresso a noi non si dessi se non a chi è abile agli uffici, troveresti che el governo di Vinegia è popolare come el nostro e che el nostro non è manco governo di ottimati che sia el loro.”

⁸¹ D. e D., pp. 118-19: “E se bene io dissi ieri che e’ cittadini buoni non hanno voluntà di governare, e che al bene essere delle città basta che vi sia la sicurtà, nondimeno questo è uno fondamento che fu piú facile a Platone a dirlo, che a chi si è maneggiato nelle republiche a vederlo, e piú rigoroso che non è oggi el gusto degli uomini, e’ quali hanno tutto per natura desiderio di essere stimati ed onorati. Anzi, come io dissi poco fa, è forse piú utile alle città, che e’ suoi cittadini abbino qualche instinto di ambizione moderata, perché gli desta a pensieri ed azione onorevoli, che se la fussi al tutto morta.

“Ma non disputando ora questo, dico che poiché negli uomini è questo appetito, o laudabile o dannabile che sia, ed appicato in modo che non si pùo sperare di spegnerlo, a noi che ragioniamo di fare uno governo, non quale doverebbe essere, ma quale abbiamo a sperare che possi essere, bisogna affaticarsi che tutti e’ gradi de’ cittadini abbino la satisfazione sua, pur che si facci con modo che non offenda la libertà.”

⁸² D. e D., p. 112: “… le città benché siano libere, se sono bene ordinate, sono sostentate dal consiglio e dalla virtù di pochi; e se pigliate dieci o quindici anni per volta insieme, troverete che in tale tempo non sono piú che tre o quattro cittadini da chi depende la virtù ed el nervo delle consulte ed azioni piú importanti.” Note that this is the first time we have found virtù used as a quality pertaining to actions, rather than to persons.

⁸³ D. e D., pp. 119-20: “E questo che noi abbiamo detto è sanza dubio grado che non gli nuoce, perché se bene sono senatori a vita, pure sono molti, hanno la autorità limitata in modo che non diventano signori, e nondimeno el grado è tale che debbe bastare a uno cittadino che non ha la stomaco corrotto di ambizione; perché se ha virtù mediocre, si debbe contentare di essere senatore; se è piú eccellente, verrà di grado in grado agli onori piú alti: essere de’ dieci, essere della pratica, essere uno de’ disegnati per gonfaloniere quando vacassi.”

⁸⁴ D. e D., p. 112: “A questi (i.e., those of the highest virtù) sia proposta la speranza di uno grado estraordinario dove pensino di arrivare, non con sette, non con corruttele, non con violenzia, ma col fare opere egregie, col consumare tutta la sua virtù e vita per beneficio della patria, la quale, poiché ha a ricevere piú utile da questi tali che dagli altri, debbe anche allettargli piú che gli altri.”

⁸⁵ D. e D., p. 121: “Le ragione che mi muovono a fare questa aggiunta sono due: l’una, che io non vorrei che a alcuno per essere diventato senatore paressi avere acconciò in modo le cose sua che giudicassi non avere piú bisogno degli altri che non sono del senato e tenessi manco conto della estimazione publica, come se mai piú non avessi a capitare a’ giudici degli uomini … L’altra, che io non vorrei che per essere e’ senatori sempre quegli medesimi, una parte di essi facessi qualche intelligenzia che facessi girare e’ partiti in loro, esclusi gli altri, … Questa aggiunta rimedia benissimo a tutt’a dua gli inconvenienti, perché romperà le sette, intervenendovi tanto piú numero e di persone che si variano; e da altro canto non potendo questi aggiunti essere eletti loro, non aranno causa di favorire per ambizione sua la larghezza, ma si volteranno ragionevolmente con le fave a chi sarà giudicato che meriti piú; e quando parte del senato malignassi, questi daranno sempre el tracollo alla bilancia.”

⁸⁶ D. e D., p. 122.

⁸⁷ D. e D., p. 123.

⁸⁸ D. e D., pp. 130-32.

⁸⁹ D. e D., pp. 132-35.

⁹⁰ D. e D., p. 133: “E queste contenzione, se bene qualche volta nascono da onesti principi, pure vanno poi piú oltre, perché la natura degli uomini è insaziabile, e chi si muove alle imprese per ritenere el grado suo e non essere oppresso, quando poi si è condotto a questo, non si ferma quivi ma cerca di amplificarlo piú che lo onesto e per consequente di opprimere ed usurpare quello di altri.”

⁹¹ D. e D., p. 135.

⁹² D. e D., p. 106: “A me pare che el governo viniziano per una città disarmata sia cosí bello come forse mai avessi alcuna republica libera; ed oltre che lo mostra la esperienzia, perché essendo durato già centinaia di anni florido ed unito come ognuno sa, non si può attribuire alla fortuna o al caso, lo mostrano ancora molte ragioni che appariranno meglio nel ragionare di tutta questa materia.”

⁹³ D. e D., pp. 138-39.

⁹⁴ D. e D., p. 139: “El consiglio grande ha seco quello bene che è principale nel governo del popolo, cioè la conservazione della libertà, la autorità delle legge e la sicurtà di ognuno …”

⁹⁵ D. e D., pp. 139-40: “Sarebbe adunche el governo vostro simile al governo loro; ed essendo el suo ottimo, el vostro almanco sarebbe buono e sarebbe sanza dubio quale non ha mai veduto la città nostra. Perché o noi siamo stati sotto uno, come a tempo de’ Medici, che è stato governo tirannico, o pochi cittadini hanno potuto nella città … che in fatto hanno oppressi e tenuti in servitù gli altri con mille ingiurie ed insolenzie, e tra loro medesimi sono stati pieni di sedizioni … o la è stata in arbitrio licenzioso della moltitudine … o è stato qualche vivere pazzo, dove in uno tempo medesimo ha avuto licenzia la plebe e potestà e’ pochi.… Però se la sorte o la benignità di Dio non ci dà grazia di riscontrare in una forma di governo come questa o simile, abbiano a temere de’ medesimi mali che sono stati per el passato.”

⁹⁶ D. e D., pp. 141-45.

⁹⁷ D. e D., pp. 141-42: “E’ governi buoni si introducono o con la forza o con la persuasione: la forza sarebbe quando uno che si trovassi principe volessi deponere el principato e constituire una forma di republica, perché a lui starebbe el commandare e ordinare; e questo sarebbe modo facilissimo, si perché el popolo che stava sotto la tirannide e non pensava alla libertà, vedendosi in uno tratto menare al vivere libero con amore e sanza arme, benché si introducessi ordinato e con moderato larghezza, gli parebbe entrare in paradiso e piglierebbe tutto per guadagno … gli sarebbe prestata fede smisurata … Non si potrebbe di questa opera attribuire parte alcuna alla fortuna, ma tutto dependerebbe dalla sua virtù, ed el frutto che ne nascessi non sarebbe beneficio a pochi né per breve tempo, ma in quanto a lui, a infiniti e per molte età.”

⁹⁸ D. e D., p. 142.

⁹⁹ D. e D., pp. 142-43: “Si introducerebbe anche el governo per forza quando uno cittadino amatore della patria vedessi le cose essere disordinate, né gli bastando el cuore poterle riformare voluntariamente e dacordo, si ingegnassi con la forza pigliare tanta autorità che potessi constituire uno buono governo etiam a dispetto degli altri, come fece Licurgo quando fece a Sparta quelle sante leggi.… Però bisogna che la forza duri tanto che abbia preso piede; e quanto piú durassi, tanto piú sarebbe pericoloso che non gli venissi voglia di continuarvi drento. Sapete come dice el proverbio: che lo indugio piglia vizio.”

¹⁰⁰ D. e D., p. 143: “Ci è adunche necessario fare fundamento in su la persuasione, e questa ora non sarebbe udita; ma io non dubio che le cose andranno in modo che innanzi che passi troppo tempo, si cognoscerà per molti la maggiore parte de’ disordini, e combatterà in loro da uno canto la voglia di provedervi, da l’altro la paura di non ristrignere troppo el governo. Ed in questo bisognerà, a mio giudicio, che giuochi la fortuna della città … Potrebbe ancora essere che questi disordini fussino grandi, ma tali che piú presto travagliassino la città che la ruinassino, ed allora el punto sarà che chi arà a fare questa riforma la pigli bene, perché sempre farà difficultà grande el dubio ch’e’ cittadini principali non voglino riducere le cose a uno stato stretto; però potra essere che gli uomini si voltino piú presto a uno gonfaloniere a vita o per lungo tempo che a altro, perché darà loro manco ombra che uno senato perpetuo, e perché per questo solo la città non resta bene ordinata.”

¹⁰¹ Ibid.

¹⁰² D. e D., p. 144: “Però concludendo vi dico che ho per molto dubio e mi pare che dependa molto dalla potestà della fortuna, se questo governo disordinato si riordinerà o no …”

¹⁰³ D. e D., p. 146: “Perché le medesime imprese che fatte fuora di tempo sono difficillime o impossibile diventono faciliime quando sono accompagnate dal tempo o dal occasione, ed a chi le tenta fuora del tempo suo non solo non gli riescono ma è pericolo che lo averle tentate non le guasti per quello tempo che facilmente sarebbono riuscite, e questa è una delle ragione che e’ pazienti sono tenuti savi … e del resto piú presto andate comportando e temporeggiatevi el meglio che potete, che desideriate novità, perché non vi potrà venire cosa che non sia peggio.” The language of Lodovico Alamanni: the wise never innovate.

¹⁰⁴ For this phase of Guicciardini’s career see Ridolfi, Life, chs. XVIII-XX.

¹⁰⁵ Ricordi, C 22 (Spongano, p. 27, cited above, ch. V, n. 22): “Quante volte si dice: se si fussi fatto o non fatto cosí, saria succeduta o non succeduta la tale cosa! che se fussi possibile vederne el paragone, si conoscerebbe simile openione essere false.”

¹⁰⁶ Ricordi, C 9, 10 (Spongano, pp. 13-14): “Leggete spesso e considerate bene questi ricordi, perché è piú facile a conoscergli e intendergli che osservargli: e questo si facilita col farsene tale abito che s’abbino freschi nella memoria.

“Non si confidi alcuno tanto nella prudenza naturale che si persuada quella bastare sanza l’accidentale della esperienzia, perché ognuno che ha maneggiato faccende, benché prudentissimo, ha potuto conoscere che con la esperienzia si aggiugne a molte cose, alle quali è impossibile che el naturale solo possa aggiugnere.” Cf. B 71, 100, 121.

¹⁰⁷ Ricordi, C 78-85; especially 79 (Spongano, p. 90): “Sarebbe pericoloso proverbio, se non fussi bene inteso, quello che si dice: el savio debbe godere el beneficio del tempo; perché, quando ti viene quello che tu desideri, chi perde la occasione non la ritruova a sua posta: e anche in molte cose è necessaria la celerità del risolversi e del fare; ma quando sei in partiti difficili o in cose che ti sono moleste, allunga e aspetta tempo quanto puoi, perché quello spesso ti illumina o ti libera. Usando cosí questo proverbio, è sempre salutifero; ma inteso altrimenti, sarebbe spesso pernizioso.”

¹⁰⁸ Ricordi, B 96 (Spongano, p. 28): “Le cose del mondo sono si varie e dependono da tanti accidenti, che difficilmente si può fare giudicio del futuro; e si vede per esperienzia che quasi sempre le conietture de’ savi sono fallace: però non laudo el consiglio di coloro che lasciano la commodità di uno bene presente, benché minore, per paura di uno male futuro, benché maggiore, se non è molto propinquo o molto certo; perché, non succedendo poi spesso quello di che temevi, ti truovi per una paura vana avere lasciato quello che ti piaceva. E però è savio proverbio: di cosa nasce cosa.”

¹⁰⁹ Ricordi, C 71 (Spongano, p. 82): “Se vedete andare a cammino la declinazione di una città, la mutazione di uno governo, lo augumento di uno imperio nuovo e altre cose simili—che qualche volta si veggono innanzi quasi certe—avvertite a non vi ingannare ne’ tempi: perché e moti delle cose sono per sua natura e per diversi impedimenti molto piú tardi che gli uomini non si immaginano, e lo ingannarti in questo ti può fare grandissimo danno: avvertiteci bene, che è uno passo dove spesso si inciampa. Interviene anche el medesimo nelle cose private e particulari, ma molto piú in queste publiche e universali, perché hanno, per essere maggiore mole, el moto suo piú lento, e anche sono sottoposte a piú accidenti.” Cf. C 34, 115, 116, 162, 191; B 76, 103.

¹¹⁰ Ricordi, C 58 (Spongano, p. 67): “Quanto disse bene el filosofo: De futuris contingentibus non est determinata veritas! Aggirati quanto tu vuoi, che quanto piú ti aggiri, tanto piú truovi questo detto verissimo.”

¹¹¹ Ricordi, C 110 (Spongano, p. 121): “Quanto si ingannono coloro che a ogni parola allegano e Romani! Bisognerebbe avere una città condizionata come era loro, e poi governarsi secondo quello esemplo: el quale a chi ha le qualità disproporzionate è tanto disproporzionate, quanto sarebbe volere che uno asino facessi el corso di uno cavallo.”

¹¹² E.g., Sir Herbert Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1940, 1955).

¹¹³ Ricordi, C 76 (Spongano, p. 87): “Tutto quello che è stato per el passato e è al presente, sarà ancora in futuro; ma si mutano e nomi e le superfìcie delle cose in modo, che chi non ha buono occhio non le riconosce, nè sa pigliare regola o fare giudicio per mezzo di quella osservazione.” Cf. B 114 (ibid.): “… le cose medesime ritornano, ma sotto diversi nomi e colori.” B 140 (Spongano, p. 82): “Le cose del mondo non stanno ferme, anzi hanno sempre progresso al cammino a che ragionevolmente per sua natura hanno a andare e finire; ma tardano piú che non è la opinione nostra, perché noi le misuriamo secondo la vita nostra che è breve e non secondo el tempo loro che è lungo; e però sono e passi suoi piú tardi che non sono e nostri, e si tardi per sua natura che, ancora che si muovino, non ci accorgiamo spesso de’ suoi moti: e per questo sono spesso falsi e’ giudici che noi facciamo.”

¹¹⁴ Ricordi, C 51 (Spongano, p. 60): “Chi si travaglia in Firenze di mutare stati, se non lo fa per necessità, o che a lui tocchi diventare capo del nuovo governo, è poco prudente, perché mette a pericolo sè e tutto el suo, se la cosa non succede; succedendo, non ha a pena una piccola parte di quello che aveva disegnato. E quanta pazzia è giuocare a uno giuoco che si possa perdere piú sanza comparazione che guadagnare! E quello che non importa forse manco, mutato che sia lo stato, ti oblighi a uno perpetuo tormento: d’avere sempre a temere di nuova mutazione.”

¹¹⁵ Ricordi, C 1 (Spongano, p. 3): “Quello che dicono le persone spirituali, che chi ha fede conduce cose grandi, e, come dice lo evangelio, chi ha fede puo comandare a’ monti ecc., procede perché la fede fa ostinazione. Fede non è altro che credere con openione ferma e quasi certezza le cose che non sono ragionevole, o se sono ragionevole, crederle con piú resoluzione che non persuadono le ragione. Chi adunche ha fede diventa ostinato in quello che crede, e procede al cammino suo intrepido e resoluto, sprezzando le difficultà e pericoli, e mettendosi a soportare ogni estremità: donde nasce che, essendo le cose del mondo sottoposte a mille casi e accidenti, può nascere per molti versi nella lunghezza del tempo aiuto insperato a chi ha perseverato nella ostinazione, la quale essendo causata dalla fede, si dice meritamente: chi ha fede ecc. Esemplo a’ dì nostri ne è grandissimo questa ostinazione de’ Fiorentini che, essendosi contro a ogni ragione del mondo messi a aspettare la guerra del papa e imperadore sanza speranza di alcuno soccorso di altri, disuniti e con mille difficultà, hanno sostenuto in sulle mura già sette mesi gli eserciti, e quali non si sarebbe creduto che avessino sostenuti sette dì, e condotto le cose in luogo che, se vincessino, nessuno piú se ne maraviglierebbe, dove prima da tutti erano giudicato perduti: e questa ostinazione ha causata in gran parte la fede di non potere perire, secondo le predizione di fra Ieronimo da Ferrara.”

¹¹⁶ Ricordi, C 136 (Spongano, p. 148): “Accade che qualche volta e’ pazzi fanno maggiore cose che e’ savi. Procede perché el savio, dove non è necessitato, si rimette assai alla ragione e poco alla fortuna, el pazzo assai alla fortuna e poco alla ragione: e le cose portate dalla fortuna hanno talvolta fini incredibili. E’ savi di Firenze arebbono ceduto alla tempesta presente; e’ pazzi, avendo contro a ogni ragione voluto opporsi, hanno fatto insino a ora quello che non si sarebbe creduto che la città nostra potessi in modo alcuno fare: e questo è che dice el proverbio Audaces fortuna iuvat.”