AFTERWORD

[I]

SINCE THIS BOOK, published in 1975, commands after nearly thirty years enough readers to justify a new edition, it clearly stood in no need of a new introduction. The text of 1975 may still speak for itself, and only confusion could have resulted from an attempt to shape it in the light of the perceptions of a new century. Now that the public of 2003 has had opportunity to read it and form its own responses, however, it may be interesting and even valuable if I supply an account of its reception, the controversies in which it has been involved, and what seem to be its significances to its author three decades after it was first composed. (It was begun at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, completed at Washington University in St. Louis, and published after I moved to the Johns Hopkins University in 1974.)

The title The Machiavellian Moment was, as mentioned in my introduction, suggested by my friend Quentin Skinner before he was either Professor of Political Science or Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University and before he became involved in the historical and philosophical debates which have surrounded this book’s later history. Like his two-volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, which appeared in 1978,1 The Machiavellian Moment is thought to demonstrate the method of writing the history of its subject attributed to “the Cambridge school.” On this there exists a considerable methodological and theoretical literature² to which I have now little to add, except perhaps to say that whereas this “school” is generally thought to advocate the return of texts to the contexts in which they were first written, The Machiavellian Moment pursues after doing this the fortunes of texts, and the discourses they may be said to have conveyed, as they travel from one context to another, in a history which moves from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth and from Florence to England, Scotland, and revolutionary America. Some would describe this as doing the “history of ideas,” but I find neither this term nor its connotations satisfactory as an account of what I have been and am doing; this volume is, however, a history as much diachronic as synchronic.

It follows that the term “moment,” which Skinner originally suggested, has taken on several meanings, although not necessarily those which he intended. It can denote—as I indicate in my original foreword—the historic “moment” at which Machiavelli appeared and impinged upon thinking about politics, and either of two ideal “moments” indicated by his writings: the moment at which the formation or foundation of a “republic” appears possible or the moment at which its formation is seen to be precarious and entail a crisis in the history to which it belongs. I see these moments as inseparable, and there thus arises “the Machiavellian moment” as that in which the republic is involved in historical tensions or contradictions which it either generates or encounters. I go on to present much, but not all, of early modern political thought as the experience and articulation of this “moment.”

This book has therefore presented a complex and at times contradictory history, narrating not only the controversies and interactions between opposing belief systems but also the ambivalences and self-questionings that have arisen within them. It has been written in a complex and discursive style which has not been easy reading; I can defend this only by saying that the story is not meant to be easy to follow and that clarifying it is more a matter of bringing its complexities to light than of seeking to simplify it. Much of the controversy in which the book has been involved, however—I do not say all of it—seems to have arisen not from mere perplexity but from an actual unwillingness to accept its basic premise: the presence of “republican” values in early modern history, and their ongoing debate with other values to which they have been sometimes opposed or with which they have been uneasily allied. Some historians, some political philosophers, and many expositors of “liberal” or “American” values have found the “republican” account of citizenship unduly challenging, and have sought to reduce its presence. Much of the criticism to which my own work has been exposed has therefore amounted to a search for ways in which I may have said that “republicanism” was more important than it was and for ways in which it may be represented as less important than I am supposed to have said it was. Some of this criticism has necessarily been imprecise and confused; the critical reader—who of course is welcome—may be cautioned against supposing that any criticism is as good as another and asked to be clear about what it is that I have been saying.

Much valuable discussion of The Machiavellian Moment—let me emphasize that there has been much to which the above strictures do not apply—has centered on its association with Hans Baron’s The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (and later with Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution). I learned much from Baron, without endorsing every contention he put forward. In particular, it was not necessary for me to adopt his belief that the identity of liberty with active citizenship was realized suddenly by Florentine humanists in the crisis of the war with Giangaleazzo Visconti in 1400-1402; I recall, though I cannot now document, that in the only correspondence I had with the late Professor Baron he expressed disappointment that I had not endorsed the critical chronology by which he sought to show that humanist writings expressed this change at that time. It was enough for me to affirm that ideas of active citizenship were formulated by Florentines, that they could be said to have rested on the ideal of the zōon politikon expressed by Aristotle, and that they had come to be identified with the possession of arms by the citizen. From there I could go on with Baron, and well beyond him, in showing how the history of Rome, Florence, England, Europe, and civil society in general had come to be rewritten in terms of the rise and fall of armed and active citizenship.

Machiavelli—this is why there is such a thing as “the Machiavellian moment”—had insisted that the armed citizen was the only truly free man but had not supposed that he was necessarily a good man. Roman history was the record of how this citizen had used his liberty to establish empire over others but had been corrupted by that empire to the point where he had lost liberty first and empire afterward. Leonardo Bruni, and Machiavelli a century later, had considered whether there had been alternative paths that Roman history might have taken, but Machiavelli had decided that it could not have been otherwise, and perhaps should not have been. Liberty was liberty, even if it could not be separated from empire. It is here that The Machiavellian Moment encounters the writings of Sir Isaiah Berlin, from which it cannot be separated even if I am not always satisfied by the historical narratives they entail. In a series of important essays—of which I became aware sometimes before and sometimes after completing my own book—Berlin argued, first, that Machiavelli had shown political life as the encounter with diverse value systems between which there could be no final reconciliation; second, that political philosophy must continue to be articulated as long as these irreconcilabilities were to be reckoned with; third, that there existed two concepts of liberty, the one positive, entailing the determination of self and its encounter with other selves engaged in the same determination, the other negative, entailing no more than the freedom from hindrances to the practice of social activities in which the encounter with other selves was diversified and rendered manageable by law, government, and culture.3 It is at the third of these points that one confronts the differences between “republican” and “liberal,” “ancient” and “modern,” concepts of “liberty”; and I see The Machiavellian Moment as concerned with the tensions between them, whose history may be ongoing and without a final outcome.

The most important and valuable criticism of Hans Baron’s contentions, and of mine insofar as they are dependent on his, was put forward a few years later by Quentin Skinner in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought.⁴ Baron and I could both be read as suggesting that a Florentine conception of active citizenship had been the first expression of republican values since the literature of ancient Rome, now undergoing a renaissance; certainly Baron contrasted it directly with a medieval concept of sacred empire, which he thought had known no rival for centuries. Skinner, however, brought to light the existence of a rhetoric of civic virtue, republican citizenship, and good government which had been present since the middle of the twelfth century at least; the form of government it entailed had been noted by the historian Otto of Freising about 1154 as needing explanation to his readers north of the Alps. Here was a concept of citizenship considered in neither The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance nor The Machiavellian Moment, and Skinner placed Otto’s text among the “foundations of modern political thought.”⁵ As against what I had argued in my work, he emphasized that the language in which this civic discourse was couched was less Aristotelian than Ciceronian, a distinction of real theoretical importance. From Aristotle’s Politics—a text well known from at latest the thirteenth century—I selected for emphasis those passages in which citizens are defined as political creatures because they both rule and are ruled, exercising that highest form of rule which is rule over one’s equals, by whose decisions you are bound as they are bound by yours, since you and they have an equal voice in making them. As the reader will know by this time, I saw in this face-to-face equality the imagined root of all civic virtue, and in its loss, direct or indirect, the root of all that came to be known as corruption. That many other messages could be and were extracted from the text of the Politics did not immediately concern me, and I rejected the contention of some critics that in mentioning Aristotle I had obliged myself to give a systematic account of his doctrines, or their medieval reception, as a whole. That is not necessarily how political texts function in history.

In setting Cicero in the place of Aristotle, Skinner was making several important statements. In the first place, he was suggesting—I would now say, rightly—that my account of the history of civic discourse should have been more responsive to the history of Latin and Roman argument than to the received canon of the history of political thought; Romans were not Athenians and should not be treated as mere extensions of that culture. Secondly, and much more far reachingly, Cicero—especially as understood in Renaissance humanism—was a rhetorician, a philosopher, within limits a jurist, and an expositor of classical culture in its fullness. He was therefore equipped, in ways that Machiavelli was not, to expound the civic life as a participation in all the social and cultural values of which human beings are capable, an activity to which the term “humanism” is often and authoritatively applied. Whether this means that the “Ciceronian” discourse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had fully anticipated the “civic humanism” and republican “liberty” which Hans Baron had seen revealed in fifteenth-century Florence does not concern me here; I mean only to argue that it does not anticipate, and does not reveal in the thirteenth century, what I intend, and find in the thought of Machiavelli, in using the term “the Machiavellian moment.”

The work known by that title is concerned with virtus in the Roman sense of the word, and with the Tuscan word virtù as employed by Machiavelli in reviving its Roman meaning. It denotes the individual’s capacity for action, including the political and military. Virtù is capable of being used when that capacity is not disciplined by moral or political restraints; this is why Machiavelli can write of the prince’s virtù when it is being exercised illegitimately. But Romans knew of virtus as a characteristic of the citizen and thought of it not only as exercised within a public discipline but as consisting in a religious respect for that discipline as a good in itself. This was the virtù as Machiavelli called it, which the Romans had possessed and had lost. It was both intensely public and intensely personal, and the case for including it in the category “civic humanism” is that it identified the citizen’s personal autonomy with his immediate capacity for public action; without the one, he would not have the other. Corruption might set in when he lost his autonomy and became the instrument of a master, or when he devoted his autonomy to the pursuit of ends other than the public, which might result in his becoming either a master or a servant.

In Greek terms, the ideal of virtus was more Spartan than Athenian. It was not until the nineteenth century that the Funeral Oration of Pericles became a sacred text of liberal culture, with its claim that Athenians could pursue a diversity of goods in action or in play and still retain their devotion to the public good. But we need not see Romans as Spartans—though it is easy to do so—to realize that we have before us a sharp if not absolute distinction between the political and the social or cultural. The political is concerned with action and decision, which are goods in themselves and in the pursuit of which the actor declares who and what he is; actions and decisions aimed at lesser goods are closer to the character of enjoyment, and a polity or individual taken up with the pursuit of enjoyment may be termed “luxurious” or “effeminate.” The Ciceronian ideal, located by Skinner in the thirteenth century, does not deserve these epithets and may entail a high degree of austerity, but it is concerned with all the goods of which human society is capable and its decisions are aimed at ensuring their just distribution. It is therefore concerned with justice—a term notoriously absent from Machiavelli’s vocabulary, though he cannot be accused of not knowing or caring what it was—rather than with virtus, the rigorous self-discipline necessary to autonomy and self-determination in the field of public action.

We begin here to encounter—though still at a very great distance—the distinctions between Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty, but at the same time we encounter the differences between two nonidentical forms of political discourse. Virtus must be practiced, though within a public discipline and in a public field, through one’s own actions and in one’s own person, whereas justice, though it may be practiced as a perpetual disposition of one’s personality, can in large measure be prescribed for one by the judge, the prince, or the laws of which they are mouthpieces. There is consequently something primal about virtus; it is the initial self-fashioning of the hero immediately after he has become a citizen and accepted the discipline of an often warlike assembly. Justice on the other hand may imply—though the philosophers challenge the implication—the opulence of a society, economy, and culture in which there are many things to do and be, many ways of doing what one wants, and many ways of being what one wants to be; it is a question whether, in the pursuit of justice, one acts always in the same role or as the same person. For good and ill, the primal citizen is exposed to fewer of the doubts arising from this question.

In the later Greek and Latin literature by which Europeans were obsessed, the Roman republic was depicted—especially by Sallust, an author of whom more might have been made in The Machiavellian Moment—as the abode of a libertas which released the energies, the virtus, of a nobility and people which the rule of the kings had repressed. This virtus had issued in imperium, meaning either the authority of the magistrate or commander, or the empire of the republic itself; there was a strong implication that libertas entailed both war and conquest. Empire had corrupted the people, and even if it had not done so, its very extent had compelled the transfer of both libertas and imperium into the hands of a single princeps. Here, we might say, was the original “Machiavellian moment”; the free republic set itself problems it might not be able to solve. From the establishment of rule by a prince or emperor, thinking might proceed in either or both of two directions. It might be said that libertas and virtus had been lost and that humans now lived as subjects of a system in which they could no longer shape themselves; or it might be said that they had been released into a universal peace, ecumene, or empire in which they were free to choose between innumerable modes of action, protected for them by a supreme magistrate and by laws they did not need to have made for themselves. Libertas et imperium were replaced by an empire of laws; freedom to act by freedom from the injustices imposed by others.

Political thought, theory, or philosophy—pervaded as they have been at every point by jurisprudence—are, we might simplify the account by saying, the ideology of liberal empire; what has come down to us from the republic is another matter. Historiography—meaning here the construction of grand historical narratives—has taken two distinguishable courses: the one recounting the transformation of republic into empire, the other maintaining that libertas and imperium are both inseparable and mutually destructive. In work I am doing while I write this afterword, on the history of the topos of Decline and Fall,6 I have been led to conclude that—though Cicero himself was a martyr to the republic in whose downfall he perished—the “Ciceronian” ideal of citizenship discovered by Skinner in the thirteenth century was by no means incompatible with the proposition that the civic virtues might be practiced under the rule of law and a just prince, so that Augustus, Trajan, or Justinian ruled over men free in the sense that there was law to which they could appeal. Hans Baron’s Florentines, on the other hand, two centuries later, were capable of insisting that under the Caesars libertas disappeared, with the result that the princes became tyrants and monsters, and the citizens had no longer the virtus necessary to maintain the empire it had acquired against the barbarians.7

These two narratives—the former compatible far more than the latter with the jurisprudence and philosophy we take to have formed the “history of political thought” in early modern Europe—rest on two concepts of liberty broadly resembling the “negative” and “positive” poles of the distinction drawn by Berlin: the liberty which is protected and the liberty which is asserted. One may of course assert the liberty to do one’s own self-protection, and perhaps that is the key to the history of democratic liberalism. In the history of political and theoretical discourse, the relations between these polar concepts have been enormously complex,⁸ but to understand this history one must understand the radical differences between them. Ten years after The Machiavellian Moment, I published in book form an essay in which I affirmed that the notions of “right” and “virtue” could never be reduced to a common meaning.⁹ Of this Richard Tuck has recently warned that it is “unconvincing” and “misleading” to draw “a hard and fast line,” as he thinks I have done, “between humanists and jurists.”¹⁰ It would indeed be misleading in the highest degree to attempt a hard and fast separation between two such large and indeterminate groups of practitioners whose memberships overlapped and who borrowed constantly from one another, but that was not what I was attempting. The sharp distinction I aimed to draw was one between two conceptual premises: between a right to which one may lay claim (perhaps because it is inherent in one’s nature) and a virtue which one must find in oneself and express in actions undertaken with one’s equals. Of these, it is true, the former is inherently part of the language of jurisprudence, and of the moral philosophy, philosophy of law, and occasionally philosophy of history, to which jurisprudence has given rise, while the latter is more likely to be found in the narratives of ancient civic action which humanists have studied and elaborated into narratives of the rise and fall of Greek and Roman systems of citizenship. This distinction is not “hard and fast,” since the two modes of understanding have constantly overlapped and interacted; but it has to be insisted upon if we are to understand the tensions which have arisen in the course of this interaction, of which the tensions between “ancient” and “modern,” “positive” and “negative,” concepts of liberty have formed a large part.

These broad distinctions may be associated with another—that between two branches of the literature of political thought: between political philosophy, which in medieval and modern times has been closely allied with jurisprudence and has tended toward a vision of human society as a complex of activities regulated by various systems of natural and positive law; and historiography, which as a branch of political thought has at times shown a concern with systems of ancient virtue and their replacement in medieval and modern times by systems more like those which interest philosophers. I see my own work, in The Machiavellian Moment, in Virtue, Commerce and History (1985), and in the ongoing series Barbarism and Religion (1999-), as being much concerned with the historiography of “ancient” and “modern” as a branch of political thought. I see this historiography as containing—but by no means confined to—a concept of liberty as rooted in the autonomy of the person, where it encounters the historical problems that arise as the interactions between persons in society, economy, and culture grow more complex; and since I see “virtue” and “right” not as incompatible but as irreduceable, I incline toward a Berlinesque vision in which these concepts of liberty are unlikely to arrive at any lasting reconciliation. This may be a philosophy of history; I see it rather as a governing formula useful in understanding what is going on in the formation of historical narrative in early modern Europe and America.

I see Quentin Skinner’s employment of “Ciceronian” concepts of citizenship, as against the ultimately “Machiavellian” concepts developed by Baron and myself, as tending toward the reconstruction of the republic as a community of citizens regulated by law and justice, rather than one of citizens whose fiercely competitive (and expansive) virtue may or may not regulate itself by establishing a discipline of equality (an equality of rule, it should be noted, rather than an equality of rights). This tendency, if I am right in detecting it, would have the effect of moving Skinner’s history of the republic as idea back into the context provided by the history of jurisprudence and philosophy; while the quite different historical scheme being proposed by Richard Tuck—in which “Ciceronian” concepts are opposed to “Tacitist” and Machiavelli himself is a “Ciceronian”—is clearly aimed at abolishing the claim that the concept of virtus has any history which cannot be enclosed within the history of natural law and its variants.11 I recognize the various histories recounted by Skinner and Tuck as histories which can be traced as having actually happened; none of us subscribes to the view that all history is fiction; but I claim to be recounting another history, which can traced as interacting with those they recount and may even—as I shall argue later in this afterword—be continued to the point of having a present tense. Meanwhile—and here I am no longer speaking of the two scholars I have just mentioned—I notice in the historical profession generally, and among historians of political thought in particular, a low level of tolerance, even after thirty years, toward the notion that civic virtue as studied in The Machiavellian Moment enjoys a history of its own; there is a fairly constant desire to diminish or dismiss its presence.¹² In some cases this arises from a preference for Isaiah Berlin’s “negative” over his “positive” liberty, but far more often it is an instance of the politics of paradigm. The history of political thought has so long, and for such good reasons, been written in terms of the triadic sovereignty of philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence that there is a deep reluctance to admit a fourth voice in the conversation. And there is an accompanying tendency—historians being often clumsy in handling the dialectical thinking in which they should be accomplished—to suppose that the unfamiliar diminishes the “importance” of the familiar and that the latter must be defended by diminishing the “importance” of the former. The Machiavellian Moment should be read as a history of the dialectic between the republic and its alternatives.

[II]

“How the devil,” demanded the late Jack Hexter, reviewing The Machiavellian Moment not long after its first appearance, “did republican thought, of all things, get a footing in England, of all places, in the first place?”13 The question was well put, and characteristically expressed. It raised a number of problems, not least the appearance of an ideology formed in Italian city republics in the centralized territorial and agrarian monarchies which historians describe as “modern states” and “nation states.” We have trained ourselves to search European history for the first moments of “modernity,” and Quentin Skinner has located one as early as the middle of the twelfth century, when Otto Freising described Italian city politics to his German feudal readers. There is a long-standing tradition of calling Machiavelli the first “modern” thinker about politics, on the double ground that his “republicanism” breaks decisively with scholastic papalism and imperialism, and that his “Machiavellism” provides the foundation of raison d’état in the age of the sovereign monarchies. I am unable to accept these theses, and in a lecture delivered in the Palazzo della Signoria itself¹⁴ I argued that what we call “modern” political thinking does not appear until the territorial monarchies, of which Machiavelli had little experience, began emerging from the wars of religion, which he did not live to see.¹⁵ In this perspective the first “modern” theorists would be the exponents of jus gentium and raison d’état, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. I would set a wider gap than do the followers of Leo Strauss between Hobbes and Machiavelli, interesting though the later theorist found the earlier, and I can make little sense of the thesis that Machiavelli was an exponent of “modern natural law,” since I see no evidence that the conceptual scheme of natural law ever entered his text, or his head. As his texts escaped his control and were read by philosophers and jurists, they may well have been retranslated as challenging the thought of the latter, but this is a point at which a sharp distinction between humanists and jurists may be of some use.

I see Machiavelli, as he saw himself, as one concerned with the statement of “ancient” values under “modern” conditions,16 and this is a key to the paradoxical appearance of “republican” thought at the heart of an early modern monarchy. The values he propounded were “ancient” in a radical sense. The ideology of virtus can be traced back to the hoplite revolution of perhaps the seventh century before Christ; it expresses an ideal of warrior citizenship pre-Socratic, pre-Christian, and pre-juristic, and attempts to prove that “ancient” values were philosophical and that Machiavelli was “modern” in departing from them¹⁷ appear to me to miss the point. The language of virtus is more Latin than Attic; it was kept alive by the great Roman orators and historians from Cicero to Tacitus, as they stressed its suppression by the values of Caesarean empire, and the history of republican and counter-republican thinking is bound up with the historiography of Decline and Fall. The immediate point, however, is that the paradox of the presence of values so radically ancient at the heart of early modernity is central to what is meant by “the Machiavellian moment.” The post-Florentine chapters of this book are concerned with a quarrel between “ancients” and “moderns” in baroque and enlightened political thinking.

Hexter expressed himself satisfied by my account of how Tudor-Stuart English thinking left room for the development of ideas of an active citizenship, but later critics—Patrick Collinson and Markku Peltonen¹⁸—have been less happy with my claim that a full-grown republicanism is not to be found before the regicide of 1649. My meaning was that it was only then that the English polity was imagined in the form of a republic. Much of what Peltonen and others have found seems to me to belong with the category of Tacitism, a mode of discourse common in the later sixteenth century and consisting in both the injunction to submit oneself to an imperfect monarchy and the means of articulating for oneself the ways in which it was imperfect.19 Based on Tacitus’s account of principate replacing republic, it contained the image of a past condition of liberty but amounted to little more than a republicanism of the court, a means by which discontented courtiers, counsellors, and magnates might imagine themselves as senators. There are few plans for replacing the monarchy by its councils, and these are by their nature transitory; David Norbrook has brought to light one such connection, whose members could, from at latest the outset of the First Civil War, imagine dispensing with the monarchy and employed the Roman poet Lucan to express themselves.²⁰ My contention has been that it took civil war, dissolution of the government, and actual regicide to compel the imagining of England as a republic²¹ and the search for a concept of active citizenship on which such a republic could be based. The pages in The Machiavellian Moment which caught Hexter’s attention were those aimed at a theory of citizenship rather than of a republic, and at concepts of property and arms which I contended must be part of such a theory.

Two years after The Machiavellian Moment appeared, I published an edition of The Political Works of James Harrington,²² on which I had been working while the earlier text was in preparation. Harrington is a central figure in the present volume and in the historical scheme that has taken shape in and around my writings; there are essays earlier than 1975 in which this scheme, and his and Machiavelli’s roles in it, are sketched out.²³ As the reader knows, it is central to this book that Harrington restated Machiavelli’s doctrine of the armed and active citizen in the setting of a history of land tenures as necessary to the exercise of arms, a history running from classical and republican antiquity through feudal tenure—termed “modern prudence”—to a present when antique conditions might be restored. This scheme, its disappointments, and its transformations, are necessary to the history of “the Machiavellian moment,” but it has been the subject of much controversy. Historical schemes of changing property were far from unknown in 1975, but most of them culminated in property as commodity and society more or less capitalist and commercial. The effect of the scheme I was proposing was to prolong the tensions between real and moveable property, land and commerce, further into modern times than was welcome to either liberal or Marxist thought in the 1970s. There were Italian critics who looked on The Machiavellian Moment as part of a scheme to impose an ideology of American liberalism on the course of European history; in the replies I made to them I was able to point out that my book was already under attack for being neither liberal nor American enough.24 In anglophone Marxism there existed a tradition—running from R. H. Tawney through C. B. Macpherson and Christopher Hill—which exhibited Harrington as a bourgeois ideologist like everyone else of his era²⁵; to these I suggested that the description “possessive individualists,” as Macpherson had developed it, fitted Harrington’s adversary Matthew Wren better than it did him.²⁶ It was crucial to my thesis that we were moving into a period in which there were tensions between land and commerce and republican theory might find itself better based on the former than on the latter. It was never the case, however, that there had been a “Machiavellian moment” at which the short-lived English republic had faced a choice between agrarian and commercial values, and I had not stated that there was.27 Harrington merely thought inheritable landed property a more secure basis for a republican citizenry than moveable goods bought and sold on a market, and argued that a republic should expand its basis in land to keep pace with the growth of its commerce. He was expounding Turner’s “frontier thesis” before it had been formulated, and the debate between virtue and commerce, unknown to Machiavelli, had barely begun.

My reading of Harrington has been most pertinaciously attacked where it rests on the assertion that he intended to base his ideal (but English) republic on the virtue of the active citizen. He wrote a good deal—perhaps more than I attended to—about the concept of interest and the means of converting the interest of the individual into the interest of the whole. There are points in his writings where he seems to present the institutions of his republic as a series of mechanisms for making men behave virtuously when they are not so by nature; and there is a decidedly strange proposal for separating speech from action and confining the former to the few, who are to debate but not decide, and the latter to the many, who are to decide without debating. On these bases it has been argued by Jonathan Scott, on a number of occasions, that Harrington was not a republican but an eccentric Hobbesian of possibly unsound mind, and his utopia a kind of dispersed and unpersonified Leviathan designed to coerce men into an obedience they would never give of themselves.²⁸ Scott is one of a number of scholars who have valuably reminded us that there were many varieties of English republicanism—I hope I did not suggest that Harrington’s was the only kind, but it would not matter greatly if I did—the full range of which has been examined in a series of chapters by Blair Worden.²⁹ I reply to Scott’s reading of Harrington by quoting a passage from the latter’s last work, which I think does not appear in The Machiavellian Moment but was known to me at the time of writing it.

The contemplation of form is astonishing to man, and has a kind of trouble or impulse accompanying it, that exalts his soul to God.

As the form of a man is the image of God, so the form of a government is the image of man.30

This language is Platonic and could scarcely have been used by Hobbes (or perhaps by Machiavelli). It tells us that as men govern themselves, they become as gods; their government of themselves is rooted in the earth, as God’s government is rooted in the creation. The institutions of Oceana are not manipulative but consist in the form through which men become what they ought to be. We have advanced far beyond Roman virtus to a Platonist theology of citizenship, one which eliminates the priest by elevating the citizen to perform his role, and may—for reasons too complex to elaborate here—end by leaving the Son less than the equal of his Father in the Christian Trinity. Hobbes may be seen arriving at the same point by a different route, and he and Harrington were at one in their attack upon orthodox Christian ecclesiology.³¹ The most valuable work on Harrington since 1977 has been done by Mark Goldie and Justin Champion, who have examined his extreme anticlericalism and his role as a pioneer of the English “radical Enlightenment.”³² The journey into political theology as a key to English thought in “the long eighteenth century” is a development which I heartily endorse³³ but which does not figure in The Machiavellian Moment. It remains to be seen how the two may be connected.

The historical scheme into which Harrington inserted the concept of citizenship was one of unusual sophistication for its time, but was still what we should call pre-modern. It took the form of a loop, returning to its starting-point, the renewal of the conditions under which the ancient republics had been possible; and the reason for this was Harrington’s belief that armies must still be settled on the land and that the attempt to pay them in cash on a regular basis was beyond the capacities of the state—the problem which had brought down the Roman republic and the principate which had succeeded it. Within half a century of Harrington’s writing, however, the emergence of the standing army, based on a system of public credit, had brought about what intellectuals by the year 1700 recognized, as I narrate in chapter XII above, as a transformation of historical conditions. My subsequent work, down to the moment at which I am writing, has been concerned with the perceived consequences of this transformation and how it gave birth to what may be termed Enlightenment, in more than one of the many senses in which that word can be used. I have elsewhere described³⁴ how in 1976, the year after this book’s first publication, I was led to begin a project of studying Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which a vision of European history based on the rise and spread of commercial society entailed a history of the collapse of ancient Mediterranean empire but was still exposed to the challenge of ancient values. In this and at many other points I was led to expand “the Machiavellian moment” into one at which the ideals and discourses of “virtue” and “commerce” challenged one another, and I found myself asserting that this moment was so far prolonged that there were ways of saying that it might be still going on.

These assertions began to take shape in the four last chapters of The Machiavellian Moment and have been elaborated in subsequent publications, in particular Virtue, Commerce and History (1985) and Barbarism and Religion (1999-).³⁵ The trajectory of these works, and their reception, has been affected by their involvement in a series of debates over “positive” and “negative” liberty, “republicanism,” and “liberalism”—debates which they have, sometimes inadvertently, helped to shape (if “shape” is a word appropriate to the present condition of these arguments).36 It may lessen confusion, though it may increase complexity, to say something here about the intentions of The Machiavellian Moment and how they may be misunderstood and should be understood. The revolutionary effects of the introduction of public credit and the standing army included the recognition as a new and dominant force in politics and history of what was termed “commercial society” and later “civil society”—that state of affairs, made possible very largely by trade, capital, and mobile property, in which exchange relations among human beings generated a wealth and civility proof against religious and civil warfare. (The need to emerge from the Wars of Religion, including their distinctive English variant, can be seen as cardinal to the growth of Enlightenment.)³⁷ In studying and encouraging the phenomena of “commercial” and “civil society,” a crucial role came to be attached to what were variously known as “manners” and “politeness”: the social usages, and the accepted images of both self and other, that arose as human beings encountered one another in an increasingly complex process of exchange and engaged in the benign friction which came to be denoted as “polishing” and issued in “politeness.”³⁸ A polite society was also a commercial society, and the culture of early dominant capitalism came to depict politics as a process of the “polishing,” “moderating, “refinement,” and (a more dangerous term) “softening” of human passions and interests through their conversion into “manners.”³⁹ If we are to consider Enlightenment as a process of the increasing disempowerment of religious belief, we must further notice that “polite” men and women would be averse to fanaticism, since they believed that they knew only what they knew of one another and that such knowledge could consist only of “opinion,” a term which obliged toleration by forbidding conviction—a crucial step in the formation of what we call “liberalism,” though the word has not yet been used in this afterword and we should not be hasty in introducing it.

The polite society, it must be noted, was one organized with increasing efficiency for war. “Commerce” generated “public credit,” and “public credit” the “standing army.” The latter was not simply an instrument through which the state pursued its purposes, but one through which it prevented that pursuit from destroying it; once the army was an arm of the state, there was decreased danger of civil war (a key to the mystery of 1688 in English history). War was increasingly under the state’s control, and there was a short-lived utopia in which Europe appeared a “confederation” or “republic” of states, in whose interactions the element of war was moderated and civilized by the combined forces of jus gentium and a shared culture of manners disseminated by commerce. (I do not deny the importance of international law in choosing to pursue the theme of manners.) This utopia was beginning to disintegrate by 1763, as the great wars between France and Britain for predominance in Europe, America, and India led each to expand its “public credit” to the point where “national debt” threatened revolutionary consequences; and in the philosophical history I am constructing I attach ideal significance to David Hume’s dictum that “the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit must destroy the nation.”40 Hume had been concerned in all his writings with the superiority of a modern society based on commerce over an ancient society based on naked individuality, but he had reached the point of imagining a society so far in debt to faceless creditors that the value of all property, the liberty of every individual, and the meaning of every thing or idea, would be reduced to its capacity to persuade creditors to continue an economy based exclusively on speculation. The natural relations between humans in society—and this would include manners—would thus be ended and disappear for lack of ontological or epistemological foundations. Edmund Burke came to see the growth of public debt as conducive to revolutionary fantasy, and revolution as a program for the subversion of all manners.⁴¹

It is with this in view that I present as crucial the argument put forward as early as 1698 by Andrew Fletcher.⁴² A warm advocate of the spread of trade—he was among the promoters of the scheme for a Scottish entrepôt at Darien—he doubted whether, with the growth of commerce and consumption, something essential to human freedom was not being given up: namely, the exercise of arms and the possession of the property on which arms were settled, essential to the individual’s capacity to appear personally in his own government. In reply to such doubts, we have seen how Daniel Defoe argued that it was enough for the individual to be represented in a parliament that would check the abuse of power by the state that now controlled the army, and that a society founded on the individual’s possession of arms was likely to be warlike, impoverished, and separated into masters and serfs. It is the debate between direct and representative democracy, and close to that between positive and negative liberty; and it is at the same time a debate between two imperfectly satisfactory moments in history, such as will from this point be the meaning of “the Machiavellian moment.” The individual who possesses the means of his own freedom is liable to regress into barbarism, unsupported by the freedom of others; the individual whose freedom consists in the exercise of diverse capacities, but who never brings them together in the performance of public acts in his own person, is liable to progress into corruption and find himself subject to tyranny. There is no ideal moment in history, and though we may imagine a species of freedom which consists in the freedom to move prudently between the ancient and the modern poles, the exercise of such freedom depends upon the maintenance of the unity of personality necessary to act in history, and history has become a process of rendering that unity precarious. There is consequently a species of historicism, in which many or most thinkers of the eighteenth century can be seen to have been involved.

I am suggesting a debate between ancient and modern liberty, the former supposing the direct action of the personality, the latter its mediation through all the multifarious activities which may relate humans to one another in society—the liberty of the hedgehog, who knows himself but may know nothing else, opposed to the liberty of the fox, who knows so many things that he may have no self left to know.43 It is akin to the debate between “positive” liberty, in which the assertion of the self can be made to look antique and barbaric, and “negative” liberty, in which freedom from restraint may fail to answer the question who it is who is being restrained or liberated. It is, however, sharply distinct—in the sense that it requires and provides a very different narrative—from that history of “negative liberty” which is told entirely in terms of the law, natural, constitutional, or positive, which furnishes the individual with rights and defines his freedom as their exercise. Liberty defined as jus, right, droit, or recht, has of course an imposing history in the eighteenth century, and in choosing to relate another history I do not mean to deny the importance of this one, though I may suspect that the history I narrate raised questions not answered or asked in that I do not. The essay quoted above, in which I asserted—and must now maintain as against Richard Tuck—that the concepts of “virtue” and “right” could not be reduced to one another, in fact made that claim with regard to a triad, of “virtues,” “rights,” and “manners.” I will now make the claim that my work from The Machiavellian Moment through Virtue, Commerce and History and several linking essays to the opening volumes of Barbarism and Religion,44 has been concerned with a dialectic between “virtues” and “manners,” initially and thereafter distinct from that between “virtues” and “rights” with which the historians of “negative” versus “positive” liberty have been preoccupied. I do not mean that the latter debate did not exist, was not important, or should be subordinated to that between “virtues” and “manners,” only that the narrative I have tried to set forth needs to be related in its own terms if we are to understand what was going on in the eighteenth century. It may be that the narrative of positive and negative liberty needs to make a detour through that of ancient and modern liberty if the richness of the story is to be understood, and I note that Quentin Skinner has not traveled much in the eighteenth century, but I am navigating by a rather different compass-card.

Since I am preoccupied as a historian with the dialogue between ancient and modern liberty, it is unsurprising that the recent political philosopher whose work has the greatest resonance for me should be the late Hannah Arendt. I have certainly been narrating the history of a phenomenon she noted, whereby in the eighteenth century the social rose up against the political, and the image of human action was replaced by that of human behavior.⁴⁵ This formula is deeply illuminating, but it does not follow—as Harvey Mansfield, a Straussian for whom history is subservient to philosophy, has wrongly supposed⁴⁶—that I have selected Arendt’s as a philosophy whose work I may convert into history; the life of the mind is neither as simple nor as muddled as that. I am a historian concerned mainly with happenings in anglophone history, and I note that the tensions between ancient and modern liberty, brought into the open by Fletcher and Defoe in 1698, were elaborated under that rubric by defenders of Sir Robert Walpole about 1734, some eighty years before Benjamin Constant employed them to understand Jacobin and Napoleonic history.⁴⁷ The late Judith Shklar once inquired with characteristic vehemence why I had spent time on anything so provincial as British and American history instead of joining that mainstream which flowed toward the Niagara of the French Revolution. I can reply only that I study a history which did not shoot Niagara and avoided it as a maelstrom; an Anglo-French history as European as it is American.

[III]

Jack Hexter’s question might now be rephrased, and it might be answered that in Whig parliamentary England (of all places), republican thought (of all things) had a specific but not an immediate effect. It did not produce any programs for replacing monarchy with a republic. The memory of the kingless regime—even when that of a Protector and a parliament—following the regicide of 1649 was a memory of civil war that nobody desired to repeat; and the conviction that human monarchy was a necessary reflection of the monarchy of God was very deeply rooted indeed. The theological convictions of what philosophical republicans there were could be ascertained only with difficulty; John Toland, if one of them, seemed not only a deist but a pantheist.48 Catharine Macaulay, the most formidably learned republican historian in Whig England, looked back to no Harringtonian formula but to the brief rule of the Rump Parliament, when a group of philosophic statesmen—Vane, Sidney, and (in Wordsworth’s later phrase) “others who called Milton friend”—might have legislated the English people into fitness for a republic.⁴⁹ This theme was taken up by later historians—William Godwin and Samuel Taylor Coleridge—in whose writings we see how easily the Platonic unitarianism attributed to these seventeenth-century figures could be rephrased as a nineteenth-century philosophical idealism. This line of thought nowhere led toward practice. The central problem of 1688 in retrospect—whether there had occurred a Lockean dissolution of government and reversion of power to the people—had little relationship to a republic of citizens and their virtue; the “people” were exercising their rights and were free to return to monarchy if they saw fit. There is no “Lockean moment” in English or British history, and the undoubted presence of one in the process by which an American “people” was led to set up a republic and make it federal is, as we shall see, open to dispute and determination.

“Republican” language in its English setting had more to do with the place of personal monarchy in a balanced constitution. Since 1642, when Charles I’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament had introduced this theory and made it controversial,⁵⁰ it had been clear that a “republic” might include a component of active monarchy, not necessarily compatible with the thesis that the king had no being outside unity with his parliament. “Republicans” might be accused of reducing him to the merely symbolic status of a Venetian doge; but Bolingbroke, claiming to reactivate the Crown against the “Venetian oligarchy” of parliament, imagined the king as a “patriot” at the head of a “patriot” people. This word carried strong connotations of republican active citizenship, and Bolingbroke’s use of it had to contend with a perception, as old as the Civil Wars, of the “patriot” as one who loved his country more than he loved its government, or even its king. He might easily appear a Brutus, a Cato, or a Catiline, and it was not until the 1790s that “patriot” acquired the primary meaning of “loyalist” (and was denounced by post-Whig intellectuals as meaning “chauvinist”). More immediately, it connoted one in opposition, appealing to Roman virtue against ministerial corruption. Dr. Johnson’s well-grounded suspicion of the motives of such oppositions led him to his famous remark that “patriotism” was “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

“Patriot” and “republican” discourse was to a large extent caught up in a parliamentarism which it might criticize but to which it could not propose alternatives; this is why it found itself confined to a role in opposition. The parliamentarism in question was that which Harrington had failed to foresee: based on the survival of patronage and influence in crown and aristocracy after the decay of feudal tenures, and their vast expansion in the world of commerce and credit, national debts, and standing armies. It was this which Tories of Anne’s reign denounced as “the monied interest,” the rule of England by a new oligarchy based on a new kind of property: the possession not of land, or even movable goods and merchant capital, but of paper tokens of confidence in the future of a state now ruled by its creditors. Hume’s analysis of “public credit” reminds us that even the great Scottish philosophers of history, tracing the evolution of commerce, liberty, and politeness, were not sure they had solved the problem of national debt. Edmund Burke saw the French Revolution as a lethal combination of “monied interest” and atheist intellectuals for the destruction of manners and their complex history; but he had to assert that the British national debt was secured, unlike the French, on the basis of a national economy—and this had to be maintained in practice against the Humean forebodings of Richard Price and Thomas Paine.51 Yet Paine was no classical republican, only a hater of monarchy; he believed that a national debt would stimulate the economy once it was under democratic control.

Once we see “republican” thinking as an advocacy of “ancient liberty,” whose survival must be ensured under “modern” conditions, we can see it as a philosophy of history engaged in a dialectic, a criticism of history contained within the history it criticised. Its consequences, however, were not merely philosophical but were also practical; it provided the means of showing any existing regime as “corrupt,” entangled in conditions that deprived personality of the independence and autonomy indicated by the term “virtue”; and the Scottish philosophy of history did not absolutely answer this challenge. It is a serious question in eighteenth-century philosophy whether the human personality can survive in history; and the consequence in rhetoric and practice is that the existing order can always be shown as corrupt. This was to be important when the American revolution broke away from the Whig and parliamentary order and set about the foundation of a republic.52

The last chapter of The Machiavellian Moment has been more involved in controversy than all its predecessors together, for the reason that it inquires into the historical character of the American founding. There are earlier writings in which I indicate that my narrative can be carried from Florence to Philadelphia,⁵³ but I can recollect realizing that this fifteenth chapter could be added, and to that extent I do not think that I wrote the book with the intent to arrive at this conclusion. Nor was I at all alone in seeing the Revolution and Constitution as rooted in “republican” prehistory. Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution had already pointed out the extraordinary power of English opposition ideology; Douglass Adair’s Fame and the Founding Fathers had shown how the leaders in 1776 and 1787 saw themselves as legislators in the Greco-Roman sense⁵⁴; and Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic had dealt with American classical republicanism and the extent of its supersession so effectively that he became one of the principal authors arguing against me. It therefore did not seem outrageous to depict the Revolution and Foundation as rooted in a long republican tradition or as entailing that dialogue between ancient and modern liberty which had become a principal meaning of “the Machiavellian moment”; and I was, and remain, surprised by the vigor (at times the venom) with which I was, and still am, attacked for taking positions I did not remember taking and felt no need to endorse. I cannot avoid thinking that much of this criticism has been blinkered, the result of misunderstanding not simple but inherent in the ways too many historians think.

I was not at any point saying that Americans—as they then began to know themselves—were actuated simply by “classical republicanism” or “country ideology.” These were present; they were highly articulated, and at times closed, belief systems, capable of providing detailed expositions of events and values. To convey their presence I was at times obliged to articulate them in full and as if self-contained. But it was inherent in the whole concept of a “Machiavellian moment” that such a discourse had encountered its opposites—including that of a “modern liberty”—and had entered into dialectic with them, in which each borrowed from the other and arrived at awareness of the historicity of both. Americans, I meant to say, were concerned with the question of retaining values under changing historical conditions; and I do not feel responsible for those who supposed I was saying that they were actuated exclusively by the values they were anxious to conserve. The Founders were a historically sophisticated generation, whatever may be said of the culture they helped bring into being.

If I am right in holding that my positions have been unjustly simplified, it is a question of how this simplification has come about. Part of the answer seems to lie in a special veneration American historians have come to feel for the figure of John Locke, a philosopher for whom veneration should surely take the form of clear thinking. In writing The Machiavellian Moment I was concerned—as I would not be now—with the argument of Louis Hartz that Americans all thought like Locke because, in the absence of a feudal past, there was no other way of thinking open to them. In earlier work on the way the English thought about their feudal past, I had noticed important debates in which Locke took no part, closely connected with those in which he did55; and in studying the eighteenth-century debate about virtue and commerce, I had not found him to be one of its principal movers. I therefore proposed, as a research strategy, that we should empty our minds of Locke and his “importance” and wait for him to force his way back—as I was sure he would—in those roles in which he had been important. So far as his place in the debate over the American Revolution is concerned, I have since been concerned with his major part in promoting that liberal quasi-Christianity whose appeal to Americans was noted at the time,56 with the ways in which his account of how a people might declare its government dissolved was employed to the rather different end of dissolving its ties with another people,⁵⁷ and with a splendidly maverick contemporary account of the Revolution which dismissed it as exclusively the result of Locke’s disastrous philosophy.⁵⁸ I do not think that The Machiavellian Moment has led me to minimize his role, or that it was intended to do so; but there persists to this day a habit of writing as if Locke were in need of vindication against me.⁵⁹ I have been trying to define his role; to define is to delimit, but not to reduce.

The difficulty here may be partly methodological. Historians often fail to practice the dialectical thinking they should study; they treat every thesis as if it were meant to explain a whole field, oppose it to another for which the same claim is made, and connect the two by such negative linkages as not-but, more-than, and from-to. This may help explain the curious habit of meeting any statement that Locke did not do something with the assertion that he did do something else; but it should be our aim to relate the part played by his writings, or his pattern of beliefs, to that played by other writings and other beliefs, and so to treat the American Founding as a conversation with itself about opposed values—as by general agreement it was. That conversation may well have been one in which Locke played an important part, but need not have been a conversation about Locke in which one took a stand for or against him, expressing views like or unlike those to be found in his writings. Here we have the possibility of another explanation, ideological rather than methodological, of the defensiveness and protectiveness which some American historians display towards him. There has grown up a practice of treating the debate in which The Machiavellian Moment has been involved as one between “republican” and “liberal” readings of the American Constitution and the culture based upon it,60 and Locke has become a patron saint and founding father of the American civil religion known as “liberalism.” It is thought necessary to affirm that it is enough for the “liberal” citizen to know his rights and to be active in asserting them, whereas “republican” theory requires him to affirm a “virtue,” a combination of autonomy and commitment, to which the concept of a rights-bearer is not altogether adequate. Here we begin to draw near, once more, to the tensions between “positive” and “negative” liberty prominent early in this essay. When I presented revolutionary thinking as based on the fear that “corruption” might promote the loss of “virtue” (and therefore liberty), I was held to be negating the extent to which it was based on an enumeration of rights; and this appears to be what the “Lockean moment” is all about. I emphasized the “republican” component because I thought it had a history that should be brought to light; but it is essential to the concept of a “Machiavellian moment” that diverse principles should form part of the same action, and perhaps that they should be incapable of a final resolution.

The Machiavellian Moment, however, contains very few references to “liberalism”—as a glance at the index will confirm—and I should be at ease if it contained none at all. The term was not used in the eighteenth century, where the adjective “liberal” did not bear its modern meaning, and though elements were present which would in due course be assembled by means of this formula, there was no system of doctrine corresponding to its later use. The book is concerned with the rather different subject of the tensions between ancient and modern liberty: between the kind of liberty enjoyed by the inhabitant of a complex commercial society, and the criticisms both of this concept of liberty and of the history which has given rise to it. I ask whether such tensions were apparent in the American Revolution and Founding, and I reply that there were. The partly Lockean program that led to independence—that of declaring colonies states and the empire a confederation, and then dissolving the confederation on grounds of misgovernance—did not of itself entail the creation of republics. There was no blueprint for a Lockean republic, and Locke—who was interested in the origin and end of government but not in its structure and exercise—had carefully abstained from instructing the people as to how they might reconstitute the state after dissolving it. A Lockean polity would be a community of rights-bearers, but that said nothing as to its form, or—beyond the premise that it would be constitutional—its constitution. We must therefore look beyond Locke to discover why it was taken for granted that the newly independent states would be republics, or what that word was understood to mean. Here Douglass Adair reminds us that the Founders came to see themselves as legislators in the classical sense, founders of classical republics to whom the rhetoric of citizenship and virtue was highly relevant. Bernard Bailyn reminds us that the rhetoric of revolution was based on a deep-seated fear of ministerial corruption, to which the independence, liberty, and virtue of citizens provided the only, but deeply threatened, answer. And J. R. Pole had already informed us that the spread of representative assemblies had been accompanied by a spreading awareness of how easily both representatives and electorates might be corrupted by patronage, including that of the state.61 The rhetoric of corruption was so widespread that it helps explain the creation of republics as the means of meeting it; but it is the essence of “the Machiavellian moment” that the republic is itself exposed to the threat of corruption.

The discourse of virtue and corruption therefore formed part of the language of both Revolution and Constitution; the question to be asked is what its presence meant. Here it is again regrettable that the debate involving The Machiavellian Moment has been an argument as to whether the foundation of the republic rested on “republican” principles or on some set of other principles—Lockean, “liberal,” or “modern.” I did not wish to determine this question in either-or terms but to say that the foundation entailed a debate and tension between what I call “ancient” and “modern” ideas of liberty, and that perhaps this debate was not finally resolved. Here of course I was trespassing on American foundationalism: the republic was founded, foundation did involve the legislation of principles, and to represent it as an unresolved “Machiavellian moment” was a challenging act. Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic had in fact replied to my challenge before it was issued. He did so by representing “classical” republicanism as unequivocally “ancient,” and American republicanism as a rapidly progressive victory of the “modern.” To this end he made more than I would have of the aristocratic character of “ancient” republicanism; he left it little more than the rearguard action of an American gentry. But his argument is sound to the extent that the classical republic, as an ideal, entailed an equality between an aristocracy and a democracy, and that an emerging American social structure soon entailed a “democracy” and an “equality” incompatible with the notion that a natural aristocracy could so much as exist, and calling for a new ideology it was tempting to label “liberalism.”

“Republic” at this point gave way to “democracy.” The author who here got into deepest trouble was John Adams; his Defence of the Constitution of the United States—“the most misunderstood book since the Bible”62—declared that an aristocracy of powerful families would always emerge and must be guarded against, and was roundly condemned for even suggesting the possibility. It is amusing to wonder what Adams might have said about the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Gores, and the Rockefellers, but if he thought the power of families rested on their kinsmen, clients, and retainers, his thinking was insufficiently modern. In his own day, however, the threat of aristocracy was perceived as modern, when Alexander Hamilton was understood to be promoting a powerful executive, possessed of a national debt, a standing army, and extensive political patronage. Here was that government by a “monied interest” for which in England the Country had been attacking the Court for a hundred years, and Hamilton was condemned as seeking to introduce a “British” system of rule.⁶³ It was a debate with a long history, in which Locke had played no conspicuous part, but from which the notions of “credit” and “property,” “virtue” and “corruption,” were certainly not absent. The extensive literature which informed me—as if I had suggested otherwise—that a republic of Jeffersonian farmers would engage in trade both domestic and foreign seemed to me to miss the point. The issue had always been credit rather than commerce, the rentier and stock-trader who invested in the state rather than the entrepreneur who invested in production and exchange; and if Hamilton himself had been defeated, the system of government he advocated might be thought to have survived, perpetuating tensions within American democracy whose history went a long way back. I was beginning to see the republic as a remedy for eighteenth-century problems, whose very success had served to perpetuate them.

The contention—perhaps not too great a simplification of Wood’s argument—that the progress of the American founding was from “republic” to “democracy” encounters, and is entangled in, the most extraordinary verbal formulation to which it gave rise: James Madison’s dictum that a society in which the citizens rule themselves directly is a democracy, while one in which they do so through their elected representatives is a republic. This is a deliberate reversal of the accepted meanings of both words, and a reversal of the accepted sense in which one is presumed “ancient” and the other “modern.” It is an ultra-conservative American position to declare that the Union is not a democracy but a republic. Madison wrote in pursuit of the project of federalism, the conversion of a confederacy of states into a federal republic capable of empire without being corrupted by it—the enterprise which more than any other rendered the thought of the Founding unique. It could not be pursued without conceiving a complex of ways in which citizens might elect authorities who represented them, and it became a commonplace that representation, unknown to the ancients (but not to Roman lawyers), was the great discovery of modern politics. This very language, however, continued the dispute between ancient and modern, and prevented Madison from abolishing it. Whether he knew it or not, Rousseau had already asked whether there was any sense in which one moral being could represent another, and whether one did not consent to one’s own corruption in choosing another whose actions should be considered as one’s own. Representation was in fact a fiction, and the creation of an entirely fictive, and fictitious, system of government might prove incompatible with the notion that one acted as a citizen or a being naturally political. It was seen as of the essence of modernity that one inhabited a world of fictions in which self and other were creations of the partial encounters between humans in a world of exchanges. It may very well be that we have ourselves reached a condition where the knowledge of fictiveness is unsatisfying to the point of being intolerable; in doubting whether the oligarchy of politicians who oblige us to choose between them represent us in any way worth speaking of, we doubt whether we have selves left to be represented. The global economy finds an ally in that postmodernism which informs us that self and society are alike fictitious and that our only choice is which fiction to buy next.

The dialogue between ancient and modern liberty has traveled a long way since commercial society was invented in England in the 1690s.64 I have been pursuing its history at some distance from either the American debate between liberalism, republicanism, and/or communitarianism, or the British pursuit of the distinction between negative and positive liberty, since while it could be linked with either, it seems to me not quite identical with them. Nor should the reader suppose that The Machiavellian Moment was written, or should be read, with the aim of arriving at this philosophical predicament. It illuminates certain things which were going on in the history it narrates, and it touches on many things which wore a different face and could be explained differently. History is a field of study in which many explanations can, and must, exist together. For this reason, if there seems to be a historical story which leads from the apparently real to the increasingly fictitious, we can return to its study and find there the many ways in which we have been making ourselves and are not yet reduced to the choice between being our own solitary fictioneers and being the passive material of those always anxious to do our inventing for us.

Santa Monica, California; Baltimore, Maryland
March-May 2002

1 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume I, The Renaissance; Volume II, The Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 1978). Works published since 1975 and appearing in footnotes in this afterword are not listed in the bibliography to this volume, which remains as it was published in 1975. Works listed in the bibliography are not footnoted here.

² The most detailed critique appears in James Tully and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton University Press, 1988). Visions of Politics, a collection of Skinner’s essays in three volumes (Cambridge University Press, 2002), has been published after this was written. I have published no detailed methodological writings since 1987; see “Introduction: State of the Art” in J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1-36; “The Concept of Language and the Mètier d’Historien: Some Considerations on Practice,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 19-40; and “Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought,” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 21-34.

³ Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Myron P. Gilmore (ed.), Studies on Machiavelli (Florence: Olschki, 1972), pp. 147-206; “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds.), Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 1-33; “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). All of these have been recently and posthumously reprinted in Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (eds.), Isaiah Berlin: The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), with further bibliographic information.

⁴ Vol. I, The Renaissance, pp. xiv, 27-28, 42-48, ch. 4 at large, 156.

⁵ Skinner, vol. I, The Renaissance, pp. 4-5.

⁶ Barbarism and Religion, vol. III: The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

⁷ On this point—the principate as decline—I draw a sharper distinction between quattrocento and trecento humanists than will be found, for example, at Skinner, vol. I, The Renaissance, pp. 54-56. The decline of Roman liberty as the earlier writers see it is not incompatible with its rebirth as sacred empire, in Ghibelline writings, or under papal protection in Guelf. For Bruni there is a more decisive break with either; for Machiavelli it has become absolute.

⁸ The bibliography of this debate, in recent political theory and historiography, is very extensive and will not be attempted here. See, however, Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

⁹ “Virtues, Rights and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought,” Political Theory, IX, no. 3 (1981), 353-68, reprinted in Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 37-50.

¹⁰ Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14. The passage to which he draws attention (n.26) employs the term “civic humanism,” which, whatever its degree of precision, does not denote “humanism” in all its forms. Tuck proceeds to define “humanism” as best suits his thesis, that is, as the humanism of jurists. Donald R. Kelley’s The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) is a fine account of how this humanism—“civil” as opposed to “civic”—has shaped historical understanding.

¹¹ Tuck’s works, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and The Rights of War and Peace, are reviewed by him in the introduction to the last-named.

¹² See, most recently, James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reflections and Reappraisals (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

¹³ J. H. Hexter, On Historians (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 288. His chapter reviewing The Machiavellian Moment—here pp. 255-303—originally appeared in History and Theory, XVI (1977), 306-37.

¹⁴ On June 20, 1994, the occasion being the transfer to New York University of the villas formerly belonging to Sir Harold Acton. I spoke in the presence of Antonio di Pietro, then a leader of the magistrates investigating corruption in the Italian political class, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, who told me I had spoken of Machiavelli in a way to give hope for the future of Italy. I believe that his Eminence and I both understood very well what we were saying.

¹⁵ The lecture was published as “Machiavelli and the Rethinking of History,” in Il Pensiero Politico, XXVII, no. 2 (1994), 215-30.

¹⁶ Pocock, “Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Ancients and Moderns,” Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory, II, no. 3 (1978), 93-109 and “Machiavelli in the Liberal Cosmos,” Political Theory, XIII, no. 4 (1985), 559-74.

¹⁷ This I take to be a central argument of Paul A. Rahe’s Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). See also Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979); Machiavelli’s Virtue (University of Chicago Press, 1996). I see Machiavelli as radically “ancient,” and the studies of his religious thought I have found most illuminating are those of Sebastian De Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton University Press, 1989) and Anthony J. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

¹⁸ Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum: Or History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

¹⁹ There is an extensive literature on Tacitism, republican, monarchical, and philosophical. See Peter Burke, “Tacitism, Scepticism and Reason of State,” in J. H. Burns (ed., with the assistance of Mark Goldie), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 479-98.

²⁰ David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

²¹ This contention may also apply to John Milton; see David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

²² J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge University Press, 1977); see now also, James Harrington: Oceana and A System of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

²³ “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, XXII, no. 4 (1965), 549-83, reprinted in J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time (New York: Atheneum, 1971; University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 104-47); “The Only Politician: Machiavelli, Harrington and Felix Raab,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand, XII, no. 46 (1966), 265-96; “Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought,” in Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, pp. 80-103; “James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: A Study of the Ideological Context of his Writings,” Journal of British Studies, X, no. 1 (1970), 30-48.

²⁴ For these—especially in relation to the late Renzo Pecchioli’s Dal Mito di Venezia all’Ideologia Americana (Venice: Marsilio, 1983)—see my “Mito di Venezia and Ideologia Americana: A Correction,” Il Pensiero Politico, XII, no. 3 (1980), 483-86; “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” Journal of Modern History, LIII, no. 1 (1981), 49-72; “Tra Gog e Magog: I Pericoli della Storiografia Repubblicana,” Rivista Storica Italiana, XCVIII, no. 1 (1986), 147-94; “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XLVIII, no. 2 (1987), 325-46, reprinted in Frank Shuffleton (ed.), The American Enlightenment (University of Rochester Press, 1993, pp. 379-400).

²⁵ R. H. Tawney, “Harrington’s Interpretation of His Age,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XXVII (1941), 199-233; C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), ch. 6; Christopher Hill, “James Harrington and the People,” in Puritanism and Revolution (London: Mercury Books, 1962), pp. 299-313. On these works, see The Political Thought of James Harrington, pp. 56-57, and Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (reissued, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 128-29, 139-44, 321-23.

²⁶ The Political Thought of James Harrington, pp. 88-89.

²⁷ Cf. Steve Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Republic,” American Historical Review, 103, no. 3 (1998), 705-36.

²⁸ Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-1677 (Cambridge University Press, 1988); “The Rapture of Motion: James Harrington’s Republicanism,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 139-63; “The Peace of Silence: Thucydides and the English Civil War,” in Miles Fairburn and W. H. Oliver (eds.), The Certainty of Doubt: Tributes to Peter Munz (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996), pp. 90-116; England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also J. C. Davis, “Pocock’s Harrington: Grace, Nature and Art in the Classical Republicanism of James Harrington,” Historical Journal, XXIV, no. 3 (1981), 683-97.

²⁹ Blair Worden, ch. 15 of Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700; chs. 1-4 of David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649-1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

³⁰ Harrington, A System of Politics, IV, 3, 4; Pocock, The Political Works of James Harrington, p. 837; Pocock, James Harrington, p. 273.

³¹ Pocock, The Political Works of James Harrington, pp. 78-82, 89-97; “Contexts for the Study of James Harrington,” II Pensiero Politico, XI, no. 1 (1978), 20-35.

³² Mark Goldie, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington,” in Anthony Pagden (ed.), Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1987) pp. 197-224; “Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism,” in Phillipson and Skinner, op. cit., pp. 209-31; and Goldie (ed.), The Reception of Locke’s Politics (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), vol. 1, introduction; J.A.I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

³³ J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge University Press, 1985; 2d ed., 2000).

³⁴ Barbarism and Religion, vol. I, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1-2.

³⁵ Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1985); “Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment,” in R. Ajello et al. (eds.), L’Etá dei Lumi: Studi Storici nel Settecento Europeo in Onore di Franco Venturi (Naples: Jovene, 1985), vol. 1, pp. 523-622; “The Political Limits to Pre-Modern Economics,” in John Dunn (ed.), The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1990); “The Significance of 1688: Some Reflections on Whig History,” in Robert Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688: The Andrew Browning Lectures, 1988 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 271-92; “Standing Armies and Public Credit: The Institutions of Leviathan,” in Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (eds.), The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688-89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 87-103; Barbarism and Religion, vol. I, ch. 4 (“The Hampshire Militia and the Problems of Modernity”).

³⁶ See note 8, above.

³⁷ For a further statement of this case, see Barbarism and Religion, I, pp. 56-58, 108-12.

³⁸ Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

³⁹ Classically stated by Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1976).

⁴⁰ Above, p. 497.

⁴¹ See further Virtue, Commerce and History, ch. 10, “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution.”

⁴² See now John Robertson (ed.), Andrew Fletcher: Political Works (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

⁴³ Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox first appeared in book form as part of Russian Thinkers (London: Hogarth, 1978).

⁴⁴ See note 35, above.

⁴⁵ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), ch. 6, “The Rise of the Social.”

⁴⁶ See Hankins, Florentine Civic Humanism, pp. 226-27.

⁴⁷ Biancamaria Fontana (ed.), Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

⁴⁸ Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981).

⁴⁹ Pocock, “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Republican,” in Hilda L. Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 243-58.

⁵⁰ Michael J. Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, Estates, and the Answer to the XIX Propositions (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1985).

⁵¹ Pocock (ed.), Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1987).

⁵² I have carried the history of Anglo-American political discourse as far as its separation by the American Revolution and transformation by the French, in “The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse,” chapter II of Virtue, Commerce and History (1985); “A Discourse of Sovereignty: Observations on the Work in Progress,” in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 377-428; and “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic: (i) The Imperial Crisis,” “(ii) Empire, Revolution and an End of Early Modernity,” chs. 8 and 9 of Pocock (ed., with the assistance of Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer), The Varieties of British Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

⁵³ See note 23, above.

⁵⁴ Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York: Norton, 1974). Like Gerald Stourzh in Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), Adair brought to light the tensions created by the Humean critique of the republican idea.

⁵⁵ The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law developed the thesis that the republication of Sir Robert Filmer’s works provoked historical as well as philosophical controversy, and that Locke was untypical in taking no part in the former. See Virtue, Commerce and History, pp. 220-30.

⁵⁶ Barbarism and Religion, I, pp. 68-70. See B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1998).

⁵⁷ Varieties of British Political Thought, pp. 281-82.

⁵⁸ “Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke and Price: A Study in the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Conservatism,” Virtue, Commerce and History, ch. 9.

⁵⁹ See, most recently, T. H. Breen, The Lockean Moment: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2001). It is almost exclusively American historians who have rallied to the defense of Locke’s role in eighteenth-century British discourse; for instance, Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ronald Hamowy, “Cato’s Letters, John Locke and the Republican Paradigm,” History of Political Thought, XI (1990), 273-94.

⁶⁰ I shall not attempt a bibliography of this debate, since I have not sought to take part in it.

⁶¹ J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London and New York: Macmillan, 1966).

⁶² Pocock, “‘The Book Most Misunderstood since the Bible’: John Adams and the Confusion about Aristocracy,” in Anna Maria Martellone and Elizabetta Vezzosi (eds.), Fra Toscana e Stati Uniti: II Discorso Politico nell’età della Constituzione Americana (Florence: Olschki, 1989), pp. 181–201. I was moved to remark that though I did not aspire to place myself in such exalted company, I knew how Adams had felt.

⁶³ Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).

⁶⁴ Those works I have found most suggestive regarding its course and present condition are: Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1997); and Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). None of these, it will be plain, says exactly what I have been trying to say in these pages.