Machiavelli and the Double Politics of Ambition

The Poetry of Ambition

DA is Machiavelli’s only work devoted to the topic of ambition. ³ It is a good starting point for investigating his thought on the topic, because it is short and vivid yet comprehensive. The 187-line terza rima poem purports to be a letter from the front lines of a war between Venice and the Papal League, which Machiavelli witnessed in his capacity as a Florentine diplomat. The savagery of the war and the apparent ignorance of the poem’s addressee, Luigi Guicciardini, prompt the poet to consider the origin and effects of ambition. The poem is didactic both in tone and in structure: a semi-pagan creation story is followed by an abstract psychology of ambition and a report of its modern effects, with advice at the end. Yet, the poet’s grisly images and laments at the horrors of war show him to be no detached moralist. He sees ambition as a powerful and dangerous goddess whose work ends in blood. Moved to spare Tuscany the carnage of unbridled ambition, the poet concludes by proposing that “better order” can “extinguish” (DA 187) its flames. The picture of ambition in DA is complete but lacking in crisp detail, as befits a poem.

Machiavelli begins the poem by chiding his friend for ignorance of a basic fact: “In every place, ambition and avarice penetrate …” (DA 11–12). To explain this endemic problem, the poet retells the story of Genesis, adding pagan elements that highlight the role of ambition. In Machiavelli’s version, Cain and Abel are “living happy in their poor dwelling” (DA 23–24) even outside of Eden, which suggests that Cain’s ambitious sin against his brother, not Adam and Eve’s sin against God, was the true Fall of Man. A “hidden power” (DA 25) from heaven, not further identified, sends down avarice and ambition in the form of two Furies that incite Cain to murder Abel. Ambition begins, then, with the very first human relationships to involve rivalry among peers. The poem does not mention that Cain is also the founder of the first city (Genesis 4:17), which would further suggest that all politics is grounded in ambition. The two Furies have four faces and eight hands, allowing them to see and grasp everywhere at once. Unlike the classical Furies, Machiavelli’s vices are beautiful “to the eyes of many,” who see in them “grace” and “delight” (DA 31–33). Here as elsewhere, the poet clearly announces his disagreement with the crowd (see DA 176) by describing the Furies’ “pestilence” and the retinue of other vices they bring. The Furies are sent “to dwell on the earth” (DA 30) in order to sate their “limitless desire” (DA 41), but they disappear unexpectedly from the action of the poem. By the end of the story of Cain, the poet begins to address the human spirit as itself the source of ambition, “above all else malignant, iniquitous, violent, and savage” (DA 56–57). In contrast to the story of Eve and the serpent, the Furies implant ambition into Cain without his consent, but like original sin the Furies’ “evil seed” (DA 61) transforms not just Cain but also all persons to come. The hardy weed of ambition requires only the slightest of nourishment (DA 52, 70–71). Ambition appears on the scene as foreign to the human soul, yet by the end of the opening sequence of DA, it has replaced concord, peace, and charity as the inheritance of humankind.

The poet shifts his gaze to the world around him, with “ambition reigning everywhere” (DA 84). What is this powerful force? It is not mere rivalry but also sordid enmity “without law or pact” (DA 65). It is incorrigibly violent, even among the best cities and persons (see DA 97–102). Ambition is distinguished from every noble aspiration by its ruthlessness: “every man hopes to climb higher by crushing now one, now another, rather than through his own wisdom and goodness” (DA 73–75). The poet (and, indeed, the Machiavellian corpus generally) seems not to have a word in his lexicon for an honorable drive to succeed. Such a drive would be, in any case, an artificial modification of the “natural instinct” (DA 79) of ambition; ambition is not the perversion of a more basic urge. The poet ascribes a remarkably weighty political role to this vicious instinct; it determines “the varying of every mortal state” (DA 66). ⁴ One might take this claim as poetic hyperbole. Reading it literally, perhaps the poet thinks ambition dominates all other forces of Machiavellian politics—for example, Fortuna, virtù, fear, and love. A less strained reading is that ambition reflects these forces in the political realm. For example, the poet equates bungled ambitions with being “mastered by Fortune” (DA 177, see FH VI.34), which suggests that ambition can use other political forces and be used by them in turn. The politics of ambition are as unavoidable as they are violent.

The poet recognizes that by finding ambition on both sides of every conflict, he can no longer use it to explain why “one people commands and the other weeps” (DA 83). Political fortunes are to be explained instead by the virtues and laws that translate ambition into action. The poet emphasizes the novelty of this pronouncement by pointing perplexed readers to his personal insight: “If you want to know the reason …[it is that] if with Ambition are joined a fierce heart, an armed virtue, one rarely fears misfortune for oneself” (DA 82, 91–93). Aggressive action serves ambition well, but sloth (ozio) and cowardice (viltà) leave the ambitious person hankering over what she cannot get. The same is true of states. Good laws will direct an ambitious state to “disturb the sheepfolds of others” (DA 101), and such foreign adventures will pacify its domestic affairs. On the other hand, “if cowardice and bad order sit side by side with this ambition, every sort of distress … comes quickly” (DA 106–108). Both individual and state will inevitably feel ambitious desires, but ambition can be guided by “law or greater force” (DA 81). What explains different fortunes in politics, “the varying of every mortal state,” is not ambition per se but the ways in which ambition is put to use.

Building on this analysis, the poet’s advice is to accept and manage ambition rather than to eliminate it. The way to control ambition is to develop the qualities encircling it since ambition itself is a constant. “Since no man has power to drive her out of himself, needful it is that Judgment and Sound Intellect, with Method and Vigor, be her companions” (DA 163–165). The poet does not reveal a great deal about what makes intellect or judgment sound, leaving mainly the example of his own thought and judgment, which commend warlike qualities above all. The goal of well-used ambition is clear, however, and its attainment is the standard by which these qualities can be evaluated. That goal, in short, is to win—to remain on the side of conquering ambition, not its cowardly and idle variant. “Of ambition you will see the one and other type: how this one robs and this other laments” (DA 127–128). To conquer, what ambition truly needs is sufficient virtue to acquire and consolidate gains in the face of others’ ambitions (see DA 169–71). No amount of encircling virtue, it seems, can neutralize ambition or keep it from all acts of violence, but a physical and moral armament can shield persons and cities from their own and others’ ambition. The poet concludes with the hope that his counsel will be heard in his native Tuscany and that “grace or better order” (DA 187) might extinguish the sparks of ambition. It is safe to say that he is not pinning his hopes on the supernatural since the main role of divine intervention in the poem is to originate ambition in mankind. Grace in the sense of fortuitous chance could solve the problem “by accident” (DA 95), but waiting for such a happy accident is a dangerous dependence on fickle Fortune. The safest course is to heed the poet’s advice and to use better order and a “severe education” (fiera educazion) (DA 117) which “can make up where Nature is lacking” (DA 113–114) by surrounding ambition with companion virtues. Haig Patapan (2003: 194–199) concludes the poem is to further a Machiavellian education in prudence by supplanting the Christian view of ambition with a quasi-pagan one.

It is unclear how the poet evaluates ambition, all things considered. On one hand, at the outset the poet states his view directly: “if [ambition and avarice] had no existence, happy enough would be our state” (DA 14–15). Ambition is an obstacle to what we greatly desire. Furthermore, the poet is acutely aware of the horrors that ambition engenders. The most deeply felt lines of the poem describe the cruel suffering of innocents in war. On the other hand, ambition does not face the straight condemnation that vice usually receives. Instead, we hear that “there is no reason to repent of doing evil” because “no man can drive [ambition] from himself” (DA 163). What is not chosen is not blameworthy, and the poet does not directly blame the perpetrators of the slaughter. The lesson to be learned from “the sad example of these [victims]” is “how ambition must be used” (DA 161–162), not that it should be avoided or condemned. Nor does the poet accuse “the cruel and ungrateful gods” (DA 140) but simply describes how apparent divine malice forged a world with omnipresent ambition. On the whole, the poet views ambition not as a moral failing but as a dangerous drive. Blame might attach to those who deal with it improperly since cultivating the necessary virtues is a matter of discipline, not Nature. Yet the poet does not blame ambition’s victims; he sympathizes with them. Perhaps these common people only suffer because of the ambitions of their rulers, or perhaps the poet’s visceral responses track the traditional view that ambition is a vice, rather than the new, ambiguous message he is proclaiming.

DA (ca. 1509) is an early work. Machiavelli went on to thematize ambition again, sparingly in the Prince (1513) and at length in D (1517–1519) and the FH (1525). ⁵ Because the former book makes scant direct reference to ambition and is more concerned with abetting ambition (of the prince) than with containing or directing it, I will concentrate on Machiavelli’s republican writings. ⁶ The account of ambition that we find in those later, longer works is far fuller and more detailed than the picture of DA, but at few points does it contradict the earlier vision, making allowance for the images and mythology that the poem employs. The vivid and memorable account from DA can guide further investigation into Machiavelli’s larger works of republican theory. The questions that linger after reading the poem will be answerable with greater clarity: how does Machiavelli really evaluate ambition? What does “better order” entail? To whom can we look for examples of “judgment and sound intellect, with method and vigor”?

Ambizione and the Common Good

The core of ambition, in Machiavelli’s usage, is the “desire to dominate” (D I.5) or, more precisely, to better oneself (usually with public resources) without regard to the common good (Price, 1982: 389). In our day, “ambition” is a morally neutral term, but it was not so in Renaissance Italy. Popularly, ambition was considered to be a vice, and even in Machiavelli’s usage it is always a term of blame, never of praise. The reasons are twofold. First, ambition disregards limits. “Nature has created men so that they desire everything,” such that ambition “never abandons them at whatever rank they rise to” (D I.37). Second, like love, ambition is blind. The petty tyrants of Italy are often “blinded by a little ambition” (FH II.34, see FH V.9, D I.42, II.20) as they run headlong into political ruin. These traits combine to render ambition tyranny in germ. The effects of ambition in the FH are not freedom, rule of law, and glory—that is, the common good (Hanasz, 2010)—but are instead what one would expect from depravity and disorder: servility and impoverishment. Despite the danger, however, Machiavelli does not blame ambition. One does not blame what cannot be helped, and DA made it perfectly clear that ambition cannot be done away with.

Traditionally, the moral polarity of “ambition” and “common good” compelled the opposite recommendation: ambition is blameworthy and must be suppressed. For Machiavelli, this is not only impracticable, but it may be impolitic as well. A well-ordered city, with citizens of sound character, might be well served or at least not harmed by ambition, provided that one not construe its common good in a moralized way, which Machiavelli’s republicanism emphatically does not do. To see the nature and extent of his break with the traditional view, we can consult Machiavelli’s evaluation of one of the heroes of the FH, Michele di Lando:

He deserves to be numbered among the few who have benefited their fatherland, for had his spirit been either malign or ambitious, the republic would have lost its freedom altogether … But his goodness never allowed a thought to enter his mind that might be contrary to the universal good; his prudence led him to conduct things in such a mode that many yielded to his party and the others he was able to subdue with arms (FH III.17).

Machiavelli’s praise of Michele sounds very traditional—it was only his lack of ambition that allowed him to accomplish what he did. At first glance, Michele’s legacy seems to support the idea that ambition and common good conflict.

The overall depiction of Michele di Lando, however, points up both Machiavelli’s disagreement with the traditional view and the aspects that he adopts. When Michele, a poor wool-carder, is thrust into power by a mob, his first act as Gonfalonier is to preside over the lynching of an ousted official. He goes on to award himself a pension and give “many other benefits to many other citizens friendly to the plebs … that they might at all times defend him from envy” (FH III.16) and manages to remain in public office when his reforms collapse. One suspects that Michele has both an ambitious desire to better himself through public office and an certain goodness that moves him to benefit the city. Since they coexist in Michele, the two traits are not incompatible. Thus, Machiavelli only partially breaks with the traditional view; whereas ambition was traditionally seen as merely dangerous, he sees it as also potentially useful and even necessary. “A republic without reputed citizens cannot stand, nor can it be governed well in any mode. On the other side, the reputation of citizens is the cause of the tyranny of republics” (D III.28).

The elimination of the nobles early in the FH sheds light on the other aspect of the traditional view, the idea that ambition should be eliminated. After a good deal of internal upheaval, in which one party of nobles expelled another and a tyrant took over the city, the old-line military aristocracy of Florence was eliminated entirely (between 1343 and 1348—FH II.37–42). As a wise but unnamed commoner observes, the common people believed that only the nobles were ambitious and factious and that replacing them with “men of the people” would remove these political evils:

How mistaken the opinion of men is and how false their judgment, for the pride and ambition of the great was not eliminated but taken from them by our men of the people, who now, by the wont of ambitious men, seek to obtain the first rank in the republic (FH III.5).

Machiavelli, who elsewhere writes that “the nature of men is ambitious and suspicious” (D I.29), scorns the attempt to root out ambition from politics. On the other hand, he agrees with the civic humanist view that a certain kind of character is needed for stable government. Since this cannot be had by removing ambition, it must be sought by surrounding ambition with good qualities, prudence, and vigor, which Michele di Lando possessed in the highest degree. Michele merits great praise because he turned his ambition to the service of the city even though there were neither good orders nor a prevailing civic character prompting him to do so. ⁷

The Institutional Response to Ambition

Machiavelli is not content simply to hope that virtuous leaders like Michele come along to solve the problem of ambition; he wants a durable, institutional solution. ⁸ “A city based on good laws and orders has no necessity, as have others, for the virtue of a single man to maintain it” (FH IV.1). Again the alternatives of DA: grazia versus miglior ordin. In large part, the regime of a city dictates the channels through which the ambitious will seek to rise because they will follow high honors wherever they are politically and culturally located. Machiavelli implies that all ambition does ultimately aim at tyranny, at its own absolute preeminence, and so it is inflexible in one sense. On the other hand, those who “ascend from one ambition to another” must accumulate power by means of the political orders on hand if they are to approach the goal of sundering all orders in their own favor. Good orders can reliably channel the energies of the ambitious in ways that are beneficial to the city, thereby diverting them from mischief.

Machiavelli divides the ways of satisfying ambition into two broad categories, the public and the private (see FH VII.1 and D III.28). Each one suffices for increasing personal power so that ambition will follow whichever proves expedient in context. Public ways are directly political: “winning a battle, acquiring a town, carrying out a mission with care and prudence, advising the republic wisely and prosperously” (FH VII.1). The distinguishing mark of these ways is that, roughly speaking, they benefit the city as a whole. Foreign affairs naturally predominate here, because the city acts as a unity with respect to other states, and so to serve in war or diplomacy benefits the material common good of the whole city. Private ways, by contrast, profit particular individuals within the city: “benefitting this or that citizen, defending him from magistrates, helping him with money, getting him unmerited honors, and ingratiating oneself with the plebs with games and public gifts” (FH VII.1). Machiavelli’s institutional solution for ambition aims to promote only the public ways “to order oneself so that the citizens are reputed for a reputation that helps and does not hurt the city and its freedom” (D III.28). ⁹

Machiavelli draws his institutional ideals from Rome, which made public service the preeminent means to power. “A well-ordered republic ought, therefore, to open the ways, as was said, to whoever seeks support through public ways and close them to whoever seeks it through private ways, as one sees Rome did” (D III.28). He finds there what we might call a carrot and stick model, offering incentives for public service and punishments for private patronage. The incentives Rome offered were public honors culminating in spectacular triumphs for successful generals. The honor of a triumph so outshone other honors that the most ambitious souls of Rome were extremely eager to serve the city well in order to earn one (D II.6). Yet, rewards alone do not suffice, and “men are kept better and less ambitious longer through fear of punishment” (D I.29). Rome had an effective system of public accusations for anyone suspected of pursuing ambition at the expense of the common good. In contrast to those of Florence (McCormick, 2011), Roman trials were particularly effective deterrents on elite schemes because they were conducted by popular assemblies, which were neither especially sympathetic to nor influenced by patricians. “For fear of being accused citizens do not attempt things against the state; and when attempting them, they are crushed instantly and without respect” (D I.7). Machiavelli emphasizes the latter point in several places: the Romans would not allow previous public service, honorable though it may have been, to work as a kind of credit for the ambitious to spend in unpatriotic ways:

No well-ordered republic ever cancels the demerits with the merits of its citizens … for if a citizen has done some outstanding work for the city, and … has an audacity and confidence that he can do some work that is not good without fearing punishment, in a short time he will become so insolent that any civility will be dissolved (D I.24).

Manlius Capitolinus is Machiavelli’s prime example of a Roman who earned extravagant honor but was later accused and executed for his ambitions. “[The Romans] considered present dangers that depended on [Manlius] much more than past merits, so much that with his death they freed themselves” (D III.8). Machiavelli acknowledges that such lack of respect for persons is rare and difficult.

The aims of the institutional solution are twofold. Machiavelli envisions a warlike republic that maintains stability through expansion (D I.6), and this requires excellent military leadership. Good orders help to provide expert generals by diverting the brightest talents into military affairs. One of the ongoing problems in the FH is that the principal men of Florence are merchants rather than generals, and so Florence must rely on mercenary arms. Machiavelli’s disdain for mercenaries is well known (P XII, D II.20). In military affairs, ambition can be directly useful to the city because its deeds bring in territory and the spoils of war to enrich the conquering city. Since this is done at the expense of others, there is no real downside to conquest per se. Of course, poorly conducted war only provides an occasion for “common loss” (FH III.26), and this was the story of Florence’s wars:

It has always been the end of those who start a war … to enrich themselves and impoverish the enemy … But victories in the times we are describing first emptied the treasury, then impoverished the people, and still did not secure you from your enemies (FH VI.1).

Again, Machiavelli puts the blame on the lack of martial ambition in Florence and on her use of mercenaries who kept all the plunder for themselves.

The other aim of good orders is to keep the city (relatively) unified in the face of ambition by suppressing political parties. In Machiavelli’s analysis, ambition is divisive and so is closely linked to partisanship. Ambition is inherently competitive; it divides any social field into winner(s) and losers since the goods it seeks are characteristically zero-sum: power, honor, and wealth. If this field of operation is the city, the deeds of ambition will tend to divide the city into parties. Machiavelli views parties as vehicles for ambition in opposition to the common good, “for the prize they desire to gain by victory is not the glory of having liberated the city but satisfaction of having overcome others and of having usurped the principality of the city” (FH III.5). Parties are content to lift themselves up on the ruins of the republic (FH III.1). It would seem that there is an easy end to partisanship, namely that when one party wins, the city will be united. But in fact:

as soon as one sect is left there without opposition, it must of necessity divide from within itself, because the city cannot defend itself by those private modes that it had ordered in the first place for its own safety (FH III.5).

Machiavelli’s reasoning seems to be that because parties thrive on patronage and personal favors, they are unsuited for participating in the prime task of the republic, which is defense and conquest (Sullivan, 2004: 34).

Also, at work in political division is Machiavelli’s broader account of social coherence. Just as he sees fear as the primary human motivation (D I.46, P XVII), he considers external threats to be a crucial binding force in any political group. “For the cause of the disunion of republics is usually idleness and peace; the cause of union is fear and war” (D II.25). It is unsurprising that cities at peace and parties without opposition will divide; as we have seen, “whenever engaging in combat through necessity is taken from men they engage in combat through ambition” (D I.37). Machiavelli rejects the idea that a principle like friendship could order a polity: “those who hope that a republic can be united are very much deceived in this hope” (FH VII.1). Cities are founded for mutual defense (D I.1), and threats to the city generate a unity of interest that trumps the divisions of domestic ambition since all want to survive, and generally, they must “hang together or hang separately,” as Ben Franklin quipped. Machiavelli’s good orders, which shift the attentions of the ambitious onto foreign affairs, generate a sense of perpetual threats from abroad and thus a civic unity based on shared fear.

Machiavelli’s good orders channel ambition primarily into war and foreign matters so that the divisions it deepens will simply be those between the city and its enemies. He has no concern about a species of common good that might embrace all the states of Europe or the world (see Price, 1982: 431). Foreign adventures provide the chance to benefit the bottom line of the whole city by taking from other cities. Machiavelli knows perfectly well that fear and the distribution of booty do not create true equality or unity in the city. They will not obscure the two humors, nor can one provide that “there will not be very great hatreds” (FH VII.1) among politicians striving for preeminence. War will affect different parts of the city very unequally. The characters of the FH often try to manipulate foreign affairs precisely to enhance their domestic standing, as when an exile lobbies the Duke of Milan to attack Florence, in hopes that such an attack will propel him back to power (FH V.8). This is why ambition remains suspect even when it serves the city. Still, if institutional incentives and punishments align to propel ambition outward, this will minimize party divisions and enrich the entire city, at least roughly speaking.

Counterweights of Character

Erecting sound institutions does not suffice to reliably harness ambition for two reasons. First, the effects of institutions depend on the quality of the citizenry. “Orders and laws made in a republic at its birth, when men were good, are no longer to the purpose later, when they have become wicked” (D I.18). Second, Machiavelli maintains that some ambitious elites pass beyond institutional control and must be checked by other means. Julius Caesar illustrates both shortcomings. In his case, the institutions channeling ambitions into foreign affairs were working; he rose to power as a spectacularly successful general. His overly long commands (see D III.24) earned him tremendous personal influence which he parlayed into a quasi-tyranny by favoring the plebs. The institution of accusations was intended to prevent this, but “the corruption that the Marian parties [had] put in the people” (D I.17) was so widespread that popular trials would not have condemned Caesar. To remedy the inevitable shortcomings of institutions, Machiavelli’s response to ambition folds in a concern for civic character. One might summarize the sort of character that is needed in a single word: virtù. But rather than offering an interpretation of this notoriously difficult term, I will focus on four discrete traits that are needed to operate the institutions that harness ambition and to counter it when it breaks loose: prudence, courage, suspicion, and the love of glory. The point of such traits is not to tame or transform ambition but to be “her companions” (DA 165). They do not restrain ambition from within, as Michele’s “goodness” did, so they paradoxically render the aspiring tyrant a more formidable threat to the city. Yet when they are diffused through the citizenry, they complement the institutions in restraining ambitious person from without.

Prudence is preeminent among the traits necessary for managing ambition. As Leo Strauss (1958: 264) remarks, “‘the true way’ consists not in the extirpation of ambition but in ambition guided by prudence.” Prudence is shrewdness or sound judgment, here meaning judgment about what will best satisfy one’s ambitions. Prudence gives eyes to blind ambition. Why does this matter? Some vision is needed because pitting raw ambition against a threat such as Caesar can be extremely damaging to the republic. Unguided ambition will aim to destroy its rivals and magnify itself, but such direct conflict can serve as a ladder for the very ambition it seeks to destroy. The direct opposition of Rinaldo degli Abizzi makes Cosimo de’ Medici “prince of the republic, to which rank he would never have been able to climb without that manifest opposition” (D I.33). It would have been better for the elites as a class and for all Florence if Rinaldo had heeded Machiavelli’s rather unexpected advice: wait. ¹⁰ Until his death, Niccolò da Uzzano makes the elites do just that, and he forestalls Cosimo’s further advance toward tyranny. As Vickie Sullivan (2004: 65) points out, however, “such a course is likely only to delay tyranny’s ultimate hold on the city; it will not of itself eliminate the threat.” Machiavelli acknowledges this, while keeping the goal in view: “if you see you have enough to cure [the threat], set yourself at it without hesitation; otherwise let it be and do not attempt it in any mode” (D I.33). Within the “economy of violence,” ambition must be held back from attempting what it does not realize is impossible.

By adding prudence to ambition, Machiavelli forges an indirect route to valuing the common good as an alternative to the rare goodness of a Michele di Lando. Prudence teaches that citizens have more to expect from the survival of the republic than from its ruin. More paradoxically put, they will live more like a tyrant in a free republic than under a tyranny. In the case of a Caesar, a Rinaldo, or a Cosimo, this is not strictly true, so one cannot rely upon their individual prudence to uphold republican orders. What Machiavelli erects as a barrier is the prudent ambition of their fellow elites, who “attempt to exalt the republic and to watch each other particularly so that civil bounds are not transgressed” (FH VII.1). Neri Capponi, whom Machiavelli holds up as a model of prudence, effectively competes with Cosimo de’ Medici and so limits the scope of Cosimo’s ambitions (FH VII.2). Unlike Rinaldo, Neri never attempts to gain an ultimate victory over Cosimo, and so he remains in a position to frustrate Cosimo’s designs when these go against the common utility (FH VI.23). Neri and Niccolò da Uzzano display the kind of prudent ambition that the whole class of elites needs if it is to thwart potential tyrants. The burden to be borne by elite prudence is a heavy one in Florence, frequently too heavy, because there are no sound institutions to rely upon, nor is there the sort of martial vigor that would turn ambition to the “public ways.”

The second trait that is especially useful in managing ambition is martial valor. It is of course a central doctrine of Machiavelli that a republic should fight its own battles and arm its own citizens; Florence’s failure to do so is a central theme of the FH (Lynch, 2012). In the scheme of managing ambition, courage in war helps to channel ambitions into military affairs. Serving in war is a preeminently “public way,” although not without potential downsides, as the case of Caesar indicates. If elites are mainly engaged in commerce, they will pay others to do much of the “public” work of the city while themselves turning to “private ways.” This is why the absence of martial aristocrats in Florence from the mid-1300s is a disaster in terms of managing ambition. Skill and valor in war may be useful to tyrants, but they are essential to republics so that institutions of triumphs and trials can direct ambition to the prime public work of the city.

Machiavelli proposes a third aspect of character that is seldom listed among the civic virtues: suspicion. Suspicion enters into the management of ambition at two points: it is essential for the conduct of public trials, and it is likewise important in elite rivalry. One might suppose that public trials ought to dispense strict justice, neither more nor less. Yet one cannot “maintain this middle way exactly” (D I.6), as Machiavelli says in another context. Forced to choose, it is better for the people to be overly suspicious than overly trusting, as “things are apt to deceive you in beginning” (D I.33), and if a threat is not nipped in the bud, it will soon grow too strong. A few unjust condemnations serve as an example of the citizens’ commitment to liberty. In those cases where elites outgrow the institutional straitjacket, suspicion is needed among their fellow elites. The rise of Octavian in Rome shows that when ambitious elites trust instead of suspecting their rivals, they are apt to create tyrants (Duff, 2011). On the other hand, in extremis prudence may dictate that suspicious envy should be put aside, but only for someone of long-proven virtue like Camillus of Rome (D. I.33). Although citizens ought to have a suspicious cast of mind, they must be clear-eyed above all. Prudence is primary.

Machiavelli is not sanguine about eliminating ambition, but he does propose one character trait that informs the ends of ambition itself: the love of glory (Fischer, 2000: 62–66; Price, 1977; Santi, 1979). Humans can direct their ambition to nearly anything. The greatest thing at which it can aim is true glory, which adds potentially undying acclaim—a kind of earthly immortality—to mere power. This glorification of glory is a general trend of Renaissance thought (Varotti, 1998), and Machiavelli distinguishes between true glory of the founder or legislator and the false glory of the tyrant (D I.10). The love of true glory does not enter at a particular juncture of Machiavelli’s remedy to ambition. Elites need not thirst for true glory in order for the scheme to work, but if they do it will show that the program as a whole is working, and it will make matters much easier by reducing the threat of ambition. The lover of true glory remains profoundly self-regarding yet is unlikely to subvert republican orders, unless the rare chance arises to found a principate or a greater republic. The highest prudence and so the greatest ambition recognize that their own highest satisfaction depends on benefiting some common good, although this may turn out to be the good of some polity other than currently existing republics.

These sketches of prudence, courage, suspicion, and the love of glory illustrate that Machiavelli adds a moral dimension to his strategy concerning ambition. The institutions will not function well if citizens both great and ordinary do not have a certain quality. Yet, if we ask how Machiavelli proposes to bring about this rather unconventional version of “civic virtue,” the distinction between institutions and character grows rather less clear. As he famously writes, praising Rome, “good examples arise from good education, good education from good laws, and good laws from those tumults that many inconsiderately damn” (D I.4). Institutions have a powerful shaping effect on the qualities of the citizens, which are, thus, at most only a partially independent factor in confronting ambition. We should, thus, rephrase the central question: Do the main institutions produce the character traits that they require for their own smooth operation? If the answer is affirmative, Machiavelli’s is a purely institutional solution that relies on character only to more clearly grasp which institutions are required.

The best response is a partial affirmative. Sound institutions do support the requisite character traits but cannot do so alone. Machiavelli writes that public trials in Rome, which issued in “excessive and notable” executions, restored “that terror and that fear” in the people, which keep them on the path of prudent suspicion (D III.1). And two bad laws (namely, the Agrarian law and the prolongation of military commands—D III. 24) were primarily responsible for the corruption that Julius Caesar exploited. There is a mutual dependence: “For as good customs have need of laws to maintain themselves, so laws have need of good customs in order to be observed” (D I.49). Yet Machiavelli’s “moral education,” if one may call it that, has at least two important sources outside good political orders. The first, which is especially relevant to courage and the love of glory, is religion. The reason that his fellow Florentines do not love freedom as much as the Romans “is the difference between our education and the ancient, founded on the difference between our religion and the ancient” (D II.2). Christian doctrine and ritual downplay “worldly glory,” as well as “greatness of spirit, strength of body,” and the things of war. The “ambitious idleness” (D I.preface) of the typical Christian character cannot power the Machiavellian program for ambition.

The second source of character formation is Machiavelli’s own project. For what do his writings amount to, if not an education into the very brand of suspicious prudence that he hopes may become widespread? The ambitious men to whom he addresses DA, his Discourses, and his Histories can hardly help but be changed by Machiavelli’s powerful rhetoric, stories, and analysis. Machiavelli claims that his teaching will “bring common benefit to everyone” (D I.preface), but this will not occur by training his students to be lovers of the common good in the manner of Michele di Lando. Readers are formed, rather, to value republican orders because they serve their own ambitions and to treat fellow citizens with the suspicion that Machiavelli thinks they deserve. Those who take Machiavelli to heart will heighten the paradox of a “moral education” that militates against ambition only by teaching them how to be ambitious. What serves the common good, in this case, is the “necessity” that will confront each, when such an education is widespread. If Machiavelli cannot dispense with the traditional concern for character, he will go about it in his characteristically unorthodox way. To return to the larger question, we can see that both religion and Machiavelli’s own educative project contribute to the character of the citizenry in ways that are not determined by political institutions. Although there is always feedback from political institutions, character remains, so to speak, an independent variable in Machiavelli’s complex account of ambition.

Machiavelli’s Solution and its Legacy

Having surveyed works of poetry, theory, and history, we can reduce Machiavelli’s diagnosis of ambition to its vital core. Ambition is as dangerous as it is ubiquitous, but its unruly force can be harnessed and channeled, to some extent, for a suitably redefined common good. Pragmatic thinker that he is, Machiavelli attacks the problem on two flanks, moral and institutional. Ambition can be moved from without by shrewdly crafted rewards and punishments that confine it to “public ways.” Roman triumphs and trials served this end well. But ambition must also be guided from within by the psychological company that it keeps. Prudence, valor, and the love of glory keep the great from the cruder blunders of ambition, while a widely diffused suspicion enforces moderation through mutual threat. Those who learn from Machiavelli will see that both the grandi and the popolo generally have more to expect from freedom than from servitude. The few who could better satisfy their ambition by ruining than by ruling—those Caesars, Cosimos, and Napoleons—must be suspected, tried, and crushed as soon as the chance arises. When properly executed (and the Machiavellian never lets an execution go to waste), good orders hone the good character that the free polity needs to confront ambition and that character, in turn, greases the institutional wheels.

Despite its dynamic of reinforcement, the Machiavellian remedy is not freestanding, so it is not stable. Even Rome depended on contingent factors such as geography and religion. Centuries of conquest and politicized liturgy eventually pushed these beyond republican parameters, but the long glory of Rome is as great a success as a Machiavellian world of motion has to offer. The problems of Christian Florence are far more immediate. The mercantile Florentines lack ordered means of political reward and punishment, leaving patronage and assassination as normal modes of satisfying ambition. At a climactic moment of the Histories, Rinaldo degli Albizzi stages a virtual coup-d’état in order to eliminate Cosimo de’ Medici, who then bribes the presiding judge to grant him exile (FH IV.28–29). The inconsistent virtue of a merchant elite is no substitute for sound orders and fierce martial character, so the occasional influence of prudent figures such as Niccolò da Uzzano and Neri Capponi cannot save Florentine liberty. But Machiavelli would not countenance simply airdropping a package of institutional tweaks and character-building into Florence, as recent democracy-building efforts by the United States have tried in the Middle East. The failure of those efforts bears out Machiavelli’s view that the apparatus of ambition rests on deeper political foundations, which he sees as arms and religion (D I.12, P XII). Ambition cannot finally be isolated in theory or in practice, and the analysis of it connects to the broader Machiavellian analysis of political life.

What is the lasting value of Machiavelli’s understanding of ambition? The finer points of his remedy have not survived him, but his broader understanding of the political relevance of institutions and character has proven extremely influential. As Albert Hirschman (1977) has shown, Machiavelli’s novel proposal of harnessing passions would have a long career. His recipe is flexible enough to incorporate very different ingredients. Machiavelli’s liberal heirs such as Locke, Hume, and Smith substitute commercial growth for military expansion, a transformation for which Machiavelli himself sets the stage (Orwin, 1978). By taking a broader view of “public modes” of satisfying ambition, they open the door for the businessman, a character scorned by Machiavelli, to turn his work to good political account. This brings avarice, a vice of the common citizen as well as the elites, into the stable of useful but dangerous political qualities, alongside ambition. As to punishment, the spectacular public trials that Machiavelli favored were already on the decline in his own day. But democracy brings a new kind of unbloody execution to the fore (McCormick, 2011). Verdicts handed down by public opinion and carried out at the ballot box (or by judges insulated from personal influence) can kill a person politically without actual dismemberment. Thus, Machiavelli’s general approach to constraining vice to public benefit through institutions and character can be valuable even with a rather different menu of vices, virtues, institutions, and goals. On the other hand, given Machiavelli’s attention to the details of military organization and the salutary effects of physical rather than merely reputational killing, it is worth considering that his specific diagnosis might be more than just one possible combination of institutional and character concerns.

Machiavelli’s amalgam of institutions and character itself faces problems of theoretical coherence. Are both aspects equally necessary—and do they need to support one another in approximately the way that he delineated? In the subsequent history of ideas, the two sides often pulled apart. At one extreme, Bernard Mandeville puts an exaggerated emphasis on institutions in the scheme of “private vices, publick benefits” in his Fable of the Bees (1714), which takes vice as an unproblematic fuel for the machinery of politics—the more vice, the better. On the other side, the liberal anti-Federalists stress that only virtuous characters could resist the manifold temptations to abuse office, such that the only true solution to ambition lies in good character. ¹¹ The greatest liberal constitutionalists are more subtle. In Federalist 51, James Madison et al. (2001: 268) famously argue that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” by savvy institutional design, not by any mold of character. Yet Madison, like Montesquieu before him, also recognizes that character plays into the outcomes of institutions. ¹² Where both differ from Machiavelli is in treating character as a dependent variable, arising entirely from the workings of institutions. The political order that they recommend “thus contains no program for inculcating republican virtue”; it remains an “institutional republicanism” (Zuckert, 1992: 138, 142). Madison can repose a greater confidence in institutions in part because he aims to reach a lower bar than does Machiavelli. The extended republic is supposed to solve the problem of parties (see Federalist 10), so a strong focus on foreign affairs and concomitant martial character is less necessary. A further reason for confidence is the much greater intricacy and penetration of the institutions at Madison’s disposal. The political worlds Machiavelli describes, Rome and Florence, are not amenable to such a solution because they are not so extensively articulated in offices. Elites acquire prestige and partisans that attach to them personally, not qua officeholders, granting them power with few strings attached (Mansfield, 1983). From the perspective of Madison’s “new science of politics,” Machiavelli’s independent reliance on good character appears to be an artifact of this incompleteness, necessary only until institutional incentives reach a mature stage.

No doubt Machiavelli would have welcomed eighteenth-century advances in institutional design, had he lived to see them, but we should not therefore disregard the value of the two-pronged approach. Its basic insight is a perennially valuable one, namely that the effects of institutions depend to a massive degree on the character of the persons inhabiting them. Against the technocrat’s impulse to “nudge” citizens (Sunstein and Thaler, 2009) instead of to form them, Machiavelli and Madison both insist that good laws or good incentives are never sufficient. Like the “nudgers,” Madison implies that one need not make apparently unliberal interventions in citizens’ free choice of a way of life because, he thinks, liberal orders produce good (enough) character. By contrast, Machiavelli claims that only a set of institutions that embraces all of life could reliably generate all the necessary facets of good political character (hence, his concern for a politicized Christianity). The more liberal a set of political institutions is, the less capable it will be of generating the character that it needs. Such a perspective is confirmed in Tocqueville’s observations on the importance of religion to American democracy, and in the more recent truism that “the liberal secularized state is nourished by presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee” (Böckenförde, 1990: 45). This dispute between Machiavelli and Madison invites further unpacking, but both thinkers are well ahead of much normative theory today in terms of practicing what Jeremy Waldron (2016) has recently praised as “political political theory,” which takes seriously the effects and limits of real political institutions.

It is worth remembering Machiavelli’s hybrid response to ambition, which stands between liberal institutionalism and a classical concern with virtue in itself. He reckons with character to reach even a morally modest version of the common good, seen as “collective selfishness” (Strauss, 1958: 11). ¹³ Despite the contributions of academic neo-republicans (e.g. Pettit, 1999), the now-dominant view purports to use fewer tools (institutions alone) to secure a more elevated end, a liberal common good defined by rights. Machiavelli’s account of ambition is a stern reminder that institutions and character cannot be finally justified apart from one another, on account of their mutual dependence, although his consequent politicization of everything from religion to family is, of course, extreme. This early account of harnessing vice helps us to see the workings of our now-universal ambivalence about ambition. Institutional restraints and a proper formation of character are as necessary as ambition is inevitable. Liberal institutions entwine with character too, perhaps unwittingly, promoting the very ambition that they are designed to restrain. If we follow Machiavelli, we will accept rather than lamenting the character-forming aspects of regime design and try to turn them to good account.