Abstract
Machiavellian Democracy is a book which works compellingly at once on three levels. First, it is an important contribution to the study of Machiavelli’s political thought. Second, building on his analysis of Machiavelli’s thought, McCormick is able to launch an insightful, challenging critique of contemporary republican and democratic political theory. Third, McCormick is able to use his account of Machiavelli’s thought to provide new and timely resources for democratic theory.
McCormick’s aim is to rescue Machiavelli’s political thought from what he sees as its misleading assimilation, at the hands of historians such as John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, into a generic civic republicanism (8–11). What this school overlooks, McCormick argues, is the distinctively democratic dimension of Machiavelli’s thought. In the mainstream view of Florentine republicanism, represented by Guicciardini, the republic is a mixed constitution involving a combination of elite and democratic elements, but with the elite element predominating. By contrast, McCormick reads Machiavelli as an enthusiast for robust democratic institutions. With good laws, the people are, in Machiavelli’s view, a good (if far from perfect) judge of indictments, candidates for offices and of laws and policy (65–90). In particular, Machiavelli advocates institutions of the kind that he thought democratised Rome: tribunes elected by the plebs, holding veto powers against other bodies within the republic (92–97); class-specific assemblies (97–100); and the use of trials to hold the wealthy and powerful to account (114–38). Also helpful are processes that randomise office-holding so as to break the hold of elites who can all too easily dominate elections (107–12). The danger for Machiavelli is not the potential waywardness of the people but the arrogance of the elite. Strong institutions which represent those outside of the political and economic elite are essential to hold the elite in check.
Some have suggested that the advice Machiavelli sets out in The Prince is an attempt to lure the prince into action that will have the effect of democratizing their principality. The prince should rest their power on the people, Machiavelli advises, who are many and whose desire not to be oppressed can be satisfied, as distinct from the nobility, who are few and whose insatiable desire to dominate makes them unreliable (23–24). Machiavelli advises the prince repeatedly to arm the citizenry. However, while this might help to secure the prince against some threats, to give the citizenry arms is also to give them a share of power. Thus, the argument goes, a prince following Machiavelli’s advice will end up furthering Machiavelli’s own democratizing goals. McCormick argues that we should read The Discourses similarly as an attempt to draw powerful political actors into Machiavelli’s preferred project of building a democratic republic (36–61). McCormick emphasises that the book is addressed to two young members of the Florentine nobility—Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti—and is thus likely to be written with an eye on the kind of arguments that are persuasive to people of this sort, republicans of the nobility (36–38). Machiavelli’s challenge is to persuade this audience that they should support a republic based on the model of Rome rather than the more aristocratic model of Venice—a republic with a strong democratic element that, on the face of it, cuts against the class interest of republican nobility. A crucial hook, McCormick claims, is the prospect that a Roman-style, democratic republic offers the possibility of conquest, expansion, and associated glory for the republican nobility, an outlet for their ambition which can work with the grain of democratic institutions rather than against them (at least in the short run). McCormick argues that whether Machiavelli himself shares this conception of glory based on external conquest and expansion is unclear. Given that conquest and expansion can eventually cause instability to democratic republican institutions (87–88), McCormick suggests that this might not in fact be Machiavelli’s underlying ideal after all—rather than a vision intended to engage the desires of the nobles his work addresses (37–38, 45, 56–60).
McCormick’s interest is not only in Machiavelli’s thought for its own sake, however, but in what we can learn from it for contemporary political theory. Democratic theory today tends to work with a conception of “the people” as the whole, “sociologically anonymous” citizen body (91, 179). The question is how to structure institutions so as to empower the people in this comprehensive sense, and the answer to this question has tended to point to the standard institutions of liberal democracy, centred on open and regular elections of representatives to national legislatures. In Machiavelli’s theory, however, “the people” are a subset of the citizen body, standing in distinction and contrast to another subset, the nobility or grandi. The question of institutional design is posed as how to empower the people in this class-specific sense against the nobility. Some might be tempted to dismiss this perspective as anachronistic, as an attempt to import into our political world notions from premodern political societies. However, McCormick has a strong case that this Machiavellian perspective is in fact highly pertinent to the present situation of capitalist democracies such as the USA. The institutions standardly presented as central to liberal democratic politics—such as the election of representatives to make decisions—actually turn out, McCormick argues, to be very susceptible to domination by wealthy elites. A number of recent and impressive empirical studies have pointed, for example, to the growing power of the rich and business corporations in US politics. (Important further studies have been published subsequent to Machiavellian Democracy.) In this context, Machiavellian theory provides crucial concepts and a stimulus to fresh institutional thinking. How can and should we restructure our political institutions to empower “the people,” in the Machiavellian sense, and so overcome or at least limit the domination by the wealthy facilitated by standard liberal democratic arrangements?
McCormick offers a provocative answer to this question in the book’s final chapter. This chapter sets out a proposal for adding a new institution to the USA’s federal constitution. To Congress, Presidency, and Supreme Court, let us add, McCormick suggests, a People’s Tribunate (183–87). This will consist of 51 citizens, chosen at random to serve for nonrenewable one-year terms, but with professional politicians and the richest 10% excluded from eligibility. The Tribunes will have the power to veto one piece of congressional legislation, one presidential order, and one Supreme Court ruling, per year. They will also have the power to call one referendum per year on any issue they choose (with a ban on advertising by parties or interest groups during the referendum campaign). They will also have the power to initiate impeachment proceedings against office-holders in any other branch of the US government. The aim is to empower the US people in the Machiavellian sense and, as part of this process, to build a stronger sense of class-consciousness on the part of this people as a group distinct from the economic and political elite. By laying out his proposal—“loosely instructive rather than strictly prescriptive” (183)—McCormick prompts us to acknowledge the institutional challenge and think for ourselves about possible solutions. If we don’t like his proposal, what would we suggest instead?
The question presents a challenge not only to contemporary democratic theorists but to “republicans” too. Focusing on Philip Pettit’s influential conception of republicanism, McCormick argues that it carries within it an aristocratic, Guicciardianian quality (145–69). Pettit is attuned to the dangers of majority tyranny and puts forward a range of proposals to limit this danger, such as saved parliamentary seats for minority groups, ombudsmen, judicial review, and the creation of “depoliticized forums” of experts to shape policy in certain areas. But Pettit has little to say about domination by the wealthy, and doesn’t consider how some of the countermajoritarian institutions he advocates might be used to consolidate their power. In the end, this means Pettit’s own institutional prescriptions do not deliver on what he sees as the goal of republicanism: freedom as non-domination. In the absence of a program of Machiavellian democracy, the wealthy will dominate.
The question this argument raises for me is whether we are ultimately left in a position of having to choose between Pettit-style republicanism and Machiavellian democracy. While I agree that we should take on board the insights of Machiavellian democracy to address the problem of domination by the wealthy, I am not sure that this has to be, or should be, at the price of Pettit’s concerns about majority tyranny and the need to create institutions that enable individuals to contest oppressive majoritarianism. How we integrate the two perspectives in institutional terms is an open question, and it may be that there are some ineradicable tensions between them. But how, and how far, we can integrate the two perspectives seems to me to be a research agenda worth pursuing.
We would not be in a position to pose this research task, however, were it not for McCormick’s superb and stimulating recovery of the Machiavellian conception of democracy.