Abstract
Niccolò Machiavelli’s immediate concern throughout his work is the fate of Florence. Even when not explicitly discussing it, Florentine affairs are arguably at the back of his mind, and even if his thoughts have reverberations that go far beyond Florence, they begin and end there. With that in mind, for her new book Michelle T. Clarke uses as its central text neither The Prince nor The Discourses on Livy but the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli’s last major work, and his most extended and direct treatment of Florentine politics. By foregrounding his Histories, typically considered subordinate to those other more celebrated works, Clarke takes a refreshing approach to Machiavelli. This is not to say that nobody works on his Histories – by now every word of his corpus has been turned over and analyzed – but merely to note that it is not nearly as widely studied as the other texts. This is due in part, I suspect, to its difficulty. Unlike his other works, where he speaks directly to the reader, in the Florentine Histories he rarely speaks in his own voice. Therefore, if one wants to unearth the political theory at work in the Histories, one must pay careful attention to narrative structure, vocabulary, character development, and other more “literary” elements of the text. And in doing this, Clarke succeeds admirably.
In the first chapter (titled “Introduction”) Clarke describes the central claim: “Machiavelli admired the emergent popular republicanism of late medieval Florence for its suspicious and defensive political sensibilities, even as he lamented its ultimate failure to secure the city’s liberty against the relentless ambition of its own grandi” (6). That Machiavelli liked republics and didn’t like those who attempt to subvert them might seem like a fairly well-established point by now, but to take Clarke’s claim so simplistically would be to misread her. Machiavelli’s republicanism is often taken (by Quentin Skinner and others) as a species of humanism, while Clarke’s claim and its development argues that Machiavelli’s republicanism is anti-humanist. It is her task in Chapter 2 to establish this claim, and I will leave this aside for the moment, noting for now that Clarke devotes the remainder of Chapter 1 to pinpointing the exact nature of Florence’s failure. According to Clarke’s Machiavelli, Florence was too interested in civic peace (7). The concern with maintaining civic peace both (a) prevented Florentine republicans from taking action against the grandi far enough to disturb the peace and (b) enabled the grandi to present themselves as loyal Florentines insofar as they contribute to the peace of the city. The upshot of (a) and (b) is that ambitious Florentines (i.e. the Medici) realized that they could subvert the republic so long as they presented themselves as contributing to domestic order. This point, Clarke maintains, is developed in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories.
If so, then why did this go hitherto unnoticed? This takes us to Chapter 2, in which Clarke argues on two fronts. First, she maintains that Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories are responding to, and criticizing, earlier more panegyric histories of Florence produced by humanist scholars. Indeed, Clarke argues that humanist histories of Florence were “complicit in the subversion of its republican identity” insofar as they consistently refrained from criticizing grandi (52). As Clarke sees it, humanist writers were co-opted by the Medici and “exploited for ideological ends” (53). Second, she argues that Skinner and others have missed this point and interpreted Machiavelli as a humanist despite his anti-humanism. Clarke writes of Skinner that he “is attempting to read Machiavelli on the back of a history of Florentine republicanism that Machiavelli himself contests (55, emphasis in original). This is surely going to be one of the more controversial claims in Clarke’s book, for it suggests that entire generations of leading Machiavelli scholars have read him backwards. First, citing Skinner against himself, she notes that “our judgement about which aspects of a particular historical moment are most relevant to interpreting a political idea must necessary rely… on presupposition about that idea” (56). In choosing to use humanism as his guide in interpreting Machiavelli, she continues, Skinner has presupposed what he is seeking to prove. To approach Machiavelli through the lens of his humanist predecessors is already to interpret him. But, as Clarke should realize, the difficulty she notes in Skinnerian approaches to Machiavelli are not particular to Skinner, but haunt any attempt at interpretation, including her own. Second, she claims that once one recognizes, as Skinner does, that humanism is an ideology, then one can no longer take the testimony of humanists as unproblematic: “it may be possible … that humanists used the political and intellectual rivalry between Florence and Milan as a pretext for articulating a new schedule of republican values more consistent with [oligarchic government]” (57). Applying a hermeneutics of suspicion to the Florentine humanists will certainly yield different conclusions than the more “naïve view” (57) Clarke attributes to Skinner and others, but not all scholars will be inclined to be so suspicious. But, since the proof of the pudding is in the eating, perhaps the best way to weigh Clarke’s criticism is to examine the results and ask if her interpretation is more or less illuminative than others. With that in mind, we turn to Chapter 3.
In Chapter 3 Clarke focuses more squarely on Machiavelli and his analysis of the weakness and corruption of modern Italy. Her position is that the cause of Italy’s sorrow is Rome. But which Rome? Clarke takes the view that while Machiavelli blames ecclesial Rome for some of Italy’s problems, it is not merely the corruption of the papal court that he blames, but “core tenets of Christianity” (63). The question of Machiavelli’s political philosophy of religion, as it were, is a vexed one and treated a bit too quickly here. One notes that Maurizio Viroli’s Machiavelli’s God goes unmentioned, even though it is devoted to the topic. Clarke can perhaps be excused for quickly moving past these topics, since in her view the real problem isn’t Christian Rome but imperial Rome. There are two reasons for this: “Roman imperial expansion always involved a deliberate attempt to corrupt or destroy the free peoples of Italy” and “the role played by colonization in the corruption of Rome’s own republican orders” (65). The poison was in the blood before the rise of Christianity.
At this point, one might wonder what this has to do with the argument in Chapter 2. The connection is present but at times obscured: the failure of Florence, and other Italian states more generally, to develop lasting republics is due, in Clarke’s argument, to the corruption introduced by Rome: “[Machiavelli] believes history can show … that modern Italy is only capable of servitude because the Roman empire made it that way” (78, emphasis in original). This point also returns us to the anti-humanism argument: Bruni and Salutati, Clarke argues, gloried in the purported founding of Florence by Romans, while Machiavelli uses it to point to the weakness of Florence. From the cradle, Florence was corrupted by the Roman imperium.
In Chapter 3 Clarke depends heavily on Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy for her interpretation of Rome; in Chapter 4 she returns her focus to the Florentine Histories and the rise of the Medici. This is a crucial chapter for Clarke’s interpretation of Machiavelli. If he is writing as an anti-humanist, then his judgement of the Medici should be opposed to that of the humanist tradition. But, as she points out, “Machiavelli paints them in glorious colors” (93); they are kind, generous, loyal, merciful, and patriotic and so on. Clarke exercises an interesting kind of judo here: the point of the Florentine Histories is to show that (and how) the Medici used their good reputation as a means of securing princely power over the republic. They did not seek power through violence and repression, as earlier tyrants and usurpers in Florence did, but through good works and charity – from precisely those characteristics that the humanist tradition praises as worthy and good are, in Machiavelli’s presentation, dangerous to the republic (98). As Clarke continues, she points to a key passage in Book 4 of the Histories where Uzzano, an opponent of the Medici, makes her point: the humanist language of political virtue and vice are confused by the Medici. Uzzano suspects Cosimo because he helps people and the city; his generosity and patriotism ought to make us suspicious of him (119–20); Cosimo is able “to mobilize the city’s language of virtue and vice on behalf of his princely ambitions” (121). The analysis of the Medici is at the same time a critique of humanist historiography and politics: according to Clarke’s Machiavelli, prudent grandi will always hide their ambitions behind a façade of good works (123); Clarke’s conclusion finds clear echoes in The Prince’s advice that a prince appear with “all mercy, all faith, all honesty, all humanity, all religion” (The Prince, Chapter 18) knowing that few will know the prince well enough to see whether or not it is a fraud.
This brings us to Chapter 5. As Clarke puts it, the central claim of this chapter is that Machiavelli “rejects key aspects of Roman virtue, including norms of personal loyalty and trustworthiness, because they have a proven record of undermining republican liberty” (134). A problem that immediately arises is precisely which kind of Roman virtue is being rejected. When Junius Brutus executes his sons, personal loyalty is subordinated to the good of the fledgling republic, although this is clearly an act of “Roman virtue.” A closer inspection of Clarke’s sources when presenting Roman virtue shows that they are all writing at a fairly corrupt time in Roman history – the fall of the republic and the rise of the Caesars. So we find, among others, Cicero, Sallust, and Seneca. But we also find Livy. And here we find examples of another kind of Roman virtue: the kind alluded to above, and in Clarke’s text, focused on Manlius Torquatus. Chapter 5 concludes with the claim that Machiavelli prefers “antisocial Manlian virtues” (157). While I think she is clearly right on this point, as his praise not only of Manlius but also of Brutus shows, I am less sure that this squares with the claim that he rejects Roman virtue. Instead, it seems to me that Machiavelli is choosing one form of Roman virtue over another.
Finally, the book concludes with Chapter 6, in which Clarke returns to the argument against Skinner and his approach. Here she maintains that while both Skinner and Machiavelli agree that history is important for political philosophy, there is a sharp disagreement as to how and why. Skinner, she claims, uses history only to understand political texts (162); Machiavelli on the other hand believes that we can use history to evaluate political theories (163). History is the laboratory of politics, and by studying the consequences of theories, one can evaluate the effectual truth of those theories or, as Clarke puts the matter, “history is especially useful in bringing to light how moral and political ideals play out under the non-ideal conditions that obtain in the real world” (166). The lesson of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories is not only that humanist virtues are inimical to preserving republics, but that philosophy proceeds best in the muck and mire of history.
In sum, this book is strongly argued and well written, and it advances a novel and important approach to Machiavelli’s work. Nevertheless, the argument against Skinner and his approach to Machiavelli scholarship will not convince everyone; indeed, it operates in a kind of hermeneutic circle. To advance the strongest version of her argument, one must accept her reading of Machiavelli; but her reading of Machiavelli is predicated on a rejection of Skinnerian approaches. I want to stress that I see this as a hermeneutic, not a vicious, circle. We are not dealing with the formal validity here, but the slow process of reading and rereading Machiavelli’s texts, where each time around, one moves a bit deeper into the spiral. It is the tragic fate of scholarship to seek certain knowledge of things – texts, contexts, and authorial intentions – that are entirely too material and messy to provide such certainty. The best a scholar can hope for is persuasiveness, not apodictic proof, and Clarke has certainly written a persuasive book.