Machiavelli’s pendulum : Political action,time,and constitutional change

Abstract

In this research, I advance an interpretation of Machiavelli’s philosophy for constitutional change. I suggest that Machiavelli’s reading of Polybius’s theory of anacyclosis (circular theory of political change) opens up a new vision for political action and historical transformation. Machiavelli subjects the inherited metaphysical conception of constitutional change to a secular view, one characterized by virtue of action and uncertainty of outcomes (Virtù/Fortuna), social divisions (nobility/plebeians), and political ideals (Republicanism). The interpretive suggestion put forth here is that Machiavelli’s innovation of the ancient theory of constitutional changes can be appreciated in terms of an oscillating pendulum rather than as a cycle, thereby fictitiously referring to the pendulum as an instrument mimicking the ‘truth of the matter’ (verità effettuale) of a perpetual shift between principalities and republics rather than as an esoteric rite to foresee the future.

Keywords

Machiavelli anacyclosis Polybius virtue mixed governments time principalities ‘Verità effettuale’

Introduction

Niccolò Machiavelli is widely praised as the father of political science.¹ This reputation is reinforced by his inclination to analyze things ‘as they are’, a realist approach he affirms in the following way: ‘it seemed more suitable for me to search after the effectual truth of the matter (verità effettuale) rather than its imagined one [emphasis added]’ (Machiavelli 2005 [1513]: 53). This expresses somehow an intellectual disdain for those philosophies (read Platonism and its derivations) who ‘have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen nor known to exist in reality’ (Ibid.), setting Machiavelli apart from Ficino, who had revived Neoplatonism, made the Latin translation of Plato’s Republic in 1484, and established his Academy in the hills outside Florence.² Political realism, the transformation of governments as well as a constant attention to civic freedom and the human condition make of Machiavelli a thinker of modernity.

However, it seems that not enough has been contributed to uncover the theoretical apparatus sustaining Machiavelli’s views on constitutional change and thus to the consideration of the situational reasons (linked to people or entities) that justify institutional shifts. In the following sections, I attempt to fill this gap in part by looking at Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of Polybius’s theory of anacyclosis (circular theory of political change) – a prelude to the understanding of history and its causes of development. With regard to tradition, indeed, whereas Classical Greek and Roman pre-republican thought (as in Polybius’s) based their historical understanding on pre-established, principled, deductive processes of transcendent freedoms, Machiavelli, for his part, emphasized the casualty of constitutional changes as something resulting from social struggles. In the analysis of the Roman Republic and its constitutional essence spelled out in the Discourses of Livy [Discourses], Machiavelli’s notion of freedom reveals indeed its constituting-authority function.³

Crucial in constitutional analysis is the role played by political freedom. Republican freedom for Machiavelli does not amount to the realization of the common good, as each social part sees the good differently from the other. The traditional Aristotelian ideal of non-conflictual politics is here reversed (Del Lucchese 2015: 92 and Pedullà 2018). Political freedom is conceived by Machiavelli as a social conflict event-dependent notion oriented to realize a particular interest within a structured constitutional project. By use of a Galenic metaphorical language, for Machiavelli the two humors (‘omori’) into which society of the Republic is divided have to find an institutionalized way to express their resentment – ‘when these humors do not have an outlet by which they may be vented ordinarily, they have recourse to extraordinary modes that bring a whole republic to ruin’ (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19], I:7, 24).

Thus, the type that will keep the Republic alive through internal political renovation is a positive type of freedom as participation oriented to the determination of the interests of a social group within the state architectonic. As a positive force of political self-determination within a constitutional setting, republican freedom constantly trespasses the constituted form of any fixed power arrangement. Machiavelli’s freedom, therefore, is neither equal to non-domination, as the neo-republican interpretations of the Cambridge School claim (Pettit, 1997; Skinner, 1990), nor to the anarcho-Arendtian style definition of ‘no-rule’ (Vatter 2000). Distinctively, Machiavellian civic republican freedom combines the two above-mentioned strands into a unitary form of constitutional self-bindingness (the constitution in a substantive form), where citizens are both actively engaged in political self-determination as well as in the generation of a more robust shell of constitutionally protected liberties. The renewal of Machiavelli’s notion of political freedom affects the way in which state-structures relate to the social body and to its internal struggles.

The Roman Republic was made of ‘mixed bodies’ (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19], III:1, 209): as with the consuls, the Senate, and the tribunes. For Machiavelli, law-differentiation was not enough to attain virtuous, freedom-enhancing, governments. The powers of the Republic of Rome had to be independent and to supervise reciprocal politics: the tribunes had to supervise the arrogance of the senate, and the senate had to react ‘against the ambition of the tribunes’ (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19], III:11, 244–5). The mixed character of Machiavelli’s praise of the republican state is rooted in the social separation of council assemblies where nobles' interests were mostly expressed in the senate and in the interests of the plebes for the popular council (concilium plebis).

Machiavelli’s view of Roman republican constitutionalism appears in terms of a polyarchic arrangement where each power was autonomously constituted by a social constituent and no constitutional synthesis was ever politically institutionalized within the Roman Republic.⁴ In Rome, not a single power – neither that of the consuls, nor the Senate or the tribunes of plebs – detained alone an exclusive authority over the others. As a conceptual template, Roman polyarchy fell short of democracy as a collective form of decision-making; yet it laid down the conditions for pre-democratic proceduralism.

Under such a constitutional framework authority was shared. The interchangeability of public offices as well as the competition among powers constituted the greatness of Rome. Just as the tribunes of the plebes were the representatives of the people in internal affairs, the consuls were their heads in foreign matters. Last but not least, Machiavelli saw that constitutional freedoms depended upon the individual and collective capacity to perform virtuous actions in a given historical time. It is not by chance, therefore, that the notion of Virtù (virtue) was treated by the Florentine Secretary in combination with Fortuna (fortune). All in all, the reconsideration of the role of political freedom within action-theory provided Machiavelli with a new instrument to account for political transformation. This opened to a renewed perspective for the understanding of Polybius’s (and the ancients) theory of anacyclosis and constitutional change.

Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero on mixed governments

Among the first authoritative philosophers to discuss the idea of a mixed constitution is Plato and before him Herodotus. Both spoke of the qualities and defects of isonomy, oligarchy, and monarchy (Herodotus 1996 [V BCE], vol. III: 80–82). Plato in the Republic introduced through Thrasymachus the debate over the three forms of government – the tyrannical, the democratic and the aristocratic – all seen as respondent to ‘what is good for the strongest’ (Plato 2000 [V BCE], 339e 9, 17). This Thrasymachean reduction to one single function, though, made pleonastic the distinction itself.

For Socrates, constitutions all represented a degeneration from a perfect constitutional form, the constitutional ideal of a ‘philosopher’s kingdom’. Thus, for Plato/Socrates there was no space for a mixed constitution as a way of optimizing all forms of government. In the Laws, Plato refers to a mix of constitutional elements in the case of Sparta, but not as a design arising all at once from the head of Lycurgus, but rather as a limitation of powers to the royalty (Plato 1961 [V BCE]; Cambiano 2007: 3–22).

Indeed, the series of governments were in a hierarchically descending order – from a higher to a lower level of quality. However, for Plato, the mixing of higher constitutional forms with lower ones always led to pejorative results. For instance, timocracy combined both the government of the best citizens (such as the philosophers' kings) and the imitation of oligarchic characters, thus introducing diminishing elements. All in all, with regard to the classifications of the forms of government, Plato clarifies that virtuous constitutions are only those which exhibit a higher degree of episteme (knowledge), no matter whether they are ruled by the majority vs the minority, by law vs anomy, or by force vs justice.

Different is the case in Aristotle, as he famously praised the median virtue of political constitutions and the convergence into a balancing center: the middle class as ‘what is moderate or in the middle is best’ (Aristotle 1932 [IV BCE] IV, IX 3, 1295 b: 329).

For Aristotle, constitution (politeia) and government (politeuma) mean the same (Aristotle 1932 [IV BCE] III, IV 6, 1279 a, 25-26: 205) as it will be later also for Polybius and Machiavelli. In the Politics, after having listed six types of constitutions, three rights and three vicious, Aristotle presents the notion of politia as the constitutional form par excellence by which all others are measured. There are two planes cooperating together in Aristotle’s political reflection. The first is the discussion on the best form of government seen in comparative terms. This is an empirical level of assessment of the relatively better constitutions placed in accordance with given contexts. The second level consists of an ideal assessment of the best constitution in absolute terms, regardless of any given situation.

It is in this latter sense that the politia gains consideration as it gets us closer to the main topic of discussion. The politia for Aristotle is a mixed constitution insofar as it is composed of ‘a mixture of oligarchy and democracy’ (Aristotle 1932 [IV BCE] IV, 8 1293 b, 34-35: 315), ‘the well-off and the poor’ (Aristotle 1932 [IV BCE] IV, vi. 4-vii 1294 a, 16-17: 319).

Aristotle’s discourse on the ideal form of government is accompanied by his naturalist consideration of constitutional justice and its accordance to nature (kata physin) to which the individual virtues of the rulers also have to conform. After all, for Aristotle a constitution ‘essentially consists of a multitude of persons’ (Aristotle 1932 [IV BCE] II, I 1261 a, 18–25: 71) and err those, like Plato, who thinks that it should be conceived as a unity.

Why is politia praised by Aristotle as the best constitution given that he considers both democracy and oligarchy as two political degenerations? (Aristotle 1932 [IV BCE] IV 1294 b, 15–17: 321). The reason is that according to the adopted comparative perspective, Aristotle sees as a perfect constitution that which stabilizes the opposition of interests and not that which praises the highest virtue of its rulers. For this reason, the median position of the politia is one which protects the state from the possibility of political-social entities taking over the power of the city by identifying themselves with one of its ruling parties. The mixing in the politia prevents the possibility of violent transformation (metabolé) of the established order.

Before turning to Polybius, it is essential to mention Cicero’s De Officiis, Philippicae and De Oratore borrowed by Machiavelli’s father Bernardo; but not the De Re Publica which was not yet in circulation at that time. However, in this latter work Cicero’s understanding of the late republican constitution of Rome is based on the idea of aequabilitas (equality) for its component parts. The Senate plays a key role in the consolidation of just relations among the state’s parties. However, the Roman mixed Republic is not, as in Polybius, submitted to the cycle of changes. It is instead conceived by Cicero as a case of slow political refinement the result of which amounts to perfection as it incorporates the right balance and the representation of each component. The Roman mixed constitution therefore has not come from the mouth of one single politician, as in the case for Lycurgus’s constitution. Rather, it has been achieved slowly through several political fine-tunings realized mostly by the merits of the Senate that have resulted in a new political form: ‘a fourth type of republic […] which is a moderation and mixing together of the three’ (Cicero 2014 [II BCE] I, 45: 50). Political ratio and theoretical ratio must be kept distinguished, as it is only the former that justified the institution of the tribunes of the plebs and their contrasting role to the imperium of the senate and the consuls. The mixed regime (contrary to Plato) cannot be realized within a monarchical system, but only within an oligarchical one. The Senate is supreme (as Polybius had also established in Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE] III, 6, 17, 5–18, 4: 309). For this reason, Cicero creates a new figure, that of the rector, someone opposed to the rex and guarantor of the equilibrium with the other powers, between imperium and libertas (Roberto 2007: 134).

All of this brief overview of the constitutional models circulating in antiquity reveal how central was the debate on mixed governments before Machiavelli’s rethinking of Polybius’s theory of anacyclosis. Machiavelli will reinterpret the connection between Polybius’s naturalism of the ancients, incorporated in the idea of change of political forms (metabolé kata physin) of cycles (anacyclosis), with that of norms generated by virtue and free will. In this renovating enterprise, Machiavelli identifies the proper way in which history will have to be understood under both materialistic laws of necessity (i.e. decay) as well as under human laws of free will (regeneration through virtue). Nature and norm, biology, and politics will be combined into one single framework, opening onto a new path of methodological syncretism applied to the understanding of modernity.

Machiavelli’s interest is to solve the age-old tension between the theory of anacyclosis and the theory of cooperative/competitive governments characterizing Polybius' conception of political change. As I demonstrate, this will be achieved by providing, through appeal to virtue and social struggle, an account of the formation of a mixed constitution out of simple constitutional forms. Machiavelli grounds the autonomy of politics by means of the foundation of political autonomy.

Machiavelli and the Antiques

Machiavelli knew classical culture well, not only the Latin world, as no one would contest, but also the Greek, as it cannot be excluded that he was able to read in the original language the works of the most distinguished intellectuals and literate scholars of antiquity (Triantafillis 1875). With regard to Polybius' Book VI, the Greek version of the text was circulating in Florence at his time together with a Latin translation of the relevant parts.⁵

Machiavelli’s interest in classical thinkers such as the historians Livius, Tacitus, and Polybius (Sasso, 1986), the Epicureans (testified among other things, by Machiavelli’s transcription and annotations of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura discovered in 1961 by Sergio Bertelli with the codex Vat. Ross. 884),⁶ as well as Roman rhetoric, particularly Cicero, was part of the necessity to find interpretive instruments for understanding the political and military decadence of Florence and Italy.

Machiavelli’s intellectual praise for the ancients is clear: a retrospective knowledge of the past is necessary in order to understand in comparative terms the ongoing experiences of the present. This line of thought implies the idea of regularities in the course of human affairs, as he makes explicit right at the beginning of the Dedicatory Letter of the Prince: ‘I have learned from a long experience in modern affairs and a continuous study of antiquity’ (Machiavelli, 2005 [1513]: 5). It is out of such presumed regularities of human nature and its relation to fortune and virtue (Virtù e Fortuna) that it articulates also the possibility of imitation as an attempt to bring back into the present the past thanks to its knowledge and through political action. It is in this attempt that the rationality of the political calculus (Virtù) strives to impose itself over the irrationality of the chance (Fortuna).⁷

However, when Machiavelli reaches the discussion of the mixed constitutions in his Discourses, I.2 ff. (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19]), he begins with Polybius’s view even though, as seen, the debate was much older. Polybius never uses the expression ‘mixed constitution’ but rather he refers to such an idea through terms like ‘competition’ and ‘balance’ of constitutional components (Straumann 2020: 31). Machiavelli discusses Polybius since he wants to reveal the inconsistencies of the cycle-conception. Machiavelli argues that not only the foundation of Sparta by Lycurgus, but also the establishment of the Roman Republic represented an innovative break with the tradition, something no longer explicable a by mere reference to a logic of change simply grounded on foreseeable necessity.

For Machiavelli it became clear that in order to account for the rise of the Spartan oligarchy (?-371 BCE) (Kõiv 2005: 233–264), or that of the Roman Republic (509 BCE-27 BCE) out of the Polybian cycle, it was necessary to completely renew the theory of constitutional change upon which these were sustaining themselves.

For the Florentine Secretary it was clear that as the constitution of Sparta was the result of the extraordinary virtues of a single founder (Lycurgus), the Roman constitution resulted from the collective political engagement of the Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR) as one people. Both the Spartan and the Roman modes of bringing about the mixed state mobilized virtue, something Machiavelli saw as a practical skill for realizing political freedom and capable of minimizing corruption and desires of self-aggrandizement.

Mixed constitutions are in Machiavelli a pervasive theme which connects the history of Rome to that of Florence. Interesting for our purposes is that Machiavelli considers that not only republics can be mixed but also civil principalities – as he refers in Chap. IX Of the Civil Principality in The Prince.

During the institutional crisis of the Florentine Republic, when the city was deprived of a successor after the death of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici in 1519, Machiavelli was asked by cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (later Pope Clemens VII), or according to some, by Pope Leo X de ‘Medici, who died shortly thereafter in 1521, to suggest an institutional reform. Machiavelli proposed a re-arrangement of Florence in terms of a republic under a disguised pope’s monarchy (§97 ‘ella è una monarchia’). But the republican ‘trojan horse’ he included was to suggest a ballot-election of popular magistrates, the provosts (‘proposti’), having a similar function to that of the roman tribunes of the plebs and serving the institution of sixteen Gonfalons of the people (Machiavelli 1997 [1519–20] 737; cfr. also McCormick 2011:103). The proposal was rejected by the Roman Curia.

Polybius’s theory of anacyclosis

Machiavelli was the first in Europe, after Bernardo Rucellai, to discuss systematically the work of Polybius’s Histories (Historiae) Book VI which we have received in an incomplete form (Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE]). There Polybius declares his interest in understanding how Rome could conquer almost all of the known world ‘in less than fifty-three years’ from 220 BCE to 168 BCE (Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE], III, 6, 1:2, 269). For the Greek historian, this incredible success was the result of the ‘form of a state’s constitution’ (Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE], III, 6, 2: 271) the Romans had developed. Polybius’s discourse on the Roman cooperative/competitive constitution became part of his general discussion of the cycle of political transformations.

In Book VI of his Histories, Polybius first introduces the traditional (Platonic) classification of the forms of government, consisting of six forms divided into three right and three degenerated types. The circular degeneration from one form to another follows from an initial explanation on how the monarch (monarchos) and his power (the authority of the strongest) arose out of the state of nature. Polybius explained this fact by referring to an original condition of absence of power where command over people established itself by means of a pure force. Next, the power of the king (basileus) as a proper sovereign evolved from this initial phase as the first form of government. Only at this stage wisdom introduced command and justice: ‘the monarch becomes a king, ferocity and force having yielded the supremacy to reason’ (Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE], III, 6, 6: 281). Kingship gave rise to the beginning of the natural constitutional cycle: the anacyclosis (Straumann 2020: 31).

As Polybius notes, the foundation of each political form rests on a single principle and it ‘is precarious, as it is soon perverted into the corrupt’ (Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE], III, 6, 10: 291). Kingship degrades into despotism, this resurges again into aristocracy which becomes, next, an oligarchy, whereas its recovery shifts into democracy that, finally, disintegrates into ochlocracy, the total absence of rule: ‘return(ing) to the point from which they started’ (Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE], III, 6, 9: 289).

Debate on the theory of anacyclosis has seen scholars divided into unitarians and anti-unitarians with regard to both the disagreement on the date of composition of Polybius’s work as well as his argumentative rationale of Book VI. I schematize below the relevant points of this debate:

a) There is an impossibility of reconciling the natural alternation of constitutional forms with the arousal of the mixed Roman constitution.⁸

b) There is a logical incompatibility between the ‘relative’ degeneration and renovations of the constitutional changes in the cycle vs the irreversible, ‘absolute’ (Sasso, 1986: 38), death of political self-consumption and decline of Polybian cooperative/competitive constitutions.

c) The biological law of decline, included by Polybius within the cycle of constitutional change, is logically incompatible both with the eternity of the anacyclosis as well as with the fall of the Roman Republic (Sasso, 1986: 40–41).⁹

It is noteworthy here that Polybius explains the shifts from one form to another by reference to rigid laws of succession moving from one fixed regime to another under the perspective of the rulers. Notwithstanding Polybius’s mention of the accompanying feelings concerning the constitutional shifts (i.e. envy or resentment), he does not consider social instability as a mechanism of transformation following constitutional corruption.

After the description of the cycle, Polybius deals with the case of cooperative/competitive constitutions. Upon closer examination, the mixed theory of constitutions and the theory of anacyclosis appear as two separate and unrelated views (Cfr. Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE] III, 6, 8: 287; Podes 1991: 581). Polybius first notes that Lycurgus had reached by ‘reasoning […] the best of all existing constitutions’ (Polybius 1979 [III-II BCE] III, 10: 293) a perfect government for the Spartans. What Lycurgus conceived in his head, the Romans reached ‘by the discipline of many struggles and troubles’ (Ibid.). However, when compared to the Roman case, the Spartan foundational moment is an event out of history, as its foundation is mythical and totally conceptual. For this reason, Machiavelli discusses to a large extent only the Roman case. With regard to the admirable fortune of Rome, this depended in great part on its military organization and value, something Polybius treats in the final part of Book VI of his Histories when narrating the glorious refusal by the Romans of a prisoners' exchange proposed by Hannibal after his victory in Cannae (Polybius, 1979 [III-II BCE], VI, 58: 401 ff.).

All in all, Polybius leaves unsolved the question as to where to locate the Roman mixed republic with regard to the cycle of constitutional transformation; however, he introduces terms of discussion that will be retaken by Machiavelli’s analyses. Arguably, it is from this philosophical-historical method of casting constitutional problems that Machiavelli finds Polybius’s theory of anacyclosis as the most suitable place to start from in order to reach an understanding of political transformation.

Machiavelli’s rethinking of Polybius’s theory of anacyclosis

Machiavelli’s and Polybius’s methodological perspectives on Roman politics differ insofar as the former follows a hindsight perspective that is believed to be relevant for understanding contemporary events (Florentine politics), whereas the latter is a direct spectator of the later phase of the Roman republic. However, Machiavelli follows the reasoning of Polybius very closely by use of syntax and presentation of the anacyclosis theory and Roman exceptionalism.

Machiavelli approaches the Polybian tradition through a compatibility thesis as he aims at reconciling pure forms of constitutional change with mixed constitutions.¹⁰ He does so by subordinating Polybian laws of necessity to the laws of freedom of action.¹¹ This conceptual move is made available as Machiavelli places Polybian naturalism in coherence with a conception of invariable human feelings, desires and wills as well as with the idea of the human being as eternal and unchangeable. However, Machiavelli adds the possibility of societal multiplicity by considering that human essence enters into educational processes and law-formations thus generating historical variability. Machiavelli introduces new conceptual stratifications to the understanding of human actions and historical determinations as, primarily, the view of a civilizational process as a way for human autonomy to attain action priority over biological laws of necessity.

If one compares Machiavelli’s opening paragraph of the Discourses at I.2 with Polybius’s account of internal and external causes of constitutional transformation of Histories, Book VI 8, the above considerations become apparent:

Polybius (1979 [III-II BCE] VI 8: 397)

Machiavelli (1998 [1513–19] I.2: 13)

There being two agencies by which every kind of state is liable to decay, the one external and the other a growth of the state itself, we can lay down no fixed rule about the former, but the latter is a regular process. I have already stated what kind of state is the first to come into being, and what the next, and how the one is transformed into the other; so that those who are capable of connecting the opening propositions of this inquiry with its conclusion will now be able to foretell the future unaided [emphasis added].

It is while revolving in this cycle that all republics are governed and govern themselves. But rarely do they return to the same governments, for almost no republic can have so long a life as to be able to pass many times through these changes and remain on its feet. But indeed it happened that in its travails, a republic always lacking in counsel and forces become subject to a neighboring state that is ordered better than it; assuming that this were not so, however, a republic would be capable of revolving for an infinite time in these governments [emphasis added].

According to the reading proposed here, Machiavelli is advancing an argument ad absurdum with regard to Polybius’s theory. In a fundamental way, this is similar to the type of argumentative reasoning he adopts in the Prince when introducing the discussion of the dialectic of virtue and fortune. There it is said that ‘many are in the opinion that the affairs of this world are controlled by Fortune and by God…[but that] in order not to wipe out free will’ it has to be allowed that half of our actions is left ‘to us’ (Machiavelli (2005 [1513]): 84).

The reasoning in the Discourses would trace similarly the following line of reasoning: if taken under idealized, purely natural conditions, constitutional rotations keep replicating themselves without any limits. This is an assumption we might link to Machiavelli’s natural theory of an invariable human essence recalled before. However, since states encounter external factors of influence, such as the will to conquest, the natural rotation of the cycle is interrupted by the unpredictability of states' war initiatives. Natural necessity opens up the ground to historical contingency. Two conceptions of time are fused here into one new idea. The decline of political constitutions – not only the mixed ones – depends on the natural (and necessary) decay of biological organisms together with their cyclical reproduction (a materialist basis of life-cycles). Nevertheless, this course of events is now subjected to the capacity of virtuous men to contrast such decay by institutional transformation – hence the exceptional value of the Roman mixed constitution (the excellent condottiere, or the founder of a state).¹²

Machiavelli’s cited text of the Discourses at I.2: 4 presents in a reverse order – by use of a chiasm – what he had stated in I.2, 3 where he referred to the causality of change: ‘These variations of governments arise by chance [a caso] among men’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] I.2: 11). He then proceeds into a long conjectural genealogy on the birth of the monarchical power arising out of a state of nature which, once more analogous to Polybius’ theory, reads: ‘For since the inhabitants were sparse at the beginning of the world […] they came back towards licence, in the modes and for the causes said’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] I.2: 13). Machiavelli’s revisitation of Polybius’s text completes the reasoning with the famous expression: ‘It is while revolving in this cycle that all republics are governed and govern themselves’ (Ibid.) (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Synoptic view of Machiavelli’s theory of anacyclosis and the Roman Republic.

If the above considerations pause to analyze the internal logic of the texts presented, the rethinking of the Polybian cyclical nature of the forms of government should also be traced back to the philosophical-political stance that the future secretary would have already adopted from the mid-1490s. For the young Florentines of the time, Lorenzo (di Pierfrancesco) de’ Medici and his brother Giovanni represented an interesting ideological-cultural alternative not only for the city but also with respect to the Platonism of their newly deposed cousins (Brown, 2010: 14). It is thus within this framework of political militancy that it can be explained Machiavelli’s interest in transcribing the Lucretian poem De Rerum Natura in 1497 (a year before his appointment to the Second Chancery). The political value of such a text was already recognized by Marcello Virgilio di Adriano Berti, Niccolò’s teacher, as well as the first secretary of the Florentine Chancery and likely the inspirator of Machiavelli’s transcription.¹³

Turning to the content of the marginalia (notes in the margin), it is relevant for our exegetical purposes to recognize that Machiavelli dwells in particular on the clinamen theory expounded by Lucretius in Book II, noting that ‘motum varium esse et ex eo nos libera habere mentem’ (motion is inconstant and from this we infer that our intellect is free [my translation]) (Machiavelli, Vat. Ross. 844, f. 25 r). If for Democritus the vertical fall of atoms bound each antecedent motion to the consequent, with Epicurus/Lucretius each new event breaks the chain of causal necessity. With respect to this, man’s freedom of thought can be deduced from the same correction made with the clinamen. Man would thus not be subject to a fate predetermined destiny by virtue of the material space that would open up in a non-orthogonal – but rather random – fall of atoms. These would thus form various compound sensible bodies. The space of political freedom of intervention in the matter of things, it is here to be vigorously emphasized, is possible on the basis of a rethinking of democritean atomism that came to Machiavelli through Lucretius.

If, therefore, forms of government no longer follow one another according to a rigid metaphysical order guided by Providence, then ‘These variations of governments arise by chance [a caso] among men’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] I.2: 11). Political changes occur due to the role that ‘Fortune’ plays in men’s lives, with its complete unpredictability and indomitability.

At this point, Machiavelli's conception of fortune intervenes to change the arrangement of the occurrence of things in the world. It is no longer a matter of grasping the mechanistic laws of the reproduction of natural cycles, but of understanding with free intellect the vagaries of fortune in their assuming the connotation of event, contingent happening. The clinamen therefore is recovered by Machiavelli from the perspective of the philosophy of action and history as a bridge to the theory of free intentionality. And yet the explanatory framework of the scope of exercise of the noetic and political will remains circumscribed within a strictly materialistic framework. The event interrupts the chain of necessity by also allowing the practical disposition of the actor to emerge.

If it is therefore virtue that plays a decisive role in the formation of the mixed constitutions of Sparta and Rome, then it is thanks to the ability to move freely between the unpredictability of the corpuscular movement of atoms and the obstacles that these pose to the realization of the ends that our understanding must be addressed. From this argument, it follows that free will is a natural capacity, one which both animals and humans have in common as Machiavelli highlights in Lucretius’s passage at Book II, 256 ‘But who can possibly perceive that they do not diverge in the very least from a vertical course’? (Lucretius, 2001 [I BCE]: 44).

This means that free will operates within the mutable combinations of the matter which the idea of clinamen had introduced within epicurean physics. Accordingly the mutation of the forms of government is up for grabs to the virtuous as well as the evil man. Here the capacity to affect the outcome of action is not guaranteed by the motivating intention but by the phronetic ability to tame the unpredictable fluxes of nature. There is no Machiavellian exit from the rules of nature but rather an intersection between the objective law of the world and the possibility of man to partially steer the course of events. If it is therefore virtue that plays a decisive role in the formation of the mixed constitutions of Sparta and Rome, then it is through the ability to move freely between the unpredictability of the corpuscular movement of atoms and the obstacles they pose to the realization of ends that our understanding must be directed. It follows from this argument that free will is a natural capacity, one shared by both animals and humans, as Machiavelli points out in the passage from Lucretius in Book II, 256: ‘But who can ever perceive that they do not deviate in the least from a vertical course’? (Lucretius, 2001 [I BC]: 44).

This means that free will operates within the changing combinations of matter that the idea of clinamen had introduced into Epicurean physics. Consequently, the mutation of forms of government is within the reach of both the virtuous and the wicked man. Here the ability to affect the outcome of action is not guaranteed by motivating intention, but by the phronetic ability to tame the unpredictable flows of nature. There is no Machiavellian exit from the rules of nature, but rather an intersection between the objective law of the world and man’s ability to partially direct the course of events. However this overall reconsideration of mixed governments along a newly considered atomistic physics reclassifies cyclical reproduction of governments along a pendulum of presence/absence of virtue: Virtù ∼ Virtù for the formation of mixed constitutions.

Justifying mixed governments outside the cycle: the tumults

The points mentioned above hints to the possibility of moving from the objectivity of the event in the cycle-scheme to the formation of mixed governments by natural but still subjective action. This was, after all, the problem we assume Machiavelli saw in the founding of the Spartan and Roman constitution. The question is how was Rome, the best example of a mixed constitution in antiquity, born out of the natural repetition of cyclical rotation?

The short answer for Machiavelli is: by social turmoil and political virtue.

If for the conservative Guicciardini to praise tumults was similar to praise sickness in a man, as he wrote in the comments to the Discourses (Guicciardini 2007 [1530] 393), for Machiavelli it was from the ‘disunion between the plebs and the Senate’ which led next to ‘the creation of the tribunes of the plebs’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19], I.2: 14). Guicciardini’s severe judgment incorporates the point of view of the ancients, among whom is Polybius, a perspective from which the tribunes were negatively evaluated as an institution rising out of civil discord, positing therefore a dangerous threat to the stability of the state. The perceived danger was based also on the idea that the tribunes were not even proper magistrates as they were elected representatives by and for the plebs.

The tribunes, insofar as they were for the first time recognized as the representatives of the plebs, positively contributed to the freedom of the state. Indeed, together with the popular council of the plebs (concilium plebis) and the mixed electoral assemblies of nobles and plebeians (comitia tributa), they supervised the legislative power of Rome. The powers of the tribunes included both acts of resistance as well as acts of civil disobedience, including acts of secession (secession plebis), such as leaving the city as a sign of political protest and camping on a hill as occurred in 494 BCE and again in 449 BCE (to demand the formation and reinstall of the tribunes of the plebs); or, finally, the refusal to go to war (detractio militiae).

However, the most worrisome acts the tribunes were empowered with was the possibility to initiate prosecutorial action against anyone in front of a popular court,¹⁴ the power to propose laws,¹⁵ as well as to redistribute property.¹⁶ Tribunes' activity for Machiavelli brought about the politically stabilizing effect that citizens did not ‘attempt things against the State’, since when they did they were ‘crushed instantly’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] I.7: 23).

Tribunes' powers together with popular tumults assured an ‘extra-ordinary’ form of political transformation which amounted then to the enhancement of mass exiles and openly violent riots.¹⁷ Situated between an infra-constitutional and an extra-constitutional refoundation of the Roman republican system, the ‘recourse to extraordinary modes’ (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19] I.7: 24) brought about a regeneration of constitutional substance.

When discussing the possibility of saving the state from its demise out of corruption, Machiavelli argues that ‘If Rome wished to maintain itself free in corruption, therefore, it was necessary that it should have made new orders, as […] it had made new laws’ (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19] I.18: 51). Reference to orders here unveils the idea that transformations aimed at safeguarding freedom touch upon the deeper constitutional structure of the state. Indeed, as he had defined earlier, the orders of a state represent ‘the authority of the people, of the Senate, of the tribunes, of the consuls; the mode of soliciting and creating the magistrates; and the mode of making the laws’ (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19] I.18: 49).

This is not to say that all tumults in Rome enhanced freedom. On the contrary, riots and tumults between the senate and the plebs during the last phase of the Gracchi’s tribunate led slowly to the end of the Republic as a result of the Gracchi brothers' Agrarian Laws of 133 BCE (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19] I.37: 78). However, even if the plebs through the Gracchi were advancing legitimate claims, the fight-shift into economic resentments and sectarism led to the instantiation of the empire (Fontana 2017: 235–256; Baccelli 2017: 362). Gracchi’s agrarian reforms came too late for Machiavelli, as the unlimited accumulation of land and richness of the nobles and the senate was too large and the impoverishment of the plebes too severe to save Rome from its ruin.

In the powers of the tribunes, Machiavelli sees the ancient institutionalization of the freedom-generating capacity of social forces which in the Republic of Florence were put in the hands of the Great Council founded in 1494 after the exile of the Medici, contributing to tax and financial reforms (Barthas 2017: 257 ff.). The parallel with Florentine history is here made clear as soon as Machiavelli argues that in Florence, had the same republican checks been in place as in Rome, the Medici family would not have succeeded in returning in 1512 with the support of the nobility and the Spanish army – an event which had the Gonfalon Piero Soderini exiled in Rome (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19] I.7: 25). This explains why he will later suggest the introduction of popular provosts in Papal Florence as mentioned earlier.

In the paragraph titled That the Disunion of the Plebs and the Roman Senate Made That Republic Free and Powerful (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19] I.4: 16), Machiavelli introduces his dichotomic social theory of the republican texture according to which in ‘every republic are two diverse humors’ (Ibid.) reinterpreting, accordingly, the Aristotelian tripartition of the poor, the medians, and the nobles. To this division, Machiavelli connects the idea that in Rome: ‘all the laws that are made in favor of freedom arise from their disunion’ (Ibid.), even if it was the case that Sparta had ‘Lycurgus’, whereas Rome had ‘fortune’ (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19], I.2: 14). Yet fortune alone is not enough to explain the greatness of Rome. Fortune has to be accompanied by virtue: ‘Rome was a tumultuous republic […] if good fortune and military virtue had not made up for its defects’ (Machiavelli 1998 [1513–19] I.4: 16).

Tumults need virtue in order to generate a valuable political order, as was the case in Rome. Machiavelli spells out the strip of consequential causes leading to virtue: from tumults come good laws, from good laws a good education, and from a good education ‘so many examples of virtue’ (Ibid.). Virtue, therefore, results from the competition between the plebs and the nobility. Whereas in Polybius, social turmoil was neutralized by the shift into a totally new constitutional form – hence the view of a natural institutional change – these same social factors paved the way for the Roman renovation of the republican architecture. Machiavelli saw in the role of an extraordinary virtue the element of mediation between social instability and institutional transformation. This was something lacking in Polybius’s natural account of constitutional transformation. Absent such an element, the government was condemned to the decay of its political forms. In the making of the Roman Republic, the fight between the Senate and the plebeians activated a number of legal and institutional reforms which constituted a yet more liberal order. The plebeians came to act constitutionally as a military constituting subject of the Republic.¹⁸

Virtue and Fortune: Overcoming Polybius’s Transcendent Forms

As indicated earlier, actions fall under the general condition of liberty as ‘Fortune is the arbiter of one half of our actions’, whereas ‘the control of the other half’ (Machiavelli 2005 [1513]: 84) is in our hands. Virtue (and fortune, accordingly) has in Machiavelli many meanings that do not appear reducible to any abstract single concept (Sasso 1993: 427). However, if for the prince virtue is necessary to the preservation of the state, as he must ‘enter into evil when forced by necessity’ (Machiavelli 2005 [1513]: 61), and if both in civil principalities and republics there cannot by stability without safeguarding a minimal degree of liberty, for lay people virtue applies to military capacity or even to commercial skills. Republicanism and realism are melded together in the subserving function of liberty and equality among citizens as necessary values for the maintenance of the state: the autonomy of politics from morality is thus preserved.¹⁹

Virtue for Machiavelli is either personally or institutionally instantiated, or both. Accordingly, it is connected to either a single extremely wise man, Lycurgus, or to a collective, the plebs, whose tumults generate new political figures (the tribunes of the plebs). In this latter form, Machiavelli speaks of republican virtue in terms of the capacity of the tribunes to preserve the prerogatives of the state by supporting the plebeians in their struggle against the great (i grandi, the nobles).

The events brought about by social struggles and virtue are accidental – they are events not necessitated by nature – notwithstanding their transformative power. Action is politically transformative when it shows the capacity to change the course of events within the realm of a constitutional framework. In order for an action to be virtuously transformative, it has to satisfy a more specific condition, described in Machiavelli’s theory of ‘riscontro’ (encounter). This theory is elaborated starting from an early writing of 1506: the Ghiribizzi al Soderino (Machiavelli, 1996: 134–6). Here Machiavelli sketches a theory where the virtue of action confronts itself with a counterforce: the time-fortune (Fortuna). The realization of virtue is embedded into Machiavelli’s theory of action, namely, into the relation between virtue (Virtù) and fortune (Fortuna). The forceful subordination of chance-fortune to action inaugurates a new pattern of understanding history and the realizability of desirable aims through individual initiative. For the ancients, chance was the time through which the ideally perfect form of government would realize itself in accordance to the laws of necessity. Accordingly, the political task was either to let the eternal forms realize themselves (if that were the case), or to know what they were (being impossible to realize them). Starting from Machiavelli, instead, the dialectic between virtue and fortune shows that ancient transcendent political forms can be brought into history by transformative action (as something ‘happening’ in time). Contingency, unlike necessity, cannot guarantee the success of its results, neither good nor bad.

In The Prince, the struggle between the impetus and the changeability of times, indifferent to the conduct of action, follows the paradoxical outcomes of prudence which, in turn, by seeking to please fortune (Fortuna) remains trapped by her. In Chap. XXV, at the end of a long argument, Machiavelli makes use of the image of fortune as ‘a woman’ who prefers ‘young men, for they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity’ (Machiavelli 2005 [1513]: 87). Before, he had compared fortune to ‘destructive rivers’ that can be contained only through ‘well-ordered virtue to resist her [emphasis added]’ (Machiavelli 2005 [1513]: 84). Machiavelli updates the idea of virtuous action by implicitly assuming the phronetic capacity of the Greek Kairos to accommodate action to times. He speaks indeed of ‘the quality of the times’ and of the different outcome to which ‘acting identically’ can lead or, instead, of the similar result two people can achieve ‘equally employing two different means, one being cautious and the other being impetuous’ (Machiavelli 2005 [1513]: 85). Are these two different accounts of the same concept? That does not seem to be the case, as the concluding remarks point out simply that ‘harmony’ between man’s ways and fortune is key to securing prosperity, but since ‘men remain obstinate in their ways’, then the personal suggestion Machiavelli makes is that ‘I certainly believe this’ is ‘that it is better to be impetuous than cautious’ (Machiavelli 2005 [1513]: 86).

The discussion of the relation between fortune and peoples in the republics is retaken in the Discourses where Machiavelli claims that ‘a republic has greater life and has good fortune longer than a municipality’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] III.9: 240).

When the state becomes incapable of maintaining open within itself a freedom-enhancing tension, then, political virtue turns into vice and the state begins slowly crumbling to its final collapse. For Machiavelli, no virtue can be restored in a city where its prince and dynasty is exterminated, but people remain corrupt: ‘a corrupt city that lives under a prince can never be turned into a free one, even if that prince is eliminated’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] I.17: 47). Therefore, Machiavelli adds that the real problem for a state is corruption, not social conflict. Insofar as social struggles are not caused by corrupted expectations but by ‘a good end […] infinite tumults in Rome did not hurt and indeed helped the republic’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] I.17: 48). Machiavelli stresses here that the lack of corruption of the social ‘substance’ is indifferent to the constitutional form: ‘well-ordered laws’ as laws without a non-corrupted polity ‘will not help’ (Ibid.).

All in all, Machiavelli finds in the capacity of acting virtuously what was still missing in Polybius: a median term in the account of the transition from the necessary shifts of the cycle to the free creation of popular mixed constitutions. Starting from the reflection on the limits of the fixed forms of governments, Machiavelli transforms Polybius’ metaphysical circle and connects it to historical contingency: in mixed constitutions, the state-form is consequential to the action-event of its constituting subjects. Discussion of Polybius' theory of anacyclosis is for Machiavelli an opportunity to introduce his political theory on mixed governments and action where the social substance of the Roman Republic, the plebs, gained priority over a form of transcendent constitutional form. The form itself is thought to be consequential to the substance, and similarly the ideal to the real.²⁰ Since the rise of a polyarchic form of institutional arrangement requires virtue, analogously, its preservation mobilizes a reverse strategy of constitution-making. For Machiavelli, the formal-institutional side of the constitution is an empty shell when not accompanied by the filling-in activity of a substantive constituting force: the Roman plebs.

‘Ritirarla spesso verso il suo principio’: A case of regressive constitutionalism?

In the third and final Book of the Discourses,²¹ Machiavelli engages with the idea of the renovation of political bodies, either in the form of republics or principalities. The theme is important as it aims to avoid political decay and ultimately the death of the state. As the Florentine Secretary writes, ‘these bodies [mixed bodies being either republics or sects] do not last if they do not renew themselves’ (Ibid.), specifying next that the way to proceed to such renewal is ‘to lead them back toward their beginnings’ (Ibid.). Since ‘all the beginnings […] must have some good in them’ (Ibid.), return to the origins consists in a process of political anamnesis, the recapturing of an original constituting principle, a spirit of political integrity lost in the course of time as the corruption of the polity took preeminence.

In republics, the regaining of an original founding ideal is achieved either through a prominent man or ‘through the virtue of an order’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] III.1: 210). In the case of Rome, as we have seen, this occurred thanks to the purifying action of the ‘tribunes of the plebs, the censors’, as well as through all those measures that refrained from ‘the ambition and the insolence of men’ (Ibid.). The connection between the drawing back towards the beginning and the tribunes of the plebs suggests that Machiavelli saw the constituting process of Republican Rome as a regressive constitutional renovation. For the Roman Republic, to constitute itself as a state was to keep continuously alive the tension towards its constituting principles. Enhancing freedom is looking backward to the grounding principles. Regressive constitutionalism gives a broader account to the idea of a Roman republican polyarchy, falling short of a democratic-populist model. This is, for instance, McCormick’s account of Machiavelli’s Republicanism where he focusses his analyses mainly on the role of the tribunes in limiting the wealth of the aristocrats. Even though the author expresses the need for Machiavelli’s democracy model to combine both the senate and the tribunes (McCormick 2011: 113), structural constitutional effects must be derived from the internal capacity of the plebeians of limiting through trials the arousal of populist leaders. The ‘guard of the liberty (D I.5)’ by the people as the author correctly points out includes also the people themselves. This makes of the Roman Republic something different from being merely a popular one. This is clearly the meaning of the case made by Machiavelli through the plebeian Marcus Menenius who, having been ‘created dictator’ had to defend himself from the patricians from the accusation of illegitimately ‘seeking honors’ (D.I.5: 19).

The return to the principles is something that Machiavelli also invokes in the case of the non-republican preservation of the state, as it was in the Florentine principality under the domain of the Medici family from 1434, with Cosimo, till its fall in 1494, with Piero II ‘The Unfortunate’. In these circumstances, the Medici family used to urge to ‘regain the state every five years’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] III.1: 211) in order not to lose it. The two cases – the republican and the principality – show a general political strategy of keeping the tension high in order to bring the constitutional arrangements of the polity back to the original inspiring principles.

Regarding the case of preserving the Roman Republic from its enemies, Machiavelli sees it necessary ‘to kill the sons [read: the senators] of Brutus’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] III.3: 214), the ‘father of Roman liberty’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] I.17: 47, III.1: 212). Lucius Junius Brutus was responsible for the exile of King Tarquinus Superbus, initiating the republican era of Rome in the VI century BCE. Machiavelli’s invocation of Brutus’s trials and the executions of his possible successors is meant to signal the importance of guarding against the detractors of the republican freedoms. Maintaining ‘a free state’ is metaphorically killing ‘the sons of Brutus’ through putting them on the rope with popular political claims (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] III.3: 214). Reversely, to keep the ‘tyranny’ (Ibid.) is killing Brutus. This can be read metaphorically as a way to present a principle of power-deterrence: no single power of the polyarchic system should rise alone to the constitutional-preeminence of the Republic. This lack of agonistic politics at the root of the republican renovation was the reason why Piero Soderini acted naively: he believed it was possible to accommodate the political eagerness of the sons of Brutus under his ruling (the Florentine aristocracy allied with the Medici family). What he obtained, instead, was the end of the Florentine Republic and his own exile.

If Florentine politics aims again to resurge to the greatness of Rome as Machiavelli’s teaching instructs, it has to be mindful of what the greatest republic on earth did in order to avoid its social and political downfall: to continuously hold back the insolent (nobles) from power.

Conclusion

The final part of the Discourses connects ideally to the last Chapter of the Prince, known as the Exhortatio: as the defenders of the Roman Republic have to kill the sons of Brutus in order to avoid the transformation of the Republic into a tyranny. Similarly, the ‘redeemer’ (redentore) of Italy in Chap. XXVI of the Prince (Machiavelli 2005 [1513], 90) has to reunify the political fragmentation of the principalities of the peninsula under his charisma. Taken together, these two endings draw a renewed picture of the Polybian cycle; this time though, as a pendulum oscillating between republics endangered by threats to liberties, on the one hand, and the degenerations of principalities, on the other hand. After all, for Machiavelli it is a general truth that ‘all things of men are in motion and cannot stay steady, they must either rise or fall’ (Machiavelli, 1998 [1513–19] I.6: 23).

The image of the pendulum is recalled here not only as a useful metaphor to rethink constitutional changes, but also as an instrument the Roman haruspices used to read the future. The rethinking of the Polybian cycle under this new perspective of historical change is now complete, as well as the foundation of Machiavelli’s new philosophy of political history. By fictionally locating Machiavelli in the position of a historical haruspex, one can appreciate a detachment from the classical perspective of analysis of the ideal models of government. These transcendent forms are now adjudicated under the perspective of the recalled notion of ‘effectual truths’, this time applied to Roman Republican history. It is from the corruption of the Republican model that the principalities arise, but the power of the prince instantiates a new form more than just a remedy to the fall of the republic.²² Machiavelli can only observe that both republics and principalities as political forms are one the result of the other, and that no absolute standpoint can replace this realistic truth of the matter. By abandoning political idealizations and accepting constitutional oscillations between republics and principalities (hopefully in the form of the popular civil principality) as an unavoidable historical perspective, Machiavelli opens the door to political modernity.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Claudio Corradetti

Notes

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