Mapping rule and subversion: Perspective and the democratic turn in Machiavelli scholarship

I. The perspectival approach: Machiavelli the mapmaker

The centrality of perspective is made most explicit at the very outset of The Prince, where Machiavelli's dedicatory letter locates his capacity to deliberate upon ‘the conduct of princes’ in an analogy to mapmaking. As Machiavelli explains, just ‘as those who draw maps of countries put themselves low down on the plain to observe the nature of mountains and of places high above, and to observe that of low places put themselves high up on mountain tops’, so an observer of the people ‘needs to be a prince’, and the observer of princes ‘must be of the populace’. ¹ Significant about the introduction is that it posits political understanding as necessarily bounded by one's experience with and relation to other political forces. The prince, in coming to occupy the isolated, ‘high’ position of rule, likewise generates a narrow understanding of his own nature. Moreover, the ‘low’ people undergo a parallel narrowing of understanding, thus suggesting that all political knowledge proceeds akin to mapmaking: just as one changes positions to identify the different features of a (geographical; political) landscape, the broader implication is that political understanding as such cannot be extricated from ruler/ruled dynamics.

Insofar as the actor is therefore grounded by circumstance, the conclusions to be drawn from any interaction emanate from an engagement with the boundaries imposed by the perspectives in play. As Lefort (2012) notes, even as Machiavelli's treatise begins with broad categorisation, the discussion actually proceeds via a prince who ‘is placed in one of the particular circumstances that we can observe, and must perform the functions imposed on him by his status’, and thus does not enable a seamless transition from a particular perspective to an understanding of rule as such but rather advances through different situations and dynamics. With Machiavelli we navigate a ‘meandering approach’ that shifts among the perspectives of different actors, forces readers to ‘embrace several thoughts at once’ (Lefort, 2012: 109), and, as I argue, ultimately brings to attention its own perspectival horizons.

If political knowledge is relational and variable, then the task of ascertaining such knowledge itself becomes embroiled in the contradictions among different positions and understandings. The Prince, in other words, is not a detached account of actors with different perspectives but itself an unfolding navigation of perspective: Machiavelli does not offer an understanding of politics in the same way one might articulate a positive knowledge that advances from axioms. His perspectivalism is not simply an epistemological orientation grounded in assessing different standpoints corresponding to different sources of knowledge. Rather, Machiavellian knowledge is itself political: an engagement that ‘meanders’, assumes different, shifting perspectives and occasionally challenges its own conclusions precisely because it ‘does not arise from within an ordered discourse’ that presumes a separation between a ‘doer’ of political action and a ‘thinker’ ‘considered qualified to adjudicate’ but problematizes the two positions from the outset (Lefort, 2012: 109). ² Insofar as The Prince is a theorisation of princely power, the theorist cannot be said merely to chart the conditions of such power, but, in charting them, engages in the construction of perspectives that make princely power possible.

There are thus two implications to the perspectival approach. As a first-order implication, the approach tracks the movement among multiple, often conflicting perspectives that differs from the simple extraction of general conclusions from particular cases. This implication thus resists interpretive attempts to draw general conclusions for, say, ‘democracy’ from particular textual examples without accounting for how actors and interactions are constituted and limited by particular perspectival contexts. The logic of the perspectival approach, however, further produces a second-order implication that (dis)orients the theorist: in problematising the straightforward disentanglement of theory from action, the above implication reveals the need to establish a perspective on the political interplays that produce, direct and manipulate the multiplicity of perspectives introduced with Machiavelli's opening analogy – a function which exceeds the first implication's perspectival readings of various actors and situations and in turn engages the capacity to cultivate a relation to perspective emerging from Machiavelli's works. Perspectivalism is thus not simply a literary device employed in theorising actors and situations, but furthermore a mode of political intervention that attempts to navigate and challenge the given dynamics between theorist, actor and audience. As I argue in the third section, this possibility of cultivating a relation to perspective introduced with the second-order perspectival implication in turn produces questions concerning how perspective is itself crafted and utilised in theorising political action.

The identification of perspective as a logic that allows us to map and navigate various shifts, tensions and ambiguities produced in Machiavelli's works thus offers an opportunity to reconsider the problem that opened this essay: the democratic turn in Machiavelli scholarship. If Machiavelli celebrates certain institutions for fostering popular rule, then what would it look like for those institutions to fail? How can actors operating within those institutions understand failure? Conversely, if Machiavelli uncovers certain events where those excluded from participation articulate relations of no-rule, then from what institutional contexts do such events arise? How are contexts themselves shaped by such events? Juxtaposing the conceptual difficulties of the two democratic approaches, I maintain that their institutional and subversive impulses are caught up in a mutually constitutive dynamic wherein neither impulse can be effectively understood in isolation from how it intersects with and is manipulated by the other. As such, the cases examined below become instructive examples of Machiavelli's perspectivalism in action. Moreover, my argument is not simply that an institutional approach could benefit from a no-rule sensibility (or vice versa) but rather that the interplay among constituted people's rule and no-rule can itself produce a political relation to perspective indispensable to the democratic implications that both approaches advance. Perspective both organises the two impulses and develops through their tensions.

II. The democratic turn: Machiavelli the institutionalist and the subverter

In this section, I turn to the works of McCormick, Winter and Vatter as exemplars of the disagreement within the ‘democratic turn’ in Machiavelli scholarship, with the implication that each approach runs into similar perspectival difficulties. On one hand, McCormick traces the pervasive role class division plays in Machiavelli's understanding of politics. Arguing that Cambridge scholars underemphasise Machiavelli's attention to class conflict, McCormick (2011: 5) maintains that different material conditions between the people and elites produce two ‘qualitatively different appetites’, with elites motivated toward oppression and the people wishing only to avoid it. On McCormick's reading these differences assume a normative valence, as Machiavelli ‘endorses class-specific institutions on the belief that they promote the class-consciousness and class-contention that animates energetic popular engagement and effective political accountability’ (McCormick, 2011: 12), with the conclusion that class conflict can be institutionalised to animate the people into political action. On the other hand, both Vatter and Winter trace the Machiavellian impulse to upset all claims and capacities to rule. ³ Here Vatter (2012) reframes the same resistance to domination attributed to the people as exemplary of the ‘form of power that Arendt called ‘no-rule’ and which is exercised in the absence of the distinction between those who govern and those who are governed’. No-rule thus amounts to a logic whose end is not to establish the conditions under which the people can check elites, but rather to locate a popular capacity to subvert the distinctions under which any rule is organised and justified, thereby asserting ‘a political freedom … which does not fall under the processes of securing political forms of domination’ (Vatter, 2000). ⁴

While McCormick's broader project examines the institutions that would enable the people to rule in a Machiavellian democracy, this examination involves a number of intermediary steps. The most significant and most problematic of these steps works to show that the people contain a basic capacity for good judgment that simply needs to be channeled into the correct institutional arrangement in order to produce a popular form of ‘active rule’. In short, by juxtaposing the people's ‘natural’ aversion to domination and ‘natural’ capacity for good judgment (McCormick, 2011: 22–23, 25) to the corruptions introduced by their oppressed condition, McCormick's argument requires a Machiavellian justification for how the institutionalisation of popular judgment can work to reconfigure the popular susceptibilities to cowardice, rumor, etc., that are inherited from elite domination. To locate such a justification, McCormick turns to the Capuan debate in Machiavelli's Discourses.

Discourses I.47 (‘However Deceived in Generalities, Men Are Not Deceived in Particulars’) examines the formalisation of popular judgment in resolving an episode of strife between the people and the elites in the Capuan Republic. While Hannibal threatens to invade Capua, the city finds itself threatened by a tumult between its people and senate, making it increasingly exposed to foreign conquest because of its internal disorder. Realising that he must reconcile both dangers, the city's chief magistrate Pacuvius proceeds as follows: first he convinces the city's senators to let him shut them inside their palace, and then tells the people that they can now tame the nobility by drawing the names of the old senators from a bag and allowing the people to decide whom to kill one by one. The catch, however, is that the people must pick from one of their own to replace any condemned senator. Here McCormick's reconstruction maintains that a ‘raucous and rowdy debate’ ultimately fails to ‘generate agreement’ on adequate replacements, thus producing agreement among the plebeians to spare the old government. McCormick (2011: 71–72) thus concludes that the people's capacity to ‘put aside their mortal hatred of the nobles’ in fact signifies that they ‘desire good government more than they desire vengeance’, an implication which enlarges on Machiavelli's explicit argument that the people are good at judging particular actors and asserts that the Capuan case ‘validates procedurally formalized popular discussion and judgment over the relative virtue of candidates’ (italics mine). Given that the stakes of Pacuvius's action ‘[establish] the people as the ultimate political judge within the republic’ (McCormick, 2011: 70), the logic behind this episode advances a ‘generalizable principle’ from ‘Machiavelli's affirmation of popular deliberation and final judgment’ (McCormick, 2011: 72, 2012).

Here, however, a number of problems arise both with McCormick's reconstruction of events from the Discourses and his generalisation of context-specific conclusions. First is McCormick's presentation of the ‘raucous and rowdy debate’, which Machiavelli actually recounts in three distinct stages: a first stage where the people jeer at the names of senators drawn from Pacuvius's bag, a second stage where the people fall silent when Pacuvius requests that they name replacements and a third stage where, once names are offered, they are likewise met with jeering. Only after the consternation produced by these three events does Pacuvius take the ‘opportunity’ (occasione) to assert that the old government must have been adequate, to which the people then agree (Machiavelli, 1996). Specific to Machiavelli's staging is that it does not enable the sort of self-evident shift from particular to general judging that McCormick's reconstruction advances. The people are indeed capable of judging that elite senator X is unworthy, and likewise that plebeian replacement Y is also unworthy. However, this does not necessarily imply a capacity to adequately judge relative virtue or decide between the two, as McCormick's ‘generalizable principle’ suggests. Rather, it is the consternation produced by overlapping rejections that creates the opportunity with which Pacuvius both ‘saves’ the old senators and asserts a unity of Capuan interests drawn precisely from the people's incapacity to generalise from particular rejections. Although the people do reject each individual candidate, it is Pacuvius who then dictates that this judgment amounts to an affirmation of the city's prior rulers. In contrast to McCormick's conclusions, such a reading brings the Capuan debate into alignment with Machiavelli's broader argument in the chapter: it is not simply that the people judge well, but that they are both ‘deceived in generalities’ and ‘not deceived in particulars’.

Here I am not suggesting that the Capuan case offers an unequivocal example of duping. Rather, my reading exposes a perspectival oversight in McCormick's account. If the people exhibit a capacity to judge particulars within certain institutions but are deceived in generalities, then who stands to benefit from this conclusion? In resisting Machiavelli's perspectival ‘meandering’, McCormick leaves us without the conceptual tools to determine why such an ambiguous parsing of judgment should amount to a ‘generalizable principle’ for an ‘active’ people and not for a prince interested in reconciling class conflict or a conniving oligarch intent on fostering only the appearance of popular validation. Indeed, with this perspectival evasion the celebration of Capuan judgment posits popular participation in a dangerously inactive light: Pacuvius's judgment alone appears to transcend institutional boundaries – only he is able to judge the relative moods and ‘appetites’ of both the people and elites outside an institutional frame and thus establish a new order to direct these appetites to productive ends. The narrowness of the Capuani capacity for judgment appears to necessitate extra-institutional, prince-like intervention by its very nature.

In identifying this shortcoming of institutionalised popular rule, there is another way to approach the problem of potential co-optation outlined above: just as Lefort notes that Machiavelli's works challenge readers to ‘embrace several thoughts at once’, Machiavelli's juxtaposition of the Pacuvius's and Capuani capacities exemplifies the need for political action as such to navigate multiple, conflicting perspectives. In this light, the chapter is not a straightforward celebration either of the people's capacity for particular judgment or of its manipulation, but rather an account of the triangulations that public judgment undergoes between various actors – an exercise in mapmaking. ⁵ Again, the implication in abstracting to the mapmaker does not preclude a democratic Machiavelli, but does expose questions overlooked on McCormick's account: how can the judgment cultivated through institutional arrangements be transferred to other contexts? Can this sort of cultivation work to check extra-institutional action?

The challenge for a Machiavellian democratic project is then to conceptualise capacities unique to popular action and yet removed from the institutions shaped outside popular control. In other words, here the first-order perspectival implications of Machiavelli's approach pose problems for McCormick's defense of popular rule insofar as this defense refrains from engaging how Machiavelli's continuous shifts among and beyond different institutional contexts could challenge the notions of judgment and action inherited from the very forms which generally temper or exclude popular participation. In Vatter's language, McCormick seeks to offer an account of how ‘the plebs achieves hegemony … by wrestling control of the state from the “wealthy” elites’ (Vatter, 2012: 243) while ignoring Machiavelli's alternate theorisation of a uniquely popular power where ‘the plebs inscribes within the state the possibility of abolishing relations of rule’, and thereby subverts all rule (Vatter, 2012: 242). Given that McCormick's difficulties arise specifically from the constrictions of institutional action, no-rule's turn to subversive events here appears to enable an examination of popular action removed from such difficulties to the greatest extent possible. Below, I thus trace no-rule's opposing democratic account through its reading of the Florentine Histories’ Ciompi Rebellion. In what follows, this approach encounters parallel perspectival difficulties in theorising the conceptual tools to extricate popular rebellions from the rule-centered logics they problematise.

It should come as no surprise that a number of no-rule sources turn to Machiavelli's account of the Ciompi Rebellion, as the 1378 Florentine textile workers’ revolt presents an event unique in its revolutionary potential and uniquely radical in its language: the uprising, which emerges out of Florence's commercial revolution in textile production, does not straightforwardly reflect a conflict between two entrenched classes, but rather involves a newly industrialising nobility's domination and reconfiguration of Florence's guilds and an emerging urban working class left ‘oppressed by their masters’ and unprotected by the guild system (Machiavelli, 1998: 121). It is in this context that a wave of Ciompi indignation produces an insurrection whose demands Machiavelli articulates in a fictive speech. In a clandestine meeting, an anonymous Ciompo argues that the workers can avoid punishment if they ‘take up arms’ and ‘[multiply] the arson and robbery’ together, thereby allowing them ‘to live with more freedom and satisfaction than we have in the past’. Accompanying this argument is a basic claim to equality: ‘strip all of us naked, you will see that we are alike … for only poverty and riches make us unequal’. As such, ‘all those who come to great riches or great power have obtained them either by fraud or force’; the Ciompi should not give in to pangs of conscience and realise that ‘bold’ action will either leave them ‘the princes of all the city’ or enable them to ‘threaten [elites] with new injuries’ (Machiavelli, 1998: 122–124). Inspiring its audience to swear an oath to take up arms, the uprising is subsequently met with the slaughter of those affiliated with the Ciompi in what Winter (2012: 742) terms ‘one of the bloodiest days in Florentine history’. Thus the Florentine elites reassert their rule over the city.

In approaching this speech, Winter's reading advances three arguments concurrent with the no-rule approach. First, in its rejection of natural social hierarchies is the Ciompo's ‘most radical claim for human equality in all of Machiavelli's work’ (Winter, 2012: 746). Second is a set of assertions – that fraud and force beget power, that the Ciompi have the capacity to become ‘princes of all the city’, etc., all culminating in a call to violence – which appear explicitly to repeat the lessons from The Prince, indeed, as Winter (2012: 748–749) notes, assertions which ‘ventriloquize’ Cesare Borgia's actions from the latter work. While here we may strike a note of skepticism, noting that Machiavelli's prince employs such means precisely to enforce forms of domination, Winter (2012: 749) argues that that the Ciompo offers a qualitatively different affirmation of manipulation and violence, as it is ‘framed primarily in terms of shaking off existing relations of domination rather than constituting new ones’, and thus amounts to a ‘necessary tactic’ of subversion but not a ruling strategy as such. ⁶ Finally, third is an affective conversion under which the Ciompo reframes the workers’ fear into a ‘politically productive’ hatred (Winter, 2012: 750), thereby reconfiguring the workers into a revolutionary force precisely within the event of the popular subversion of rule.

Winter's reconstruction of the speech thus produces three broad dimensions of the no-rule event:

(1) A radical assertion of equality

What flows out of these arguments is a popular capacity not contingent on institutional arrangements but rather inherent to popular action as such. It is precisely because the assertions to equality, its tactics and the affective conversion are not ‘susceptible to absorption into available institutional political forms’ (Winter, 2012: 757) – forms by their nature premised on hierarchies and divisions among actors – that the Ciompi event produces a ‘revolutionary’ and fundamentally democratic subject. Nowhere here can there be a problem of co-optation, as popular action subverts the very subjects whose interests may be redirected and the forms through which contending actors may do so.

How do we square no-rule's subversive Machiavelli with his institutionalising counterpart? If the latter stands in need of extra-institutional sensibility while the former rejects all institutions as such, then can the two form a coherent democratic project? To approach these questions I turn to a perspectival problem at the heart of the no-rule argument: namely, the need for the radical egalitarian claim to ground the subsequent tactical considerations and the call to action in Winter's reconstruction of the speech. This reconstruction, however, in fact reshuffles the order of the speech in emphasising the egalitarian argument. As the FH’s speech appears in the text, the Ciompo begins by arguing that a redoubling of abuses would absolve the Ciompi of punishment (Winter's ‘necessary tactics’) and asserting that such action could bring the Ciompi greater freedom and satisfaction, only then moving to voice the radical egalitarian claim (Machiavelli, 1998: 122–123). Egalitarianism does not self-evidently ground the discussion of violent tactics and princely means, but rather appears as one of the speech's many contentions: it flows out of the Ciompo's awareness of the possibilities of avoiding punishment and of becoming ‘princes of all the city’ and therefore cannot be extricated from its strategic capacity to move its audience to action, inspire violence and legitimate an inversion of who dominates whom.

Insofar as the perspectival approach agrees with Winter's call to take the polysemy of Machiavelli's text seriously, ⁷ it thus becomes increasingly difficult to identify the Ciompi solely as those refusing ‘the struggle for economic advantage of one part of the city over another’ (Vatter, 2012: 252) ⁸ or those not ‘susceptible’ to institutional ‘absorption’ (Winter, 2012: 757). Instead, the Ciompi begin to echo their characterisation by the FH’s unsympathetic narrator as groups constituted through particular institutional orders whose demands merely reaffirm the underlying logic and language of that arrangement: the Ciompi are not those unaccounted for revoking ‘all forms of government’ but workers ‘not satisfied’ (non sodisfatti; the narrator's language) whose attempt to gain ‘satisfaction’ (sodisfazione; the Ciompo's language) predictably fits within the city's ruler/ruled binary in swapping who occupies which positions (making the Ciompi ‘princes’) and hence ‘satisfying’ those below. By no means am I suggesting that the egalitarian claim serves only to manipulate. However, the existence of overlapping linguistic elements between Ciompo speaker and narrator nonetheless renders the no-rule approach's capacity to unite the speech's competing elements into one subversive, democratic frame increasingly difficult.

If the speech's ‘tactical’ elements cannot be easily separated from or subsumed by the egalitarian claim, then what is to be made of the Ciompo's recurring ‘ventriloquizing’ of a prince? While the next section will consider this difficulty in detail, here it is important to recognise that the popular enactment of a princely logic encounters a perspectival difficulty insofar as action theorised specifically in the perspective of an isolated, ruling ‘high’ actor (in The Prince) is now assumed by ‘low’ actors and employed for ends which should ostensibly subvert the high/low binary. Though such capacities may be conceivable, the broader concern is that the no-rule approach provides no way to engage their conceivability: the Ciompi may be using an egalitarian language as a princely tactic to achieve an inverted form of rule; conversely, they may be using princely tactics in asserting a radical egalitarianism. No-rule's celebration of the speech's egalitarian language, however, both demands the viability of the latter conclusion and yet leaves no way to distinguish it from its more manipulative, rule-oriented counterpart.

In juxtaposing the institutional and no-rule approaches, my goal has not been only to show that both face various perspectival problems, nor to suggest that the institutional reading lacks a subversive sensibility or that no-rule readings could benefit from an increased attention to Machiavelli's institutions. Indeed, the opposite appears to be the case: each approach has run into difficulties precisely by virtue of the other's existence. Institutionalised popular rule appears problematic because subversive impulses threaten to render such rule fatally narrow; conversely, no-rule subversion appears problematic because the dynamics of rule which undergird institutional forms threaten to surface within subversive events. In other words, the logics behind both approaches imply critiques of one another and yet both operate together and thus continue to resist the democratic implications that arise from Machiavelli's arguments. How, then, can one formulate a Machiavellian account of democracy?

Missing from the above discussion and from both the institutional and no-rule readings is a way of engaging the second-order implication of Machiavelli's perspectival approach identified in the previous section: the capacity for what Lefort identified as Machiavelli's perspectival ‘meandering’ to establish a perspective on the political interplays that produce, direct and manipulate the various perspectival deficiencies examined above. As was suggested with this second-order implication, perspective functions not only to limit actors’ horizons or to shape the interactions among actors but is also fostered through political action and therefore could be crafted and affected by political actors – if they learn to be good Machiavellians. That Machiavelli's logic should allow for perspectives to be manipulated should come as no shock, even though the capacity for manipulation would seem to fit naturally only with certain Machiavellian actors: strategists, well-advised princes – namely actors who in some way approximate Machiavelli. In contrast to such a characterisation, in the following section I argue that a democratic reading of Machiavelli must likewise establish a popular account of this capacity if it hopes to move beyond a seemingly endless reproduction of institutional/no-rule oppositions. In what follows, I trace the possibility of locating this sort of capacity in Machiavelli's thought, and subsequently identify it in a reexamination of Machiavelli's comedy La Mandragola.

III. Princely and popular perspectives

Before moving on to Machiavelli's comedy and its connection to democracy, we must first establish how first-order perspectival implications can in turn produce second-order implications. In other words, to understand how Machiavellian actors may come to foster a productive relation to perspective rather than simply being limited by it. Indeed, the contradictions between the two democratic approaches above arose from inattentiveness not only to the limitations of certain perspectives as such but also to the implication that an engagement with such limits could in turn cultivate a capacity to craft, affect and utilise perspective to productive ends.

The task of tracing the generation of such a relation requires that we return to The Prince, where Machiavelli again offers the most explicit articulation of how an actor may put perspective to work. The articulation in question follows Machiavelli's investigation of the various subjects of praise and blame: what begins as a set of questions concerning the ethical quality of certain practices (e.g. ‘what really counts as cruelty?’) transforms into a consideration concerning how ‘ethical’ questions are judged when it comes to princely action. Indeed, it is precisely the result of this shift that enables Machiavelli to conclude that a prince will need to know ‘how to do wrong when he must’, a knowledge in turn premised on his understanding of the relation between prince and people arising from the condition that ‘in general men judge more with their eyes than with their hands [alle mani], since everybody can see [vedere] but few can perceive [sentire]. Everybody sees what you appear to be; few perceive what you are, and those few dare not contradict the belief of the many, who have the majesty of the government to support them’. As such, if a prince succeeds in generating ends amenable to the judgment of those ‘many’, then ‘his means are always judged honorable and everywhere praised, because the mob is always fascinated by appearances and by the outcome of an affair’ (Machiavelli, 1989: XVIII).

Although Glibert's translation here renders two different types of judgment originating in seeing and perceiving, the Italian text literally differentiates between different actors’ capacities ‘to see’ (vedere) and ‘to feel’ (sentire). Princely action thus appears as a response to the basic fact that the many see the effects of his politics but do not feel them firsthand (alle mani), a division along a sensory dimension which finally and explicitly inscribes Machiavelli's ethical considerations within a perspectival orientation to political action. The Prince may need to ‘do wrong’; but this need does not so much inspire a reevaluation of right and wrong as refocus his orientation to action such that he now comes to determine action in response to the perspectival limitations of those with whom he interacts. Machiavelli's consequentialist conclusions here are inseparable from their perspectival grounding.

Is the Prince, then, confined to the feeling/seeing, high/low, one/many perspectival dynamic? On one hand, we can read this conclusion as an echo of Machiavelli's opening mapmaking analogy, this time with an affirmation of a politics premised upon the ‘high’ prince's manipulation of what and how those ‘below’ him are able to see and judge. But if the above quote is a simple restatement of the analogy, then consider, for example, the fact that the Prince here is made aware of the fact that some ‘few’ do retain a capacity to ‘feel’ his action, but that they will not be able to resist ‘the majesty of the government’. ⁹ The Prince, in other words, will encounter challenges to the perspectival order upon which his rule has been constituted, but should understand that he can use his power precisely to enforce the perspectival limitations at play – to ensure that his actions are judged only by ‘the mob’ and only on outcomes. The above perspectival division thus appears not only as the condition upon which the Prince's politics are grounded but rather a product of princely action, insofar as the Prince utilises his capacities to enforce the very perspectival division that makes his mode of action both possible and justifiable. Machiavelli's assertion, then, that ‘everybody sees what you appear to be; few [feel] what you are’ can be read not only as a statement of the fact that certain perspectival limitations determine how the prince should act, but further as a theorisation of how princely actions themselves shape those limits and, as Panagia (2009: 93) puts it, ‘sustain the intensive impact’ of princely appearance. We thus encounter a Machiavellian perspectival dilemma: is the sensory division between one and many a backdrop upon which actors partake in a consequentialist politics, or is this backdrop itself shaped by different actors and actions?

It may come as a surprise that the democratic readings I have engaged with throughout this essay are in fact in agreement when it comes to this last question: at least implicitly, both approaches understand the above dynamic between princely and popular capacities to be a given in politics – a dynamic that simply describes a reality of political action. For one, McCormick's characterisation of the above seeing/feeling capacities interprets this dynamic as a way of privileging a popular capacity: the judgment of ends. Unlike elites, who possess the ‘luxury of fussing over means’, the people need an ends-oriented public actor precisely because his sort of action is the only type that masses can easily discern (McCormick, 2011: 22–23). While this conclusion appears to adhere to McCormick's class-oriented democratic reading of Machiavelli, what remain unquestioned are a host of assumptions concerning how different forms of action and judgment come to be associated with prince and people. Likewise, Winter's presumption that the people even can ‘ventriloquize’ a prince already takes a princely mode of action as a given – thus overlooking the fact that this very mode is itself premised against a backdrop of popular affirmation of individuated achievement – that in its no-rule mode, action nonetheless ‘commands’ and (with Vatter) locates no-rule transgressions where ‘the citizens become princes’ (Vatter, 2000: 304). ¹⁰ To resist domination it is still presumed that the people need to somehow engage in (a non-dominating version of) princely action. But why is this a necessary condition of Machiavellian politics?

In truly Machiavellian fashion, The Prince both theorises princely rule and cast doubts on whether the conditions which necessitate such rule could arise from anything but princely rule to begin with: the text appears both to celebrate princely rule and to present it as inexorably parochial and tautological. Problematically, democratic interpreters have consistently overlooked the contingency implied with such a tautology. In approaching the prince–people division, McCormick in effect has argued that in this dynamic the people's capacity of only judging outcomes can in fact amount to an adequate conception of rule (given the right sorts of institutions); conversely, Vatter and Winter have argued that popular action can in fact adopt the capacities associated with the Prince (given the right sort of princely action). While they have disagreed on how popular action proceeds, both approaches have nonetheless retained a basic conceptual binary between ‘high’ (princely) and ‘low’ capacities, and thus run into difficulties in differentiating popular institutionalisation from co-optation and popular subversion from the re-imposition of rule precisely because both approaches presume and perpetuate a princely perspectival binary even while advancing democratic arguments. ¹¹ The shortcoming here is a failure to question how this binary is itself reproduced and manipulated in Machiavelli's texts, and thus whether it could be challenged or manipulated differently.

What, then, would a move away from princely action look like? While The Prince leads us to this question, here it avoids exploring its implications, instead turning to celebrate the Prince's capacity to liberate Italy. And though I have argued that a prince's relation to perspective may be contingent on his own enforcement of a certain perspectival order, other relations to perspective remain mere postulations until we can identify concrete alternatives in Machiavelli's texts – namely, ways of reformulating perspectival orders and the modes of action associated with them. Given this challenge, I now turn to Machiavelli's comedy La Mandragola, arguing that it not only displaces the Prince as political actor but further reformulates the organisation of feeling, seeing and judging that undergirded princely action above. In contrast to the consternation produced by democratic turn approaches, the comedy will thus enable the formulation of a uniquely democratic relation to perspective.

IV. Machiavelli the comedian: La Mandragola and the democratic perspective

Unlike The Prince, which was first sent to Lorenzo de’ Medici, then spread among Machiavelli's friends, and remained unpublished during his lifetime, La Mandragola maintains a concrete connection between Machiavelli and an emergent Florentine public. First staged in 1518, the play was produced five years after the dissemination of The Prince appears to have had little effect on Medici rule. Unlike its more clandestine predecessor, the play marks Machiavelli's explicitly public return to Florentine life after his dismissal from office. As such, the production of the play is directed largely at the wide audience of ‘young gentlemen’, those ‘whose attitudes and future actions [would] have the greatest effect on the wider community’ (Flaumenhaft, 1981: 4). ¹² Coupled with this more public status is the significance of renaissance Florentine theater and Machiavelli's relation to it. Here the play's own prologue offers an initial reflection on this relationship, as it asks the audience to excuse Machiavelli's comic material if it ‘is not worthy’, explaining that its author is trying ‘to make his wretched time more pleasant’ because he is ‘cut off’ from engaging in virtuous undertakings (Machiavelli, 1981). While at face value the prologue seems ready to dismiss Machiavelli's own efforts, significant here are the reasons why its author has had to engage in such ‘vain thoughts’: he has ‘nowhere else to turn his face’; the sort of action associated with Machiavellian virtù has been foreclosed in Florence. The irony is that such a forthright confession of one's public uselessness is proclaimed in the most public medium that Machiavelli's works ever assume: just as it seems to denigrate Machiavelli's own work, it is as if the prologue demands that The Prince’s very men ‘in general’, upon whose perspective princely appearance was premised, see their own worthlessness. That virtù has been ‘cut off’ should not be understood simply as an observation made within Machiavelli's text, but rather a necessarily public assertion which will form the conditions of possibility for a new, comedic relation to action.

Lurking behind the prologue's readiness to dismiss its own material, then, is the establishment of a perspective on how that material is seen and judged. Indeed, this new perspective does not emerge out of nowhere but rather tracks an aspect of Machiavelli's oeuvre largely downplayed by political theoretic engagements with his work, namely his vocation not only as theorist but also as one of the pioneers of renaissance comedy. Here Machiavelli fits in a movement that begins with the revival of Roman theatrical forms and culminates in the establishment of modern European theater, his specific intervention an attempt to move away from the earlier ‘moralistic’ plays in the absence of a princely court receptive to innovative humanist experimentation (Andrews, 1993: 51). Details concerning how the play establishes its public are not insignificant: the facts that the play's performances did not have a set location but moved around (occasioning performances in private houses) and that printings of its script were ‘innumerable’ though irregular should alert us to the novelty of both the comedic practice and the sort of audience which this practice generated (Andrews, 1993: 51). I note the uniqueness of these details especially because political theorists so often take Machiavelli's comedy to be merely another iteration of The Prince and its problems. My arguments regarding the play's perspectival significance will instead depend on the untenability of such an interpretation. First, though, the relevant details of the play's plot should be recounted.

La Mandragola features Callimaco, a Florentine living in Paris who returns to Florence upon getting word of Lucrezia, famous for her unmatched beauty and manners. In Florence Callimaco solicits the help of the matchmaker Ligurio to seduce Lucrezia from her old and witless husband, Nicia. After the two consider a few strategies for the seduction, which Ligurio shows to be shortsighted and which nearly drive Callimaco to abandon the project altogether, Ligurio comes up with a plan. Nicia, he tells us, desires nothing more than to have a child, though he is incapable of it. Ligurio thus introduces Callimaco to Nicia as a famous Parisian doctor, and Callimaco prescribes that Lucrezia take a mandrake root (mandragola) potion to cure her sterility. The catch is that the first person to have intercourse with Lucrezia afterwards will die, therefore necessitating that they find an outside party, convince Lucrezia to have sex with him, and then dispose of his body. Though Nicia is in disbelief, Callimaco convinces him of his medical expertise and suggests that he and Ligurio will help with the conspiracy. After soliciting Friar Timoteo to help convince Lucrezia that her participation will not count as a sin (the Friar agrees to take part after Ligurio ‘dupes’ him into accepting a donation), Ligurio presents Nicia with a disguised Callimaco as their victim, and Nicia throws him in bed with his wife. As Callimaco recounts, at the end of the night he confesses the plot to Lucrezia and promises to take her as his wife upon her husband's death. Lucrezia, noting Callimaco's ‘astuteness’ and her husband's ‘stupidity’, says that she will take Callimaco as her ‘lord, master and guide’, though her actual assent to Callimaco's proposal remains ambiguous. The following day, Nicia introduces Lucrezia to (the now undisguised) Callimaco outside the church and, ecstatic about the success of their ploy, suggests that Callimaco and Ligurio visit and keep a key to their house, to which Lucrezia gladly agrees. The play ends with Timoteo calling the group to come into the church and pray.

Given La Mandragola’s apparent celebration of deception, interpreters often compare the action of the play to Machiavelli's political advice in The Prince. Indeed, the affinity both works have for manipulation is apparent. However, most political theoretic readings of Machiavelli's works (those, that is, that do not ignore the comedy altogether) go beyond simple comparison and attempt to map the characters in the play onto the figures in the treatise. Lucrezia, for instance, has become an allegory for either ‘the people’ (Lord, 1979) or the goddess Fortuna (Behuniak-Long, 1989), Ligurio for Machiavelli, and Callimaco the ‘new’ Machiavellian Prince, ‘whose insatiable ambition is coupled with a readiness to risk his life’ (Lord, 1979: 812). Most interpreters thus tend to engage in the rote identification of the same lessons concerning when to be a lion and when to be a fox (Behuniak-Long, 1989: 272), the same ‘aggressive’ division between the public and private (O’Brien, 2004: 191), indeed the same ‘insatiable ambition’ proper to princes when reading the play (Lord, 1979: 812). As Berlin (1971: 31) remarks, ‘the notion that Callimaco is a kind of Prince in private life, successful in creating and maintaining his own world by the correct use of guile and fraud …  appears highly plausible’. ¹³ The Prince, it seems, may as well have been a dress rehearsal for La Mandragola.

If Callimaco is taken to be a sort of prince – ‘private’, allegorical, or otherwise – then the prior perspectival order established with The Prince again falls into place: Machiavellian action again requires one to occupy a privileged, individuated site along the seeing/feeling and one/many binaries, just as the play's ‘successful’ outcome reaffirms the protagonist's capacity to maintain himself within this dynamic. It is exactly this line of reasoning that I dispute. La Mandragola has no Prince – and needs no princes, either. Instead, the comedy will both unsettle any given characters’ (first-order) attempt to establish themselves upon The Prince’s metaphorical mountaintop and displace the (second-order) relation to perspective among theorist, actor and men ‘in general’ that undergirds princely action as such. In its satirical enactment of ‘Machiavellian’ themes, the comedy will therefore engage a distinctively public capacity to reformulate and manipulate perspective with subsequent democratic implications overlooked by both no-rule and institutional approaches.

First, given the princely interpretive frame discussed above, we must examine Callimaco's role in the manipulations that take place. Consider, for instance, Callimaco and Ligurio's deliberations over how to seduce Lucrezia: prior to Ligurio's plan with the mandrake, the two consider convincing Nicia to take Lucrezia to the local baths, which, as Callimaco reasons, could make the virtuous Lucrezia ‘change her nature’ and become open to seduction (Machiavelli, 1981: 1.1). Though Callimaco champions this plot, Ligurio quickly begins to dissuade him, explaining that ‘a man could come [to the baths] who’d like Madonna Lucrezia as much as you do, who might be richer than you, or more gracious than you; so you risk the danger of enduring this trouble for others’. Callimaco's response to this complication is to fall into immediate despair, exclaiming that he has ‘to try something, be it great, dangerous, harmful, scandalous’ concluding that he will die ‘if there's no remedy’, which prompts Ligurio to instruct him to ‘curb such a rush of sprit’ (Machiavelli, 1981: 1.3). This early interaction between Callimaco and Ligurio reveals a curious dynamic between the two. Callimaco seems ready to back any plan to seduce Lucrezia, without considering the perspectival context within which such a plan will have to take place. Indeed, that Ligurio must explain that this plan would expose him to competition with other seducers reveals a significant lack of awareness on Callimaco's part concerning how one manipulates others within different public and private contexts, coincidentally the very knowledge that Machiavelli purports to establish in The Prince.

Upon seeing Callimaco's initial anxiety, we could conclude that he simply starts from a general unawareness of Machiavellian tactics and learns from Ligurio. After all, the political actor in The Prince must ostensibly learn from Machiavelli before he can put his ambition to work. However, Callimaco's own recounting of the seduction scene at the end of the play resists such a reading. Here Callimaco tells Ligurio that, though he took pleasure in his night with Lucrezia, his mind remained ‘troubled’: ‘it didn't seem good to me’ until ‘I made myself known to her, and made her understand the love I bore for her, and how easily, on account of her husband's simplicity, we could live happily without any scandal, promising her, whenever God did otherwise with him, to take her for my wife’ (Machiavelli, 1981: 5.4). As other commentators note, Lucrezia is curiously silent on the proposal itself, referring to Callimaco as neither ‘husband’ nor ‘betrothed’ in her response (Behuniak-Long, 1989: 270) (not to mention ‘lover’), but instead reformulating her assent within a language more ‘genuinely political’ than the ‘traditional heroic motifs’ (Ferroni, 1993: 113–114) of Callimaco's proposal: Lucrezia takes Callimaco as her ‘lord, master and guide’, adding also ‘father’ and ‘defender’ – categories not only emptied of Callimaco's amorous connotations but also those which, Mansfield (2000: 7) reminds us, the comedy has explicitly betrayed in its course.

Remarkable about Callimaco's account is therefore his lack of manipulation at the conclusion of his interaction with Lucrezia, specifically in contrast to her own response: here we are told that she accepts Callimaco's ‘friendship’ because of his astuteness and Nicia's stupidity, that while her husband thought he could conspire to get what he wanted, she will now demonstrate how one really engages in Machiavellian manipulations. Callimaco's rush to establish the promise of marital relations in effect disregards this transformation in Lucrezia's character; while he confesses and proposes, Lucrezia accepts her part in the affair but fails to directly address Callimaco's specific ambitions. Where Callimaco's manipulations appear to have ended – where he is (again) ready to ‘die’ on account of Lucrezia's ‘sweet’ words (Machiavelli, 1981: 5.4), her tenure as Machiavellian actor is just beginning.

Who, then, ends up manipulating whom? The answer to this question requires us to examine not merely the ‘agents’ of manipulation but rather how these manipulations take place within the play. In contrast to The Prince, such manipulations do not assume the high (prince)/low (people) perspectival binary as their conceptual starting point. Instead, all of the play's characters are in various ways embroiled in each other's perspectives as they adjust to new circumstances: Nicia and Callimaco – both manipulators – likewise both find themselves lost in their manipulations; insofar as they rely upon Ligurio's strategising, they cannot help but enter into the operations of others – of Timoteo, of Lucrezia, and of each other. Moreover, such manipulations are never unidirectional: Ligurio does not simply trick Timoteo into convincing Lucrezia that her participation in the mandrake plot is not sinful, but solicits the friar in such a way that it appears that Ligurio, too, has fallen into misusing a sum of money intended for a different purpose (Machiavelli, 1981: 3.4). ¹⁴ The reason the friar can become accomplice and the strategist can become church donor is that both adjust their perspectives to each other's shifting demands and act accordingly: there is no separation here between those who act and those who judge, no strict division between secret means and apparent ends, no mountaintop from which to enforce what is seen and felt. The conspiracy and thus ‘success’ as understood in the play rest on a capacity to keep these terms fluid, to leave the question of who manipulates (acts) and who is manipulated (acted upon) open. As Timoteo concludes following his deal with Ligurio, ‘I don't know which one has duped the other … It's true that I’ve been duped; nevertheless, this trick is to my profit’ (Machiavelli, 1981: 3.9). The capacity for mutual duping, and not the princely perspectival separation between low and high actors, is thus the driving force behind the comedy's portrayal of action.

So La Mandragola appears to disperse the knowledge of and ability to engage in princely action. But what makes this conclusion uniquely ‘democratic’? Here a second key dimension of La Mandragola renders it particularly significant in theorising Machiavelli's relation to democratic theory, namely its status as public performance. The play does not simply challenge The Prince’s perspectival binaries, but presents such challenges as popular, public engagements. It is not the case, then, that La Mandragola simply lacks a Prince or replaces him with some other prince-like actor – a Pacuvius who can manipulate public judgments, a Ciompo who can ventriloquise princely ‘tactics’, or some other agent whose capacities to inspire popular action are theorised while maintaining the broader (second-order) perspectival relation between theorist, tactician and men ‘in general’. Rather, the comedy forces open the perspectival order undergirding princely action as such by enacting a public capacity to reformulate how perspective is crafted and affected – of how and where action is seen and felt and of who does the seeing and feeling. Just as The Prince has made sense of princely power by theorising an actor capable of imposing a hierarchical division of perspective, here the comedy advances its logic of mutual duping precisely by leveling the princely perspectival order.

Consider, first, that the comedy's exploration of the pervasiveness of manipulation within the Church and the family – a pervasiveness that survives in private while the institutions maintain their public stature – itself exposes these institutions’ amenability to action from all sorts of places as a public performance. In other words, the comedy's capacity to satirise various public and private spaces reimagines them as all likewise manipulable, and then proceeds to showcase such manipulations on the same perspectival register. Between the play and its audience there is no longer the stable division of which things are seen (and not seen) and felt (and not felt) but rather an exhibition of how such divisions are instituted, manipulated and subverted. This is the leveling of perspective: within the space enacted by the play, anything seen as one thing can be shown again as another – a church as a site of conspiracy, of prayer, of public gathering; a bedroom as a site of confession and of new political relations; a lover as a future spouse, as a co-conspirator, as one to be duped. To be sure, it is not that subversion or ridicule of Church and family is, as such, a necessary guiding impulse of any democratic project, but rather that here the comedy subjects received spaces and capacities – and thus the very mountain and valley that grounded The Prince – to public navigation. Consider, again, the prologue's deprecation of its own material: in presenting an image of a public space deprived of virtù within what is itself a public performance, the comedy challenged presumptions concerning where virtuous action could be located and carried out. In contrast to the princely correlation of virtù with the isolated, individuated ‘high’ actor, here La Mandragola posits a new public forming around its capacity to navigate the dynamic between things accessible to sight and touch, to judgment and action. ¹⁵

Hulliung (1983: 104) has remarked that La Mandragola ‘implies that private life, rather than an alternative to power politics, is a continuation of such politics’ – a conclusion with which all readings that approach the play as a ‘political’ text should agree. But this conclusion does not go far enough. The play does not merely reveal that the ‘private’ is political, but makes spaces, actors and interactions political. The comedy's function as performance here becomes exceptionally important, as it not only presents its audience with new conclusions about politics, morality or public spaces but offers a new way of being in public as such. The comedy's novelty lies not simply in its Machiavellian lessons but in its capacity to instantiate a Machiavellian public which heretofore did not exist. The comedy thus thematises the ‘postulation’ across which we had stumbled at the outset of this section: The Prince’s implication that a princely enforcement of perspectival binaries could also allow for the theorisation of an entirely non-princely orientation toward political action in Machiavelli's thought. In leveling perspective and exposing the contingency of any perspectival ordering, La Mandragola has introduced a uniquely public and popular capacity to craft, affect and utilise perspective through a comedic mode of action. This movement – from a public leveling of perspective, to the revelation of its contingency, to the capacity to challenge the princely perspectival order – is the creation of a democratic relation to perspective. Where the prince could impose the ‘majesty of the government’ to police how his actions were seen and felt, here La Mandragola establishes a new capacity to negotiate what seeing and feeling entails, one contingent on a new public arising from new comedic spaces.

Conclusion

Insofar as an attention to Machiavelli's perspectivalism has enabled this essay to map the tensions between institutional and subversive impulses in Machiavelli's works, the concept of perspective offers a number of interpretive implications. First, perspective demands an understanding of Machiavelli not reducible to the propositional content of his arguments – even when such content appears to align with democratic designs. Rather, Machiavellian perspectivalism enables us to trace how concepts are put to political use in their capacity to reinforce or disrupt different political relations and practices. Machiavelli's ‘lessons’ do not simply instruct his readers or impart an objective knowledge of politics, but further orient Machiavellian audiences toward particular forms of understanding, judgment and action. At the very least, this interpretive implication insists that we recognise Machiavelli's diverse rhetorical commitments: though for political theorists Machiavelli largely joins the ranks of philosophers and treatise writers, we fail to grasp significant aspects of his interventions if we neglect his unique postures as letter writer, historian, comedian, poet and politician.

The question of orientation renders a uniquely practical implication of Machiavelli's work for democratic theory in that Machiavelli's comedy enacts a capacity to move away from a princely perspectival order. Here La Mandragola’s staging of ‘princely’ manoeuvers does not simply satirise The Prince but begins to formulate the comedic audience as a force capable of generating its own perspective. It is Machiavelli's perspectivalism that enables The Prince’s men ‘in general’ – those ostensibly confined to valleys and not mountains – to appear in a dynamic space of political negotiation in La Mandragola. ¹⁶ A comedic reorientation of the democratic turn in Machiavelli scholarship thus focuses our attention away from determinations over whether popular action is essentially subversive or rule-oriented and question how both phenomena take shape and can be reshaped – over how it is that ‘rule’ comes to be the popular affirmation or rejection of elites, that ‘subversion’ comes with the promise of making revolutionaries into princes, that in general men come to judge more with their eyes.