Discourses on Livy

"I chose the Discourses on Livy , which I very much prefer to The Prince . The Prince is a great book of course. But it’s also a book that, as we now know, Machiavelli wrote almost as a job application. He thought The Prince would be his ticket, to get back into the game of politics in the new Florence, dominated again by the Medici. With the Discourses , we hear Machiavelli’s real voice, without any sense of further purpose or motive in writing it. Here is Machiavelli the humanist, commenting on the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. And I think his insight into republican liberty is just extraordinary throughout the book. Every discourse within it contains a jewel, by way of an intuition, an idea, or an argument – and offers endless inspiration for further argument. “Italians…are much more pessimistic about the course of history. They don’t think of history as linear, but as circular” My favourite discourses are the ones around what Machiavelli saw as the strength of the foundations of Roman liberty. There are two or three discourses in the first book, where he asks how the Romans managed to create a free state after getting rid of the monarchy of Tarquinius Superbus. He says that was quite exceptional, because most peoples who get rid of a tyrant will not be able to maintain their freedom, their liberty, since in the meantime they lost – or perhaps had never developed before – the beliefs, customs and habits of liberty. They won’t know what it is to be a free people. They will not have the sentiment of liberty and the sense of duty that political liberty requires. When the Romans got rid of Tarquinius Superbus, they still had those beliefs and sentiments. They still got what liberty was about. Corruption had begun within the elites, with the family of Tarquinius and the people around him, and it had begun to sink into the fabric of society. But society was still sufficiently healthy that they could get rid of the tyrants, and create and sustain a free republic that lasted until the civil war five centuries later. He was a realist and a pragmatist in the sense that he didn’t theorise politics in an abstract way. But, insofar as he had a sense of what his political moral values were, there is no question that he thought liberty was an important political and moral value. A free republic and a free people are what he would have wanted to be associated with. But, at the same time, because he was a realist, he thought that it wasn’t within the power of politicians or philosophers to just make liberty happen. You have to look at the real conditions. You have to look at – as he put it – the mettle of the people. And, if you’re dealing with the Romans of the sixth century BC, then yes, there is still some hope of creating a free state. If you’re dealing with the Romans of the first century BC or first century AD, there was no hope anymore. Caesar gets killed, Caligula gets killed, Nero dies, but freedom doesn’t follow from any of those events, because the people at that point were too corrupt. It’s one of those things that perhaps in contemporary analysis of liberty we sometimes prefer not to discuss. Maybe it’s become a bit politically incorrect to think about peoples as being ‘suitable’ or ‘ready’ for free government. But for Machiavelli that was a key consideration. He thought you really have to look at who the people are and ask yourself: can these people – with these values, with these beliefs, with these customs, with this history – sustain liberty? Even if you think – as I do – of freedom as a fundamental entitlement of human beings and political communities, the question of whether we have what it takes to be free is a different one. Yes and before then. In fact, Machiavelli here links up a bit with Vico, who is my next thinker on the list of five. Italian historicism is quite different from British historicism. Maybe it’s a difference between Catholic and Protestant historicism. British historicism is quite often a Whiggish historicism – this idea that history will progress and that there is linear evolution. I suppose Mill too thought that at some point people would have graduated from their nonage into adulthood. In this Whiggish sense, political institutions will become freer and freer as people become better and better. A virtuous cycle emerges: if you give them free institutions and good laws, people will flourish and improve under them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Italians, like Machiavelli too ultimately, but Vico especially, are much more pessimistic about the course of history. They don’t think of history as linear, but as circular. Machiavelli would not have been surprised that the Florentines, whom he would have considered extremely accomplished in so many pursuits, like art and literature, were not as accomplished politically. It just happened to be the case that the Florentines at that point in time—despite his own efforts through 12 years in active politics—were not ready for liberty. They were also disadvantaged by all sorts of geopolitical considerations. Florence was difficult to defend. The fact was that a combination of geopolitics and who the Florentines were at that point meant that a republican Florence could not, realistically, be successful. Yes, I think he was unusual in the degree of real political experience he had. He was one of the senior political figures in Florence for 10 or 12 years between Savonarola and the return of the Medici. In that capacity too, he brought his acute sense of reality to the table. In one of his first documents when appointed to office in Florence, Machiavelli set out for Soderini, who was essentially the prime minister/chancellor, the challenges the city faced. He explained, “We have no land and the Pope wants to conquer us. We need to count on the French because they can protect us from the Pope. Venice is always going to interfere if we try to expand our territory, but that is really what we need to do, if we want to become more sustainable as a republic. But we can’t expand our territory because the moment we get into the Romagna, Venice will go to war with us. Here in Tuscany, if we move only 20/30 kilometres south or east, we already find obstacles and enemies. So it is difficult for us to remain free in these circumstances. But this is the best we can do: let’s keep the French on our side and always remember the Pope is our enemy and will never be on our side.” He would have been amazing. I think Grotius is another philosopher with a lot of practical experience, and also a practising lawyer, who would have been good at the dinner table. But the two of them are quite exceptional, I think, in the history of political philosophy—you would have thought there would be more people with political experience among political philosophers, but there are not that many. I think so. It’s very readable. In Italian, it’s a very Florentine Italian and it can be a bit difficult for modern readers, but there are various excellent English translations, like the one by Harvey Mansfield."