One might well suppose that, after more than five centuries, the examination of Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought has been conducted in so thorough and minute a fashion that the possibility for further large-scale insights on the topic has been entirely exhausted. John McCormick’s new book—the third of what he describes as an unintentional trilogy (p. 228)—amply demonstrates that any such supposition would be entirely unwarranted. McCormick is perhaps best known as the foremost expositor of a “democratic” reading of Machiavelli, proposed most prominently in his 2011 book, Machiavellian Democracy. The volume presently under review represents a substantial extension, rather than a simple restatement, of his previous scholarship. Where Machiavellian Democracy concentrated on the activities of the popular faction (the popolo) itself in Machiavelli’s political theory, The People’s Princes addresses the roles played by its leaders, shining new light on the figures—historical and modern alike—who he held up as paragons as well as failures.
In particular, McCormick’s exercise may best be characterized as an intensive examination of Machiavelli’s tyrants, which leads to a surprising conclusion: Many apparent epitomes of tyrannical conduct singled out by Machiavelli, especially from Greek antiquity, prove to be agents and facilitators of democratic transformation and endurance. Not all tyrants, it seems, were created equal. In McCormick’s view, then, it becomes possible to reconcile two apparently conflicting visions of Machiavelli—as an avatar of democracy and as a friend of tyranny. “Salutary tyrants,” among whom McCormack counts Agathocles of Syracuse, Clearchus of Heraclea, and Cleomenes of Sparta, harnessed the natural antipathy of the people toward their oligarchic oppressors—the proverbial “sons of Brutus”—as a means for achieving and maintaining popular liberty. While more typical of Greece, tyrannical rule that resulted in democratic dominance over the noble faction sometimes transpired in Roman times. By contrast, leaders in Machiavelli’s own Italy are generally rebuked—Savonarola, Piero Soderini, and Cesare Borgia all earn his reprobation—for their incapacity to direct the people’s sentiment to control the excesses of the wealthy and powerful. The inbred humor of the elites drives them inexorably to squeeze the ordinary mass of citizens ever more effectively when the latter are left leaderless and thereby unprotected from their masters. In the main body of The People’s Princes, McCormack self-consciously adopts Machiavelli’s own method of invoking useful exempla to illustrate the best practices of ancient leaders (pp. 7–8) concretely. He supports the evaluation of the relative merits of rulers by offering a series of quasi-Plutarchian comparative sketches of the techniques they employed and eschewed in guiding popular passions toward maintaining control over the elite disposition to dominate.
How precisely does Machiavelli think this outcome is to be attained? McCormick highlights three common elements of successful leadership of which the Florentine approves. First, members of the nobility ought always to be subject to the threat of public adjudication when they are perceived to be pursuing goals that run counter to the liberty of citizens. Nor should popular governors shrink from applying harsh penalties—primarily capital punishment—to those found guilty of conspiring to subvert the people’s interests. And princes in the service of the popular faction must always be prepared to organize and command civil militias to take up arms against recalcitrant oligarchs. Machiavelli’s famed ruthlessness finds a congenial home in such actions. Second, the unequal distribution of property must be severely constrained for the sake of public liberty. The success of a salutary tyrant’s policies may be measured by the extent to which he efficiently regulates the efforts of the great men to accumulate riches at the expense of the people. Machiavelli reserves special praise for Greek tyrants as exponents of the cause of economic leveling, in contrast with the comparatively modest reforms sought by Roman champions of redistribution such as the Gracchi brothers. Finally, popular princes need to be ready to submit themselves to the judgment of their subjects. The salutary tyrant is not exempt from democratic accountability. Moreover, should a sentence be passed upon him, he ought never to resist the consequences of the determination, since the people frequently soon regret their error and restore him to power.
One wonders about whether or how McCormack’s understanding of tyranny—salutary or otherwise—might translate into the plural. Although Machiavelli mostly ascribes tyranny to specific individuals, they are not the only ones capable of exercising power tyrannically. For instance, while Machiavelli in the Discourses considers Appius Claudius to be a tyrant, he in fact instigated the creation of a group—the Decemvirs—who devolved into a sort of collective tyranny. Indeed, Machiavelli points to a number of such examples in which not a single man, but a faction or party, tyrannized a state. This might involve a relatively small number of people holding magistracies or positions of unrivaled authority, such as the Decemvirate. But it might also encompass much larger groups. Thus, in the Art of War, Machiavelli cautions that a professional army has inherently tyrannical tendencies. That is, professional soldiers as a group have their own set of interests that do not coincide with the public good, and they possess the force to impose their collective will on citizens. Machiavelli attributes similar inclinations to other groups as well. In the Florentine Histories, for example, he speaks of tyranny exercised by the Ghibelline and Guelf parties when each ruled the city. Moreover, Machiavelli observes that not only Piero de’Medici alone, but together with his followers, lived tyrannically rather than in accordance with Florence’s laws and the will of its populace. Could salutary tyranny likewise be exercised through a multiplicity rather than singularly?
McCormack states that his purpose in writing The People’s Princes is threefold: to contribute “to the fields of intellectual history, democratic theory, and contemporary political science” (p. xiii). That he has accomplished the first two goals should be fully evident from the foregoing appraisal of the book. The third aim is somewhat more implicitly and imperfectly realized. McCormack acknowledges only briefly the timeliness of his subject matter (pp. xii, 222–224). One is left to wonder how many of Machiavelli’s lessons about democratic leadership actually transfer from the city-republics of Greco-Roman antiquity and Renaissance Italy to the modern world comprised sovereign states tightly interwoven by globalized economic interests and instantaneous communication. Beyond expressing broad generalities about the dangers of populism when led by unscrupulous governors who twist the people’s rage at plutocracy into a self-destructive knot, I’m not sure that McCormick’s efforts quite hit their mark. I do not mean to disparage his achievement. But the fact that some ideas do not travel as well as others may prove to be an inadvertent lesson of The People’s Princes.
