Gabriele Pedullà, author of Machiavelli in Tumult (Cambridge University Press, 2018), offers here a valuable introduction to Machiavelli, treating of his life and times, his political writings, and the centuries of commentary his works have inspired and provoked. The distinguishing feature of this introduction is the attention it pays to context, that is, to Machiavelli situated among his Renaissance contemporaries and to the innovative literary forms he employed.
A background chapter discusses Italy before and after the invasion of Charles VIII, king of France. The invasion was a seminal event in the history of Italy, effectively ending the Italian Renaissance, and in the life of Machiavelli, providing him the opportunity to hold office under the republic. In the Dedicatory Letter accompanying The Prince, Machiavelli states that he wishes to bestow on young Lorenzo de’ Medici, the addressee, the wisdom that he, Machiavelli, has acquired through “constant reading of ancient things” and through “sustained experience of modern things.” The first source of his wisdom, reading, takes Pedullà on a review of humanism’s recovery of the Greek and Roman past and of Machiavelli’s conflictual relationship with his immediate predecessors (e.g., they thought that study of classical masterpieces would moralize politics; Machiavelli thought not), while the second, experience, occasions a description of the Florentine government and of Machiavelli’s services to Piero Soderini, the gonfalonier of the republic, prior to the return of the Medicis.
The heart of the book is an analysis of Machiavelli’s major writings: The Prince, Discourses on Livy, The Mandrake, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. Coverage is necessarily spotty, and the analysis, as becomes an introduction, is introductory, but it is not without insight and is enriched, as noted, by frequent reference to historical and literary context. In The Prince, for instance, Machiavelli produces a “mirror for the prince” handbook typical of the classical-humanist tradition, but he departs from that tradition by extending the same freedom of action to private individuals as the tradition allowed only to states; also (to cite but one of many examples) by treating virtues (sometimes called qualities) as unrelated, outward-facing appearances meant to earn the affection or respect of others and judged virtuous by their effectiveness, rather than (à la Aristotle) as internalized and integrated dispositions for the rational management of emotions.
Pedullà further contends that in composing his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli created a new literary form unlike any of the forms then existing, to wit: scholastic expositions, philological corrections, and generalized discussions of varied fields and authors. Plentiful examples of each are given, showing that Pedullà is an intellectual historian of the first rank. Departures from Livy, Pedullà discovers, trace to a pair of Greek historians a century or so apart and living in Rome: Polybius (c.200–118 BCE) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c.60–7 BCE). Livy is a moralist, while Machiavelli, following Dionysius especially, is a constitutionalist. With precedents in Dionysius, Machiavelli argues that liberty is best preserved by a balance of power between the two social classes, patricians and plebeians, represented institutionally by the senate and tribunate, respectively; that open republics, large and expanding, endure the longest, whereas closed republics, small and stationary, come to ruin (e.g., Sparta); that, counterintuitively, civil discord is a blessing, and social harmony is a fraud; finally, that occasional recourse to a dictator is an indispensable corrective to the corrupting effects of security and prosperity. No revolutionary project can be ascribed to Machiavelli, because a society without class division would descend into tyranny.
Machiavelli was not only a political theorist and historian, but also a playwright. His most famous play, The Mandrake (or Mandragola), written in 1518 and published and performed in the mid-1520s, teaches that acquisition (meaning here the beautiful Lucrezia, wife of Nicia) is better achieved through fraud than through force, because all parties can then cooperate (knowingly or unknowingly) and share in the benefits. In the Roman original (from Livy), Lucretia, raped by a son of the Tarquin king, commits suicide, precipitating the fall of the kingship and the institution of the republic. While Machiavelli admires the heroic ethos of the ancients (imitate the Romans he instructs his contemporaries), he favors the utilitarian ethos of the moderns (private vice/public virtue, or, as in the play, illicit love/birth of a “legitimate” heir). Another takeaway is that Machiavelli’s republicanism is less than complete—for Nicia remains the public head of the household (i.e., monarchy on the surface), even though he has lost the affection of his wife to a permanent household guest (i.e., republic underneath).
As a servant of the Florentine republic, Machiavelli championed the creation of a citizen militia. In The Art of War, Machiavelli examines in close detail the organization of the militia reaching down to the tactical level. A neo-Roman reform of warfare is the objective, using the modern Swiss phalanx as a model. The discussion of tactics gives Pedullà the opportunity to explain the sub-title of his book, “The Bonds of Politics”: i.e., distant peripheries (military units) directed by the center (commanding authority) through the bonds of fear, love, religion, and state.
Florentine Histories tells the story of Florence from 1215 (the feud between the Buondelmenti/Donati and the Uberti/Amidei families) to 1492 (the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent). The work was commissioned in 1520 by Cardinal Guilio de’ Medici and presented to him six years later when he had ascended to the papacy as Pope Clement VII. Machiavelli appreciated history as a superior way of teaching philosophy, affording opportunities for authors to mull over counterfactual conditionals and for readers to role-play. Each of its eight books (excepting the first, about the founding of Florence and its early history) begins with a theoretical chapter that functions as an interpretive lens for viewing the events that follow. The often-discussed “speech of the plebeian” in book 3—a radical attack on the upper class—is read by Pedullà as an expression of Machiavelli’s pro-populist sympathies, while also as a critique of Florence for its failed management of class conflict when compared with that of Rome. A sub-theme of the Histories is that Florence was a debased copy of Rome.
The final chapter, constituting a quarter of the book, is a literature review covering centuries of Machiavelli commentary. Pedullà divides this material into four chronological periods (1523–39, 1540–1815, 1816–1945, 1946–today), within which he identifies five “alternative readings” (163) and “seven fundamental trends” (174). Some of Pedullà’s classifications are familiar, like Machiavelli the Antichrist, Machiavelli the technician of power, Machiavelli the Italian/Florentine patriot. Some seem to repeat (not surprising, since latter-day commentators resurrect the positions of their predecessors), like Machiavelli the theorist of absolutism and Machiavelli the friend of tyrants. The French Revolution and its aftermath had interesting effects on Machiavelli scholarship. First blamed for the violence of the Revolution, Machiavelli was later credited with emancipating state power from the constraints of religion and morality. During the first half of the twentieth century, the focus of scholars was exclusively on The Prince. After the war, the Discourses was rediscovered, and Machiavelli the republican, or the mixed-regime constitutionalist, became the dominant interpretation. Today, says Pedullà, the preferred view is Machiavelli the arch-democrat. A helpful diagram brings order to these competing schools of thought.
