In 1525, Niccolò Machiavelli presented the eight books of his Florentine Histories to Pope Clement VIII (Giulio de’Medici), on whose insistence he had been commissioned to write a history of Florence five years earlier. Though admired by the likes of Hume, Tocqueville, and Marx, the Florentine Histories has been largely sidelined in the English-language scholarship on Machiavelli’s political thought. Michelle Clarke’s new book is part of a series of recent books that reverses this trend. Among the many refreshing effects of this new wave are a shift away from the stale debates about the tension between The Prince and the Discourses on Livy and a more serious focus on Machiavelli as a Florentine (rather than neo-Roman) political thinker.
One of the interpretive difficulties posed by the Florentine Histories is its despondent narrative of the lost opportunities of this “great and wretched city” (bk. 2, ch. 25). Many readers regard the work’s disenchanted timbre and its overt veneration of the Medici as evidence for Machiavelli’s disillusionment with broad-based republican arrangements. By contrast, Clarke reads the Histories—appropriately, in my view—against its pro-Medicean grain and positions it in direct continuity with the more avowedly republican Discourses on Livy. She argues persuasively that once readers account for the “literary strategies” that allow Machiavelli to criticize the Medici without appearing to do so (p. 18), the Histories reveals itself to deliver a “true education in republican citizenship” (p. 11).
For Clarke, the Florentine Histories examines how the Medici were able to subvert republican institutions to establish themselves as princes in Florence while appearing as principal benefactors of the republic. Unlike previous magnates who were widely regarded as self-serving tyrants, the Medici managed to construct a philanthropic public profile, such that the very “accusation that they were tyrants [became] literally unintelligible” (p. 127). This profile was a result of their shrewd use of conventional virtues, such as liberality, mercy, and fidelity, to build a form of clientelist social power that was widely regarded as legitimate.
From this angle, Clarke interprets the Histories as a subtle exposition of how Florence’s first family harnessed virtues to build a nearly unassailable position of preeminence. Machiavelli, she writes, seeks to “educate” republicans about the peril posed by wealthy elites who have figured out how to translate virtue into tyrannical power (p. 94). Connecting the Medici language of virtue and friendship to its Roman sources, she opens up new perspectives on the well-tilled soil of Machiavelli’s critique of virtue and puts forward a provocative reassessment of Machiavelli as a critic of friendship and civic trust.
As Clarke perceptively notes, humanism played a significant ideological role in normalizing elite power (p. 12). It is not by coincidence that the Medici surrounded themselves with humanists and became patrons of arts and letters. Humanist ideas “were deliberately fashioned . . . as ideological armaments for legitimating [the Medici] regime as a species of republican government” (p. 29). By comparing Machiavelli’s historical narrative to that of his humanist predecessors, especially Leonardo Bruni, Clarke shows how it offers a critique of the humanist infatuation with oligarchy.
A case in point are the divergent portrayals of how Florence became a republic. In the thirteenth century, the Florentine popolo broke the dominance of the feudal nobility and established a republican regime. Yet the story is told very differently by Machiavelli and his humanist predecessors. Whereas Bruni represents the city’s liberty as political independence that Florentines received as a gift from the emperor, Machiavelli conceptualizes liberty as freedom from oppression that the popolo obtained through collective struggle against the elites (p. 31). Similarly, Bruni depicts the guild-government as a Guelf bulwark against Ghibelline influence, while Machiavelli portrays it as a class-based institution set up to defend guildsmen against elite violence (pp. 32–33). In short, whereas Bruni regards the oligarchic trend in Florentine republicanism as “a sign of progress, maturation, and self-fulfillment . . . for Machiavelli, it is a symptom of failure and defeat” (p. 47).
Clarke channels this antihumanist reading of Machiavelli into a substantive and methodological critique of Quentin Skinner, whom she accuses of rehearsing the exact humanist narrative about the emergence of Florentine liberty that Machiavelli denounces (p. 54). In the final chapter, she develops this argument into a critique of Skinnerian contextualism.
I find Clarke’s reading of the Florentine Histories as a critique of Medici power and of humanist complicity compelling, and am partly convinced by her critique of Skinner. Yet beginning in Chapter 3, she weaves a further thread into her argument that I consider much less plausible. Against the overworked Straussian thesis, according to which Machiavelli blames Christianity for the evils of the modern world, Clarke proposes a new culprit: the Roman Empire. For Clarke’s Machiavelli, imperial Rome is the source of many of the political woes that weighed on Renaissance Florence (p. 65). This idiosyncratic claim draws on Machiavelli’s scathing portrayal of the Roman Empire in the Discourses and on his theory of the continuing importance of a city’s founding moments. Because Florence was founded by imperial Rome, it was endowed with the empire’s corrupt political culture, which continues to hobble it, fifteen hundred years later (p. 86).
In an odd twist, Clarke even renders the Roman Empire the source of “modernity,” by which she means the moment when the relation between nature and history is reorganized, such that politics ceases to be part of the natural cosmos and nature becomes a pliable object of human action. Clarke’s Machiavelli represents Roman imperial power in such a way that not even nature escapes from it: “According to this story, modernity is the greatest and most lasting product of Roman virtue. In advancing its own imperial ambitions, Rome transformed the West, and especially Italy, into a region incapable of anything but servitude and slavery, and the world largely continues to be what Rome made it even today” (p. 90).
Interpretively, the claim that Machiavelli traces the political conditions of modern Italy back to imperial Rome ignores the key role he ascribes to the Germanic tribes in remaking Italy in Late Antiquity. In the first book of the Florentine Histories, he observes that the Franks, the Burgundians, the Vandals, and the Visigoths fashioned new political institutions and political cultures, that they changed “government and princes . . . the laws, the customs, the mode of life, the religion, the language, the dress” and substituted names like “Piero, Giovanni, and Matteo” for the “Caesars and Pompeys” (bk. 1, ch. 5). These transformations, Machiavelli writes, led to the ruin of some polities and the birth of others. It is difficult to see how the thesis that the Germanic tribes forged a wholly new set of norms, customs, and institutions can be squared with the claim that the political culture of Renaissance Italy remains shackled by the legacies of imperial Rome that date from a millennium and a half earlier.
Equally dubious, in my view, is the notion of modernity that underpins this line of argument. The claim that modernity is a Roman legacy is predicated on a metaphysical and dehistoricized conception of modernity. When modernity is understood as human techne unfettered from nature, or as the moment when human freedom registers itself as a radically unconditioned creative agency (p. 91 n. 84), then it is abstracted from concrete historical forces and the forms of social, economic, and political power with which it is usually associated. This stylized view of modernity is a staple of Heideggerian and Straussian accounts of intellectual history deeply invested in idealist metahistorical narratives that marginalize social conflict. Yet it is oddly out of sync with Clarke’s insistence on reckoning with the ideological and political dimensions of ideas.
One of the oddities of the book is that the republic that governed Florence between 1494 and 1512 is not mentioned once throughout the text. For a book entitled Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic, this is perplexing. After all, this was Soderini’s republic, the republic which Machiavelli served as secretary to the Second Chancery from 1498 to 1512, the republic which entrusted him with its diplomatic missions to France, to Cesare Borgia, to Rome, and to Emperor Maximilian; it was the regime that marked his life and thought most distinctly. Moreover, this was the most democratic and inclusive regime that had governed Florence since the Ciompi revolt of 1378, extending the franchise to approximately 3,000 citizens who were called upon to participate in the deliberations of the Great Council. Why then, does Clarke omit any mention of this republic? And why does she insist that “[a]ccording to Machiavelli, Florence’s republican regime had amounted to little more than a fantasy, as imaginary as anything found in the books of Plato” (p. 9), when in fact, Machiavelli was a major participant and senior official in this republic?
This may just be an oversight, or it may indicate a deeper conceptual and political disagreement between Clarke and me about the nature of republicanism. At one point, Clarke characterizes Machiavelli’s republicanism as “a sense of oneself as free, a belief in the necessity and rewards of political work, a feeling of pride and dignity in political struggle, and a contempt for the sometimes seductive strategies of oppression” (p. 12). Elsewhere, she writes that “for Machiavelli, republican politics is concerned above all with limiting power” (p. 134). There is no mention of equality (political and economic), of participation, or of shared power, which suggests that despite claims to the contrary, the version of republicanism Clarke attributes to Machiavelli is rather minimalist, and perhaps no more equipped to withstand the oligarchic onslaught than the humanist variety so eloquently chastised in these pages.
In spite of these shortcomings, Clarke’s book offers an important interpretation of the Florentine Histories as a critique of Medici power and of the humanist complicity in legitimating oligarchic republicanism.
