The Contribution to the Scholarship

Catherine Zuckert's new book, Machiavelli's Politics, on one level offers no surprises. Like her other books it is both deep and wide. On both dimensions, the scope of Zuckert's enterprise is nothing short of breathtaking. She brings her depth of understanding and clarity of thought to a very big and unrivaled project: interpreting not only The Prince and Discourses on Livy, but The Art of War, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, the plays, and the Florentine Histories in the order that Machiavelli wrote them. If one were to place her achievement in presenting and analyzing Machiavelli's thought in the terms of the discovery of new lands to which Machiavelli compares his own enterprise at the beginning of the Discourses, one might fittingly say that encountering her book is akin to looking across the Great Plains and then peering into the depths of the Grand Canyon from its brim. The breadth and the depth of the book are inextricably linked: in showing how Machiavelli later elaborates, and therefore revises in some sense, certain themes of The Prince and the Discourses, Zuckert establishes the daunting fact that a deep understanding of the Florentine's intent must also be broad.

What I would like to do first is to place aspects of Zuckert's interpretation in the context of the scholarship on Machiavelli of the last several decades, one strand of which insists on the primacy of Machiavelli's historical situation, associated primarily, but not exclusively, with the Cambridge School, J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, and another that depicts Machiavelli as essentially a democrat, a lover of the people, associated primarily, but not exclusively, with John McCormick. Some of the implications of Catherine's book can in their totality be viewed as at once both a response to and a more moderate and reasonable culmination of both of these schools or approaches. Ultimately, she gives us a democratic and historical Machiavelli—but one with a difference: her Machiavelli is eminently more reasonable in his claims and therefore more compelling.

In considering Zuckert's approach in light of the Cambridge School, one should note a striking similarity of intentions. Specifically, Zuckert endeavors to contextualize Machiavelli's thought by asking the following questions that look to his historical context and responding to them throughout the work: To which of his contemporaries was he writing? What were his immediate purposes? What cultural and political tendencies did he discern on the European political horizon and how did he attempt to catch and to channel these? How did his thought develop over the course of his time as a political thinker?

Now, the Cambridge School at its most pointed maintains that in order to know what any given writer can think, one has to examine the vocabulary of that writer's contemporaries because those contemporaries establish the paradigm of thought for the individuals in any givenplace and time. Skinner, for example, insists that the meaning of texts can only be plumbed when scholars attend to “the linguistic context,” understood as “the whole range of communications which could have been conventionally performed” in that particular cultural setting.Footnote ² Similarly, Pocock, in expounding “the conceptual vocabulary of the ‘Machiavellian Moment,’” notes that he works with the contextual “model which asserts that there were available only certain limited and specific ways of rendering the sequence of secular phenomena intelligible.”Footnote ³

By contrast, Zuckert's attention to context is neither this rigid nor extreme. Rather, she takes seriously Machiavelli's own indications of his historical context. This combination of attention to text and to context produces nuanced and compelling interpretations of Machiavelli's thought, such as her fruitful examinations of Machiavelli's personal dedication to establishing a citizen militia for Florence (which contributes to her depiction of him as a supporter of the people) and of how Machiavelli both grasps the need for the development of new and larger monarchies in Europe, such as France and Spain were then becoming, and sees that this new development pointed to a new international order in Europe.

In considering the relation of Zuckert's claims to the democratic literature on Machiavelli, one finds her arguing that Machiavelli was, in fact, on the side of the people in endeavoring to satisfy their political needs. Now, she does not goes as far as the more extreme claims of those scholars who maintain, for instance, that Machiavelli “resents, despises, and distrusts” “elites,” recognizing that “they need to be cut down to size—literally”—when they become too troublesome.Footnote ⁴ Nor does she interpret Machiavelli as endorsing the direct rule of the people.Footnote ⁵ Instead, Zuckert convincingly shows how, on Machiavelli's understanding, the people always need rulers, but Machiavelli's rulers understand the claims and the power of the people. On the basis of this understanding, they will provide institutions that supply the people's needs. In favor of this popular strain in Machiavelli's thought, she finds that his politics rests on the consent of the governed: “Without popular consent, Machiavelli sees, no state has a firm foundation.”Footnote ⁶

Both schools of thought, the contextual and the democratic, explicitly position themselves as opposed to Strauss's or to Straussians’ interpretation of Machiavelli. Witness, for example, Pocock's exchange with Harvey Mansfield in Political Theory in which Pocock posits that “a more historical exegesis would have produced a Machiavelli more credible as an actor in history” and observes that “Straussians are unduly contemptuous” of this “tenable position.”Footnote ⁷ Witness, for example, McCormick's claim that “Straussian” interpreters of Machiavelli “cling to the notion that Machiavelli shares their own sweet-tooth for oligarchy.”Footnote ⁸

Although these representatives of alternative interpretative schools draw a caustic distinction between their approaches and that of Strauss and his students, it is, in fact, the case that they actually share with Strauss key interpretative positions, which Zuckert's interpretation of a “historical” and “popular” Machiavelli is filling out and ultimately corroborating. Strauss's interpretation of Machiavelli's writings is far from oblivious to Machiavelli's immediate historical context, for example.Footnote ⁹ At one point Strauss enjoins: “Let us not forget the many who could read and who had followed Savonarola. Savonarola had praised Pope Gregory the Great for having burned the works of Livy.”Footnote ¹⁰ This arcane historical fact is important for understanding Machiavelli as he regards the devastation that Saint Gregory wrought on Livy's work as a “malignity.”Footnote ¹¹ Strauss is thus aware of the possibility that Machiavelli might be responding to intellectual currents in Florence, but this particular example shows Machiavelli's thought not so much being determined by that of his contemporaries as opposing it. Elsewhere, Strauss reveals his sensitivity to the broader European context: “Machiavelli's silence about the Reformation need not be due to ignorance; the fact (if it is a fact) that 1517 is the date of the latest event to which he refers in the Discourses does not prove that the Discourses as we have the book was completed prior to Machiavelli's having become aware of Luther's epoch-making action.”Footnote ¹² Thus, Strauss's knowledge of and sensitivity to Machiavelli's Florentine and European context is not what one would expect from an interpreter whom current scholarship often characterizes as eschewing historical context.

Just as an examination of Strauss's work might surprise if one were to listen to the critics who charge him with disregarding context, so too does it challenge those who charge him with reading Machiavelli as a spiritual fount of oligarchy and therewith of intransigent opposition to democracy. In noting that Machiavelli launches his criticism of previous writers on the basis that his philosophical predecessors disparage unfairly the character and capacities of the people as opposed to the great, Strauss muses: “This may incline us to believe that he was the philosopher who originated the democratic tradition; the undeniably non-democratic character of classical political philosophy might thus seem to justify Machiavelli's revolt which, through Spinoza and Rousseau, led to democratic theory proper.”Footnote ¹³ Strauss, therefore, raises in a serious way the question whether Machiavelli's embrace of the people influenced or even initiated the democratic impulse found in modern philosophy.

These reflections perhaps show that with respect to the characteristics that many may judge distinguish Zuckert's approach from that of Strauss and align her more with his critics—namely, a historical approach and a finding in favor of a democratic Machiavelli—Zuckert is actually truer to the substance and example of aspects of Strauss's interpretation than one might expect.

Machiavelli on Religion

At one point, Zuckert distinguishes her interpretation from Strauss's by saying: “Because he treats the Discourses primarily in terms of Machiavelli's “spiritual war” against Christianity, Strauss does not pay much attention to the new form of republic Machiavelli introduces there.”Footnote ¹⁴ Thus, Zuckert looks more at the politics of the Roman republic and less to Machiavelli's teaching regarding religion. As Alex Duff points out in his remarks in this issue, Zuckert's book largely abstracts from religion, and when she does broach it, she treats it as a part of the arts of peace and a useful instrument of the rulers.

But religion for Machiavelli, I would argue, is simply another way to rule, and to ignore the lessons he endeavors to teach on the topic is to bypass some of his important lessons on republican rule. Religions have their princes just as earthly regimes have theirs. Religions offer a form of education, just as polities and epochs do. Religions can take lessons in rule from republics and principalities, and republics and principalities from religions. Machiavelli's criticism of and appreciation for Christian rule suffuses his presentation of the Roman republic in the Discourses. Attention to these facets of the work opens up the possibility both that in Machiavelli's view Christianity has had insights into human behavior and that on their basis he suggests specific political responses. Some of these innovations Machiavelli suggests have been harmful to republican rule, and some could be decidedly helpful if formulated to support a temporal cause. In order to glean his evaluations on the topic, it is necessary to acknowledge that his republicanism in the Discourses is infused with religious terms and implications, even when he is not explicitly addressing religion.

Machiavelli's republicanism highlights punishments. An aspect of Machiavelli's advocacy of harsh punishment in a republic makes reference to original sin and the threat of God's ultimate punishment, but Machiavelli endeavors to transform that otherworldly threat so that it is used for an entirely temporal purpose—the maintenance of a republic. As Machiavelli points out, the human material is corrupt: “It is necessary to whoever disposes a republic and orders laws in it to presuppose that all men are bad, and that they always have to use the malignity of their spirit whenever they have opportunity for it.”Footnote ¹⁵ Everyone is guilty … This doctrine is akin to that of original sin. In fact, it might be said to mimic Augustine's claim that original sin is such that human beings, through free will, are responsible for their evil acts—and therefore deserve punishment for them—but that all their good deeds are the product of grace and so they cannot take credit for them. In the same way, Machiavelli assumes that people left to their own devices will behave badly, and that if they act rightly, it is the result of the constraints that institutions, laws, and threats impose.Footnote ¹⁶

One sees how Machiavelli applies this understanding that all are corrupt when speaking of a dangerous religious sect that had seeped into Rome during the time of the Macedonian War—that is, long before Rome conquered Jerusalem. He explains that it came to the attention of the Roman authorities that a large contingent of women, under the thrall of these new and threatening beliefs, were conspiring to poison their husbands. The guilty were so numerous that not all could be punished, so the Romans decided to punish one in ten, selecting those to be condemned by lot. So impressed is Machiavelli with this approach to punishment that he renders it into a general maxim: “For when a multitude errs and the author is not certain, all cannot be punished because they are too many; to punish a part of them and leave a part of them unpunished would do wrong to those who are punished, and the unpunished would have spirit to err another time.” The maxim that Machiavelli derives from this episode is very much akin to the inscrutable character of God's choice of punishment and redemption. As Machiavelli explains, “if a tenth part is killed by lot when all deserve it, whoever is punished grieves for his lot, and whoever is not punished fears lest another time it touch him, and guards himself against erring.” Thus, Machiavelli agrees with Christian doctrine that all men are guilty; a republic that spares some but not others is akin to God's seemingly arbitrary distribution of grace. Indeed, Machiavelli infuses his retelling with terms his fellow Christians can understand: “Thus were punished the poisoners and the Bacchanals as their sins [peccati] deserved.”Footnote ¹⁷ A new application of Christian doctrine—of original sin and punishment—can be helpful to republican politics, Machiavelli teaches.

In this matter, Machiavelli himself fulfills his call for a new interpretation of “our religion.” He notes in the Discourses that the weakness of Christianity results from “the cowardice of the men who have interpreted our religion according to idleness and not according to virtue” and that an alternative interpretation would permit “us the exaltation and the defense of the fatherland.”Footnote ¹⁸ Of course, he conveys his lessons regarding his reading of a pagan historian, but he highlights many episodes that can be infused with terms and meanings highly evocative of the advantage of Christianity and its doctrines.Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, Machiavelli's reworking of original sin shows a positive side to Christianity. But it is no longer quite religion anymore as its focus is temporal rather than spiritual. In this manner, application of Christian insights can invigorate republican politics, according to Machiavelli.

Conversely, other Christian propensities, when applied in the political realm, have been quite harmful to republican politics. Indeed, Machiavelli is very concerned, as Zuckert emphasizes, that the most ambitious men in a republic, those who would use demagoguery to become tyrants in a republic, not attain their desire: sole rule. Because the mass of people can be quite susceptible to the promises of such demagogues, the danger to a republic is quite formidable. Machiavelli's Discourses highlight a series of ever more cunning, and hence dangerous, leaders who manifest this threatening ambition. Machiavelli infuses their approach to winning the people over to their cause with Christian terms.

One of Machiavelli's chapter headings provides an example of his infusing the origins of tyranny with Christian terms: “That One Should Be Mindful of the Works of Citizens Because Many Times underneath a Merciful [or pious] Work [opera pia] a Beginning of Tyranny is Concealed.”Footnote ²⁰ That very mercy generates followers for an aspiring tyrant, and partisans cause corruption, Machiavelli instructs.Footnote ²¹ Two tyrants who used these methods were Julius Caesar and Cosimo de'Medici. According to Machiavelli, Julius's rule was devastating to Rome: “He was the first tyrant in Rome, such that never again was that city free.”Footnote ²² The phrase “such that never again was that city free” is an extremely powerful statement: Rome during Machiavelli's lifetime was Christian, but it is still not free, according to the author.

In chapter 33 of the first book of the Discourses, Machiavelli turns his attention to the ascendancy of these two demagogues, Caesar and Cosimo. He declares, “For if in a republic one sees a noble youth arise who has an extraordinary virtue in him, all eyes of the citizens begin to turn toward him and agree in honoring him without any hesitation.”Footnote ²³ His ostensible point in this chapter is that when such extremely ambitious men accumulate many partisans, it is then too late to strike against them. If one does attempt such a strike, one may kill the man but create a martyr, which serves only to deepen the tyranny, as happened, for example, in the case of Caesar when after his death others “rul[ed] under that name.”Footnote ²⁴ Thus, an ambitious man who has accumulated many followers presents a very dangerous situation for a republic, according to Machiavelli. Machiavelli is warning against striking the noble youth—either exiling him as in the case of Cosimo or assassinating him as in the case of Caesar—when things have come to this pass. In this situation he offers the seemingly un-Machiavellian advice to temporize.

So, Machiavelli presents his readers with Caesar and with Cosimo who became martyrs when the authorities attempted to strike against them, though they had already garnered a large following. In reflecting on this chapter, a reader might well consider what other youthful figure garnered a large number of followers as a result of an “extraordinary virtue” and then became a martyr. Christ is one possible candidate. Machiavelli has already used the term “extraordinary” to mean something like miraculous. He says of Savonarola: the Florentines believed this friar to have spoken with God, “without having seen anything extraordinary to make them believe him.”Footnote ²⁵ Thus, in Machiavelli's lexicon “extraordinary” can mean not simply rare or extralegal, but also miraculous. It does not necessarily have to have this meaning in any given context, but it can. Therefore, Christ is the best example in this chapter, if Machiavelli also means extraordinary as miraculous. Christ would be the missing third example.

Machiavelli is particularly interested in youthful men of extraordinary virtue. Again, in his words: “For if in a republic one sees a noble youth arise who has an extraordinary virtue in him, all eyes of the citizens begin to turn toward him and agree in honoring him without any hesitation.”Footnote ²⁶ Jesus was thirty when he began his earthly ministry, and traditionally Jesus's mission was understood as having lasted three years.Footnote ²⁷ The number of this chapter—33—strongly suggests that Machiavelli is encouraging his readers to consider the youth and the extraordinary character of Christ, as well as the results of his martyrdom. This is a form of esotericism, but it is very much on the surface. The number confirms the line of thought that a reader can pursue merely by ruminating on the content of the chapter. It is as if Machiavelli is winking: “Yup, you're thinking along the right lines.” On one level, then, Christianity represents a deepening and an intensification of the appeal of demagogues. It also helps to explain how strong, vigorous, worldly, and martial Rome fell, in Machiavelli's view. It fell, after all, to the apparently weak Christians. And again, in Machiavelli's estimation, Rome was never again free after Caesar became tyrant.

Machiavelli thus infuses his treatment of republics with a sly usage of Christian teachings. Perhaps, as Zuckert maintains, Strauss chose not to emphasize the manner in which republicanism could be maintained, so that he might instead keep his extensive focus on Machiavelli's war on Christianity. But, conversely, one might also conclude that in her emphasis on Machiavelli's republican politics, Zuckert deemphasizes the manner in which Christianity's role in history has influenced Machiavelli's thinking regarding the full range of threats to republics, as well as of the opportunities for maintaining them.

Machiavelli and Montesquieu

Zuckert adduces compelling evidence that Machiavelli was attempting to enlighten both rulers and peoples as to their proper interest so that politics—and therewith ordinary human lives—could be improved. Although by no means does her interpretation gloss over the murderous side of Machiavelli, hers is a Florentine who looks to the end—not the end of any ravenous tyrant but rather that of the ruler who brings relief both to himself and his people. His are princes who eschew not only depredations on their people, but also unnecessary wars. His republics pursue a foreign policy of defensive federations with other republics. These are some attributes of liberal rulers and regimes. On this reading, Machiavelli has much in common with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, and, in fact, Zuckert terms the Frenchman “Machiavelli's great student.”Footnote ²⁸

Montesquieu, in his turn, calls Machiavelli “great” in his great work The Spirit of the Laws and indicates that he regards him as a philosophical legislator who stands alongside Plato, Aristotle, Harrington, and More.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, Montesquieu is not a writer who would make a show of denouncing the murderous Machiavelli, only to embrace much more subtly his more disreputable teachings.Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, Montesquieu borrows from Machiavelli when he declares the need for vibrant contention in a republic.

Nevertheless, however much Montesquieu learned from Machiavelli, he issues warnings against the harshness of Machiavelli's writings that, in fact, highlight the distance between the politics of Machiavelli and liberalism's later proponent. As we have already seen, punishment is an important topic for Machiavelli. In fact, accusations and punishments for treason are topics which both thinkers treat extensively and which afford an enlightening contrast between their differing approaches to political life. Machiavelli lauds the manner in which the elder Brutus, as consul in the fledgling republic, condemned his sons to death for conspiring to overthrow the new government and presided at their execution. Indeed, the Florentine makes the deeds of the stern Brutus a republican maxim: it is necessary for republics to “kill the sons of Brutus.”Footnote ³¹ In this spirit, Machiavelli declares that punishments make republics live long. (Of course, those same punishments, applied when corruption has produced committed partisans, can lead to the tyranny of the type of a Caesar or a Cosimo, so it is important to administer them early and often, Machiavelli instructs.)

Accordingly, republican punishment and particularly republican trials certainly feature in Zuckert's interpretation of Machiavelli. She emphasizes that in Machiavelli's republic “individuals suspected of trying to overthrow the republic would be subject to trials in front of large popular juries,” which would help to vent the animus of the people against the great.Footnote ³² An almost liberal concern with the rights of the accused emerges: these trials would also “allow those individuals to present witnesses and evidence to counter the accusations.”Footnote ³³ Nevertheless, Zuckert notes that in Discourses 3.1, in which public trials play such a noteworthy part in bringing a republic back to the mark so as to stem corruption, Machiavelli “exaggerates the number of deaths” that the Romans imposed in these trials, “perhaps to emphasize the fearsome character of these ‘executions’.”Footnote ³⁴

For the liberal Montesquieu, fear is not a passion that government should cultivate excessively. He conflates “liberty” and the “feeling of security” and notes that a “citizen's liberty depends principally on the goodness of the criminal laws” and warns that one's “security is never more attacked than by public or private accusations.”Footnote ³⁵ Accusations of treason and the passions that they arouse occupy a great deal of Montesquieu's attention in The Spirit of the Laws. He finds that both historical Rome and Machiavelli's depiction of the city are woefully unsatisfactory from the standpoint of the security of the individual; the accused will not have the appropriate security when the passions of the people—their judges—are so engaged. Accordingly, Montesquieu is quite critical of the Roman republic, both the unreformed republic of Brutus who had his own sons executed and the reformed one in which the people served both as accusers and judges of treason.Footnote ³⁶ At one point, the Frenchman remarks “how dangerous it is in republics to punish excessively the crime of high treason.”Footnote ³⁷

So much of the surface of Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses is violent—even gory—that it is certainly possible for readers, particularly rulers with a propensity for violence, to come away from his writings with their violent propensities reinforced rather than shaken.Footnote ³⁸ Montesquieu may very well be expressing deep hesitation and mournful regret at the harshness of Machiavelli's teachings and the bloody results that they have engendered when he reflects that “a legislator who wants to correct an ill often thinks only of that correction; his eye is on that object and not on its defects. Once the ill has been corrected, only the harshness of the legislator is seen; but a vice produced by the harshness remains in the state; spirits are corrupted; they have become accustomed to despotism.”Footnote ³⁹ This remark seems to fill out an even more elusive comment in his preface: “One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself.” If Machiavelli is a legislator who instituted a correction, then from Montesquieu's perspective, in which criminal law is “the one thing in the world that it is most important for men to know,” the Florentine is also the perpetrator of abuses, which Montesquieu's moderate spirit endeavors to correct.Footnote ⁴⁰

Montesquieu's achievement as the corrector of a corrector should not, however, blind us to Machiavelli's own achievement. Indeed, Zuckert's presentation of Machiavelli's thought does justice to the richness of Machiavelli's act of correction. What Zuckert has given us in Machiavelli's Politics is the strongest evidence yet for a Machiavelli who anticipated the popular republicanism or even the liberalism of later thinkers—a Machiavelli who “constitutes a ‘watershed’ in the history of Western political philosophy” “because he was the first to redefine the purpose of government as the satisfaction of popular desires for security of life, family, and property.”Footnote ⁴¹ Therefore, Machiavelli's Politics has changed the course of Machiavellian scholarship in a most salutary way by exemplifying the depth of understanding and the breadth of knowledge required to interpret the Florentine in a manner that does justice to his fullest intention.