Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850

By Victoria Kahn and Neil Saccamano

Focusing on the new theories of human motivation that emerged during the transition from feudalism to the modern period, this is the first book of new essays on the relationship between politics and the passions from Machiavelli to Bentham. Contributors address the crisis of moral and philosophical discourse in the early modern period; the necessity of inventing a new way of describing the relation between reflection and action, and private and public selves; the disciplinary regulation of the body; and the ideological constitution of identity. The collection as a whole asks whether a discourse of the passions might provide a critical perspective on the politics of subjectivity. Whatever their specific approach to the question of ideology, all the essays reconsider the legacy of the passions in modern political theory and the importance of the history of politics and the passions for modern political debates.


Contributors, in addition to the editors, are Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, Riccardo Caporali, Howard Caygill, Patrick Coleman, Frances Ferguson, John Guillory, Timothy Hampton, John P. McCormick, and Leonard Tennenhouse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9781400827152

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Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850

Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850

Edited by Victoria Kahn,

Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

© 2006 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Politics and the passions, 1500–1850 / edited by Victoria Kahn,

Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-715-2

1. Political science. 2. Emotions. I. Kahn, Victoria Ann. II. Saccamano,

Neil, 1952– III. Coli, Daniela.

JA71.P6416 2006

320.01' 9—dc22

2005028068

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Introduction

VICTORIA KAHN AND NEIL SACCAMANO

Tempering the Grandi’s Appetite to Oppress: The Dedication and Intention of Machiavelli’s Discourses

JOHN P. MCCORMICK

Difficult Engagements: Private Passion and Public Service in Montaigne’s Essais

TIMOTHY HAMPTON

The Bachelor State: Philosophy and Sovereignty in Bacon’s New Atlantis

JOHN GUILLORY

Hobbes’s Revolution

DANIELA COLI

Happy Tears: Baroque Politics in Descartes’Passions de l’âme VICTORIA KAHN

The Desire to Live: Spinoza’s Ethics under Pressure JUDITH BUTLER

A Mind for Passion: Locke and Hutcheson on Desire

NANCY ARMSTRONG AND LEONARD TENNENHOUSE

Rousseau’s Quarrel with Gratitude

PATRICK COLEMAN

Parting with Prejudice: Hume, Identity, and Aesthetic Universality

NEIL SACCAMANO

Vico, Tenderness, and Barbarism

RICCARDO CAPORALI

Kant and the Relegation of the Passions HOWARD CAYGILL

Beliefs and Emotions (from Stanley Fish to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill)

FRANCES FERGUSON

Contributors

Notes

Index

Introduction

Victoria Kahn and Neil Saccamano

IN RECENT YEARS there has been a renaissance of interest in the passions in interdisciplinary work in the humanities and social sciences. Scholars have directed their attention to the passions as vehicles of knowledge, as attributes of aesthetic experience, as labile affects or shifting currents that contribute to political upheaval or religious self-sacrifice. The reasons for this affective reorientation are multiple. We might think of it as a reaction to the linguistic turn or the deconstruction of the subject. We might instead think of it as the logical consequence of the focus on tropes and figures: themselves, as ancient rhetoricians tells us, the best means of representing the swerve of affect away from pure cognition, as well as the best means of stirring up the passions of the audience. We might think of the recourse to the passions as a consequence of the interest in the body and the body politic across a variety of disciplines. But there are also less academic reasons for the renewed interest in the passions. At a time when a rhetoric of terror is a central feature of our common political life, when political ideologies on the right and left vie to characterize themselves as compassionate, and when religious passions lead to shocking acts of violence, it is worth reexamining the history of Western reflection on politics and the passions.

This volume begins with the early modern period and concludes with Bentham. It focuses in particular on the new theories of human motivation, the new calculus of passion and interest, that emerged as a result of the social, political, and religious changes that facilitated the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It is arguable, of course, that the passions have always played an important role in Western reflection on politics. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, philosophers, political theorists, and literary critics have devoted considerable attention to the role of the passions in shaping human knowledge and experience, both individual and collective. At the same time, however, scholars as diverse as Norbert Elias, Albert Hirschman, and Max Horkheimer have argued that the early modern period signals a shift in the conceptualization of the passions, specifically in relation to the political sphere. This volume proceeds from this argument. In the following pages, we briefly set out a framework for thinking about this conceptual shift that may provide a context for the essays that follow.

Elias famously argued that the centralization of political power at court produced a distinctive court society that required the sublimation of the passions and the cultivation of manners as the mark of the political elite. As the early modern state developed a monopoly of physical force, so the individual was no longer compelled—or allowed—to gain prestige on the battlefield. Instead, he began to be shaped by indirect forms of coercion, such as the norms of courtly society and increasing rationalization of economic life. At the same time, coercion was internalized: the nobility’s increasing dependence on the king or prince was accompanied by a transformation of human consciousness and libidinal make-up, according to which the individual constrained and controlled himself. For Elias, then, the modern Western notion of the civilized individual cannot be understood without tracing the process of state-formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹

Whereas Elias linked the sublimation of the passions to the civilizing process and the sociogenesis of absolutism, Max Horkheimer traced the revived interest in the passions to the skeptical and materialist strains of early modern philosophy and to bourgeois ideology. Skepticism about the persuasiveness of older normative discourses was accompanied by a new, naturalistic anthropology, involving the historical, political, and psychological analysis of the emotions.² For Horkheimer, early modern scientific and philosophical discourses of the passions, especially those of Hobbes and Spinoza, establish a simple naturalism premised on the normative judgment that for everything in nature, and thus for the body and its indwelling soul, to perish represents the greatest evil.³ This ostensibly scientific concept of nature is, however, the ideological kernel of seventeenth-century discourses on the passions because the claim that the self-preservation of each thing is its law and standard corresponds to the social condition of the bourgeois individual. On one hand, the elevation of life itself to the highest good acknowledges the value of material embodiment and the concomitant passions. On the other hand, the recognition accorded material life in these discourses remains nondialectical and ideological in Horkheimer’s account because the passion of self-preservation is presented as the motion of an autonomous subject, not one who is conditioned by social and economic factors.

In his influential work on the passions and interests, Albert Hirschman also traced a historical shift in attitudes toward the passions to specifically political concerns. Like Horkheimer, Hirschman considered seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophical anthropology and ethics as developing in relation to political imperatives, but he differed about the ideological character of those imperatives, especially concerning the early modern critique of glory. The aristocratic passion for military glory, which was the traditional object and reward for action in the political realm, came under attack from early modern writers as contributing to civil and religious wars and thus as an unacceptable challenge to state power. The new theory of human nature required by a science of politics was characterized by a dynamics of countervailing passions. Against the heroic violence of glory, early modern writers opposed the dependable passion of acquisitiveness or greed. Against the desire for self-aggrandizement, they opposed the desire for self-preservation or fear of violent death. This reduction of human nature to its basest passions or interests, and of society to self-interested individuals who bind themselves through contracts, then set the stage for reconstituting the state from the ground up. It also gave rise to a new understanding of the relationship between the public and private spheres, and a new, positive evaluation of everyday life. Yet historically, Hirschman argued, this denunciation of the heroic ideal was nowhere associated with the advocacy of a new bourgeois ethos.⁴ The critique of glory marshaled a scientific, positive approach to politics that initially served to counsel princes in the practice of governing and that only later addressed the conduct of individual subjects, extending scientific discourse from the nature of the state to human nature (13).

Both in its emphasis on mere life and its representation of government as artificial (contractual or conventional), early modern political theory represented a radical departure from classical antiquity. In the political culture of ancient Greece, the life concerned only with preservation and reproduction—with the body—was traditionally the life of women and slaves who were excluded from political participation and relegated to the management of the patriarchal household, consigned to purely economic labor and devoted to bare life alone. The inglorious life was private in the sense of privative, enslaved to the necessity of reproducing life itself as the mere condition of political freedom. The equality of free men in a political sense presupposed the inequality of those in the household who were concerned with economics. For a citizen of the polis, to live the good life meant to be free from the demands of mere life, and to be worthy of glory meant to master mere life and be willing to risk death for the polis. By contrast, early modern political theory appeals to the inglorious passions of the private individual in an effort to establish a civil society in which, as Hannah Arendt put it, the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.⁵ For modernity, society is that for which the inglorious life of the ancient Greek household—economics—becomes a matter of public concern. And the reason of the state, in this modern conception, is the protection and preservation of the life of its citizens—a general collective management of economic transactions whose political form is the nation (28). In the classical conception of politics, the category of political economy would have been idiotic or senseless because it is a contradiction in terms until the modern period.

In time, the theory of countervailing passions provided the motor not only for a new validation of self-interest and a sanction for economic activity in civil society, but also for the emergence of a new culture of sentiment. Eighteenth-century moral and political philosophers were concerned to manage the conflictive potential of the passions without necessarily advocating the absolutism of state power. The managing of the passion of self-preservation was sought not through the repression of passion by the authority of reason or by the sovereignty of public regulation but through the discovery of other, socially beneficent and constitutive feelings such as benevolence, sympathy, and pity. If, in a Hobbesian account, the demystification of heroic virtues as forms of self-love and self-interest required the intervention of an absolute sovereign to provide security, subsequent writers have recourse to moral sentiments precisely to obviate or defer the exercise of state power by aligning the passions and desires of subjects with the imperatives of law. Lord Shaftesbury, for instance, appeals to a moral-aesthetic sense in human nature that gives rise to social affections and allows virtue to be reconciled with what he calls self-enjoyment and true interest. Similarly, Rousseau claims that the natural passion of pity originally takes the place of law in moving subjects to act in ways consistent with morality on the basis of a common, prerational sentiment of humanity. In these and other eighteenth-century writers, the passions hold out the promise of an immanent ethical community insofar as humanity becomes a natural sentiment that orients the desire and actions of subjects toward a common good.

Despite their countervailing of the interested passions, the discourses of moral sentiment partly share the skeptical perspective of early modern accounts of the passions to the extent that these discourses continue to derive their ethics and politics from the experiential matrix of individual subjects, especially the fundamental sensations of pleasure and pain. In this respect, moral and political discourses on the passions in the eighteenth century entertain an essential relation to aesthetics. As a philosophical and critical discourse on art, aesthetics emerges in the eighteenth century in an effort to make sense of sense, to order sensations as judgments, by differentiating the kinds of pleasures and pains elicited by particular works of nature and imagination. Signifying more broadly the material realm of sensation and perception, however, aesthetics was already integral to moral, political, and even epistemological discourses of the eighteenth century. The figurative meaning of taste, as aesthetic judgment, is complexly tied to the literal meaning of taste, as a corporeal sense presumed to have a certain regularity and predictability. Along with the sciences of morality and politics, the logic of art requires that there be a logic of the body and a common sense. As the discourse particularly concerned with the sensations of pleasure and pain that accompany perceptual and imaginative acts and elicit passions and interests, aesthetics does not merely stand alongside morality and politics as another human science in the eighteenth century: it provides for a universal subject of sentiment to support the discourses of moral and political law. From the early modern period to Kant, aesthetic experience is increasingly scrutinized as to whether the particular sentiments of individuals might accord with social virtues and universal humanity. Kant may insist on the autonomy of the aesthetic subject, for whom common sense is only a promise, in contrast to Hume, who makes the social virtue of sympathy essential to aesthetic pleasure. Yet the aesthetic remains crucial to these and other eighteenth-century writers as it is the realm of the pleasures and passions that need to be reflected, represented, refined, educated, or purified in order to make possible ethical and political community.

These accounts of the sentimental, affective, or passionate subject for whom empirical experience or the body is of utmost value signal a historical shift in the political operation of power that Michel Foucault had termed a movement from state violence toward bio-power. In Foucault’s well-known formulation of this transformation, state power over subjects is characterized not only by the decision to make die or let live, exemplified by Hobbes’s Leviathan, but by the imperative "to make live or abandon [rejetter] to death."⁶ Death is the effect of the withdrawal, not just the exercise, of sovereign power. The new, positive evaluation of everyday life as independent of the state makes, in turn, the psychological and physiological conditions of individual subjects of utmost political import. The private life of the subject becomes a care of the state. In this respect, the analysis of the passions forms part of the broader question of the politics of subjectivity examined by recent scholarly and theoretical work.

Some of the essays that follow address, implicitly or explicitly, the crisis of traditional moral and philosophical discourse in the early modern period and the necessity of inventing a new way of describing the relation of private to public selves, subjective reflection, and action in the realm of politics. In the place of traditional notions of virtue and the traditional superiority of reason to the passions, writers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, and Vico begin to reconceive the passions as substitutes for virtue’s spur to political action. In contexts of internecine conflict, of civil and religious war, a clear-sighted recognition of the role of the passions in motivating human behavior can itself be a first step in developing a new political rationality, whether the author’s purpose is ultimately to control the aristocratic desire to dominate the people (McCormick), to articulate a space of political agency indebted neither to classical notions of virtue nor to modern reason of state (Hampton), to reinvent philosophy as natural philosophy (Guillory), to bring about a revolution in political theory predicated on a physics of motion and desire (Coli), or to recast the history of the transition from barbarism to civilization (Caporali).

Many of the essays in this volume also address the disciplinary regulation of the body or the ideological constitution of identity from the seventeenth century onwards. Our contributors approach this issue in various ways. The changing discourses on the passions over the course of this historical period indicate, for some, the reach of class politics into affective life. The contestation of aristocratic and absolutist ideology by a bourgeois and liberal ideology can be read in the reevaluation of gratitude or generosity as moral but nominally apolitical passions at the heart of friendship and familial intimacy (Coleman). The ideological imperatives impinging on various accounts of the passions from Descartes to Bentham prompt efforts to displace the corporeal and material conditions of experience in order to give primacy to a self-affecting subject—by blurring the difference between sentiments and ideas, feelings of pleasure or pain and their representations (Armstrong and Tennenhouse); by differentiating between passions, which have some reference to sensation, and internal feelings or reflections, which preserve but supersede the material character of passionate subjectivity (Kahn); and by pathologizing the passions as implicated in the masochism of a voluntary servitude and by distinguishing them from affects that remain linked to sensibility but do not threaten freedom and moral self-legislation (Caygill), to cite only a few examples. Other contributors to this volume acknowledge the ideological and disciplinary role the passions have historically played but also explore whether a discourse of the passions might provide a critical perspective on the politics of subjectivity—whether, for instance, the concept of life might be rethought apart from its role in liberal political theory (Butler); aesthetic experience might expose or incite acts of disidentification rather than consolidate the autonomous subject of bourgeois civil society (Saccamano); and recent attacks on liberalism’s exclusion of religious passions and beliefs might be answered by recognizing the progressive potential in liberalism’s collective, historical, and contingent understanding of affects in relation to social action and law (Ferguson). Whatever their specific approach to the question of ideology, however, all the essays in this volume reconsider the legacy of the passions in modern political theory and recognize the importance of the history of reflection on politics and the passions for modern political debates.

Tempering the Grandi’s Appetite to Oppress

THE DEDICATION AND INTENTION OF MACHIAVELLI’S DISCOURSES

John P. McCormick

ONE OF THE MOST anxiously posed questions in the history of political thought is: What was Machiavelli’s intention in writing The Prince?¹ Was it to advise a prince, or undo him; to encourage tyranny or more subtly moderate it?² Quite appropriately, interpreters begin to answer this question by focusing on the book’s dedicatee, Lorenzo de’ Medici. They then proceed to read The Prince in light of how Lorenzo specifically, or a young prince more generally, might receive, understand, and potentially act upon the book’s advice. However, few scholars ask the same question, certainly with comparable urgency, of Machiavelli’s greatest work, Discourses on Titus Livy’s First Decade.³ It’s largely taken for granted that the purpose of The Discourses is self-evident—to promote republics—and that its immediate audience is obvious—two young friends with republican sympathies.⁴ Since Machiavelli dedicates The Discourses to friends from his literary circle, the Orti Oricellari, who supposedly share his political predilections, the book is assumed to be a more straightforward and less artful work than The Prince. In other words, one need not ponder too deeply the relationship between the book’s declared audience and its content.

In this essay, I examine the issue of The Discourses’ dedicatees a little more closely to draw out what might be one of Machiavelli’s hitherto unacknowledged intentions. Cosimo Rucellai and Zanobi Buondelmonti are not simply friends or republicans. They are young men of considerable wealth and good name who, on the basis of lineage, education, and talent, would expect to hold positions of prominence within their polity. Defined in terms of the appetite that pursues and acquires such economic advantage and political privilege, and viewed from the perspective of their social subordinates, Rucellai and Buondelmonti are what Machiavelli calls grandi: members of a class driven by the humor to oppress. Like interpreters who detect a rhetorical strategy in The Prince, through which Machiavelli’s advice manipulates a prince into tempering or even jeopardizing his dominion over the people, I discern a similar strategy in The Discourses with respect to the grandi’s domination of the people. While Machiavelli dedicates neither work to the people, I would argue that both are very much intended for the people; each book is intended to alleviate the people’s oppression by their two most persistently malicious political antagonists: respectively, a tyrant and the oligarchs; the one and the few.

Here, I read the first six chapters of The Discourses from the perspective of young grandi like Cosimo and Zanobi. In doing so, I seek to open the possibility that Machiavelli uses a hypothetically reconstructed Roman republic to moderate the people’s eternal oppressors in all regimes that are not principalities. He attempts to convince the grandi that the best republic is one in which they maximize the material and immaterial benefits they gain from political preeminence in such regimes, and protect themselves from the deleterious results of their own appetite to dominate. Machiavelli advises the grandi, against their natural and learned inclinations, to render themselves more accountable to an armed and politically empowered common citizenry. If followed, however, this advice might eventually make the grandi even more extensively and substantively accountable to the people than Machiavelli lets on. The Florentine’s subsequent examples of how the Roman grandi use religion, electoral fraud, and unnecessary wars to manipulate the people may expose, more than serve, grandi interests and machinations.

In the opening chapters of The Discourses, Machiavelli establishes the parameters of a political bargain, and ultimately maneuvers his dedicatees into accepting its terms: the grandi constrain their appetite for complete domination of the people at home, granting the latter institutions like the tribunate and practices such as public accusations so that the people may serve as the regime’s guard of liberty; in return, the young grandi gain the opportunity for increased riches and eternal fame through the pursuit of empire, that is, domination of countless others abroad and even, in the long run, domination of mortality. On this reading, whether Machiavelli really anticipates or even hopes that the grandi make good on this opportunity remains an open question. Roman-style imperialism may be only one of several military options for Machiavelli, and given its role in the republic’s collapse, perhaps not the most preferable.

A proper understanding of the dedicatees’ identity and what it stands for may allow readers of The Discourses to adopt the appropriate perspective when confronting the book’s immediate surface. By asking, first and foremost, how the work’s declared audience might interpret it, the grandi perspective of the dedicatees provides a hermeneutic key with which readers might unlock the often less than transparent significance of Machiavelli’s arguments, assertions, and judgments. Admittedly, this mode of procedure entails considerable speculation: although I try to ground my assumptions historically and with the best textual support I can muster, in many instances I will be compelled to guess how Machiavelli thinks his immediate audience will react to specific passages.⁵ Ultimately, I suggest that a proper understanding of Machiavelli’s stated audience in The Discourses highlights the work’s less-than-obvious purpose—the control of elites in a popular government.

It is now widely assumed that Machiavelli writes disingenuously when he flatters Lorenzo in the dedication of The Prince. After all, the Medici had dismissed, imprisoned, and tortured Machiavelli after the collapse of the Florentine republic that he served for over a dozen years. But he’s taken to be straightforwardly honest in the dedication of The Discourses when he flatters Buondelmonti and Rucellai. He tells them that although they are not princes, they deserve to be. In the language of The Discourses (e.g., I.12, II.2), this primarily means that they should be leading citizens—magistrates, captains, senators—in a republic rather than, as they presently are, the subjects of an individual prince. Notwithstanding the perhaps unusual use of princes plural, this sentiment is not inconsistent with a republican understanding of the work, since a republic can be defined as a regime where not one, but more than one, actually governs.⁶

Some might assume more generally that the book’s specific addressees are simply private citizens, or just common people, as opposed to the royal dedicatee of The Prince. But this easy association of the dedicatees with the people, and hence republicanism with popular government per se, falls prey to an undifferentiated notion of republicanism, as well as to an historically uninformed understanding of who Buondelmonti and Rucellai actually were, and, even more significantly, what social type they might represent.⁷ The Discourses is dedicated neither to a single prince—a prince proper—nor to the people, or even to men of the people (popolari): Buondelmonti and Rucellai are young nobles—ottimati in the parlance of the day, grandi in Machiavelli’s general usage (P 9; D I.4).⁸ Both come from families with long traditions of influence and command in Florence, and, more pertinently, with well-known biases against any republic that is not a governo stretto, that is, a polity within which only the very few, most wealthy citizens rule. The Rucellai and Buondelmonti families were staunch opponents of both the governo largo, or more widely participatory republic, within which Friar Savonarola was influential, and the republic under Piero Soderini’s chief magistracy that succeeded it. The latter bitterly disappointed them by not fully purging what they considered to be the popular excesses of its predecessor.⁹ And yet the class background and social perspective that was Rucellai’s and Buondelmonti’s political patrimony is generally ignored in the political theory literature that presents them as humanists and literati, republican sympathizers, patriots, and, overwhelmingly, just friends of Machiavelli.¹⁰

As a close and valuable aid to Soderini, and as a new man recruited to public service from outside the ranks of the ottimati, Machiavelli was certainly not considered a friend by this earlier generation of Florentine elites, the elders of his dedicatees in The Discourses. On this basis we might conclude that Machiavelli not only understands the nature of individual princes, as he suggests in the dedication to The Prince—having observed firsthand the actions of kings, queens, popes, and warlords on his diplomatic missions for the Florentine republic, and having experienced firsthand the attentions of a Medici prince upon that republic’s collapse.¹¹ In addition, Machiavelli may have valuable insight into the nature of grandi from firsthand experience. The Florentine ottimati did not resort to violence against Machiavelli, but he certainly endured their constant disdain and derision.¹² While Machiavelli came from a family with an old name, he was not of suitably high birth or sufficient wealth to vote on, or stand for, the highest offices in the republic.¹³ And he owed entirely to the patronage of Soderini the diplomatic, secretarial, and military posts usually inaccessible to people of lower social station. Of course, the grandi accustomed to a monopoly on these posts were not terribly pleased with this state of affairs, and are documented as having spit their poison at Machiavelli on a regular basis.¹⁴

Yet despite good reasons for resenting and mistrusting the wealthy and the well-born in general, some of Machiavelli’s best friends in particular were ottimati; most famously, Francesco Vettori and Francesco Guicciardini.¹⁵ More importantly, for our purposes, so were Buondelmonti and Rucellai—even if the relationship between the young nobles and the wry, erudite political veteran was far from perfectly symmetrical: the underborn and unemployed Machiavelli was in debt to one of them, or likely both, financially.¹⁶ Yet it is intellectual credit, not monetary reimbursement, that Machiavelli returns to Zanobi and Cosimo in the dedication of The Discourses. Machiavelli thanks his friends for having forced him to write what he would not have written otherwise. Apparently, excited by Machiavelli’s discussions of politics and history at their reading group, the young grandi insisted that he discourse on the topic in writing. And Machiavelli dutifully submits to these friends who command.¹⁷

So, unlike The Prince, The Discourses, according to its dedication, was actively solicited by its dedicatees, who happen to be the author’s social superiors and intimate friends. And since the young grandi to whom Machiavelli dedicates The Discourses are also humanist intellectuals, members of a scholarly circle, they presumably will not scoff at a book on politics that takes a scholarly form. They might even welcome a book that presents itself as a long commentary on a classical text—a book with the full title, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio.¹⁸ Indeed, ottimati, whether in or out of power, differ from a prince because they can afford to take a bit more time and effort cultivating themselves. Zanobi and Cosimo, like most members of their class, probably do not expect to justify their claims to preeminence with force alone; they probably have some pretensions about really being the best citizens. Fortunately for them, both political inactivity under a principality and the political division of labor entailed by grandi domination allow young nobles the time to study and improve themselves. So the full title and academic form of Machiavelli’s work might attract rather than discourage young grandi seeking to justify themselves through education.¹⁹

This analysis points up the fact that unlike a prince, grandi, when in power, collegially share the load of ruling among themselves. There is a name for such a regime. Nevertheless, just as tyrant is never mentioned in The Prince, oligarchy is rather scarce in The Discourses. In the first three chapters of the latter, Machiavelli refers to those of status, wealth, and command interchangeably as optimates (ottimati),²⁰ nobles (nobili), the few (pochi), the powerful (potenti), and, in a Roman context, the senate (senato). In accord with the apparently classical mood set by Machiavelli’s title, his prologue and his ostensible fidelity to Polybius’s cycle of regimes, in I.2 he seems to abide by a distinction between good and bad kinds of nobility; he distinguishes between rule by optimates and rule by merely the few.

In fact, young ottimati would be quite flattered by association with the following description of their class, largely derived, but for the significant reference to their wealth,²¹ from Polybius: a group who surpassed all others in generosity, greatness of spirit, riches, and nobility. . . . [who] governed themselves according to the laws ordered by them, placing the common utility before their own advantage; and . . . preserved both public and private things with the highest diligence (I.2). In the quasi-Polybian cycle of regime transformation, this class of the powerful is obeyed and revered by the multitude during the elimination of tyranny and the establishment of a noble-governed republic. But, according to Machiavelli’s narrative, the heirs of the powerful in the next generation respect neither civility nor the multitude’s property and women. As a result, a government of optimates is corrupted into a regime dominated by the few, and so they provoke a democratic revolution that is itself, as nobles are inclined to expect, destined to degenerate into license.

Heartened or perhaps confirmed in their expectations by an approximation of the classical distinction between aristocracy and oligarchy, Cosimo and Zanobi might not be disturbed by mention of the Roman nobility’s insolence toward the end of I.2. This is, after all, just one particular group of ottimati, not nobles in general, who, as Machiavelli has shown in his apparently faithful rehashing of Polybius, are good, basically. However, they might be surprised that Machiavelli attributes the creation of the tribunes, a magistracy of the Roman plebs, to the insolence of the nobility rather than to the ambitions of the common people—ottimati being inclined to assume that the people agitate spontaneously and unprovoked to take all or part of their political power. The dedicatees are likely even more surprised that Machiavelli promises to show how conflict or disunion between the senate and the plebs made the Roman republic perfect (I.2).

Machiavelli still refrains from offering a categorical assessment of the dedicatees as a class at the start of I.3, focusing instead on humanity in general: for political purposes, it must be assumed that "all men [uomini] are bad, and that they are ready to vent their malignant spirit as soon as they have a free opportunity to do so. But the immediate example of such malignant evil is the Roman senate and nobility, who concealed their hatred for the plebs during the reign of the Tarquin principality, but offended them in all the modes they could once the monarchy was abolished. This insolence and the confusions, noises and dangers of scandals that arose as a result of the plebs’ reaction to it, led to the creation of the tribunes by the two parties, for the security of the plebs" (I.3).²² It is important to note that, so far, this is still just an isolated case of preemptively bad nobility; and secondly, the accidents, referred to in the chapter’s heading, that emerged in the conflict between the plebs and senate are rather mild (confusions, noises, threat of scandal).

The most casual familiarity with classical writings would suggest that the few are inclined to fear that they will be targeted for expropriation, ostracism, and even violence as a result of conflict with the common people; the example of democratic Athens serving as the chief source of their anxiety.²³ Yet Machiavelli shows here and in the next chapter that as wild as tumults became, they never really harmed the Roman nobles: public shouting, street demonstrations, and popular evacuation of the city are frightening to those who only read about them (I.5); and later he claims that the extreme measures taken by the Athenian populace against their elite were perhaps justifiable responses to the experience of tyranny (I.28). Even this early in The Discourses it is clear that Machiavelli is teaching Cosimo and Zanobi about the people’s nature as well as about their own; in fact, the two lessons seem to be inseparable. But at this point in the text he is more forthcoming about the nature of the people and about the character of the tumults between them and the ottimati than he is about the nature of the latter.

Chapter 4 is devoted to the disunion or tumults that made Rome free and powerful, tumults criticized by many, that is, the unnamed classical sources that Machiavelli previously appeared to be following. These authors, taking on the nobles’ perspective, pine for an orderly people and blame the latter for civil discord.²⁴ Why aren’t they sensible enough to submit quietly to rule by their betters? But the people themselves are not the cause of tumults in Rome, according to Machiavelli. There are two causes of tumults, two seemingly irreconcilable appetites: in every republic are two diverse humors, that of the people and that of the great, and all the laws that are made in favor of freedom arise from their disunion (I.4). Here is the first appearance of Machiavelli’s universal category for the nobles: the grandi, or the great.We can assume that grandi is his general category on the basis of his judgment that they exist in every republic, and by cross-referencing this passage to the sociology of every city in The Prince (P 9).²⁵ There Machiavelli tells a prince that success depends on establishing his authority with the correct humor of the two, while here free play between the great and the people generates laws that insure liberty.²⁶ In The Prince, Machiavelli immediately defines the substance of the grandi’s humor or appetite; while in The Discourses he postpones that declaration—even if it’s already intimated by particular examples throughout the initial chapters—until the next chapter, I.5.

It may well be that Machiavelli assumes, at this point, that his young dedicatees care more about their welfare in the hypothetical tumultuous contest between themselves and the people than about the truth of their own nature. And so Machiavelli assures them with even more specific examples than he proffered in the previous chapter: he insists that exiles, fines, and killings were kept to an absolute minimum in tumultuous Rome, and were spread out over three hundred years (I.4). Moreover, the humor of the people, now revealed, is merely not to be oppressed, and they act rambunctiously only when they are oppressed in actuality or when they become suspicious of being oppressed. Hence the desires of free peoples are rarely pernicious to freedom. Machiavelli cajoles his dedicatees further by insisting that the plebs respond only reactively or passively in most cases anyway. In accord with their nature, the people refrain from doing something instead of actively doing something: in response to actual oppression, they exit the city or fail to enroll for military service.²⁷ When the people fear being oppressed, they can be convinced otherwise by a good man, a man of faith, presumably a noble,²⁸ in deliberative assemblies, the concioni. Later Machiavelli will state, perhaps against actual Roman practice, that any citizen at all could speak in a concione (III.34), hence suggesting that a noble’s speech might be contested publicly by a pleb.²⁹ He does not open this possibility to his young grandi audience at this juncture, preferring instead to concur with Cicero’s seemingly authoritative judgment that the people are ignorant—but not so ignorant as to be incapable of truth or of recognizing a man worthy of trust; for Cicero, this would certainly mean a member of the ottimati.

However, returning to the exiles, fines, and blood mentioned above, since they are a little more worrisome to a noble than the confusions, noises, and scandals mentioned earlier: even if these costs are kept to a minimum, they may be too exorbitant for a grandi audience to accept unless they are guaranteed a disproportionate reward in return for their risk. (Of course, the chapter leaves open the option that Cosimo and Zanobi simply choose not to oppress the people, or never give the latter cause to worry about the possibility of oppression. Why that course of action would never even occur to the grandi is not revealed until the next chapter, I.5.) Hence, the most intriguing sentence in this section of I.4 is the prospect offered in exchange for allowing the people to express themselves politically, and for tolerating the tumults that necessarily ensue therefrom: cities that do, like Rome, may avail themselves of the people in important things. The title of the chapter would suggest that these important things pertain to liberty, which remains undefined, and power, which may have something to do with, on the one hand, what Rome is most famous for and, on the other, the people’s proximity to military matters mentioned in this section.

Machiavelli repeats the great as his term for the oligarchic component in every republic in I.5. Etymologically, grandi or the great ought not to be a displeasing appellation for the dedicatees, affiliated as it is with, for instance, grandeur (grandiosità ), or, a word that will take on considerable import quite soon, greatness (grandezza). It’s perhaps not as gratifying a label as aristocrats, yet not so disparaging as oligarchs. But beyond pleasant names, Machiavelli substantively defines the grandi, and later in the chapter the nobles, by the appetite or humor that drives them to acquire the riches, recognition, and power that they hold, and want more of—the great desire to dominate. On the other hand, the ignobles, the people, "only desire not to be dominated" (emphasis added). As opposed to classical historians and philosophers, in his general definition Machiavelli no longer professes to define the great in terms of moral probity or meritorious accomplishment. These are the very qualities that young nobles tend to think (or pretend) that they possess, and would like to develop further. These are the very qualities that might have initially seduced the young grandi into tackling such a daunting scholarly tome as The Discourses. By chapter 5 of the work, however, they discover that they are defined simply by their appetite to make others bend to their will. The insolence that seemed to be extraneous to the nature of the grandi is now defined as its core.³⁰

Thus, since Machiavelli’s stated addressees have requested this work, since they have intellectual aspirations, and since they are his friends, perhaps he can be more honest after all about his beliefs and intentions in The Discourses than he is vis-à -vis his dedicatee in The Prince. Even if he must ease them along in the way suggested here, Machiavelli does not permanently hide from his immediate audience what he thinks of them as a class or social type. What is a temporary stratagem in The Discourses, is the dominant one in The Prince: there Machiavelli never speaks directly on the nature of princes; instead demonstrating by example or, as he did with respect to the grandi in I.3, through generalizations about the nature of men (e.g., P 15, title).³¹ However, after I.3, Machiavelli speaks more frankly about the political nature of his immediate audience, especially in I.5 of The Discourses. We do not know whether Zanobi and Cosimo yet recognize themselves in Machiavelli’s depiction of the grandi as those with the appetite to oppress. Nonetheless, Machiavelli’s straightforward presentation invites them to be honest about it rather than to be ashamed or embarrassed by it. It’s just a fact, a natural fact. The instruction, already in progress, will be that they should obey that appetite more prudently so as to satisfy it better, although we don’t yet know exactly how.

Chapter 5 also deals with the guard of freedom and with what humor those constituting (founding? reforming?) a republic should place it, the people’s or the great’s. Before delving into this issue, it might be helpful to speculate what Machiavelli means by freedom, or a free way of life, since he invokes but still does not define it here. What might freedom mean to his dedicatees? We learn in this chapter that they have the appetite to oppress. What are the conditions of possibility for them to act freely, with liberty, on this appetite? First off, we should assume, their regime must be independent of another regime—it cannot be a client or subject state, a satellite or a colony. In such circumstances the prince or princes of a foreign regime would circumscribe the extent to which the grandi will oppress their own people. The same can be said for a domestic prince, who, as Machiavelli demonstrates elsewhere, cannot be secure if he allows the grandi free rein to satisfy their appetites (P 9; D I.16). Certainly, submission to the reinstalled Medici principality must frustrate the desire of these young grandi to compete freely for public offices, and exercise the command, reap the rewards, and gain the prestige that accompanies them.

So grandi are free in the absence of an imperial or princely authority, and, in fact, this is their definition of a republic, an autonomous regime without a single prince. More specifically, given the inclinations of their recent ancestors mentioned above, and based, just for instance, on Guicciardini’s depiction of young ottimati in his political writings,³² we can guess that Buondelmonti and Rucellai think of a republic as a regime where members of the best families circulate political offices among themselves. They are free vis-à -vis the people in such a regime by exercising command over the latter through these offices, and by refusing to share such offices with them. The general citizenry might select which of the nobility hold office at any particular time—election being, after all, an aristocratic institution.³³ But the people will not exert any further control on them. Certainly, the highest offices would not be open to anyone outside of these better families.

Machiavelli points out in I.5 that Sparta and Venice were republics that placed the guard of liberty with the nobles; in other words, they reserved all magistracies for the grandi and entirely excluded the people from political participation. Conventional wisdom among the ottimati in Florence insisted that Sparta and, most especially, Venice were the best republics due to their tranquility and longevity.³⁴ Certainly, Sparta and Venice satisfy the young grandi’s definition of liberty: exercising offices on their own terms over the people rather than the terms of a foreign or domestic prince, let alone the people’s terms. This is precisely the kind of oligarchic republic that was nearly instituted in Florence when the Medici were expelled in 1494. That is, until Savonarola and Soderini made it more populist in their own different ways: over and against the wishes of the ottimati, Savonarola insisted on establishing an assembly of all the citizens, the Great Council; Soderini retained the Council and, as mentioned above, offered ministerial posts to nonnoble, new men, like Machiavelli.

Machiavelli concedes the longevity of Sparta’s and Venice’s freedom in I.5. But emphasizing the fact that he is speaking in his own voice on behalf of Rome (I say), Machiavelli makes a