Crisis and Power: Economics, Politics and Conflict in Machiavelli’s Political Thought
Filippo Del Lucchese[1]
The theme of social conflict is present from the opening pages of TheDiscourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. The causes of the greatness of a republic, Machiavelli argues, are a good army and a good constitution. Equipped with both, Rome was able to demonstrate its fortune. Machiavelli thus criticizes the opinion held by ‘many’, according to which ‘good fortune’ and ‘military virtue’ compensated for the constitutional defects of Rome and the ‘extreme confusion’ created by conflicts between the plebs and the senate. One of the main arguments in this discussion precisely concerns the role of fortune and military virtue in keeping Rome virtuous despite these conflicts. Machiavelli intervenes vigorously to reject both positions, arguing in Book One, chapter 4 of TheDiscourses that good fortune and military virtue developed precisely because of the city’s conflictual character.
The causes of the greatness and hence the liberty of Rome may have been various. But the primary cause was the clash between the two main social classes. Machiavelli stresses the argument of disunion that generates positive effects, using an image derived from the language of medicine. As in natural organisms, claims the author of TheDiscourses, various humours are to be found in social bodies, in different proportions. Good laws, those favouring liberty, are always born out of the ‘disunion’ of these humours, as is shown by the social turmoil which, from the time of the Gracchi to that of Tarquin, never had negative effects.[2]
Machiavelli employs an ‘organic’ metaphor, whereby the structure of political bodies is similar to that of natural organisms and the needs and demands of a social group, or even the social group itself, are compared with the different humours which, for the sake of the organism’s health, must find their natural outlet. In the first phase of Roman history, the clash between the various humours never took such an extreme form as to provoke exile or death. The conflict was moderate and violence was contained within certain limits. Without perverse, destabilizing effects, the popular humour succeeded in finding a suitable outlet.
Subsequently, still in TheDiscourses, Machiavelli considers turmoil that assumes a more violent and extreme form – so much so that it has been placed at the origins of Rome’s decline. This is the rioting connected with the agrarian law at the time of the Gracchi, when conflict turned violent and destructive, leading to the ruin of the republic and the tyranny of Caesar. In many respects, this second type of conflict resembles that characteristic of the events described by Machiavelli in the Florentine Histories. Here the struggles between the Grandi – the elite of powerful and wealthy families – and the popolo[3] no longer seem to express the ‘natural’ humours of the social body, but merely the private interests of opposed, contending factions, exhibiting violent and perverse effects for the existence of the republic.
A dichotomy between moderate and excessive conflict would thus seem to emerge in Machiavelli’s analysis of conflict, which various authors have highlighted.[4] These interpreters have paradoxically sought to ‘save’ Machiavelli from himself and his own radicalism.[5] However, a careful reading of the texts reveals how Machiavelli’s conception of conflict is neither straightforward nor linear. That is to say, it is not characterized by an initial positive estimate of conflict, in the moderate terms of the first phase of Roman history, and a subsequent condemnation of conflict, with respect to the typical form of Florentine history. The majority of interpreters have restricted themselves to considering TheDiscourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. In order to fully appreciate the orginality and power of Machiavelli’s thought, in my opinion, thorough consideration must also be given to his other major works, above all the Florentine Histories. This makes it possible to highlight the links between political dynamics and not only the institutional effects of conflicts, but also their economic effects. Machiavelli is probably among the first thinkers of modernity to grasp the explicit nexus between economic struggles, institutional factors and political dynamics. It is for this reason that his thought goes well beyond the republican formulation that interpreters tend to assign to it.
‘Close to the heart of the problem...’: Crisis of Power in The Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius
The first and important constitutional ‘result’ obtained by the Roman plebs in their struggle against the nobles is the establishment of the tribunus plebis, in whose hands was placed the ‘guardianship of liberty’. Challenging the ambitions of the nobles, the popolo fight for a greater role in government. It is precisely these ‘accidents’ – i.e. this long history of struggles – which slowly moulded the Roman constitutional order. In the first chapters of TheDiscourses, interest focuses mainly on the institutional results of the ongoing conflict, setting to one side the causes of the struggles. Nevertheless, Machiavelli already radically rejects the classical apologia for internal harmony in the state, counter-posing to this tradition his ‘conflictual’ model, which he regards as the ‘first cause’ of the greatness of Rome.
Book One, chapter 37 opens with an intense reflection on human passions, especially desire, which is based (according to Machiavelli) on the imbalance created by the capacity to desire anything while being able to attain only a few things. Desire generates an extremely violent conflictual situation, because ‘since some strive to get more and others fear to lose what they have gained, they indulge in enmity and war. These cause the ruin of one province and the prosperity of another’. In a characteristic descriptive move, Machiavelli passes directly from a theoretical statement describing the nature of human desire, to a historical example to be described and interpreted:
I wrote this because it was not enough for the Roman plebs to make sure of the nobles by setting up the tribunes – a desire to which it was forced by necessity – but at once, having attained that, it began fighting through ambition and through its hope to share honors and wealth with the nobles, as things much esteemed by men. From this rose the disorder that brought forth the contention over the Agrarian Law, which at last resulted in the destruction of the republic.[6]
Hence this is the origin of the conflict over control of the system of land ownership, which has a long history but which explodes with the most serious consequences at the time of the Gracchi. In a few lines the origins of the decadence of the Republic and the end of liberty are described. The degeneration of the conflict produces an immediate effect. The contending parties organize militarily against one another, ‘privately’ (says Machiavelli) – i.e. in a manner alien to legal and institutional structures – forming factions with militias loyal to their own ‘heads’ rather than to the state.
With the material presented up to this point, there emerges an interpretive switch in Machiavelli’s conception of social conflict. The initial manifestations of conflict between nobles and plebs are positive for the greatness of Rome, while those consequent upon the agrarian law are destructive of its liberty, because of their serious disintegrative impact on the social fabric. The main causes of this slide appear to be two-fold. The first consists in the changed interest of the contending parties as regards the object of their contention. If in the early days of the republic’s existence the parties struggled over political responsibilities and ‘honours’, at the time of the Gracchi the struggle switched to the economic terrain, to material goods and (to use a term of Machiavelli’s) ‘belongings’. The transition from the struggle for ‘honours’ to one for ‘belongings’ is thus the first cause of the degeneration in the phenomenon of conflict.
The second cause derives from this switch onto the economic terrain and consists in the violent development of conflicts. History in fact reveals that struggles for ‘honours’ are moderate and hence positive, while those for ‘possessions’ are extremely violent and hence destructive. Thus, the increase in violence and the transfer to the economic terrain emerge – in this phase – as the cause of the loss of Roman liberty and, more generally, of the transformation in the conception of conflict in Machiavelli.
In all, the following characteristics are to be found in Machiavelli’s oeuvre: the theme of the goal of the struggle – i.e. ‘belongings’ as opposed to ‘honours’; the theme of violent struggles and moderate conflicts; and, finally, the theme of public and private – the distinction, in other words, between the nature of the parties and that of the factions engaged in struggle. But it nevertheless seems possible to go beyond this dichotomy, which the majority of Machiavelli’s interpreters stop at. While it is true that Machiavelli describes and compares these characteristics of conflictual mechanisms, he does not restrict himself to a simple prioritization of the first element at the expense of the second. That is to say, he does not limit himself to elevating the struggle for ‘honours’ over that for ‘possessions’, moderate conflict over excessively violent conflict and, finally, struggle via public apparatuses over struggle that occurs in ‘private’ mode. This linear contrast in fact already runs into difficulty in the very same chapter 37 of Book One of TheDiscourses.[7]
What caused the decline was the plebs who, from fighting out of necessity, passed to fighting out of ambition, in accordance with the natural mechanisms of human desire. But it is precisely here that we have the first reversal. In this same chapter 37 we return to the ambitions of the nobles. The negative role played by the plebs recedes and the object of condemnation is once again the attitude of the nobles. All things human are in motion and cannot be arrested as we read in The Discourses I,6. Hence even Rome must ‘ascend’ or ‘descend’. But if it had not descended as a result of the ‘conflict’ over the agrarian law, the city would have been corrupted ‘even more quickly’ on account of noble ambitions, which are a constant threat to the liberty of any republic.
The straightforward opposition between two types of conflict is here already undermined. In TheDiscourses Machiavelli does not go more deeply into the question, as he was to do in the subsequent Florentine Histories.[8] He seems to point to a general normative principle in a politics that bases the economic power of the state on public wealth, as opposed to large private fortunes. This could ensure a more tranquil political existence, where the pursuit of virtue prevails over ambition. In Sparta, for example, it was Lycurgus’s laws that realized the ‘equality of property’ which eliminated the cause of conflict between nobles and plebs. And the same end was to be achieved by Agis and Cleomenes, who are referred to in Book One, chapter 9 of TheDiscourses. As some ancient law-makers understood, virtue is more readily realized where there is no possibility of accumulating great fortunes and where, as a result, major inequalities between citizens do not develop.
In this sense, Machiavelli forcefully argues in TheDiscourses, book One, chapter 37,that the virtuous Republic must keep ‘the state rich and the citizens poor’. Hence the goal of the agrarian law was just and ‘laudable’, but its authors found themselves confronting enormous private power, based on the wealth of the nobles, who had no intention of giving in to the demands of the plebs. ‘To touch’ private fortunes means unleashing the violence of the nobles and hence those mechanisms that possess the requisite characteristics to be placed, in a ‘dualistic’ schema like that of TheDiscourses I, 37, in the category of negative conflicts.
Interpreters who defend a moderate, civic image of conflict on the part of Machiavelli generally stress the need to keep his major writings – TheDiscourses on the one hand and The Prince on the other – separate. In reality, however, precisely on this point the two works are consistent and exhibit a profound unity in the thinking of their author. In Book Three, chapter 19 of TheDiscourses, for example, Machiavelli affirms that for men thinking about money is superior to any other sentiment and value. To ‘avoid hatred’, it is necessary ‘to let your subjects’ property alone, because no prince desires their blood except when compelled, if greed is not hidden under his desire; and such compulsion seldom comes. But desire for blood, when greed is mixed with it, appears continually, and there is never a lack of cause or desire for bloodshed’. Machiavelli thus recommends a policy that avoids ‘robbery’ of citizens’ private fortunes, because (as we read again in chapter 17 of The Prince) ‘men forget more quickly the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony’ .
Now, if the analysis could be terminated at this point; if Machiavelli had halted at producing The Prince and TheDiscourses without composing the Histories, it could be claimed that the ‘tension’ present in the first part of the commentary on Livy finds an almost definitive systematization in those two texts. Keeping the state rich and the nobles poor; favouring popular and middle-class economic power – such might run a synthesis of the principles illustrated in TheDiscourses and The Prince, for the purposes of hitting upon a theoretical solution to the problem represented by the agrarian law in Book One, chapter 37 of TheDiscourses, where the social conflict effectively becomes the cause of the loss of liberty, but where the necessity to strike at the aristocratic class is ‘nonetheless’ confirmed.
Thus matters stood up to the Florentine Histories. In these pages from Machiavelli’s final years, the tension implicit in this argument re-emerges in force, putting in question the solution offered in the preceding works. Economics, which seemed to provide a solution to the aporiae in the theme of conflict, precisely compels Machiavelli to reflect anew on the mechanisms of this phenomenon. The theme of conflict in the Histories does not entirely confirm the schema present in Book One, chapter 37 of The Discourses. In certain respects, it changes it.
‘From inequality to a wonderful equality’: Crisis and Power in Florentine Histories
Florentine Histories offers a highly original vision of politics and one that is in some respects different from that of the previous works. What emerges is a genuine revision of the dualistic schema employed in the description of conflict in Book One, chapter 37 of The Discourses, which now proves inapposite to describe the Florentine situation.
In the preface to the Histories, Machiavelli proudly takes his distance from his great predecessors in Florentine historiography, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini. These ‘very excellent historians’ are accused of not having made sufficient reference to ‘civil discords and internal enmities’ and of having been ‘altogether silent about the one and so brief about the other as to be of no use to readers or pleasure to anyone’. Social conflict was pervasive in The Discourses, but it is in the Histories that the theme becomes absolutely central and predominant.
The whole history of Florence is one of conflicts and ‘dissensions’. Rome’s is a history of virtue and power, which ultimately experience decline and crisis. For Florence, by contrast, crisis is the very substance of history. There is not a moment of this history which is not at the same time a moment of crisis. But – and this is one of the work’s most interesting aspects – that does not exclude the principle of power, in a mode notably different therefore from the example of Rome. Rome experiences virtue and its crisis, characterized by the two contrasting models of conflict. Florence experiences nothing but crisis and its conflict is foreign to any facile schemas or positivity. In this instance, crisis includes power without being, as was true of Rome, its exact opposite.[9] The new conception of the conflictuality of Florence is not presented as a model complementing that of Rome. Instead, it is indicated as a more useful tool for political understanding. Machiavelli does not disown the works prior to Florentine Histories, but intends to underline the change in his previous standpoint dictated by new reflection.
The constant characteristic of the parties in Florence, once victory has been obtained, is that they always discover a ‘new reason’ for further division and for renewing the terms of the conflict. Florence is thus the subject most adapted for speaking of ‘divisions’. Rome is not forgotten, but – the times having changed – it is appropriate to change the ‘matter’ of reflection. In chapters 7 and 8 of Book One of The Discourses, Machiavelli had asserted the importance of offering an outlet, through the laws, for the opposed ‘humours’ present in any city. If these laws are absent, the conflict develops along extraordinary paths, as in Florence, allowing private forces to ruin ‘free life’.