In the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli maintains that the people is often superior epistemically to princes. This forms the outlines of an argument from popular epistemocracy. However, in light of his theory of humours, how can governance belong to the most epistemically capable if they are driven solely by a negative desire? How can the best decisions regarding domination be made by those who only have a desire to not dominate? This paper develops the thesis that the people’s negative humours (...) can be consistent with the claim that it has the best epistemic capacities to rule insofar as such capacities are understood only negatively, based on the people’s competencies to assess error and identify mistakes in collective decision-making. The argument is divided into three sections. The first unpacks the problem by clarifying how multiplicity in Machiavelli has more robust epistemic value and, consequentially, more political value in certain circumstances. The second explains the negative dimension of epistemic capacity and how Machiavelli attributes it to the people by highlighting two epistemically crucial characteristics: multiplicity and diversity. The third lists the people’s three forms of negative governance displayed in the Discourses: intra-institutional opposition, institutional participation (in litigation, the selection of magistrates, and lawmaking), and extra-institutional contestation. In the end, it should be clear that Machiavelli qualifies as an epistemocrat with democratic tendencies insofar as the people fulfils the role of a ‘negative legislator’. (shrink)

Machiavelli’s Prince has often been the subject of study limited to individual chapters or topics. In this reading, I guide the reader through an alternative route, a deconstructive analysis unfolding chapter-by-chapter, and revealing a dynamic of logical failure of the principalities. A positive moment is regained only at the end of the book where in the Exhortatio ad capessendam Italiam the urgency for a new political leader to constitute a unifying state is declared. This structural dynamic of The Prince allows (...) to postulate that the solution to the crisis of Italian politics resides outside the forms of the same principalities presented in The Prince. In this respect, more support is gained for the connection between the best form of civil popular principality with the exaltation of the Roman republic as treated in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. (shrink)

The article examines Chapter 29, Book VIII of the Florentine Histories, which contains an interesting digression on Genoa and the “Casa di San Giorgio”, a financial institution created in 1407 to manage the Genoese public debt that, over time, acquired control and administration of cities and territories. The Machiavellian digression has attracted the attention of interpreters, who have sometimes considered it surprising or paradoxical. Recently, attention has been drawn to the possibility that Machiavelli was primarily interested in the political consequences (...) of the consolidation of the Genoese debt. An interest that looked, also, at the Florentine reality. In this article, I intend rather to suggest that the chapter should be read as a classic example of Machiavellian realism, focusing-from a comparative point of view-on the analysis of a peculiar case and its relative advantages. (shrink)

The aim of this article is, first, to reconstruct Machiavelli’s understanding of the nature and aims of the political community (in his language, “state”), and, second, to situate this reconstructed concept within the broader history of political ideas. It will do so through an examination of several passages in the Discourses on Livy, followed by a study of its reception in the seventeenth century. What will emerge is that Machiavelli’s reasoning about the state connects him with several later authors in (...) a manner that suggests the presence of a unique, and previously obscured, strand of argument about the nature of the political community; a strand of argument whose recovery can help us better to understand not only the political struggles of early modern Europe, but also the way of thinking about the state that eventually emerged dominant from them. (shrink)

Jean Bodin’s first major prose work, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem of 1566 inaugurates a long critical tradition of challenging the coherence and the consistency of Machiavelli’s theory of the state, without indulging in conventional ad hominem attacks. Bodin’s analysis, brief and cogent, can still help us to understand Machiavelli today and to grasp some of the major tendencies of Machiavelli criticism that have developed since the Renaissance. Bodin takes Machiavelli seriously as a major threat to his own theory (...) of sovereignty. Moreover, he focuses our attention on the rhetorical dimension of Machiavelli’s work and draws some suggestive parallels between Machiavelli and the sophistic tradition, especially in his second major work, Les six livres de la République, where he likens Machiavelli to the sophist Favorinus of Arles, who wrote a paradoxical encomium of the quartan fever. Bodin’s reading reveals the striking affinities as well as the basic antagonism between these two major figures in the history of political thought. (shrink)