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ABSTRACT
Machiavelli’s historical writings, notably the Discourses on Livy (1531) and the Florentine Histories (1532), continued the tradition of the humanist historical enterprise. They were informed by the humanist conviction that historical learning provided guidance for public activity and was therefore an important means of political education. However, a close examination of these works reveals internal strains and an undercurrent of skepticism concerning the value of historical knowledge. The article argues that these tensions and doubts are symptoms of a paradox inherent in humanist discourse: the paradox of historical distance. The humanist project of reviving classical antiquity was based on the premise that the past is different yet relevant to the present. But the very historical consciousness implied by this project threatened to reveal the opposite: that the past was alien and therefore irrelevant to the present.
Notes
1. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 1.Pref.6. Hereafter abbreviated as D, with book and chapter numbers, and page numbers where relevant, cited in the text.
2. It is no coincidence that these two discourses reflect the two major modern interpretive currents, namely of Machiavelli as a political scientist, indeed as the founder of political science, and of Machiavelli as the champion of civic virtue. See Zuckert, Machiavelli’s Politics, 1–6.
3. See, e.g., Skinner, Machiavelli, 48–77; Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumult, esp. 24–37. Pedullà argues that the Discorsi established a new historical approach to politics that dominated the field for three centuries (29, 32).
4. Machiavelli, Preface, Florentine Histories. Hereafter abbreviated as FH with book and chapter numbers, and page numbers where relevant, cited in the text. On the humanist characteristics of Machiavelli’s historical writing, see, e.g., Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 236–40; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 127–36; Wilcox, The Development, 20–23; Skinner, Machiavelli, 78–83; Black, Machiavelli, 248–54.
5. See, e.g., Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 240–54; Phillips, On Historical Distance, 42–58.
6. On Machiavelli’s various historical conceptions and schemes, see Najemy’s comprehensive and perceptive analysis in “Machiavelli and History,” 1131–64. I have adopted many of Najemy’s insights, but my typology of Machiavelli’s historical notions and my argument’s conceptual framework differ from his.
7. See Nagel, “Philosophy of History before Historicism,” 292–304.
8. See, e.g., Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 215–17; Hampton, Writing from History, 1–7.
9. Bruni, History of the Florentine People, vol. 1, 2–3.
10. The term is Mark Phillips’s (On Historical Distance, 45).
11. At least when they wrote the histories of polities they were associated with. See Wilcox, The Development, 22.
12. Phillips, On Historical Distance, 45–47. See also, Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 238–39.
13. The narrative of the Florentine Histories provides little room for the use of examples. But as Phillips argues, the comparison between Florence and Rome—explicitly formulated in the introductory chapters of Books 2–6 of the work—indicates the same understanding of historical knowledge and the same “historical method” (On Historical Distance, 22).
14. See, e.g., Hampton, Writing from History, 62–65; Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric, 21–25; Hankins, Virtue Politics, 476–94.
15. Machiavelli, The Prince, 26.
16. Clarke argues in Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic that behind Machiavelli’s explicit “methodological” criticism of his predecessors lay a critique of their elitist and oligarchic republicanism as opposed to his genuine popular republicanism (8–14, 27–58). Hankins argues, by contrast, that the difference reflects Machiavelli’s critique of his predecessors’ moralistic republicanism from the perspective of his own mature and realistic one (Virtue Politics, 476–94).
17. In this vein Gian Mario Anselmi argues that Machiavelli’s conception of history was “scientific” and ultimately naturalistic. See his Ricerche sul Machiavelli storico, 75–114.
18. See Najemy, “Machiavelli and History,” 1149–51; Najemy, Between Friends, 202–8.
19. Hampton, Writing from History, 62–79. See also Burke’s remarks about the use of examples in historical writings in the Renaissance in “Exemplarity and Anti-Exemplarity,” 48–59.
20. Di Maria, “Machiavelli’s Ironic View of History”; Quint, “Narrative Design and Historical Irony.”
21. This is the gist of Guicciardini’s famous criticism of Machiavelli’s notion of historical examples. In the Ricordi he writes: “To judge by example is very misleading. Unless they are similar in every respect, examples are useless, since every tiny difference in the case may be a cause of great variations in the effect. And to discern these tiny differences takes a good and perspicacious eye” (Maxims and Reflections, 71). See also Phillips, On Historical Distance, 50–53.
22. Machiavelli, The Prince, 84.
23. Machiavelli argues that Germany is the only place in Europe where there is civic virtue and consequently political liberty (e.g., D, 1.55; 2. Pref). He also repeatedly depicts France as a well-ordered monarchy conducive to the vivere civile (e.g., D, 1.16, 58; 3.1).
24. See Najemy, “Machiavelli and History,” 1142.
25. See Gennaro Sasso, “La teoria dell’anacyclosis,” and “Polibio and Machiavelli: costituzione, potenza, conquista”; Trompf, Idea of Historical Recurrence, 250–74; Garin, “Polibio e Machiavelli,” 3–28. Trompf and, more elaborately, Sasso, argue that, while Polybius grounds the cyclical theory in nature, in the classical philosophical sense of the term as physis, Machiavelli describes it as an outcome of human actions. This difference is indicative of a deeper distinction: Polybius’s theory reflects the fundamental assumption of classical (and medieval) philosophy, namely that human reality partakes in the rational order of the cosmos. By contrast, Machiavelli, as an heir of humanism, perceived human reality as a human artifact. For him, as we just saw, “tutte le cose del mondo” are “operate dagli uomini” (D, 3.43.302; Machiavelli, Discorsi, vol. 2, 768).
26. See also Yoran, “Machiavelli’s Critique of Humanism,” 267.
27. This is also Najemy’s conclusion, “Machiavelli and History,” 1140, 1153–54.
28. There is extensive literature on the subject. See, e.g., Garin, Italian Humanism, 1–9; Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past; Kelly, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, 21–49; Schiffman, Birth of the Past, 138–98.
29. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 42–113.
30. See, e.g., Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, 101–5, 123–25.
31. For the classic formulation of this position by the civic humanists, see Baron, Crisis of the Early Modern Italian Renaissance.
32. One bloody and brutal event that Machiavelli knew only too well was the sacco di Prato of 1512, in which Spanish forces conquered and brutally pillaged the city, inflicting heavy losses on the Florentine militia that he himself had organized. See Bayley, War and Society, 268–76.
33. On Machiavelli’s distortion of the realities of these battles, see the critical notes in the Italian edition of the Istorie fiorentine, vol. 1, 384 n. 14, and vol. 2, 528 n. 14. See also Di Maria, “Machiavelli’s Ironic View of History,” 264–66.
34. See Gilmore, “The Renaissance Conception of the Lessons of History”; Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 23–46.
35. See Quint, “Humanism and Modernity”; Hampton, Writing from History, 31–80.
36. See Pigman, “Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past.”
37. Machiavelli, The Prince, 85.
38. Machiavelli does not use the term “civilization,” but the substance of his discussion allows this anachronistic use.
39. For a detailed analysis of Machiavelli’s notion of succession of civilizations against the background of classical and medieval related discussions, see Sasso, “De aeternitate mundi.”
40. See Gilbert, “Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine,” 145–46.
41. Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli, 142–52, Di Maria, “Machiavelli’s Ironic View of History,” and Quint, “Narrative, Design and Historical Irony” highlight Machiavelli’s pessimism. Gilbert, “Machiavelli’s Instorie Fiorentine” argues by contrast that the cyclical theory of history produced the expectation that after its long decline, Italy would be redeemed. Najemy, “Machiavelli and the Medici,” and Mark, A Great and Wretched City, 9–13, argue that Machiavelli was cautiously optimistic.
42. Machiavelli, The Prince, 20–21, 85.
43. See also Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 52–79; Lyons, Exemplum, 36–41.
44. See, e.g., Alberti, I libri della famiglia, 156.