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Abstract
The chapters of Rousseau’s Social Contract devoted to republican Rome prescribe institutions that obstruct popular efforts at diminishing the excessive power and influence of wealthy citizens and political magistrates. I argue that Rousseau reconstructs ancient Rome’s constitution in direct opposition to the more populist and anti‐elitist model of the Roman Republic championed by Machiavelli in the Discourses: Rousseau eschews the establishment of magistracies, like the tribunes, reserved for common citizens exclusively, and endorses assemblies where the wealthy are empowered to outvote the poor in lawmaking and elections. On the basis of sociologically anonymous principles like generality and popular sovereignty, and by confining elite accountability to general elections, Rousseau’s neo‐Roman institutional proposals aim to pacify the contestation of class hierarchies and inflate elite prerogative within republics – under the cover of more formal, seemingly more genuine, equality.
Acknowledgements
For comments and criticisms on earlier drafts, I thank Richard Bellamy, Mary Dietz, Nan Keohane, Nomi Lazar, Jim Miller, Melissa Schwartzberg, Tracy Strong, audiences at the 2005 APSA meeting in Washington, DC, at the Columbia University Seminar on Social and Political Thought, and three anonymous reviewers for CRISPP.
Notes
1. Rousseau (Citation1997b), henceforth cited as SC, with book, chapter and page numbers inserted parenthetically within the text. I also take the liberty of reducing to lower case many words that the translator capitalizes.
2. Machiavelli (Citation1997a), hereafter cited within the text as D with book and chapter numbers in parentheses. All Italian references correspond with Machiavelli Citation1997b.
3. Jean Starobinski (Citation1990) carefully delineates the oligarchic strands of Rousseau’s political theory. I contribute to this line of interpretation here by focusing attention on Rousseau’s interpretation of Roman institutions, and contrasting it with Machiavelli’s. In the latter regard, even the most thorough comparisons of the authors’ respective republicanisms do not treat institutions with sufficient care, and, consequently, perhaps too complacently conclude that Machiavelli and Rousseau were more or less in accord on what constitutes a ‘well‐ordered’ republic. See Viroli Citation1988, Citation1989.
4. Any theory of popular government that takes seriously the republican principle of ‘non‐domination’ requires robust institutional means that insure elite accountability. On this principle, if not the institutional apparatus to realize it, see Pettit Citation1999.
5. The paradigmatic application of Rousseau’s political thought to contemporary democratic theory is perhaps Barber Citation1984. A quite lively recent debate demonstrates just how confounding such efforts can be: see Putterman Citation2003, Scott Citation2005, and Putterman Citation2005. Miller (Citation1984) meticulously explores the complexities of Rousseau’s democratic dilemmas, while Wingrove (Citation2000) provides fresh insight into the dialectic of freedom and subjection in Rousseau’s political thought.
6. Rousseau asserts: ‘I believe I can posit as a principle that when the functions of government are divided among several tribunals the least numerous will sooner or later acquire the greatest authority; if only because of the ease in dispatching business, which naturally leads them to acquire it’ (SC III 4, 91). Machiavelli suggests something quite similar, but in a more nuanced manner, in the chapter from which the epigram that starts this essay was drawn. When he pronounces that ‘the few always behave in the mode of the few’, Machiavelli argues that small political bodies are much more inclined than large ones (preferably ones comprising the whole citizenry) to act in a biased fashion when passing judgment on prominent citizens accused of threatening liberty (D I.7, cf., I.49). After all, in most cases, the wealthy and prominent citizens who tend to sit on such committees share the political proclivities of the accused. But, unlike Rousseau, Machiavelli also leaves open the possibility that members of smaller tribunals may be more susceptible to intimidation and, so, such bodies can be weaker than large bodies.
7. In the Discourses, Machiavelli suggests that a republic is any regime where more than one person rules, as opposed to a principality where only one rules. To formulize this in a manner that might have pleased Rousseau: in a principality, rule=1; in a republic, rule=1+n.
8. Obviously, see Rousseau Citation1997a. The most eloquent interpretation of the many dimensions of Rousseau’s egalitarianism remains Shklar Citation1965.
9. Rousseau famously remarks: ‘if there were a people of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. Such a government is not suited for men’ (SC III 4, 92). Explaining this statement, Manin remarks that for Rousseau the ability act generally in one instance and concretely in the next ‘is beyond human capacity’. See Manin Citation1997: 75–76. As we will see, the differences between the people assembled in Athenian and Roman fashions, enables Rousseau to attribute this rare, indeed divine, ability of deciding both general and particular tasks to the Roman people, under very specific circumstances.
10. Rousseau also provides a foreign policy rationale for preferring elective aristocracy to assembly democracy: ‘the state’s prestige is better upheld abroad by venerable senators than by an unknown and despised multitude’ (SC III 5, 93).
11. Other important differences conditioning the possibility of popular government in Greece and Italy are the place of slavery within each and their respective climates. The Roman people, for instance, could not constantly assemble because slaves were not responsible for most material reproduction as in Greece, and the seasons’ varied from temperate to intemperate weather in Italy (SC III 15, 115).
12. On the full ramifications of Rousseau’s enmity toward representation, see Urbinati (forthcoming).
13. For more up‐to‐date details of Roman political institutions, see Nicolet Citation1980 and Lintott Citation1999.
14. This remark may not reflect class elitism but rather fear of political corruption: Rousseau may not be outraged at the prospect of former slaves holding office per se, but merely that such men were notoriously dependent on their former masters, who remained their patrons.
15. Rosenblum (n.d.) situates Rousseau’s ‘republican holism’ within the context of various lineages of anti‐party, anti‐pluralist and, hence, anti‐political political thought. I would supplement this account with the argument that Rousseau’s holism is actually the most systematically developed version of an aristocratic republicanism that emphasizes the ‘common good’, political generality and social homogeneity while actually elevating some particular sub‐set of the citizenry to political preeminence.
16. Rousseau suggests that lottery is used in a democracy because magistracy is a burden (presumably because even the poor must assume office), not necessarily on anti‐oligarchic grounds (SC IV 3, 125).
17. In fact, the lottery determining the century with the ‘prerogative’ of voting first was confined to the wealthier classes exclusively. See Nicolet Citation1980: 257; Taylor Citation1990: 70–74.
18. Tribunes with consular power were a magistracy devised by patricians, and accepted by the plebeians for a time, that undercut the tribunes of the plebs and placated plebeians who demanded eligibility to stand for the consulate. They were effectively patrician tribunes.
19. I agree that Machiavelli could be more precise in his discussion of the Roman assemblies, but Millar goes too far in his criticisms of the institutional deficiencies of the Discourses – especially given his quasi‐democratic reading of Rousseau on Rome’s assemblies. See Millar Citation2002: 71, 75, 113. On Machiavelli’s use of Roman history, class relations and political institutions, see Coby Citation1999.
20. Machiavelli’s aristocratic interlocutor, Francesco Guicciardini (Citation1994; Citation2002), promoted general election – open eligibility and wide suffrage – on precisely these grounds.
21. The historical concilium almost certainly excluded patricians. While Lintott cannot say so definitively, he muses that ‘it would surely have been improper, even repugnant, to include patrician votes in a decision which would be described as “X … plebem rogavit plebesque iure scivit”’; that is, a law made by and for the plebeians. See Lintott Citation1999: 54. He adds a footnote of citations supporting the fact that patricians did not attend the concilium until late in the republic (1999: 54, n.67), which Taylor (Citation1990: 60–64) corroborates.
22. Urbinati (Citation2002: 65) grasps the singular novelty of this aspect of Machiavelli’s political thought within the republican tradition.
23. Machiavelli pays the obligatory lip service to the prejudices of the ottimati to whom the Discourses are dedicated when he denounces the role of the Gracchi in the collapse of the republic (D I.37). He adds, however, that the patricians would have destroyed Roman liberty long before that point had it not been for pro‐plebeian, anti‐patrician efforts precisely like the Gracchi’s legislative agenda. Moreover, his ultimate judgement on the Gracchi is that one should praise their ‘intention’ more than their ‘prudence’ (D I.37). Machiavelli speaks abstractly in terms of the need to temporize rather than legislate in such circumstances. But the implication of the line preceding this is that the grandi will eventually share offices with plebeians, but will never, without extraordinary violence, share their property with the plebeians (even if they’ve appropriated it from the latter in the first place). The imprudence of the Gracchi may have been their belief that property can be redistributed through legislation alone. Martin Luther King, it might be noted, was not assassinated while championing voting rights, but only once he endorsed the Poor People’s Manifesto.
24. In a note, Rousseau, quite curiously, seems to contradict himself: he depicts Rome as ‘a genuine democracy’ whose transformation into the tyranny of the emperors was generated by aristocratic corruption (SC III 10, 107, n). On the ‘Machiavellian’ possibilities pregnant in this contradiction, see Miller Citation1984: 68–69. Nevertheless, Rousseau still manages to criticize the tribunes rather than, like Machiavelli, exonerate them in this passage.
25. In particular, Florentine ‘civic humanism’ or ‘civic republicanism’, which emphasized socially holistic rather than class‐ or guild‐contestatory notions of citizenship often served to legitimate Florence’s more oligarchic republics. See Hankins 2000: 75–178. This fact seems lost on many contemporary political theorists and intellectual historians who study and attempt to revive it today. For criticisms of such intellectual efforts and/or the programmatic uses to which it is put: see Sunstein Citation1988: 1539–1590; Patten Citation1996: 25–44; Jurdjevic Citation1999: 994–1020; and McCormick Citation2003: 615–643. Also consult Eric Nelson’s (Citation2004) often‐surprising excavation of the interplay of political and social inequality in the history of republicanism.