McCormick - Subdue the Senate

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directly exercise rule. As he states: It was fitting that the plebs had hope of gaining the

consulship and that they actually attained it (I.60, emphasis added). Opening the consulship to

plebeians allowed republics like Rome, in Machiavellis eyes, to avail themselves of virtue

wherever it resides, among both the nobles and the ignobles (D I.30). Republics like Sparta,

Venice, and even Florence, which fail to arm the plebeians, and to elevate them to high

command, can never fully tap into popular virtue, whether military or civic.

Ironically, sharing certain affinities with the Straussian literature, many contemporary,

self-styled radical democrats, also suggest that Machiavelli was opposed to the people

themselves collectively exercising rule.

ix

Inspired by Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin and/or

Jacques Rancire,xcontributors to this literature express hostility to both the notion of rule by

the people and to legal/institutional approaches to democracy. The people, such scholars aver,

should act as agents of contestation against the forces of rule (i.e., powerful economic and state

actors) but should not themselves rule; doing so would render their actions somehow ethically

impure and practically self-defeating. It would, in fact, signal a cooptation of the people into the

matrices of power, a neutralization of their primordially good, spontaneously expressed political

vitality. Moreover, institutional or constitutional analyseseven reform proposals that empower

direct popular judgment and ruleare woefully insufficient or downright counterproductive:

institutions and laws, on this view, inevitably serve oligarchic and almost never democratic ends.

Democratic moments are simply too rare and uncontainable to be formally regularized in law.xi

As I have demonstrated more extensively elsewhere, Machiavelli did not adhere to no-

rule as the normative standard of popular government.xii

In the Discourses, Machiavelli

recommends that the people wield not only the following negative claims on rule accentuated by

these radical interpreters: publicly and collectively protesting the senatorial order, and


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tyranny: tyrants will cut to pieces the fewin other words, they will dismember, un-member the

few from their exalted status; furthermore, they will divide up and distribute the nobilitys great

wealth among the people. In other words, prudent tyrants like Agathocles and Clearchus, unlike

imprudent ones like Appius, will endeavor to make the grandi piccoli.

Machiavellis example of Pacuvius offers readers an instructive metaphor for the

appropriate place of elites within republics: The nobles must be confined within their official

chamberthat is, their oppressive behavior must be publicly contained, restricted,

circumscribed. Whether the grandi continue to enjoy the relatively safe incarceration of office or

actually lose their lives is a question that virtuous magistrates are wise enough to put to the

formal judgment of the people. But the people themselves, Machiavelli insists, should decide

ultimately whether a senate house is to serve as a fairly comfortable penitentiary or something

more approximating an abattoir.


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ends than did participants within in the aristocratic, Roman and Florentine republican traditions.

v. The radically democratic spirit of Machiavellis political philosophy was clearly

recognized by twentieth century Marxist and post-Marxist theorists on the continent, especially,

Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Claude Lefort. Such thinkers translated Machiavellis

ideas concerning the struggle between the humors of the great and the people in terms of

capitalist class conflict; they noticed an important affinity between Machiavellis prince and

the party vanguard who purportedly would lead the people to socio-economic liberation; and/or

they appropriated for contemporary circumstances Machiavellisdepiction of politics as a

strategic game in which actors negotiate a field of myriad opposing forces. However, perhaps

due to the powerful legacy of reason of state on the continent, the state, a concept that

Machiavelli never really deployed, became for this literature an unproductive ide fixe.

Moreover, seemingly bewitched by orthodox illusions of eliminating elites or overcoming rule

altogether, authors in this tradition consistently failed to revive or elaborate anew the institutional

means through which Machiavelli intended the common people to realize civic liberty; that is, to

rule themselves and control socio-economic and political elites. See Antonio Gramsci, The

Modern Prince (1925), in The Modern Prince and Other Writings, trans. L. Marks

(International, 1959) 135-88; Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us (1972), ed. F. Matherson;

trans. G. Elliott (Verso, 2001); and Claude Lefort, Writing: The Political Test, trans. D. A. Curtis

(Duke 2000).

vi. Machiavelli refers to Agathocles virt di animo e di corpo, and, more simply, la

virt di Agatocle (P 8). On the ambiguities of Machiavellis assessment of the Syracusan

tyrant, see Victoria Kahn, Virt and the Example of Agathocles in MachiavellisPrince,

Representations 13 (Winter 1986) 63-83.


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vii. See John P. McCormick, Machiavelli and the Gracchi: Prudence, Violence and

Redistribution, Global Crime 10, no. 4, (November 2009) 298305.

viii. See Harvey C. Mansfield. Machiavelli's Virtue (Chicago, 1996) 251. Furthermore,

Vickie Sullivan notes, with unrestrained glee, Machiavellis devilish delight in exposing and

ridiculing the peoples supposed credulity in similar circumstances where elites apparently

manipulate them. See Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal

Republicanism in England (Cambridge, 2004) 53. For the masters own suggestion that

Machiavelli does not, appearances to the contrary, exalt the peoples judgment over that of the

nobles, see Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL, 1958) 137.

ix. Proponents of this view include: Miguel E. Vatter, Between Form and Event:

Machiavellis Theory of Political Freedom(London, 2000), Filippo Del Lucchese, Conflict,

Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation (London, 2009), and

Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian (Cambridge,

2011).

x. Arendts idiosyncratic translation of the ancient Greek term, isonomia, or legal

equality, as no-rule is the intellectual genesis of contemporary radical democratic theory in

its recent agonistic, post-Marxist, post-modern, or poststructuralist forms. See Arendt, On

Revolution (London, 1965) 30-31. Wolin conceives of democracy as an existential moment

rather than a political regime; and Rancire insists that democracy cannot be realized in any

institutional form but rather manifests itself most robustly in the peoples fervent, intransigent

opposition to the state. See Sheldon S. Wolin, Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of

Democracy, in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy,

Eds. J. Peter Euben, John Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca, 1994) 29-58; Wolin, Fugitive


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Democracy, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting Boundaries of the Political, Ed. Seyla

Benhabib. (Princeton, 1996) 31-45; and Jacques Rancire, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve

Corcoran (London, 2007).

xi. Among the unfortunate results of the radical appropriation of Arendts reading of

democratic Athens is, for instance, Wolins and Ranciresinsistence that apportionment of

public offices through lottery was the realization of no-rule, rather than an attempt by the

Athenian demos to distribute rule much more widely than do non-democracies; i.e., rather than

serving as a non-institution that defies the principle of rule as such, the distribution of

magistracies through lottery actually institutionalized the democratic principle to rule and be

ruled in turn. See Wolin, Norm and Form, 43; andRancire, Hatred of Democracy, 41, 54.

xii. See McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, chaps. 3-5.

xiii. Perhaps the simplest refutation of the attempt by Vatter, Del Lucchese and

Abensour to sharply separate popular contestation of authority from concrete popular rule is

Machiavellis own insistence that: all the laws made in favor of freedom arise from the disunion

between the popolo and the grandi (D I.4, emphasis added). Throughout the Discourses,

Machiavelli describes laws as concrete instantiations of hard won democratic gains--always

necessary for libertys attainment, but by no means permanently sufficient for its preservation.

Such gains are secured and expanded by further popular contestation, by greater apportionments

of formal governing power to the people and by additional legal enactments conducive to liberty

in the future. Put simply, Machiavelli did not, as the radical democratic literature too often

does, confuse popular government with anarchy.

xiv. Scholars associated with the so-called Cambridge School ofintellectual history

tend to interpret Machiavelli as advocating a balance between the people and the nobles within


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McCormick - Subdue the Senate