Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict

430 Pages·2017·2.661 MB·English

by  David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, Camila Vergara

Machia velli on Liberty and Conflict

Machia velli on Liberty and Conflict
Edited by
David Johnston,
Nadia Urbinati, and
Camila Vergara
The University of Chicago Press
chicago and london
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations
in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of
Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN- 13: 978- 0-2 26- 42930- 4 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0-2 26- 42944- 1 (e-b ook)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226429441.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Johnston, David, 1951– editor. | Urbinati, Nadia, 1955–editor. | Vergara,
Camila (Political scientist), editor. | Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in
America, host institutions.
Title: Machiavelli on liberty and confl ict / edited by David C. Johnston, Nadia
Urbinati, and Camila Vergara.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes
index. | Papers from a conference held 6-7 December 2013 at the Italian
Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University to mark the fi ve-
hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Prince.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016028711 | ISBN 9780226429304 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780226429441 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1469–1527—Congresses. | M achiavelli,
Niccolo, 1469–1527. Principe—Congresses. | Machiavelli, Niccolo,
1469–1527. Principe—Congresses. | Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1469–1527—
Infl uence—Congresses | Republics—Philosophy—Congresses. | Political
science—Philosophy—Congresses.
Classifi cation: LCC JC143.M4 M3225 2017 | DDC 320.0111—dc23 LC record available
at https://lccn.loc.gov1201602871 1
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48– 1992 (Permanence
of Paper).
Contents
Introduction 1
David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara
Part One: Between Antiquity and Modernity
1. Machiav elli on Necessity 39
Harvey C. Mansfield
2. Machia velli on Good and Evil: The Problem of Dirty
Hands Revisited 58
Giovanni Giorgini
3. Machiav elli and the Critics of Rome: Rereading
Discourses I.4 87
Gabriele Pedullà
4. Machia velli, “Ancient Theology,” and the Problem of
Civil Religion 113
Miguel Vatter
Part Two: The Prince and the Politics of Necessity
5. Machia velli and the Misunderstanding of Princely Virtù 139
Quentin Skinner
6. The Necessity to Be Not-G ood: Machia velli’s Two Realisms 164
Erica Benner
7. Loyalty in Adversity 186
Stephen Holmes
v
vi contents
8. Machia velli and the Modern Tyrant 207
Paul A. Rahe
Part Three: Class Struggle, Financial Power, and
Extraordinary Authority in the Republic
9. Machia velli and the Gracchi: Republican Liberty
and Class Confl ict 235
Benedetto Fontana
10. Machiav elli, the Republic, and the Financial Crisis 257
Jérémie Barthas
11. Extraordinary Accidents in the Life of Republics:
Machiavelli and Dictatorial Authority 280
Marco Geuna
Part Four: Machia vellian Politics beyond Machiav elli
12. The Reception of Machiav elli in Contemporary
Republicanism: Some Ambiguities and Paradoxes 309
Jean-F abien Spitz
13. On the Myth of a Conservative Turn in Machia velli’s
Florentine Histories 330
John P. McCormick
14. Political Imagination, Confl ict, and Democracy:
Machiavelli’s Republican Realism 352
Luca Baccelli
15. “Armi proprie e improprie” in the Work of Some
Representative Italian Readers of the Twentieth Century 373
Michele Battini
16. What Does a “Conjuncture- Embedded” Refl ection Mean?
The Legacy of Althusser’s Machiav elli to Contemporary
Political Theory 399
Marie Gaille
Contributors 415
Index 417
Introduction
David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara
Centenaries come unsolicited, but their celebrations are carefully de-
vised. Celebrations of anniversaries of events, authors, and works
are representative of the times, and places, in which they occur. Celebra-
tions of anniversaries acquired momentum along with the establishment
of the nation-s tates in the nineteenth century. This was particularly true
in Italy, as the work of the great authors of the past had been for centu-
ries the only or most visible monument of the unity of the country. In
the age of the Italian Risorgimento, Niccolò Machia velli became an em-
blem of national unifi cation in an explicitly intended way. In 1859, the
provisional government of Tuscany initiated the process of annexation to
the newly born Kingdom of Italy “by decreeing a new and complete edi-
tion of Machiav elli’s works.” Its decision provoked a harsh reaction from
the French government (opposing Italian unifi cation for strategic reasons),
which expressed its “indignation” at the fact that the new Italy was glo-
rifying “a monster of perfi dy” (Villari 1878, I:v– vi). Hence Felix Gilbert
wrote that “Machiav elli’s teachings are so rich that in them each succeed-
ing century can fi nd answers for the political issues which are its main
concern, and the myth of Machia velli can grow and vary without losing
contact with the personality which inspired it” (1953, 137). The intersec-
tion between Machia velli’s texts and the men and women who read and
used them through the centuries has prompted a variety of dissenting in-
terpretations, so that Machia velli could and still can be used to serve the
ideology of the “man of providence” and to sponsor a civic and republican
conception of liberty that would also be able to justify tyrannicide and re-
volt. Moreover, his Florentine Histories have inspired socialists and theo-
rists of class confl ict by asserting a direct association between wealth and
dishonesty to the point of declaring property to be theft and identifying its
1
2 David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara
concentration in the hands of a few wealthy and powerful people a reason
for discord and, fi nally, the death of political liberty.
The 2013 anniversary of The Prince has been thus an excellent oppor-
tunity to examine critically and at length Machia vellian studies through
both the reconstruction of the historical foundations and meanings of
Machia velli’s texts and the legacy of Machiav elli’s thought in contempo-
rary interpretations of liberty and political power. This anniversary comes
after some other, similar celebrations and a hugely authoritative and rich
tradition of scholarship on Machia velli, humanism, and the Renaissance
that dates back at least to the sixteenth century. It may thus be useful to
situate the Columbia celebration within the broader historical context of
previous celebrations. We shall begin with events that were held in the
years of the unifi cation of Italy. We know of course that Machia velli’s
thought shaped generations of thinkers and political leaders well before
the nineteenth century. The Prince—which exiled Italians for reason of
religious persecution translated into Latin in the sixteenth century, thus
facilitating its circulation—had an immediate impact on the European Re-
formers and the English Revolution. It inspired the renaissance of modern
materialism in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, cir-
culating as a clandestine text among the French “libertines” and illumi-
nating the debates on reason of state, tacitism, and the construction of
modern sovereignty up to the American founders, the French revolution-
aries, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment, both in its Scottish and
its French branches. The Prince was revered by Jean- Jacques Rousseau as
a republican text unveiling the nature of tyranny to the people, and He-
gel hoped for a new Theseus of the German nation in an explicit praise of
Machia velli’s vision of the role of state founders. Machia velli and Machia-
vellism (and anti-M achia vellism) constitute the weave of political history
and the political thought of modern and contemporary world history.
Aware of this enormous body of thought, we designed our introduc-
tion consciously to be limited to the academic scholarship within the
“celebratory” tradition that started together with the construction of the
nation-s tate. This book is the outcome of a celebration of the fi ve hun-
dredth anniversary of The Prince at Columbia University and thus part
of that celebration tradition. We would like to thank the Italian Academy
for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, the Embassy of Italy in
Washington, DC, the Columbia Seminar on Studies in Political and Social
Thought, the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and
the Heyman Center for the Humanities for their support of this confer-
ence, which was held on December 6 and 7, 2013, at the Italian Academy
Introduction 3
for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. We also express appreciation
to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at Colombia University. We
also express appreciation to the Schoff Fund at the University Seminars at
Columbia University. Most of the material in this book was presented to
the University Seminar on Studies in Political and Social Thought.
I
The 1869 celebration of the quatercentenary of Machiav elli’s birth was a
starting point in the “celebratory” tradition, which oriented interpretation
and scholarship in a durable manner. That celebration coincided with the
fi nal stage of the Italian Risorgimento, as the geographical unifi cation of
the peninsula had been perfected in 1866 and its capital city was estab-
lished in Florence, which is geographically situated between Turin (Pied-
mont’s city center and the original site of the House of Savoy) and Rome
(which until 1870 was part of the Papal States). Florence was a symbolic
city both for the country and for Machiav elli. To the Italians of the age of
the Risorgimento, the political meaning of Machia velli was imbued with
a strong patriotism, albeit consciously inscribed within an ideal horizon
that was European, not nationalist. After Greece had attained indepen-
dence from the Ottoman Empire, Italy and Germany were the two large
countries of the continent that brought to completion their unifi cation in
the second half of the century. In Italy, furthermore, the Risorgimento was
a process both of independence and of unifi cation—thus all in all, in 1869
the country of Machiav elli represented a full actualization of chapter 26
of his Prince, and the promoters of the celebrations were fully aware of it.
It is fair to say that the nineteenth century marked the renaissance
of scholarship on Machia velli and early modern Italian history, both of
which the committee for the quatercentenary celebrations conceived as
essential chapters in a truly European political history. The 1869 cente-
nary occurred in an age in which the postimperial order whose inception
Machia velli had already detected was almost accomplished, as territo-
rial states were covering almost the entire continent. The national basis
of state legitimacy, the construction of educational institutions, the birth
of historical studies as an academic and autonomous discipline, and the
“business” of the celebrations of great authors and works of the past were
part and parcel of a broader endeavor that had the nation-s tate at its core.
For all these historical and ideological reasons, the celebrations were a
starting point that prompted a remarkable work of search, collection, anal-
ysis, and publication of Machiav elli’s papers, most of which were placed