Machiavelli Against Republicanism

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Machiavelli against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School's "Guicciardinian Moments" Author(s): John P. McCormick Source: Political Theory, Vol. 31, No. 5 (Oct., 2003), pp. 615-643Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3595689Accessed: 04-03-2015 20:15 UTC

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MACHIAVELLI AGAINST REPUBLICANISM On the Cambridge School's "Guicciardinian Moments"

JOHNE McCORMICK University of Chicago

Scholars loosely affiliated with the "Cambridge School " (e.g, Pocock, Skinne; Wroli, and Pettit) accentuate rule of law, common good, class equilibrium, and non-domination in Machiavelli's political thought and republicanism generally but underestimate the Florentine 's preferencefor class conflict and ignore his insistence on elite accountability. The author argues that they obscure the extent to which Machiavelli is an anti-elitist critic of the republican tradition, which theyfail to disclose was predominantly oligarchic. The prescriptive lessons these scholars draw from republicanism for contemporary politics reinforce rather than reform the "senatorial," electorally based, and socioeconomically agnostic republican model (devised by Machiavelli 's aristocratic interlocutor, Guicciardini, and refined by Montesquieu and Madison) that permits common citizens to acclaim but not determine government policies. Cambridge School textual interpretations andpractical proposals have little connection with Machiavelli 's "tribunate," class-specific model of popular government elaborated in The Discourses, one that relies on extra-electoral accountability techniques and embraces deliberative popular assemblies.

Keywords: Machiavelli; republicanism; Cambridge School; Skinner; Pocock; Pettit; elitism

INTRODUCTION

Republicanism, in ancient and modern political theory and practice, guar- antees the privileged position of elites more than it facilitates political participation by the general populace (Nippel 1980, 1994; Molho et al. 1991). I argue that this fact is obscured by scholars associated with the most influen-

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This essay was presented at the American Political Science Association meeting, SanFrancisco (September2, 2001); theRemarqueInstitute, New York University (Sep- tember 21, 2001); and the Department of Political Science, University of Chicago (December 13, 2001). For comments and criticisms, I thankEeterBreiner, Bob Dahl, Tony Judt, Jacob Levy, Bernard Manin, Patchen Markell, John Padgett, Jennifer Pitts, John Pocock, Jerry Seigel, Ian Shapiro, Carl Shaw, Quentin Skinner, Susan Stokes, Nathan Tarcov, Iris Marion Young, Alex Wendt, and two anonymous reviewers for Political Theo.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 31 No. 5, October 2003 615-643 DOI: 10.1177/0090591703252159 C) 2003 Sage Publications

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616 POLITICAL THEORY / October 2003

tial approach to the study of classical and early-modem republicanism, the so-called Cambridge School. The classical model of republicanism-from Aristotle to Cicero in theory, from Sparta to Rome in practice-assigns specific institutions or particular functions to the general or poorer segments of the population who govern alongside of, or subserviently to, aristocratically dominated offices and bodies. The modem form, perhaps best represented by Guicciardini and Madison, permits the populace at large to select which- almost invariably wealthy and notable-magistrates will rule over them. The latter form is often identified as the forerunner of representative, liberal, or mass democracy, and even-with proper disassociation from ancient, more "direct" examples-democracy, as such. Theorists such as Pareto (1987), Michels ([1911] 1990), Mosca ([1896] 1980), and Schumpeter (1942) rel- ished the persistence of elite domination over the general populace in modem democracy; more progressive theorists like Dahl (1990) and Przeworski (1999) seem to be resigned to it. The republican-inherited "minimalist" crite- rion of popular government generally agreed upon by both sets of democratic theorists-namely, periodic selection of public officials for specific terms of office by the general populace-seems insufficient for contemporary democratic theory and practice.' Critics point out that the primarily electoral conception of popular government does not succeed at keeping elites accountable and responsive to the general public (see Bachrach 1967; Habermas 1973; Shapiro 2001).

Scholars of republican political thought associated with the Cambridge School, such as Pocock (1975), Skinner (1998), Viroli (1998), and Pettit (1999), often use insights derived from their historical and theoretical research in an attempt to inform, enhance, and broaden contemporary political theory and practice.2 They admirably show us what contemporary liberal democracy, whatever commonalties it shares with republicanism, lacks in contrast with the latter tradition: for example, the expression of a non-xenophobic patriotism, attention to the common good, emphasis on duties as opposed to rights, and the importance of more substantive political participation (e.g., Viroli 1997; Skinner 1978; Pocock 1985; Pettit 2001).3 However, on the basis of what follows, I implore these scholars to desist in such endeavors. Because of the traditional oligarchic tendencies of republicanism I plead with them, and those influenced by them, to reconsider the use of the term and cease in the attempt to supplement contemporary democracy with insights from that tradition (see Ackerman 1991; Habermas 1996; Sandel 1996; Sunstein 2001). I am convinced that republicanism, unless reconstructed almost beyond the point of recognition, can only reinforce what is worst about contemporary liberal democracy: the free hand that socioeconomic and political elites enjoy


McCormick / MACHIAVELLI AGAINST REPUBLICANISM 617

at the expense of the general populace. The grounds for my plea are based on conceptual analysis and historical examples, and my greatest resource in this effort is the work of an intellectual figure very dear to the Cambridge School scholars of republicanism mentioned above: Niccolo Machiavelli.4

I have argued elsewhere (McCormick 2001) that Machiavelli is an unac- knowledged compromise between minimalist or elitist theorists of democracy, on the one hand, and more idealist, participatory theorists, on the other (e.g., Barber 1990; Sandel 1996). Importantly, I understand this compromise to be, as it were, a better deal for egalitarian democrats than what is generally offered by elitist, minimalist, republican, and/or substantive democrats. Machiavelli conceded that socioeconomic elites will very likely attain most of the positions of political power even in the most popularly inclusive regimes, but he also shows that the general populace can render these elites more accountable than do the simple electoral standards and mechanisms that liberal democracy has inherited from republicanism. On these and other grounds, I have argued that Machiavelli's populist theory of holding elites to account is closer to a more egalitarian democratic than to a traditional republican theory: unlike the latter theory of popular government, which is largely acclamatory, Machiavellian democracy is both participatory and contestatory.

Beyond conventional republican principles and practices, in Book I of The Discourses, Machiavelli advocates procedures for the popular indictment of officials, judgment by the people on certain kinds of legal cases, and the establishment of class-specific advocacy institutions; praises the people gathering collectively in deliberative bodies; and, generally, interprets Roman representative institutions in more democratic ways (e.g., 1.4,1.5,1.7, 1.44,1.57). These practices and institutions may seem superficially consonant with republicanism, but, as I will elaborate below, the latter had always pre- scribed a much more narrow role for the populace in republics or "mixed regimes"-at least too narrow to warrant association with Machiavelli and to render republicanism a resource for contemporary progressive politics. Thus, while we owe republican interpreters of Machiavelli a tremendous debt of gratitude for calling into question narrowly "tyrannical" or "immoralist" interpretations of the great Florentine, their inattention to the inherent elitism of traditional republicanism and the steadfast anti-elitism of Machiavelli's political thought renders their attempts to improve the contemporary theory and practice of popular government wanting and even harmful. Before dem- onstrating this, however, I would like to reinforce some of the provisional claims made above.



MACHIAVELLI, REPUBLICANISM, AND DEMOCRACY

If one thinks along the lines of less descriptive terms like "popular government" or "representative government" the continuity between republicanism and minimalist democracy is apparent: there are inherent elitist dimensions to each. In traditional republicanism, aristocrats are assigned specific political tasks that supposedly complement but usually supersede those reserved for poorer and lower born segments of the populace. It is, so to speak, aristocracy combined with democracy but with the latter assuming a decidedly subordinate position. Modem minimalist democracy may be understood in starkest Schumpeterian terms as competitive oligarchy, that is, the selection by the general populace of which set of elites shall rule over, or in at least the narrowest functional sense, "represent," them (see Pitkin 1990). Madison is, of course, the intellectual conduit for the transition from traditional to modem popularly constrained oligarchy, or from republicanism to minimalist democracy. Madison famously defines republicanism in terms of representative government (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay [1788] 1998, no. 10) and "the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity" (Madison, Hamil- ton, and Jay [1788] 1998, no. 63).

Thus, merely a few generations before "democracy" would reappear on the Western political horizon, Madison had already precluded from the democratic agenda what was a feature of more popularly inclusive republics, namely, some direct institutional embodiment of popular expression such as an ombudsman, or tribunate, or an unbiased method for selecting public officials, such as lot.5 Madison's rationale was not quantitative but qualitative: it was not the scale of modern regimes that necessitated representation in his logic but rather the assumption that elections would produce the "best" statesmen. As Manin (1997) has demonstrated, the aristocratic character of elections and the abandonment of the more egalitarian practice of lotteries entailed the pacification of modern democracy before its triumph. To be sure, Madison was less elitist than most of his American contemporaries (Pocock 1975, 520). Nevertheless, at his prompting, democracy, representative democracy, by forgoing any direct or unbiased expression of the general populace, would allow elites as much or perhaps even more free reign than did traditional republicanism, which reserved ex ante special offices or tasks for them. As we will see below, Madison could achieve the elitist results desired by Machiavelli's aristocratic-republican contemporary, Francesco Guicciardini, without the overtly elitist, formal restrictions on the general populace's participation in politics.

Machiavelli wanted to constrain or patrol elites in a manner more radical than this, such that his political theory is more populist and anti-elitist than



what passes under the name of either republican or democratic theory today. Machiavelli is not guilty of the idealism of direct, participatory, or substantive democrats who think that popular control solves all problems, and who eschew confrontation with the challenging "iron law of oligarchy": Machiavelli concedes that elites, socioeconomic and political-often combined-will emerge through even the most populist political arrangements. Nor, however, is Machiavelli guilty of the negligence of minimalist democratic theorists who, following Schumpeter, grant elites far too much leeway when acknowledging the inevitability of their rule. Here Machiavelli is by contemporary standards not a republican but rather, alternately, an elite-wary minimalist democrat or an elite-realistic participatory democrat. Thus, while there are reasons Machiavelli's politics might appropriately be called "republican" (that is, after all, the word he used), in fact, when compared with general connotations of the term, it proves to be something of a misnomer. According to historians of republican Rome (e.g., Nicolet 1980; Jolowicz 1967; Millar 1998), the Cambridge School intellectual historians of republicanism (e.g., Pocock, Skinner, and Viroli), and analytically inclined scholars of political representation (Manin 1997), post-Athenian popular government generally entails the selection, ratification, or arbitration of the elite by the people. But Machiavelli's conception of popular government in The Dis- courses (1997a) goes far beyond this model of popular participation. There- fore, drawing upon previous work, and on the basis of evidence provided below, I argue that Machiavelli's political theory is more fundamentally democratic than it is republican according to current conventional and scholarly understandings of either "republicanism" or "democracy."6

"CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL " INTERPRETATIONS OF MACHIAVELLI AND REPUBLICANISM

Pocock and the Guicciardinian Republican Model

John Pocock, while the least prescriptive of the "Cambridge School" scholars on whom I focus in this essay, nevertheless establishes the interpretive framework for understanding Machiavelli and republicanism that the other scholars mentioned will follow. In particular, this interpretative framework will shape their attempts to address contemporary issues in political theory, specifically, the deficiencies of liberal democracy. Pocock's (1975) magisterial The Machiavellian Moment argues that Renaissance polities and intellectuals sought to reconcile classical republican texts with both a Chris- tian worldview and the novel historical circumstances that confronted them:



Civic humanists posed the problem of a society, in which the political nature of man as described by Aristotle was to receive its fulfillment, seeking to exist in the framework of a Christian time-scheme which denied the possibility of any secular fulfillment. (P. vii)

The resulting theory of political stability, what I term republican existentialism, grappled with "the problem of the republic's existence in time" and proposed that a republican regime characterized by a governo misto was best suited to enduring and flourishing in human time (p. vii). From the standpoint of this political existentialism,7 Machiavelli, the theorist par excellence of fortuna and virtui, becomes something like the founder of modem popular regimes and their analysis. However, had Pocock accentuated social and institutional arrangements in the regimes and theorists that he studies over questions of political temporality and endurance, he might have more accu- rately titled the book The Guicciardinian Moment. After all, it is the elite- privileging republican model espoused by Machiavelli's younger contemporary and sometimes interlocutor, Francesco Guicciardini (Gilbert 1965), that eventually wins out and becomes the forerunner of modem liberal democracies. This recognized, the "Florentine republicanism" inherited by contemporary popular regimes perhaps ought to be much less celebrated by advocates of democratic government than it often is.

In Pocock's (1975) work, the theme of a republic's "temporal finitude," the fact that it was "finite and located in space and time," overwhelms the author's recognition of a major source of such finitude, class conflict, and the frank acknowledgment of the institutional means most often adopted in republicanism for dealing with it, aristocratically dominated popular regimes (pp. viii, 3). While I would never discount Machiavelli's innovative thoughts on political contingency (see McCormick 1993), I suggest that if we look beyond issues of republican existentialism, modem popular government is institutionally and socioeconomically much more Guicciardinian than Machiavellian. A major subtext ofPocock's book, never made explicit, is that the more egalitarian political models proposed by, for instance, Savonarola, Giannotti, and, especially, Machiavelli, lose out to the Guicciardinian model.

When read from this perspective, Pocock's work is particularly frustrating precisely because it provides ample evidence for such conclusions even if Pocock does not draw them himself. After all, Pocock does not ignore the issue of elites or of socioeconomically reflected institutional arrangements. For instance, he recounts beautifully Aristotle's theory of aristocratic elites, a theory that was in principle egalitarian because the aristocracy could con- ceivably entail the entire citizenry of a polity: Pocock (1975) points out that there were in Aristotle



a variety of categories recognized as forming elites of this sort: the good, the wise, the brave, the rich, the wellborn, and so on. But it is important to remember that such elites were in theory as many as the identifiable value-goals which men pursued, and that since every citizen had been defined as possessing his own value-priorities, there was in principle no citizen who did not belong to as many of these elites as he had chosen values for special emphasis. (Pp. 69, 73)

Of course wealth and pedigree tended to define what individuals from which families would count as elites in practice. Pocock's recounting of the notion of republican elites, or ottimati in the Italian context, bears this out, even if it distinguishes the wealthy and well-born, as such, from crude oligarchs. The latter, unlike genuine ottimati, would attempt to hold monopo- listic rule over a regime and prevent the poorer or lower born citizens from contributing anything at all to its governance: the ottimati were the

inner circle of influential Florentine families who considered themselves an elite and identified themselves with the few in the Aristotelian scheme [who] cannot exercise their natural function of leadership, or develop the virtues pertaining to it, unless there is a par- ticipant non-elite or many for them to lead. (Pocock 1975, 118-19)

With this in mind, Pocock (1975) recounts Florence's attempt, after the flight of the Medici in 1494, to establish and practice a more popularly inclusive republic, a governo largo, rather than an ottimati-dominated one, or what was known as a governo stretto:

The former clearly does not mean a constitution which extends citizenship to all or even to the popolo or "many" as a defined social group-the constitution of 1494 did not explicitly do that-but rather one which, by refusing to confine citizenship to an exactly defined (stretto) group among the inhabitants, acknowledges that civic participation is good, something that men aim at, that develops men toward goodness, that is desirable to extend to as many men as possible. (P. 118)

And to his credit, Pocock is forthright about the success of the ottimati, to whom Guicciardini but not Machiavelli belonged, at steering the republic in a more elite-dominated direction, one that culminated in the establishment of a senate that usurped virtually all the political functions previously performed by the more popularly inclusive Grand Council (p. 122, cf. p. 257).

Most strikingly, however, Pocock (1975) recounts Guicciardini's republicanism in ways that foreshadow the principal elements of minimalist or elitist democracy, even if he accepts at face value this noble's distinction of simple elitism from unjust oligarchy: Guicciardini's



bias in favor of a political elite is always explicit; but it is important to note that... there is an equally strong rejection, whether implicit or explicit, of formally closed oligarchy.... If authority is to be free it must be public; if it is to be public it must be impersonal; if it is to be impersonal than the group conferring it must be over a certain size. In his own words, if the foundation of liberty is popular government, at Florence the foundation of popular government is the distribution of magistracies and dignities by the Consiglio Grande. (P. 127)

Guicciardini conceived of popular government in an acclamatory or selective sense, one conducive to the popular selection of officers through intermediary organs, here the Great Council, much as liberal democracies would later use state legislatures or party conventions as such intermediary bodies. In Pocock's account, Guicciardini seems only more explicit about his anti- popular prejudices-prejudices that, for instance, Madison either prudently kept to himself or, being aware of the aristocratic effects of elections, never felt the need to consider publicly:

It seems fairly clear that Guicciardini's theory as regards both election and legislation rests upon an Aristotelian conception of decision-making by the many. Though not themselves capable of magistracy, they can recognize this capacity in others; though not themselves capable of framing or even debating a law, they are competent judges of the draft proposals of others. By excluding them from the functions they are to evaluate, the principle of impersonalization is secured. (P. 129)

Pocock (1975) reveals that the ottimati theorists, like Guicciardini, did not initially address themselves to the problem of temporality orfortuna because they considered themselves relatively secure in their positions (p. 156). But this observation brings an interesting dichotomy into view: the Guicciardinian institutional model that prevails historically is the one that was not formulated with the novel historical concept of temporality identified by Pocock in mind. The Guicciardinian republican model was not, appar- ently, most conducive to the theory of political contingency at the core of Pocock's book, namely, "the politics of time" (p. 183). Only after engagement with Machiavelli does Guicciardini himself take up republican existentialism (e.g., pp. 237, 251). Machiavelli, of course, argued that a more popularly inclusive regime could better withstand the political contingencies of fortune than elite-dominated regimes. But Pocock's account suggests that this intellectual exchange encourages Guicciardini to become even more exclusively elitist and, hence, vaguely oligarchic in his political orientation. Therefore, since Machiavelli's model of popular government (1) did not pre- vail historically and (2) did not affect the model that actually did-except to render it more elitist-I would ask, What's so "Machiavellian" about this moment?



If this exchange between Guicciardini and Machiavelli constitutes the "Machiavellian moment," then this instance amounts to something little more momentous than the occasion when the populist-republican shows the elitist-republican how to think about temporality-in response to which the elitist did not change his theory except to make it less like that of the populist theorist of political existentialism. In this spirit, Pocock concludes his first Guicciardini chapter with reflections on Machiavelli's subordinate class position in Florence. However, according to Pocock, these non-aristocratic origins purportedly inspire Machiavelli to launch an "intellectual revolution" only tangentially related to social class: a revolution over the temporality of mixed regimes and not one over with the way in which these regimes arrange class institutionally (Pocock 1975, 155). Indeed, at the book's conclusion, Pocock reduces Machiavelli's singular contribution to modem political theory to his development of a philosophy of history for modem political thought, and he ignores any of Machiavelli's insights into institutional design and class interaction (Pocock 1975, 503).

Along these lines, there are particular points in Pocock's interpretation of Machiavelli where he underplays the latter's profound anti-elitism. For instance, Pocock (1975) underestimates the extent to which Machiavelli would recommend eliminating the old nobility in a conquered territory (p. 164). He does not think through what might be the ramifications of Machiavelli's advice to princes to protect the people against the nobility in these circumstances (The Prince, IX)-something about which Machiavelli is more explicit in The Discourses (I.16): with the example of Clearchus, Machiavelli makes plain the advantages of securing oneself with the people by cutting to pieces the wealthy, either literally through murder or figura- tively through redistribution (see McCormick 2001, 298).8 In another instance, Pocock recounts how the Guicciardinian attempt to combine ottimati supremacy with aspects of governo largo dominated Machiavelli's milieu (pp. 185-86). But he does not take up how Machiavelli, given his class position and ideas, might have been trying to rearrange the balance in this scenario, especially considering that he assigns the "guardianship of liberty" to the people in The Discourses (1.5). Pocock does acknowledge The Dis- courses as a "democratic theory" of sorts (p. 212), but his understanding of popular prominence in such a theory seems to be confined to the crucial role of the "citizen soldier" in Machiavelli's thought-a role that is much more soldier than citizen in Pocock's rendering since he almost exclusively emphasizes popular inclusion in war-making not policy-making. Indeed, Pocock instructs us that Guicciardini's Dialogo is a direct response to Machiavelli's Discourses to the extent that it identifies virtue, not with the "armed many" but with the experience and prudence of the few. It would seem that, accord-



ing to Pocock, in addition to, or rather in conjunction with, Machiavelli's political existentialism, all that modem popular regimes inherited from the Florentine was the most unsavory characteristic of both the regimes and the theorist: their apparent militarism.

This is not to suggest that Pocock is sympathetic with or is somehow attempting to cover up the elitism of Guicciardini's republicanism. Rather, I argue that his somewhat idiosyncratic political existentialism thesis serves to confuse just what the actual legacy of Florentine republicanism is in modem popular government, elitism, and renders it difficult to recognize what is most promising about Machiavelli's potential contribution to our contemporary circumstances, a democratic anti-elitism. In defense of Pocock (1975), note his trenchant criticisms of Guicciardini's later writings, which are even less confident in the general populace than the early ones mentioned above:

Once the distinguishing quality of the leader ceases to be virtui and becomes esperienzia, [Guicciardini's] belief becomes less plausible, since esperienzia is an acquired characteristic which can be evaluated only by those who have acquired some of it themselves; and since a republic is not a customary but a policy-making community, there is little opportunity for the many to acquire experience of what governors do-a form of experience whose expression is not custom but prudence. (P. 234)

Pocock points out that since his earlier writings Guicciardini has learned that the selection of magistrates through elections as opposed to the practice of lot will favor the ottimati (p. 234). But Pocock still accepts Guicciardini's distinction between republican elitism and crass oligarchy-Guicciardini's "elitist model of government is at every point in the analysis a competitive meritocracy"-even if one that assuredly favors the rich (p. 248). Pocock points out that Guicciardini's "liberty is that of the elite to develop their virtiu to the full" (p. 235). The people's virtue consists not in actively defending the liberty of the regime against its own elite or against foreign enemies, as it does in Machiavelli's theory, but in passively confirming the virtue of the elite. To be sure, even in Machiavelli's understanding, elite lording over the people cannot be satisfying to the nobility if it is merely based on force, and so, in Hegelian terms, the master needs the recognition, and not just the com- pliance, of the servant:

Meritocracy necessitates a measure of democracy. The libertci of the few is to have their virtit acknowledged by the res publica; the liberta of the many is to ensure that this acknowledgement is truly public and the rule of virtii and onore a true one. (P. 253)



According to Guicciardini's model, the few express their need to dominate, and the many, in a rather passive and mechanical fashion, make sure that such domination only functions to the good of the regime.

In its actual functioning then, Guicciardini's republicanism somewhat foreshadows the workings of minimalist democracy. True, while lower houses typically have more power in contemporary democracies, in the aristocratic republican model the more populist governing institution, the Great Council, "is assumed incapable of initiating legislation" (Pocock 1975,255). But most discussion and debate are presumed to be the purview of the upper house in both models: in fact, Guicciardini excludes the Great Council "from all deliberazione, all framing and discussing of proposed legislation. It retains only the bare power of approvazione, of accepting or vetoing the proposals laid before it by smaller deliberative bodies" (Pocock 1975, 255). Foreshadowing Madisonian government, "the many" themselves are enlisted only for their effect on the elites and not for prospective insight provided by any perspective of their own-not even the passive cum active Machiavellian one of the need not to be dominated: Guicciardini "stressed their function of universalizing decision, of ensuring that it was free from corrupting particular interests. The role of the many was less to assert the will of the non-elite than to maximize the impersonality of government" (Pocock 1975, 255). This scenario has much more in common with the justifications for and workings of contemporary democracy than do impressionistic generalizations that identify Machiavelli as founder of modem constitutional arrangements, specifically, a commonplace view that attributes to Machiavelli's interpretation of the Roman Constitution the origins of the modem separation of powers.9

In terms that anticipate the oligarchic acclamatory democratic practices that the Italian elite theorists and, to a lesser extent, Weber ([1918] 1998; but cf. Breiner 1995) advocated, and critics such as Habermas ([1962] 1989) crit- icized, Pocock (1975) describes the core of Guicciardini's governmental ideal:

The elite shall display virtui before the eyes of the non-elite. It is for this reason that the deliberazioni of the few require the approvazione of the many, and he is strongly opposed to any attempt by the former to trespass on the province of the latter. (P. 255)

The people make their selection on the basis of visual display as opposed to a rational explanation. Ultimately, without recognizing it, Pocock quite suc- cinctly draws a conclusion from Guicciardini's later writings that would define the essence of modern democracy more than any conclusion one could draw from Machiavelli: "the identification of aristocratic with popular gov-



emrnment" (p. 253). And later in the work, in the midst of a discussion of eighteenth-century debates over republicanism in England, Pocock invokes Guicciardini in a way that presents him for what he is, the godfather of elitist democracy:

Guicciardini, the most aristocratically minded of Florentine republican theorists, had made it clear that the few needed the many to save them from corruption, and that when the many accepted the few as their natural leaders they did not cease to display critical judgment or active citizenship. (P. 485)

The problem, made patently clear in Machiavelli's theory and modem democratic practice, is that such patronizing and exclusionary first-order treatment of the electorate makes subsequent and sustained popular criticism and engagement very difficult and perhaps impossible. For elites to remain uncorrupt, or, in Machiavellian terms, if they are to be prevented from inevi- tably corrupting a regime, the people must engage them in a more active way, that is by substantively vying for power and resources with them. Ultimately, Pocock is most concerned with popular animism in international relations, that is, war, that helps a republic to better grapple with fortune and situate itself in time. Therefore, Pocock, like most scholars associated with the Cam- bridge School treated here, examines in only the most general terms domestic popular expressions of ferocity against the nobility and the institutional chan- nels that carried and sustained such expressions. As Machiavelli describes it, the former are usually appropriate responses on the part of the people to the nobility's unquenchable desire to dominate (e.g., 1.3,1.6, III. 11), and the latter include the veto, the accusations, and referenda (e.g., 1.5, 1.7, 1.8).

Skinner and Republican Liberty

Quentin Skinner is more prescriptive than was Pocock in his use of Machiavelli and the republican tradition to inform contemporary political concerns.10 And whereas Pocock associates the singularity of Machiavelli's populism with the prominence of the citizen solider in the latter's theory, Skinner devotes more attention to the domestic manifestations of this role. Unfortunately, this effort is still insufficient to accentuate Machiavelli's serious departures from the republican tradition and his potential as a resource for contemporary democratic theory. Skinner acknowledges the originality of Machiavelli's political thought with respect to social discord (Skinner 1981, 65-66; 1990, 130, 136). But he interprets this discord in terms of an "equilibrium" where equally dangerous motivations, those of the nobility and those of the people, are balanced. He often moves from a recognition of



the two different social types that Machiavelli identifies,popolo and grandi, to a discussion of only one type: selfish humans who, under the right political arrangements, might become virtuous citizens (Skinner 1983, 10-13). Skin- ner extrapolates a political theory of liberty on the basis of a social type that is characterized by the unsavory qualities that Machiavelli attributes to either the elite, in The Discourses, or mankind, generally, in The Prince, but only very seldomly, if ever, with the "people," as a class."1 In general, Skinner transforms Machiavelli's class-based political-sociology into a sociologi- cally agnostic one focused on abstract citizens.

In the first place, this mode of interpretation normatively equates noble and popular motivations in a very un-Machiavellian way (cf. 1.5, 1.46), and, second, it renders closed and docile the open-ended, dynamic, and "wild" quality of social discord described by Machiavelli in The Discourses (1.4). Machiavelli is only able to praise conflict in such a radical manner because he separates and perhaps privileges the motivations of the Roman plebs over those of the nobility. Machiavelli can recommend contention precisely because the people, as the "guardians of liberty," have the "honest" aim of wishing to avoid domination (1.5). Had Machiavelli formulated his political sociology in the manner that Skinner implies, that is, that the people are in essence as equally ambitious as the nobles, then the result would be the kind of intransigent and corruption-inducing factional conflict that Skinner rightly notes traditional and contemporary republicanism to have abhorred.

It is manifest in Book I of The Discourses that Machiavelli identifies exhi- bitions of popular ambition in Rome as a legitimate response to the far more unlimited and dangerous ambition of the nobles (McCormick 2001, 299- 300).12 It would not be until a later work, "Discourse on Florentine Matters" (Machiavelli [1520] 1997b), that Machiavelli seems to equate the ambitions of the people and the nobles as casually as Skinner wrongly insists that the Florentine does in the Discourses on Livy (Skinner 1981, 66). I will offer an explanation for why Machiavelli does so below when I turn to the work of Viroli. But regarding the use of the term and concept of equilibrium, Skinner is much closer to the Polybian view (Polybius 1979, 317-18) that Machiavelli attempts to radicalize. Skinner leaves underspecified the particular arrangements that ensure that the antagonistic noble-pleb relationship does not lead to the demise of Rome: he does not look beyond a summary description of the constitutional arrangement of consuls, senate, and tribunes-that Machiavelli lifted from Polybius-and he largely ignores how Machiavelli describes noble-pleb interactions within and without these institutions in practice-descriptions that often depart dramatically from Livy's histories.13 Thus, even though Skinner acknowledges that the dynamic among the different parts of Rome's constitutional arrangement entailed conflict in The Dis-



courses, because Skinner focuses on the aspects that are faithful to classical sources and not those that are less faithful, he misses just how innovative and energetic Machiavelli's socio-political contentiousness really is.

If Machiavelli had left the nobles and the people to find an "equilibrium" through the Polybianly described formal structures alone the result would have been one of two outcomes: on the one hand, aristocratic triumph and oligarchy or, on the other, popular triumph and Caesarism much earlier than it actually emerged. For Machiavelli, equilibrium, properly understood, is intense socioeconomic antagonism between classes that stops just short of one or the other party's recourse to a domestic or foreign military solution. The latter may indeed destroy the power of the opposing social class, but it also compromises the potential power of the party that enlists, for instance, a Caesar or King of France, to put down their opponent by force. An equilibrium of contest between plebs and grandi that stops short of this republican equivalent of "going nuclear," as Machiavelli describes it, can only be regu- lated through institutions and practices that Skinner largely ignores: the concilium, contiones, accusations, appeals, and attempts by the people to share in the spoils and offices held by the nobility, and so forth. Skinner men- tions accusations as institutional devices that minimize slander and hence inhibit the proliferation of factional strife (Skinner 1981, 71-72), but Machiavelli presents them primarily as means by which lesser citizens can chastise, expose, or bring down "great" ones (1.7). Hence Skinner puts a fairly typical Cambridge spin-accentuating the neutralization of conflict- on what is actually a Machiavellian inclination in The Discourses toward active, insubordinate, and impudent anti-elitism.

In his more prescriptive work, Skinner (1998, esp. 108, 110-12) draws on Machiavelli and republicanism to trace the rise and decline of a "neo-roman" notion of liberty in the history of Western political thought. He uses the term "neo-roman," rather than "republican," for this notion of liberty, because the former may be realizable under a monarchy, while the latter, by definition, generally could not (pp. 11, n. 31; 55, n. 174; 56, n. 176). For example, mixed government in the English republican model often made a place for a monarch whose power is mixed with aristocratic and bourgeois institutions. On the other hand, Machiavellian mixed government included a kingly element, rather than a monarch per se, although he concedes that people can live free under a prince given the proper conditions, as Skinner rightly points out (p. 54). Skinner characterizes neo-roman liberty as the ability of regimes and individuals to enjoy their existence and property without the actual intervention of another regime or person, and without arrangements that make a potential interference along these lines possible, whether it actually occurs or



not. Skinner has often associated this notion of liberty with Machiavelli (Skinner 1983 13, n. 9). On the contrary, classical liberalism only defines liberty in terms of the absence of actual interference, and so ignored the forms of dependence or subordination that living with the threat of arbitrary intervention entailed (Skinner 1998, ix-x; but see Holmes 1995, 13-41).

In an interesting footnote (Skinner 1998, x, n. 3), a remark pregnant with possible insights into Machiavellian democracy, its practices and its goals, Skinner notes how "strikingly prominent" is the language of roman liberty in Marx's analysis of capitalist socio-political relations. In fact, Marx is the greatest progenitor of the critique of structural power that should have been a resource for both Skinner's and, as we will see, Pettit's attempts to formulate an alternative to classical liberal notions of liberty-an alternative that does not also fall into the pitfalls of Berlin's positive-negative liberty dichotomy that both Skinner and Pettit criticize. Machiavelli, Marx, and the power critics have perhaps more in common with Skinner's and Pettit's goals than with the republicanism to which the latter are so devoted.

On a related note, a persistent problem in Cambridge historical and normative analysis is inattention to social domination, such that when Pettit finally tries to address it, his reliance on the republican tradition, seen through a Cambridge lens, seems inappropriate. Skinner's analysis of neo- roman liberty insists that this liberty was not, as some have argued, a goal exclusively reserved for free regimes and that it obtained for individuals as well. But the domination that Skinner shows republican intellectuals to be criticizing is almost always political and seldom social-most likely because of the prominence of absolutist-executive abuse of power in these debates (Skinner 1998, 17). To be sure, Skinner's neo-roman conception is available for application against illegitimate social hierarchies that either structurally or directly interfere with people's liberty. But it is not theorized as such except in an ambiguous gesture against Berlin at the very conclusion of Lib- erty before Liberalism (Skinner 1998, 119). Machiavelli certainly would have applied such a neo-roman notion of liberty against the theorists, such as Milton, Sidney, and Neville, who developed it and whose aristocratic and anti-populist leanings Skinner makes explicit (Skinner 1998, 32).

In short, largely due to his underspecifying of class conflict in Machiavelli, Skinner's conception of neo-roman liberty is noticeably weak on social domination. It mostly focuses on political domination: specifically, the way that subject-regimes and specific populations are treated by, respectively, imperial and absolutist rulers. But most economic inequality and social injustice do not fall into these categories. In The Discourses, Machiavelli, for his part, was concerned with domination of the people by



those of wealth and status, not just by tyrants. Machiavelli theorized remedies to subordination that do not conform with the enslavement or servitude examples that occupy Skinner (1998, 37). Noble domination of the people is not identical to that of master over slave, imperial power over subject city, or tyrant over oppressed people, and yet it is described with something approaching moral disapprobation by Machiavelli. Ultimately, Skinner uses Machiavelli to narrowly reduce the concept of domination to overweening rule by a tyrant and arbitrary sway over a subject city. But this seriously dis- torts Machiavelli's actual theory of liberty and diminishes the efficacious application of his theory to contemporary circumstances of injustice.

Viroli and the Equation of Popular and Elite Excess

Skinner's prominent protege, Maurizio Viroli, far surpasses his teacher in analyzing class relations in Machiavelli's political thought. In fact, no one's scholarship is so clearly motivated by affection and admiration for the great Florentine as is Viroli's, and this gives his work an intensity and insight rare among studies of Machiavelli representative of any interpretive stripe (see Viroli 2000). Viroli (1998) points out a tension in the Florentine's work between moments, on the one hand, where Machiavelli is in "full agreement" (p. 117) with the republican tradition and, on the other, where he is "hetero- dox" from that tradition (p. 126). While the latter approach to the thinker touches upon Machiavelli's populism, the former, much more dominant in Viroli's account, serves to thrust Machiavelli back into the conventional theory of mixed government that ultimately facilitates elite domination of the people. Viroli's work certainly sheds new light on the place of law, rhetoric, patriotism, and liberty in Machiavelli's thought (pp. 5-10; cf. Viroli 1990), but it also tends to underplay the ramifications of the latter's distinction between elites and the people.

Viroli recounts the two ways that republics were conceived as mixed gov- ernments in traditional republicanism: one entails "the rule of elective magistrates with limited tenure appointed by the sovereign body of the citizens.... Rulers are elected by the citizens and are bound by the laws of the city" (Viroli 1998, 117); the other arranges institutions in a way that "wisely combines the virtues of monarchy, aristocracy and popular government" (Viroli 1998, 117). In this context Viroli asserts that Machiavelli was "in full agreement with the tradition that I have outlined" (Viroli 1998, 117): specifically, Viroli demonstrates his adherence to the rule of law and mixed government. What this reading of Machiavelli as a "faithful" republican omits is the fact that the "tradition" often allowed different laws to apply to nobles and the



general citizenry and that the mixed quality of its institutional arrangements favored the nobility. In the "mix" of institutions, economic elites almost inev- itably wound up with agenda-setting, policy-forming, and law-enforcing capacities not available to the people. Most importantly, Viroli's approach overlooks the fact that these are two elements of republicanism that Machiavelli's Discourses specifically attempts to undermine: legal inequality and asymmetrical institutional arrangements. Machiavelli (1997a) lauds the attempt by the plebs to gain parity with the nobility, and he praises practices beyond the mere selection of magistrates or the simple balance among institutions by which the people kept Roman elites accountable (e.g., 1.4,1.5, 1.7,1.44,1.57; cf. McCormick 2001, 303-6). Also at odds with the traditional republican notion of the people's place in a socio-political "mixture," Machiavelli approves of pleb attempts to share in the wealth and honor of the nobility-so long as these attempts fall short of resorts to violence (1.37).

Viroli does go further than any Cambridge School scholar in explicating and evaluating Machiavelli's comparison and contrast of the Roman nobility and plebs (Viroli 1998, 124-25). But he understates Machiavelli's novelty when he expressly identifies the Florentine's idea of "well-ordered popular government" with Cicero's conception, according to which "each compo- nent of the city has its proper place" (Viroli 1998, 125). An obvious difference between Cicero's and Machiavelli's notions of the "proper place" of the people in their respective models of a well-ordered regime is that Cicero, the Roman senator, while praising the people interprets their place as subordinate to the nobility and senate (Cicero 2001,284-90), while Machiavelli, the Florentine citizen, ascribes the people an ascendant place over the former.14 Like Skinner, therefore, Viroli too readily equates the purported excesses of the people with those that Machiavelli quite definitively attributes to the nobility. In his interpretation of The Discourses, Viroli disproportionately weighs and inappropriately equates Machiavelli's evaluations of noble and popular motivations and actions. For instance, Viroli invokes Machiavelli's ultimate conclusion that noble ambition was the most dangerous force in Roman politics but concludes his evaluations by citing exclusively the few isolated incidents where Machiavelli chastises the people and their agents, the tribunes, for excessive ambition (Viroli 1998, 126).

Viroli most forcefully makes his case along these lines by drawing on the aforementioned "Discourse on Florentine Matters," Machiavelli's ([1520] 1997b) recommendations for reforming the Florentine republic (Viroli 1998, 125). In this text, Machiavelli does indeed specify the possibility that the people could gain too much power in a republic, thereby depriving the nobility of their proper role, and hence undermining the polity as a whole, and that they



had, in fact, done so in Florence on occasion, as had various oligarchic alli- ances, on occasion. Viroli (1998) recounts that in Florence, according to Machiavelli,

the people wanted completely to exclude the nobility from-the government in order to "be alone in the government." Whereas the desire of the Roman people to share the highest honors with the nobles was reasonable, that of the people of Florence was injurious and unjust. (P. 126, emphasis added)

However, Viroli does not consider that Machiavelli shows how the people in the Roman context had the opportunity to exclude the nobility on several occasions, only to defer to the latter when they recognized their own deficiencies (1.47, III.8). The people of Florence, on the contrary, seldom had the opportunity to actually exercise such power and subsequently exhibit such self-restraint because successive strata of Florentine nobility were notoriously jealous of their own power (see 1.39). Perhaps more seriously, Viroli makes no mention of the fact that the "Discourse on Florentine Matters" was solicited by Giulio de' Medici (Pope Clement VII) under whose authority the republic would be reorganized, and whose family, along with the other aristocratic families allied with them, ought not be offended if Machiavelli's plan is to have any chance of being implemented. Thus, in this particular instance, Machiavelli judges it best to attribute the same amount of blame to the people as he does to the Florentine ottimati for the traditional factional deficiencies of Florentine politics.

I cannot fully elaborate this interpretation here, but the following is worth considering. In contrast to The Prince, which is addressed to a Medici prince and contains the advice that the latter subordinate the nobility and elevate the people to secure a principality, "Florentine Matters" is addressed to a Medici oligarch who belongs to an elite class and who, unlike a prince, cannot be expected to turn against his class and form an easy alliance with the people in establishing an aristocractic republic. Nevertheless, the goals of the two works might be understood in tandem: The Prince is ostensibly helpful advice to a prince that actually blueprints the eventual supercession of a principality by popular government, while "Florentine Matters" is ostensibly useful advice for nobles who wish to more securely dominate a republic that in the end actually promotes a more popularly inclusive regime. One need not adopt the hermeneutic approach to Machiavelli set out by Leo Strauss and his students to consider these issues (see Strauss 1958; Mansfield 1979). Viroli, himself, has demonstrated Machiavelli's ties to the tradition of classical rhetoric.15 But in this instance, he does not pause to consider a crucial element of rhetorical analysis: the relationship among a speakers' intentions, their



words, and the specific audience to which the latter are addressed. Given the oligarchic addressee of these specific policy proposals, we should ask: why might Machiavelli place equal blame on the people and the aristocracy for the factionalism of Florentine politics? Especially since this assertion contra- dicts a central claim-perhaps the central claim-of Machiavelli's greatest work, The Discourses, a work that, we may assume, he intended for a fairly wide audience. In any case, Viroli's interpretation evens the playing field of political culpability in a very un-Machiavellian way, and seriously disrupts the balance of factional blame in Machiavelli's political sociology.16

Pettit and the Contestation of Elites

Philip Pettit (1999) has set forth the most ambitious effort to put republicanism in the service of contemporary democratic theory. But it is less than clear what his undeniably powerful recommendations really have to do with republicanism at all. Through a very complicated interpretation of the tradition, Pettit distinguishes non-interference from non-domination, the latter principle which he associates with republicanism. Similar to Skinner, with whom he engages extensively over these issues (Skinner 1998, 22-23, n. 67; 37, n. 114; 70, n. 27; 78, n. 46; 82; Pettit 1999, 27-37, 189, 285, 300-303), Pettit associates prohibitions against interference with liberalism and the broader, purportedly more robust, standard of non-domination with republicanism. Again, domination entails a status of subordination whether or not concrete intervention by the dominating agent occurs in actual fact: the mere threat of intervention is sufficient to invoke domination. But because Pettit intends for his insights to be more immediately and concretely practical than does Skinner, it is more disappointing that he takes virtually no account of the following: the domination that, according to ancient and even early modem republican theory and practice, the nobility was entitled and able to exercise over the general populace in republics (Molho et al. 1991, 135-354) and the domination that particular republics were permitted to exercise over other regimes, including other republics (Molho et al. 1991,565-640). In this light, non-domination seems a peculiar principle to derive from republicanism.

In addition, if one were to enlist Machiavelli in a reconstruction of republican theory, one would have to take into account that, as stated above, unlike conventional republican theorists he was dismayed by the former kind of social domination but that he endorsed, perhaps even more enthusiastically, the latter kind of imperial domination (e.g., 1.6). On the first point, the fundamentally mixed aspect of republican regimes, and the almost universal ascen- dancy of nobles within them, entails not only "interference" with the lives of the lower class of citizens but "domination" over them. The following cer-



tainly constitute domination in Pettit's sense: arbitrary power over the conditions under which citizens of lower birth may or may not stand for office, can or cannot choose magistrates, will be compelled to march off to war, are permitted to marry outside of their class, when the rules governing these spheres would be changed, and so forth.17

Pettit might respond that non-domination is a republican principle because it enlists the perspective of the general populace, not the nobility, in a mixed regime. This is, after all, the method that Machiavelli adopts in formulating something like a standard ofjustice in The Discourses: that is, he associates it with the people's desire not to be dominated. But I suggest that, consonant with most Cambridge approaches, Pettit misinterprets Machiavelli in such a way that the socioeconomic and institutional practices by which the people secure non-domination against the elite are neglected-practices, again, that I argue render Machiavelli a democrat and not a republican. In the end, Pettit comes around to advocating such Machiavellian means himself, associating them with his model of contestatory democracy (Pettit 1999,292-97; 2000). He theorizes contestatory practices such as judicial, tribunal, ombudsmen- like, multicameral, and localized institutions through which electorates and subsets of them might review or amend decisions of elected elites. Such institutions function in a manner reminiscent of the tribunes, the accusations, and the appeal in Machiavelli's account of ancient Rome. However, Machiavelli's democratic theory suggests that contestatory practices do not function well without accompanying participatory practices. Hence, the office of the tribunes was supplemented with the general populace's attempt to gain legislative power for themselves. As we will see, Pettit, because of his anxiety over majoritarian tyranny, accentuates contestation over participation.'8 In any case, the similarity between contestatory and Machiavellian democracy, in name as in spirit, raises the question for Pettit's efforts, why republicanism at all?

Under the influence of scholars such as Colish (1971), Guarini (1990), and, of course, Skinner (1981), Pettit emphasizes those passages in Machiavelli that accentuate the desire of the general populace to be left free from interference in their persons and property, as well as from the fear that they might be so interfered with (Pettit 1999, 28). Unfortunately, this literature focuses on the abstract "concept" of liberty in Machiavelli at the expense of attention to the specific means that Machiavelli declares necessary for the people to take up in order to secure this liberty. These means include compet- ing for office, establishing class-specific advocacy institutions, opening pro- cesses of appeals, creating opportunities for the condemnation of officials, and facilitating the meeting of the people in their collectivity (McCormick 2001, 303-6). Thus, what appears to be a passive disposition in the abstract



turns out to be a quite animated one in the concrete. According to The Dis- courses, the people are not only aggressive toward foreign enemies while serving in the military but aggressive against the nobility in the defense of their otherwise passive disposition not to be dominated.'9 This aggressive- ness manifests itself in extra-electoral accountability mechanisms aimed at magistrates, and efforts to share in the wealth and honor of senatorial families. But Pettit eschews the centrality of populism and participatory democracy to Machiavelli's political theory because he seems to associate these elements exclusively with radical Rousseauianism and the tyrannical majoritarianism to which it tends (Pettit 1999, 30). Yet "populist" seems to be an appropriate term for Machiavelli, given his designation of the people, as opposed to the nobility, as the "guardian of liberty" and the general anti-elitist spirit of his efforts to theorize how the people might successfully maintain such a position. Machiavelli's political theory, contra Pettit, was more participatory and populist than republicanism, generally, and, for that matter, than democracy as usually conceptualized today. On these grounds, Machiavelli's thought should give Pettit cause to ponder whether contestatory democracy would be effective or sustainable without participatory democracy.

Ultimately, Machiavellian democracy and the contestatory democracy that Pettit eventually formulates have much more in common than either have with republicanism, conventionally theorized and practiced. Pettit distinguishes contestatory democracy from merely electoral democracy, which, as I have suggested above, shares many of the same defects as its intellectual- political progenitor, republicanism. After invoking the tyranny of the majority that elective democracy may pose, Pettit raises the alternate problem of keeping elected elites accountable to the electorate:

Since [elections] only allow for a very loose control of the policies eventually pursued by government, they may fail to stop those elected to power from nurturing policies that fail to answer to particular interests or from pursuing policies in a way that doesn't answer to popular interests. The electorally democratic state may be an elective despotism; it may represent a tyranny of the majority or indeed a tyranny of this or that elite group. (Pettit 1999, 293-94)

Given the secure positions of the wealthy in liberal democratic regimes (see Shapiro 2000), Pettit's anxiety about a tyranny of the majority-or at least over what is relevant here, the majority against the rich-seems less appropriate than the opposite anxiety: that politics conducted primarily through elections decisively favors the autonomy of elites. Pettit (1999) continues:

Electoral standing gives the collective people the power of an indirect author in relation to governmental laws and decisions. They may not be the authors of what those in gov-



emment say and do but they determine who the authors shall be or at least who the overseers of the authors shall be. The problems just identified with electoral democracy stem from two sources: on the one hand, the fact that this authorial control is exercised collectively, so that minority voices may be ignored; and on the other, the fact that it is exercised indirectly, so that other factors may dictate what happens: in particular, factors that it is not in the common interest to empower. (P. 294)

Thus, the indirectness of strict electoral democracy allows the space for the discretion of political elites in the conduct of government and the intervention of socioeconomic elites into the political process. It is this space that both Machiavellian democracy and contestatory democracy seek to fill with mechanisms by which the disadvantaged, marginalized, or exploited might bring elites more directly to account (see McCormick 2001, 309-11).20

In the end, I would suggest that rather than the somewhat tortured extrapolation of a very fine-tuned distinction-non-interference versus non- domination-from the history of republicanism, Pettit might have drawn on the "power" literature in democratic theory, specifically, the analysis of structural, as opposed to direct, forms of domination that occupies many of the authors associated with it.21 It seems that this would have been a more helpful, reliable, and appropriate shortcut to Pettit's theory of contestatory democracy than the domination-tainted history of republicanism.

CONCLUSION

I conclude by summarizing how Cambridge scholars tend to misinterpret Machiavelli in ways that artificially emphasize his conformity with conventional republicanism: they underspecify class conflict in his theory with the result that they ignore the institutional means by which the people rendered elites responsive and held them to account; Cambridge scholars associate animated popular participation in Machiavelli's thought primarily with military conquest as opposed to domestic politics; they inappropriately equate his criticisms of the nobility with those of the people thereby undermining the prominent role that Machiavelli assigns to the people as "guardians of liberty"; they focus on his abstract definitions of liberty at the expense of Machiavelli's specific policy recommendations for how to maintain it; Cam- bridge scholars use Machiavelli to formulate a definition of liberty that is opposed to political oppression of various kinds but that is actually weak with respect to social domination; and they remain largely silent on the kind of domestic domination of the people by elites that was fully consonant with republican theory and very often perpetrated in republican practice.



The singular focus on the abstract concept of liberty and the purportedly passive political disposition of the general populace in Machiavelli's theory conforms with the selective, acclamatory, and "senatorial" quality of minimalist, elite-privileging democratic arrangements. But it overlooks the active, "ferocious" defense of popular liberty that is pursued through extra- electoral devices and practices in Machiavelli's "tribunate" reconstruction of ancient Rome-a social disposition and a set of political institutions with constructive implications for contemporary democratic theory and practice. More generally, the misinterpretations catalogued above yield two results: Machiavelli's outrage against social domination goes largely overlooked, and republicanism can be interpreted too easily as an anti-hierarchical political theory. As such, these interpretations are helpful for neither Machiavelli studies nor democratic theory. If inclined to such things, one might claim that the Cambridge School approach to Machiavelli has contributed to a certain ideological view of modem popular government, in which the latter exhibits a Machiavellian-populist veneer underneath which actually obtains a rather Guicciardinian-elitist structure. This would seem to heighten serious suspi- cions that Madisonian republicanism and subsequently liberal-democracy deliberately secure profoundly oligarchic results through practices that appear to be the most generally inclusive and formally egalitarian in history.

NOTES

1. Dahl (1971) is so dissatisfied by this state of affairs that he attaches a different name, polyarchy, to elite-dominated popular regimes; yet his minimalist formulation of popular government establishes rather robust standards for the conduct of elections and the social conditions under which they take place (see, respectively, Dahl 1990, 71-76, 84-89; 1989, 220-24). Przeworski once defined democracy in the very thinnest of terms: specifically, as a scenario where political losers accept the result of any procedure-electoral or not-for selecting political elites (e.g., Przeworski 1991, 10-12). With elections now firmly established as his baseline (Przeworski 1999), he has been exploring the feasibility of extra-electoral devices for controlling elites: see Manin, Przeworski, and Stokes (1999).

2. While there are subtle differences in these authors' individual understandings of republicanism (Buttle 2001), they all tend to distinguish the republican tradition from a liberal-democratic one. Sympathetic theorists Dagger, Ryan, and Miller (1997) attempt to combine republicanism and liberalism in the cause of a more progressive political theory generally, and see Bellamy and Castiglione (1996) in the contemporary context of European integration. I tend to follow Holmes (1995, 5-6) in conceiving modem republicanism and liberal democracy as continuous with each other, that the latter largely evolved out of the former. On the differences among discrete eras of republicanism, see Rahe (1992), and on the commercial aspect of modem republicanism, see Wooten (1994).

3. These authors successfully show that such aspirations have been associated with republicanism, in different places and at various times, but I will suggest that they have failed to render



them the definitive characteristics of republicanism. On the contrary, I define republicanism in terms of the institutional and sociological attributes of the governo misto or "mixed regime," which seem more uniformly identifiable with republicanism throughout history in both works of political philosophy and circumstances of political fact. Of course, more generally, the name "republic" has also been applied to any regime that is not a monarchy, or a regime that exists independent of foreign powers, or a regime that permits some form of "self-government." Apro- pos the latter sense of the term, I will show how the Cambridge School has been consistently insensitive to the inequitable way that, on the one hand, socioeconomic and/or political elites and, on the other, common citizens have been entitled to "govern themselves" in republican theory and practice. On the gender implications of this idealization of republicanism by the Cambridge School, see Springborg (2001). The classic statement of gendered issues of self- government or autonomy in Machiavelli and modem political thought is the recently repub- lished Pitkin (1999).

4. I draw specifically on The Prince (Machiavelli 1998), composed circa 1513 and published in 1532, and TheDiscourses (Machiavelli 1997a), composed circa 1513-19 and published in 1531. I cite these works with, where appropriate, book and chapter references in parentheses within the text.

5. On the evolution of democratic institutions and theory, see, respectively, Dunn (1993) and Held (1997).

6. Instead of unspecific notions of "populism" or "participation," I understand the current requirements of progressive democratic theory and democratic practice to consist in holding elites accountable and responsive by the general populace through an antagonistic spirit and concrete institutional techniques not confined to elections. Machiavelli puts greater store in both of these facets of"participation" than: (1) traditional republicanism, which gives wide latitude to socioeconomic and political elites; (2) minimalist democracy, which focuses narrowly on electoral politics; and (3) substantive democracy, which advocates not necessarily class-antagonistic participation for the overall health of a political culture. See McCormick (2001, 297, 309-11). With this particular emphasis on institutional techniques of elite accountability and responsive- ness my approach differs from earlier Marxian treatments of Machiavelli undertaken by, for instance, Gramsci ([1925] 1959) and Althusser ([1972] 2001). They emphasized, quite admirably, the importance of popular advocacy and anti-elitist class conflict in the great Florentine's work, but, perhaps bewitched by orthodox Marxist illusions of overcoming elites altogether, they did not adequately accentuate the institutional means of controlling the latter. Other tradi- tions of continental social and political thought, such as phenomenology and poststructuralism, have explored Machiavelli's populism and anti-elitism but again with a less specific focus on institutional accountability mechanisms than I have in mind in this article. See Merleau-Ponty ([1949] 1990), Lefort (2000), and Vatter (2000). The latter is indicative of what seems to be a most welcome contemporary reemergence of more populist interpretations of Machiavelli's political thought in general: see also Coby (1999) and Fontana (2001).

7. I am not the first to note the strongly existential aspect of Pocock's book. Note how it inspires Kari Palonen (1998).

8. This example raises the important issue-crucial for any interpretation of Machiavelli that privileges The Discourses over The Prince-of the compatibility or lack thereof between principality and popular government. In this instance, I would agree with the object of my criticism in this essay, the Cambridge School, that Machiavelli understood a prince or at least princely power to be necessary for the establishment of a regime that might become a mixed or more popular government in the future, and for the reformation or rejuvenation of such a government that has begun to sustain corruption in the present.



9. It is difficult to imagine that Machiavelli would have approved of the socioeconomically agnostic division of institutional competences characteristic of liberal democratic constitutions, one in which the wealthy can and generally do occupy all of the branches of government, or can rather easily influence the political magistrates who may happen to occupy hem. See McCormick (2001, 300-301, 303).

10. In fact, Skinner (1973) authored one of the classic criticisms of democratic theory, one that seeks to mediate between empirical and normative, minimalist and substantive approaches.

11. Compare Machiavelli (1998) on "mankind generally" and "the people generally" in The Prince (XVII versus IX and XIX).

12. This is not to suggest that Machiavelli is a naive or uncritical champion of the people against the nobility: the former are capable of being manipulated (I.13) and deceived (I.51) by the latter, even if the intentions of the people were often good in such instances (1.48); the people can and do make bad decisions (1.39,1.53); and, shockingly, given what he says about their irre- deemable tendency toward domination and eventually corruption, the nobility would seem quite capable of good-faith persuasion of the people (1.47) and virtuous leadership in general (III.8). However, while Machiavelli (1997a) at various points in The Discourses considers the possibility that popular excesses led to the downfall of free Rome (1.5,1.37,1.40, III.24-25), he ultimately blames the nobility for the demise of Rome's free government, even claiming that they would have corrupted Rome much sooner had it not been for the opposition of the people (1.37). I dis- cuss all of these instances in greater depth in McCormick (2001, 306-9).

13. For Machiavelli's departures from Livy, see Mansfield (1979) and Sullivan (1996). More recently, Sullivan (2001) criticizes Skinner's "republican" interpretation of Machiavelli for avoiding the morally ambiguous aspects of the Florentine's thought. See also the recent Strauss-influenced reevaluation of Machiavelli's place in the history of republicanism by Rahe (2000).

14. Given the factual supremacy of the nobles over the people in Rome, I interpret the normative assessments by Polybius and Cicero that celebrate an equilibrium between the two classes as one that tacitly approves of this effectually inequitable state of affairs.

15. Although on Machiavelli's rhetorical innovations, see Kahn (1994). 16. And if there is any doubt about who Machiavelli really distrusts more, see Najemy

(1990) on his private views of the Florentine elite. 17. For instance, see Livy (1971,1987), Jolowicz (1967), and Nicolet (1980) for the details

of this kind of sway that the nobility exercised over the people in the Roman republic. 18. See Shapiro (1999) who combines contestatory and participatory strategies in his for-

mulation of "democratic justice." 19. On the underestimated Machiavellian quality of controlled or even reflective aggres-

siveness or "ferocity," see McCormick (2001) and Lukes (2001). 20. Here contestatory democracy and Machiavellian democracy are consonant with

Young's (1990) appeal for means by which oppressed identity groups might be given greater say in the policies that affect them than does conventional majoritarian politics. However, all three approaches must guard against domination of groups by the elites entrusted with their advocacy or those charged with the conduct of contestatory practices. Indeed, Machiavellian democracy may be vulnerable to the charge that the tribunes exercised more influence on the plebs than vice versa even in Machiavelli's stylized depiction of Roman history and politics. See Benhabib (1996) for contemporary reflections on reconciling democratic theory and practice with the claims of specific subsets of the electorate conceived along class, ethnic, or gender lines.

21. Pettit is right to cite Lukes (1975), but he might also have consulted Connolly (1972), Polsby (1980), Gaventa (1980), Roemer (1982), Bachrach and Botwinick (1992), and Foucault



([1975] 1979) (even though the latter is notoriously short on the kind of prescription that concerns Pettit).

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