McCormick - Machiavelli Against Republicanism

ARTICLE
POLITICAL/ THEORY
10.1177/0090591703252159
McCormick MACHIAVELLI
/ October
AGAINST
2003 REPUBLICANISM
MACHIAVELLI AGAINST REPUBLICANISM

On the Cambridge School’s
“Guicciardinian Moments”
JOHN P. MCCORMICK
University of Chicago
Scholars loosely affiliated with the “Cambridge School” (e.g., Pocock, Skinner, Viroli, 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 preference for
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
they fail 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 and practical 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 partici-
pation 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, San Francisco (September 2, 2001); the Remarque Institute, New York University (Sep-
tember 21, 2001); and the Department of Political Science, University of Chicago (December
13, 2001). For comments and criticisms, I thank Peter Breiner, 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 Theory.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 31 No. 5, October 2003 615-643
DOI: 10.1177/0090591703252159
© 2003 Sage Publications
615
616 POLITICAL THEORY / October 2003
tial approach to the study of classical and early-modern republicanism, the

so-called Cambridge School. The classical model of republicanism—from
Aristotle to Cicero in theory, from Sparta to Rome in practice—assigns spe-
cific 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 modern 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 modern
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 demo-
cratic theory and practice.1 Critics point out that the primarily electoral con-
ception of popular government does not succeed at keeping elites account-
able 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 patrio-
tism, 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 tra-
dition (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: Niccolò Machiavelli.4
I have argued elsewhere (McCormick 2001) that Machiavelli is an unac-
knowledged compromise between minimalist or elitist theorists of democ-
racy, 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., I.4, I.5, I.7,
I.44, I.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 govern-
ment” 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 politi-
cal tasks that supposedly complement but usually supersede those reserved
for poorer and lower born segments of the populace. It is, so to speak, aristoc-
racy combined with democracy but with the latter assuming a decidedly sub-
ordinate position. Modern 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 mod-
ern popularly constrained oligarchy, or from republicanism to minimalist
democracy. Madison famously defines republicanism in terms of representa-
tive 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 dem-
ocratic 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 offi-
cials, 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 pop-
ulace, 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 substan-
tive 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 com-
bined—will emerge through even the most populist political arrangements.
Nor, however, is Machiavelli guilty of the negligence of minimalist demo-
cratic 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 “repub-
lican” (that is, after all, the word he used), in fact, when compared with gen-
eral 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 republi-
canism (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 dem-
ocratic 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 interpre-
tive framework for understanding Machiavelli and republicanism that the
other scholars mentioned will follow. In particular, this interpretative frame-
work 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 existential-

ism, grappled with “the problem of the republic’s existence in time” and pro-
posed 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 virtù, becomes something like the founder of modern 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 contempo-
rary and sometimes interlocutor, Francesco Guicciardini (Gilbert 1965), that
eventually wins out and becomes the forerunner of modern liberal democra-
cies. This recognized, the “Florentine republicanism” inherited by contem-
porary popular regimes perhaps ought to be much less celebrated by advo-
cates 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, modern popular government is
institutionally and socioeconomically much more Guicciardinian than
Machiavellian. A major subtext of Pocock’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 princi-
ple 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 inclu-
sive 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 republi-
canism 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 intermedi-
ary 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 or fortuna 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 engage-
ment with Machiavelli does Guicciardini himself take up republican existen-
tialism (e.g., pp. 237, 251). Machiavelli, of course, argued that a more popu-
larly 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 modern political the-
ory to his development of a philosophy of history for modern 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 (I.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 empha-
sizes 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 modern 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 modern
popular government, elitism, and renders it difficult to recognize what is
most promising about Machiavelli’s potential contribution to our contempo-
rary 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 virtù and becomes esperienzia,
[Guicciardini’s] belief becomes less plausible, since esperienzia is an acquired charac-
teristic 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 experi-
ence 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 dis-
tinction 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 virtù
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 libertà of the few is to have their
virtù acknowledged by the res publica; the libertà of the many is to ensure that this
acknowledgement is truly public and the rule of virtù 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 aris-
tocratic 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 pro-
posals 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 particu-
lar 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 work-
ings of contemporary democracy than do impressionistic generalizations that
identify Machiavelli as founder of modern constitutional arrangements, spe-
cifically, a commonplace view that attributes to Machiavelli’s interpretation
of the Roman Constitution the origins of the modern 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 virtù 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-
ernment” (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 modern

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., I.3, I.6, III.11), and the lat-
ter include the veto, the accusations, and referenda (e.g., I.5, I.7, I.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 seri-
ous 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.11 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. I.5, I.46), and,
second, it renders closed and docile the open-ended, dynamic, and “wild”
quality of social discord described by Machiavelli in The Discourses (I.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 (I.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 arrange-
ments 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 differ-
ent 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 oli-
garchy 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 equilib-
rium 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 (I.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 mon-
arch 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 interven-
tion 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 lib-
erty in terms of the absence of actual interference, and so ignored the forms
of dependence or subordination that living with the threat of arbitrary inter-
vention 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 crit-
ics 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 nor-
mative 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, respec-
tively, 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 protégé, 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 the-
ory 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 magis-
trates 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 com-
bines the virtues of monarchy, aristocracy and popular government” (Viroli
1998, 117). In this context Viroli asserts that Machiavelli was “in full agree-
ment 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 inequal-
ity and asymmetrical institutional arrangements. Machiavelli (1997a) lauds
the attempt by the plebs to gain parity with the nobility, and he praises prac-
tices beyond the mere selection of magistrates or the simple balance among
institutions by which the people kept Roman elites accountable (e.g., I.4, I.5,
I.7, I.44, I.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 (I.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 differ-
ence 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 subordi-
nate 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 peo-
ple 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 deficien-
cies (I.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 notori-
ously jealous of their own power (see I.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 aristo-
cratic 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 prin-
cipality 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 rhet-
oric.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 republi-
canism 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 tradi-
tion, 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 republi-
canism. 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 modern
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 republi-
can 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., I.6). On the first point, the funda-
mentally 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 condi-
tions 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 per-
mitted 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 of justice 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 insti-
tutions 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 participa-
tion.18 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 litera-
ture 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.19 This aggressive-
ness manifests itself in extra-electoral accountability mechanisms aimed at
magistrates, and efforts to share in the wealth and honor of senatorial fami-
lies. But Pettit eschews the centrality of populism and participatory democ-
racy to Machiavelli’s political theory because he seems to associate these ele-
ments 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 partic-
ipatory 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 distin-
guishes 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 major-
ity 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 appro-
priate 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-
ernment 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 interven-
tion 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 struc-
tural, 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 democ-
racy 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 conven-
tional 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 mili-
tary 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 lib-
erty”; 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 mini-
malist, 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 politi-
cal 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 modern 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 gov-
ernment 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 politi-
cal 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 control-
ling elites: see Manin, Przeworski, and Stokes (1999).
2. While there are subtle differences in these authors’individual understandings of republi-
canism (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 modern 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 modern republicanism, see
Wooten (1994).
3. These authors successfully show that such aspirations have been associated with repub-
licanism, 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 modern political thought is the recently repub-
lished Pitkin (1999).
4. I draw specifically on The Prince (Machiavelli 1998), composed circa 1513 and pub-
lished in 1532, and The Discourses (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 elec-
toral 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 admira-
bly, 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 criti-
cism 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 govern-
ment 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 (I.48); the people
can and do make bad decisions (I.39, I.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 (I.47) and virtuous leadership in general (III.8).
However, while Machiavelli (1997a) at various points in The Discourses considers the possibil-
ity that popular excesses led to the downfall of free Rome (I.5, I.37, I.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 (I.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 nor-
mative 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 con-
cerns Pettit).
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John P. McCormick is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chi-

cago. He is presently completing the book Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the
European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge,
forthcoming) and working on another, titled Machiavellian Democracy.

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ARTICLE

MACHIAVELLI AGAINST REPUBLICANISM

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

tial approach to the study of classical and early-modern republicanism, the

MACHIAVELLI, REPUBLICANISM, AND DEMOCRACY

“CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL” INTERPRETATIONS OF

Pocock and the Guicciardinian Republican Model

John Pocock, while the least prescriptive of the “Cambridge School”

The resulting theory of political stability, what I term republican existential-

Of course wealth and pedigree tended to define what individuals from

Guicciardini conceived of popular government in an acclamatory or selective

If this exchange between Guicciardini and Machiavelli constitutes the

ing to Pocock, in addition to, or rather in conjunction with, Machiavelli’s

According to Guicciardini’s model, the few express their need to dominate,

Guicciardini, the most aristocratically minded of Florentine republican theorists, had

The problem, made patently clear in Machiavelli’s theory and modern

Skinner and Republican Liberty

Viroli and the Equation of Popular and Elite Excess

had, in fact, done so in Florence on occasion, as had various oligarchic alli-

Pettit and the Contestation of Elites

them the definitive characteristics of republicanism. On the contrary, I define republicanism in

9. It is difficult to imagine that Machiavelli would have approved of the socioeconomically

John P. McCormick is an associate professor of political science at the University of Chi-

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