Review Article

J.H. Whitfield
The Machiavellian Moment

J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the
, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975. x +
Atlantic Republican Tradition
602 pp. £11.80; £6.10 (paperback).

Ideally, I suppose, when an author has devoted eigtrt years to the elaboration of 1m
book should allow tumsett oght years plus to traverse its Iler, and deter-
its reviewer
mme its achievement t3ut this course would not be popular with editors off
periodicals, nor with authors, who, however long they have been m tlreir prepara-
tions, will always be desirous Of more speedy recognition of their merit.... And it
would dispose of the trade and practice of reviewing. I mention the possibility of
such delaying tacucsas a sign of alarm at the wrdtlr of the field, or fields, presented
m thm volume. Here we must not be blmded by the Wle. 1’InS, The Muchruvol!run

Moment, is brief, and beckomng, and many readers will be allured by its synthetic
eloquence. They should be warned prehmlllanly that this is not a book about
Machiavelli, and that, far trom being concerned with one moment, It spans two
thousand years. It sets a theoretic stage with Aristotle on polmc5 and I-ortesCLie on
English law, and starts the exainitiatioii ol matenal with St Augustine and t3oethms,
belore embarkmg on the business of the book’S subiiile, florentme Political
Thoughl and the Alluttiic Truclrlron, which will take us lrom Leonardo Bruill to the
theorists ot the Amencan colomes in revolt against England, via those of the Com-
monwealth m the English seventeenth century, and the European Enlightenment of
the eighteenth. In this sequence we shall find statements such as that on page 486,
’The &dquo;Machiavellian moment&dquo; of the eighteenth century, like that of the mxteenth,
confronted civic virtur with rorrupUon, and saw the latter in terms of a chaos of ap-
petites ’
This makes It plain that the book r5 concerned with smutanttes, and not just with
influence; with moment.&dquo; which may also be profoundly dl&dquo;’>1Il1IIar, as notably with
t3oethm5, or Augustine, or with England pre-Commonwealth. By virtue Of this fact
we may proceed to a trank inodificatioii of the trtle, as on page 462 at the beginning

of the chapteron the ’Eighleenlh-Lenlury Debate’: ’The Amencan founder5 oc-

cupied &dquo;Machiavellian moment&dquo; - a crisis rn the relations between personality

a
and society, virtue and corrupuon’. And thrs, together with the statement of the
arms of the book as set out on the cover (’Thm book is a study of the consequence

for modern historical and social consciousness of the ideal ol the clasmcal republic
revived by Machiavelli and other thinkers of Renaissance Italy. J.G.A. Pocock sug-
gests that Machiavelli’s priiiie emphasis was on the moment rn which the republic
contronts the problem of its own Il1’>tabllll) m tiiiie, and wlnclr Ire calls the

European Sludies Review (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills), Vol. 8 ( 1978),, 365-
365-72

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&dquo; MaLhiavellian moment&dquo;’), we must take as being the nearest to a definition ot what
the title means It is (.tear. ) I hope, that it miphes a wide dispersal of emphasis, which
tcw rcaders, 111 spite of Profcssor Poc.ock’s vast resources of teaming, or because ot
these, wit) be able to hold togethcr.1 say that ruetully, havmg read the book four times
through.
It is, the title, and the Subtitle, of the work which brought it my way, and
naturally,
smce its nucleus IS certainty that run Of Lhapters from Leonardo Brum to Giannotti
and Contanlll (pages 49-329), wrth the name and personality of Ma,.hia~elli a front
runner rn what rs then still to come, there is some justification for one who is pnmanty,
m this context, a Machiavellian scholar making his inodenta) comments. First,

though, with regard to this startling point of Leonardo Brum. I think that by now
enough time has elapsed since the appearance of Hans Baron’s Cmsis oj the Eailv
Italian RenU/5sance for us not to take his thesis without some prudent modification.
Put crudely, it was the notion that the threat of Gian Galeazzo Visconli focused the
mmds of Florentine,,, galvanizing them to the discovery of republican, not Caesarian,
origins tot Florence, and to republican Icrvour rn rcpulsing the monarchical ambitions
of the Visconti. And that would leave previous Florentine attitudes to be assimilated,
presumably, to the shai ply contrasting ideas of Dante. But we have only to turn to
Brum’s splendid Hisloi v oj the flOfentme People to see that the two strands are
separate The discovery of a republican ongll1 lot Florence is new, and can give a ra-
tiotial basis to an attitude; the republican front is old enough, and dated to the noble
Florentine yeai ot 1250.

Post FedcilLi obituni, mrus de netando sceterc supra diximus, florentrnus

populus,iam prideni illorum qui rctnpublicam occuparant superbiam saevitiamque

exosus, capessere gubernacuta rerum aL tuen libertatem perrexit, c.rvitatemque

totam omnemque cius statum populan arbino LOntll1ere (Bk. 11)

Nor rs there anything to be surprised about m this, since it is the Lanonical date which
Machiaveth inscribes m the Istolle jtot en line.

Con questi ordmi mititan c civrli fondorono i Florentllll la loro I~berta. Ne si

potrebbe pensare quanto di autonta e forze in poco tempo Firenze si acqurstasse; e
non solamente capo di Toscana diveiine, ma intra le pnme citta di Ilaha era

numerata; e sarebbe a qualunquc grande/za salita se le spesse e nuove divisione non

la avessero aftlitta. (II, vi)

In Brunr’s in particular the insolence of the nobles, lead

History these divisions, and
straight the ordmamenta iustitiae and their tutor, the vexillifei lustlllae, neither
on to

of which fmd any place in Professor Pocock’s Baroman account of Brum and
Florence. On the effects of the first Brum remarked, ’Ita, perculsa nobill tate, potestas
et arbrtnum reipublicae ad populum redit’. And on the reversal of roles effected by the
second, ’Ex eo tantus terror inieclus est nobrlitati, ut non minus iam formidarent
populares, quam ipsi quondam a popularibus formidati.’ And for those who think
that Dante’s political thought corresponded to a Florentine disposition in his time,
Leonardo Bruni’s History should be read for its stern dismissal of all Dante’s heroes:
Frederick 11 as quoted above, Manfred, and especially, Henry VII. Nor does Dante
escape the obvious censure ot Dante’s policies. Did he not write a letter, full of the
vam hopes of an exile, against the Florentiiies?

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Extat Danns poetac epistola amarissima rcterta Loniumcliis, quam hat. mam
tidULia exultans, Lontra Florentmos, ut Ip~e vocdt, II1tnn,>eLo,> scrips)) . Ilk vero
m hoc deceptus, quod se iam mde putabat victorem (Bk IV)

It is well to remember that Dante&dquo;> pohtica) creed was forged m the vacuum Of exile,
and is not representative of Florence then or after. Even Boccaccio, as I have remarked
elsewhere, tn spite of his deep reverence tor Dante, behaves as il he had not noticed
Dante’s political opinions, and states an opposite without retcrelice to them. And
while we Iiiiger with this thirteenth-century establishment of the Florentne republican
tradition, we had better notice, still in Bruni, the cxpresssion, f/f/t/, of that clear v irw
of terrestrial affairs for which III a very famous passagc Bacon praised MaLhia~cill. It
comes appropriately 111 their reply to Pope Gregory X: ’Noli quaeso, nos ad hanc

scrupulosam mvendt normam vocare: alitcr enim coelum, alter terra rcgitur.’ (Bk. I)
All that is dear to the political theonst m the world of Maihiavdli, the autonomy of
politics, is here m the Histotia Flotentini Populi, the best part of a century before
Machiavelli; just as there t5 the prehistory of Florentine repubhcamsm a century and a
halt before the conversion of I400. 1 cannot help regretting that here Professor Pocock
has looked through Baron’v eyes, and not through Brum’s, at first hand. This lack of a
histortcat perspectiveseems to me to clmg to Poc.ock’s account Of MaLhlavell1. Though
he rs a Professor of History and of Politi(-al Sciemc, in this book at least, he let’> the 5e-
cond ride over the first. But hlstory rs not made from political theory, or only exlep-
Uonally so, rn highly evolved and artILulate societies. It is the result of the clash and
combination of forces used, most often blindly, by those who tind them to hand. The
tradition ot political theory rn the Middle Ages was to ignore these, and to write from
theory, as if theory was the key to events. And so we have the blameless precepts of
Aqurnas’s De tegiinine pnflClpum, or the groundless 10glL of Dante’.., Motialt hia. The
novelty of Machiavelli, prepared by Petrarch and Brum, Valla and Fiavius Blondus,
was to abandon theory, and to try and fmd - under the most urgent of LOMPL[l~10ilS
-
the solution to an histormal problem rn history itself. Now Professor Pocock counts
Machiavelli m the Aristotelian tradition, with man as zoon politiaoti, and the classical
parameters of the one, the tew and the many as the bases for rule. But m all
Machiavelli’s writing there are only two references to Aristotle, and one of these is of
dismrssal. It will be found 111 hrs letter to Francesco Vetton of 26 August 1513, and is
redolent of an attitude ot mmd.

Ne so quello si dica Arisloiile delle republiche divulse; ma io penso bene quello che

ragionevolmente potrebbe essere, quello che c, et quello che c stato.

Aristotle, that is, had been cited by Francesco Vetton in the letter to which MaLhlavelh
isreplying, and is tossed out of the window by Machiavelli, who is not concerned with
theory or theorists, but with history, past, present, and future.
Now in Professor Pocock’s account of Machiavelli there is, fortunately, no trace of
machiavellianism or anttmachiaveuiamsm. But less fortunately, he chooses to take no
account of history, looking the other way, and counting Machiavelli, in with the
Anstotehans. He might, of course, retort, But then, the one, the few and the many?
And I should answer that these legendary figures seem to me to exhaust the
mathematics of rule, in fact as well as in theory. You will come to them whether you
come from theory, or whether you come trom history,. From the one direction you mll

say with Cicero, ’Statuo esse optime constltutam rempublicam quae, ex tnbus
genenbus illis, regalt, ophmo, et populan modice confusa.’ (De Republica, 11, 41)

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And trom the other, with Taotus. ’Cuncta&dquo; iiaiioncs, et urbes, :)OpLllus, aut priorcs,
aut singuli regunt. Delema ex his et consmuta rcipubillac torma laudari tacitus quam
evemre ; vei, si event, haud diUtLirna esse potest.’ (Annals, IV, 33)
But it you look at that raltle oJ antitheses (page 158) which PocoLk quotes from
PI/nee, Chapter I, you mll see that it is a summary of history, and not a product of
theory. The nearest Professor Pocock gets to recognizing this fact is m a casual remark
(page 163) on MaLhiavdli’s great originally as ’a student of deleglt1l111zed pohlics’.
For it this rather unlovely phrasc has any meamng U must be in the distinction that
legttunacy is a concept denmng from theory, while history (that is to say, life) is what it
happens to be. To return to that answer of the Florcntines to the Pope, ‘aUter emm
Loelum, aliter terra regUUr’, we may amend it now to say, that theory and realtty are
different entitles.
In the context of Machiavelli thts is, as many of his devotees have done their best to
show, to come straight to what Pocock calls, m a phrase which smce he repeats it
several times he evidently loves, ’the moral ambiguity of Machiavelli’ ’The dualism of
vutue and mtu ...’ (page 487). 1 shall hope to return to the subject of wrtu, which
Russdl Price discussed m this Journal 111 wlde-rdngll1g terms, but with a wrong c.oncfu-
sion (Volume 3, Number 4, October 1973) What I would say here is that thts dualrsm

has an innoccni and purely linguistic nature, and is common to Machiavelli and the
whole Latm tradition. We coutd only legitimately extend it rnto the tnoral field, tor
Maihiavdh or tor any other wnter, h we were prepared to prove that he, or they, apart
trom having one word which sometimes means virlue, and sometimes means ability,
Itiilitaly valoul (and allied senses), has no other words for virtue, or viriucfi, and makes
no moral statements m plain terms that do not happen to mclude this shifiing word, or
include it in a clearly vtrtuous sense. Let us take a dip mto a chapter to which Pocock
often refers, Drsrorsr, III, i, with its theme of ’ndurgll verso e’ pnnClpll suoi’. In the
begrnntng of states there its, tor Machiavelli, always some bonta, but 111 the process of
time ’quella bonta st corrompe’, so to regam its health the body ot the state must go
back towards its orrgms, In the case of Rome,

sr vede comeegli era necessano che Roma tussr presa dai Franciosi a volere che la
ritiascesse, e i iiiasceildo ripigliassc nuovaita e nuova mrtu e ripigliasse la osser-
vanza della retigtone e della giLlStizia....

In the pursuit ot this last, on the next page,

gli ordiiii che nttrarono la Republica romana verso it suo pnncipio, turonoi
Trtbum della plebe,Censor) e tutte l’altre leggi che vemvano contro all’ambiztone
ed alla msolenna dcgli uomm.

What posstble relevance can the dual sense ot vulu have to these clear statements? To
these, lumtnous, passages I would add two more a few chapters further on:

Sappino adunquer pnncrpr come a quella ora ei commoano a perdere to stato,

che cominciano a rompere le leggi e quelli modi e quelle consuctudini che sono an-
ttche e sotto le quali lungo tempo gli uomini sono vivuU....
Perche egir c motto piu tactle essere amato dai buom che dai Lattlvl,ed ubbidire
alle leggl Lhe volere comandare loro. (DISC, 111, v)

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If there is any moral ambiguity lurkmg rn any ot these Statements I should be glad for

Professor Pocock, or anyone with sharper eyesrght than I have, to point it out. For me
it is ’cosa piu chiara che la luce’ that these are the siraightforward statements of a
moralist, and that they dominate his wew, for mstance, of ancient Rome ill its progress
from mcorrupnon to corruption.
It may be, however, m the Pnnce that Machiavelli gives himself away. And certainty
it is in his account of the Prince that I mms most the element of history m Protessor
Pocock’s evaluation This is the more the pity in that he starts with the right hunch.
The Prince, he says, is about innovation; and this, of course, is right. But then, to
count himself out from the beginning from any possibility of an historical context to
this theme of innovation, he twice, on the first two pages of hm chapter on the Prrnre,
writes of Machiavelli ’beginning work on the Prince III 1512’ (page 156). This effective-
ly divorces the Prince trom the chapter-headmg, The Medlcean Restoration, only an
rnch away, and makes the Prince, as Pocock will repeat III the rest of the book, a piece
of abstract theory, to which Machiavelli was led on by the ‘reckless danng’ of his
temperament. Now I have mysell tentatively put f orward the date of 26 August 1513 as
the moment ot conception ot the but If that is a refnement, nobody has ever
Prrnce,t
disputed Chabod’s demonstration, m his dassic article of 1924, of Machiavelli’s
writing of the Prince m the second halt of 1513. It is inconceivable in the world of 15122
precisely because the opportunity depends, not just on the Mediccali restoration m
Florence in 1512, but on that plus the ensmng election of Leo X m March 1513. What
was the historical problem? It was the prostration of Italy before the barbarian tomcfi,

the French, the Spanish, the Emperor, and the Swrss. Out of the live states which
dommated the peninsula m 1494 three, the three strong ones, Naples, Lombardy and
Venice, had been cut down by the scythe of war. This is the situation for which
Castiglione found the poignant phrase ot the ’lacerata e distrutta Italia’, echoed m the
Pnnce with Italy ’battuta, spogliata, lacera, corsa’, grief at which runs through
Machiavelli’s writing. The opportunity of 1513 (and Professor Pocock should look
agam at Prince, Chapter vi, where all the opportunities are similar) is to be faced with
catastrophe; but U is also based on the positive reality of the remaining two states ot
Italy’s five, Florence and the Church, rn their new Medicean combination.
It you ignore this fact you will come, as Professor Pocock does, to some odd results.
Thus on page 160 he first equates the Medici with all the other princelings of Italy.

There is some evidence tor the view that U was meant to advise Grulrano and
Lorenzo on the acquisition of dominions elsewhere in Italy, but in doing this the
Medici would differ little from other princely families.

Then, having kicked history on one side, he draws the formal consequence:

I/PrinCipe, formally anatoml<;ed, would seem to be a theoretical treatise, inspired

by a specific situation but not directed at U.

By these means it naturally becomes opaque, especially in its last chapter. This is
’famous and problematic’ (page 163), ’a nddle’ (page 180), ’addressed to a &dquo;new
pnnce&dquo;’ (page 180), m spite of the fact that on the next page he prints as footnotes the
abundantly clear language of Machiavelli,

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370

quello che si puo sperare facci la illustre Casa Vostra Volendo dunque la illustre
...

Casa Vostra seguitare quelli eccellenti che redimerno le provmcie loro.... t

necessano pertanto preparasi a queste arme, per potere con la virtu italica
defendersi dalli esterm.2,

without a word of discussion, either of the historical context, or of the candidature of

the Medici. Indeed, following the general argument, they have already been run off on
the page before as anonymous members m a ’gallery of specimen types of innovator’.
And even more senously, in a retrospective glance at the beginning of the next chapter,
on the Discorsi, Pocock sums up his commentary on the lessons of the Prince.

By the exercise of a partly nonmoral Vlrtú, the mnovator imposes form upon for-
tuna : that is to say, upon the sequence of happenings in time disordered by his own
act. (Page 184)

This is perhaps the most countermeaningful statement in Professor Pocock’s reper-

tory, and to show it so, in the context of the Prince, we have only to turn back three
pages, to that page 181 where Pnnce, Chapter via joins Prince, Chapter xxvi m the foot-
notes. So then, in these great specimens of the mnovator, Moses was responsible for
the slavery of Israel in Egypt, Cyrus for the oppression of the Persians by the Medes,
and Theseus for the diaspora of the Athenians? Only by this token can Machiavelli or
the younger Medici become responsible (disordered by his own act) for the downfall of
Italy from 1494 to 1513 (to 1527). Meanwhile, to show how mnocent he is of any
historical assessment of the situation of 1513, Professor Pocock rebukes Machiavelli
for not having pondered what would happen if, and when, his ’new prince’ conquered
the whole world!

In the simpler but sufficiently terrible world of the Renaissance he could afford to
see the prince as launched on a career of the indefinite maximisation of his power,
with no more final question to be asked than what would become of him if he
should achieve universal empire - and Ii Principe does not ask that question.
(Page 166)

Many cntics before Pocock have boggled at the last chapter of the Prrnce, or wished
to cast it out from the bosom of the treatise. Not because they found it problematic, or
a ‘riddle’, but because they found its language too startlmgly clear, and too different
from what they had been busily infernng from Prince, Chapters i-xxv. That the earher
sections of the Prince were not concerned with rule in Florence we can see all the
clearer in this book from the close juxtaposition of an analysis of Guicciardini’s
Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, with its close detail, all looking mwards to the
Florentine scene. But Professor Pocock carries forward his deductions from the Prince
into his study of the Discorsi, as into his comparisons of Machiavelli with Giannotti.

Rome is, as it were, the ’new prince’ among republics, and Machiavelli would
rather study Rome than Venice as he would rather study the new prince than the
hereditary ruler: the short view is more interesting than the long, and life in it more
glorious. (Page 198)

Or, as he puts it on the last page of his chapter on the Discorsi:

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MaLhia,,elli’~ contributions to republican theory were extraordinarily original, but

were based on and hrlllled to his decision that military dynamism was to be prefer-
red before the search for stabiltv (Page 218)

It is this reckless daring of Mac hiavelli’S temperament which Lames hun on. But
strangely Professor Pocock has again printed as a footnote on page 198 what put&dquo; a
very different emphasis on Machravellr’s temperament, showing him much more
Florentrne than Roman, and Pocock ignores it just as much as he did the plam
language of Pnnce, Chapter xxvi whmh he quoted on page 181 In that rIchly poignant
discussion ot the choice of model, Rome or Venice, Machiavelli puts up m Discolsi, I,
via a whole page m which he draws transparently his ideal, of a Florence strong enough

to detend herselt, and preduded by her own constitution from any temptation to ex-

pand. And he adds, and Protessot POLOCK quotes, a revealmg phrase tor this ideal
state.

E saiiza dubblo credo che poteiidosi tenere la cosa bilaiiciaia m questo inodo, che
e’sarebbe il vero were polmuo e la vera quicte d’una citta.

Than this there is no more warmly nostalgm sentiment ut the BNliole range of poliual
thought. This is the temperament of Machiavelli, but Professor Pocock cold not feel
his pulse here because he had chosen to interpret Machiavelli without rclatiiig him In
any way, at any time, to the hrstormal problem which he was striving hard to meet It is
its stern necessity which takes hun to the Sequel, which Professor Pocock happens not
to quote,

Ma sendo tutte le Lose degli uommr in moto, e non potendo stare salde, eonviene
che le salghmo o che le ,>cendll1o, e a molte cose che la ragione non t’mduce. t’lI1-
duce la neces~l1a. (Disc., I, vi)

In particular, it take5 Mac.hravelir away from Florence or Venice, and towards Rome.
And with awareness of the historical moment there disappears the contrast which
Pocock makes between Machiavelli and Giannotti For the latter,

The ideal Florence is to be armed and popular like Rome, but stable and peaceable
like Venice; and Giannotti has moved decisively away from the reckless dynamism
of Machiavelli. (Page 306)

Not history that has moved on, leaving Florence enslaved with no possibility of
so: it is

any initiative,in an Italy also enslaved to Charles V

Giannotti, Guicciardini and Gasparo Contarni are certamly easier to interpret and
expound than Machtaveih. and there is much to adniire later m the articulatron of the
modes by which the ideas ot Florentine civic consciousness are shown to become relc-
vant to the iniiially alien world of British monarchy; or to the later passage, with its
strong emphasis on ndurre ai pnnclpll, to the climate of the founding fathers of
America. In all this Pocock finds the Florentine tradition, and Machiavellian thought,
still relevant. It would not be less pertinent if he had managed to get his Machiavelli
right. It secms sad to me that an historian should have looked so resolutely away from
history when dealing with one who is an historical, and not a political, ihcori>1.

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Notes
1 , prefixed to the facsimile edition of the
J.H. Whitfield, An Essay on the Prince
Charlecote Manuscript (Wakefield: S.R., 1969), xi.
2. This is Prince
, Chapter xxvi, but Pocock quotes it as Opere
, 84-5, because he is
using a one-volume edition. By quoting in this way, however, it is impossible to check
with all the other editions.

J.H. Whitfield
is Serena Professor Emeritus, University of
Birmingham. He was Chairman of the Society
for Italian Studies 1962-74. His publications in-
clude Machiavelli (Oxford 1947 & New York
1966), Discourses on Machiavelli (Cambridge
1969), Facsimile of the Charlecote MS of II Prin-
cipe, with An Essay on the Prince (Wakefield
1970), and A Short History of Italian Literature
(Harmondsworth 1960 & 1970, Westport Conn.
1976).

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