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Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy - Rahe - Fischer Prologue [1]

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Date: 2026-04-02  

NOTES on Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy

Ediited by Paul A. Rahe [University of Tulsa]

(Cambridge University Press, 2006)

The notes in parenthesis refer to the page number of the following works by Machiavelli:

(D = Discourses on Livy)

(FH = Florentine Histories)

(P = The Prince)

“Prologue – Machiavelli’s Rapacious Republicanism”

Markus Fischer

[California State University, Fullerton]

p. xxxviii ...the maxim that the founders of political orders must be armed was probably suggested to Machiavelli in 1498 by the fiery death of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who had led the Florentines in founding a republic, for he wrote in 1513 that "Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus would not have been able to make their peoples observe their constitutions for long if they had been unarmed, as happened in our times to Brother Girolamo Savonarola" (P 6). Likewise, Machiavelli's realization that republican institutions must at times be defended by extralegal force probably arose from the downfall of Piero Soderini, the chief magistrate of the Florentine republic since 1502, who believed that he "could extinguish ill humors with patience and goodness," and therefore failed to "take up extraordinary authority and break up civil equality together with the laws" when it was necessary to do so in order to crush the enemies of the republic (D 3.3), who overthrew it in 1512.

We have been taught that Machiavelli promoted the use of means that are unsavory and immoral. Here, we get our first hint that while Machiavelli wanted a republic of laws and justice, when it came to the survival of the republic itself, he recognized that sometimes “extralegal force” and “extraordinary authority” would be required to defeat the enemies of the republic. This causes a high level of discomfort to our modern sensibilities, but it is worth looking at a few instances of USA history to see that Machiavelli was not entirely wrong.

Consider Lincoln’s policy of “charity for all, malice toward none.” In light of the reimposition of southern slaveholder bigotry and the century-long ordeal of Jim Crow, there is certainly an argument to be made that Jefferson Davis should have been tried and executed as a traitor, along with many other Confederate leaders. Moreover, the proposed policies of Thaddeus Stevens and the “radicals” of the Republican Party at the time should have been followed: there should have been widespread confiscations of the land and wealth of the slaveholders, and its redistribution to the newly freed men and women. How much more advanced politically and socially would we be, as a nation and as a planet, had this occurred and the mythologizing of the “Lost Cause” never been tolerated? Rather than where we are now: dealing with a Trump regime engaged in overwhelmingly numerous unconstitutional actions, that have for decades been conceived, discussed and refined in the neo-confederate councils of conservative and libertarian think tanks, resulting in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Then there is the example of the Business Plot— also called the Wall Street Putsch— to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt and install retired Major General Smedley Butler as a puppet dictator under the control of certain factions on Wall Street and in big business. Given the history of how the opponents of Roosevelt and the New Deal have spent untold billions of dollars creating and nurturing the network of conservative and libertarian think tanks that are now using the Trump regime to impose Project 2025.

Iran-Contra Paved the Way for Trump to Defy Democratic Norms

Sam Lebovic, March 7, 2025 [Bloomberg]

... In The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy (The University of North Carolina Press, March 4), Alan McPherson argues convincingly that Iran-Contra should be plotted not as a minor sideshow in the Cold War’s final act, nor as a case study in flawed national-security policymaking, but as a key moment in the collapse of democratic norms. Defying Congress and the law required operating in secrecy, which also meant sidelining the federal bureaucracy. Policy was conducted instead by a small cluster of officials close to the White House, who delegated key tasks to a coterie of allies who weren’t elected, some of whom weren’t even really part of the government. McPherson is particularly good at highlighting the corruption that flourished in such a freewheeling environment. Weapons sales to Iran were managed by a small firm known, appropriately, as “The Enterprise” — operating for profit, its owners marked up the price of the missiles and decided to pay themselves millions of dollars in commission…. This was all part of a radical revision of the role of the presidency. Lawyers in the Reagan administration embraced what is known as the Unitary Executive Theory — a reading of the Constitution in which the president has sole and complete authority over the executive branch. That meant sidelining Congress and ending the independence of the bureaucracy. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s second attorney general — who would resign in 1988 amid corruption allegations — believed “the entire system of independent agencies may be unconstitutional.” Iran-Contra was a perfect illustration of the theory in practice: Congress could be ignored, and policy would run through the White House….

Finally, there are the two examples of President Barack Obama’s “only look forward” policy of ignoring the war crimes committed by the Bush Jr. regime, and Obama’s decision to not prosecute the “Too Big To Fail” banks that caused the financial crash and near depression of 2008-2009.

Or, as Jim Stewartson wrote on April 7, 2025, in Trust and the End of the American Empire:

The Executive Branch is simultaneously too weak, and too strong. Put a man in the presidency who adheres to norms and institutions and the worst crime in modern American political history, January 6th, goes totally unpunished — except for the foot soldiers. Put a malignant narcissist in the presidency who has no regard for anything but his own power and you get the unrecoverable disaster we see around us. Neither of these is acceptable.

The Civil Way of Life: Orders and Laws

Machiavelli frequently refers to vivere civile and vivere politico and to their synonyms, "civility (civiltà)" and "free way of life (vivere libero)." To the humanists, as we saw previously, vivere civile meant a life devoted to the development of man's natural capacity for virtue through participation in political authority. In Machiavelli's narrower and more instrumental understanding, vivere civile referred to a political process that unfolds through laws and institutional orders and gives every major group a share.

To begin with, a civil way of life means that the citizens assert claims and resolve conflicts through laws (leggi), rather than by means of threats, riots, or factional violence. Thus, the Florentine magistrates once admonished the leaders of rebellious guilds "to ask for [something new) with civility and not

p. xxxix

with tumults and arms" (FH 3.11), and Machiavelli asserts that for cities to order "themselves so that they may be able to live civilly and quietly" is to find "good laws for maintaining themselves free." (D 1.49.2).

In addition to laws, Machiavelli defines the vivere civile in terms of "orders" (ordini), which determine where political authority resides and how it can be exercised in, for example, the making of the laws. Accordingly, orders are wider in compass and more enduring than laws. In Rome, for instance,

there was the order of the government, or truly of the state, and afterwards the laws, which together with the magistrates checked the citizens. The order of the state was the authority of the people, of the Senate, of the tribunes, of the consuls; the mode of soliciting and creating the magistrates; and the mode of making the laws. (D 1.18.2)

In a civil way of life, authority is institutionalized. Obedience is owed not to concrete persons but to holders of public office, who execute laws that have been ratified by a public assembly. Machiavelli was clearly aware of the advantages of such an arrangement when he wrote:

[I]n a republic, one would not wish anything ever to happen that has to be governed with extraordinary modes [i.e., outside established orders). For although the extraordinary mode may do good then, nonetheless, the example does ill; for if one sets up a habit of breaking the orders for the sake of good, then later, under that coloring, they are broken for ill.

(D 1.34.3)

Most importantly, the orders of a civil way of life check the licentious ambitions of men. In Rome, for instance, the great authority given to the office of dictator was limited by his inability to alter the other offices of the state, so that giving dictatorial power to individuals in emergencies proved beneficial rather than harmful; in contrast, the Decemvirate, in which ten men had been authorized to collect and edit the laws, led to tyranny precisely because all other orders had been suspended:

When the dictator was created, the tribunes, consuls, and Senate remained with their authority; nor was the dictator able to take it away from them. If he had been able to deprive one of them of the consulate, one of the Senate, he could not annul the senatorial order and make new laws. So the Senate, the consuls, the tribunes, remaining in their

p. xl

authority, came to be like a guard on him to make him not depart from the right way. But in the creation of the Ten it happened all the contrary, for they annulled the consuls and the tribunes, they gave them authority to make laws and do any other thing, like the Roman people.

(D) 1.35)

Indeed, Machiavelli seems to show an incipient appreciation for the importance of due process when he asserts that the "authority to shed blood against its own citizens... was well ordered in Rome because one could appeal to the people ordinarily," that is, through established orders (D 1.49.3). In particular, public accusations differ from calumnies in that corroborations and of circumstances that show the former "have the truth of the need of troe accusation"

(D 1.8.2).

Machiavelli understood both orders and laws as humanly created means for maintaining effective authority under the changing exigencies of political life. In their original condition, men were thus "reduced to making laws and ordering punishments for whoever acted against them: hence came the knowledge of justice" (D 1.2.3). Thereafter, some cities "were given laws by one alone and at a stroke... like those that were given by Lycurgus to the Spartans, some had them by chance and at many different times, and according to accidents, as had Rome" (D 1.2.1), where a "tribune, or any other citizen whatever, could propose a law to the people, on which every citizen was able to speak, either in favor or against, before it was decided" (D 1.18.3). Likewise, "new necessities in managing that city were always discovered, and it was necessary to create new orders, as happened when they created the censors" as "arbiters of the customs of Rome" (D 1.49.1). That Machiavelli had a positivist notion of orders and laws is further evident from the fact that he never mentioned natural law a divinely willed, universal standard of right that could be discerned by all rational beings though he was surely aware that it was the principal concept governing the manner in which men of letters inquired into politics at the time.

This denial of natural law goes hand in hand with Machiavelli's belief that, as a rule, regimes that are shaped by pragmatic responses to changing cir-cumstances are better at preserving their independence and at attaining great-ness and empire than those that are rigidly drawn up in accordance with even the best theoretical principles. At Sparta, Lycurgus created a highly artificial order - enforced equality of belongings, lifelong military service, prohibition of immigration and foreign exchange that was perfectly adapted to preserv-ing Lacedaemon as a small city-state within a system of city-states. Indeed, its cohesion and prudence enabled it to ward off the existential threat posed by Athens' aggression during the Peloponnesian War (432-404 B.C.). But then, having defeated Athens and attained hegemony over all of Greece, Sparta's iso-lationist regime failed at the novel task of maintaining that hegemony. In Machi-avelli's words, "Sparta... after it had subjected almost all of Greece to itself, showed its weak foundation upon one slightest accident; for when other cities rebelled, following the rebellion of Thebes..., that republic was altogether

p. xli

ruined" (D 1.6.4). The contingency of human affairs is such that orders conceived by abstract reason eventually find themselves confronted with unforeseen challenges in the face of which they fail catastrophically, due to their inability to deviate from the model believed to be superior. In contrast, orders that evolve over time by way of institutional solutions to concrete problems are shaped by the very contingency that they have to contend with and thus are better at chang-ing as demanded by the exigencies of the moment. For "all things of men are in motion and cannot stay steady and to many things that reason does not bring you, necessity brings you" (D 1.7.4). Thus, the Romans, who had their laws "by chance and at many different times, and according to accidents," were able to keep what they acquired after defeating the existential threat posed by Carthage and attain an imperial grandeur hitherto unprecedented. Where ancient writers sought for the single best regime under all circumstances, Machiavelli realized that for a republic to take the contingent challenges of history in stride, it must itself be highly contingent."

Finally, Machiavelli's statement that "in a republic one would not wish any-thing ever to happen that has to be governed with extraordinary modes" should not be taken to imply that he entertained a precocious admiration for consti-tutional government and the rule of law. First, his idea of orderly procedures allows for injury to innocents: Every republic should have public accusations by which the ill humors that grow up in cities against certain individuals can be vented, he asserts, for "if a citizen is crushed ordinarily, there follows little or no disorder in the republic, even though he has been done a wrong" (D 1.7.2). Second, in cases where observing its orders and laws is not sufficient to avert

danger from the state, he believes that its orders and laws should be disregarded. Such a case occurred in the Florentine republic during Machiavelli's tenure in the government of Piero Soderini, who should have summarily executed those in favor of a return to the princely regime of the Medici but abstained because he did not want to "take up extraordinary authority and break up civil equal-ity together with the laws" (D 3.3). In this he grievously erred, according to Machiavelli, for one "should never allow an evil to run loose out of respect for a good, when that good could be easily crushed by that evil" (D 3.3), as indeed happened shortly thereafter when the republic was overthrown, the Medici returned, Soderini had to flee for his life, and Machiavelli was imprisoned. In sum, one who has not only a positivist conception of orders and laws but sees all of political life through the lens of "the effectual truth," as Machiavelli does, is bound to understand orders and laws as mere means conducive to the sta-bility and prosperity of the whole and thus to conclude that they should allow for meting out expedient injustices to individuals and for their own suspension in cases where their observance would be detrimental to public order.

12 In the metaphysical terms employed by Miguel E. Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machi avelli's Theory of Political Freedom (Boston: Kluwer, 2000), to whom this paragraph owes its inspiration, republics ought to remain in the realm of "event" rather than trying to enter into the domain of "form."

Seeing Things For What They Are — And not for what they used to be

Hamilton Nolan, Mar 15, 2025 [How Things Work]

Here are a few notable ways in which many (not all) of our political and media and business and intellectual leaders have failed to update their priors for current times: The federal government is now controlled by a political party that is nakedly, not bashfully, racist, and hopes to eradicate the past century’s worth of racial progress; economic policy is being dictated, stupidly, by a small group of zealots who do not understand economics; the primary concern of the president now is vengeance, and he is going to use the tools at his disposal to enact vengeance upon his endless list of enemies in a way that could surpass McCarthyism; “civil liberties” mean nothing to those who control the federal government now, and will likely provide little protection from that vengeance in the real world; the law, and the power of the courts to enforce laws that constrict the behavior of the federal government, is very much in question, and it is distinctly possible that within the next year or two the law is exposed as toothless in the face of the president’s will, and therefore the law should not be relied on as the primary guard rail of our democracy now; voter suppression is about to reach extremes not seen in generations, and outright election theft based on shoddy racist claims of voter fraud is extremely likely in upcoming elections at all levels; the US government is going to lose its status as a reliable source of information—economic statistics, scientific data, and more—as official information is manipulated for partisan gain in unprecedented ways, a development that will be devastating for almost all fields of knowledge, and for the economy; the federal government is being run by people who want to eradicate the government’s functions, except to the extent that those functions can be used to crack down on foreign and domestic enemies; many people are going to be jailed and deported and potentially killed unjustly in the very near future, by the president and his loyalists; institutions that imagine themselves to be proud, ethical, important parts of the fabric of America are going to cower in fear and abdicate their responsibilities in ways that their own leaders would scoff at right now.

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