Machiavelli and Spinoza on the origin of Perpetual Peace

It’s easy to miss in Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses on Livy, but he has hopeful things to say about to (use Constant’s term) old-style federations, or what Machiavelli is inclined to call ‘a league of republics.’ The classical exemplars of these, the Aetolians and Achaeans are mentioned in passing in The Prince.

The reason why it’s easy to miss is that they are not mentioned in the taxonomy of states mentioned early in the first two chapters of The Prince:

All states and governments that ever ruled over men have been either republics or monarchies. Monarchies may be hereditary, if the ruler’s family has governed for generations, or new. New monarchies can either be entirely new, as when Francesco Sforza captured Milan, or they could be territories a ruler has added to his existing hereditary state by conquest, as when the King of Spain took Naples…I won’t be considering republics since I’ve written about them at length elsewhere. 1-2 (Tim Parks, translator)

In The Prince there are signs that this taxonomy is not wholly exhaustive because it’s not entirely clear how the Papal state fits into it. Is it a new, elective monarchy? That seems odd.

Be that as it may, in the Discourses republics are divided into two: those made for expansion “in dominion and power” (Rome), or “whether it is to remain within narrow limits.” (Sparta) This too, seems not exhaustive. For, the non-ad hoc, enduring Federations are on the whole non-expansive, but in potentially broad limits. In addition to the Aetolians and Achaeans, Machiavelli considers the Samnites and Tuscans as ancient examples; he treats the Swiss (and Schwabians) as contemporary examples.

To the best of my knowledge there is not much focused discussion of leagued republics. But at the start of the second book of the Discourses, there are a number of connected chapters on these, and the discussion leads to the following conclusion:

The method of leagues earlier mentioned, according to which the Tuscans, the Achaians and the Aetolians lived, and according to which the Swiss live today, is, after that of the Romans, the best. Though through it you cannot grow very great, two good things result: first, you do not easily draw wars down on yourself; second, all you take, you keep easily. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, II.2, translated by Allan Gilbert, p. 337.

So, the bad news is you cannot become a dominant empire in the way the Roman republic did. The good news is you do not implode the way it did, and you can still grow to a non-trivial size as connected republics (and their dependencies). While Machiavelli tends to like to emphasize the trade-offs in each course of action, this is a relatively happy mean for polities not oriented toward glory.

Now, crucially Machiavellian leagues here anticipate Constant’s new federalism: they are republics that join in a republican, consultative decision-making procedure. The participating states are not monarchies. (Machiavelli is familiar with all kinds of leagues between states that lack this constitutional commonality.)

As an important aside, More’s Utopia, which was written around the same time, with Utopia offers us a blueprint for an expansive federation. It does so by rule-following Machiavelli’s main maxim for expansive republics: “to keep the treasury rich, the individual poor, to support military training with the utmost zeal, is the true way to give greatness to a republic and to gain power.” But in foreign policy, Utopia avoids the very slow, deliberative structure it otherwise has because it has an elective prince who (like a modern US President) can act decisively with foreign enemies. (There is precedence for this in the Hebrew federations of old. [see Spinoza, TTP, ch. 17.53-54])

Be that as it may, as is very well known, in his (posthumously published) Political Treatise (1677), Spinoza explicitly alerts us that he has read Machiavelli’s Prince (5.7) and Discourses (10.1). In both cases he calls Machiavelli “acutissimus.”

By contrast, it’s not often remarked upon that in the Political Treatise, Spinoza also alerts us that he has read Utopia. In explaining the failures of the philosophers, he writes. “That’s why for the most part they’ve written Satire instead of Ethics, and why they’ve never conceived a Politics which could be put to any practical application, but only one which would be thought a Fantasy, possible only in Utopia, or in the golden age of the Poets, where there’d be absolutely no need for it.” It’s notable that More is classed among the philosophers (my peer experts wouldn’t do so). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that here Spinoza invents the trope that Utopia offers a politics without a practical application (a trope repeated by Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith).

Unsurprising, when it comes to federations, Spinoza’s view is closer to Machiavelli’s than to More’s. However, Spinoza does not follow Machiavelli’s view slavishly. Here’s what Spinoza writes:

The greater the number of Commonwealths which enter into an agreement for peace with one another, the less each one must be feared by the others, or the less is the power each one has to make war, and the more it is bound to observe the conditions of peace, i.e. (by iii, 13), the less it is its own master and the more it is bound to accommodate itself to the common will of the allies. (TP. 3.16, translated by Curley.)

Now, for Machiavelli, the optimum size for a federation of republics is about fourteen member: “A league may attain twelve or fourteen communities, and then not try to go any farther, because when it reaches such strength as to believe it can defend itself from anybody, it does not strive for more dominion, both because necessity does not force it to gain more power and because it sees no profit in conquests, for the reasons given above.” Crucially, a federation is for profit or what Montesquieu and Kant would call a ‘commercial republic.’ And so lurking here is a cost-benefit analysis of why a federation stops growing in size. And the bottom line is that it does not pay to do so.

But Spinoza thinks Machiavelli has missed a move. In a relatively small federation commercial profit has to compete with considerations of fear of conquest not just from un-federated neighbors but also, and not the least, from fellow members of the federation. Whereas, Spinoza suggests, if you let the number of federated republics grow then both fear of external and fear of intra-federated conquest goes down.

This has some predictable effects. As Machiavelli suggests, and Spinoza seems to agree, coordination costs go up and there is little probability that any federated member can impose its will on the rest. One gets in the habit of accommodating oneself “to the common will of the allies,” but this will just is — as is familiar from the EU — bland (or diluted). One loses what makes self-government so glorious, but as an effect, uncertainty and fear disappear altogether and one can focus on profit and become securely unwarlike.

Spinoza's position implies, then, that as size increases of federated republics the odds of open-ended peace go up.** Montesquieu, Kant, and Smith all pick up on this idea (although in Smith it is blended with constitutional monarchy).* Kant plausibly suggests that by Machiavelli’s and Spinoza’s logic if the world were divided among reginal, federated blocks enduring peace has a chance.

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*As regular readers know, St. Pierre and WIlliam Penn also proposed perpetual peace plans not too dissimilar from Spinoza’s, but they were much more structured about the existence of different kind of states that nudged by the existing balance of power would allow an assembly of the federation to act as mediator or binding arbitrator of conflicts among them.

** UPDATE: An earlier version of this sentence overstated what I should have claimed. I thank Jack Stetter for pushing me on this.