This week I’ll be in Rome, so I expect somewhat less regular digressing.
The first paragraph of the fifth book of the Florentine Histories shows that Machiavelli has a generally cyclical view of history. Let me quote the passage in Mansfield’s translation:
Usually provinces go most of the time, in the changes they make, from order to disorder and then pass again from disorder to order, for worldly things are not allowed by nature to stand still. As soon as they reach their ultimate perfection, having no further to rise, they must descend; and similarly, once they have descended and through their disorders arrived at the ultimate depth, since they cannot descend further, of necessity they must rise. Thus they are always descending from good to bad and rising from bad to good. (V.1)
This account suggests that all political systems have an internal limit or steady state, and if its reached decline follows necessarily. And vice versa. Machiavelli then offers a further mechanism for this claim: “For virtue gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin; and similarly, from ruin, order is born; from order, virtue; and from virtue, glory and good fortune.” By ‘virtue’ here he means, something like ‘good governance.’' Good governance creates glory and its own political luck.
Machiavelli then illustrates his claim by a striking anecdote that is drawn from Plutarch, and that through Bayle was well known during the eighteenth century. In Machiavelli’s telling there is a contrast between the practically prudent in worldly affairs represented by Cato the elder and philosophers/men of letters (who are wise, perhaps, in speculative affairs), represented by Diogenes and Carneades. Okay, I quote:
Whence it has been observed by the prudent that letters come after arms and that, in provinces and cities, captains arise before philosophers. For, as good and ordered armies give birth to victories and victories to quiet, the strength of well-armed spirits cannot be corrupted by a more honorable leisure than that of letters, nor can leisure enter into well-instituted cities with a greater and more dangerous deceit than this one. This was best understood by Cato when the philosophers Diogenes and Carneades, sent by Athens as spokesmen to the Senate, came to Rome. When he saw how the Roman youth was beginning to follow them about with admiration, and since he recognized the evil that could result to his fatherland from this honorable leisure, he saw to it that no philosopher could be accepted in Rome.— Florentine Histories (V.1(
So, for Machiavelli, the very existence of philosophy as a social practice presupposes political order (“military captains arise before philosophers”).*
Machiavelli’s stance toward Cato’s actions is a bit ambivalent. At first sight it seems like he clearly endorses Cato’s stance because Cato prevents or (more accurately) postpones the predictable corruption, that is, decay of Roman martial excellence if philosophy is introduced into the polity (granting that there is no philosophy in Rome before then.) Yet, at the same time Machiavelli calls the practice of philosophy a ‘honorable leisure’ twice over! Why would he do that if philosophy is corrupting and useless?
This puzzle is only resolved near the end of the Florentine Histories (VIII.29). There Machiavelli describes a set of political institutions from the Bank of San Giorgio in Genua that produced flourishing amidst civil turmoil. It’s an anecdote that caught David Hume’s attention and also (recall my decade old post) David Stasavage more recently.
In modern terms we would call the Genovese experience a kind of ‘natural experiment.’ Machiavelli notes that the very same people behaved differently depending on the institutional context; one was orderly, the order conducive to civil disorder. In “That Politics May be Reduced to a Science,” Hume draws the inference citing and quoting Machiavelli in Italian as his source: "And so little dependance has this affair on the humours and education of particular men, that one part of the same republic may be wisely conducted, and another weakly, by the very same men, merely on account of the difference of the forms and institutions, by which these parts are regulated." Hume treats the natural experiment as an exemplar of the significance of institutional design (in part to rule out competing explanations in terms of human nature and natural character). The very same humans respond differently to (as we modern say) different incentives!
Machiavelli’s own commentary on the example is also worth quoting:
An example truly rare, never found by the philosophers in all the republics they have imagined and seen: to see within the same circle, among the same citizens, liberty and tyranny, civil life and corrupt life, justice and license, because that order alone keeps the city full of its ancient and venerable customs. And if it should happen-which in time it surely will-that San Giorgio should take over the whole city, that would be a republic more memorable than the Venetian.
So, at first sight it may be thought that this treats empirical evidence as a way to show up and dismiss the models in speech or the useless, mere thought experiments of the philosophers. One can put it like that and avoid anachronism. A version of this polemical idea can be found in Spinoza (at the start of the Political Treatise) and Hume (in the Treatise and “Idea of Perfect Commonwealth), and so on (including Adam Smith). To what degree the polemic is fair, I leave aside.
Machiavelli actually notes that the older philosophers also were empirical (‘seen’). So, in some ways Machiavelli is just lucky to live later (and, perhaps, has a better theoretical framework).
For, as the final sentence of this quoted passage suggests, Machiavelli himself treats the mechanism social history has exhibited as a source or a possible blueprint (or feature of such a blueprint) for an ideal/realizable commonwealth! (Venice was the republican ideal as Pocock has taught us, too.) Machiavelli here is legislating a desirable future no less than the philosophers did.
My interest here today is not to try to spell out how empirical evidence, theory, and Machiavellian’s republican ideals interplay here. But rather to suggest that Machiavelli is suggesting that a new kind of practically useful philosophy is possible. (That has been noted by many readers of Machiavelli before me, of course.) One that draws on mechanism design rooted in an understanding of social/political history. And that more useful philosophy thereby can aim to design institutions that may stave off corruption longer than they otherwise would. As my regular readers know (see here for the scholarship), I think that for all their differences, Spinoza (in the Political Treatise), Hume, and Adam Smith run with this idea no less than Kant (in Perpetual Peace).
That’s all I wanted to digress. But let me add this practically useful Machiavellian philosophy has been incredibly influential on constitutional design and the social sciences. One can praise that while also recognizing that during the last half century there has been too much faith in the idea that well designed institutions and properly aligned incentives can establish desirable social order and stability. As Machiavelli himself would have noted at once, the desirable long-term effects of practically useful philosophy require political agency to be achieved and maintained.
*This is a position that Adam Smith echoes in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. We have good evidence that Smith was familiar with Florentine Histories.