Conflit civil et liberté: La politique machiavélienne entre histoire et médecine (review)

This is a useful introduction to a relatively unexplored area of Machiavelli's thought: his political psychology. Gaille-Nikodimov examines The Prince, the Discourses, and The History of Florence to address what she construes to be Machiavelli's fundamental question: Under what conditions can civil conflict produce liberty? That Machiavelli found this question urgent is understandable if we recall that the tumultuous Florence of his day saw its civil and military institutions increasingly unstable, its government ever in crisis, and its status as a free city in growing jeopardy. In medical parlance, the city's health was failing.

This medical analogy is not accidental: it was central to the theoretical discourse of Renaissance politics. In Machiavelli's redaction the body politic — whether city, republic, or principality — was a biological organism: a living, hierarchically organized structure of head and members subject to an ineluctable historical cycle of birth, growth, corruption, and death. Its health was to be measured in terms of political freedom, liberty being understood as a state of balance, not of virtues but of governing humors (or desires, or appetites — Machiavelli used the terms interchangeably). Of these there were two: the universal desire of the nobility to oppress and the equal and opposing desire of the people not to be oppressed. Closely linked to these were the emotions of hatred, fear, ambition, anger, and dissatisfaction — elements that exacerbated any conflict and threatened the health and liberty of any body politic. Rome resolved this conflict by eventually developing a mixed constitution that allowed its classes to vent their humors by participating in a process that led to legal institutions. When, for example, the people refused military service, they were given tribunes.

Ultimately the Roman republic succeeded because it developed what Gaille-Nikodimov calls an "ethos of liberty" grounded in a fear of the gods and a policy of keeping the treasury rich and the public impoverished. Such measures insured that collectivist values trumped self-serving individualistic acquisitiveness. But Florence could never imitate this. Her Christianity was profoundly different from Rome's pagan religion, and because she never learned how to control her wealthy citizens, her conflicting humors could never countenance a wealthy public treasury built out of personal poverty.

Humoral theory is thus a suggestive way into Machiavelli's political psychology, but it is not without its ambiguities. In the first place, as theory it focuses on personal individual temperament; it makes no claim about the humors of collective public bodies. In dealing with the nobility and the people, Machiavelli focuses only on the humors regarding oppression, not on the four humors of the traditional paradigm, and one is left wondering why this is so.

In the second place, it is not clear how the humors relate to morality. More than once Machiavelli categorically asserts that all men are wicked. But if this is so, then does it matter which temperament one brings to one's wickedness? Are the vices of a sanguine or a phlegmatic more or less politically disruptive than those of a choleric or melancholic? We are not told. In a passage cited by Gaille-Nikodimov, Machiavelli asserts that beneath their clothing men are all alike in their nakedness, inequality being a matter only of poverty or riches. But this suggests that humors might be irrelevant, that attitudes are a function of economics. Indeed, Rome's policy of citizen impoverishment suggests that the manipulation of wealth is also the manipulation of attitudes about wealth: it becomes the very fulcrum upon which private self-interest and the common good can achieve balance.

Gaille-Nikodimov's study is more successful when she focuses on civil conflict and liberty within the medical-political paradigm. This is because she supplies all the references and contexts necessary to build and follow the argument. Her work is less successful when she tries to relate Machiavelli to contemporary...