Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (review)

This informative and provocative study has two essential aims: to reposition Machiavelli in the mirror-for-princes tradition and to revisit his thinking regarding tyranny and liberty. Its central question, one might say, is whether a free people can properly be governed by a virtuous monarch without having its freedom compromised. Cicero, with Caesar in mind, had said no. In the De officiis monarchy meant tyranny. Seneca, however, with a disruptive populus in mind, had said yes. In his De clementia a willful people needs a rational ruler whose virtus enables him so to govern that violence becomes unnecessary and his people can be happy. There is never any conflict between what is right and what is expedient.

Stacey convincingly argues that if we are to understand The Prince, we need to see it repositioned vis-à-vis Seneca rather than Cicero because the De clementia is the main target of Machiavelli’s attack. For example, in Seneca the prince’s virtus results in so much love on the part of his subjects that he can go about unarmed, confident that his people will protect him. For Machiavelli, the popolo will defend its prince only when danger is distant, not when it is close at hand, so the prince must always be armed. Then, even more trenchantly, Seneca had argued that the prince can spare the surviving family of a defeated ruler so as to show himself merciful and worthy of glory. But for Machiavelli that family requires elimination so as to preclude its revenge. In a similar vein Machiavelli methodically inverts Seneca on fortune, necessity, moral absolutes, conscience, the body politic, the common good, happiness, love, fear, and liberty. Altogether, Machiavelli “pulls the guts out of the Roman theory of monarchy with almost surgical precision” (279).

But is Machiavelli in fact performing the surgery Stacey describes? Part of what makes this book problematic is that it unevenly presents two Machiavellis. One is the author of The Prince, a tract “almost exclusively about states which are . . . unfree” (269). The other is the writer of the Discourses, a treatise about “the properly virtuous prince” (315) who can “conform [his regime] to a ‘vivere civile e libero’” (269). Stacey does not, however, explore the behavior of this other properly virtuous prince or the republic with which he is often linked. The term principe appears countless times in the pages of the Discourses, and twenty-one times in its chapter titles, suggesting that there are political practices equally applicable to both princes and republics. For example, the elimination of a conquered ruler’s line, which is so iconic of the prince in The Prince, appears also in the Discourses in a chapter entitled, “A prince is not secure in a princedom while those who have been deprived of it are alive” (3, 4). Then again, Machiavelli recommends that a free state preemptively protect itself against potential enemies by killing the sons of Brutus (1, 16). He even devotes a full chapter to the topic (3, 3). Machiavelli’s choice of words is instructive: “And he who undertakes to govern a multitude either by way of liberty or by way of princedom [o per via di libertà or per via di principato] and does not secure himself against those who are the enemies of that new government creates a state of short life” (1, 16). He further asserts in a passage that would appear to be more typical of The Prince, that “[w]hen it is entirely a question of the well-being of the country [la salute della patria], one must not allow any consideration of what is just or unjust, of what is merciful or cruel, of what is praiseworthy or shameful; rather, considering nothing else, one must follow that course that saves her life and maintains her liberty” (3, 41).

Stacey does not discuss these passages. Nor does he discuss a key passage in The Prince where Machiavelli presents a...