Machiavellian Democracy (review)

John McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy puts aspects of Florentine political theory in productive conversation with modern American constitutionalism. Seeking to restore Machiavelli’s fascination with and high estimation of the office of the tribunes in ancient republican Rome to modern consideration, McCormick uses Machiavelli to make two important contributions to theory. First, the ideas of unified popular sovereignty and equality before the law, benchmarks of the American constitutional imagination, actually mask fundamental divisions of economic interest between plebian or popular and aristocratic or wealthy segments of the society. And second, in welcome contrast to a great deal of democratic theory, McCormick turns our attention to issues of law, institutional design, and the practices necessary to maintain institutions appropriate to a state of liberty and democracy.

The polemical nature of the book also demonstrates the limits of its contributions to both political theory and historical studies of Machiavellian thought. Throughout much of the book, McCormick takes aim at the “Cambridge” intellectual history of republicanism associated with J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Phillip Pettit, arguing that the paradigm of neo-Roman republican discourse of participatory civic virtue and liberty as non-domination cover up the democratic radicalism of Machiavelli’s thought. In contrast to his younger contemporary Francesco Guiccardini, Machiavelli appreciated the role of a tribunate selected from within a popular assembly designed to represent the voice of the common people and to provide a check on the power of the grandi within a specifically republican polity (McCormick, unlike the subject of his study, has little to say about princes and principalities, and about as little to say about what his subject had to say about them). Guiccardini’s emphasis on the popular election of esteemed elites as opposed to Machiavelli’s idea of a mixed balance between respective bodies representing the aristocratic and the common interests, so the argument goes, makes Guiccardini rather than Machiavelli the father of modern republicanism associated with the founding of the American republic and Madisonian fears of unchecked democracy. Pocock’s “Machiavellian Moment,” McCormick quips, should have been called the Guiccardinian moment. But the argument of Pocock in his 1975 work The Machiavellian Moment was that a vocabulary of public and individual liberty employed by Machiavelli could be shown to have had a surprisingly long life in Anglo-American concerns about the importance of the arms-baring and independent citizen to resisting the corruption of public liberty by private interest and overly centralized executive or legislative power.

McCormick could have used some Machiavellian and Pocockian attention to history. His attempt to appropriate Machiavelli leads him to overlook two central aspects of Machiavelli’s thought that Pocock and Skinner have grappled with for the sake of understanding both Machiavelli’s time and ours: the historical context of Machiavelli’s work, and the relationship between republican liberty and empire. For example, straining to emphasize the radicalism of Machiavelli’s democratic insights, McCormick overlooks Machiavelli’s criticism of the Gracchi and the lex agraria, arguing that Machiavelli is concerned with the method of pursuing the law rather than the policy itself, but ignoring the fact that what Machiavelli saw was the necessity of maintaining a mixed constitution where the interests of the few and the many checked one another’s particular interests and steer their respective strengths toward the power and glory of the state as a whole. With the Gracchi as with the tribunes, McCormick is content to highlight them while downplaying the fact that Machiavelli is equally concerned to highlight the importance of their opposites to the maintenance of a free state.

Ultimately, McCormick’s desire to use Machiavelli in the present, while in many resects laudable, welcome, and to be taken very seriously, undercuts the potential of the book to impact the present. Machiavelli famously organized much of his theoretical output on the importance of maintaining not just a principality or a republic, but a principality or republic for increase. McCormick briefly footnotes recent studies that draw attention to the centrality of empire to Machiavelli’s thought, but largely ignores the implications of...