Historiography and Machiavelli

Author

Text

Context

Whig

Having seen political realities from within as well as from above and below Machiavelli gives an unflinching account of the necessity of the problem of ‘dirty hands’ in politics but also of the inevitability of taking the popular will seriously.

For all their differences, the two texts converge on the view that while a visionary leader is essential to the founding of new regimes and re-ordering of corrupt ones, that that individual ought to retain the sympathy of the many, and ought for the sake of deserved glory to establish a mixed republican law-abiding regime with a citizen militia in which executive and distinct institutions for rich few and poor many check and balance one another.

Italian city-states, including Florence are small and vulnerable to the new realities of nation-states.

Marxist

Author

Deprived of full citizenship by his illegitimate birth and poverty, deprived as well of real opportunities, Machiavelli is a bit ideologically desperate with no choice but to write what he thinks his audience wants to read to secure him self a job.

Text

Text is too preoccupied by the myth of the great artist, the superficial showmanship of political power, to realize that the real source of power: is the system of economic ownership. Machiavelli does note that most people will sooner forget the death of their father than forgive the loss of their patrimony. He also stresses that a republic must expand, i.e., become imperialist or disintegrate. However, though he claims to view politics from below he shows no great sympathy for the working man, counsels bread and circuses to keep them amused, and regards the peasants as lice.

Context

The rise of the nation-states is a function of the linked development of war-making, tax-taking and state-building. It also reflects the growing predominance of urban mercantile and manufacturing economies and post-guild social relations over rural and landed economies and feudal relations.

Feminist

Author

Machiavelli had love affairs but also probably consorted with prostitutes. His attitudes towards women are conventionally patriarchal and patronizing.

Text

Text articulates a deeply gendered conception of the nature of public action in the world, casting the masculine, activist, imposing will of the vir against both effeminate inaction and the capricious, masochistic Fortuna. Although, he is also extremely impressed by Caterina Sforza she reflects the masculinist flipside of the contextual view of the noblewoman as an aesthetic thing: ‘decorous, chaste, and doubly dependent--on her husband as well as the prince’ (Kelly). Other than that, women are absent.

Context

Women did not have a Renaissance. On the contrary, as a result of 1) the regulation of female sexuality,2) access to economic and political roles, and 3) their roles in cultural construction, women suffered a loss of prestige and possibilities.

Post-Modern

Author

Machiavelli is party to the Renaissance formulation of the individual self-fashioning or self-maximizing on multiple fronts. He is himself a protean self, who rises from lowly beginnings to become accomplished in several areas of the human arts.

Text

Text eschews the grand metaphysical narratives of Plato and Aristotle and Christianity in which the world is taken to be subject to natural purposes, functions, or telos or divine providence. Instead it presents a world that is constantly changing under circumstances that are partially fated but also open to activist effort and the imposition of will. The world is what such men, treating others the way artists handle clay, make of it, even if this devastates societies.

Context

Re-naissance of classical themes and preoccupations sponsors repudiation of grand Christian narratives but their replacement by new myths of reason, science, and the world-creating individual self.