Think
Machiavelli and immediately the mind jumps to The Prince. And why
not? It’s a damned good book, despite the outrage generated when he
had the temerity to be honest about how political reality worked.
However,
he also wrote a number of other books, including Discourses on Livy.
It’s larger than The Prince’s slender proportions, similar in
terms of including advice on governance but differing in the general
preference for a republic over a principality.
The
Prince was written [in a rush] for a specific individual, Lorenzo de
Medici, at a specific time, when it seemed the Medici family might be
able to form a solid Italian state and rescue it from what
Machiavelli saw as perpetual infighting, leading to weakness and
making Italy ripe for foreign invasion.
Discourses
on Livy took longer to write, and was not aimed at a specific
individual who might give Machiavelli a job and spare him from
drudgery. It’s also, as the same suggests, more focused on
commentaries about Livy’s (surviving) writing and comparing ancient
Rome to modern Italy. There are some other historical and
contemporary comparisons, but that’s the heart of it.
You do
not not need to have read anything by Livy to get the references,
which are explained both by Machiavelli himself and the very helpful
notes (as an aside, I still hate endnotes and this edition, by Julia
Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, uses endnotes).
Machiavelli’s
commentaries are a mix of domestic governance and military advice,
and whilst I don’t agree with everything he says, he does back
everything up with his own reasoning and historical/contemporary
examples.
The
hero-worship of Rome does lead to some questionable conclusions. For
example, he praises Hannibal’s skill unstintingly but nevertheless
describes the Carthaginian general as treacherous and cruel. The
first is a charge made by Romans who thought battle tactics amounted
to cheating (specifically cited was his provoking Flaminius into
chasing him to Lake Trasimene, which didn’t end terribly well for
the Romans), and the second is a shade rich given Livy himself
praised his ancestors for wiping out so many adult males from a
rival. (Hannibal also never committed genocide, unlike Alexander or
Julius Caesar).
However,
for the most part Discourses on Livy is an interesting blend of
history, politics, and human nature. Unlike many at the time,
Machiavelli is ready and willing to face up to the fact that people
are capable of acting horrendously in their own self-interest, and
that those at the top of politics have their actions governed more by
expedience than morality (more recently termed ‘reasons of state’).
The main
flaw, endnotes aside, is the Animal Farm problem. Like 1984 to Animal
Farm, Discourses suffers a bit by way of comparison with the slimmer
and similar ‘other book’. I’d probably suggest buying The
Prince, and, if you like it, then giving Discourses on Livy a look.
Thaddeus
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