This article argues that Machiavelli’s chapters on the Decemvirate ( D 1.35, 1.40-45) advance an internal critique of the juridical discourse of sovereignty. I first contextualize these chapters in relation to several of Machiavelli’s potential sources, including Livy’s Ab urbe condita, Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Roman Antiquities, and the antiquarian writings of Andrea Fiocchi and Giulio Pomponio Leto. I then analyze Machiavelli’s claim that the decemvirs held “absolute authority” ( autorità assoluta)—an authority that was unconstrained by either laws or countervailing magistrates. (...) I proceed to argue that Machiavelli’s account of the decemvirs’ election contains a web of allusions to the lex regia, the “royal law” by which the Roman people were thought to have conveyed their sovereign power to an emperor. By modeling the decemvirs’ election on the lex regia, Machiavelli reveals the political limitations of the doctrine of popular sovereignty; moreover, he illustrates that even free and fair elections can easily give rise to tyranny. (shrink)

Is Machiavelli an Epicurean in his political and religious thought? Recent scholarship has identified him as the foremost representative of Epicureanism in Renaissance Florence. In particular, his incomplete epic poem, The Ass, is read as an expression of his adherence to Lucretian naturalism. This article offers a new reading of the poem and shows that its teaching reveals that Machiavelli is closer to a Platonic variant of classical naturalism linked with the idea of a natural virtue modelled on the lives (...) of animals which has been lost through human civilization and progress and to which it is necessary to return periodically. The article focuses on the poem’s claim that civil religion is a necessary component for good laws that maintain a free republic and argues that Machiavelli offers a poetic reflection on the role of Numa as the founder of Roman religion on the model of a neo-Pythagorean philosophical religion that was instrumental in the rise of constitutional government. More than Lucretius’s critique of religion, Machiavelli’s poem can be read as an extended reflection on Plutarch’s texts – above all, his Life of Numa. (shrink)

This paper assesses the complex debt of Machiavelli’s moral and political thought to Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, especially in its Scholastic variant. My claim is that Machiavelli’s attitude vis-à-vis Aristotle is twofold because it reflects two different aspects of Aristotle’s moral and political theory that are closely intertwined and that were selectively developed by subsequent Aristotelian Scholastic commentators: a teleological and a realist aspect. On one hand, Machiavelli provides a model that dramatically breaks with Aristotle on, for example, the (...) question of the origin of human society and the moral prudence of rulers. On the other hand, Machiavelli’s engagement with Aristotle amounts to something more complex than a simple rejection. The Florentine appears to read Aristotle rather selectively, and emphasizes the realist dimension of certain Aristotelian ideas that suit his own original overturning of classical moral and political ideas. I use two paradigmatic themes in which the Aristotelian teleological-realist divide is most evident, i.e. the account of the origin of human society and the case of prudence, in order to prove the dual relationship of Machiavelli’s thought with Aristotelianism. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has demonstrated the extent to which the latter's republicanism is of a populist type, and a potentially important resource for contemporary democratic theory. Although work has been produced on the constitutional form of the Machiavellian republic, less effort has been made to articulate the theoretical assumptions upon which the advocacy of such a republic is ethically grounded. Here, I attempt to locate the democratic ethical imperative in the affirmation of a fundamental (...) human difference. Influenced by the Epicurean tradition, Machiavelli's natural philosophy considers material entities as absolute singularities lacking internal teleological direction, their movement the productive result of contingent encounters. One cannot assume a natural or pre-social identity of desire between persons. Democracy is the ethically preferred regime because it is the one that is capable of facilitating the expression of this human uniqueness. (shrink)

Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics: It is the magistracy, the “ordinary mode,” to which they turn to deal with “extraordinary accidents,” political and military emergencies. Machiavelli's gaze is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: Although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that (...) were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli's discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will briefly tackle the more general question of the relationship between politics and law in his work as a whole. (shrink)

It is possible to find in Machiavelli an expression of the original consent to explain the origin of the political communities. This paper investigates this hypothesis in the approach of the roman political thought. With Lucretius and Cicero, it is clear the terms of the pact, covenant, consensus, and the primitivism of the difference between man and beasts, the fear and the common safety to founder the political community under the leadership of one man. The paper also debates the Aristotelian (...) premises of the political nature of man and explores some examples of the Machiavellian time, that aims to confirms the existence of the language of the Aristotelianism within the original consent. It concludes that Machiavelli does not have a substantial theory to explain the origins of the political community, because politics and its study requires the research of the cities in the historical mean. This contractual language in accordance with that Aristotelian is used as a rhetoric strategy in the beginning of the Discourses. (shrink)