He then declares, however, that if any city is so imprudent as to rely on this initial good Fortune, it will not only cheat itself of greatness but will very soon collapse. For while ‘one alone is suited for organising’ a government, no government can hope to last ‘if resting on the shoulders of only one’ (218). The inescapable weakness of any polity that puts its trust in ‘the virtú of one man alone’ is that ‘the virtú departs with the life of the man, and seldom is it restored in the course of heredity’ (226). What is needed, therefore, for the salvation of a kingdom or a republic is not so much ‘to have a prince who will rule prudently while he lives’, but rather ‘to have one who will so organise it’ that its subsequent fortunes come to rest instead upon ‘the virtú of the masses’ (226, 240). The deepest secret of statecraft is to know how this can be done.
The problem, Machiavelli stresses, is one of exceptional difficulty. For while we can expect to find a surpassing degree of virtú among the founding fathers of cities, we cannot expect to find the same quality occurring naturally among ordinary citizens. On the contrary, most men ‘are more prone to evil than to good’, and in consequence tend to ignore the interests of their community in order to act ‘according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope’ (201, 215). There is thus a tendency for all cities to fall away from the pristine virtú of their founders and ‘descend towards a worse condition’ — a process Machiavelli summarizes by saying that even the finest communities are liable to become corrupt (322).
The image underlying this analysis is an Aristotelian one: the idea of the polity as a natural body which, like all sublunary creatures, is subject to being ‘injured by time’ (45). Machiavelli lays particular emphasis on the metaphor of the body politic at the beginning of his third Discourse. He thinks it ‘clearer than light that if these bodies are not renewed they do not last’, for in time their virtú is certain to become corrupt, and such corruption is certain to kill them if their injuries are not healed (419).
The onset of corruption is thus equated with the loss or dissipation of virtú, a process of degeneration which develops, according to Machiavelli, in one of two ways. A body of citizens may lose its virtú — and hence its concern for the common good — by losing interest in politics altogether, becoming ‘lazy and unfit for all virtuoso activity’ (194). But the more insidious danger arises when the citizens remain active in affairs of state, but begin to promote their individual ambitions or factional loyalties at the expense of the public interest. Thus Machiavelli defines a corrupt political proposal as one ‘put forward by men interested in what they can get from the public, rather than in its good’ (386). He defines a corrupt constitution as one in which ‘only the powerful’ are able to propose measures, and do so ‘not for the common liberty but for their own power’ (242). And he defines a corrupt city as one in which the magistracies are no longer filled by ‘those with the greatest virtú’, but rather by those with the most power, and hence with the best prospects of serving their own selfish ends (241).
This analysis leads Machiavelli into a dilemma. On the one hand he continually stresses that ‘the nature of men is ambitious and suspicious’ to such a degree that most people will ‘never do anything good except by necessity’ (201, 257). But on the other hand he insists that, once men are allowed to ‘climb from one ambition to another’, this will rapidly cause their city to ‘go to pieces’ and forfeit any chance of becoming great (290). The reason is that, while the preservation of liberty is a necessary condition of greatness, the growth of corruption is invariably fatal to liberty. As soon as self-seeking individuals or sectarian interests begin to gain support, the people’s desire to legislate ‘on freedom’s behalf’ becomes correspondingly eroded, factions start to take over and ‘tyranny quickly appears’ in place of liberty (282). It follows that whenever corruption fully enters a body of citizens, they ‘cannot live free even for a short time, in fact not at all’ (235; cf. 240).
4. Portrait of Machiavelli by Santi di Tito in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.
Machiavelli’s dilemma is accordingly this: how can the body of the people — in whom the quality of virtú is not naturally to be found — have this quality successfully implanted in them? How can they be prevented from sliding into corruption, how can they be coerced into keeping up an interest in the common good over a sufficiently long period for civic greatness to be attained? It is with the solution to this problem that the rest of the Discourses is concerned.
Machiavelli believes that the dilemma he has uncovered can to some extent be circumvented rather than having to be directly overcome. For he allows that, while we can hardly expect the generality of citizens to display much natural virtú, it is not too much to hope that a city may from time to time have the good Fortune to find a leader whose actions, like those of a great founding father, exhibit an unforced quality of virtú in a high degree (420).
Such truly noble citizens are said to play an indispensable role in keeping their cities on the pathway to glory. Machiavelli argues that if such individual examples of virtú ‘had appeared at least every ten years’ in the history of Rome, ‘their necessary result would have been’ that the city ‘would never have become corrupt’ (421). He even declares that ‘if a community were fortunate enough’ to find a leader of this character in every generation, who ‘would renovate its laws and would not merely stop it running to ruin but would pull it backwards’, then the outcome would be the miracle of an ‘everlasting’ republic, a body politic with the ability to escape death (481).
How do such infusions of personal virtú contribute to a city’s attainment of its highest ends? Machiavelli’s attempt to answer this question occupies him throughout his third Discourse, the aim of which is to illustrate ‘how the deeds of individuals increased Roman greatness, and how in that city they caused many good effects’ (423).
It is evident that in pursuing this topic Machiavelli is still very close to the spirit of The Prince. So it is not surprising to find him inserting into this final section of the Discourses a considerable number of references back to his earlier work — nearly a dozen allusions in less than a hundred pages. As in The Prince, moreover, he lays it down that there are two distinct ways in which it is possible for a statesman or a general of surpassing virtú to achieve great things. The first is by way of his impact on other and lesser citizens. Machiavelli begins by suggesting that this can sometimes produce a directly inspiring effect, since ‘these men are of such reputation and their example is so powerful that good men wish to imitate them, and the wicked are ashamed to live a life contrary to theirs’ (421). But his basic contention is that the virtú of an outstanding leader will always take the form, in part, of a capacity to imprint the same vital quality on his followers, even though they may not be naturally endowed with it. Discussing how this form of influence operates, Machiavelli’s main suggestion — as in The Prince and later in Book IV of The Art of War — is that the most efficacious means of coercing people into behaving in a virtuoso fashion is by making them terrified of behaving otherwise. He praises Hannibal for recognizing the need to instil dread in his troops ‘by his personal traits’ in order to keep them ‘united and quiet’ (479). And he reserves his highest admiration for Manlius Torquatus, whose ‘strong spirit’ and proverbial severity made him ‘command strong things’ and enabled him to force his fellow citizens back into the condition of pristine virtú which they had begun to forsake (480–1).