Finally, Machiavelli discusses what he takes to be the most serious danger to the balance of a mixed constitution, the danger that an ambitious citizen may attempt to form a party based on loyalty to himself instead of to the common good. He begins to analyse this source of instability in chapter 34, after which he devotes most of the remainder of the first Discourse to considering how such corruption tends to arise, and what type of ordini are needed to ensure that this gateway to tyranny is kept closed.
One way of encouraging the growth of faction is by allowing the prolongation of military commands. Machiavelli even implies that it was ‘the power citizens gained’ in this way, more than anything else, that eventually ‘made Rome a slave’ (267). The reason why it is always ‘to the detriment of liberty’ when such ‘free authority is given for a long time’ is that absolute authority always corrupts the people by turning them into its ‘friends and partisans’ (270, 280). This is what happened in Rome’s armies under the late republic. ‘When a citizen was for a long time commander of an army, he gained its support and made it his partisan’, so that the army ‘in time forgot the Senate and considered him its head’ (486). Then it only needed Sulla, Marius, and later Caesar to seek out ‘soldiers who, in opposition to the public good, would follow them’ for the balance of the constitution to be tilted so violently that tyranny quickly supervened (282, 486).
The proper response to this menace is not to take fright at the very idea of dictatorial authority, since this may sometimes be vitally needed in cases of national emergency (268–9). Rather the answer should be to ensure, by means of the right ordini, that such powers are not abused. This can be achieved in two main ways: by requiring that all absolute commands be ‘set up for a limited term but not for life’; and by ensuring that their exercise is restricted in such a way that they are only able ‘to dispose of that affair that caused them to be set up’. As long as these ordini are observed, there is no danger that absolute power will corrupt absolutely and ‘weaken the government’ (268).
The other principal source of faction is the malign influence exercised by those with extensive personal wealth. The rich are always in a position to do favours to other citizens, such as ‘lending them money, marrying off their daughters, protecting them from the magistrates’ and in general conferring benefits of various kinds. Patronage of this nature is extremely sinister, since it tends to ‘make men partisans of their benefactors’ at the cost of the public interest. This in turn serves to ‘give the man they follow courage to think he can corrupt the public and violate the laws’ (493). Hence Machiavelli’s insistence that ‘corruption and slight aptitude for free life spring from inequality in a city’; hence too his frequently reiterated warning that ‘the ambition of the rich, if by various means and in various ways a city does not crush it, is what quickly brings her to ruin’ (240, 274).
The only way out of this predicament is for ‘well-ordered republics’ to ‘keep their treasuries rich and their citizens poor’ (272). Machiavelli is somewhat vague about the type of ordini needed to bring this about, but he is eloquent about the benefits to be expected from such a policy. If the law is used to ‘keep the citizens poor’, this will effectively prevent them — even when they are ‘without goodness and wisdom’ — from being able to ‘corrupt themselves or others with riches’ (469). If at the same time the city’s coffers remain full, the government will be able to outbid the rich in any ‘scheme of befriending the people’, since it will always be possible to offer greater rewards for public than for private services (300). Machiavelli accordingly concludes that ‘the most useful thing a free community can bring about is to keep its members poor’ (486). He ends his discussion on a grandly rhetorical note by adding that he could ‘show with a long speech that poverty produces much better fruits than riches’, if ‘the writings of other men had not many times made the subject splendid’ (488).
By the time we reach this point in Machiavelli’s analysis, we can readily see that — as in his third Discourse — there is a continuing preoccupation with the fortunes of his native city lying beneath the surface of his general argument. He first of all reminds us that, if a city is to preserve its liberty, it is essential that its constitution should embody some provision against the prevalent vice of slandering and mistrusting prominent citizens. He then points out that this ‘has always been badly arranged in our city of Florence’. Anyone who ‘reads the history of this city will see how many slanders have at all times been uttered against citizens who have been employed in its important affairs’. The outcome has been ‘countless troubles’, all of which have helped to undermine the city’s liberties, and all of which could easily have been avoided if only ‘an arrangement for bringing charges against citizens and punishing slanderers’ had at some time been worked out (216).
Florence took a further step towards slavery when she failed to prevent Cosimo de’ Medici from building up a party devoted to the advancement of his family’s selfish interests. Machiavelli has shown what strategy a city needs to adopt if a leading citizen tries to corrupt the people with his wealth: it needs to outbid him by making it more profitable to serve the common good. As it was, Cosimo’s rivals instead chose to drive him from Florence, thereby provoking so much resentment among his followers that they eventually ‘called him back and made him prince of the republic — a rank to which without that open opposition he never could have risen’ (266, 300).
Florence’s one remaining chance to secure her liberties came in 1494, when the Medici were again forced into exile and the republic was fully restored. At this point, however, the city’s new leaders, under the direction of Piero Soderini, made the most fatal mistake of all by failing to adopt a policy which, Machiavelli has argued, is absolutely indispensable whenever such a change of regime takes place. Anyone who has ‘read ancient history’ knows that once a move has been made ‘from tyranny into republic’, it is essential for ‘the sons of Brutus’ to be killed (424–5). But Soderini ‘believed that with patience and goodness he could overcome the longing of Brutus’ sons to get back under another government’, since he believed that ‘he could extinguish evil factions’ without bloodshed and ‘dispose of some men’s hostility’ with rewards (425). The outcome of this shocking naïvety was that the sons of Brutus — that is, the partisans of the Medici — survived to destroy him and restore the Medicean tyranny after the débâcle of 1512.
Soderini failed to put into practice the central precept of Machiavellian statecraft. He scrupled to do evil that good might come of it, and in consequence refused to crush his adversaries because he recognized that he would need to seize illegal powers in order to do it. What he failed to recognize was the folly of yielding to such scruples when the city’s liberties were genuinely at stake. He should have seen that ‘his works and his intentions would be judged by their outcome’, and realized that ‘if Fortune and life were with him he could convince everybody that what he did was for the preservation of his native city and not for his own ambition’ (425). As it was, the consequences of his ‘not having the wisdom to be Brutus-like’ were as disastrous as possible. He not only lost ‘his position and his reputation’; he also lost his city and its liberties, and delivered his fellow-citizens over to ‘become slaves’ (425, 461). As in his third Discourse. Machiavelli’s argument thus culminates in a violent denunciation of the leader and the government he himself had served.