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The Quest for Empire

At the beginning of his second Discourse, Machiavelli reveals that his discussion of ordini is still only half-completed. He has so far claimed that, if a city is to achieve greatness, it needs to develop the right laws and institutions for ensuring that its citizens behave with the highest virtú in the conduct of their ‘inside’ affairs. He now indicates that it is no less essential to establish a further set of ordini designed to encourage the citizens to behave with a like virtú in their ‘outside’ affairs — by which he means their military and diplomatic relations with other kingdoms and republics (339). The exposition of this further argument occupies him throughout the central section of his book.

The need for these additional laws and institutions arises from the fact that all republics and principalities exist in a state of hostile competition with each other. Men are never ‘content to live on their own resources’; they are always ‘inclined to try to govern others’ (194). This makes it ‘impossible for a republic to succeed in standing still and enjoying its liberties’ (379). Any city attempting to follow such an eirenic course will quickly fall victim to the incessant flux of political life, in which everyone’s fortunes always ‘rise up or sink down’ without ever being able to ‘remain fixed’ (210). The only solution is to treat attack as the best form of defence, adopting a policy of expansion in order to ensure that one’s native city ‘can both defend herself from those who assail her and crush whoever opposes himself to her greatness’ (194). The pursuit of dominion abroad is thus held to be a precondition of liberty at home.

As before, Machiavelli turns for the corroboration of these general claims to the early history of Rome. He declares in his opening chapter that ‘there has never been another republic’ with so many of the right ordini for expansion and conquest (324). Rome owed these arrangements to Romulus, her first lawgiver, who acted with so much foresight that the city was able from the outset to develop an ‘unusual and immense virtú’ in the conduct of her military affairs (332). This in turn enabled her — together with her exceptional good Fortune — to rise by a series of brilliant victories to her final position of ‘supreme greatness’ and ‘tremendous power’ (337, 341).

As Romulus correctly perceived, two fundamental procedures need to be adopted if a city is to regulate its ‘outside’ affairs in a satisfactory way. In the first place, it is essential to keep the largest possible number of citizens available for purposes of expansion as well as defence. To bring this about, two related policies have to be pursued. The first — examined in chapter 3 — is to encourage immigration: it is obviously beneficial to your city, and especially to its manpower, to preserve ‘the ways open and safe for foreigners who wish to come to live in it’ (334). The second strategy — discussed in chapter 4 — is ‘to get associates for yourself’: you need to surround yourself with allies, keeping them in a subordinate position but protecting them with your laws in return for being able to call upon their military services (336–7).

The other crucial procedure is connected with this preference for assembling the largest possible forces. To make the best use of them, and hence to serve the interests of your city most effectively, it is essential to make your wars ‘short and big’. This is what the Romans always did, for ‘as soon as war was declared’, they invariably ‘led their armies against the enemy and at once fought a battle’. No policy, Machiavelli crisply concludes, could be ‘safer or stronger or more profitable’, for it enables you to come to terms with your opponents from a position of strength as well as with the minimum cost (342).

Having outlined these military ordini, Machiavelli proceeds to consider a series of more specific lessons about the conduct of warfare which he believes can be learnt from a study of Rome’s achievement. This topic, introduced in chapter 10, occupies him for the rest of the second Discourse, as well as being taken up — in a more polished but essentially similar style — in the central sections of his later treatise on The Art of War.

It is perhaps an index of Machiavelli’s growing pessimism about the prospects of reviving ancient military virtú in the modern world that all his conclusions in these chapters are presented in a negative form. Rather than considering what approaches serve to encourage virtú and promote greatness, he concentrates entirely on those tactics and strategies which embody mistakes and in consequence bring ‘death and ruin’ instead of victory (377–8). The result is a long list of admonitions and caveats. It is imprudent to accept the common maxim that ‘riches are the sinews of war’ (348–9). It is injurious to make either ‘hesitating decisions’ or ‘slow and late ones’ (361). It is entirely false to suppose that the conduct of warfare ‘will be turned over, in course of time, to the artillery’ (367, 371). It is valueless to employ auxiliary or mercenary soldiers — an argument which, as Machiavelli reminds us, he has already presented ‘at length in another work’ (381). It is useless in time of war, and in peacetime it is actively harmful, to rely on fortresses as a principal system of defence (394). It is dangerous to make it impossible for a citizen to be ‘avenged to his satisfaction’ if he feels insulted or injured (405). And it is the worst mistake of all ‘to refuse every agreement’ when attacked by superior forces, and try instead to defeat them against the odds (403).

The reason Machiavelli gives for condemning these practices is the same in every case. They all fail to recognize that, if civic glory is to be attained, the quality that needs most of all to be instilled in one’s own armies — and reckoned with in the armies of one’s enemies — is that of virtú, the willingness to set aside all considerations of personal safety and interest in order to defend the liberties of one’s native land.

With some of the policies he lists, Machiavelli argues that the danger involved is that of raising up exceptional virtú against those who practise them. This, for example, is why it is a mistake to rely on fortresses. The security they afford you makes you ‘quicker and less hesitant about oppressing your subjects’, but this in turn ‘stirs them up in such a way that your fortress, which is the cause of it, cannot then defend you’ against their hatred and rage (393). The same applies to the refusal to avenge injuries. If a citizen feels himself gravely insulted, he may derive such virtú from his sense of outrage that he inflicts a desperate injury by way of return, as happened in the case of Pausanias, who assassinated Philip of Macedon for denying him vengeance after he had been dishonoured (405–6).

The danger in other cases is that your fortunes may fall into the hands of people lacking in any virtuoso concern for the public interest. This is what happens if you allow political decisions to be made in a slow or hesitating way. For it is generally safe to assume that those who wish to prevent a conclusion from being reached are ‘moved by selfish passion’ and are really trying ‘to bring down the government’ (361). The same is true of using auxiliary or mercenary troops. Since such forces are always completely corrupt, they ‘usually plunder the one who has hired them as much as the one against whom they have been hired’ (382).