sense of state was forged by Italian humanists who sought to under-
stand the changes of regime of their cities, the mutazioni di stato, during
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the England of the 1530s,
during Henry VIII’s political reformation, the Dialogue between Pole
and Lupsetby the Italian-educated royal chaplain, Thomas Starkey,
weighed up the virtues of government of ‘the state of the commonalty
... by a prince, 〈or〉by certain wise men, or by the whole multitude’,
concluding unremarkably that ‘a princely state’ was ‘most convenient
for our country’.^12 In the midst of the French wars of religion,
Montaigne looked to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livyas an authority
on mutationslike those which were convulsing his country in the 1580s,
though he proclaimed it folly to seek to upset the existing regime and to
change ‘the government of a few into a popular state [le commandement
de peu en un estat populaire], or a monarchy into something else’, in the
hope of improving the situation.^13 Machiavelli’s Discourses, printed
posthumously in 1531, had analysed the regimes of the city-states in
terms of three stati, Principato, Ottimati, and Popolare, and their
perversions, tyrannia, stati di pochi, and licenza, showing how one
could slide into another and how ‘a free state’ (uno stato libero) might
emerge from the tumult.^14 Though born of the experience of renaissance
Italy, and particularly of Florence, of which Machiavelli had been
second chancellor from the fall of Savonarola in 1498 until the return
of the Medici on the coat-tails of a Spanish army in 1512, both the
Discoursesand the Princeset their analyses within the political cate-
gories—monarchy (principato), aristocracy (ottimati), and democracy
(popolare)—created by Aristotle in the fourth century bcand recovered
in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke and Thomas Aquinas.
William’s translation of Aristotle’s Politicsaround the year 1260 and
St. Thomas’s commentaries upon them, constituted a turning-point in
the history of European political theory.^15
In his discussion of government by one, a few, or many, in the treatise
De Regimine Principumwhich he was writing within half a dozen years
of William of Moerbeke’s translation, and in the more detailed com-
mentary on the Politicswhich he began around the year 1269, Aquinas
used the Latin Aristotle’s monarchia, aristocratia/oligarchia, and
State as regime 3(^12) N. Rubinstein, ‘Notes on the Word statoin Florence before Machiavelli’, in Florilegium
Historiale, ed. J. G. Rowe and W. H. Stockdale (Toronto, 1971), 315–16, 318; Thomas
Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer, Camden 4th ser. 37 (London:
Royal Historical Society, 1989), pp. 36, 119, 120.
(^13) M. de Montaigne, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. A. Thibaudet and M. Rat (Paris, 1962), 116–
19.
(^14) The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli, tr. L. J. Walker (London, 1950), i. 1–2, 252–62,
333–45, ii. 316.
(^15) J. A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D’Aquino: His Life, Thought and Works(Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1975), 380–1, for the chronology of Aquinas’s works.