Western Civilization - History Of European Society

The Renaissance: Political Renewal and Intellectual Change 249

In the Middle Ages, the dominant form of history
had been the chronicle. Outside the Italian cities,
chroniclers tended to record events without troubling
themselves greatly over causation or the objective accu-
racy of their sources. The cause of historical events was
after all God’s will. The Greeks and Romans had taken
a different view. Beginning with Thucydides, the best
of them had defined their topics as questions to be an-
swered in causal terms because they believed that hu-
man nature was consistent and that history therefore
repeated itself. If history was cyclical, it offered a price-
less guide to action in the present, not so much because
it was predictive in absolute terms, but because the
process of historical causation could be understood and
used by the educated to their own advantage.
The most effective exponent of this view during
the Renaissance was the Florentine lawyer and some-
time politician Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). In
works such as The Princeand The Discourses on Livyhe at-
tempted to establish rules for the conduct of political
life based upon examples from the historical past. In the
process, he freed political theory from the theological
principles upon which it had long been based. While
his name became a byword for cynicism and political
manipulation, Machiavelli was in his own way an ideal-
ist. The Italian wars begun by Charles VIII of France in
1495 eventually destroyed the independence of the
Italian cities with only Venice retaining full sovereignty.
Machiavelli believed that this calamity could be under-
stood and remedied only by looking with a clear eye
at the way in which politics was conducted (see docu-
ment 13.6).
His younger contemporary, Francesco Guicciardini
(1483–1540), agreed but thought that governing one-
self by the kind of rules proposed by Machiavelli was
impossible. As he said in his Ricordi,a grim collection of
musings on a variety of subjects, no two situations were
the same; there were always exceptions. He seems to
have believed that by studying history one absorbed
what he called discretion: the ability to react intelli-
gently to unforeseen contingencies. His History of Italy,
which examines the loss of Italian freedom in the years
after 1494, is probably the first modern historical work
and remains a useful source for the political and military
history of the age.
By comparison with its impact on politics and his-
tory, the humanist contribution to philosophy was indi-
rect. The Renaissance was not a great age of formal
speculation, but the course of modern philosophy
would be hard to imagine without the recovery of clas-
sical works that had been lost during the Middle Ages.

Much of Aristotle, most of Plato and the Alexandrian

Neoplatonists, the Pre-Socratics, and many of the Epi-

cureans and Stoics were either unknown or had been

studied with little regard to their historical and intellec-

tual context. By recovering lost works and seeking a

deeper understanding of the mental world that had pro-

duced them, the humanists immeasurably broadened

philosophic discourse in the West. By attacking the

scholastics, they opened the way for the acceptance of

ideas that lay outside the Aristotelian tradition as it was

then understood. They may have done little to exploit

DOCUMENT 13.6

The Political Philosophy

of Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli’s most famous book was The Princein

which he appears to favor despotic rule as a means of ridding

Italy of its “barbarian” invaders. However, he was an ardent

republican both in theory and in his own career as secretary

to the second chancery of the Florentine republic. The follow-

ing passage from The Discoursessets out what may be

taken as his real view.

And finally to sum up this matter, I say that both

governments of princes and of the people have

lasted a long time, but both require to be regulated

by laws. For a prince who knows no other control

but his own will is like a madman, and a people

that can do as it pleases will hardly be wise. If now

we compare a prince who is controlled by laws,

and a people who is untrammeled by them, we

shall find more virtue in the people than in the

prince; and if we compare them when both are

freed from such control, we shall see that the peo-

ple are guilty of fewer excesses than the prince,

and that the errors of the people are of less impor-

tance, and may therefore be more easily remedied.

For a licentious and mutinous people can be

brought back to good conduct by the influence

and persuasion of a good man, but an evil-minded

prince is not amenable to such influences, and

there is therefore no other remedy against him but

cold steel.

Macchiavelli, Nicoló, The DiscoursesI, 58, trans. Luigi Ricci, rev.

E.R.P. Vincent. Modern Library Editions. New York: Random

House, 1950.