tame and restrain each other. If one or the other were allowed to predomin-
ate, the result would be a return to the political chaos and instability from
which republican government had rescued Rome. It is, therefore, precisely
the antagonism inherent in the Roman constitution which, for Machiavelli,
renders it worthy of praise and emulation (Skinner 1990 , 135 – 6 ).
Yet if Machiavelli has little patience for the notion ofconcordia, he has even
less for another pillar of the Roman system of values: the principle of justice.
His complaint here is, once again, lodged on purely empirical grounds. On
the Roman account, justice is, at least in part, an intermediate value: Roman
theorists prize justice because it produces concord, which in turn makes glory
possible. We have already seen that Machiavelli eliminates concord from this
equation, but the question remains whether the pursuit ofiusleads us to
glory. Given his survey of history, and his own diplomatic experience,
Machiavelli concludes that the answer to this question is ‘‘sometimes.’’
There are occasions on which doing the ‘‘just’’ thing contributes to the
aggrandizement of the republic, and there are other occasions on which the
opposite is true. But, given this fact, if we are serious about placing glory at
the summit of values, then we will have to agree that justice should not be the
guide of our actions. 11 If it were, our pursuit of glory would be compromised.
Machiavelli is conscious that this conclusion is unprecedented and will prove
extremely unsettling to his readers. But as he puts it inIl Principe, he is not
interested in describing men as we might wish them to be; he is interested,
rather, in the ‘‘eVectual truth’’ (la verita`eVetuale), the way things actually are
(Machiavelli 1991 , 150 ).
This subversive rejection of justice as a value is everywhere on display in
theDiscorsi, but perhaps its most dramatic appearance comes during Machia-
velli’s discussion of a familiar topic. At the end of theWrst discourse, there is a
chapter entitled, ‘‘What Scandals the Agrarian Law Gave Birth to in Rome.’’
Given the title, Machiavelli’s readers might be forgiven for assuming that he
was about to restate the conventional Roman attack on the redistribution of
wealth. And, sure enough, Machiavelli does indeed condemn the Gracchan
laws for ‘‘turning the city upside down,’’ causing the rise of factions, and
furnishing ‘‘the cause of the destruction of the republic’’ (Machiavelli
1996 , 79 ). But his readers would then be quite surprised to discover Machia-
velli’s more general view of agrarian laws: he states unambiguously in the
same chapter that ‘‘well-ordered republics have to keep the public rich and
11 See, for example, Machiavelli’s vindication of Romulus inDiscorsi,I. 9.202 eric nelson