David Levy provides a lucid and concise analysis of Machiavelli's republicanism. His arguments are well supported by textual evidence. Although his reading of the Discourses on Livy and the Prince turns up little that will be altogether new to the specialist, his sound interpretation may serve as a sobering corrective to such recent renderings of Machiavelli as a democrat, a rhetorician, a Socratic moral philosopher, and a Christian prophet.
Levy starts with Machiavelli's proposition that the ancients loved republican liberty as a mere means to attaining dominion, greatness, and riches. Combined with the assumption that the inhabitants of every city naturally divide into the classes of the people and the great, this instrumental love of liberty gives rise to two opposing desires: the people desire freedom so as to enjoy their possessions securely, whereas the great desire freedom so as to dominate. This instrumentality further implies that the experience of liberty does not lead to the actualization of man's true nature in Aristotelian fashion, as J. G. A. Pocock argued in reference to Machiavelli's claim that once people have experienced republican liberty they can no longer accept subjection to a prince. According to Levy, they do not accept it for the simple reason that they want to regain the wealth, power, and security that living in a republic brings.
The fundamental conflict that stems from the opposing desires of the people and the great gives rise to republican liberty if the people are able to establish a representative institution—such as the Tribunate of the Roman Republic—that prevents the great from oppressing the people. (This ability of the people is enhanced if the great decide to arm the people in order to use their manpower in wars of imperial expansion.) However, this emergence of liberty from the people's resistance to the great does not make Machiavelli a populist or democrat, as John P. McCormick holds. There are simply too many passages in which Machiavelli argues that a successful republic needs the leadership skills of the great and instructs the great in manipulating the people. Rather, and this principle holds to the present day, republican liberty arises from a well-balanced conflict between the people and the great.
Regarding foreign policy, Levy perspicaciously recognizes Machiavelli's argument that republics are eventually forced to expand because they find it impossible to be just strong enough to deter but not so powerful as to frighten others into attacking preventively. In addition, having first acquired out of necessity, they will then begin to acquire out of ambition. The city that best followed this course of action was, of course, the Roman republic. Accordingly, Levy disagrees with Maurizio Viroli's claim that Rome's foreign policy as presented by Machiavelli was not predatory at all. But neither was Machiavelli an unqualified admirer of Roman imperialism, as Mark Hulliung averred, because he understood that Roman subjugation ended republican liberty, as all other free cities were reduced to servility and Rome itself became corrupt from the absence of foreign danger. It was this corruption, together with the debilitating effects of the Christian religion, which led the world into the weakness that Machiavelli so laments.
But corruption comes not only from imperial success. A republic begins to grow corrupt soon after its founding, as its naturally selfish citizens begin to shirk the laws as they lose their fear of the gods and shed their good customs; for it is religion, interpreted according to political necessity, and good customs, equivalent to a sober and austere morality, that sustain republics. Accordingly, Levy largely agrees with Quentin Skinner's major claim that Machiavelli found a third way between liberalism, which wants government to keep its hands off the citizens’ character, and Aristotelianism, which wants the city to actualize the citizens' capacity for moral virtue. According to Machiavelli's third way, the citizens of a republic will be free if the government promotes their religiosity and civic habits, whether through education, manipulation, or compulsion. And the compulsory way to maintain good customs is to execute wrongdoers in public so as to bring fear back into men's minds.
But republican corruption cannot always be remedied by republican means. Princes are needed to impose order on thoroughly corrupt multitudes, suggesting to Levy that Machiavelli's Discourses should not be read in isolation from the Prince. Yet the two works differ essentially in this: whereas the Discourses advise the republic's leaders to disregard moral considerations for the common good, the Prince seems to advise princes to enter into evil for their own good. How the author of the Discourses could also be the author of the Prince has been debated for a long time, of course. Levy joins this debate by most insightfully discussing the three most common solutions: that Machiavelli wrote the Prince as a pragmatic response to the current political situation, suggested in various ways by Ernst Cassirer, Federico Chabod, and Gennaro Sasso; that Machiavelli became a republican after writing the Prince, as Hans Baron averred; and that he warned republicans against princely government in the guise of giving advice to princes, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote. Noting that the Discourses contain princely and even tyrannical advice as well, Levy then offers his own reconciliation of Machiavelli's republican and princely teachings. Machiavelli was a “sincere republican” who nonetheless held the “belief that principalities are sometimes necessary” (100–101), namely, when order needs to be imposed on an anarchic multitude by ruthless means. To turn this order into a common good, Machiavelli instructs the prince that his rule will be more secure if he allies himself with the people against the great by providing the people with security (which they desire as their ultimate end). In other words, Machiavelli's jarring appeals to the prince's selfish desires are rhetorical devices to make him act for the common good out of self-interest.
This persuasive reconciliation of Machiavelli's republican and princely teachings leaves one last problem, however. A prince cannot be counted on to establish a republic. He may create security and even rule by law, but he will not voluntarily step down to let his subjects become self-governing citizens. Hence, the prince will have to be removed forcibly by men aspiring to become leaders of a republic. To teach them how to overthrow a prince, Machiavelli provides these would-be citizens with the longest chapter of the Discourses, the chapter on conspiracies.
Levy's argument concludes with a brief comparison of liberalism and Machiavelli's republicanism. Whereas liberalism starts from the common desire for life, liberty, and property, Machiavelli starts from two contrasting ones: the desire to be free from princely rule so as to dominate and the desire to be free from any oppression so as to be secure. Whereas liberty is thus an ultimate end to liberalism, it is merely a proximate end to Machiavelli. Whereas liberalism constructs representative government on the moral basis of rights that are equal for all, Machiavelli constructs a mixed regime on the utilitarian basis of satisfying the desires of the great and the people. Nonetheless, Machiavelli provides liberalism with the crucial idea that common good can arise from institutionalized conflict between self-interested actors, as taken up by the invisible-hand argument of liberal economics and the checks-and-balances reasoning of liberal constitutionalism.
