Thank you to Yves Winter for his very thoughtful and fair evaluation of my book. As Winter says, Machiavelli’s Florentine Republic is a book about Machiavelli’s effort to take the measure of Florentine republicanism in the Florentine Histories. Winter is persuaded by the foundational argument of the book, which is that Machiavelli wrote the Histories to provide his readers with a corrected account of what Florentine republicanism actually was—a more faithful rendering of its defining principles and achievements, intended to supplant the faulty and tendentious storytelling of humanist historiographers like Leonardo Bruni. Moreover, Winter is convinced that with this account in hand, Machiavelli develops a subtle but uncompromising analysis of Medici power, dissipating the pseudo-republican fog that had once surrounded figures like Cosimo Medici and shielded their tyrannical designs against intelligible republican critique.
Winter is skeptical, however, of my further claim that Machiavelli identifies the Roman Empire as being Florence’s deepest and most long-standing source of civic disability, pointing out that Machiavelli describes the West as having been utterly transformed by the waves of Germanic tribes that eventually overran it. Yet a careful review of the relevant passage demonstrates that Machiavelli believes certain facets of antiquity became “mixed” through contact with Eastern peoples (e.g., the Latin language).
Moreover, textual evidence from Discourses 1.49 suggests that Machiavelli sees Florentine political orders as being of this “mixed” variety: “As one sees in what happened to the city of Florence: having had its beginning subordinate to the Roman Empire, and having always lived under the government of another, it remained abject for a time, without thinking for itself. Then when the opportunity came for taking a breath, it began to make its own orders, which could not have been good, since they were mixed with the ancient that were bad. So it was gone on managing itself, for the two hundred years of true memory that it has without ever having had a state for which it could truly be called a republic.” This passage, which I quote in full on page 64, forms the centerpiece of my argument about Machiavelli’s ambivalence concerning his city’s Roman inheritance, which finds additional reinforcement in D 2.2, P 26, and FH 5.1.
Winter also expresses dissatisfaction with the concept of modernity developed in this chapter. I confess that I do not have any special attachment to Machiavelli’s idea that modernity is marked by the loosening of nature’s grasp on humanity; perhaps Winter is right that it is a flawed one. My claim is simply that Machiavelli conceives of modernity in this way, as shown by the evidence marshaled in Chapter 3. As for the possibility that it marginalizes social conflict, I discuss how Machiavelli traces this concept of modernity to the conflict between Rome’s insatiable desire to dominate and its neighbors’ implacable resistance to subjugation, as well as how Machiavelli utilizes this concept of modernity to explain the barrenness of social conflict in his own time. For these reasons, I would not describe the place accorded to social conflict in my interpretation of Machiavelli as marginal.
Finally, Winter finds it odd that I downplay Florence’s brief return to republican political forms between 1494 and 1512. In part, this reflects my decision to focus on Machiavelli’s portrayal of Florentine republicanism in the Florentine Histories, which ends with Lorenzo Medici’s death in 1492. But it also conforms to Machiavelli’s own refusal to make any hard distinctions between early Florentine republicanism and the so-called republican regimes of 1494–1512. As the earlier quote from D 1.49 attests, and as I stress throughout the book (pp. 9, 52, 64, 89–91, 93), Machiavelli sees in “the two hundred years of true memory that [Florence] has” the same hard fact: that it has never “had a state for which it could truly be called a republic.”
