Naturally, the Greeks did not think of everything or eclipse all subsequent achievement. Vergil is as great in his way as Homer and Sophocles are in theirs, and there are even classicists who think that Shakespeare is fit to be named in the same sentence as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In political theory, perhaps the most important contributions have been made by Machiavelli and his disciples—a group that James Burnham discussed in one of his best books, The Machiavellians, perhaps the late Sam Francis’ favorite book about politics.
Machiavelli advanced human understanding in many ways, but three of his most significant advances are associated with the words state, power, and liberty. The Greeks had not talked much about the nature and functioning of what we call the state. Aristotle did write a great deal about the nature of the city and the commonwealth, but of the state—a permanent institutionalized government that operates independently and often against the interests of the people of the commonwealth—he appears to know very little, except insofar as he is describing tyranny. But a tyranny, even a popular tyranny, is an illegitimate exercise of power, while the state defines legitimacy. The reason for the Greek and Roman silence-a silence preserved by St. Thomas—seems evident to me: the state is the creation of the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. There are at least two lines of development: the development of centralized monarchies in England, France, and Spain, which is fairly well known, and the less familiar development of the city-states of Tuscany. To condense a great deal of complicated history as succinctly and simply as I can, the republics of Pisa and Florence were the creatures of corporations, of, on the one hand, craft and mercantile guilds, and, on the other, of protective associations formed by rich and powerful families, initially aristocratic but later including the wealthier businessmen. The state, then, is the supercorporation that expresses the power of its constituents. This is in sharp contrast with the Athenian polis or even the Roman Imperium, which were conceived of as institutions that served the interests of the citizens.
The state is an instrument of power, the power exercised by the corporate members over themselves and, what is more important perhaps, over non-members or junior members. Thus in a state, politics is the pursuit of state power to use in your own interest and the interest of your family and allies. This fact is sufficient to explain what seems to be Machiavelli’s obsession with power.
The ancients were very interested in political liberty, which they regarded as first, a commonwealth’s freedom from external control, such as the control threatened by the Persian invasion, and secondly, freedom from arbitrary and abusive government. This is basically Machiavelli’s understanding. For Florence to be free, she has to be free of foreign occupation, whether French, imperial, or papal, and freely governed by a broadly distributed elite class that does not too much abuse the lower orders. To maintain freedom, the political class (neither Aristotle nor Machiavelli were foolish enough to include the masses) had to exercise vigilance. It had to recruit and maintain a citizen army (mercenaries, as NM warned, were fickle and dangerous) and it had to be prudent in spending and taxing. Florence’s wars of imperial conquest led to excessive debt, taxation, and, ultimately, to the opportunity for the Medici to buy the state.
Thomas Fleming, Machiavelli: Discourses A and Machiavelli I: An Abbreviated and Highly Inaccurate Brief History of Florence
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