A new 'realistic' understanding of politics and the state

Whereas the development of science from Copernicus onwards should most probably be regarded as a revolution, the relationship between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is more open to discussion in the fields of historiography and political and social thought.⁶ The founder of Italian Renaissance historiography is Leonardo Bruni, who wrote Historia Florentini Populi (History of the Florentine People) in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Although writing in a terse and matter-of-fact style, Bruni celebrates the Florentine republic from its foundation until 1402, the year when the city was saved from conquest by Milan by the sudden death of Giangaleazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, who at the time had conquered the surrounding cities and was preparing for the final assault on Florence itself. Particularly the last part of the work depicts the heroic defence of the city against tyranny.⁷ Despite its seemingly neutral style, the work is strongly patriotic and it also tries to interpret the main lines of development in the history of the republic, from its foundation by Sulla — i.e. during the Roman Republic — until the present. Patriotic historiography was no novelty in the fifteenth century; Florence and other Italian cities has a long tradition of urban history from the thirteenth century onwards. However, Bruni differs from this tradition on several important points. He preferred Latin to the Italian of his predecessors. He is also strongly influenced by classical historians, not only Livy but also Greek historians like Thucydides, Polybius and Plutarch, who were unknown to his predecessors. He mostly avoids legend and religious explanation, to a greater extent attempts a critical assessment of his sources and seeks to explain the development of Florence in secular terms.

The fall of the Florentine republic gave rise to a new and more sombre kind of political reflection in Machiavelli’s and Guicciardini’s works.

In his best-known work, The Prince (1513), Machiavelli departs from the traditional medieval genre of mirrors for princes, which is based on moral rules, and addresses the question of how to succeed as a ruler and remain in power. The book contains a series of strikingly cynical remarks, such as that it is better for a prince to be feared than to be loved — directly in contrast to the traditional doctrine — and that people more easily forgive the killing of their father than the loss of their property. However, the importance of The Prince and other of Machiavelli’s works does not consist in such statements but in his attempts to build a theory of politics and society on systematic analysis of examples of actual behaviour from the present as well as the past. It also implies a more cynical and individualistic theory of human nature. Most people act to serve their own interests and political theory must be based on this fact, although in other contexts, Machiavelli is concerned with patriotic virtue and how this can be promoted in society. Both in The Prince and his other works, he takes his point of departure in concrete situations which he develops into analyses of more complex and long-term phenomena, such as the causes of the rise and decline of Florence and the Roman Empire and of the relative merits of princely and republican government. In principle, Machiavelli prefers the latter but he admits that it will not always work in practice. Machiavelli’s theories are based on extensive reading of Roman authors, notably Livy, and contemporary and earlier Italian historical writings but also on his own career as an official of the Florentine republic, which had given him considerable practical experience; he was responsible for organizing and training the popular levy and he participated in diplomatic missions to foreign powers.

Modern democratic readers may find Machiavelli’s cynicism, particularly in The Prince, less attractive than the medieval Aristotelian tradition and may have good arguments for this.

Although we may easily oppose Machiavelli’s cynicism and political opinions, however, he is a pioneer in sociology. He starts from empirical observations rather than norms and he shows great understanding of political behaviour. Thus, his analysis of the reasons for the Ciompi rebellion has been celebrated as a brilliant piece of sociology; the example from it discussed in Chapter 3 shows an excellent understanding of political psychology.⁸

Machiavelli’s younger contemporary, Francesco Guicciardini (1483—1540), belonged to one of the most prominent families in Florence and spent most of his life as an administrator and military officer in the service of the pope. He became the governor of Florence after the defeat of the republic in 1530 but was dismissed when Cosimo I took power in 1537 and spent the last years of his life writing the history of Italy from the first French invasion in 1494 to 1534, largely based on his own experience. As the story of Francis I’s captivity, discussed in Chapter 1, indicates, Guicciardini has a similar pessimistic view of politics and human folly as Machiavelli but is less concerned with general theories. His main contribution to the understanding of history and society are his meticulous analyses of decisionmaking processes, to reveal exactly why the actual events took place, in most cases, why things went wrong.

Modern historians who use Machiavelli and Guicciardini as sources find much to criticize in their accounts, particularly those of Machiavelli, who often deliberately changes the information he has received from his predecessors in order to make some political point. Nor did these writers or other humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries make any important scientific observations. Nevertheless, there seems to be some connection between the combination of an empirical and generalizing approach to society and human actions and the experimental science that developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is also a clear connection between the Renaissance and the contemporary religious movement, the Reformation.

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Source: Bagge Sverre H.. State Formation in Europe, 843-1789: A Divided World. Routledge,2019. — 306 p.. 2019

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