The People’s Princes: Machiavelli, Leadership, and Liberty, John P. McCormick, University of Chicago Press, 2025

I start with a quotation from David Hume:

Machiavel was certainly a great genius; but having confined his study to the furious and tyrannical governments of ancient times, or to the little disorderly principalities of Italy, his reasonings… have been found extremely defective; and there scarcely is any maxim in his Prince, which subsequent experience has not entirely refuted… Trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century; and there scarcely is any ancient writer on politics, who has made mention of it. Even the Italians have kept a profound silence with regard to it, though it has now engaged the chief attention, as well of ministers of state, as of speculative reasoners. The great opulence, grandeur, and military achievements of the two maritime powers [the United Kingdom and the United Provinces] seem first to have instructed mankind in the importance of an extensive commerce…

Hume had no patience with those of his contemporaries who wanted to see a citizen or subject militia of the sort advocated by Machiavelli; there was nothing wrong with Hanoverian mercenaries. In the modern age, victory required deep pockets, not military virtue, and Great Britain and the United Provinces had deeper pockets than any states before them because they were able to sell long term debt on the open market at favourable interest rates.

This is the third book by John P. McCormick arguing that Machiavelli was a radical democrat, and that when he argued for the rule of tyrannical princes it was only in order to lay the foundations for democratic government. What is peculiar about this book, and the reason why I began by quoting Hume, is that it does not simply claim to interpret Machiavelli; it claims to draw from him lessons which should now be applied in our own politics. There is no suggestion here that, as Hume argues, modern politics is fundamentally different in character from classical or Renaissance politics because we now live in commercial rather than feudal societies and in nation states rather than city states.

There is a tradition of interpreting Machiavelli as advocating an economy of violence. McCormick’s Machiavelli is positively extravagant where violence is concerned. McCormick is well aware that what he calls ‘morally fastidious readers’ will take exception to the advocacy of bloodshed, but, like Machiavelli before him, he does not hesitate to shock. What’s needed, he claims, is for democratic leaders to follow the examples of Moses and Romulus, examples which require, in Machiavelli’s own language, ‘much blood’, ‘infinite betrayals and cruelties’, ‘intolerable violence’, and the killing of ‘infinite numbers’ of men. Good laws, Machiavelli says, must be ‘invigorated with extreme force.’ In McCormick’s own language what is needed is ‘salutary tyranny’, ‘bloodletting’, the spilling of ‘actual blood’ (just in case we should think all this talk of violence was somehow metaphorical). McCormick, interpreting Machiavelli, generously concedes that ‘popular governments need not nec­essarily kill their entire nobilities through arbitrary violence’, but still concludes there is a lot to be said in favour of what he calls ‘senatocide’, the killing of all senators, who may conveniently be found gathered together when the senate is in session, which is much more efficient than having to round them up one by one.

McCormick summarises the intellectual move that Machiavelli makes in his writings on politics in a way that should seem surprising. Long understood as an unconditional admirer of ancient Rome, Machiavelli is in fact, according to McCormick, advocating a return to the politics not of Rome, but of Greece. Over and over again his exemplars are men like Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse. Agathocles committed senatocide; a less tyrannical procedure is to put individual oligarchs on trial before the mass of the citizens gathered in the town square, followed, naturally, by their execution, or, exceptionally, their banishment.

McCormick calls this Athenization, although Machiavelli’s exemplars are not Athenian but rather Greek. McCormick is well aware that Machiavelli, as he interprets him, represents the antithesis of the political teaching of Madison and Hamilton’s Federalist Papers, with its arguments for adapting the classical republican tradition, based on city states, to a modern nation state by introducing indirect democracy, the separation of powers, and checks and balances. Athenization is a direct rejection of the American constitution as conceived by the founders. ‘Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob,’ wrote Madison. Machiavelli, of course, was  not replying to Madison, but McCormick certainly is. Following Machiavelli, he argues we should put our trust in the people assembled, a.k.a. the mob.

McCormick’s advocacy of violence and salutary tyranny comes at a most dangerous moment in the politics of Western democracy when there is a growing disconnect between established, bureaucratic elites and the populace. Just yesterday (as I write this) the President of the United States called for six Democratic lawmakers to be tried for sedition, facing the death penalty. Their crime: stating the, one might have thought, universally accepted post-Nuremberg principle that members of the armed forces are not obliged to obey illegal commands. We have also of course had a number of chilling assassinations: in the US of Charlie Kirk and Brian Thompson; and in the UK of David Amess and Jo Cox. John Gray has recently called for a Hobbesian liberalism: for Hobbesian liberals the key function of government is to prevent, not incite, violence.

Is McCormick a reliable interpreter of Machiavelli? Let’s take the example with which McCormick begins his book, the case of Pacuvius in Capua when Hannibal was threatening the city. The populace was hostile to the senate. So Pacuvius locked the senate up, and told the populace they could execute the senators one by one provided they could agree on who should replace them. Agreement proved to be impossible, and so the senate was restored, nominally, to power, but from then on it knew that its survival depended on the people’s acquiescence. Machiavelli follows Livy’s account very closely, but then reaches his own conclusion: ‘A people therefore is apt to err in judging of things and their accidents in the abstract, but, on becoming acquainted with particulars, speedily discovers its mistakes.’ The populace was wrong when it wanted to kill all the senators, but right when it voted on the life of each individual senator. Montaigne, telling the story with both Livy and Machiavelli in mind, reaches a very different conclusion: everyone, he claims, now understood ‘that the oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried’, a conservative conclusion to set against Machiavelli’s defence of direct democracy.

McCormick has a problem with this story: no blood was shed. The story fits perfectly with the economy of violence interpretation of Machiavelli, but not with the McCormick interpretation which requires ‘actual blood’. One might note in passing that the lesson of Machiavelli’s Mandragola is that ‘actual blood’ isn’t needed; imaginary violence will, as in this case, serve just as well as real violence. But the lack of bloodshed is alright, McCormick insists, because the outcome was indeterminate: the people might well have voted to kill a few senators, if not all of them. ‘I submit’, he writes, ‘that Machiavelli invites his readers to visu­alise the following: How many senators soiled their togas when they heard Pacuvius put their lives in the people’s hands?’ But this is to go against the moral of the story as told by Livy, Machiavelli, and indeed Montaigne. All understand that Pacuvius knew exactly what he was doing. He promised the senators that he would save their lives and he did save their lives. They trusted him, and were right to do so. The outcome was not at any moment indeterminate; if it had been, the contrasting lessons that Machiavelli and Montaigne seek to draw would not have followed.

The better part of a chapter is devoted to an attempt to explain why Machiavelli misnames two Roman characters in book 1 chapter 5 of the Discourses. He should, McCormick claims, have called them — according to the editions of Livy available to him, which differ from ours — Caius Menenius and Marcus Follium; in fact he calls them Marcus Menenius and Marcus Fulvius (or rather, of course, since Machiavelli is writing in Italian, Marco Mennenio and Marco Fulvio). At this point McCormick engages in elaborate arguments of a sort that one might have hoped would be confined to Straussians, based on the claim that Machiavelli expects us to think of other characters with similar names; indeed what we seem to have here is a chapter which employs reading between the lines to reach the opposite of Straussian conclusions.

There are two problems with McCormick’s argument before it even gets going. The first is an absolutely elementary failure to understand Livy’s Latin. Livy refers to Marcus Follium because the name is in the accusative case; in the nominative case the name would be Marcus Follius. It’s difficult to see how a Machiavelli scholar would not know this. The second is almost equally basic. The Discourses were published posthumously. We do not have any manuscript, apart from for the first few paragraphs, in Machiavelli’s hand, or corrected and approved by Machiavelli. Thus we really don’t know if Machiavelli wrote ‘Marcus Menenius’ (or rather Marco Mennenio: McCormick forgets thats Machiavelli was writing in Italian), or simply wrote ‘Mennenio’ and the printer, copyediting as printers in those days did, simply assumed he was referring to the best-known Mennenio and stuck the name Marco into the text when he should have stuck in Caio, just as a modern copyeditor might add the name Michel to a discussion of the Foucault Pendulum, when the Foucault in question is not Michel but Léon. As for the difference between Follius and Fulvius (or Follium and Fulvium in the accusative, Follio and Fulvio in Italian), this is exactly the sort of error (‘o’ for ‘u’, ‘iu’ for ‘vi’) that someone reading a manuscript might make, where a word that is difficult to decipher is interpreted as being a word with which the reader is more familiar. Since Italian scholars are obsessed, as it would seem to an anglophone reader, with what they call ‘philology’, it is strange indeed that a Machiavelli scholar would fail to consider the possibility of discrepancies between Machiavelli’s original text, scribal copies, and the first printed editions, which probably derived only indirectly from Machiavelli’s own text.

I can’t help but note that when Walter of Brienne, the tyrant of Florence, takes up residence in il convento de’ Frati Minori di Santa Croce, he is not living in a nunnery and thus proving himself to be effeminate, but in the all-masculine world of a Friary, which he seems to have turned into a barracks. Even if you don’t know convento doesn’t always mean ‘nunnery’, Frati is unequivocally masculine.

But let’s leave these slips of the pen, dignified by philologists with the Latin term lapsus calami, and of the eye, and the mind, aside. Is Machiavelli a radical democrat? The simple truth, in my view, is that Machiavelli believes states are engaged in a ruthless and endless struggle, each against all the others. The states that are most effective in this struggle are neither tyrannies nor democracies, but those that are driven to external expansion by the internal conflict between elites and the populace. This argument is well made in the recent book by Gabriele Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumult. What Machiavelli believes in is following in the path of practical realities, and ignoring intellectual falsifications (andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa che alla imaginazione di essa). Bill Connell has recently demonstrated that translators of Machiavelli — myself included — are mistaken to translate this as ‘going straight [dritto] to the effective truth’ when it means ‘following behind [dietro] the effective truth’.

He would surely have sympathised with McCormick’s desire to shock the morally fastidious reader, although Machiavelli has his own moments of ethical squeamishness, not only when it comes to the murder of one’s fellow citizens, but also when it is a matter of what we now call ‘ethnic cleansing’. But I think he would have been astonished to be told that he had argued for a Greek rather than a Roman politics. After all, the Greek city states had crumpled one by one when brought face to face with Roman legions. Rome, not Athens, was the model to be copied.

My remarks so far have been critical. But McCormick’s book improves greatly when he turns to Machiavelli’s History of Florence. Here his method is to ‘accentuate within Machiavelli’s narrative facts over opinion, deeds over words, and verbs over adjectives’. Somewhat to my surprise, I think this works. His argument is that Machiavelli expects the astute reader to grasp that the Florentines have achieved nothing worthwhile because they are addicted to moderate policies, and have lacked the courage to follow the examples of Moses, Romulus, and Agathocles. In short, too little bloodshed, too little ‘populism’. Unlike most users of the word, McCormick thinks there are good populisms as well as bad populisms, just as he thinks there are good tyrannies as well as bad tyrannies. Failure, McCormick claims, was not, in Machiavelli’s view, inevitable; indeed Machiavelli still had hopes that his lessons might fruitfully be applied in practice.

Whether he was right about the Florence of his day is now an academic question. Montaigne was convinced he had little to teach Frenchmen caught up in religious wars, and Hume insisted he had little to teach 18th-century Britain with its new, global empire. Against McCormick, I would argue this is still true as we face our own acute political dilemmas. We need to learn what works and how to reproduce it; but no good comes of incitement to violence while we still have functioning democracies. The greatest advantage of democracy, after all, is that it makes possible non-violent regime change. Machiavelli thought a true statesman must know how to be ‘completely wicked’. McCormick thinks we are yet again in need of such wicked states-persons; I think we should be profoundly grateful we are not.