Cambridge University Press
announces the publication in paperback of
Paul A. Rahe's
Against Throne and Altar:
Machiavelli and Political Theory
under the English Republic
Now Available in Paperback from Amazon at a 10% Discount
Niccolò Machiavelli, who was born in Florence 540 years ago, is an enigmatic figure. In some quarters, he is regarded as a teacher of evil and a proponent of tyranny and injustice. In others, he passes as an advocate for virtuous republicanism. Some today contend that he was an exemplar of piety, intent on pursuing ecclesiastical reform and Christian renewal, but no one in his own time supposed anything of the kind. Among his familiars, Machiavelli enjoyed notoriety for the contempt that he harbored for religion. He so rarely attended mass that it was a subject of comment, and he is said by a friend never to have given thought to the well-being of his soul or to the fate reserved for it: he conducted his life in accord with what Francesco Guicciardini pointedly identified as "a contrary profession" of faith. Sending you to find a preacher for Holy Week, as the Wool Guild had done, the latter quipped in a letter to the author of The Prince, is like sending a well-known pederast to choose for his friend a beautiful and elegant wife.
In fact, as award-winning historian Paul A. Rahe shows in this path-breaking book, Machiavelli was a close student of both the Arab philosopher Averroës, whose analysis of the political character assumed by the clerical establishment in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam he borrowed intact, and of the Roman poet Lucretius, whose De rerum natura he copied out in its entirety on the most expensive paper in his finest hand, emending the Latin as he worked his way through the text. From the former, Machiavelli learned to think of the res publica Christiana as a principality - more powerful and effective than any secular polity hitherto even imagined, able to deploy a mercenary army of clergymen equipped with a capacity to control human minds, and capable thereby of ruling the better part of a continent without ever having to take responsibility for the governance of any particular place and without its dominion even being recognized and resented by those under its sway. And from Lucretius, the Florentine learned not only to think of religion as a source of gratuitous cruelty, but also to envisage the universe as an infinite space - eternal in duration, and populated solely by atoms in constant motion.
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On the basis of the latter doctrine, Machiavelli rejected the argument made by Plato, Aristotle, and their Christian successors for preferring peace to war, as well as the case made on behalf of the contemplative life by Lucretius, his teacher Epicurus, the other classical philosophers, and the Christians as well, contending that in such a universe "all the things of men" must also be "in motion, and that they cannot remain fixed - for they must either rise or fall; and to many things to which reason does not lead you, necessity leads you." With the help of this anthropology, Machiavelli effected a revolution in political thought. Morality as such he rejected, treating the traditional virtues and vices as postures to be adopted as circumstance dictates. Justice, in his most important works, he deliberately sidestepped even mentioning. And when he constructed a republican politics, he repudiated all ancient thinking on the matter, grounding it in conflict, rather than concord; looking to process, rather than to deliberation; and orienting it in the direction of aggrandizement, rather than preservation. All of this he did because he believed that human beings are as restless as the universe depicted by Lucretius. "The human appetites" are, he contended, "insatiable"; "by nature" human beings "desire everything" while "by fortune they are allowed to secure little"; since "nature has created men in such a fashion" that they are "able to desire everything" but not "to secure everything," their "desire is always greater than the power of acquisition."
In some circles, as Rahe makes clear, Machiavelli's new doctrine was most unwelcome. In England, after the execution of Charles I, when those who had sided with Parliament found themselves forced to contemplate the establishment of a republic, Machiavelli's Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy received careful attention. We know from John Milton's commonplace book that the Secretary of Foreign Tongues for the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland read the book with great care at this time. But it is no less clear that, upon reflection, he rejected the amoral, conflict-ridden, procedural, imperialist republicanism of the Florentine, and in his pamphlets he espoused a republicanism modeled on that of ancient Greece and Rome - grounded on moral education, civic virtue, and the deployment of transcendent reason in public deliberation. He had only one thing in common with Machiavelli. Like the Florentine, he adopted the Averroist critique of the ecclesiastical polity, and he, too, launched a withering assault against what his compatriot James Harrington would soon denounce as "Priest-craft."
In other circles, however, Machiavelli enjoyed a vogue. Milton's "particular friend" and "crony" Marchamont Nedham was a genuine Machiavellian. He it was who first Anglicized the Florentine's thought, exploiting certain bourgeois propensities inherent in Machiavelli's argument, restating as a critique of episcopalianism and presbyterianism alike Machiavelli's analysis of priestcraft, and refashioning the Florentine's novel account of republicanism in such a fashion as to make it not only compatible with the establishment of a free state on an extended territory but also supportive of the traditional English concern with rights, the security of property, and the rule of law. If Milton found the company of so notorious a libertine congenial, it was arguably because, though they differed in the measures they thought best-suited to countering priestcraft and promoting republican liberty, the two men shared a common appreciation for the merits of philosophy - and a common enemy.
James Harrington, the greatest of the English republican theorists, was not, as is often supposed, a thoroughgoing Machiavellian. His thought was rooted, Rahe shows, in Thomas Hobbes's appropriation, critique, and reorientation of the argument presented in The Prince and the Discourses on Livy. To fully understand Harrington, to situate him properly within his intellectual milieu, one must first trace Hobbes's trajectory - noting the Machiavellian and republican proclivities he displayed in his youth, exploring the manner in which he was led to a more positive appreciation of monarchy in the course of the 1620s as he worked on Thucydides and contemplated the struggle emerging between Parliament and King, and attending to the profound debt he owed Sir Francis Bacon, Paolo Sarpi, the poet Lucretius, and their admirers among the French libertines. Then, one must consider the Machiavellian foundations of his argument; attend to the analysis of priestcraft that Hobbes shared with the Florentine and with Sarpi, Bacon, Milton, and Nedham; and take note of the radically Erastian posture he adopted with regard to ecclesiastical polity. Above all, one must attend to the degree to which the Malmesbury philosopher's monarchism was at all times prudential, provisional, and subject to republican revision, and one must ponder whether, in publishing Leviathan, in returning to England, and taking the Engagement required by the Commonwealth, he was not just acquiescing in the Roundhead victory, as scholars generally assume, but actively lending support to the Rump and to its Lord General, Oliver Cromwell, by offering them sage counsel and by attempting to guide public policy - especially with regard to ecclesiastical polity.
In the end, England's republican experiment failed - largely because of the inadequacy of its leaders, who, as statesmen, were found wanting in the end. If the theorists examined here also as statesmen fell short, if they failed to provide those who sought to direct events with the guidance required, it was in part because they were not in tune with the religious sentiments of those responsible for Pride's Purge, and in part because they were genuinely at odds with one another. What Cromwell reportedly said to his murmuring officers shortly after the establishment of the Protectorate could have been said with equal justice to nearly everyone involved in the project of republican construction: they knew not what they meant - or, rather, though they certainly knew what it was that they were rejecting, they could not agree on what to put in its place.
If the speculative efforts of Milton, Nedham, Hobbes, and Harrington were nonetheless of lasting significance, it is because of their legacy. They pioneered lines of thinking that others - such as Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, the contributors to the standing army controversy of the late 1690s, the third earl of Shaftesbury, the authors of The Independent Whig and Cato's Letters, David Hume, and the baron de Montesquieu - would recast in such a fashion as to enable statesmen, at the time of the American and the French Revolutions, to act on their schemes. In this book, Rahe explores the earliest stages in the development of the various Whig understandings of the constitution of liberty.
Paul A. Rahe, who holds The Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, is also the author of Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992), Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic (2009), and Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (2009).