APPENDIX
THE QUESTION of the relationship between humanist rhetoric and republicanism is a venerable topos in the historiography of the Italian Renaissance, and in Machiavelli studies in particular. The most influential recent interpretations of Machiavelli—those by political historians such as J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner—are couched in the terms of this debate. For this reason, the debate deserves special consideration here. Both Pocock and Skinner accept the argument that humanist rhetoric contributed to the development of civic humanism and that Machiavelli was the inheritor of this civic ideology. Yet, while Pocock and Skinner represent the current consensus regarding the influence of humanist rhetoric on Machiavelli, Machiavelli is still read and analyzed as though his own rhetoric were irrelevant to his political thought. In the following pages I suggest that both the debate and the recent consensus have important—but unrealized—methodological implications for the interpretation of Machiavellism in particular and for the relationship of rhetoric to political theory in general. Both suggest that Machiavelli’s own work needs to be read and analyzed rhetorically.
The following brief history of the debate provides a topology of approaches to the question of rhetoric and civic humanism, and thus helps to situate my own rhetorical approach. The historians discussed below conceive of rhetoric variously as a tool of argument in the service of political ideas, an ideologically neutral technique of argument on both sides of a question, or as a mode of debate and dialogue that is both formal and critical. It is this last definition of rhetoric that informs my own rhetorical analysis of Machiavelli and that helps to explain the tensions and the ties between the Machiavel and the republican Machiavelli.
Although scholars agree that the quattrocento saw a burgeoning of humanist defenses of libertas, the explanations for this phenomenon vary. In The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance Hans Baron argued that the Florentines developed an ideology of civic humanism under the pressure of the Visconti threat to the Florentine republic in 1401–1402.1 Before this time, according to Baron, humanism was essentially a literary endeavor, unrelated to the exigencies of political life. Fourteenth-century humanists, “compounding medieval ascetic ideals with stoic precepts, believed that the true sage ought to keep aloof from society and public duties.” Petrarch’s intermittent interest in the active life was an exception: for Baron he was “a Moses, led to see a new land, but not granted to enter it.”2 And Salutati, while very much engaged in the active life as chancellor of the republic on the eve of the Florentine crisis, did not integrate his political experience with his humanist literary and intellectual pursuits. If he had, according to Baron, he could never have defended Caesar’s tyranny and condemned the republican Brutus in De tyranno (165–66). For all these reasons, it took the political crisis of the early quattrocento to channel the humanists’ rhetorical skills into the defense of republicanism and the active life.
In a series of articles addressing Baron’s claims, Jerrold Seigel argued that humanist defenses of libertas in the quattrocento were not simply responses to a political crisis but rather the products of a humanist rhetorical culture that encouraged arguments pro and contra a given topic. Pace Baron, there is no clear alliance between humanist rhetoric and republicanism in the early quattrocento, nor is there a sharp “break between the literary humanists of the fourteenth century and the ‘civic humanists’ of the fifteenth” (7–8). Drawing on Kristeller’s definition of the humanists as professional rhetoricians, Seigel claimed instead that Petrarch and Bruni shared the culture of Ciceronian rhetoric, one that would dispose them to defend both the active and the contemplative lives at different points in their careers.
Ironically, then, although Baron and Seigel differed concerning the conditions that gave rise to the defense of republicanism, they agreed on the merely contingent relation of rhetoric to these values. For Baron, the decisive factor in the transformation of literary humanism into civic humanism was the political threat from the Visconti; for Seigel, humanist rhetoric was no more conducive to republican than to other political values since it was still essentially a literary exercise in the early quattrocento. In both cases rhetoric is conceived of as a neutral technique of argument that for professional or political reasons may be allied to particular substantive arguments.
Eugenio Garin offered a different analysis of the import of rhetorical training for Renaissance culture and politics. In contrast to Seigel, Garin stressed the discontinuity between medieval and humanist study of the ancients. And although he acknowledged with Baron the importance of political circumstances for the development of humanism, he focused instead on the political implications of the studia humanitatis as forms of knowledge. Drawing on humanist works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Garin argued that humanist philology involved a new, disinterested critical study of the past, and that rhetoric for the humanists entailed a theory of historical change and of the kinds of knowledge most appropriate to civic or political life.3 In addition, he showed the frequent association of oratory with times of political crisis or republicanism. Patrizi, for example, credited Petrarch with reawakening the spirit of the ancient orators buried by monarchs and barbarians; and Brocardo, in Speroni’s dialogue on rhetoric, remarked that he did not see “why rhetoric should be banished from republics, seeing that it is the art which has as its object human actions, from which republics arise.”4 According to Speroni, republics are especially subject to change, to history, and thus to considerations of decorum; conversely, because the laws of the republic are made “with reference to time, place, utility, one’s own power and that of others, they often change form and appearance.”5 It is important to see that Garin’s—and Speroni’s—point here is not simply a thematic one. Rhetoric does not simply take politics as its subject matter but is uniquely suited in its form and method, its sensitivity to context and audience, to dealing with political issues and facilitating civic participation. Here the formal techniques of rhetorical argument both allow for a critique of the status quo and encourage positive political commitment.
Garin’s work helped to create a consensus concerning the importance of humanist rhetoric for the development of civic consciousness among those historians, such as Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock, who sought to mediate between Baron’s emphasis on political conditions of republicanism and Seigel’s on the humanists’ professional training.6 However, this consensus has not yielded the attention to the rhetoric of political theory that Garin’s analysis would seem to dictate.
While not rejecting the importance of political circumstances for the formation of republican political theory, Quentin Skinner argued for the contribution of “a new and self-conscious humanist form of rhetorical theory, which was imported into Italy from France in the second half of the thirteenth century” (Foundations, 1:35). He thus objected that,
in treating the crisis of 1402 as “a catalyst in the emergence of new ideas,” Baron has underestimated the extent to which the ideas involved were not in fact new at all, but were rather an inheritance from the City Republics of medieval Italy. . . . The other problem is that, in emphasising the special qualities of “civic” humanism, Baron has also failed to appreciate the nature of the links between the Florentine writers of the early quattrocento and the wider movement of Petrarchan humanism which had already developed in the course of the fourteenth century. (1:71)
Like Seigel, then, Skinner stressed the continuities between medieval and Renaissance rhetorical defenses of liberty; but like Garin, he insisted that these defenses were not mere rhetorical exercises but the genuine rhetorical expression of civic consciousness.7 Yet, while Skinner acknowledged that humanist rhetorical theory enjoined the imitation of the classics and transformed “the prevailing conventions of the Ars Dictaminis,” his argument concerning the connection between humanist rhetoric and republicanism is finally thematic: the study of the classics was important because it led to a familiarity with classical political arguments for republican government and against tyranny (1:35). Not surprisingly, Skinner’s analysis of Renaissance works of political thought also is entirely thematic, focusing on abstract ideas (sometimes called “vocabulary”) rather than the literary or rhetorical dimension of humanist culture. It thus falls short of his own methodological claims, as well as the important methodological implications of Garin’s remarks on the humanist conception of rhetoric, both of which require some attention to the form of the works Skinner is summarizing. This is particularly striking in his analysis of Machiavelli whom he sees as both continuing and criticizing the earlier humanist tradition. Machiavelli emerges as a republican thinker who distances himself from an earlier humanist rhetoric of consensus by emphasizing the benefit of political conflict and dissension. But his achievement as a republican theorist is divorced from the rhetoric of his texts and summarized thematically. This misses a crucial element in Machiavelli’s political theory, as well as a reason for the wide readership of his works.8
In The Machiavellian Moment, as we have seen, J.G.A. Pocock viewed Machiavelli as an example of that moment in the Renaissance in which secular, republican political theory emerged in response to the perception of historical contingency. For Pocock, humanist rhetoric is one facet of this complex historical moment. Yet, while Pocock saw rhetoric as contributing to the “emergent historicism” (3) of Renaissance republicanism, he finally subordinated it to the more impressive achievement of a genuinely secular political theory. “Machiavelli” in this analysis names the way in which politics displaces or supersedes humanist rhetoric, just as the historical Machiavelli moves beyond the assumptions of civic humanism. This displacement describes both Pocock’s historical narrative and his method. In his discussion of the work of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and others, rhetoric as a topic and a method of analysis has fallen by the wayside. A close look at Pocock’s discussion of the Baron-Seigel debate will illustrate why this is the case.
While conceding Seigel’s point about the internal constraints of the humanist rhetorical culture, Pocock also insisted that civic humanism did exist, whether or not it was genuinely espoused by its humanist defenders. Echoing Garin, he noted: “Since rhetoric was both civic and active, it was possible for the rhetorician—or the humanist qua rhetorician—to provide a language in which to articulate a civic consciousness he might or might nor share” (59). This participation might take the form of republicanism but need not, since the “affinity” between rhetorician and citizen “ran far deeper than that” (60): “The rhetorician and the citizen were alike committed to viewing human life in terms of participation in particular actions and decisions, in particular political relationships between particular men” (59–60). For Pocock, as for Garin, this concern with particulars explains the similarities between “philological and political humanism.” Elaborating on the analogy between “the conversation with the ancients” and “the conversation among citizens” (61–62), he argued:
The humanist stress on communication was enough to raise the question of how particular men, existing at particular moments, could lay claim to secure knowledge. The answer could not be given in terms of the simple cognition of universals, or the intellectual animal would be thrust back into the universe of the scholastics, the political animal into that of the imperial hierarchies; to give it in terms of the simple accumulation of experience would be similarly fatal to humanist and citizen alike. Yet an answer must be given somehow, or Petrarch would be unable to read Livy, Florence unable to govern itself. How might a conversation between particulars be capable of organized rationality? The rhetoric of philology, or of politics, might provide the answer; but politics was more than rhetoric. (62–63)
In the end, although Pocock and Skinner agree on the contribution of humanist rhetoric to the development of Renaissance republicanism, they see this rhetorical moment as one superseded by a properly political analysis. Rhetorical attention to particulars—whether in a republic or principality—eventually gives way to republican theory. As an art for dealing with contingency, rhetoric thus provides Pocock and Skinner with an analogue for the republican response to political crisis; but it does not provide a tool of analysis of republican texts.
There are several costs to this supersession of rhetoric when we come to Machiavelli’s work. The first is a neglect of one of the dominant languages available to Renaissance writers for conceptualizing the sphere of contingency and the problem of innovation within this sphere. According to Pocock, politics is more than rhetoric because the rhetorical resources for the articulation of a given mode of civic consciousness may exist without being exercised; that exercise requires favorable political conditions, as well as the language to conceptualize them. Yet, in focusing on these conditions, Pocock distanced himself from the humanists’ usual understanding of their own activity. Although some humanists reflected on the social and political conditions necessary for civic liberty and the appropriation of the past in the economic and institutional terms that we would recognize, most tended—as Pocock’s analogy between reading and governing in the quotation above suggests—to assimilate these historical conditions to the philological study of ancient texts and the rhetorical standard of decorum: the study of classical languages and ancient history was necessary for the proper understanding and editing of classical texts, and the recognition of historical change was necessary to determine what in the classical work could speak to—and was worth imitating in—the present. Notoriously, it was not only Petrarch who read Livy and for whom the ability to read Livy was related to the possibility of Florentine self-government, but also Machiavelli.
The second problem with the neglect of rhetoric is the unproblematic assimilation of Machiavelli the author of The Prince to the republican theorist of the Discourses, and the consequent refusal to take seriously the reception of Machiavelli as rhetorician and Machiavel. Thus, although Skinner notes in passing the ironic treatment of humanist virtues and what he misrepresents as Machiavelli’s shocking silence about religion in The Prince, he tends to focus instead on such similarities as the shared concern with “greatness” and “the government of cities” in Machiavelli’s two major works of political thought. For Skinner, Machiavelli is “essentially . . . an exponent of a distinctive humanist tradition of classical republicanism.”9 Pocock also emphasizes the continuities between The Prince and the Discourses as “analytic stud[ies] of innovation and its consequences.” As Pocock writes in one of his characteristic dismissals of the reception of Machiavelli as Machiavel, “the truly subversive Machiavelli was not a counselor of tyrants, but a good citizen and patriot” (MM, 218). For both Pocock and Skinner, virtù is assimilated to classical virtue, and the problem of the relation of The Prince to the Discourses is resolved in favor of classical republicanism. In neglecting the humanist rhetorical tradition and the hyperbolic rhetoric of Machiavelli’s texts, this vision of classical republicanism domesticates what is most disturbing and innovative in Machiavelli’s work.