Democratizing Machiavelli? A Critique

Appropriating Machiavelli for a political camp is tempting, and appropriations by all sorts of political leanings have rendered his body of thought as contradictory at best. John McCormick, in two relatively recent works, tries to cut through this by portraying Machiavelli as a populist and a democrat. Despite his insights, McCormick tries to end the conversation with the hopes of making his appropriation of Machiavelli conclusive. In response, I take a Gadamerian hermeneutical approach towards him and Machiavelli in order to keep the conversation open by asking two questions: (1) What is the relationship between popular sovereignty and statecraft? (2) What is the relationship between class conflict and statecraft? I will illustrate that Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and The History of Florence do not contain any notion of popular sovereignty along populist or even democratic lines despite exposing the strengths and limitations of the People in relation to the life of the republic and to other sectors within it. Overall, democratizing Machiavelli casts aside his gift of being sensitive to the internal problems facing a democratic project—a sensitivity to the weaknesses of the People and the complexities of factional conflict beyond binary oppositions and in relation to statecraft.