Machiavelli and the ten-year cure for corruzione

A dismissed clerk, February 1513

On 18 February 1513 the Florentine police arrested Niccolò Machiavelli. His name sat on a list found in the pocket of Pietro Paolo Boscoli, a young man plotting against the newly restored Medici. He hadn't been part of it. They gave him the strappado anyway: six pulls of the rope, by his own count in a sonnet he sent from the cell to Giuliano de' Medici. Four months earlier he'd been running the Second Chancery of the republic, a job he had held since 1498 and used to raise a citizen militia. The Medici came back in September 1512 and sacked him on 7 November. He walked out of prison in March 1513 under the amnesty for Giovanni de' Medici's election as Pope Leo X.

He went to a small farm at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, about ten miles south of Florence, and was bored out of his mind. Afternoons went on cards at the inn with the host, a butcher, a miller and two kiln-men, and the rows over a farthing could be heard in San Casciano. On 10 December 1513 he wrote to Francesco Vettori, Florence's ambassador in Rome, describing his evenings. He strips off the clothes he has worn all day among the woodcutters, puts on court dress and goes to his desk, where "I enter the ancient courts of ancient men". The book waiting there is Livy. He's reading the first decade, Rome from its founding to 293 BC. What he built around it over the next six years became the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, read aloud to young Florentines in the Orti Oricellari, the Rucellai gardens, and printed only in 1531, four years after his death.

"I enter the ancient courts of ancient men." Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513

Six regimes on a wheel, and the Spartan shortcut

Book I opens with a scheme lifted almost intact from Polybius, Histories VI: six kinds of regime, three sound and three degenerate, revolving into one another. Machiavelli's names are principato, ottimati and popolare, each rotting into tirannide, stato di pochi and licenza. The Greeks called the rotation anakyklosis, the cycle of constitutions. Machiavelli's addition is bleak. A city left alone would go round the wheel for ever, and no city is ever left alone, so the rotation ends when a better ordered neighbour arrives with an army.

So the wheel has to be stopped by design. His remedy is the stato misto, the mixed state, in which prince, nobles and people are all built into one constitution and each watches the others. Lycurgus did it at Sparta in a single act of legislation, and Machiavelli reckons the resulting laws held for more than eight hundred years. Solon mixed nothing at Athens. He gave it a purely popular government and lived, Machiavelli says, to see Pisistratus take it. Rome had no Lycurgus. Rome got to the mixed state by accident, through fighting.

That accident is what made the book notorious. Chapter I.4 argues that "la disunione della plebe e del senato", the falling out of plebs and senate, is what kept Rome free and made it powerful. Livy had treated the secessions as trouble the city survived. Machiavelli says they wrote the laws. The tribunate of the plebs exists because in 494 BC the plebs walked out to the Sacred Mount and refused to come back.

How the rot works, and the ten-year clock

Two words carry the argument. Virtù is the capacity to act effectively in public life: nerve, and a willingness to bear a cost for the common good. Corruzione is its loss, and he means something exact by it. A corrupt city is one where citizens chase private ambition through public office. Powerful men collect clients instead of fellow citizens. It's a city where the vivere libero e politico, the free and civic way of living, has stopped feeling worth defending. In I.55 he names the carriers: gentiluomini, men who live idly on the revenues of estates they don't work. He says the Kingdom of Naples, the Papal States, the Romagna and Lombardy are full of them, and that no republic can be built where they exist unless they're wiped out first.

Watch how the rot actually spreads, because the mechanism is precise enough to use. Ordini, the institutions and procedures, get built by men with virtù and hold as long as most people expect them to be enforced. As corruption spreads the ordinary laws stop biting: still on the books, still ignored by anyone strong enough to ignore them. Only extraordinary means work then, meaning violence, or one man with sole authority. In I.18 he admits the difficulty. Reordering a state for civic life takes a good man, seizing sole power takes a bad one, and the second sort is what turns up.

Which leaves renewal. Discourses III.1 gives the rule: every mixed body, a religious order or a republic, has some good in it at the start. That good wears out unless the body is dragged back towards its beginning. His phrase is ridurre gli stati verso il principio suo, to pull a state back towards its origin. The drag can come from outside, as when the Gauls took Rome in 390 BC and the shock forced the Romans to rebuild their institutions and their religion. It can also be done from inside, by publicly destroying someone important. He lists his cases: the sons of Brutus, the ten men of the decemvirate, Spurius Maelius the corn dealer. And he puts a clock on it. The interval has to stay under ten years, because past that men start changing their habits and breaking the laws, and nobody left has ever been frightened.

Guicciardini's answer, and who holds the rope

The best objection came fast, from a man who had actually governed. Francesco Guicciardini, president of the Romagna under Clement VII and a historian with a low opinion of crowds, wrote his Considerazioni intorno ai Discorsi del Machiavelli around 1530. On I.4 he's blunt. Praising the disunion of plebs and senate, he says, is like praising a sick man's disease because of the remedy it produced. Rome grew, on his account, out of the virtù of its soldiers and the weakness of its neighbours, and the tumulti were a cost the city happened to survive. The road from the Gracchi to Sulla runs straight through the machinery Machiavelli admires. Machiavelli half concedes it. In I.37 he writes that the quarrel over the Agrarian law was what finally destroyed the republic.

What I can't get past sits inside the doctrine itself. Renewal by exemplary terror needs people with enough virtù to aim it correctly. Corruption has already removed them. In a city where offices are traded, the man with sole authority to purge is a product of the trade. Nothing in the Discourses separates a return to first principles from a faction settling accounts. Florence had already run the experiment. Savonarola burned in the Piazza della Signoria on 23 May 1498, and to the men who lit the fire it felt like renewal. Machiavelli got the Second Chancery four weeks later. The doctrine hands you the rope and no instructions.

J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment (1975) reads the Discourses as civic humanism, an Aristotelian idea of citizenship travelling from Florence to James Harrington and on to the American founders. The genealogy is elegant. I think it's too clean. Book II is mostly about how a republic takes territory, and Book III largely about military discipline and command. That's a manual for a republic that expands. Reading it as a theory of flourishing citizenship leaves the army out.

The part worth keeping: date the last real punishment

Against the fatalists collected in the pillar on why civilisations fall, the Discourses do something odd: they turn decline into a variable with a knob on it. The Polybian cycle happens to you. Machiavelli's happens at a rate you partly set, through the design of your ordini and your willingness to enforce them on people who are expensive to punish. Fortuna, he writes in Il Principe XXV, is arbiter of about half of what we do. The other half is why he bothered writing.

The usable part is the clock. His claim is testable, which is more than most theories of decline manage. Take any institution and date the last occasion on which it enforced its own rules against someone it couldn't afford to lose. If that date is more than a decade back, the rules are decoration, and everyone who joined since has never seen them work. Ten years is arbitrary but not stupid. It's roughly how long it takes for the witnesses to leave. That's ridurre ai principii with the executions taken out. He'd say the executions are the part that works.

He never got his own renewal. The Sack of Rome on 6 May 1527 brought the Medici down in Florence ten days later, and the republic came back. The man who had spent his exile writing about how republics get restored lost the vote for his old job to Francesco Tarugi. He died on 21 June 1527. The Discourses were printed in Rome in 1531 by Antonio Blado, under a privilege granted by Clement VII, a Medici pope.