Deep Republicanism: Prelude to Professionalism

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HODGES

Political Science • Political Theory “Highly Recommended.” —Choice

A unique treatment of Machiavelli’s political agenda—its implementation by numerous historical actors, and its legacy, professionalism—Deep Republicanism examines aspects of Machiavelli’s work that have often been overlooked. It also sheds light on Machiavelli himself, whose famously devious and crafty writing style was partly motivated by his political vulnerability in fifteenth century Florence. Hodges’s study is both a novel examination of the historical influence of Machiavelli’s thought and a testament to the enduring power, influence, and subtlety of one of the bestknown Western political philosophers. Donald C. Hodges is professor of philosophy at Florida State University.

For orders and information please contact the publisher Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 www.lexingtonbooks.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2936-4 ISBN-10: 0-7391-2936-8

DEEP REPUBLICANISM

Deep Republicanism: Prelude to Professionalism establishes the importance of Machiavelli’s radical republican agenda in understanding the major revolutions of the modern world. Donald C. Hodges’s nuanced analysis of The Discourse of Livy reveals a subversive republicanism in Machiavelli’s theorizing that is at odds with the demoliberalism often perceived as the work’s primary political agenda. Hodges follows this strand of republicanism through history, providing a fascinating account of how these two political philosophies vied with each other throughout much of modern history in conflicts that culminated in the American and Russian Revolutions.

DEEP REPUBLICANISM Prelude to Professionalism

DONALD C. HODGES

Deep Republicanism

Deep Republicanism Prelude to Professionalism

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham Boulder New York Toronto * Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham. MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright O 2003 by Lexington Books First paperback edition 2008 AN rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows: Hodges, Donald Clark, 1923Deep Republicanism: Prelude to Professionalism / Donald C. Hodges. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Republicanism-History. 2. Professions-History. 3. Machiavelli, Niccola, 1469-1527-Contributions in republicanism. I. Title JC421H58 2003 321 .8'6---dc21 2003043411 ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-0553-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-0553-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2936-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-I 0: 0-7391-2936-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) eISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3000-1 eISBN-I 0: 0-7391-3000-5 Printed in the United States of America @-The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSVNISO 239.48-1992.

In well-regulated republics the state ought to be rich and the citizens poor. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (1 53 1 )

As a result of many years of domination by a totalitarian social and political system, our society ended up in a state of deep crisis. . . . An essentially antipopular policy was pursued for a long period: a rich state with a poor people. Stanislav Shatalin et al, The "500 Days" Plan (August-September 1990)

Contents Introduction I.

A Dangerous Enterprise

2. The Republican Agenda 3.

The First Republican Vanguard

4. The Second Republican Vanguard

5. Prelude to Professionalism Selected Bibliography Index About the Author

Introduction In the minds of active revolutionaries, at any rate the ones who "got there," the longing for a just society has always been fatally mixed up with the intention of securing power for themselves. George Orwell, "Catastrophic Gradualism" (November 1945) Two kinds of republicanism, a moderate demoliberal and an extreme collectivist version, vied with each other throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with virtually nothing in common except their intellectual roots in Machiavelli's writings. In The Machiavellian Moment (1975), J.G.A. Pocock did a monumental job of spelling out one fork of Machiavelli's complex legacy-the Atlantic Republican Tradition of civic humanism and its post-classical development as liberalism and representative democracy.' The time has come to examine the other fork, if only in a briefand nonmonumental sketch ofthe European Republican Tradition that includes the shallow version, but highlights Machiavelli's deep republicanism and its post-classical development as socialism and communism. Although taking issue with Pocock's interpretation of the classical roots of American republicanism, historians agree with his reading of Machiavelli as a precocious liberal opposed to the arbitrary use of power. Such is the interpretation conformable to the demoliberal current in the West, that of an arrested and bland republicanism for which conflict resolution rather than the deepening of social conflicts is the way to resolve them. The few hints in Machiavelli's writings in defense of deep republicanism have been picked up by Marxists of different persuasions to support not the Atlantic model but the political current leading to and following from the Great French Revolution. This revolutionary current is the focus of the present historical sketch in which Machiavelli had a role as a plausible forerunner, a current too readily dismissed as out of bounds. That a tradition of deep republicanism can be traced to the Florentine Secretary is borne out by an extended argument in three parts: first, that a close reading of The Prince and the Discourses in the light of Machiavelli's personal history reveals a radical republican project at odds with what passes for Machiavellism because of a failure to penetrate the veil of misunderstanding he deliberately cultivated;

2

Introduction

second, that this project representedthe interests of an emergingclass of professionals against rule by a landed aristocracy followed by that of an upstart bourgeoisie; and third, that its institutional embodiments included the Jacobin and Bolshevik Reigns of Terror. Rousseau is not "Rousseauism," says Judith Shklar in her second thoughts on the citizen from Geneva.' Neither should Machiavelli be conhsed with Machiavellism. In both instances the unsuspected outcomes oftheir political works clashed with the written word. But their texts in turn present only a pale and distorted image of their respective persons. Machiavelli is neither The Prince nor the Discourses anymore than Rousseau is A Discourse on Inequality or The Social Contract. The book is not the author. There is more than one Machiavellism. The Machiavellism ofthe texts differs substantiallyfrom their interpretationsas do these interpretations from one another. The same words have different meanings, and sentences are flush with ambiguity. Political texts, writes Hannah Pitkin in Fortune Is a Woman (1984), can be and are used "to conceal, deny, or distort reality: hypocritically,ideologically, defensively." How else should one understand and account for the plethora of readings and misreadings of Machiavelli's texts that are not just complementary but c~ntradictory?~ When intentionsare dangerous and subversive,words may be used to conceal them. One learns less about Machiavelli from his writings than from his life. In Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power ( 1 996), Roger D. Masters says we should reject the standard readings of Machiavelli that take him at his word. He is shown to be exceptionally deceptive in concealing his republican principles, and exceptionally devious in presenting a republican political philosophy in the name of a handbook for princes. But since critics are reluctant to accept the likelihood that an author may have a secret or hidden intention, Masters hesitates to attribute an esoteric meaning to Machiavelli's works except on the following conditions: the historical and intellectual context must justiQ the author's lack of truthfulness;there must be hints of contradictionsthat lead a careful reader to search for hidden meanings; and the autobiographical data, including private letters, must show an awareness of deceptive writing by others and possibly by him~elf.~ These criteria are satisfied with reference to The Prince and the Discourses. First, as a former official of the Florentine Republic suspected of a conspiracy to overthrow the Medici, then imprisoned, tortured, and banished on that account, Machiavelli had ample reason to hide his intentions for fear of further repression. Second, his writings contain contradictions and other puzzles that are impossible to resolve unless they point to hidden intentions. Third, Machiavelli commends the usefulness of "covert7' writing in chapter 18 of The Prince.' "Deceptive or so-called 'esoteric' writing might be not only necessary as a means to prevent difficulty with the Medici," Masters adds, "but prudent for deeper reasons." Machiavelli feared the Church authorities who had excommunicated Savonarola and burned him at the stake: His method of evading persecution by the censors misled them with generally accepted and inoffensive statements at the start, confused them with multiple contradictions, ambiguities, and inverted meanings of

Introduction

3

words, and bored them with a prohsion of seemingly meaningless detaik6 Deliberate deception is not the only obstacle to understanding Machiavelli. Like his friend Leonardo da Vinci, he favored a multiplicity of perspectives for gaining general knowledge, "a proportioned and harmonious view ofthe whole, that can be seen simultaneously, at one glance just as things in nature." The ability to imagine a scene from more than one angle in painting has its political counterpart in the ability to empathize with antagonistic social classes and hostile political parties. Unlike his successors in political theory with their "simplistic ideologies'-Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Burke, Man-Machiavelli did not think system-atically but operated on several wavelengths simultane~usly.~ Contradictions were not just a device for protecting himselfbut, as in the case of Marx's dialectical method, a condition of understanding the world. In The Prince especially, according to Masters, Machiavelli concealed his republican convictions. Yes, but which ones? Those deriving from Polybius and the ancient Romans, or those he learned from Brother Savonarola and the aborted Italian Reformation? Masters presumes it was Polybius' shallow republicanism. It was at least that, but there is a case for including Savonarola's deep republicanism. The ambivalences in Machiavelli's writings have evidently not been given their due. Without talking in circles, Machiavelli is almost as difficult to interpret as some ofthe biblical parables. And we may suspect that,just as there is no end to the quest of the historical Jesus, it is unlikely that we shall ever know the real Machiavelli. The vast secondary literature testifies to the uncertainty. As Machiavellian scholar J. Patrick Coby recently observed, Machiavelli is not only maddeningly vague about what he intends, but is also "an ambivalent writer who moves in contrary directions because his loyalties are divided and his temperament mixed."' In addition to being a political thinker, Machiavelli was a dramatist with an uncanny ability to identify with his characters. In part, this may account for the different roles he assumed. As a "yes, but" political thinker, one hardly knows which one to stress. An enemy of both the Church and the ruling nobility, he defended the only "true religion" that was Christianity and the nobles' mastery of the art of war. And like the advice he gave to princes, his protective coloring was to appear what he was not. In Machiavelli's Romans: Liberty and Greatness in the Discourses on Livy (1999), Coby acknowledges the ambivalencesand contradictionsin the Discourses, but tries to pin the Florentine down. Machiavelli's republicanism, he argues, combined "greatness" or "empire" with "freedom" in a mixed regime with checks and balances among classes as well as among the principal organs of government. Like Masters, he believes that Machiavelli's subversive intentions went no further than a demoliberal republic. That accounts for the "middle ways [he] adopted," but fails to account for the "middle ways [he] rejected." While acknowledging that Machiavelli was a political extremist, Coby plays down the importance of equality in his republican credc-the liberty and equality of deep republican^.^ Here we are concerned with the man only insofar as his life experiences shed

4

Introduction

light on his writings, and with his writings only inasmuch as they hrther our understanding of his legacy and the political transformations following from it. Both the Machiavellism of deeds and the Machiavellism of the texts constitute the pivotal subject of the present inquiry. Effects have causes and supporting conditions that must be examined to understand the outcomes. Such a study is bound to be selective. Although Pitkin makes a strong case for machismo at the root of Machiavelli's several concerns-a manly ideal summed up in the notion of classical virtue as a mixture of force and ability-that is only one motif traceable to his political writings." The present work focuses on a different set of motifs that links the man, his works, and their political consequences to the major revolutions of the modern world. Such were the revolutions leading first to the overthrow ofgentlemen (aristocracy) and second, of those who live like gentlemen (bourgeoisie). The textual source ofthese motifs may be found in the Discourses. Their common denominator is political extremism aimed at subvertingrule by gentlemen and those who live like them. Here are some guidelines. In "well-regulated republics the State ought to be rich and the citizens poor." Republics "which have thus preserved their political existence uncorrupted do not permit any of their citizens to be or to live in the manner of gentlemen, but rather maintain among them a perfect equality." Such "republics are the most decided enemies of the lords and gentlemen that exist in the country, so that, if by chance any of them fall into their hands, they kill them, as being the chiefpromoters of all corruption." Consequently, "should anyone wish to establish a republic in a country where there are many gentlemen, he will not succeed until he has destroyed them all." Republics should follow the example of Rome, where "the consulate was 'the reward of merit, and not of birth."' It is necessary for the rule of merit "to keep the citizens poor, so that their wealth and lack of virtue may neither corrupt themselves nor enable them to corrupt others."" (When taken out of context, these extracts suggest that Machiavelli was not only a precocious Robespierre, but also a precocious Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot.) By Machiavelli's deep republicanism 1 mean the model of government that reflects these cardinal motifs. 1do not argue that they are the dominant motifs. But in shaping the ideology ofthe French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, they paved the way to a postrevolutionary society governed by an elective meritocracy of professionals. Most interpretations of Machiavelli's politics fail to probe deeper than his shallowrepublicanism,his concern for effective suffrageand checks on the exercise of power that defined bourgeois demoliberal politics during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Why shallow? Because they stop short of total power for professionals, the impulse behind the communist and socialist politics of the twentieth century. The distinction between shallow and deep republicanism suggests a veiled moral judgment that "deep" is somehow better than "shallow." But one may survive in shallow water, and drown in deep. Of what avail is a republic of virtue that turns

Introduction

5

out to be neither feasible nor durable? Moralizing is a weak substitute for power politics in a world ruled by Machiavelli's lions and foxes. Revolutionary haste makes for waste, as revolutionary politics repeatedly testify. Caterpillar politics is not just for the timid and undemanding. In the long run the tortoise may catch up to the hare. Unlike Machiavelli's shallow republicanism that surfaced in England during the Puritan Revolution of 1640-1660, followed by the conspiracies leading to the Glorious Revolution of 1689, it took more than two full centuries for his deep republicanism to catch fire. Nor was Machiavelli its principal disseminator. Rousseau was the first to give it a public hearing, and it was in the name of Rousseauism that it acquired a substantial following. Machiavelli has yet to be recognized as deep republicanism's fountainhead in a long series running through Rousseau, the Illuminati, and the Jacobins during the Great French Revolution to Marx and Engels. Although Marx acknowledged his debt to none of the foregoing, Marxism replaced Rousseauism as the principal carrier of deep republicanism across the globe. But by then it consisted of a major revision of the original doctrine, while its crowning achievement as MarxismLeninism proved its undoing. Courses on recent political thought often take as their subject matter not the history of political ideas, but the great political thinkers considered independently or as representatives of liberal, democratic, socialist, fascist, and Nazi currents of thought in abstraction from their class significance and from the role of professionals in particular. As a contribution to the history of ideas, the present study focuses on the republican legacy that most clearly represents the interests ofprofessionals as a class. Considering the connection of political theory and practice with professionals outside the academy, the history of political ideas cannot be credibly taught in a vacuum. Political theories are mainly the work of professionals. So it is a fair guess that what is called bourgeois ideology-liberalism and democracy, representative government, and the system of checks and balances-also represents professional interests. The same may be said of proletarian ideology, notably socialism and communism as masked expressions of meritocracy (rule of, by, and for professionals), and of Fascism and Nazism that are avowedly meritocratic. In the conviction that the consequences of these doctrines speak louder than words, one can reasonably conclude that the innocent reader who takes the literal meaning of a political text at face value is duped. The first Age of Revolution culminated in bourgeois republican governments in the Netherlands followed by Cromwell's republic in England, but with traces of deep republicanism lurking underground. The second Age of Revolution beginning in 1789 went further in compounding the class struggle between bourgeoisie and landed nobility with the struggle between bourgeois and professionals as leaders of the sans culottes. The third Age of Revolution dating from 1917 found shallow and deep republicanism at loggerheads in a global class and intraclass war between professionals allied to bourgeois interests in the West and to workers and peasants

6

Introduction

in the so-called Second and Third Worlds. Each successive Age of Revolution called into play a broader movement and politically more consequential development of deep republicanism until the advent of a Postrevolutionary Age in 1991. But the verdict of history-the triumph of shallow over deep republicanism-should not mislead us into thinking that capitalism won and that the New Class ofprofessionals lost the Cold War. At most, the sector allied with bourgeois interests won, but under conditions in which the New Class prevailed on both sides of the former Iron and Bamboo C~rtains.'~ As the title and subtitle of this book indicate, the purpose of this study is to trace the rising tide of professionalism concealed beneath the ideology of deep republicanism. From having to share power under the banner of demoliberalism, professionals opted for total power in the name of communist ideology. The irony is that shallow republicanism underwent a revival as professionals in power turned against the workers and peasants they no longer needed to fight their battles for them. By branding the new order capitalist instead of socialist,they made capitalists instead of professionals prime targets for society's discontents. Meanwhile, from being revolutionaries and champions of the dispossessed under the old order, they became the new lords of pelf and power. Machiavelli is a key figure in this history, the first in modem times to defend rule by professionals in place of gentlemen and those who live like gentlemen. No matter that his politics took an ascetic, egalitarian, and brutal turn-a republic of virtue in which the State is rich and the citizens are equal in poverty. His choice of downward leveling responded not only to mixed personal motives, but also to the recognition that upward leveling is precluded in an age of scarcity. Before the Industrial Revolution held forth the promise of abundance, the only possible equality depended on leveling downward. The chimera of upward leveling had to wait for the dawn ofanew capitalist civilization. When professionals began to scale the heights a century later, deep republicanism would lose support in favor of a more self-centered republic of unequals. An inquiry into origins does more than explain the difference between moderate and ultra-republicanism. In revealing the motives behind each, it serves as a clue to the divergence of republican principles and oftheir outcomes. With the help of biographical data, we probe into the ulterior motives seldom acknowledged and even less often recognized by their authors. As a prime example, Machiavelli's humiliating experience on the rack and subsequent banishment from Florence are reflected in his murderous intentions toward gentlemen. But that accounts for only part of his m~tivation.'~ The first chapter discloses the dangers of Machiavelli's enterprise; the second chapter, his subversive project of a republic of equals. But for a full understanding of deep republicanism we need to know how it worked in practice and contributed to changing the world. On the premise that history is the ultimate judge of political doctrines, the third and fourth chapters explore the successive permutations of Machiavelli's ultra-republicanism. The last chapter accounts for its final metamorphosis in an open and then a dissembled dictatorship not just of and by, but

Introduction

7

also for professionals-a far cry from its early baptism as a republic o f virtue. Machiavelli's influence can hardly be overstated. Virtually all modern political thinkers in the West represent one or another strand of his rich and complex legacy. A s the father of modern political thought, his influence is visible in almost all matters political. Even more than what used t o b e said o f Marx, in one respect or another almost everybody is a Machiavellian nowadays.

Notes 1 . J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). For a Marxist reworking of Pocock's main thesis, see Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 2. JudithN. Shklar, Men andcitizens: A Study ofRousseau 'sSocial Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 2 16. 3. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccold Machiavelli (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1984), 6. For a catalogue of the disconcerting number of discordant interpretations of Machiavelli's writings, see Isaiah Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," in idem, Against the Current: Essays in the History ofldeas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Viking, 1980), 25-39. Berlin's explanation of this diversity is that Machiavelli leaves his readers in a moral dilemma without hope of a final solution to the question of ultimate ends (66-71, 74-76). Nor, we would agree, is there any final solution to the political question. 4. Roger D. Masters, Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power (Notre Dame, Ind.: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1996), 4, 30,33. 5. Masters, Machiavelli, 4 4 , 4 5 2 0 8 . 6. Masters, Machiavelli, 46-47. 7. Masters, Machiavelli, 52, 53,211. 8. J. Patrick Coby, Machiavelli's Romans: Liberty and Greatness in the Discourses on Livy (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999), 1, 1 1 . 9. Coby, Machiavelli's Romans, 22-25,228-247,277-284. 10. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 7-22. 1 1 . Niccolb Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Christian E. Detmold (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 1.37,55,60; 3.16,25 (numbers refer to book and chapter). For a discussion of the full significance of 1.37,55; and 3.25 in Machiavelli's political thought, see Gennaro Sasso, Niccol6 Machiavelli: Storia del suo pensieropolitico, rev. ed. (Bologna Italy: il Mulino, 1980; orig. pub. 1958), 493-497,521523. 12. For the thesis that professionals are neither bourgeois nor exploited proletarians but a class in itself and for itself, see Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Norton, 1962; orig. pub. 1955), 203-240, 3 12, 3 14; Lewis S. Feuer, Marx and the Intellectuals: A Set of Post-Ideological Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1969), 53-69; AndrB Glucksman, Hacia lasubversi6n del trabajo intelectual, trans. Oscar Barahonaand UxoaDoyhamboure (Mexico City: Era, 1976; orig. pub. 1974), 74-120; Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in

8

Introduction

Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster and The American Enterprise Institute, 1982), 186203; Harold Perkin, The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1996), xi-xviii, 1-27; and Donald C. Hodges, Class Politics in the Information Age (Urbana, Ill.: Universityof Illinois Press, 2000), xi-xiii, 1-8,30-37,99-151 . 13. See the letter of Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori dated 16 April 1527, in Niccolb Machiavelli, The Prince and Other Works, ed. and trans. Allan H. Gilbert (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1946; orig. pub. 1941), 270.

Chapter I

A Dangerous Enterprise This is a book about Machiavelli's relevance to republican politics and to the history of modern republicanism,one fork culminating in the American Revolution of 1776,the other in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The birthplace of modern republicanism is not to be sought in the overrated British tradition of misstyled parliamentary democracy-a two-chamber government in which members of the upper house are there by right of birth-but in the Florentine Republic of 1494-1 5 12. Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), whom Martin Luther credited with launching the Reformation, was its unarmed prophet; Niccolb Machiavelli (1469-l527), its greatest political thinker and apologist. In theory, if not in practice, deep republicanism dates from the posthumous publication of his most important work, Discourses on Livy; shallow republicanism issued from a superficial reading of it. Dormant for the remainder of the sixteenth century, a republican creed took hold during the Puritan Revolution of 1640-1649, leading to the first English Republic under Oliver Cromwell. But this first English Republic was also the last, expiring with the return of the monarchy in 1660. Persecuted at home, ardent republicans found a refuge by emigrating to North America, where they carried on the republican torch. The American Revolution established the first enduring republic of its kind. But predicated on a shallow version of Machiavellism in which the Puritan experience was derailed, it was truncated from the start. Deep republicanism was first revived in theory by the ultra-Puritan and Calvinist from Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Machiavellianthrough and through, his major discourses topped by The Social Contract (1762) became the bible of the Jacobins during the Great French Revolution. There, for the first time in modem history, we find deep republicanism in f i l l practice as well as theory. The Jacobins made up the first republican vanguard. The Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution made up the second. Both revolutions were incarnations ofrepub-licanism and patriotism, no less so than the American incarnation. Puritanism was a product of the English Reformation, a distant cousin of the Italian and German reformations. Broadly interpreted, puritanism stands for excessive zeal in moral matters bordering on asceticism. Opposed to the dolce vita of indolence and self-gratification,Machiavelli was a puritan in this broad sense. He

10

Chapter I

was also an admirer and exponent of virtic, the combination of forcefulness and talent exemplified by the great liberators of mankind. For Machiavelli, the highest virtic was that of redeemers like Moses for leading his people out ofthat slave-pen, Egypt. Unlike Solon and Lycurgus, the legislators ofAthens and Sparta, Moses was not only a supreme moralist and lawgiver; he was also a hero in a movement of national liberation. Contrary to the misreadingsof Machiavelli's companion volume to the Discourses, the much-execrated Prince, not Cesare Borgia of the infamous Borgia family, but Moses was its exemplary figure. If Machiavelli's reputation has suffered, it is because his principal works can be read as celebrating villains as well as heroes.

New Politics In the introduction to Book 1 ofthe Discourses, Machiavelli states his purpose: "to open a new route [in the study of politics], which has not yet been followed by anyone," an investigation "as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents." A route new in the sense that "you will find neither prince, nor republic, nor captain, nor citizen, who has recourse to the examples of antiquity!" And a route dangerous to the investigator for not hewing to the prescribed formulas, because of the introduction of "new principles and systems." So we should ask what is politically novel about Machiavelli's commentary on the work of Titus Livius (59 B.C.-A.D. 17) that makes up the bulk of the Discourses. How do Machiavelli's political prescriptions not only rely on those of the ancient Romans, but also depart from and improve upon them? In particular, how do they diverge from his other sources in Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus? What was so dangerous politically about his new prescriptions for republics? And how did he go about protecting himself from hostile critics? The Discourses is a commentary on the first ten books of Livy's History of Romefrom Its Foundations. Of the 142 books that comprised the original work, only 35 have survived. Of these, the first five on the early history of Rome are the most important. A close reading ofthe Discourses shows that its author's commentary concentrates mainly on these five books. It is the early rather than the later history of the Roman Republic that lies at the center of Machiavelli's reflections, a history comprising Livy's first pentad. The first pentad covers the period from Romulus, the city's founder in 755 B.C., to Camillus, its refounder in 390 B.C.-the virtual midpoint ofRoman history down to Augustus' proclaimed restoration of the Republic in 27 B.C. Not just a midpoint, one should add, but also the completion of the first cycle of Roman history from its rustic and egalitarian beginnings, through the corrupting influence of urban wealth and luxury, to the reassertion of its pristine origins and virtues. "Thus while Livy describes explicitly one sequence of foundation, decline, and refoundation from Romulus to Camillus, so he holds out implicitly the prospect of a

A Dangerous Enterprise

11

second sequence from the refoundation by Camillus through the decline of the late Republic"-a cycle leading to a possible new refoundation by Augustus.' In the Discourses, Livy's historical cycle reappears as the return of a republic to its original principles, as a "renovation or new birth; so that, being thus born again, she might take new life and vigor." Besides bringing the government back to its first principles, the process of refounding, reconstructing,and renovating had happy consequences for religion in undoing a previous turn toward corruption. Thus, Christianity "would have been entirely lost had it not been brought back to its pristine principles and purity by Saint Francis and Saint Dominic"-not to mention Savonar~la.~ The Discourses should be read, therefore, as a study of civic virtue and civic corruption responsible for the rise and decline of political formations. Following Livy at almost every step, Machiavelli identifies the conditions of civic virtue with poverty and the simple life, and civic corruption with inequality bred by luxury and the pursuit of wealth. Why a commentary on Livy's history ofthe early Republic instead of Polybius' history of the late Republic? Because the early Republic is replete with examples of a self-made people who surpassed those in the late Republic in rustic simplicity, morality, and warfare; because as late as 400 years after its foundation, Rome was still a city in which the citizens were poor and dedicated to agriculture instead ofthe corrupting influence of commerce; because the Roman nobility in early times tilled the soil like common peasants and unlike the social parasites they eventually became. The Roman Dictator L. Quintus Cincinnatus (5 19439 B.C.) had no equal in this last respect and was idolized by both Livy and Machiavelli as a paragon of ~irtue.~ Consider what is new and politically dangerous in Machiavelli's commentary. First, the liberty achieved by republics in which the people are sovereign cannot be preserved except by restraints on human freedom. The history of Rome is testimony to the adage that "all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they find occasion for it." Although this premise may be derived in part from the Church's doctrine of original sin, the history of Rome provides "one of the proofs of the argument we have advanced that men act rightly only under compulsion." What kind of compulsion? Poverty and hunger that contribute to making men industrious plus military di~cipline.~ In other words, forced labor. Second, in a republic where there are two parties, that ofthe nobles and that of the people, the preferred form of government requires the participation of both under conditions in which "the people have the greatest share of power," but also are continually agitating and resorting to extreme measures against the nobility. Unlike Livy, Machiavelli concludes that not some but "all the laws that are favorable to liberty result from the opposition ofthese parties to each other." Thus, "I maintain that those who blame the quarrels of the Senate and the people of Rome condemn that which was the very origin of liberty." We have here a riposte to Thucydides, who blamed the class war in Corcyra and other Greek republics for

12

Chapter I

calamities responsible for their decline and d o ~ n f a l l .In ~ other words, civil disobedience. Third, peace is preferable to war, and therefore small republics are preferable to empires. The two motives making for wars are the desire to subjugate and the fear of being subjugated. Consequently, if a republic's defenses are well organized and it "entertains no ambitious projects, the fear of its power will never prompt anyone to attack it." Even better, if its constitution and laws prohibited all aggrandizement, "it would be the best political e~istence."~ In other words, anti-imperialism. Fourth, in the interest of peace and security instead of cruelty in peace and war, it is indispensableto have "recourse to religion as the most necessary support of any civil society." Contrary to Livy, who gave precedence to Rome's founder, if the question were raised whether Rome was more indebted to Romulus or to Numa who established its religion, "I believe that the highest merit would be conceded to Numa." For "where the fear ofGod is wanting, there the country will come to ruin." Republics that wish to maintain themselves free from corruption must above all things preserve "everything that tends to favor religion (even though it were believed to be fal~e)."~ The doctrine of original sin is a case in point. In other words, religious reformation. Fifth, the preferred form of republic is one without nobles and a class of gentlemen and people who live like gentlemen. That is to say, a democracy ofthe poor is preferable to a mixed constitution that includes the wealthy. Such perfect equality of which the German republics were said to be a shining example, "are the most decided enemies of the lords and gentlemen." Consequently, "if by chance any of them fall into their hands, they kill them, as being the chief promoters of all corruption and troubles." That is how the German free states had supposedlypreserved their existence uncorrupted, while also preventing any of their citizens from becoming or living in the manner of gentlemen.' In other words, compulsory equality. Sixth, the common fault of republics in times of peace is to take small account ofpeople ofmerit, for which there are two remedies. The first is to keep the citizens poor "so that their wealth may neither corrupt themselves nor enable them to corrupt others." The second is "so to organize for war as to be ever prepared for it, and always to have need of men of merit and reputation, as Rome did in her early days." Livy had already argued that poverty is a condition of the special virtue of republics, whereas riches have only served to ruin them. What is novel about Machiavelli's treatment is the claim that the existence of a noble or leisure class is unnecessary to the formation of people of merit.9 In other words, meritocracy instead of aristocracy. Machiavelli was playing with fire. To dispute Polybius' account ofthe political cycle in The Rise of the Roman Empire, according to which all single-class governments become corrupt, is to dispute the need for mixed government and therefore an upper class required to contain the excesses of the hoi pol10i.'~The danger is further evident in the case he makes for political extremism: freedom under compulsion; defense of class war; resistance to wars of aggrandizement;the

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fear of God; a republic of equals; keeping the citizens poor. Together, they are a recipe for subversion, for overthrowingexisting governments, for killing all gentlemen and those who live like gentlemen-a prelude to Robespierre's Republic of Virtue and to the Jacobin Terror of 1793-1794. Admittedly, this is not the Machiavelli of established scholars. As in the case of Jesus' parables, they interpret the master as they see fit. They do not take seriously the dangers of his enterprise and do not scrutinize the text of the Discourses to confirm their existence. Having approached Machiavelli's work with a different set of questions of their own, it is hardly surprising that they arrive at different answers about the content of his republicanism. Polybius stands at the beginning and end of their studies, as if the Florentine Secretary were captive to a mixed constitution and, as in every modern state, a republic of unequals. Knowing the risks of being linked to subversion even in theory, Machiavelli avoided making a direct challenge to Church and State. His shift from shallow to deep republicanism is buried in remote and disconnected parts of the text likely to remain inconspicuous and do the least harm. The unaware reader is bound to be mystified and misled into believing that they are irrelevant to the author's main concern. What is central to the Discourses, the scholars tell us, is the discussion at the beginning of Book 1 on mixed government and mixed constitutions that automatically rules out a commitment to people's democracy. Given the absence of any summing up at the end of Book 3, the discussion ofthe Polybian cycle and the need to overcome it stands in bold relief. The bourgeois gentilhomme has to plow through the first fifty-four chapters even to get a glimpse of the terror awaiting his class brothers. In line with this tour de force of literary psychology, Machiavelli makes doubly clear that his republic of equals is inapplicable not just to Florence, but also to the Italian peninsula. That it applies exclusively to Germany should scare nobody. As for his murderous language, toss it off to poetic license.

Dissembled Politics Machiavelli's writings face in opposite directions and lead to opposite results. The Machiavellians have invariably been at loggerheads because Machiavelli deliberately contrivedthat he would be misunderstoodby superficial and corrupt readers. For that, Machiavelli can hardly be blamed. Imprisoned from 12 February to 12 March 15 13 with a pair of shackles on his legs because of supposed complicity in a conspiracy against the Medici, he was mercilessly tortured for the purpose of extracting information. The method of torture, known as the strappado, or simply "the rope," consisted of tying his wrists together behind his back and binding them to a rope hanging from a pulley affixed to the ceiling. The loose end was pulled down and Machiavelli hoisted into the air, his arms yanked out and up behind his body, its weight borne by twisted arms and shoulders. When the rope was released

14

Chapter I

his body plunged just short ofthe floor, the sudden halt nearly tearing his arms from their sockets. Machiavelli endured six hoists of the rope. He left an account of his ordeal in his "Prison Sonnets" addressed to his tormentor Giuliano de' Medici, targeted by the conspirators for possible elimination: I have, Giuliano, a pair of shackles on my legs With six hoists of the rope on my shoulders; My other miseries I do not want to talk about . . . These walls exude lice, Sick with the heaves no less, as big as butterflies, Nor was there ever such a stench in Roncesvalles!"

Confined to Florentine territory but banished from re-entering the government house even after being declared innocent, he hoped to return to public life by veiling his republican intentions. To avoid exposing himself in his writings, he was obliged to become a liar, counseling fraud not only for princes, but also for himself. It is not improbable that Machiavelli, the comic artist and satirist, was playing catand-mouse with his readers, challenging them to "catch me if you can," to pin him down to the subversive doctrines he secretly relished. He turned trickster, says Leo Strauss. Mindful of both his own fate and that of Savonarola, Florence's unarmed prophet who was burned at the stake, Machiavelli became two-faced. As he wrote to his friend Guicciardini on 17 May 152 1 : "For years 1 have never said what I believed, nor ever believed what I said; and if it sometimes happens that I tell the truth, I conceal it among so many lies that it is hard to find."" Therein we have one key to Machiavelli and to so-called Machiavellism. Deprived of force from having lost his post as Florentine Secretary, Machiavelli made a personal cult of fraud. Unable to play the lion, he exaggerated the virtues of the fox. Prevented from conspiring in the political world, he would become "a master theoretician and practitioner of conspiracy" within the realm of political ideas.I3 The theme of conspiracy is evident in the two longest chapters of both The Prince, chapter 19, and Discourses, Book 3, chapter 6. Among the memorable passages in the Florentine Histories are those in Books 7 and 8 on the conspiracies against the Sforza and against the Medici. His comedy Mandragola is a complex tissue of intertwined conspiracies that leads Michael Palmer to conclude that "Mandragola is not only a play about conspiracies, it is a play that is, itself, a conspiracy." That Machiavelli misleads his audience concerning the identity of the arch-conspirator, who dupes the other characters without being duped in turn, suggests that he enjoyed the trickery. By tricking his audience, Machiavelli had the last laugh.I4 Strauss believed that to save himself from charges of either heresy or apostasy, Machiavelli was compelled to lie, to search for subterfuges, to mislead his readers

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by combining gravity with levity, by confronting them with riddles. But more than religious persecution weighed on his memory since it was not for heresy that he had been put on the rack. At least Strauss was on the right track in noting that Machiavellimuzzled messages that he subsequentlyclarified in later chapters. What worried Strauss was that he quoted the Gospel out of context by brazenly counseling a would-be David "to organize the government entirely anew." That is, to leave nothing unchanged, to make a revolution, as if that were God's intent, who puts down the mighty from their thrones, and exalts those of low degree.I5 Could Machiavelli have been speaking with the voice of Savonarola who turned Florence upside down and would have all Florentines live in holy poverty? As one biographer describes the friar, he was a communist on his own turf. There is reason to believe so. Jesus in the Gospels advocates poverty, and the duty of Christians is to follow his example. They must sell what they have, give the proceeds to the poor (Luke 18:22), and share all things in common (Acts 2:44 and 4:38).16 Machiavelli had more than one reason to fear for his safety. Under Savonarola's influence he had become a man of the Reformation, an enemy of the Church as well as of the Medici. While he commended St. Francis as an example ofthe life of Christ, he reproached him for leaving the punishment ofwicked rulers to God. "And thus these wicked rulers do as much evil as they please, because they do not fear a punishment which they neither see nor believe." What is to be done? We must deal with them as the Romans did, shrieked Savonarola."Do justice, I tell you. Cut off their heads!" This was Machiavelli's solution. John Lillburne, the radical agitator and leader of the Levelers during Cromwell's revolution, was among the first to have perceived that owing to the corruption of the age and for the safety of his life Machiavelli was forced "to write in some kind of unhandsome disguises."" Machiavelli's Prince represents an even greater feat of dissimulation. In scrutinizing The Prince, writes Louis Althusser, the suspicion arises that its truth is "a prodigious stratagem, that ofthe non-stratagem; a prodigious dissimulation,that of nondissimulation-the great snare of the 'actual truth' set in the open for rulers to come and entrap themselves." By instructingthem in the art of dissimulation and government by guile, Machiavelli simultaneously casts doubt on the reasons for obeying them. As Althusser puts his finger on the Florentine's amazing feat of deceiving the deceivers by telling them the truth, "whom does this ruse of the ruse, this feint of the feint, serve?'Evidently the ruled, not their rulers.18 How does The Prince serve the people? As a first answer, Althusser cites Diderot's entry in the Encyclopkdie: When Machiavelli wrote his treatise on The Prince, it is as if he said to his fellow citizens: Read this work carefully. Should you ever accept a master, he will be such as I depict him for you. Here is the savage brute to whom you will be abandoning yourselves. Thus it was the fault of his contemporaries if they mis.judged his aim: they took a satire for a eulogy.

16

Chapter I

But Diderot's is a blatant misinterpretation, says Althusser. Why should anyone misconstrue a satire as a eulogy when The Prince is neither? Diderot failed to grasp the double viewpoint internal to the text.I9 As Althusser explains, Diderot was right in believing that The Prince can be read from the viewpoint of the people. It is not a eulogy, because The Prince backfires on the Prince. But Diderot was wrong in "denouncing a Prince who is simultaneously called upon to accomplish the great work of Italian unity."" That alone would disqualify The Prince as satire. In this accounting of Machiavelli's double viewpoint, The Prince is not just a book for princes, nor is the Discourses a book of republics addressed only to republicans. The Discourses begins with Machiavelli agreeing with Polybius that all governments are defective: monarchy along with its degeneration into tyranny; aristocracy in addition to its corrupted form of oligarchy; democracy as well as its termination in anarchy. Unjust governments are defective because they are corrupt; just governments, because they are transient instead of stable. In this perspective, a democratic republic is no better than a monarchy." Accordingly, Althusser believed that, in recasting the classical tradition in political theory, Machiavelli's overarching problem was how to escape the Polybian cycle. Following Machiavelli in the opening chapters of Book 1 of the Discourses, Althusser identifies the durable state with a composite or mixed government. In a triple combination that includes features of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy checked and balanced against one another, he locates Machiavelli's ideal republic. "The republic of all republics is Rome, centre of all antiquity. But Rome affords the singular peculiarity of being a republic founded by kings, which would never have been what it was without them." Thus a monarchy-republic displaced the oversimplified dualism of The Prince and Discourses. Both works concern the same subject, for it was Rome's beginning and foundation in monarchical government that enabled it to endure when it became arepublic. Follows Althusser's conclusion: "Machiavelli is a theoretician ofthe national state, and hence of absolute monarchy as a transitional state between feudalism and ~apitalism."~~ But is this the last word on the Florentine Secretary? On the contrary, after Machiavelli's first exception to Polybius' theory of revolutionary cycles, he proceeds by stealth to negate the negation. Not content with arguing that all governments are defective because they are unstable, and then making an exception of mixed governments, he locates the most stable government of all in a republic of equals built on a contemporary German rather than an ancient Roman model. How ironical it is, therefore, that after becoming cognizant of Machiavelli's double viewpoint, Althusser is so readily bamboozled by it! A generous reading would note that Machiavelli corrects himself not once, but twice. According to Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli is partly to blame for the misinterpretation ofhis thought. He did not express it in systematic form, he did not "feel called upon to develop the consequences of his thought, nor to explain actual

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or apparent contradiction^."^^ Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but it was in his interest not to be consistent in the matters that most concerned him. Under interrogation, inconsistency offered a way out, a safeguard against being pinned down. He wanted to be misunderstood. The underhanded way in which he presents his case for shared poverty in a classless society fully accorded with the need for dissimulation.

Revolutionary Politics In the history of modern political thought, Rousseau stands out as both a disciple of Machiavelli and as one of his leading interpreters. Following in the latter's footsteps, his republic is one in which no one is either rich or poor, but all are selfsufficient. Wrote Rousseau, "in respect ofriches, no citizen shall be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself'-a virtual paraphrase of Machiavelli's praise of self-sufficiency. Like Machiavelli's politics, Rousseau's politics were revolutionary in equating the common good of republics with liberty and equality, "liberty, because all particular dependencemeans so much force taken from the body of the State, and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it." His republic of equals corresponds to Machiavelli's austere republic sans gentlemen and those who live like gentlemen.24 Rousseau was among the first to perceive that Machiavelli had been studied mainly by superficial and corrupt readers. The illustrious Florentine, "being attached to the court of the Medici, could not help veiling his love of liberty in the midst of his country's oppression." That taught him to dissimulate. "He professed to teach kings; but it was the people he really taught. His Prince is the book of

republican^."^^ It is not a book for gentlemen. Republics that have preserved their political existence uncorrupted, wrote Machiavelli, do not permit any of their citizens to be or to live like gentlemen. Any gentlemen they chance upon, they That is hardly a counsel of political moderation compatible with a mixed constitution and a system of checks and balances. Besides, Giuliano de' Medici was a gentleman! And Machiavelli, the self-confessed liar and political extremist, was not thinking of murdering him? The vulgar interpretation of Machiavelli's political extremism associates it with the principle that the end justifies the means, as if everything were permitted regardless ofthe goal. Extremist he was, but not for that reason. Consider his candid statement in the Florentine History, placed in the mouth of one of the boldest and most experienced plebeian leaders during the revolt of 1378. In justifying the plunderings and burnings and redoubling of disturbances,the plebeian leader says: If you watch the ways of men, you will see that those who obtain great wealth and power do so either by force or by fraud, and having got them, conceal under some honest name the foulness of their deeds. Whilst those who through lack of

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Chapter I

wisdom, or from simplicity, do not employ these methods are always stifled in slavery or poverty. Faithful slaves will remain slaves, and good men are always poor men. Men will never escape from slavery unless they are rapacious and fraudulent, because both God and Nature have placed the fortunes of men in such a position that they are reached rather by robbery than industry, and by evil rather than by honest ski1L2' Is Machiavelli for once speaking straight from the heart? Or should we accept Pitkin's reading in the light of Machiavelli's commentary that the speech helped to inflame the workers7 spirits, which were already "hot for evil"? The following arguments were meant to support her claim that the speech was not an articulation of Machiavelli's views. First, the only person in the rebellion for whom he directly expresses admiration was Michele di Lando who led the uprising in its later stages, resisted the extreme demands ofthe anonymous speaker, and "'publicly proclaimed thatnobody should burn or rob anything."' (But as Pitkin concedes, from fear of offending the Pope who commissioned his work, Machiavelli's moderating framework may be deceptive.) Second,the overall theme of the Florentine Histories is that unreasonable demands and a failure to observe limits in dealing with the opposition were the causes of Florence's continuing instability. (But stability is a Polybian ideal that Machiavelli accepted with reservations in republics that included gentlemen.) Third, the speech is allegedly a "simple inversion of past oppression, not liberty." (But what else is liberty if not an escape from slavery?) Pitkin's prejudices concerning what "can rightly 'be called free"' and "standards of good and bad" are purely subjective, hence irrele~ant.~' Overall, she fails to make her case. Antonio Gramsci highlighted Machiavelli's precocious Jacobinism without having the guillotine in mind. That was an oversight. A careful reading of Machiavelli's "Book of Republics" reveals that his veiled solution to corruption and the related loss of human liberty was not a mixed government resting on checks and balances (Pitkin), much less absolute monarchy (Althusser),but a variation on what Antonio Negri calls absolute democracy. "The absoluteness of the political, invented in The Prince, is made to live in the republic: only the republic, only democracy, is absolute go~ernment."~~ Yes, but only should it become feasible. Democracy is not the combination in ancient Rome formed ofthe three powers, which supposedly made the constitution perfect. The Roman Republic of the first seventeen chapters ofthe Discourses is shunted aside once Machiavelli exposes its defects. "For such corruption and incapacityto maintain free institutions result from a great inequality that exists in such a state; and to reduce the inhabitants to equality requires the application of extraordinary measures, which few know how, or are willing, to employ." Thus Negri: "It is clear that it was impossible to answer in Polybian terms the questions that Machiavelli now posed. The Prince becomes the new answer: constituent power." That is to say, the power to establish a new republic on a new political base in which liberty is shored up by equality under the leadership of a new prince. Contrary to Althusser, the mixed constitution fades and

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disappears: "Abandoning the theory of the cycle implies abandoning the mixed constit~tion."~~ Lenin came as close as anyone to defining what Negri calls absolute democracy. The democracy typical of bourgeois society is narrow and curtailed with restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles that "squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation." Once in every few years the poor are allowed to decide which particular representatives of the ruling class shall supposedly represent them in parliament. Hypocritical and false, representative democracy cannot be reformed by gradually eliminating the restrictions toward greater and greater representation. The tables must be turned by excluding the exploiters. The democracy of the poor must begin on a new foundation, on a new constitution of society, by legislating from scratch-what Negri calls "constituent power." Only a dictatorship of the proletariat under a collective prince-a communist politicalmilitary vanguard-is capable of accomplishingthis tour de force that will "for the first time create democracy for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority." Such are the preconditions, according to Lenin, of a republic of equals-deep republicanism ifyou will. That Lenin's project broke down does not contravene its original potential, nor does it constitute a refutation of Machiavelli's p r ~ j e c t . ~ ' Negri stands almost alone in noting that for Machiavelli, as for Rousseau, "equality is the condition of freedom."32Equality is the sine qua non of virtue, the main protection against corruption, the blight eating away at Polybius' just governments. At issue is not only political equality, but also economic equality. As long as everyone's share is equal, freedom is compatible with private property. The thorny question is how to achieve equality. Machiavelli says the laws should "compel men to labor where the sterility ofthe soil does not do it." That will make each able-bodied citizen self-sufficient, so there will be no idle class of gentlemen dependent on the labor of others. Furthermore, the laws should "keep the citizens poor so that their wealth and lack of virtue may neither corrupt themselves nor enable them to corrupt others."33 To interpolate the saying of Lord Acton, "Wealth corrupts; absolute wealth corrupts absolutely." Once more Negri: "The fact that Machiavelli, a Renaissance man, supports a drastic reduction of needs, Spartan clothing, the struggle against luxury, and so on cannot but surprise us." The surprise vanishes when poverty is seen as the principal remedy against vice masquerading as innocent ambition. Without voluntary poverty, where is the spirit of sacrifice needed for a people's militia as a guarantee against tyranny? Since not everyone can be rich, the citizens' poverty is their insurance against inequality. Herein lies Machiavelli's solution to the problem of democratic disunion and the potential for political instability and revolution generated by corruption. That is to say, "there can be no political democracy that is not an economic dem~cracy."~~ To be sure, Machiavelli was hardly the democratNegri imagines. His preferred form of government was a meritocracy under conditions of economic equality. He had no experience of anything like universal suMage in Florence, which even

20

Chapter I

during the Republic resembled a commercial oligarchy like Venice. As Machiavelli notes in Book 1, chapter 49 of the Discourses, the new laws enacted under the Republic coexisted with the old laws, such that all the reforms had yet to produce a government for the common benefit-a republic in the strict sense of respublica or commonwealth. But as a political extremist he pointed the way to at least a potential solution to the democratic problem.

Depraved Politics? "The history of Machiavellism," writes Robert Adams, "is a history of misunderstandings." The word has been interpreted as a synonym, on the one hand, "for trickery, equivocation, and unscrupulous cruelty; on the other hand, "for utter honesty and surgical accuracy of thought." As if this were not perplexing enough, it has been taken "for audacious republicanism, craven support of tyranny, and unscrupulous tyrannicide; for fanatical Catholicism and for religious toleration; for national liberation and for enslavement to the devil; for cynical opportunism and the highest of moral principles." They can't all be right, he believes.35Machiavelli's reputation in connection with unscrupulous political behavior must not be c o n k e d with the genuine coin. Machiavellism is not just the unmasking of political hypocrisy, lies, and halftruths, but also a strategy for achieving and holding political power. That would have us become "all things to all men" (I Corinthians 9:22)--not only to save them, but also to gain their support. But divorced from Machiavelli's political priorities, his strategy for power becomes a caricature and, along with other short-sighted interpretations of his writings, a license for pseudo-Machiavellism. Machiavelli's immoralism supposedly found expression in "Reasons of State" according to which a prince, "being responsible for the survival of the state, is entitled to use extraordinary means (as we would say, 'executive privilege') toward that end." It was a legacy initially associated with Catherine de' Medici's attempt on St. Bartholomew's Night, and for several weeks thereafter in 1572, to wipe out the entire Protestant population in France. As an immoralist, Machiavelli was held responsible for Realpolitik (interest or practical politics) and for Macht-politik (power politics), both of which assume that "statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power7'-the doctrine of such realistic political thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, Joseph de Maistre, Donoso CortCs, and more recently Carl Schmitt and Hans M ~ r g e n t h a u . ~ ~ Since what passes for Machiavellism for the most part defines it, its legacy of depravity has been historically more consequential than its deep republicanism. Adams acknowledges that the identification of Machiavellism with immoralism is set in the language and is now part of the folkway^.^' As for the academic community, the confusion of Machiavellism with immoralism is less prevalent but also anchored in the language.

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In 1539, only a decade or so after Machiavelli's death, the English Cardinal Reginald Pole became the first to denounce the impious and evil doctrine of the diabolical prince Henry VIII, who had broken with the papacy and launched the English Reformation. Henry's close advisor, Thomas Cromwell (no relation to the more famous Oliver), after reading The Prince, had become transformed into what the Cardinal called an agent of Satan. Soon the story became current that Machiavelli had given the Devil the popular title "Old Nick." Thus, "not only was Machiavelli regularly described as devilish, but the Devil in turn came to be described as Ma~hiavellian."'~ The Jesuits were among the first to perceive in Machiavelli's writings a challenge to the Church; it was they who had them placed on the Index ofProhibited Books.39 Yet they too were accused of being Machiavellians, notably in Protestant countries where Jesuitism became virtually synonymouswith the Devil's work. At issue was the end to be served by the so-called Machiavellian maxim, "The end justifies the means"-a phrase imputed to chapter 18 of The Prince without actually being there. Nor is it to be found in the Jesuits' own writings. According to a Jesuit maxim, there are two kinds of lies: those that are due and those that are not due to others. If a person is not due the truth, lying is justified. That is not to say that lying is justified as a means to any end. Machiavelli counseled the use of force and fraud by princes, not by private persons in interpersonal relations. You must realize, he wrote, "that there are two ways to fight." The preferred way is by recourse to laws. But because of war, which includes civil strife and class struggles, the prince must also act as a beast. Machiavelli's objection to Christian ethics is that it encouragespassivity in the face oftyranny. "The kernel of Machiavelli's thought," writes Prezzolini, "is that politics is a human activity incompatible with Christian morality."40 In war one needs to defend oneself against an enemy. Since political history is largely a record of fighting outside the law, to that extent Machiavelli denied the relevance of Christian morality in political matters. What does it mean, asks Prezzolini, to say that Christian morality does not apply to politics? "It means that a prince would not dream of doing as a private individual what he is obliged to do as head of a government." Once he takes on that responsibility, "he abandons the moral criteria he held as a private individual without a twinge of conscience." Like the captain of a ship, he subordinates everythingto the safety ofthe passengers and to bringing the ship to port. "He does not hesitate a moment to lie or to use force against a passenger or a member of his crew when the safety of the ship is threatened."4' Salus rei publicae: the State's security is the supreme law. Machiavelli was responsible for the secularization ofpolitics. But as his critics read him, he not only desacralized the political realm; he also deprived political action of a moral basis in Christian ethics. He was not just reporting on the secular tendencies of the age, on the secularization of religion and on the downgrading of moral ideals in favor of worldly success. He is charged with advocating the demoralization of the political.

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Chapter I

In his posthumously published lectures on politics, Heinrich von Treitschke (1 834-1 896) epitomized this critique of the depraved political thinker whom he nonetheless admired for having agreed with Martin Luther concerning the defense of the state. Machiavelli had coined the maxim according to which, "when the State's salvation is at stake, there must be no inquiry into the purity of the means employed." To his great credit, "he set the State upon its own feet, freed it from the moral sway of the Church, and above all was the first to declare distinctly that the State is Po~er."~' Ironically, his mistake was to have defined morality in exclusively Christian terms, says Treitschke, so that "when the State cuts loose from the Church, she also breaks away from the moral law in general." The deep immorality in his political teaching supposedly stemmed from his failure to justifj, power independently of religion, "by its exertions for the highest moral welfare of the human race."43 So conceived, Machiavellism is founded on disregard for the moral law. What moral law? The law ofpersonal freedom, according to which an artist "has the right to develop his gift before all else, and may put other duties in the background." As among individuals, says Treitschke, so among States the duties of each are bound to clash with the duties of others. The moral universe presupposes war between States, not peace. "The individual must sacrifice himself for the community of which he is a member," but the State is the highest community and therefore the duty of self-sacrifice does not apply to it. "Weakness must always be considered as the most disastrous and despicable of crimes, the unforgivable sin of politi~s"!~~ Treitschke's Politics is not only a critique of Machiavellism for profaning the political, but also aprime example ofthat profanation. On the one hand, he censures both "Reasons of State" and power politics. On the other hand, he incorporates them under a spurious moral law that is neither Christian nor Classical. His tour de force was to idealize Realpolitik and Macht-politik on moral grounds that only the Germans recognized. Early readers of The Prince, he notes, dubbed it "the Devil's Catechism, or the Ten Commandments reversed."45 Should we not say the same of Treitschke's Politics? Unlike Treitschke, Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) described the long tradition of raison d'Ctat as wholly depraved and opposed in principle to both Christian morals and Classical humanist values. His main contribution to the study of Machiavellism lies in his historical account ofthis third legacy distinct from both deep and shallow republicanism, a tradition supportive of both absolute monarchy and the despotic politics associated with what he calls the demonic forces ofmodem nati~nalism.~~ By interpolation, it would also include the major dictatorships of the twentieth century. The Prince served as his model with occasional references to the Discourses. Ironically, his appeal to the latter backfires since Machiavelli's case against republicanism is made on grounds ofvirtue as well as reasons of state. Thus, where there are many powerkl gentlemen, being the chief promoters of corruption and factional troubles, the "only way to establish any kind of order there is to found a monarchical government." For where the body of the people is so corrupted, "it

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becomes necessary to establish some superior power which, with a royal hand, and with full and absolute powers, may put a curb upon the excessive ambition and corruption of the po~erful."~' Mixed government may have been a restraint on corruption in the ancient world, but Machiavelli hesitates to recommend it for modem times. And in any event, it has only a limited application to societies with an established nobility or class of gentlemen in which the plebs play an active role. Machiavelli's third legacy became increasingly prominent in the twentieth century with the advent of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. Both Hitler and Mussolini described themselves as disciples of Machiavelli on grounds of power politics alone.48Owing to the abuses of power associated with Stalin's reign of terror and the gulags, Communism is frequently included as another instance of totalitarianism, occasionally as its most destructive form. The consequences of Nazism and Communism were similar, writes Hannah Arendt, a "radical evil," a "concentration camp society," a regime of "total terror." Yet even she acknowledges a difference in the type of concentration camp. "Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union's labor camps. . . . Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by those types of camps perfected by the Nazis."49 Communism came out of the French Revolution and is an instance of deep republicanism;Fascism andNazism were implacable enemies of both. While Lenin targeted the old class of bourgeois gentlemen for elimination and Stalin raged against the corrupting influence of a new class of professionals beginning to live like gentlemen, the Nazis' mortal enemies were "identified in order of importance as the Jews, Freemasonry, Marxism, and liberalism." Both Communism andNazism were repressive and genocidal, but for opposite reasons. As Stalin summed up the difference, it boiled down to a choice as to whether supermen "will try to rule the 'tailless monkeys,"' or conversely. "To proceed like Hitler, to affirm flatly that the era of supermen has come and to demand all power for them? Or to make . . . a civilization of the masses and to send all the intellectual individualists to the devil?"' Machiavelli has been faulted for skirting the moral question, but Benedetto Croce (1 866-1952) is right to wonder why. Surely, the Florentine was not bound to discuss all kinds of questions, especially those for which he was not prepared. Machiavelli's starting point was Livy's early history of Rome originally founded by force of arms. War had played such a prominent part in Roman history that it became a focal point of Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses. As Livy notes in Book 1 of his History of Romefrom Its Foundation, the temple of Janus was built "to serve as a visible sign of peace and war; open, it meant that the city was in arms; closed, that war against all neighboring peoples had been brought to a successful conclusion." The astonishing fact is that since the reign of Pompilius Numa, Rome's second king and principal legislator(ca. 7 15-673 B.C.), the temple had been closed only twice over a period of nearly seven centurie~.~' As Croce notes, Machiavelli starts from the condition ofwar and provides rules suited to this state of affairs. Not being cut out for a moral philosopher, why should he discuss the ethics of war? He goes straight to the heart of the matter: "Men are

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Chapter I

wicked-he says-and to the wicked it is needful to behave wickedly. You will deceive him who would certainly deceive you." In war, if not in peace, the cardinal virtues are force and fraud. "What is evident is that a morality which desired to introduce into war the maxims of peace would be a morality for lambs en route to the sla~ghterhouse."~~ For most people, Machiavelli believed, the outcome of action is what counts. If the outcome is praised, the means will hardly be found wanting: "A prince needs only to conquer and to maintain his position. The means he has used will always be judged and will be praised by everybody, because the crowd is always caught by appearance and by the out~ome."~' Machiavelli believed that the end justifies the means, but on grounds quite different from those of the crowd. What makes a prince worthy of admiration is not that he is successful in his bid for political power, but that he employs force and fraudfor the benefit of the people. Thus we are told "how laudable it is in a prince to keep his word and to be an honest man and not a tri~kster."'~Far from being an immoralist, Machiavelli counsels his prince to put aside Christian ethics "only when dealing with faithless men who will, if they can, ruin him and his country." With truth-tellers, the prince is to tell the truth; otherwise, he should lie. In the late-nineteenth century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche challenged Christian morality on ethical grounds. Unlike Nietzsche, Machiavelli opposed it on political grounds. In Book 2 of The Art of War, Machiavelli wrote, "the Christian religion has wrought such a change in the manners and customs of mankind, that they are now no longer under the necessity of defending themselves with such a degree of obstinacy and despair as they did in former times." Formerly, when a town was taken, "it was either demolished or the inhabitants were stripped of their goods, dispersed all over the world, and reduced to the last degree of poverty and wretchedness." Dreading what lay in store for them if they did not become adept in the art of war, they had to defend themselves with vigor and discipline. But their apprehensions disappeared when Christianity brought the victors to respect the vanquished, so that those who fell into the hands of conquerors were no longer killed or de~poiled.~' Machiavelli did not object to the moral alternative to the atrocities of war. He objected to the slackness and lack of military preparedness encouraged by Christian morality. Isaiah Berlin disputes this interpretation.For him there is no differencebetween Machiavelli and Nietzsche in this matter. In contrasting the realm of politics with that of morality, "Machiavelli is not contrasting two 'autonomous' spheres of acting-the 'political' and the 'moral."' He is "rejecting one morality-the Christian-but not in favor of something that is not a morality." He is rejecting Christian ethics for pre-Christian, Greek and Roman ethics, much as Nietzsche did. "Machiavelli's values are not Christian, but they are moral values."56 The Discourses tells a different story. Machiavelli lauds the Christian religion and its moral principles. "And certainly, if the Christian religion had from the beginning been maintained according to the principles of its founder, the Christian states and republics would have been much more united and happy than what they

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are." Nor is this the only reference to Christianity's founder. Italian decadence and corruption were halted thanks to "the example of the life of Christ." As a counter to the licentiousness ofthe prelates and heads ofthe Church, the revival ofChristian morality by St. Francis and St. Dominic was hailed by Machiavelli against those who failed to practice it." It seems that Sebastian de Grazia is right and Berlin mistaken in their divergent readings of The Prince and Discourses. "For Niccolb," writes de Grazia, "all religions great and small are false; the exception is Christianity." Machiavelli called it "our religion," the religion that "shares in 'the truth and the true way,' echoing the Gospel of John's 'the way, and the tr~th."'~'At most, Machiavelli enjoined both Christian and classical morality: the former in the private sphere, the latter in public matters. Berlin is not alone in the conviction that Machiavelli spurned Christian morality. Leo Strauss professes the old-fashioned opinion according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil, nothing less than "maxims of public and private gangsterism." For Strauss, Machiavelli's patriotism reduces to collective selfishness; his so-called dispassionate and scientific approach abounds with value judgments that no decent human being would profess and that make his study more normative than scientific. "Machiavelli's teaching is immoral and irreligious," although most interpreters think otherwise because, as heirs of the Machiavellian tradition, they "do not see the evil character of his Contrary to Berlin, Strauss argues that Machiavelli rejected classical morality, not just Christian ethics. Machiavelli's revolt against classical political philosophy, he contends, was also a revolt against its moral foundations. But Strauss confuses the Christian religion and morality of St. Paul with Jesus' religion and morals as presented in the Synoptic Gospels. Nor is there the incompatibility between Classical humanist and biblical moralities for Straussthat there was for Machiavelli and Nietzsche. That is because Strauss has an eye for a hypothetical common denominator that blots out the differences. In Citizen Machiavelli, Marc Hulliung builds a similar case for Niccolo's contempt for both Christian morals and civic humanism. Like Strauss, he contends that Machiavelli used his classical sources in an arbitrary and often cynical manner. As "one of the greatest subversives of the humanist tradition," he was also a "selfconscious provocateur." But unlike Strauss, Hulliung tries to save Machiavelli's sting not only from its defamatory popular image, but also from efforts by the scholarly community to sterilize the wound.60 Almost alone in catching the meaning of Niccolo's sardonic smile in Santi di Tito's famous oil painting in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Hulliung argues that Machiavelli enjoyed shocking his readers. Unlike the defanged Machiavelli who favors violence as a last resort, Hulliung presents him-in peace as well as in war-as "always extremely partial to extraordinary and violent methods" (Guicciardini). He "yearns for the good fight, the fight that is only good provided its scope is great and its violence substantial." If only those willing to use force can tame Mistress Fortune, then Machiavelli's centaur alone can convert brutality into

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Chapter I

manliness, greatness, and empire. Men like to fight, and those who don't he dismissed as faint-hearted and effeminate. Since he believed in violence for its own sake, Hulliung concludes,he "favored a reading of the classics that idealized power

politic^."^' If Hulliung is right, then the killing of gentlemen was not only a means for Machiavelli, but an end in itself. Although Rome's ancient nobility born ofthe city was a source of civic well-being, the feudal nobilities of Europe standing for inequality and without any trade that might earn them a livelihood "had no proper place within the city. . .unless it was a city tired of being a republic and longing for princely rule." Nor was it feasible to tame them and oblige them to enter the guilds. For that gave rise to the commercial nobility Machiavelli abhorred, an enfeebled nobility that could not ennoble the populace owing to its "pedestrian bourgeois "There was no democracy, but only among the well-to-do; the democracy was their democracy," says Hulliung, the most despicable imaginable, according to Niccolo. Unlike the Roman nobility, under the Medici "the new nobles were the 'promoters of slavery' and the people [remade in their image] were the 'promoters of license."' As Hulliung sums up his and Machiavelli's indictment of the monied interest, "a vile ruling class brings out the worst in everyone." In the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli is unsympathetic "first to the democracy of merchants and traders and later to the democracy of artisans and shopkeepers." He also expresses a "distaste for the 'stench of the lower class' . . . he turns his back on commercial republicanism in all its variations ofregimes, from the most oligarchical to the most plebeian.'"j3 Machiavelli liked to fight, but there was nothing depraved about his choice of enemies. Nor was he an immoralist, as Strauss charged, unless all morality is Christian or humanist. The case against him, like that against Savonarola, was predicated on a caricature of the historical Jesus. A second Moses according to Thomas Miinzer and other prophets of the Reformation, Jesus was remembered as the rebel who drove the money-changers from the Temple in preparation of a war of liberation against the Roman occupation. If his kingdom was not of this world, it was because worldliness is synonymous with Mammonism. Like the Reformers who branded the Pope as anti-Christ, Machiavelli assailed the Church's dignitaries for being less than holy. Were they not also gentlemen and those who lived like them? The nearer the masses are to the Church of Rome, he admonished,the less religious are they. Like Brother Savonarola,he denounced the prelates' way of life and prophesied the Church's ruin. The logic of his position added to the boldness of his words could hardly have escaped the Church's scrutiny-and surveillance.For ifall gentlemen and those who live like them should be killed, then the dignitaries of the Church were also vulnerable.

A Dangerous Enterprise

Politics and Truth "We are much beholden to Machiavelli and other writers of that class who openly and unfeignedly declare or describe what men do," wrote Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1 605), because "a virtuous and honest man can do no good upon those that are wicked, to correct and reclaim them, without first exploring all the depths of and recesses of their malice." Such was the accomplishment of the author of The Prince, who claimed to be describing the political world as it is rather than as it should be. But did that make him the founder ofthe modern science of p o l i t i ~ s ? ~ ~ The science of politics may indeed be traced to Machiavelli, but was this science the alpha and the omega of Machiavellism? As Gaetano Mosca observed, "the art of attaining power and holding it has nothing to do with political science." Machiavelli reasoned with the help of examples, but political science is more than anecdotal; it is not simply amatter of case studies and the generalizationstherefrom. "Certainly, Machiavelli's precepts would have been of little use to the statesmen of the Roman Republic, and they would serve the statesmen of modern Europe very badly indeed." Granting that "rectitude, self-sacrifice, good faith, have never been anywhere or at any time qualitiesthat best serve for attaining power and holding it," that is little more than a platitude that hardly qualifies as scientifi~.~~ In The Machiavellians: Defenders ofFreedom (1943), James Burnham notes that Machiavelli did not have a clear understanding of scientific method. "Machiavelli mixed together an art and a science of politics; his scientific conclusions are frequently the byproducts of an attempt to lay down a rule for securing some particular kind of political result"-indeed, a dangerous one. In sharp contrast, contemporary Machiavellians are "fully conscious of what they are doing and of the distinctions between an art and a science." Their chief concern is to advance the science, not the art of politics. That signifies the formulation not of rules for acquiring and holding power, but rather of general principles for studying social behavior, an instrument for social and political analysis.66 Machiavelli's interest in political truths focused on those that were potentially subversive and geared to change. The established authoritiestend to shy away from such discoveries as exposures threatening their power and pelf. Political truths can be dangerous. Whatever may be the desires ofmost men, according to Burnham, "it is most certainly against the interests ofthe powerful that the truth should be known about political behavior." He adds that if Machiavelli's collection ofpolitical truths were to become widely known, "the success of tyranny and all the other forms of oppressive political rule would become much less likely," ordinary citizens "would no longer be deceived into accepting that rule and privilege, and they would know what steps to take to overcome them.'"j7 That explains why Machiavelli is defamed by the powerful and their spokesmen. Machiavelli says that rulers are not to be trusted, that the ambitious and unscrupulous are those in power-an argument for disobeying them. In self-defense,

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Chapter I

the authorities reply that he libels human nature, that he encourages subversives, that he aims to smash your faith and ideals6' Small wonder, Burnham concludes, that Machiavelli's enterprise was a dangerous one. Burnham underscores the impossibility ofboth political and economic equality allegedly on Machiavellian grounds. Most of the Machiavellians he cites believed that history points not to the liquidation of elites, but rather to their circulation in positions of authority. If all revolutions end by substituting one ruling class for another, then the only realistic option for the powerless is to place limits on the exercise of power. The science of politics lends itself to a justification of demoliberal mixed government on the grounds that, if not the best political choice, it is the least of evils.69For Burnham, the only republicanism compatible with the world as it is, rather than as it should be, is the shallow variety. Defending the Atlantic Republican Tradition and its version of Machiavellism, Burnham argues that extreme solutions to political and economic problems lead to the destruction of liberty. In Congress and the American Tradition (1959), he argues that the Fathers of the Constitution had anticipated that the assumption of superhuman or heroic virtues and goals results only in failure, and that the absolute preponderance of either the people or the elites in government leads straight to despotism.'O Since the system of checks and balances can be traced to Machiavelli, the Fathers may have come under his influence. But considering Machiavelli's partiality for extreme measures in liquidating both nobles and gentry, on this score the Fathers hardly qualify as Machiavellians. Within the limits of his understanding of scientific methods, Machiavelli tried to be scientific but did not always succeed. When it came to military matters, much of what he wrote was less than realistic. Obsessed by his studies of ancient Rome, he became blinded by its military practices. The people's army he trained in Florence was not the most effective mode of fighting. Following the Roman example, he esteemed infantry to be more effective than cavalry, while at the same time dismissing firearms and artillery as unimportant. He was not the cool and detached observer: "He rejected the newest weapons and stipulated for the oldest." The Roman example in matters of warfare became a source of systematic error. In 1512, "the militia he had counted on so much ran like rabbits at the first sight of the Spanish veterans." The Florentine militia was not prepared to stand up to the Spanish pikes. "There was the bloody sack of Prato, and the republic collapsed before his eyes."" Although Machiavelli had long been esteemed as a political realist, it was not until 1911that Frederick Pollock first conferred on him the title "scientist." We find in him, Pollock wrote, "the pure passionless curiosity ofthe man of science." In The Myth of thestate (1 955), the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer virtually enshrined this twentieth-century image ofthe Florentine Secretary. By then it had become the standard interpretation in keeping with the prevailing climate of scholarly opinion. In praise of Machiavelli, Cassirer considers The Prince a technical book comparable to one written by a skilled physician. Machiavelli "tells the ruler what he has to do in order to establish and to maintain power, to avoid inner discords, to foresee

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and to prevent conspiracies." His counsels are likened to Kant's hypothetical imperatives independent of any moral ends. "He never blames or praises political actions; he simply gives a descriptive analysis of them-in the same way in which a physician describes the symptoms of a certain illness.'772 Ifthat were all there is to The Prince, we would be hard-pressed to account not only for Machiavelli's patriotism, but also for his egalitarian heresy. Cassirer's account borders on caricature, especially when he adds that "Machiavelli studies political actions in the same way as a chemist studies chemical reaction." Further, "Machiavelli's Prince contains many dangerous and poisonous things, but he looks at them with the coolness and indifferenceof a ~cientist."'~Cassirer brackets out the other Machiavelli, the political hothead. Vice and virtue for him were not akin to products like vitriol or sugar, nor did he deal with them in a cool and detached scientific spirit. The Prince is not only a mirror for princes, but also the work of a dangerous political propagandist. The term "science" is much abused when used to describe The Prince. Machiavelli's prose has a literary quality combining verve and bite with a deadly polish. It was designed to tease and shock. "Machiavelli seems to delight in intensifying the shock and deliberately employing devices to heighten it," writes Garret Mattingly, a Machiavelli scholar and professor of modem European history at Columbia University. "Of these [devices] not the least effective is the way The Prince imitates, almost parodies, one ofthe best known and most respected literary forms of the three preceding centuries, the handbook of advice to princes." Although in some respects it resembles other Mirrors of Princes, it was "a diabolical burlesque ofall ofthem, like apolitical Black Mass." The book's literary fame rests largely on its outrageous politics. If intended as a scientific manual, it owes its literary reputation to an artistic bl~nder.'~ Take for example Machiavelli's portrait of the book's supposed hero, Cesare Borgia. Members of a family as old and as illustrious as Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici were expected to emulate "a foreigner, a Spaniard, a bastard." Convicted in the court of public opinion of "fratricide, incest, and a long role of abominable crimes, a man especially hated in Tuscany for treachery and extortion," as a prince he had been a notorious and spectacular failure. Without papal support, the most ambitious plans of this bloodstained buffoon would have gone astray. Machiavelli could hardly have been serious in proposing this monster for the choice role of his country's Moses. Consequently, if one takes The Prince "as an objective, scientific description of political reality, we must face contradiction not only by what we know of Machiavelli's political career, ofhis usual opinions and ofhis literary skill, but also by the facts of history as reported by, among others, Machiavelli himself."7s Did Machiavelli rely only on the facts at hand, or did he manipulate them for artistic effect? The weight of evidence suggests the latter. His early descriptions of Cesare's statesmanship contradicthis later account in The Prince. As the Florentine ambassador in Rome, he knew as well as anyone that Cesare was a coward and that he whined over matters he could not control. One can read in Machiavelli's dispatches from Rome his growing impatience with the duke, his growing contempt

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Chapter I

for Cesare's wild talk, aimless shifts of plan, alternate blustering and whining. "The duke, who never keeps faith with anyone," he wrote contemptuously, "is now obliged to rely on the faith of others." Later, he added: "The duke who never showed mercy, now finds mercy his only hope." And still later, in his historical poem Decessinali, he made his contempt for the Borgias clear.76 Is it possible that The Prince was an underhanded satire of Cesare-and a joke on the Medici who were advised to emulate him? By satire I mean, following Mattingly, the intention to denounce, expose, or deride somebody "by the employment of such devices as irony, sarcasm, and ridicule." Or by saying the opposite of what one believes, along with deliberate distortion and exaggeration. Considering that The Prince can be read as a defense either of tyranny or of national liberation, could Machiavelli have intended that it be interpreted in opposite ways? Was it in part a vicarious revenge against Giuliano, who had just had him tortured? "Who could really believe that the lazy, insipid Giuliano or his petty, vicious successor was the liberator Italy awaited?"77 If not, then The Prince had a double meaning: first, as a call for a new prince to liberate Italy; and second, as a taunt to the Borgias and the Medici for failing to live up to the challenge. That The Prince is a masterpiece of double-talk was acknowledged by at least one of Machiavelli's contemporaries. Alberico Gentili, an Italian lecturer on civil law at Oxford University during Queen Elizabeth's reign (1 558-1603), believed that Machiavelli had been misinterpreted as defending tyranny when he was really "a praiser of democracy [Democratice Laudator] and its most zealous champion." His purpose was not to instruct princes, "but to reveal their secret machinations, stripping them bare before their suffering people." It was the people he aimed to instruct, "under the pretext of instructing the prince, hoping that thus his teaching might be t~lerated."'~ None of these comments discredits The Prince from being at least in part a scientific work. What they do is to discredit the image of Machiavelli as an impassive scientific observer. A complex and gifted personality, Machiavelli presented his scientific findings, insofar as they were such, in the form of a satirical masterpiece and a political manifesto. Political history may be a history of elites, but it is the work of individuals and not of abstract entities, such as nations, classes, or forces of production, much less races, civilizations, or revolutions as the reputed locomotives of change. Although chance or fortune plays a part, the only responsible agents are individuals to which all collective entities are reducible. Strictly speaking, nations and states have no history, but only the successive generations that live, work, and fight together. On this score, Machiavelli's contribution to the art of politics is impregnable. As a political observer, Machiavelli describes persons and peoples in flux in such terms as civil disorder and order, disease and health, relapse and recovery, corruption and redemption, virtue and vice, good and bad. These contrasts are emotionally loaded and suggest that his political craft concealed an ideology. His statements may be tested by facts accessible to and observer, rich or poor, ruler or ruled, but they do not qualifi as neutral with respect to practical political goals.

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The Prince has been periodically misread as a manual for princes. But as Machiavelli noted, its ground rules "have always been applied by the greatest men in history." Since these were the great legislators and teachers of mankind, Gramsci concludes that it is unlikely he wrote to advise those who already know. Rather, "he intended to give political education to those who do not know." Who are they? Answer: "the revolutionary class of the time, the Italian 'people' and 'nation,' the citizen democracy which gave birth to Savonarola," to those in need ofa leader who would know how to make a rev~lution.'~ The fundamental characteristic of The Prince, wrote Gramsci from his prison cell, "is that it is not a systematic treatment, but a 'living' book, in which political ideology and political science are fused in the dramatic form of a 'myth."' By myth he meant a Sorelian myth, as defined in Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence, a book that first appeared as a series of articles in Mouvement Socialiste from January to June 1906. Unlike a utopia or hypothesis about the future, wrote Sorel, a myth is a "body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspondto the differentmanifestationsofthe war undertaken by Socialism against modern ~ociety."~' As Sorel explained in a letter to his friend Daniel HalCvy (15 July 1906), "myths are not descriptionsofthings, but expressions of a determination to act." By evoking the will to fight, myths cannot be refuted. "A Utopia is, on the contrary, an intellectual product." Utopias are the work of theorists who, "after observing and discussing the known facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing society in order to estimate the amount ofgood and evil it contains." Myths prepare men for combat that will destroy the existing state of things, whereas the effect of utopias is to direct our minds toward reforms that can be brought about by patching up the existing system. Unlike myths, a utopia "can be compared with the movements actually observed in the course of history, and we can in this way evaluate its ~erisimilitude."~'It can be refuted by showing that its imaginary foundations are incompatible with prevailing tendencies. To return to Gramsci's assessment of Machiavelli, The Prince is a work of "political ideology which is not presented as a cold utopia or as a rational doctrine, but as a creation of concrete fantasy which works on a dispersed and pulverized people in order to arouse and organize their collective will." Its purpose is to excite their artistic fantasy and to give concrete form to their political passions. So, "after having presented the ideal condottiere, Machiavelli, in a passage of great artistic effect, calls on the real condottieri to bring him to life historically." The Prince is an impassioned work by a would-be political activist intent on exciting apassionate fever and fanaticism for action.'* The Sorelian myth in the final chapter of The Prince prompts Gramsci to depict the work as a party manifesto. Whose party? The party ofthe plebs or people versus the nobles and gentlemen-the party of the revolutionary class. Althusser agrees with Gramsci. In The Prince, "with all the resources of rhetoric and passion requiredto winpartisans to his cause," he writes, ''[Machiavelli] explicitly engages in the ideological battle on behalf of the political party he supports." For that

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Chapter 1

purpose he places his manifesto at the disposal of a prince who will hopefully redeem Italy from foreign oppres~ion.~~ In view of Machiavelli's self-depiction as a man of the people-"he who wishes to understand [the nature ofl princes must be one ofthe people3'-it is clear where he stands. As Althusser comments on this passage, Machiavelli takes the side of the people in calling for "a prince who will establish Italian unity from the standpoint of the 'popolare."' That means a class struggle between the people and the nobles. In effect, the prince is invited "to carry out his historical mission by gaining the people's friendshipthat is, to speak plainly, an alliance with the people against the nobility."84 Contrary to Sorel, utopias are not unqualifiedly intellectual and reformist, but may also serve a revolutionary purpose. As a political manifesto, The Prince embodies a utopia in addition to a myth. (So does the Communist Manifesto for that matter.) The first twenty-five chapters are about a prince who is only imagined to exist, says Gramsci, "who did not present himself to the Italian people in a directly objective way, but was a purely doctrinaire abstraction, the symbol of a leader, the ideal condottiere." Machiavelli's republic ofequals, his project for perfect equality, hinged on the search for a prince who would "lead the people towards the foundation of a new State."85 An ideal prince? Is that not a fantasy worthy of utopia? Although Machiavelli made ample concessions to human cupidity, violence, and fraud that are anything but ideal by ordinary standards, his prince was an idealized human being. Like The Prince, the Discourses can be read as a revolutionary tract. Despite its length, it repeatedly evokes a will to fight against organized oppression. Evidently, it is not a pure example of a Sorelian myth. Unlike "Gracchus" Babeuf s Manifesto of the Plebeians (1795) and Sylvain MarBchal's Manifesto of the Equals (1796), it fleshes out a pseudo-utopia that partly existed in the past. The expression "perfect equality" first occurs in reference to the Germans who "do not permit any of their citizens to be or to live in the manner of gentlemen."86 In this usage, a republic of virtue at least existed, although hardly as free from corruption as Machiavelli imagined.

Notes 1 . Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 2002; original pub. 1960), 5.47-55; and Gary B. Miles, L.I. 1'. Y: Reconstructing Early Rome (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 94. 2. Machiavelli, Discourses, 3.1 (numbers refer to book and chapter). 3. Livy, The Early History ofRome, 3.18-21,26-29;and Machiavelli, Discourses, 3.25. 4. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.3-4. 5. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.4-5. See Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, ed. F. W. Walbank, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (New York: Penguin, 1979), 6.14; and Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War, ed. and trans. R.W. Livingstone (London: Oxford

A Dangerous Enterprise University Press, 1949), 3-82. 6. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.6. 7. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.lo, 11, 12. 8. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.55. See Tacitus, Germany and Its Tribes, in The Complete Works of Tacitus, ed. Moses Hadas, trans. A.J. Church and W.J. Brodribb (New York: Random House, l942), 5, 7, 10-1 1, 16-26. 9. Machiavelli, Discourses, 3.16,25; and Livy, The Early History of Rome, 1.1. 10. On the Polybian cycle, see Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, 6.3-10. 11 . Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 36-37. In the Song of Roland (eleventh or twelfth century) the rear guard of Charlemagne's army was ambushed and massacred by Saracens(actually by Basques) at the village of Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees. 12. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958), 47-48, 50. 13. Michael Palmer, Masters and Slaves: Revisioned Essays in Political Philosophy (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001), 99. 14. Michael Palmer, Masters and Slaves: Revisioned Essays in Political Philosophy (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001), 99-1 00, 100-101. 15. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 48, 52-53. 16. Ralph Roeder, Savonarola: A Study in Conscience (New York: Brentano's Publishers, 1930),90; idem, The Man of the Renaissance (New York: Time, 1966; orig. pub. 1933), 3738. 17. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.55; 3.1 ; Roeder, Savonarola, 163; and "Marginalia." in Niccolb Machiavelli, The Prince: A Revised Translation, Backgrounds, Interpretations, Marginalia, 2nd ed., trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1992), 273. The citation is from John Lilburne, The Upright Man's Vindication (London, 1653). 18. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1999), 30. 19. Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, 3 1; 32; Diderot cited by Althusser. 20. Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, 3 1-32. 21. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.2. 22. Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, 40,47-48, 116. 23. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.55; 2.2; 2.19; and Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli, trans. Gioconda Savini (London: Robert Hale, l968), 18, 19. 24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1950), 49-50; and Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.55 and 3.1. 25. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 71 and 71n. 26. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.55. 27. Machiavelli, The Florentine History in VlIl B o o b (London: Printed for Charles Harper and Jack Amery, 1674), 3.13 (numbers refer to book and chapter). 28. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 3 10-314. 29. Negri, Insurgencies, 61; for the reference to Gramsci, see Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince, in The Modern Prince and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Louis Marks (New York: International Publishers, 1957), 139. 30. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.17; and Negri, Insurgencies, 64-65. 3 1. V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975), 373-374; and Negri, Insurgencies, 291 -292, 293-300. 32. Negri, Insurgencies, 68. 33. Negri, Insurgencies, 76; and Machiavelli, Discourses, I . 1; 3.16.

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34. Negri, Insurgencies, 77, 78, 300. 35. Robert M. Adams, "The Rise, Proliferation, and Degradation of Machiavellism: An Outline," in The Prince (Adams edition), 236. 36. Robert M. Adams, "The Rise, Proliferation, and Degradation of Machiavellism," 239; and Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 4th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967; orig. pub. 1948), 5. For Morgenthau's six principles or scientific guidelines of Realpolitik, see 4-1 1; for Carl Schmitt's list of realistic political thinkers, see William E. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 232. 37. Adams, "The Rise, Proliferation, and Degradation of Machiavellism," 236. 38. Prezzolini, Machiavelli, 90,92; and Adams, "The Rise, Proliferation, and Degradation of Machiavellism," 237. 39. Adams, "The Rise, Proliferation, and Degradation of Machiavellism," 237. 40. Prezzolini, Machiavelli, 5; and Discourses, 18.2. 41. Prezzolini, Machiavelli, 29. 42. Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, ed. Hans Kohn, trans. Blanche Dugdale and Torben de Bille (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963; orig. pub. 1897-1898), 46,47. 43. Treitschke, Politics, 47. 44. Treitschke, Politics, 48, 52. 45. Treitschke, Politics, 48. As Treitschke's American editor Hans Kohn comments, "These lectures can be read as a warning against Macht-politik," against "self-centered and arrogant nationalism, which believes in anational mission, in national superiority over other peoples." See "Introduction," xvii. 46. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d 'Etat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957; orig. pub. l925), 1-6,29-32,49-5 1,410,419-424. 47. Meinecke, Machiavellism, 55-56; and Discourses, 1.55. 48. Margherita G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, trans. Frederic Whyte (London: Thornton Buttersworth, 1925), 127-133 (Mussolini cited); and Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1940), 273-278 (Hitler cited). 49. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1959; orig. pub. 1951), 443, 447,459,464-465,445. 50. For the striking contrast between these two worldviews, see Budu Svanidze, My Uncle Joseph Stalin, trans. Waverly Root (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1953), 130-131; and Wilhelm Fuhrlander's mimeographed SS training manual, in Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933-1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), 143-145. 5 1. Livy, The Early History of Rome, 1.19. 52. Benedetto Croce, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, trans. C. M. Meredith (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 1 I0 n. I . 53. Machiavelli, The Prince, in The Prince and Other Works (Gilbert edition), 18:6 (numbers refer to chapter and paragraph). Unless otherwise indicated, all references to The Prince are to this editioh. 54. Machiavelli, The Prince, 18:1;and Gilbert's explication of the text, 148 n. I. 55. The Art of War cited by Prezzolini, Machiavelli, 38; and Discourses, 1.10; 3.1. 56. Berlin, "The Originality of Machiavelli," 53-55. 57. Discourses, 1.12; 3.1. 58. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, 89. 59. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 9, 10-1 1, 12.

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60. Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1983), ix, 25; 3,25-27; 208-209; 246-248. 61. Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, 8 (Guicciardini quoted), 12-13,27,29-30, 159,222. 62. Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, 74-75, 79, 80. 63. Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, 80, 81, 89. 64. Cited by Adams, "Marginalia," in The Prince, 273; and Prince, 15:1. 65. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, ed. Arthur Livingston, trans. Hannah D. Kahn, 1923 rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939; orig. pub. 1896), 202, 203. 66. James Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (Washington, D.C.: Gateway, 1987; orig. pub. 1943), 93,251. 67. Burnham, The Machiavellians, 87. 68. Burnham, The Machiavellians, 87-88. 69. Burnham, The Machiavellians, 184-186. 70. Burnham, The Machiavellians, 127, 131,232,236-257,245; and idem, Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959), 19-20 n.2,23-24. 71. Joseph Kraft, "The Myth of Machiavelli's Political Science," in De Lamar Jensen, Machiavelli: Cynic, Patriot, or Political Scientist? (Boston: Heath, 1960), 73-74; and Garrett Mattingly, "Political Science or Political Satire?" in Jensen, Machiavelli, 101. 72. Mattingly, "Political Scienceor Political Satire?" 99- 100; and Ernst Cassirer,"Science and Political Theory," in Jensen, Machiavelli, 65-66,66. 73. Cassirer, "Science and Political Theory," 66,67. 74. Mattingly, "Political Science or Political Satire?" 99, 102, 102-103, 103. 75. Mattingly, "Political Science or Political Satire?" 103, 103-104. 76. Mattingly, "Political Science or Political Satire?'lO4-105. 77. Mattingly, "Political Science or Political Satire?" 106, 107. 78. Mattingly, "Political Science or Political Satire?" 105. Gentili cited by Mattingly. 79. Gramsci, The Modern Prince, 141- 142. 80. Gramsci, The Modern Prince, 135; and Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence,trans. T.E. Hulme and J. Roth (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), 142, 144. 81. Georges Sorel, "Introduction: Letter to Daniel HalCvy," in Reflections on 17iolence, 57, 58. 82. Gramsci, The Modern Prince, 135, 135 n. I, 136. 83. Gramsci, The Modern Prince, 141, 142; and Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, 23. 84. The Prince, Proem.2; and Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, 129. 85. Gramsci, The Modern Prince, 135, 136. 86. See Markhal's "Manifesto of the Equals" and Babeuf s "The Manifesto of the Plebeians," in the Appendix to Ian H. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 167-172; and Discourses, 1.55 and 2.4.

Chapter 2

The Republican Agenda The servant's mentality is governed by double-think. Servants must please their master by anticipatingwhat the master wants; at the same time, they think independently accordingto their own wont. Double-think leads to double-talk, to saying what the master wants to hear while meaning something else: "Yes, Giuliano, I will do it for you," and simultaneously, "Shit floats, you s.o.b.!" Meanwhile, one's master is practicing the same art of politics in miniature, generally known as civility or good manners: "Thank you, Niccolo, I appreciate your services," and silently, "You treacherous bastard, I can't rely on you!" Such is the art of politics, or civility written large. Poor Niccolb! Giuliano has him tortured, and he must then beg Giuliano to restore him to public life. The Prince was originally dedicated to its author's tormentor. It was subsequently dedicated to the nephew, Lorenzo de' Medici, but only because Giuliano left Florence in 1513 and died before he might have been of service. Lorenzo was supposed to do what his uncle was unable to, that is, respond to Niccolo's abject efforts to "win favor with a prince," to "offer him the things they [the petitioners] most value and in which they see that he will take most pleasure." My gift to Your Magnificence, says Niccolb, is my most cherished possession, "my knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from being experienced in modern affairs and continual reading on ancient ones." Follows ingratiating and fawning praise addressed to a person with the power to return the favor with interest. "I beseech Your Magnificence, therefore, to accept this little gift." And if, from your lofty summit, "Your Magnificence will sometimes turn your eyes to these low places, you will perceive how undeservedly I endure the great and continual malice of Fortune."' (In other words, "Take me into your service, you swine! Let me back into City Hall!") To the master of his destiny Niccolo depicts the purpose of The Prince: "to examine the conduct of princes and give rules for it." An outsider, albeit former insider, he was well prepared for the job. But was the dedication an example of double-talk? Buried in the middle of his work, he fleshes out his intention: "I break away completely from the principles laid down by my predecessors." He thinks it

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more effective to go back to the practical truth of the subject. "Practical" refers to the art; "truth" to the "subject" of politics. Its practical lesson is: "anybody who abandons what is for what ought to be will learn something that will ruin rather than preserve him, because anyone who determines to act in all circumstances the part of a good man must come to ruin among so many who are not good."' As if Lorenzo didn't know as much! To Francesco Vettori, in a letter dated 10 December 1513,Niccolb presents the matter somewhat differently. From his reading of the works of ancient writers, he says, he has "composed a little book, De principatibus, in which I go as deep as I can into reflections on this subject, debating what a principate is, what the species are, how they are gained, how they are kept, and why they are lost." To a prince, especially a new prince, the work ought to be welcome. "Hence I am dedicating it to His Magnificence Gi~liano."~

The Republican Prince But is The Prince mainly concerned with the conquest of the State? Is it a manual on how to succeed in the struggle for power? The foregoing depictions deliberately omit its ulterior purpose. A partial glimpse of its author's intent appears in the final chapter: "An Exhortation to Take Hold of Italy and Restore Her to Liberty from the Barbarians." Under the heel ofthe French occupation, the divided Italian states cried out for a prince who would deliver them from foreign oppression and bring about national unification. The people's struggle against imperialism is the overriding purpose which the prince should serve. That is decidedly not the subject of the preceding twenty-five chapters. At most, Niccolb argues that a new prince may win honor and glory by benefiting his subjects-a double purpose consistent with Niccolo's double-talk "that will do him [the prince] honor, and bring good to the mass of the people of the land."4 But is this The Prince's ultimate purpose, or is there an ulterior purpose behind it? The key to understanding the first twenty-five chapters, according to Gennaro Sasso, is to be found in Book 1, chapter 18 of the Discourses. There Machiavelli stumbled on a problem so immensely important in his judgment that he needed a separate book to work through it. Is it possible, he asked, to reform a people completely tainted by corruption? Machiavelli believed that for a solution to this moral as well as political problem, a prince must "resort to extraordinarymeasures, such as violence and arms [against one's fellow citizens], and above all things to make one's self absolute master of the State." How to produce good by evil means when no other alternative is available? His answer is to have "all the Ephores massacred," summed up in chapter 55 of Book 1 in the maxim that, "where there are many gentlemen, he [the prince] will not succeed until he has destroyed them

The Republican Agenda

39

all." For they are the principal source of all c~rruption.~ Beware, Lorenzo! Niccolb intended to use you for purposes he never made clear. It was not just national liberation and unification that he was after so much as their sequel in a republic sans gentlemen-the ulterior purpose behind his ulterior purpose. The theme of The Prince is the theme of the Discourses. Once Lorenzo had liberated Italy in Machiavelli's active imagination, his task was to follow in the footsteps of Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea. Clearchus, finding himself placed between the insolence of the nobles on the one hand, whom he could in no way content or control [the same nobles who recalled him from banishment in order to put down the popular faction], and the rage of the popular faction on the other hand, who could not support the loss of their liberty, resolved suddenly to rid himself of the importunities of the nobles, and to secure himself the good will and support of the people.

Listen to this, Lorenzo! Availing himself of a favorable opportunity, "he had all the nobles rna~sacred."~ Rousseau believed that what passed for Machiavellism were interpretationsby corrupt and superficial readers. For Niccolo the art ofpolitics is not mainly what an ambitious man must do in order to acquire, maintain, and enlarge his power. Because the work was misread as justifying any means toward those ends, Machiavelli became identified with an incarnation ofthe Devil, as "Old Nick" after his Christian name Niccolb. That is the sense in which Machiavelli was not a Machiavellian. Thus Mario Praz: "Machiavelli is no more the inventor of Machiavellism than [Robert] Graves is the inventor of Graves' disease."' Machiavelli would have his readers believe that in charting new paths, "I break away completely from the principles laid down by my predecessors." His concern in The Prince for the practical truth of politics is supposed to have replaced his and his precursors' fancies about it. Thus "many have imaginedrepublics and principalities that never have been seen or known to exist in reality."' Such efforts at formulating utopias constitute the greater part of political philosophy to this day, a history of normative thinking and speculation on the ideal republic, on an illusory social contract, and on other slippery subjects such as political justice and human rights. "Leaving aside, then, things about an imaginary prince," Machiavelli proceeds to discuss the facts of life, the "things that are true." Although the final chapter of his little book talks about the prince's "good" and "just" enterprises-the imaginary actions of an imaginary prince-we may forgive him these brief lapses into normative thinking.9 Like The Prince, the Discourses examines the deeds of great men based on a "real knowledge of history." However, there are three salient differences. First, the examples in the Discourses are taken mainly from ancient rather than modem history and from republican Rome in particular. Second, its prime concern is not

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how princes gain, hold, and lose power, but how they contribute to the common benefit. Third, its focus is not on the prodigies of vice, on princes who act from selfish motives, but on the "prodigies of virtue and wisdom displayed by the kings, captains, citizens, and legislators who have sacrificed themselves for their country"-the actions not just ofprinces and legislators, but also of private citizens both as individuals and collectively.Nonetheless, the two works are continuous as The Prince leads into the Discourses. While the former concludeswith the author's exhortation to a wise and vigorous ruler to make changes "that will do him honor, and bring good to the mass ofthe people," the latter opens with his intent to benefit the people by "the wonderful examples which the history of ancient kingdoms and republics presents to us."'O Rather than a systematic treatise on politics or logically structured political theory, Machiavelli offers the reader a political agenda in both The Prince and the Discourses. It consisted of the new principles he had promised in the Introduction to his commentary on Livy, principles ofpatriotism in a five-part agenda presented partly in The Prince but mainly in the Discourses. His first and most pressing task was to find and to encourage a strong prince to found a monarchy and to tame the nobility for the purpose ofliberating Italy from foreign occupation and establishing a unified national state. This task of emancipation was to be followed by liberation from internal oppression through a series of political, military, religious, and economic reforms. A republic would replace the monarchy and the country would be liberalized politically. A popular militia would replace a mercenary army for the purpose of warding off domestic tyrants as well as foreign enemies. A religious reformation would put an end to the corrupt teachings and practices ofthe Roman clergy. And economic equality imposed from the top down would rid the country of parasitic gentlemen who reap what others SOW. The ultimate objective of these reforms was a society in which the State is rich and the people are poor. Why poverty as the goal? Because wealth corrupts, according to Machiavelli, and absolute wealth corrupts absolutely. Because without private wealth or the opportunity to acquire it, the citizens would no longer be corrupted or able to corrupt others. For a government that cannot be bought or made to serve special interests, an elective meritocracymight avoid corruption only under these harsh conditions. Extreme measures were needed to introduce these reforms. The strategy required for Machiavelli's tour de force was nothing less than revolutionary: a class war of the poor against the rich.

National Liberation and Unification Machiavelli was concerned with rules for governing. But by what sort ofrulers? The Prince opens with a distinction between two kinds of princes, hereditary and

The Republican Agenda

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nonhereditary. The former become princes thanks to luck or fortune; the latter through a struggle for power, intelligence, and force of character. Although Machiavelli was a republican, he astutely recognized that a prince might be needed to serve republican ends. Republics cannot survive under conditions of foreign occupation. Servitude to a native prince is also onerous. But a native prince may be the only recourse for raising an army and centralizing power in a concerted effort "to liberate ltaly from the barbarians." Machiavelli's supreme goal in life was to be of service to his fellow citizens. As he revealed in a letter to Francesco Vettori (16 April 1527), "1 love my native land more than my soul." But would that not damn him in the eyes of God? On the contrary, "I believe that the greatest good that can be done, and the most pleasing to God, is that which is done to one's country."" Considering the theme of The Prince set forth in its final chapter, Machiavelli believed that a war ofnational liberation against French domination would serve not only the interests of his fellow citizens in Florence, but also the national interest. Although Charles VIII had discredited Piero de' Medici and opened the way for Savonarola to reform the government of Florence, his army was driven out of Italy in 1495. When he died in 1498, his successor King Louis XI1 returned until 1512 when he too was forced to leave. But in 1515 the barbarians again took Milan under Louis Xll's successor Francis I. Florence was again threatened when Machiavelli came to its rescue with his political tract The Prince. Machiavelli's allegiance was not only to Florence, but also encompassed the rest ofthe Italian peninsula. United as they were by reasons of language and culture, the Papal States,Neapolitans, Milanese, and Venetians also considered themselves Italians. After all, ltaly was the greater fatherland and the city-states only a piece of it. Where might one find an Italian military genius willing to redeem his country? Until then, nobody capable of such a mammoth task had appeared. Past leaders had been notoriously weak. In desperation, Machiavelli thought Cesare Borgia might fit the role. But the latter died prematurely in 1507. So he dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo the Magnificent's son Giuliano (1479-1 5 16) and, after Giuliano died, to Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino (1492-1 529)-also a member ofthe Medici family. Thus it was not to republican statesmen that he turned. An armed prophet is of more use than an unarmed one. In Machiavelli's description of Achilles' education at the hands of Chiron the centaur, Chiron teaches the art of politics based on how not to be good. Like a centaur, half human and half beast, a prince is obliged to act like both. As a beast, he must learn from the fox how to defend himself from traps, and from the lion how to defend himself from wolves. Laws do not suffice to preserve the prince's power. He must carry a big stick, disguise his character, and become a great dissembler. Force and fraud are not just the ruin of the world; they are also its salvation." Moses was Machiavelli's model intended to guide the behavior of Italy's liberator. The Hebrew prophet is mentioned in six separate places in The Prince at

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the head of other historical redeemers. That this biblical hero made such a deep and lasting impression on Machiavelli may be traced in part to Savonarola and his twenty-two sermons on the Book of Exodus just prior to his fall fi-om power. Machiavelli attended several ofthe sermons and commented upon some at length." If only the prophet in the role of a Florentine Moses had been armed, the republic might have endured. What Florence needed was a leader capable of mobilizing and retaining the support of its people; but more than the future of Florence was at stake. The Florentine problem, Machiavelli reasoned, could only be solved in the context of the Italian problem, that is, the unification of Italy. For that purpose there was need of a redeemer, a general at the head of an army capable of liberating Italy fi-om foreign domination. The time had come for deliverance. The Italians,Niccolo believed, had reached the bottom of the abyss, having become more oppressed than the Israelites in the land of Egypt, and more scattered than the Athenians before Theseus arrived on the scene. As a prelude to national salvation, "Italy had to be brought down to her present position, to be more a slave than the Hebrews, more a servant than the Persians [oppressed by the Medes], more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without government; defeated, plundered, tom asunder, overrun." Not only the French were to blame. The Catholic Church had "destroyed all piety and religion in Italy," which had brought in its train all kinds ofdissension and disorder. The Church has been the cause of our ruin, Niccolb complained, because it deliberately keeps our country divided.l4 A country can only be united and happy, Machiavelli explains, "when it obeys wholly one government, whether a republic or a monarchy, as is the case in France and in Spain." The division of Italy cannot be blamed on the "barbarians"; the sole cause of Italy's not being united is the Church. Although having acquired a temporal dominion, she has never had sufficient power or courage to seize the rest of the country and to make herself sovereign. Since the Church has not permitted any other power to do so, "ltaly has never been able to unite under one head, but has always remained under a number of princes and lords, which occasioned her so many dissensions and so much weakness" that she became a prey to others." "Machiavelli's chief immediate practical goal," writes James Burnham in The Machiavellians, "is the national unification of Italy." About that, there can be no doubt. His treatise on The Art of War was designed to teach his countrymen how to beat back the French in northern ltaly and the Spaniards in the Kingdom of Naples in order to establish an independent nation. His History of Florence "finds in the stories of the past a traditional spirit that can be linked with arms in the struggle." Who might become the agent of deliverance from the despised foreigners? The examples of French and Spanish unification suggested to Machiavelli that only a prince en route to becoming an absolute monarch in mortal conflict with the centrifugal feudal lords could bring the destruction oftheir power, unitjl the nation, and end the foreign occ~pation.'~ But as Burnham presents The Prince's immediate goal, unification would come first as the indispensable condition of liberation. That is not how Machiavelli presented it. Following the example of Cesare

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Borgia-"I do not know what better precepts I could give a new prince than the example of his actions9'-the deliverance of ltaly would have to begin by building up power and arms sufficient to match the French and Spanish armies. It was a question of hand-in-glove, two related tasks to be solved partly in tandem and partly successively. National unification depended on defeating the French and Spanish armies, which in turn depended on destroyingthe power ofthe local Italian nobility. Besides the external enemy, Cesare had to face an internal enemy among the nobles who disputed the greatness ofthe Pope- Alexander VI in attempting to make great his son Cesare. The preponderant military power was in the hands ofthe Orsini and Colonnesi, feudal lords of Rome and its vicinity. Cesare's first task was to weaken them by duplicity, by seizingtheir lands, and then "by exterminating all the families of those lords he had dispossessed."" After expelling the invaders he would have other noble families to be dealt with similarly, those in the formerly occupied territories. Machiavelli's concern for the liberation and unification of ltaly had to wait until the later-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries to become widely recognized as a sine qua non of Machiavellism. First in Germany and then in Italy, two countries that were still divided and under foreign tutelage, The Prince was finally understood as it should have been from the beginning. As a manual of national liberation and unification, it relied on the French and Spanish examples of taming the feudal nobility and establishing an absolute monarchy. As Hegel nailed down the thesis of The Prince's final chapter, "freedom is possible only when a people is legally united within a state." But even where Machiavelli's basic aim of raising Italy to statehood is acknowledged, it is alleged that his means are abhorrent, and "this gives morality ample scope to trot out its platitudes that the end does not justify the means, etc." But, Hegel continues, only the most drastic measures can reconstitute the social order. "Gangrenous limbs cannot be cured by lavender-water, and a situation in which poison and assassination have become common weapons permits no half-measures." Again, agreeing with Machiavelli, Hegel wrote: [B]y the arbitrary will of an individual exerting itself so as to subjugate a whole body of men, a community is formed; and comparing this state of things with that in which every point is a center of capricious violence, we find a much smaller number of points exposed to such violence.lR

Political Freedom That was only the beginning of the Machiavellian project. If the new prince's enterprise were to be completed, says Pasquale Villari, it would not stop at a principality but would lead to a republic. Such is the theme of the Discourses, starting from the enterprise begun by the prince and then going forward relentlessly to the end, showing how "the people should possess itself ofthe government, render

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it strong and prosperous, and administer it by means of free institutions and m~rality."'~ The Discourses is devoted mainly to the task of reforming the government. When "there is combined under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check." In ancient Rome, says Niccolb, that is what rendered the constitution perfect. Class struggle was not only a source of internal dissension; it was also a sine qua non of freedom. For that reason a country is fortunate when there are two parties, that ofthe nobles and that of the people. For "all the laws that are favorable to liberty result from the opposition of these parties to each other."*O But mixed government is not the end ofthe matter. There is the further question to whom the guardianship of freedom can more safely be confided, whether to the nobles or to the people. Machiavelli believed that the nobles were less trustworthy than the people, who wish not to be dominated, and consequently have a greater desire to live in the enjoyment of liberty. The people will take better care of it; "being unable to take it away themselves, [they] will prevent others from doing so." Beware of the haughty manners and insolence of the nobles and the rich! For they "excite in the breasts ofthose who have neither birth nor wealth not only the desire to possess them, but also the wish to revenge themselves by depriving the former of those riches and honors which they see them employ so badly." Would not government by the many be preferable to government by the few? And does it not follow that even in a mixed government the many should exercise the lion's share of power?" After demonstrating that "the people are more prudent and stable, and have a better judgment than a princev-not to mention the nobility-Niccolo invokes the popular maxim, "The voice of the people is the voice of God."'' Like Savonarola, he defends the interests of plebeians in their struggle against both king and nobles. An ardent republican, he was not just a liberal, but also a democrat. Democracy signified government by the many rather than by a few, government by the plebs or common people, most of whom were poor. In 1519, six years after beginning work on the Discourses, Machiavelli penned at the request of Pope Leo X a new constitution for Florence. As his Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence summed up the overriding difference between monarchy and a republic: in a monarchy, "the gentlemen rule the people, the nobles the gentlemen, and the king the nobles"; in a republic, the "people" rule, but are divided into classes representing "three sorts ofmen, such as are to be found in all cities, that is, the upper class, the middle class, and the lowest class."23 The upper, middle, and lower classes are seldom the same in monarchies and republics. Rather than nobles, gentlemen, and plebs, in republics one finds a gradation based on wealth and merit. The citizens are typically guildsmen who are economically active rather than idle because they live off their trades rather than their properties. As Machiavelli envisioned a reformed Florence, all classes would be represented. From the upper class, he said to the Pope, choose a Council of Sixty-Five,

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"fifty-three from the major guilds and twelve from the minor guilds, who shall continue in the administration for life"-they will become the heads of government. Next, from the middle class, "set up a Council of Two Hundred," forty from the minor guilds and a hundred and sixty from the major guilds, who shall also hold office for life. Finally, "reopen the hall of the Council of Two Thousand, or at least of the Six Hundred Citizens"-representing the lower class in the third rank of government-to be chosen ostensibly by lot from those qualified to serve, but secretly by the Pope's agenkZ4 Besides this mixed government of three classes, Machiavelli called for a Court of Appeals made up of "thirty citizens whose names are drawn from the ballot box of the Two Hundred and the Six Hundred together." He considered such a court necessary in a republic, because few citizens have the courage to punish great men.25It would serve as an independentjudiciary and thereby check abuses by the heads of government in the Council of Sixty-Five. Such was Machiavelli's model of mixed government based on the separation of the combined powers of government into three chambers corresponding to the three classes of bourgeois society after the nobility and the landed gentry had been removed. The Sixty-Five and the Council of Two Hundred, the parliaments respectively of the haute bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, would carry on the most important business of government involving both legislative and executive tasks. As the top lawmakers, their job would be to propose new legislation and to discuss and debate alternative proposals before submittingthem to the Six Hundred for ratification-the third chamber representing the "multitude" or "rabble." For such a republic to survive, three conditions were necessary. First, there must be "great equality among the citizens," as in Florence. To found a republic elsewhere, as in Milan where there is great inequality, it would be necessary "to get rid of all the nobility and reduce it to equality with the masses." Second, persons of merit must have access to the highest offices: "the highest political ambition in the city must be satisfied." Otherwise, there will be political disturbances,enmities, and rebellions. Third, no single class of citizens or their representatives"should be able to decide on any action without having at hand someone able to check them." With the patricians eliminated and the plebs in control of all three chambers, Machiavelli concludes, we have both a "stable republic" and a "perfect republic" because every man has a share in it and "no citizen of any class will be led to desire revolution either through fear for himself or through ambiti~n."'~ To be sure, this revised scheme ofmixed government hardly squares with what is understood by democracy. Still, it was an improvement on what passed for a republic. During the two hundred years of which there was a reliable account, according to Niccolb, Florence never had a government that could really be called a republic. Its successive reformers "never organized it for the general good, but always with the view of benefiting their own party." As Burnham reminds us, the rule ofthe plebs, in Florence as in Rome, held out the prospect ofpublic office only to a rich minority, while the word "'people' meant in the first instance the burghers and the leading members ofthe guilds." Although in the course oftime the "people"

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also came to include the lesser people or populo minuto--the lower strata of apprentices, hired hands, and those not regularly employed-these had no role in the government of Florence." To be fair to Machiavelli, how far could he have realistically gone with his reforms at the request both of Pope Leo X and of his sidekick, Cardinal Giuliano de' Medici, later Clement VII? He could hardly have recommended to the Medici that they should commit hara-kiri. What he omitted from his proposals were the additional reforms he later included in the Discourses, that the citizens should be kept poor--comfortably poor rather than abjectly so-and the state rich. In that event, we would have not a bourgeois republic ruled by the rich, but a pettybourgeois democracy without the extremes of wealth and poverty. Instead of three classes, there would be only a class of small proprietors without any need for mixed government. His earlier reforms were only stations along the way.

The People in Arms Political liberalization has a bearing only on domestic policy. It is far from exhausting even that, and it says nothing about foreign affairs. In matters ofwar and peace, Machiavelli weighed the pros and cons of policies appropriate to different kinds of republics: (I) the ecclesiastical or Papal States in Italy; (2) the free cities of Germany; (3) ancient Sparta; (4) ancient Rome; and (5) migratory republics in the case of Germanic inroads on the Roman Empire and the Hebrews in the Promised Land. Concerning the Papal States, Machiavelli wrote, their religious roots and customs enable them to survive without their prelates either governing or defending them. "[Ylet these states are never taken away from them as a result of not being defended." These republics alone, he concluded, are secure and happy. But "because they are protected by a higher power, it would be presumptuous to consider them as an example for others."28 Next to the Papal States, the free cities of Germany are the most admirable. Although their territories are small, "they are fortified in such a way that everyone thinks their capture cannot be other than tedious and difficult." They have plenty of artillery, "they always keep in the public magazines enough to drink and eat and burn for a year," '?hey always have for general use enough raw material to give employment for a year," and they also hold military exercises in high esteem-all of which explains why they fear nobody and obey the emperor only when they choose. These republics are not only free, but also pious and full of moral virtue, "observing their laws in such manner that no one from within or without could venture upon an attempt to master them." Since they have no great commerce with their neighbors and are content to remain at home and to live on what their country produces, they have no need to expand and are no threat to their neighbors. Among them "we see no wars, or only wars of short duration," because the emperor interposes his authority as a conciliator and puts an end to any differencesthat occur

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between them. But because these conditions are peculiar to Germany and Switzerland, other countries cannot adopt the same system.29 Among ancient republics, Sparta had an enviable constitution because Lycurgus had established equality in fortunes. The nobles were kept poor like the people; the people "neither feared nor desired authority,and consequently there was no motive for any differences between them and the nobles, nor any cause for disturbances." Furthermore, "by not permitting strangersto establish themselves in the republic, they had neither opportunity of becoming corrupt, nor of increasing their population''-hence no pretext or cause for expanding. For Machiavelli, as for Plato, to found a republic it would be best to organize her internally like S~arta.~' That is a difficult recipe to follow because "states naturally either rise or decline, and necessity compels them to many acts to which reason will not influence them." A republic competent to maintain itself without expanding will under unforeseen circumstances and pressures attempt to enlarge its dominion to its own ruin. Consequently, it is advisable in organizing a republic to select the most honorable course, "so that, even if necessity should oblige her to expand, she may yet be able to preserve her acquisitions." That explains Machiavelli's choice ofthe Roman Republic as a last recourse, and his willingness to "tolerate the differences that will arise between the Senate and the people as an unavoidable inconvenience in achieving greatne~s."~' Rome was a fitting example for all States that either choose to be great or otherwise are so constituted as to offer strangers the opportunity of becoming citizens. By opening its arms to the world, it was compelled to become a world power. For Machiavelli, to conquer the world becomes the objective of every people that aspires to greatness. Just as no citizen can be great without having things under his control, so no nation can be great without subordinating other states to its will. Republics "aim to enervate and weaken all other states so as to increase their own power." The Roman Republic (509-27 B.C.) became an empire long before Augustus became the first emperor. Thanks to their method of waging war with lightning speed, the Romans made their road to world power both easy and cheap. Thus "Rome became great by ruining her neighboring cities, and by freely admitting strangers to her privileges and honors."32 Unlike the racially homogeneous German states that discouraged strangers and showed little interest in territorial expansion, Roman imperialism had for its foundation a racially heterogeneous melting pot of nations. Being overpopulated, she was compelled to expand. To achieve a great empire, anation or republic "must endeavor by all possible means to make her populous." Following the Roman example, this may be done in either of two ways: "The first is to make it easy and secure for strangers to come and establish themselves there, and the second is to destroy the neighboring cities, and to compel their inhabitants to come and dwell in yours." Although Sparta and Athens were the most warlike republics of antiquity, they never attained the greatness of Rome for failure to follow the above rules. Whereas Rome had two hundred thousand men under arms, Sparta and Athens were never able to raise more than twenty thousand each.33

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To these two methods of national aggrandizement, Machiavelli added three others. First, "to form a confederation of several republics," none of which has authority over one's own. Second, to make associates of other states, keeping for one's own "the rights of sovereignty,the seat of empire, and the glory." Third, "to make the conquered people immediately subjects, and not associates." Employed by the Tuscans, the first method proved less effective than the second used by the Romans; recourse to the third method by Sparta and Athens proved unfeasible because their armies were not strong enough to secure the obedience of the conquered. Only Rome was positioned to apply successfidly the third method. Its associates were degraded to subjects once they found themselves surrounded by provinces subject to Rome, and at the same time they were pressured into making concessions to their ally.34 The secret of Roman power was to have proxy armies among associates that suffered most of the casualties and shared in the costs, without becoming aware of the trap into which they were led until it was too late to break out of it. Thus Rome's "associates (without being themselvesaware of it) devoted their own efforts and blood to their own subjugation." Such wars are dangerous, but "the conqueror is satisfied with the submission of the conquered, and generally leaves them their dwellings and possessions, and even the enjoyment of their own institution^."^^ The worst scenario is that in which an entire people, constrained by famine, overpopulation, or some other scourge, leaves its homeland in search of a new home, "not for the purpose of subjecting it to their dominion as in the first case, but with the intention of taking absolute possession." In extreme instances, it means driving out or killing the original inhabitants. Less violent were the wars caused by the great migrating hordes when Rome was taken by the Gauls. The Gauls who overran the Roman Empire did so not only for the trivial reason that they were tempted by the fruits and wines of Italy, but mainly because "Gaul was so overpopulated that the country could not support all its inhabitant^."^^ So an ever-growing population is not such a blessed event after all. Like the Vandals who overran the later Roman Empire, the Hebrews led by Moses "came in overwhelming numbers, making violent irruptions into other countries, killing the inhabitants and taking possession of their goods." It was the first recorded example of a holocaust, which "changed the name ofthat part of Syria which he [Moses] occupied into Judea." It extinguished not only the native people, but also the memory of them. "To drive out nations from before thee greater and mightier than thou art," said Moses, keep the commandments and you shall inherit the earth. Such total wars in which each side fights for its very existence, Machiavelli observed, are the most frightful and crueL3' Wars of conquest, he believed, were poison to most republics. Most republics are weak, and "such acquisitionsby feeble republics always prove their ruin." Their salvation is to eliminate the motives for making war, the fear of being subjugated and the desire to subjugate. The pretexts for war are removed, first, by fortifying a republic against possible aggression and, second, by entertaining "no ambitious projects, [for] the fear of her power will never prompt any one to attack her,"

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especially if her constitution and laws prohibit all aggrandizement. That "wouldbe the best political existence, and would insure to any state real tranq~ility."~~ But for that, its citizens must be virtuous, able to defend themselves, and willing to die for their country. Most republics should beware of following the Roman example because the pursuit of greatness may prove injurious. On the one hand, one may "extend one's dominion without increasing one's power." On the other hand, "dominion without power is sure to bring with it ruin." Not all conquests are cost-effective:"Whoever impoverishes himself by war acquires no power, even though he be victorious, for his conquests cost him more than they are worth." They also prove injurious when they assimilate peoples who are corrupt and enervated by pleasures and luxury. Considering how pernicious to Rome were such conquests when she evinced so much wisdom and virtue in her conduct, "what would the consequences be to those who deviate so far from that example?"39 But if feeble republics should seek peace instead of greatness, is such tranquility feasible? Peace is possible only for a republic, first, "sufficiently powerful, so that no one could hope to overcome her readily"; and second, "not so powerhl as to make her formidable to her neighbors." Such a slippery balance is difficult to achieve and impossible to maintain for peoples who lack virtue.40 The pursuit ofpeace, Machiavelli observed, has a flip side, for "ifthe [Roman] republic had been more tranquil, it would necessarily have resulted that she would have been more feeble." She would have lost with her energy "that high degree of greatness to which she attained." In the real world there are only trade-offs, pluses for minuses. Since in all human affairs "you cannot avoid one inconvenience without incurring another," the question becomes, "what presents the least inconvenien~e?'~' Free states naturally tend to grow in population because "people will gladly have children when they know that they can support them." Since a growing population will eventually exhaust its means of subsistence, republics tend to expand.42Such being the natural tendency among republics, Machiavelli's advice was to accept reality and act accordingly, to pursue greatness as a second-best solution in the event of an impossible peace. It seems that "a free city is generally influenced by two principal objects, the one to aggrandize herself, and the other to preserve her liberties." The two are not unrelated. Just as the general good makes cities free, so it also "makes cities great."43Greatness as well as liberty is in the national interest, provided'its price is not extortionate. Hence Machiavelli's deeply felt reverence for vigorous republics and for Roman greatness as a model in those instances in which a people is able and willing to pay the price. Military virtue has a different significance and leads to different results for different peoples. Pygmies should not attempt to be giants, nor should giants seek to behave like pygmies. The same foreign policy does not suit all peoples. Machiavelli's politics of the possible admits of contradictory behaviors. Weak peoples should concentrate on defending themselves and should avoid entangling

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alliances by following the example of the free republics of Germany. Vigorous peoples should pursue a policy of empire modeled on the Roman example. And, cruel as it may be, homeless peoples should follow the example of Moses, provided God or Fortune is on their side.

Religious Reform Empire makes not only for greatness, Machiavelli argued, but also for corruption. The Roman Republic was ruined because of corruption, and the Empire followed suit. For a republic to last, there is need of religion to curb the natural tendency of men to display their vicious nature. In modern as in ancient times, Italy was ruined because its religion became corrupt. A religious rebirth following in Savonarola's footsteps would have to return to the original principles of Christianity. Failure to do so, as Savonarola prophesied, would bring about Christianity's and the Church's ruin. In Machiavelli's words, "whoever examines the principles upon which that religion is founded, and sees how widely different from those principles its present practice and application are, will judge that her ruin or chastisement is near at hand."44 What prompted Machiavelli's fierce denunciation of corruption in Rome, the trumpery of the Holy Catholic Church, if not Savonarola's sermons? Savonarola had called for a reform of religion through a return to origins. As Machiavelli notes at the beginning of Book 3 of the Discourses, the Christian religion would have been corrupted beyond all measure "had it not been brought back to its pristine principles and purity by Saint Francis and Saint Dominic." The religious orders they founded "were so severe and powerfkl that they became the means of saving religion from being destroyed by the licentiousness of the prelates and heads of the Church." Was that not Savonarola's message? To stay corruption, his sermons abounded with "accusations and invectives against the wise ofthe world, for it was thus that he styled the jealous opponents of his d~ctrine."~' His enemies lived by a different set of rules. Theirs was the gospel of force and fraud, the theme of Savonarola's The Ruin of the World Seeing the world turned upside down . . Happy is he who lives by stealing And he that feeds on others' blood; Robbing widows and babes is good, Good to hear the poor appealing. Gentle the soul is and feeling That gains the most by force or fraud.j6

Machiavelli respected Savonarola's motives, but had second thoughts of a practical nature. In his letter to Francesco Guicciardini (1 7 May 152I), he confessed that he wanted a preacher in Florence who could make his way in this world: "They

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[the Florentines] want one who will teach them the road to Heaven," that is, a man prudent, blameless, and frank. Instead, Niccolb wanted to find one "craftier than Fra Girolamo." It was for honesty and sticking to principles when hypocrisy might have saved him that Savonarola was excommunicated and burned. Machiavelli wanted a preacher who would teach people the ways of the Devil, "for I believe that this is the true way to get to Heaven; namely, to learn the way to Hell, in order to avoid it." People need to learn not only how they ought to live, but also how to survive among the wicked. As he recalled what happened to Savonarola, "A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good."47 Unless one believes in miracles, Moses was a master of pretense. Did his ten commandments really come from God? "In truth, there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would not have been accepted by the people." Where the fear of a divine being is missing, Machiavelli observed, "the country will come to ruin unless it be sustained by the fear of the prince, which may temporarily supply the want of religion." Follows the example of Savonarola, who succeeded in persuading the people of Florence that he held converse with God. To which Machiavelli added with a tinge of skepticism, "I will not pretend to judge whether it was true or not." The point is that the masses believed it "without having seen any extraordinary manifestation that should have made them belie~e.''~' Is it any wonder that Strauss questioned Machiavelli's religiosity and considered him a dangerous teacher? With good reason, he believes, Machiavelli's writings were condemned by the Church for leading Christians astray, for depicting the unscrupulousness of princes as a kind of virtue instead of a deliberate and malicious debasement of Christian morality and the Bible. But just as corrupt republics can be saved only when its citizens are "born again," so with respect to religion "revivals are equally necessary." Proof of this is furnished, says Machiavelli, by Italy's religious revival by St. Francis and St. Dominic who helped to restore the Church's credibility. By their voluntary poverty and the example of Christ, they encouraged others to live likewise.49That was not a debasement, for Machiavelli, but an affirmation of Christian morality.

Economic Equality Religious reformation would become the prelude to economic leveling. Niccolb's brief for a mixed constitution was designed only for corrupt societies typified by great social inequalities. But in republics that do not permit any of their citizens to be or to live like gentlemen, there is no upper class that needs restraining. Instead of mixed rule in which birth and riches prevail, Machiavelli looked to rule by the competent or meritorious. Meritocracy, the exclusive rule of men of ability, becomes possible when the founders of republics decide to keep the citizens poor

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so that their wealth may neither corrupt themselves nor enable them to corrupt others. To provide for people of merit meant that "poverty was never allowed to stand in the way of achievement of any rank or honor." Conversely, the principle of meritocracy, from each according to his abilities and to each according to his work, "made riches naturally less de~irable."~~ The thorny question is what Machiavelli intended in the Discourses by a regime of "perfect equality." By perfect equality he meant the abolition of hereditary ranks, privileges, and possessions, the expropriation of the property of nobles and gentlemen. But on close inspection it also stood for equality of opportunity in the pursuit, not of riches, but of public office and prestige. There might be graded classes based on service to the community, but nobles and gentlemen would not be among them. Nor would membership in a superior class entail privileged access to wealth or corresponding economic inequality. The Venetian republic was a step in that direction. Although "none but gentlemen could attain to any rank or public employment," the gentlemen of Venice were so more in name than in fact. They were not landed proprietors, "their riches being founded upon commerce and movable property, and moreover none of them has castles or jurisdiction over subject^."^' Since the name "gentleman" was reserved for persons of superior merit as a title of dignity and respect, the Venetian upper class consisted not of idle proprietors but of Marx's entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. To explain more clearly what is meant by gentlemen, says Machiavelli, "I say that those are called gentlemen who live idly upon the proceeds of their extensive possessions." Few republics had done away with them. The uncorrupted German republics were the exception. Should gentlemen who inhabit neighboring cities fall into their hands, "they kill them." Being content to remain at home and to live on what their country produces "takes away all occasion for intimate intercourse with strangers and all opportunity of corruption." Consequently, the German republics "have been prevented from adopting either French, Spanish, or Italian customs"-the customs of gentlemen, the great corrupters of the Gentlemen are pernicious to any country or republic, but even more pernicious are nobles with castles and obedient subjects. Where there are very many of both, as in the Kingdom of Naples, in the Roman territory, in the Romagna, and in Lombardy, the "only way to establish any kind of order there is to found a monarchical government." Full and absolute powers are necessary to "put a curb upon the excessive ambition and corruption of the powerful." Only where there are "no lords possessing castles, and exceedingly few or no gentlemen," Niccolb concludes, is a republic of virtue p~ssible.'~ Such was Machiavelli's ultimate hope for his fellow citizens and the government of Florence. That it was unrealizable testified to the presence of too many gentlemen who opposed his reforms. Commentators on the Discourses frequently take his mixed constitution for the ideal one. The passages just cited are either passed over in silence, acknowledged but minimized, or otherwise distorted.s4 In the opening chapters of the Discourses Machiavelli says that "all the laws

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favorable to liberty result from the opposition of these parties [nobles and people] to each other." This called for a system of checks and balances since the nobles needed restraining by both the people and a prince. Thus "a combination was formed of the three powers, which rendered the constitution perfectn-that is, for a corrupt society as in ancient Rome and modern Italy. But what of Germany's free states?'" Such were the states on the Upper Rhine. In 1510 an anonymous publicist known as the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine registered the religious ferment among the common people in his Book of a Hundred Chapters. It targeted the people's enemies, "dwellers in Babylon" and "devotees of Luxuria and Avaritia." In a spirit reminiscent of the slain Savonarola, it singled out the rich and well-fed, loose-livingclergy as the chief enemy. These "children of Satan," the friars, monks, and nuns living idle lives from not working for their keep, were to be massacred by pious Christians. "Kill every one of them!" exhorted the anonymous preacher. A future prince, a Messiah ofthe poor, would launch the impending holocaust. There can be no doubt, writes Norman Cohn, "that in one form or another that prophecy continued to fascinate and excite the common people of Germany" as late as the sixteenth ~entury.'~ The Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine provides a clue to the opening comments in chapter 11 of The Prince on "Ecclesiastical Principalities." Sebastian de Grazia suggests that Machiavelli had in mind the free cities in the Holy Roman Empire, where he had been sent as an envoy to the Emperor Maximilian's court in 1508 and again in 1509. Though he never got beyond the Tyrol, he wrote three reports on German affairs in which he noted the frugality, simplicity, and comparative equality among the German people, their "religious intensity" and "deep religious fervor."" Like the Revolutionary ofthe Upper Rhine, Machiavelli stressed the corrupting effects of riches and idleness on both the clergy and the nobility. Thus, if anyone should wish to establish a republic in a country where there are many gentlemen, he would have to kill them all. Shades of the guillotine! This conclusion worthy of a modern Jacobin also has a contemporary ring. "The Jacobins of contemporary Social-Democracy," wrote Lenin of the Bolsheviks in 1905, want the people "to settle accounts with the monarchy and the aristocracy in the 'plebeian way,' ruthlessly destroying the enemies of liberty."s8 Machiavelli's ideas on revolutionarypolitics and on reforming the government of Florence were not original. Some three decades earlier, Savonarola had penned a Treatise on the Organization and Government of the City of Florence. A Dominican friar, Savonarola began by reforming the Church of San Marco and ended by promoting political and economic reforms. The malediction of St. Dominic-"Cursed be he who brings possessions into this Order3'-was given a secular interpretation. The holdings of San Marco were sold, and the monks were obliged to support themselves. When they went forth to proselytize, a lay brother went along and supported them with his craft. They were told to preach the gospel and not to beg. For "Ifthey tell everyone the truth, they will receive no alms." Truth

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being commonly detested, if they beg "they will shrink from plain speaking and be as muzzled dogs"-so said the friar.59 Savonarola's war on private property did not stop there. Voluntary poverty, the original rule of the Order, was restored. The reformed Dominicans, "once so conspicuous for the ample majesty oftheir flowing black and white robes, were now recognized by their pinched hoods, abbreviated frocks, and ungainly figures." As Ralph Roeder sums up the reforms, the war on property amounted to "a war on personal identity, and for a time, in fact, a rudimentary form of monastic communism prevailed in San marc^."^^ Although there is no way of ascertaining the exact date, Machiavelli became a member of the Company of Piety perhaps as early as 1495. His initiation address, "Exhortation to Penitence," was designed to prepare young men for positions of leadership in Florence; it clearly suggests the friar's influence. Its theme is the road to Hell for which penitence is the road of redemption. A man is an enemy to his neighbor, Niccolo preached, when he lacks charity. It alone raises one's soul to Heaven: "On this one virtue is founded the faith ofChrist." Therefore, "it behooves us to imitate Saint Francis and Saint Jerome," who mortified the flesh to prevent it from leading to evildoing. To repress the itch for usury, the only way is with gifts of charity. Otherwise, we find ourselves in the grip of the devil. Besides the Savonarola who talks like Machiavelli, Prezzolini observed, "there is the Machiavelli who preaches like Sa~onarola."~' Was Savonarola responsible for Machiavelli's war on private possessions? Because "some men desire to have more, while others fear to lose what they have," writes Machiavelli, "enmities and war are the consequences." To avoid the pernicious effects of greed, envy, and resentment, the state ought to be rich and the citizens poor. These remarks were not made in passing; Machiavelli repeats what both he and others have said on the subject. Thus, in the concluding book of the Discourses: "I might demonstrate here at length that poverty produces better fruits than riches, that the first has conferred honor upon cities, countries, and religions, whilst the latter have only served to ruin them, were it not that this subject has been so often illustrated by other writers." He alludes here to the Fathers of the Church, St. Dominic, St. Francis, and not least to Savonarola, "for we must speak with all respect of so great a man."62 In 1494, "The Most Christian King" of France, Charles VIII, invaded Italy. ARer his father Louis XI had bequeathed him a united nation, he set forth to enlarge his dominions. Savonarolawelcomed the French invasion as a providential disaster. In a series of sermons on the Biblical Flood two years earlier, he had alluded to the French monarch as "a new Cyrus sent to castigate Italy for its sins"-the sins ofthe wealthy. In September, when the French army took Milan, he again preached his diluvial message, calling citizens to repent because the "Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." His words struck a responsive chord when Piero de' Medici offered to surrender Florence to the invaders. The Florentines revolted and declared him no longer fit to rule. Savonarola interpreted his overthrow as an act of divine intervention. "The Lord has heard your prayers," he preached. "He has brought about a

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great rev~lution."~~ The republic was restored that same year, and a charter modeled on the constitution of Venice was adopted. But a deadlock ensued between supporters of the Popular Party and the partisans of an oligarchical republic. At that point Savonarolawas called upon to mediate. His measures for reforming the government would later haunt Machiavelli, who modeled his reforms thereon. "Give over pomps and vanities," exhorted the friar, "sell your superfluities and relieve the poor." If needed, "let us seize the vessels and ornaments of the churches, and I shall be the first to contribute.'"j4 He knew he was asking too much, so he moderated his demands. Governments must be adapted to the conditions of a people, he conceded. Where there is much force and little intelligence among the citizens, a leveling equality will not work. But in Italy, above all in Florence where force and intellect abound and the citizens are restless, there is room for hope. Rather than rule by the wealthy, he called for rule by the virtuous, an elected merit~cracy.~~ It was a position associated with the Popular Party, and it enjoyed Machiavelli's stamp of approval. Since Charles VlII had been a godsend, Savonarola had mixed feelings about expellingthe invader. When the other Italian states, mostly principalities,organized a League for the Defense of Italy with the backing of the King of Spain and the Emperor Maximilian, Savonarola refised to join. "The Florentines do not wish to enter the League," he explained, from fear that it "might come to destroy the popular government and set up a tyrant in F l ~ r e n c e . " ~ ~ Savonarola tried to make peace with the Church. But in 1497-98 when Machiavelli attended his sermons, he outdid himself in reviling the Vatican for corruption. Excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI, he was arrested, tried, and burned at the stake in May 1498. His leveling experiment had failed. As Machiavelli recalled the reasons for its failure: "All armed prophets succeed, and all unarmed prophets come to ruin."67 The foregoing principles were part of a political agenda in five steps stretched out over a number of decades and possibly several generations. Beginning with a struggle for national liberation and unification, the next step would be to establish a demoliberal republic with the corresponding checks and balances among the principal social classes, then a citizen's militia to defend the mixed constitution, followed by a religious reformation to destroy the seeds of corruption and to prepare the citizens for a republic of virtue, and finally to establish a republic in which the citizens are individually poor but collectively rich. The strategy for accomplishing this tour de force consisted of so-called salami tactics aimed at cutting down the political opposition piecemeal, one enemy at a time. It meant taking as allies the enemies of one's immediate enemy with the intention ofconfronting them at a later moment. Thus the nobility might serve in the struggle for national salvation and the establishmentof a demoliberal republic with nobles in control of the senate. But both they and the lower gentry would have to be eliminated in the final struggle to establish a republic of equals, not just the landed aristocracy and gentlemen without castles, but also those who lived like

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Chapter 2

gentlemen who reap what others sow.

Class War Machiavelli was the first of the moderns to advocate all power to the people although he realized that not every people is prepared to exercise such power. He was also the first to advocate the means thereto-class war of the poor against the rich-while acknowledging that it would not always achieve its ultimate objective. From Numa's reign (715-673 B.C.) to the founding of the Republic in 509 B.C., the populace was engaged in a hard-won struggle for freedom. It had taken some 200 years for the people of Rome to become fit for ruling. Earlier kings would have done their country a great disservice, wrote Livy, if they had yielded prematurely to the people's passion for liberty. "One has but to think ofwhat the populace was like in those early days-a rabble of vagrants, mostly runaways and refugees [from other cities]." Think ofwhat would have happened ifthey had suddenly found themselves enjoying complete freedom of action, if not full political rights. Before any real sense of community had time to grow, they would have set sail on the "stormy sea of democratic politics, swayed by the gusts of popular eloquence and quarreling for power with the governing class." Premature liberty would have been a disaster, he concludes: "we should have been torn to pieces by petty sq~abbles."~~ Machiavelli agreed. A prince was indispensable then, and was also indispensable in Machiavelli's time for a nation in need of a new foundation. But not otherwise. In the second book of his History of Romefrom its Foundation, a work begun around 26 B.C., Livy describes the "popular clamor," "rioting," "and "mob violence" that on several occasions threatened civil war. The "Secession of the Plebs" was the commoners' response to the Senate's refusal to cancel the onerous debts that had reduced large numbers of citizens to poverty and ultimately to slavery. Wealthy Romans, declared the plebs, "threatened them with worse slavery than a foreign foe." So deeply was Rome divided over the plight of citizens bound over to their creditors that, on hearing the alarming news that a Volscian army was marching on Rome, the people hailed the prospect of invasion. Besides urging their friends to avoid military service, they encouraged them to let the body politic perish rather than themselves. Let those face the dangers of war "who alone reaped its profits," they cried.69 The consuls were divided on how to respond. Appius took a hard line; Servilius favored appeasement. But Servilius' edicts, which made it illegal to fetter or imprison a Roman citizen for debts and to seize and sell his property behind his back, were invalidated as soon as the Volscians were defeated. Although the people appealed to him a second time, he was unable wholeheartedly to support them for fear of the violence of the governing class. "Consequently, he temporized, and 6y trying to make the best ofboth worlds, succeeded in neither: the commons disliked him and thought him dishonest; the nobles distrusted him." Soon he was as much

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hated as Appi~s.~' Machiavelli approved of popular riots and the Roman plebs' refusal to serve in their country's wars when the nobles infringed on their liberties. What else were the people to do in their defense? Their extreme methods obliged the Senate to satis@ them in some measure. In war as in peace, he concluded, "a precise middle course cannot be maintained" and in some instances cannot even be found. Polybius' mixed government represented a middle course between nobles and plebeians, the few and the many, the rich and the poor. But a middle course, Machiavelli complains, is for those who know not how to be entirely good or entirely bad. Rome became a great city because its citizens "in all decisions of state avoided half-way measures and always went to extremes." Considering that "the Romans never took any undecided middle course in important affairs," he concludes, princes and republics should imitate their example." The rupture with the Polybian scheme begins in chapters 17 and 18 of the Discourses, precisely where Machiavelli interrupted it for the composition of The Prince. That the reader is not privy to Niccolb's shift to a different set of problems testifies to his ability to play his cards close to his chest in a living book whose earlier theses were set aside. Chapter 17 finds him positing an alternative to mixed government as a means of escaping from the Polybian cycle. Henceforth, he argues that equality is the best defense of freedom and the most effective means of warding off corruption. In a passage remarkable for its republicanism, he says that corruption and incapacity to maintain free institutions result from a great inequality, and that "to reduce the inhabitants to equality requires the application of extraordinary measures, which few know how, or are willing to apply."72 Following this new tack, chapter 18 begins by considering some of those extraordinary measures never before considered. How were the corrupting effects of personal wealth and power to be contained? How to tame the rich and mighty? Machiavelli's rupture with the classical tradition begins with his challenging introduction of these new questions leading to new answers, new principles and systems, that may "prove for the common benefit of all." Such is Niccolo's postPolybian republic, based on a model "which has not yet been followed by anyone."73 Machiavelli's new route from the liberal balancing and checking of interests by a mixed government to the democratic turning of the tables on the rich presupposes a class war by the poor. Not having become corrupted by wealth and luxury, according to Niccolo, the poor alone are positioned to become virtuous. Wealth being a cause of corruption, the class war of the poor against the rich is a struggle between virtue and vice. In Books 2 and 3 of the Discourses Machiavelli raises virtue to center stage. Whatever the citizens do in a free and equal republic "is for the common benefit, and should it happen to prove an injury to one or more individuals, those for whose benefit the thing is done are so numerous that they can always carry the measure against the few." Such commonwealths are able to endure thanks to reforms that bring them back to their original principles. Since all religious republics "have

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within themselves some goodness, by means of which they obtain their first growth," by becoming perpetually renovated through class struggle they can be prevented from perishing.74 Livy provided some of the evidence. In section 1 1 of the preface to his great work, he contends that no other state had ever been as virtuous as the early Roman Republic. "Neither did greed and extravagance enter into a state so late, nor were poverty and frugality anywhere held in such great honor and for so long a time." As one commentator notes, Livy "expresses his preference for early Roman history on the grounds that the Roman people in early times had not yet been corrupted by wealth, greed, luxury, and various pleasure^."^^ Machiavelli's passion for equality and virtue under conditions of poverty and frugality suggest the makings of a democrat. But that depends on how democracy is defined. Polybius defined it as majority rule in which the will of the commons prevails. Aristotle was more precise. The basis of a democratic state is liberty for all to rule and be ruled in turn, whence it follows that the people must be sovereign and the will of the majority must prevail. Do numbers alone define the majority? No, they do not. In a democracy, the poor have more power than the rich because there are more ofthem. Thus "oligarchy is characterized by good birth, wealth, and culture"; democracy by "low birth, poverty, and vulgarity." Which counts more, numbers or poverty? Aristotle says that all should count equally and that the poor should have no more share in government than the Machiavelli disputes this contention. The poor alone should rule because wealth corrupts and there should be no wealthy citizens. Machiavelli defines democratic government as popular government. It ceases to be popular should it "fall into the hands of a prince or a small number ofnobles." Take the case of Venice. Initially, "all those who inhabited Venice had the right to participate in the government, so that no one had cause to complain." Newcomers had no such right, but there were not enough of them to have "produced a disproportion between the governing and the governed."77 But by then Venice was no longer a democracy. Commerce was its undoing. We have seen that for Machiavelli equality is the basis of freedom. It was also more important to him than numbers in defining popular or democraticgovernment. What kind of equality? Besides the right to vote or to make laws, the right to an equal share in property. The agrarian law in Rome was designed for that purpose. It provided, first, that no citizen could possess more than a fixed number of acres, and second, that all the lands taken from their enemies should be divided amongst the people. But the agrarian law had three defects according to Machiavelli. "[Elither in the beginning [it was] so made that it required constant modification; or the changes in it had been so long deferred that it became most obnoxious because it was retrospective in its action; or perhaps it had been good in the beginning and had afterwards become corrupted in application." Because the nobles were disadvantaged by it, they conspired in every way to alter it and prevent it from being applied. Thus civil war was provoked and after much bloodshed the nobility retained the

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upper hand. N o matter, concludes Machiavelli, the agrarian law still proved a boon to popular government. For "if the contentions about the agrarian law needed three hundred years to bring Rome to a state o f servitude, she would have been brought there much quicker if the people, by these laws and other means, had not for so great a length o f time, kept the ambition o f the nobles in check."" Precisely how? By class war, even when failing in its ultimate objective.

Notes I . Prince, Proem, 2, 3. 2. Prince, Proem, 3; and 15:1. 3. Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, (10 December 1513), in The Prince and Other Works, 242. 4. Prince, 26: I. 5. Sasso, Niccold Machiavelli, 3 19-320,323-328; and Discourses, 1.18. 6. Discourses, 1.16; italics mine. 7. "Marginalia," in The Prince (Adams edition), 272. The citation is from Mario Praz's book The Flaming Heart (New York: Anchor, 1958). 8. Prince, 15:l. 9. Prince, 15:2; 26: 1. 10. Discourses, Introduction; and Prince, 26: 1. I 1. Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori (1 6 April 1527), in The Prince and Other Works, 270; and idem, "Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence," in The Prince and Other Works, 9 1. 12. Prince, 18:2-5. 13. Machiavelli to Ricardo Bechi (9 March 1497-98), in The Prince and Other Works, 2 18-22 1. For Savonarola's sermons on the Book of Exodus, see Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 5; and for Savonarola's influence on Machiavelli, John H. Whitfield, Machiavelli (Oxford: Blackwell, 1947), 87-91. 14. Prince, 26: 1; and Discourses, 1.12. 15. Discourses, 1.12. See 1.18 on degrees of corruption. 16. Burnham, The Machiavellians, 35, 37,42-43. 17. Prince, 7.3; 7.5; 7.8. 18. G.W.F. Hegel, "The German Constitution," trans. H.B. Nisbet, and ed. Laurence Dickey and H.B. Nisbet, G. W.F. Hegel: Political Writings (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 80, 8 1; and G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956), 399. 19. Pasquale Villari, "The Regeneration of Italy," in Jensen, Machiavelli. 20, 21. Excerpted from Villari's The Life and Times of Niccold Machiavelli, 2 vols., trans. Linda Villari (London: T.F. Unwin, l898), 2:511-517. 20. Discourses, 1.2; 1.4. 21. Discourses, 1.2; 1.5. 22. Discourses, 1.58. 23. Niccolb Machiavelli, "Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence," in The Prince and Other Works, 84,85.

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24. Machiavelli, "Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence," 85-87,89. 25. Machiavelli, "Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence," 89-90. 26. Machiavelli, "Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence," 84, 88, 92. 27. Discourses, 1.49; and Burnham, The Machiavellians, 64, 65. 28. Prince, 11 :1. 29. Prince, 10:2; Discourses, 1.55. 30. Discourses, 1.6. 3 1. Discourses, 1.6. 32. Discourses, 1.20; 2.2; 4. 33. Discourses, 1.21; 2.3. 34. Discourses, 2.4. 35. Discourses, 2.4; 2.8. 36. Discourses, 2.8. 37. Discourses, 2.8; and Deuteronomy 7: 12; 16; 20: 10-17. 38. Discourses, 1.6; italics mine. 39. Discourses, 2.19. 40. Discourses, 1.6. 41. Discourses, 1.6. 42. Discourses, 2.2. 43. Discourses, 1.29; 2.2. 44. Discourses, 1.3, 12, 55. 45. Discourses, 3.1, 30. 46. Savonarola cited by Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance, 7. 47. Discourses, 1.10, 57. 48. Discourses, 1.1 1. 49. Discourses, 3.1. 50. Discourses, 1.55; 3.16, 25. 5 1. Discourses, 1.55. 52. Discourses, 1.55. 53. Discourses, 1.55. 54. Discourses, 1.4, 55. 55. Discourses, 1.3,4, 55. 56. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearings on Modern Totalitarianism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 114-117, 122-123. 57. Discourses, 1.6; and de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, 92, 103,261-262. 58. Discourses, 1.55. 59. Savonarola cited by Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance, 37. 60. Roeder, The Man ofthe Renaissance, 37-38. 6 1. Machiavelli, "The Exhortation to Penitence," in The Prince (Adams edition), 121-122; and Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli (London: Robert Hale, 1968), 170. 62. Discourses, 1.11, 37; 3.25. 63. Savonarola cited by Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance, 45,46-47. 64. Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance, 53-54. 65. Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance, 55. 66. Roeder, The Man of the Renaissance, 72-73. 67. Prince, 6. 68. Livy, The Early History of Rome, 2.1. 69. Livy, The Early History of Rome, 2.23; 2.24; 2.32.

The Republican Agenda

70.Livy, The Early History of Rome, 2.27. 71.Discourses, 1.4;1.6;1.26;2.23. 72.Discourses, 1.17. 73.Discourses, 1.18;and Introduction to Book I. 74. Discourses, 2.2;and 3.1; 3.16;3.25. 75. Gary Forsythe, Livy and Early Rome: A Study in Historical Method and Judgment (Stuttgart, Germany: Steiner, 1999), 42,65. 76. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, 6.3;and The Politics ofAristotle, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 6.2:l-2,7,9. 77.Discourses, 1.2;1.6;1.55. 78.Discourses, 1.37.

Chapter 3

The First Republican Vanguard Unlike the Anglo-American stream of shallow republicanism, the French revolutionary tradition leading to Jacobinism became the main pipeline of deep republicanism. By deep republicanism I mean the post-Polybian development of Machiavelli's political thought in the Discourses interrupted by his work on The Prince. By insisting not only on the synthesis of the two works but also on a revolutionary reading of both--deep republicanism instead of the shallow version in the opening chapters of Book 1 of the Discourses-we go beyond the AngloAmerican model ofmixed government to arepublic without gentlemen in which the state is rich and the citizens are poor with the prospect of becoming virtuous as well. Rather than an instance of arrested Machiavellism, deep republicanism represents its final development not only by Machiavelli, but also updated and adapted by his successors to the changed social milieu of later ages. Going beyond Machiavelli's petty-bourgeois democraticproject, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1 7 12-1 778) adapted it to the class ofpetty traders, shopkeepers,artisans, and peasants who, unlike Machiavelli's petty-bourgeoisie, labored without the benefit of hired hands. As Rousseau's followers got the upper hand during the great French Revolution, they became more outspoken in demanding the expropriation of the bourgeoisie in addition to big landowners. The Jacobin Club was the first political party to give an institutional embodiment to Machiavelli's and Rousseau's deep republican agendas. Thanks to an alliance with the shallow republicans in the Girondin Party, the first revolution in the revolution of 1789 occurred on 10 August 1792 when the Jacobin-Girondin steamroller toppled the monarchy, expelled the aristocratic Feuillant party from the Legislative Assembly, and established a republic. A second revolution in the revolution on 2 June 1793 purged the Girondins from the National Convention to give rise to the first government in history controlled and animated by deep republicans. When the Jacobins began quarreling among themselves, the apostle of virtue Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety with near-dictatorial powers began a purge of the party's ranks. After physically liquidating the leading

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extremists they decapitated the leaders of the moderates. But in July 1794 fear of Mme. Guillotine.within the ranks of the ruling party led the surviving ultras and citras to join forces in removing Robespierre's head. Since the ultras were a small and uninfluential minority, the collapse ofthe party's center enabled the moderates to establish a government of their own. But as moderates, they were deep republicans in name only. Followed a conspiracy of the ultras aimed at a third revolution in the revolution. The conspiracy was betrayed, and its leaders were executed or imprisoned. Such was the destiny of history's first republican vanguard.

The Machiavellian Moment The foregoing interpretation of "hard" as opposed to "soft" Machiavellism, of "deep" in contrast to "shallow" republicanism, is not part of the conventional wisdom-whether demoliberal or socialist, Madisonian or Marxist. Nor does the Machiavellian moment, as currently conceived by the academic community, correspond in any way to our conception of it. On the premise that it represents the most momentous events in the life of the Florentine Secretary and his responses to them, it should be defined as the arrest, imprisonment, torture, banishment, and execution he first witnessed in the case of Savonarola and then experienced in part some fifteen years later in his own person. The Machiavellian moment was Savonarola being burned at the stake and Machiavelli swinging on the rack. No wonder he chose to wield his pen in support of an extremist political creed! The most enduring and shattering moment in Machiavelli's life-his humiliation by the Medici-reappears in sublimated form throughout the pages of both his major works. It is evident not only in his sociology of equality as distinct from liberty, but also in his animadversions toward surrogate Medicis and other gentlemen. Not being related to his imprisonment, torture, and exile, political stability was the least of his concerns. That Pocock makes it central is the result of a misreading. We take issue, therefore, with Pocock's presentation of the historical context of Machiavelli's major works. The profoundly personal side ofNiccolo's response to his times holds no interest for his British and American interpreters. An overly abstract and depersonalizedimage ofthe Florentine Secretarythat reflects their own politics and preconceptions would have us believe that he was an ordinary liberal, a citra instead of the ultra he really was. As Pocock defines the Machiavellian moment, it denotes: first, the moment and manner in which Machiavelli's thought made its appearance; second, its central problem of political stability and virtue confronted with fortune and corruption; and third, its continuing history as a "sociology of liberty, transmitted to the European Enlightenment and the English and American revolutions."' But this reading of the Discourses leaves out The

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Prince, where a different Machiavellian concern is present-the liberation of Italy from foreign occupation. Nor is it evident in the Discourses that the problem of political stability has precedence over the struggle against avarice and luxury. Although the English and American revolutions were strongly influenced by Machiavelli's revival of Polybius' theory, his legacy is also evident in the sociology of equality transmitted by Rousseau to the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. As Machiavelli informs his readers, "I have resolved to open a new route, which has not yet been followed by anyone, and may prove difficult and tro~blesome."~ That was not the route followed by Polybius and his Florentine admirers. The Machiavellian moment in both The Prince and the Discourses is the experience of the pernicious and corrupting role of gentlemen in republics, mixed or otherwise. After all, gentlemen were responsible for Savonarola's dire fate and for Machiavelli's banishment from political affairs. With the return of the Medici, they were further responsible for overthrowing the Florentine Republic. What was "dangerous," "difficult," and "troublesome" about Machiavelli's new route was the novel idea of killing or at least ridding a republic of every last one of them. But he had to make his point cryptically by attributing it to others-the German free cities-r he might have to face the rack again. In sotto voce, but unequivocally, Machiavelli claims that "corruption and incapacity to maintain free institutions result from a great inequality," and "to reduce the inhabitants to equality requires the application of extraordinary measures, which few know how, or are willing to employ." Pocock cites this passage, but his interpretation of what Machiavelli meant by equality completely misses the point. It connotes, he says, "neither inequality of wealth nor inequality of political authority-there is no reason to suppose that Machiavelli objected to either-but a state of affairs in which some individuals look to others [Guicciardini's particulari] when they should be looking to the public good." Unequal wealth is salvaged from the charge of corruption by a ~ubterfuge.~ Since men act rightly only under compulsion, declaimed Machiavelli, consistent republicanism depends not only on laws that compel men to labor, but also on sumptuary laws reducing expenditures, laws against luxury and gluttony, and an agrarian law limiting the amount of land each may own. Reflect for a moment on the original meaning ofthe word "republic," from the Latin res (things), and publica (public)--a commonwealth. As Machiavelli never tired of repeating: "in well-regulated republics the state ought to be rich and the citizens poor"; "the state rich and the individual citizen poor"; "so that their wealth and lack of virtue may neither corrupt themselves nor enable them to corrupt others"; "it is of the greatest advantage in a republic to have laws that keep her citizens p00r."~ That is the deep meaning of republicanism that prevailed throughout the Soviet Union's early history under Stalin, that survives in Cuba today, and to a lesser extent in Communist China, Vietnam, andNorth Korea. In the Discourses, one gets a taste of it in the opening chapter of Book 1, where Machiavelli says laws are required that compel men to labor.

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The shallow meaning of republicanism also surfaces in the early chapters ofthe Discourses, but is barely visible afterward. Its classic statement is in chapter 2, which describesthe only stable and solid government as mixed and balanced. When the same constitution combines a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these three powers can be relied on to watch and keep each other reciprocally in check. Such is the form of government in liberal democracies throughout most of the Western world, where executive power substitutes for monarchy, elected representatives for nobility, and the word "republic" means little more than the absence of monarchy. The overriding concern is to limit the exercise of power, to prevent its abuses. Thus, "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton forgot to add that "wealth corrupts, absolute wealth corrupts absolutely." Machiavelli was less ingenuous in arguing that checks are also needed on acquisitiveness, on the amount of wealth and land in anybody's possession, on those who neither toil nor spin but still rake it in. Republics that have preserved their political existence uncorrupted, says Machiavelli, do not permit any of their citizens to be or to become gentlemen. Not just gentlemen, he adds, but also those who live like gentlemen by dressing better, eating better, and in general living better than their neighbors. Toward them he is merciless and, wherever feasible, he would destroy them all. Not just the Medicis, but the entire tribe. Machiavelli's private war against the Medicis led him to oppose the accumulation of both wealth and power. In order to check the corrupting influence of private wealth and superior income, he would make rank instead of riches the reward for merit. Power would no longer serve as an avenue to wealth. He knew that such reforms would be resisted by both the wealthy and the powerful. But while the rich and powerfil cannot live without the services ofthe poor, the latter can best thrive without the former. Shallowrepublicanism, Niccolo believed, is the last-ditch defense ofthose who live like gentlemen. In the Discourse on the Origin ofhequality Rousseau suggests that the most likely explanation of mixed constitutions has nothing to do with the Polybian cycle. Rather than an effort to establish virtue on the basis of stable governments,the origin of shallow republicanism is to be traced to the efforts of the few rich to defend themselves against the more numerous poor. As Rousseau presents the conspiratorial origins of civil society based on fraud instead of force, without compelling arguments and strength to defend himself and unable to join with his equals against numerous enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich man conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man: to employ in his favor the forces of those who attacked him, to make allies of his adversaries. Let us join, said he, to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambitious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him: let us institute rules of justice and peace, to which all without exception may be obliged to conform, rules that may in some measure make amends for the caprices of fortune,

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by subjecting equally the powerful and the weak to the observance of reciprocal

observation^.^ Deceived by specious reasoning, the poor fell into the trap. No longer able to challenge the rich by force, they had to rely on peaceful arbitration, on the courts, on laws favoring the rich that ostensibly defended the poor. The resulting mixed governments founded on corruption were designed to shore up corruption in perpetuity. Rather than an argument for virtue, the Atlantic Model defended by Locke and Montesquieu ended by magnifying the amount of vice. Although Rousseau lacked the wherewithal to establish the origins of mixed government, he had a keen sense of its current reality. Regardless ofwhy men place themselves in chains in hopes of securing liberty, mixed government is no blessing for the poor. It puts new fetters on them and gives new powers to the rich. A shallow republicanism, he reflected, "irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual l a b ~ r . " ~ In the history of deep republicanism, the French Revolution and First French Republic became the principal link between the Florentine Republic (1494-1 5 12) and the First Russian Republic followed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Since Rousseau became the principal ideologue of the French Revolution, the republicanism of his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and The Social Contract became the principal link between Machiavelli's deep republicanism and that of Lenin and Stalin. But in each instance, what began as an experiment in deep republicanism ended in the triumph of its shallow variant. Savonarola died at the stake. The liberal republicanism of Jean Pierre Brissot, leader of the Girondist faction in the Convention after the proclamation of the French Republic in September 1792, would eventually prevail over the radical republicanism of Robespierre. A victim of Madame Guillotine, Robespierre was betrayed by moderate Jacobins in his own party. The bland socialism of Alexander Kerensky, the champion of shallow republicanism in the Provisional Government (March to October 1917), would ultimately supersede the extreme socialism of Lenin and Stalin, whose efforts to build communism were in turn scuttled by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Sun Yat-sen's shallow republicanism would become entrenched on the island of Taiwan while Mao's Proletarian Cultural Revolution would be undermined on the Chinese mainland by Deng Xiaoping. What does this tell us about the viability of the two republicanisms? The obvious answer is that cupidity wins. Compassion for the lot of the poor and exploited is no match for corruption. Rousseau's effort to provide a constitution for the government of Corsica is instructive. In a 1765 draft he wrote: "Far from wanting the state to be poor, I should like, on the contrary, for it to own everything." Or, if that should prove unfeasible, "I want the property of the state to be as large and strong, that of the

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citizens as small and weak, as is possible." Following Machiavelli's example, he further recommended the enactment of sumptuary laws that would make simplicity a point of vanity, at once "more severe for the leaders of the state, and more lenient for the lower orders."' But nothing came of it. Machiavelli has been acclaimed as the intellectual precursor of both the American and the Russian revolutions. The Fathers of the Constitution are said to be his heirs, and Marx and Lenin his intellectual progeny. One can make a credible case for both claims, but not exclusively for either one. Pocock and those influenced by him swear that Machiavelli's fundamental problem in the Discourses was the search for political stability through mixed government, a system of checks and balances, and the rule of law that defines the Anglo-American tradition of liberal democracies. Antonio Gramsci and the political scientists who follow his lead maintain that Machiavelli's core concern was the national liberation and unification of Italy, the anteroom to a demoliberal republic leading to socialism. For Pocock, Machiavellism spilled over in a westerly direction to find its ideal habitat in England and North America; for Gramsci, it overflowed eastward as the precocious socialism of the new Russian r e p ~ b l i c . ~ That the only Machiavellism is that represented by the Atlantic Model is a misreading of both the Discourses and modern history. "In Machiavelli, the most influential of the Renaissance transmitters of Polybius," writes Pocock, "stability in the political system is a precondition of morality in the individual life." But is it the sole precondition? Since the mixed or balanced constitution ought to last forever, Pocock adds, it is the best safeguard against both political and moral corr~ption.~ But is it really the best safeguard? The eminent historian is mistaken on three counts: first, in not giving credit to Machiavelli's political extremism; second, in misconstruing Machiavellian virtue as a result exclusively of political stability and not also of perfect equality; and third, in defining corruption as a product of political instability instead of economic inequality, as if the presence of gentlemen were not its principal cause. The fact that there are two republicanisms at odds in the contemporary world is of more than academic interest. As seen from America, the Cold War between the "open society" and the "closed" meant freedom and its absence. But if Machiavelli is to be believed, if men act rightly only under compulsion and laws are needed that compel men to labor, then freedom in the West implies "corruption," and coercion in the East implies "virtue." In Rousseau's inimitable words parroting the Florentine Secretary, freedom lies not in doing as one pleases but in being "forced to be free."'O Not only is there more than one meaning of freedom, not only is there a plurality of freedoms, there is also the inescapable incompatibility of some freedoms with others. Freedom to seek employment under conditions of private property is incompatible with freedom from exploitation. Freedom to do business under conditions of an unregulated market is incompatible with full employment and freedom from want. So the struggle between so-called open and closed societies boils down to a trade-off of some freedoms for others. That a society is "open"

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instead of "closed" does not guarantee that it is somehow more free. Besides the absence of a universal measure of the amount of freedom in a given society, there is no reliable way of comparing different kinds of freedom. A balanced judgment of political extremism would have one distinguish not only between shallow and deep republicanism, but also between partially and fully regulated societies. The meteoric career of Curzio Malaparte (1898-1 957) testifies to a considered and final preference for the fully regulated. One ofthe first Fascists who accompanied Mussolini on his March to Rome in October 1922, prefect of Florence in 1922-23, delegate to Moscow in 1929, author ofnine books by the time he reached his early thirties, and known as both the poet and the pen of Fascism, he subsequently shifted allegiance to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. After witnessing the enormous changes in the Soviet Union, he resigned from the Fascist Party in the conviction that it had yet to carry through the kind of revolution made famous by Lenin and Stalin-"the downing of the middle classes."" In his search for a post-bourgeois society that might qualify as both free and just, he opposed the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. He continued despairing of any hope for mankind until his second visit to the Soviet Union and his first to mainland China in 1956. In his last book, to, in Russia e in Cina (1957), he discovered in a fully regulated society the freedoms he had been hoping for. Among Moscow's teeming millions, he had seen only one beggar. What most impressed him was the people's freedom from invidious distinctions based on private wealth, on the bourgeois taste for luxury, superfluity, refinement, and vain elegance beyond reach by society's poor. Mussolini had talked of creating a "new man," but the Fascist version barely got beyond the "old Adam." Creation of a communist man opposed to European decadence and licentious liberalism was mainly China's bid for world fame. The West boasts of freedom, Malaparte mused, but where is the freedom when the important things of life are not free and the poor have no access to them? Only where there is comradeship, only where Christianity thrives in spirit if not in name, is it possible for everyone to be free.I2 Machiavelli's deep republicanism is an outsider's dream. Updated, his commonwealth of equal freeholders was recast as a commonwealth of equal cooperators. The reader must suspect that such a model taken literally is nothing short of utopian. Still, it has a critical function. Deep republicanism highlights the failures of shallow republicanism.

The Atlantic Model Declined As I have indicated, to interpret Machiavelli's project solely on the basis of The Prince is tantamount to arresting it at an early stage. His full project becomes evident only in the Discourses. The irony is that most accounts fail to consider that, like The Prince, the Discourses arrives at its destination not in the early chapters but

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only toward the end. Just as The Prince has been confused with an argument for tyranny and irresponsible government-arrested, so to speak, at half-mast-so the Discourses has been interpreted as an argument for mixed government. It is generally believed that in the Discourses, if not in The Prince, Machiavelli chose to reveal everything at the beginning, instead of teasing his readers and dropping occasional clues along the way for those intelligent and patient enough to wait for and perceive his final message. The dissemination of Machiavelli's model of mixed government with its separation of powers and its checks and balances was the distinctive contribution of his Anglo-American followers, who first made mixed government an enduring reality in the modern world. Its English propagator was James Harrington (16 1 1-1 677), whose Commonwealth of Oceana (1 656) presented an adaptation of Machiavelli's model influential among the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. Pocock calls it the "Atlantic Republican Tradition." Dedicated to Oliver Cromwell and presented in the guise of a utopia, the imaginary commonwealth of Oceana was actually a blueprint for reform. In this respect it resembled Machiavelli's Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence, likewise placed in the hands of a political ruler in aposition to implement reforms. Its construction of an ideal republic was based on historical examples of ancient republics and the principles of prudence that would make it applicable to modern times. In an apparent appeal to Cromwell, it took the form of a report of the activities of a fictional constitutional council chaired by the sole legislator of Oceana, elected for that purpose by a victorious army in a recent civil war. The compiler of the index for an eighteenth-century edition of Harrington's collected works abandoned the task of citing "Machiavelli" after the first twelve references and simply wrote, "quoted passim." The Florentine Secretary was unquestionably the political thinker Harrington most admired.I3From Machiavelli he borrowed, first, the role of a legislator or constitution-maker who might fix for perpetuity the form ofgovernment; second, a two-chamber legislature for balancing and checkingthe powers ofthe landed gentry. Although not the sole instances ofhis indebtedness,these two features ofhis Oceanic Republic were crucial in getting his model of a people's republic accepted by his North American followers. Harrington is also important for the additions he made to Machiavelli's model that made his Oceana an independent contribution to political thought. Original to Harrington was his "law ofthe Balance"-the balance of property as the foundation of the balance of power. Corresponding to the three distributions of governmental power-princely, aristocratic,and democratic-he distinguished three distributions of property in land. If one man becomes the chief landlord and overbalances the people's lands by a ratio of 3: 1, the corresponding political system will be absolute monarchy. If the few constituting the nobility, landed gentry, and the clergy are the principal landlords and overbalance the people's lands by a ratio of 3: 1, the correspondinggovernment will be a mixed monarchy. (Oligarchy would be a better term.) If the people become landlords and overbalance these other landowners, although no ratio is mentioned, then the corresponding government will be a

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commonwealth or rep~blic.'~ The important point is that the political division and distribution of powers has an economic foundation. Harrington opted for a republic. But his proposed reform ofthe government of England in the form of an equal commonwealth was a travesty of Machiavelli's political project. For stable government to exist, he believed, the balance of property would have to be decisively in the hands of one, the few, or the many. Otherwise, as in Cromwell's republic, the nobility and gentry would be continually contending for supremacy against the commons, and the commons hard pressed to retain their control over the government without a major shift of property in their favor. Instead of arguing that the nobility and gentry are poison to a republic, Harrington "corrects Machiavelli by saying that [each is] destructive of popular government only if it has an overbalance of property." Instead of making them free, he excludes wage-earners and service workers from citizenshipbecause they are not freemen but servants, and therefore under the thumb of another.'' Given an agrarian law imposing a maximum limit on the amount of land owned and the rents therefrom, Harrington believed that the distribution of lands in Cromwell's republic would be compatible with a people's republic. How was the land in fact divided? Harrington estimated that the nobility under Cromwell owned not more than 10 percent; the landed gentry, something less than 40 percent; and the people, consisting of yeomanry and burghers, in excess of 50 percent. That hardly matched his 3:l ratio defining the meaning of "overbalance" in the case of the privileged classes. It sufficesfor the people to overbalancethe former, Harrington pleaded, as long as they have the opportunity to acquire land and riches through industry and merit. The people have all the riches of the nation at their disposal if they will only work hard enough to acquire them. In effect, equality of opportunity replaces the actual distribution of property in determining the balance. Thus C.B. Macpherson concludes that Harrington's mixed government is that of a bourgeois republic that takes for granted the "superiority of capitalist relations of production, and a concept of equality which is essentially bourgeoi~."'~ Unlike his compatriots Hobbes and Locke, concludes one commentator, "Harrington was the only republican ofthe three." Whether or not he was also more influential in disseminating his version of mixed government in North America, however, remains an open question. The popular view that the American liberal tradition stems mainly from Locke overlooks his unacknowledged debt to Harrington. According to Russell-Smith, it is highly probable that "Locke was influenced by the theory of the balance of property." If he never alluded to Harrington, it was because the practice of making citations and references had become discredited as a hangover from medieval scholasticism. Locke went to the other extreme by refusing to acknowledge his indebtedness to anyone." Locke7scommitment to a mixed monarchy and to a balance of classes as well as government functions may be traced to classical sources. If popularity is a reliable measure of influence, writes Richard Ashcraft, "then seventeenth century literate society stood in the shadow of Seneca and Cicero." Library holdings are

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another index of the influence of particular authors. Locke's collection of Cicero's writings was extensive and, in his case at least, the influence of the Roman statesman is clear. It was from Cicero's Republic that he most likely borrowed the principle of mixed government with its separation and balance of social classes as well as governmental powers. Although a prime illustration of the Atlantic Model, Locke's shallow republicanism was unique in not being derived from Machiavelli, but from Machiavelli's sources in Polybius as transmitted by C i c e r ~ . ' ~ Locke's Second Treatise of Government is a defense of shallow republicanism, if by a republic we mean a res publica, commonwealth or property of a people. In its etymological sense, a republic may include kingship along with shared rule by an hereditary aristocracy and the plebs. In this restricted meaning, Locke was not just a republican who favored a mixed monarchy, but also a potential regicide. Readers of the Treatise should be alerted to the fact that its primary target was Charles I1 and not just his brother the Duke of York, who ascended the throne in 1685 as James 11. Thanks to Ashcraft's painstaking research, we can date its composition to some time between 1683 and 1685, at least five years before its publication in 1690. That makes it a manifesto for overthrowingthe government of Charles 11 and not just an apology for the consummated overthrow of James I1 in 1689. It came in response to a state of war brought on by the design of Charles I1 to impose by force against the wishes of parliament a proven Catholic as his legitimate succes~or.'~ Locke was a leading member of a conspiracy whose objective was to prevent James' succession. The Treatise was not a theoretical but a practical work of political philosophy in defense of the violated rights of Englishmen by a monarch who had betrayed their trust. The coded political language devised by the conspirators to prevent detection may also be found in the Treatise, without which Locke might have been charged with sedition. More than once, Ashcraft notes, "Locke refers to 'dangerous' and 'noxious' beasts, such as 'wolves,' 'tigers,' or 'lions"' that might be killed or destroyed without compunction. "In using this language, it was clear to the participants in the revolutionary movement that they were speaking of the King or the Duke of York."'O In retrospect it has become evident that Locke was no tepid, middle-of-the-road liberal, but a flaming revolutionary. But is it possible to reconcile his extreme political designs with the political moderation implicit in a mixed and balanced government? How else might he have challengedthe political extremism of Charles I1 without a moderate counterproposal? The conspiracy against the King was the work of a small minority willing to risk imprisonment and exile to restore the rule of parliamentary government that had been suspended in 1681. So it was a conservative revolution that Locke advocated in an effort to return to a forsaken past. The goal of the proposed insurrection was a classic example of political moderation; only the means were revolutionary. This unusual combination of political moderation and extremism would, of course, characterize the American Revolution that was revolutionary in its means only. The Atlantic Model of which the American Revolution is the supreme

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exemplar owed a profound debt to Locke. Not for nothing is Locke frequently upheld as the philosopher behind the Declaration of Independence adopted by the Second Continental Congress on 4 July 1776. The Declaration's censure of the British monarch, the King's insistence that Americans should "relinquish the right of representation," his "invasions on the rights ofthe people," his "WAGING WAR AGAINST US," his "oppressions," and his havingUdissolvedrepresentativehouses repeatedly" are in the same coded language used by Locke in the Second Treatise. No serious student ofAmerican political thought during the eighteenth century, writes Merle Curti, has questioned the enormous influence of John Locke. "Otis, John and Samuel Adams, and other leading revolutionists quoted 'the great Mr. Locke' reverently; Franklin, Hamilton, and Jefferson read and praised him." His doctrine of natural rights and "the doctrine that all government rests on the consent of the governed and may be overthrown by revolution if it persistently violates individual life, liberty, and property, was incorporated in the Declaration of Independence."Nor was that the end ofthe influence that he continued to exert until the second American Revolution-the Civil War in 1861. By then it was discovered that Locke's Second Treatise, "once regarded as bold and even revolutionary, could be used as a bulwark for the status quo" and for the defense of bourgeois interests. The great attractiveness of his political doctrine lay in its ambiguity, for "it appeared to be liberal, without endangeringthe individualisticconception of social relations and property rights."" Deeply influenced by Locke in addition to Harrington, John Adams played a leading role in shaping the government of the fledgling American republic. As the first vice president under George Washington and then as the second President of the United States, John Adams also became the single most influential purveyor of Machiavellism in America. Appearing on the eve of the Constitutional Convention in 1787,his three-volume Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States ofAmerica played an important role in shaping the federal government. Presented in the form of letters of varying lengths to an anonymous "Dear Sir," some running to more than one hundred pages, the multivolume work covers a multitude of subjects relating to mixed governments in the various states, individual political thinkers, and ancient, medieval, and modem republics. Letter XVII in volume 1, on "Mixed or Composed Governments," is but one of several essays bearing on Machiavelli's discussion of government in the opening chapters ofthe Discourses. ARer rejecting democracy as suited only to small towns accompanied by circumstances that are seldom found, Adams concludesthat "there never was a good government in the world, that did not consist of the three simple species of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy." Letter XXIX on "Ancient Republics and Opinions of Philosophers" is in two parts, the first on Harrington and the second on Harrington's fellow republican Algernon Sidney, who, like Harrington, was strongly influenced by Machiavelli's model ofmixed government. Dominating all three volumes is the letter on "Italian Republics ofthe ~ i d d l ~e g e , " consisting of some 130 pages devoted to Machiavelli's Florentine History and its relevance to the government of the United States."

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As Adams summed up the benign influence of Machiavelli on the political thought and government of England-the prototype of America's system of mixed government-for their improvements in the theory of government, the English people have "more merit with the human race than any other among the modern^."^' Machiavelli's influence through Harrington on Adams and the other Fathers of the American Constitution has been amply documented by Russell-Smith in Harrington and His Oceana: A Study of a 17th Century Utopia and its Influence in America ( 1 914).24The thorny question is how to interpret the "Atlantic Model" in the light of Books 2 and 3 ofthe Discourses, which are not about mixed government. One may recall that in the Discourses mixed government is initially presented as the combination under a single constitution of "a prince, a nobility, and the power ofthe people"-three powers that will keep each other reciprocally in check. But Machiavelli also included under mixed government the Roman Republic in which two consuls replaced the king, thereby eliminating royalty but not the regal power; and a Senate, once the nobility was destroyed but not the senatorial power.25 We thus have a government of consuls, senators, and tribunes without either prince or nobility-all three powers being in the hands ofthe people organized into classes according to their wealth. But as the Discourses progress, there is no more talk of regal power, much less of senatorial power. And, after "killing all gentlemen" and "keeping the citizens poor, and the state rich," the three classes ofbourgeois society disappear from the scene. Machiavelli was no more a champion of the Florentine burghers than was Savonarola. The Machiavelli clan lived off farm and rental properties, but Niccolo was not a member of the landed gentry for the simple reason that he worked his farm. As he recounts a typical day in his life-the year was 1513-he "had spent part of the morning with the bills and records of a working farm" and "he had admitted one hired hand to listen to his grievances against another." When the diary of his father was discovered and published in the wake of World War 11, hrther light was shed on Niccolo's class background, that of the "pious, thrifty, hardworking, rather puritanical Florentine petty bourgeoisie who were the backbone of the city's greatne~s."'~ His proposed reform of the government of Florence would have cast him as a member of the middle class in opposition to the Florentine bourgeoisie. Machiavelli makes concessions to bourgeois mixed government in discussing the past or when he has no other alternative, as under the watchful eyes of Pope Leo X and the Medici Cardinal, later Clement VII. Otherwise, he defends the interests of his class. Although hardly poor in the eyes of the lower class, he considered himself in financial straits and thought of himself as poor. By keeping the citizens poor and the state rich, he did not mean abject poverty or the condition of the "rabble." Even so, his call for economic leveling was unquestionably revolutionary, even heretical. As he notes in a seldom cited letter, he had been accused of "great affection to the Democratical Government" and had been condemned of heresy for believing "that a Democracy founded upon good orders is the best and most

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excellent Government." Why heresy? Because it was still widely held that what is most like the government of the world by God is the best, that is, m~narchy.'~ Machiavelli's tour de force in the Discourses was to propose, first, a bourgeois revolution against the nobility and landed gentry culminating in their physical liquidation, as during the Great French Revolution; second, a petty-bourgeois revolution against the bourgeois successors to the nobility and gentry, that is, a middle-class revolution without the bourgeoisie. There is no indication in the Discourses that he favored a mixed government under those conditions. Since there would be no upper class to check or balance, there would be no call for a mixed government. Besides, he believed that everyone should have a share of property in order to become self-sufficient. The Machiavellian republic was thus well in advance ofthat of his English and his American followers. They claimed him as their intellectual forebear and so he was, but not to the extent they imagined. Although his American followers broke new paths with their balanced Constitution and Bill of Rights, Machiavelli was leagues ahead of them in fieling the revolutions of the twentieth century. That is not how he is currently interpreted, at least by the scholarly community. As Pocock reads the Discourses, they not only embody the classical tradition of civic humanism as expressed in Aristotle's Politics and Polybius' Histories; they also barely overstep that legacy. It follows that Machiavelli was not the original thinker for which he is usually celebrated. His break with classical republicanism was limited to two claims, says Pocock: first, that in Rome civil strife was a condition of civil peace; and second, that "military dynamism was to be preferred before the search for stability."'' In effect, he was not the precocious Jacobin described by Gramsci, and his self-styled fresh start in political thought was an overstatement. Pocock's fellow historian Quentin Skinner takes a similar view. Although Machiavelli starts from Polybius' premise that neither patricians nor plebeians should be able to legislate their special interests, it does not follow that factions spell the death of republics. On the contrary, only through class struggle was it possible in Rome to engineer "a tensely balanced equilibrium which ensured that neither party was able to oppress or ignore the interests of the other." Thus Machiavelli took issue with classical republicanism owing to his novel political insight that "class conflict is not the solvent but the cement of a comrnon~ealth."'~ Both Skinner and Pocock underestimate Machiavelli's partisanship in the class struggle. Rather than supporting balance, he was partial to the plebs. Machiavelli was willing to put up with occasional members of the upper classes, only if they happened to be poor and exemplified a meritocracy of virtue. The leading families were tolerable only if their members lived like Cincinnatus, for whom poverty did not stand in the way of achieving rank or honor. When not holding office, Cincinnatus labored on his small plot while most members of his class were corrupted by wealth instead of working for their keep.30 Pocock takes for granted that Machiavelli's argument for equality in the Discourses refers exclusively to military equality, or the duty of all citizens to bear

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arms. Inequality, he asserts, "connotes neither inequality of wealth nor inequality of political authority-there is no reason to suppose that Machiavelli objected to either." On the contrary, Niccolo's repeated insistence that citizens should be poor and the state rich suggests that they are equally wealthy as coparticipants in the public treasury and also equally poor, or nearly so, as private persons. Unlike wealth, there are few if any degrees of poverty. The context in which Machiavelli talks about perfect equality suggests not only political equality, but also economic equality as a safeguard against corruption." Besides the militarization of citizenship, Pocock concedes that Machiavelli's uncorrupt republic guarantees each citizen a home, occupation, and economic independence.But such independence falls short ofeconomic equality, he contends. How else should one interpret Machiavelli's reservations concerning the agrarian law in Rome? Its revival by the Gracchi, Pocock reminds us, "caused such hatreds between nobles and people that each faction appealed [for support] to its own military leaders and their armies." But nobles and gentlemen have no place in an uncorrupt republic. From this it follows that Machiavelli's objection to the agrarian law was that it did not go far enough in removing inequality, since "to reduce the inhabitants to equality requires the application of extraordinary measures, which few know how, or are willing to employ."32 In the Discourses, Pocock finds that the term "corruption" is used in three different senses: first, as the degenerative tendency to which all particular forms of government other than Polybius' mixed government are prone; second, as the specific cause oftheir degeneration in each instance traceable to the dependence of some men upon others when all should be autonomous and independent; third, as the degeneration of individual citizens unable under such circumstances to acquire and to practice public spiritedness and solidarity of one for all, if not all for one. However, missing from this account is a fourth sense of corruption,personal wealth. For Niccolb, rich citizens must be relieved of their properties so that their wealth "may neither corrupt themselves nor enable them to corrupt others."33 The more credible interpretation is that Machiavelli represented both the tailend of the ancients and the first sprouts of a modem tradition charting a new course in political thinking. While the classical tradition survived in the three British Revolutions of 1642, 1688, and 1776 on American Machiavelli's modern legacy bore fruit not only in the Great French Revolution, but also in the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and its byproducts throughout the Third World. Contrary to Pocock's interpretation of Machiavellism, the Discourses bristle with arguments for both moderate historical change through civil strife and military expansion, and a precocious Jacobin inducement to revolution aimed not just at checking and balancing the power ofthe aristocracy and bourgeoisie, but at putting an end to all privileged classes. Machiavelli's personal history was not alone in being two-faced, one open and the other subterranean. The legacy he spawned was Janus-faced: one face pointing toward civil peace through methods of conflict resolution and compromise under the influence of civic humanism and moderation; the other face toward turbulence

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culminating in insurgency and related expressions of political extremism. Skinner and Pocock concur that Machiavelli was ultimately committed to mixed government as the alleged sine qua non of republican virtue. That is where they part company with Machiavelli, who acknowledged an alternative to the Polybian scheme. His ideal republic, ifwe can call it that, was patterned on the free states of Germany, where the plebeian class struggle had knocked out the patricians altogether. Granted that the original purpose of class struggle was a balancing of class interests, its ultimate purpose was their unbalancing in favor of the plebs.3' Although Machiavelli conceded that this final solution to civil discord is seldom practicable, it cannot be ruled out as a rival model to what passes for his republican legacy in England and America.

The Specter of Rousseau At the crest of the Great French Revolution, the ghost of the Calvinist from Geneva hung over the deliberations and guided the policies ofthe twelve who ruled through the Committee of Public Safety, the Jacobin dictatorship known as the Reign of Terror (October 1793-July 1794). It would be difficult to find another representative in the history of modem political thought who so completely exemplified the teachings of the Florentine Secretary. Shades of Machiavelli come to life in his political trilogy: A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), A Discourse on Political Economy (1758), and The Social Contract (1762). To top it off, his Government of Poland (1 772) exhibits his dependence on Machiavelli's political agenda in the space of a single work and in even greater detail. The Machiavellism ofthe principal architects ofJacobin rule in the Committee of Public Safety rested less on their direct familiaritywith Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses than on the refraction ofhis teachings through Rousseau's political lens. For a full appreciation of Rousseau's role as the shadowy eminence behind the Terror, one must consider his precocious Jacobinism. While the critical literature and mountain of commentary on Rousseau commonly focus on his theory of the general will, his republic of virtue hinges on his reading ofthe Roman historians in the light of Machiavelli's works. A scrutiny of the Social Contract reveals more than half a dozen direct and indirect references to the Florentine Secretary. What Machiavelli called "virtue" Rousseau called the "general will." "If you would have the general will accomplished, bring all the particular wills into conformity with it." Since "virtue is nothing more than this conformity of the particular wills with the general will, establish the reign of virtue." The reign of virtue means the reign of equality, in agreement with Machiavelli's political project: "It is therefore one of the most important functions of government to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes." Yes, but Rousseau's means were different: "not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving all men of means to accumulate it." For that purpose,

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frugality is necessary through the "prudent management of what one has [rather] than ways of getting what one has not." Virtue implies abstinence. As one astute commentatorobserves concerningRousseau's Government ofPoland "Rousseau's version of ancient virtue is entirely compatiblewith the notion of 'republican virtue' taught by that most notorious of 'moderns,' Niccolo Ma~hiavelli."~~ Rousseau's major work, The Social Contract, ostensibly takes men as they are and laws as they might be. Might be? That smacks of utopia, but not entirely so because he repeatedly offers second- and third-best alternatives to his social contract based on the general will. As a Machiavellian through and through, he fully recognized the presence of "unhappy circumstances in which we can only keep our liberty at others' expense, and where the citizens can be perfectly free only when the slave is most a slave." Extremes meet more often than people care to believe. In such circumstances,he says, liberty shouldbe sacrificed for the sake of equality, which is not to say that it will be ~acrificed.~' The Social Contract was Rousseau's response to the problem of social and economic inequality posed in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Existing societies were not founded on the so-called right of conquest, he maintains, but have their origin in social compacts between the rich and the poor. Yes, but contracts founded on pure trickery, the deception by the rich and bamboozlement of the poor aimed at preserving ill-gotten property. "What, then, is to be done?" Must society be totally abolished and man return to the state ofnature to live among the bears? Such was the silliness imputed to him by hostile critics. No, Jean-Jacques found another escape route from the human predicament. "As for men like me," he explained, "who can no longer subsist on plants or acorns, or live without laws," they are persuaded that God did not intend for men to live either in a state of nature or in civil society as it has existed from time immemorial. Rejecting Locke's social contract and Bernard Mandeville's and Adam Smith's sophism that private vices lead to public benefits, "they will love their fellow citizens and serve them with all their might." They will particularly honor those wise and virtuous princes who find means of preventing, overcoming, and palliating the inequalities of civil society; but they will not therefore have less contempt for a society "that cannot support itself without the aid of so many splendid characters, much oftener wished for than found." Besides, such rulers are not always a blessing since, from their very best efforts, "there always arise more real calamities than even apparent advantages."" The fundamental concept of The Social Contract is that ofthe general will. The general will "must both come from all and apply to all." That it comes from all and applies to all indicates that it is a common will on behalf of everybody's interest. Such is the sovereign will of the people, although "what makes the will general is less the numbers of voters than the common interest uniting them."39 The only laws Rousseau recognized were those proceeding from the general will, a will that is general only if it "binds or favors all the citizens equally." That is more easily said than done, for it requires that there should be no partial society within the state. "But if there are partial societies, it is best to have as many as

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possible and to prevent them from being ~nequal."~'Either all factions must be suppressed, or they should be so equalized that they cancel one another's influence. Is it reasonable to expect the people to be assembled on a weekly basis as lawmakers and also be able to go about their business of making a living? The common will cannot be represented, but the government can under certain conditions substitute for it. Although there is no commonweal the moment a master exists, this does not mean that the commands ofrulers cannot pass for general wills. All that is requisite, for Rousseau, is that "the Sovereign,being free to oppose them, offers no opp~sition."~' With respect to the land and population of a republic, the right proportion is "that the land should suffice for the maintenance of the inhabitants, and that there should be as many inhabitants as the land can maintain." If there is too much land, it will be inadequately cultivated, produce more than is needed, and tempt others to seize it. If there is a shortage of land, the state must turn to commerce or wars of offense to obtain what it needs, neither of which is desirable because commerce leads to dependence and war leads to insecurity. So to avoid the consequences of having too much and too little land, it is indispensable that the people be "neither rich nor poor, but self-sufficient."42 One must be prepared to die for one's country, Rousseau urges, but only if the common will prevails. Since the social pact is for the benefit of each, it is imperative that each defend it and that rebels and traitors be removed by exile or by death as violators of the compact. Nonetheless, it is the exception rather than the rule that ill-doers cannot be turned to some good. As long as "whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body," he should be allowed to live.43 A people has need of a legislator. "The legislator is the engineer who invents the machine, the prince merely the mechanic who sets it up and makes it go." The prince who holds command over men should not have command over the laws, says Rousseau, and the legislator who has command over the laws should not have command over men. Nor should the constitution-maker be a lawmaker. His private aims, his particular will, might take precedence over his public function.44 To accomplish his purpose, the legislator must rely on trickery as well as wisdom. To get the people to follow him, he must invoke the will of God. Lacking the force of a prince to impose his will, he "must have recourse to an authority of a different order capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing." That is what in all ages compelled the fathers of a nation to credit the gods with their own wisdom. Such decisions the legislator "puts into the mouth of the immortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move." For authority, Rousseau cites Machiavelli on the practice of using religion as a political instrument. Although anybody may grave tablets of stone or fake secret intercourse with God, only a clever soul with Machiavellian instincts can do so and get himself believed by the m~ltitude.~' The end of every system of legislation reduces to two main objectives: "liberty [in order to escape dependence]"; and "equality, because liberty cannot exist

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without it." Neither one is possible without economic self-sufficiency. Consequently, "in respect of riches, no citizen should ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself." As Rousseau explains in a footnote, for a republic to be virtuous the legislator must allow neither rich men nor beggars, who are naturally inseparable and are equally fatal to the common good. Fatal, because both conditions support the designs of tyrants. "It is always between them that public liberty is put up to auction: the one buys [services], and the other sells [them]."46 Rousseau reduces the executive power to the role of intermediary between members of the social pact in their dual role as active citizens and passive subjects-sovereign and state when considered collectively. On the one hand, the executive or government "should be proportionatelystrongeras the people are more numerous." On the other hand, "the greater too should be the force at the disposal of the Sovereign for keeping the government in hand."47 The individual, corporate, and general wills become more active in proportion as they are concentrated but as the least concentrated, "the general will is always the weakest." The most energetic government is therefore monarchy; the least energetic, that in which every citizen is both a legislator and a member of the government. Since strong government is necessary in order to enforce the general will, according to Rousseau, the legislative authority should not be in the same hands as the governing a~thority.~' In a democracy, the executive and legislative powers are united in a single working body-the sovereign people in assembly. But such a government confoundsthe common interest with its interpretationsand applicationsto particular cases, the commonweal with special interests. Besides, it is impossible that the people should spend all their time on public affairs. The people are best served not by democraticgovernment, but by "a large measure of equality in rank and fortune," and "little or no luxury." Since luxury either comes from riches or makes them necessary, Rousseau adds, it corrupts the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness. Thus, "a famous writer [Machiavelli] has made virtue the fundamental principle of Republics; for all these conditions could not exist without virtue."49 Even though democracy is impossible, the more elements of democracy there are in a state, the more will the common interest prevail. An elective meritocracy is the government best suited to the human condition, Rousseau concludes. Why should twenty thousand do what a hundred picked substitutes can do even better? Although a meritocracy does not demand all the virtues needed by popular government, it requires "moderation on the side ofthe rich, and contentment on that of the poor." That presupposes inequality. But there is nothing the people can do about it since "thoroughgoing equality would be out of place, as it was not found even in Sparta."'O A fundamental defect "will always rank monarchical government below republican government," because in a monarchy the public voice hardly ever raises to the highest position men who are enlightened and capable. "The people is far less

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often mistaken in its choice than the prince, and a man of real worth among the king's ministers is almost as rare as a fool at the head of a republican government." Rousseau's opposition ofmonarchical to republican government may strike readers as inconsistent. And so it is: "I give the name 'Republic' to every State that is governed by laws, no matter what the form of its administration"-whether democracy, aristocracy, or m~narchy!~' Any one ofthe simple forms of government is preferable to mixed government "just because it is simple." This assumes that the executive power is subordinate to the legislative power. Otherwise, when the executive power is not sufficiently dependent upon the legislative, "this lack of proportion must be cured by the division of government." Not to be confused with the separation and balance of powers, the division of the executive power deprives it of centralized authority and makes it more amenable to control by the general The ultimate aim of political association, according to Rousseau, is the "preservation and prosperity of its members." The surest evidence of that is their numbers. As long as there is no pressure on the means of subsistence, the government under which "the citizens increase and multiply most is beyond question the best." Since their multiplication is symptomatic of prosperity, a government under which the population diminishes is the worst.53 Sincegovernments striveto increasetheir power through encroachments on the legislative power, "sooner or later the prince must inevitably suppress the Sovereign." Governments increase their power when they contract by passing from the many to the few, "from democracy to aristocracy, and from aristocracy to royalty." Contrary to Polybius, that is their natural propensity. The state dissolves when the prince usurps the sovereign power; the state contracts while the government expands. Although this process of degeneration applies to political associations based on consent, Rousseau concedes, governments founded on force degenerate following the opposite course described by P ~ l y b i u s . ~ ~ As soon as public services cease to be the chief occupation of citizens, "the State is not far from its fall." When citizens would rather serve with their money than with their persons, deputies or representatives take their place. Commerce and the arts are to blame, Rousseau observes. It is "through the greedy self-interest of profit, and through softness and love of amenities that personal services are replaced by money payments"; a republic is truly free only when "the citizens do everything with their own arms and nothing by means of money." Domestic cares, business interests, fair-weather patriotism, and the vastness of states, among other factors, are responsible for the taxes needed to support representative government. But sovereignty cannot be represented, any more than can the common will that defines it. Public servants do not represent; they obey orders and carry out the people's mandate. The idea of representation is modem. In ancient republics, "the people never had representatives; the word itself was unknown."55 Because no legislator is able to foresee or to make provision for every threatening situation, the laws should be suspended "whenever the existence of the country is at stake." In an emergency, there is need of an emergency power, for the

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"people's first intention is that the State shall not perish." Those elected to take charge of public safety may momentarily suspend the laws, but may neither abolish them nor make new laws. For Rousseau, an elected dictator is especially necessary in response to factional struggles and conspiracies leading to civil wars. The dictatorship is designed to defend the Sovereign, not to overthrow it.56 Rousseau divides religions into two kinds: the religion of man and that of the citizen. The first has neither temples nor altars, nor rites. In Western Christendom, it is the "religion ofthe Gospel pure and simple." The second kind ofreligion is that institutionalized and codified in a single country with its dogmas, its rites, and its external cult prescribed by law. Although based on lies, "it unites the divine with love of the laws, and makes country the object of the citizens' adoration." To be effective, the positive dogmas of civil religion should be few and simple, limited to the belief in a Supreme Being, the immortality of the soul, reward and punishment in the hereafter, and the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. As for religious intolerance, "whoever dares to say, 'Outside the Church is no salvation,' ought to be driven from the StateM-unless the State is the Church and its Prince is the P~pe!~' Among these guidelines of greatest import for posterity, and for the French Revolution in its culminating moments, one should note: first, the depiction ofthe sovereign as the people's will; second, the death sentence and enforced exile for enemies ofthe people; third, the case for forcing people to be free and equal; fourth, the preference for meritocracy; fifth, the reconceptualization of forms of government as instrumental to the general will; sixth, the inversion of established accounts of how governments and states degenerate; seventh, the provision for a dictatorship to defend the general will; eighth, religious toleration supplemented by civil religion as aprop to popular sovereignty;and finally, a frank acknowledgment of the obstacles to a republican vanguard and to a republic of virtue that can only be approximated as long as people are what they are instead ofwhat they should be.

A Machiavellian Lawgiver Toward the end of his life, Rousseau again wove the several strands in Machiavelli's agenda into a political composition with radical overtones. In The Government of Poland we see a revived Rousseau in the role of legislator, in the same capacity as Machiavelli's and his own idols, Moses and Lycurgus. As Charles Hendel presents the circumstances attending the composition of this work: "the cause of liberty again drew him away from his own concerns and memories, when a call came, in 1771, from certain patriots in Poland, to be their legi~lator."~~ In his magnum opus he had announced his readiness for the role of legislator for any and every unhappy nation that might need his services. The first deep republican in a position to legislate for a particular people, Rousseau was well prepared for the job. He had already drafted a new constitution for the small island

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of Corsica. The republican principles developed in the Social Contract would now be adjusted to the needs and customs of a major European state. Love of the fatherland, a profound sense of patriotism, would become the guiding spirit of his proposed laws. While the Social Contract is a venture in pure theory, the Government of Poland answers the question first raised in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: "What, then, is to be done?"9 Rousseau had been commissioned to reform the government of a country that in many ways resembled Machiavelli's Italy. Poland had been periodically overrun by foreign powers, by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Although formally unified, the central government consisted of a weak and elective kingship up for sale to the highest bidder. Owing to the refusal by a vast and powerful nobility to fund the government, its army was ineffectual confronted by the private armies of local magnates capable at any moment of overriding the king's authority and that of a weak national assembly hamstrung by the unanimity principle and the imperative mandates of its constituencies.The powers ofthe nobility went virtually unchecked owing to a Church confined to spiritual matters, an unrecognized Third Estate, and a peasant population consistingwholly of serfs. As in Italy in the sixteenth century, Poland lived in a state of virtual anarchy. The outstanding difference between the two peoples was that Poland was ripe for partition despite formal unification. The first partition occurred in 1772. Two other partitions followed in 1793 and 1795 when Poland ceased to exist as a separate state. To preserve the Poles' national identity, Rousseau recommended the adoption of customs, ceremonies, and laws modeled on Moses' legislation that might enable them, like the Hebrews, to survive partition and extinction as a territorial entity. Following Machiavelli, he also relied on the example of the Swiss cantons and the free cities of Germany to counter the corrupting influence of the French, Spanish, and English monarchies where money and luxury prevailed. Like Maximilian I, the German Emperor in Machiavelli's day, the Polish king had subjects and cities he could not control. The only feasible constitution for that unhappy country lay not in strengtheningthe central government, but in establishing as many states in Poland as it had palatinates loosely organized for self-defense in a federal system of government similar to Switzerland's. For the Poles, Rousseau recommended "a confederation of thirty-three tiny states" that might combine the strength of a great monarchy with the freedom of small republics.60 Moses had shaped a nation out of a people without an inch of territory to call their own. For this people wandering aimlessly in the wilderness, he had devised "customs and practices that could not be blended with those of other nations and [had] weighted them down with rites." These were calculatedto keep them strangers among everybody else, but for their own protection. That explained why this odd nation, "to all appearances annihilated, but always utterly faithful to its law," had not been absorbed by other peoples. The Poles, Rousseau observed, might do well to follow their e~ample.~' The Poles' salvation, Rousseau believed, was to love their country more than their own souls. Once again, shades of Machiavelli. Consideringthat freedom from

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the Russian Goliath and from Poland's other neighbors was beyond reach, he settled for a form of national solidarity that might withstand all obstacles, but would need supplementing with other components of the Florentine's political project. There could be no solidarity, Rousseau believed, without political liberalization, without cutting the nobles down to size by granting the other two orders of burghers and peasants full and equal rights of citizenship. The most pressing reform would be to enfranchisethe mass ofthe people by emancipatingthe serfs.62 Suffrage should be made effective by changing deputies often, by making sure that no single individual would be elected repeatedly, and by binding deputies "to the letter of their instructions and to a strict accounting to their constituents." The kings would continue to be elected, but the crown should never pass from father to son; it should not be for sale and should be reserved solely for Polish citizens.'j3 What might be the role of the armed people in a nation not destined for greatness? Poland should exult in its capacity to be peaceful and free, a nation that fears nobody. Eschew ambition, keep a low profile, mind your own business, Rousseau admonished, and "avoid being dragged into any war fought in Europe." Then nobody will pick quarrels with you. Echoing Machiavelli, he questioned the maxim that money is the sinews of war. Citing the barbarians at the gates of Rome, he noted: "Rich people, in point of fact, have always been beaten and taken over by poor people." Surrounded by warlike powers with huge armies, Poland should be content with defending its frontie~-s.64 Echoing the Florentine Secretary, Rousseau insisted that the way to defend yourselves is to rely not on professional soldiers, but on individual citizens. A welltrained militia is the only solution to your problem, he wrote, because people always fight better in defense of their own than in defense of what belongs to others. Also bear in mind the expense of keeping legions constantly on a war footing, he cautioned, for the "expense of regular armies outweighs a hundred times their usefulness to any people not bent upon conquest." Prepare yourselves, therefore, for counterattack. If your neighbors penetrate your territory, make it hard for them to leave unscathed. That will teach them how costly it is to withdraw from your territory and will discourage others from entering it. Switzerland is a small country, but the Swiss have managed to preserve their independence.'j5 So imitate their example. The youth ofPoland should be instructed in ancient virtue, not in modern vices, Rousseau admonished. Whereas the citizens of neighboring countries "dream only of luxury, and know no passion except for money," Poland can do better by prohibiting "amusements that one ordinarily finds in courts: gambling, the theater, comedies, operas--everything that makes men unmanly, or distractsthem, or causes them to forget their fatherland." The Poles should always think of their fatherland, they should behold nothing else. That will distinguishthem from typical Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Italians, raised in an all-European culture, who are not patriots but cosmopoIites.'j6 Children should be taught by patriots, not by foreigners or priests for whom the

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Church rather than one's country is the supreme object of loyalty. Hence Rousseau's plea for free public schools, or at least those cheap enough for everyone to attend. For the Calvinist from Geneva, avarice and sloth were not only mortal sins, but also sins against the fatherland.67 Moral reform, Rousseau observed, leads naturally to economic leveling and is impossible without it. As long as luxury rules in the homes of rulers, "covetousness will rule in the hearts of all." Avoid moral reform in favor of keeping people rich and you will end up with a people at the two extremes of misery and opulence with nothing in between. Thus magistrates should always have the whip-hand "to sap the power of wealth and to produce men whom money cannot In attempting to stamp out cupidity in Sparta, Lycurgus contrived that money should be made of iron. So reduce trade with the outside world and "you will have, as a result, neither beggars nor millionaires; luxury and indigence will disappear simultaneously." Best to conscript labor not paid for in money; and for public services, payments in kind. A condition ofequality in both burdens and benefits will thus make Polish citizens in~orruptible.~~ If there is a single principle that sums up his proposed legislations, it is that of self-sufficiency. As in the Social Contract, no one should be rich enough to buy another's services, and none so poor as to have to sell himself for hire-a principle that also makes for peace among nations. Rousseau's political project may be attractive on paper, but how did it turn out in practice? Gentle Rousseau, but not-so-gentle followers invoking his name. As in Machiavelli's case, a humiliating life experience provides a clue to the mismatch of words and deeds. Hobbes and Locke traveled through Europe in grand style as did Montesquieu, including the Frenchman's brief visit to England in 1731. In sharp contrast, the penniless Rousseau wandered about like a vagabond not always sure about his next meal and lodging. Apprenticed to successive trades as a youth, he ran afoul of his masters and failed to carve a career out of any of them. Poverty induced him to thieve at an early age and to change his religion for material advantage. Even more humiliating, he was compelled to seek charity, to accept employment from people he came to detest, to serve as valet to an Italian nobleman, and to suffer abuse as secretary to a French diplomat.'O His Confessions contain a clue to his political ideology. Concerning his apprenticeship as an engraver, he recalled that the sight ofthe pleasures enjoyed by his master increased the weight of his servitude. As a result, "I learned to covet in silence, to dissemble, to lie, and, lastly, to steal." From this experience he understood why all servants are rogues and why a peaceful state of equality is indispensable to overcoming such disgraceful behavior." In Paris his gentle and friendly personality and his musical works and compositions for the theater and opera opened the doors to the best salons. But owing to his plebeian origin and Puritanical background, he felt ill at ease in high society and preferred the company of a servant girl for his life's companion. Thrown into the "great world without possessing its manners, and unable to acquire

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or conform to them," he resolved to give himself courage by trampling them underfoot. Shame made him cynical and sarcastic: "I affected to despise the politeness which I did not know how to practice." Neither polite nor refined himself, he resented these characteristics in others. Not enjoying wealth and leisure, the breeding ground of propriety, courtesy, and decorum, he acquired a strong dislike for gentlemen. When a certain baron sought him out, a "natural repugnance for a long time prevented me from meeting his advances." Asked why, he answered, "You are too ~ealthy."~' His autobiography shows why, like Machiavelli, he made virtue the findamental principle of republics and equality a condition of virtue. For a large measure of equality in rank and fortune is needed to stamp out luxury which, he noted, "comes ofriches or makes them necessary.. . [and] corrupts at once rich and poor." "Were there a people of gods," he adds, "their government would be ' democratic." But such a perfect equality is not for men.73 This accounts for Rousseau's choice of a second-best form of government. Thus, "it is the best and most natural arrangement that the wisest should govern the many." Meritocracy, yes, but only on condition that the most capable citizens will govern in the interest of all. By the wisest and most capable, Rousseau meant "people of uprightness, understanding, experience, and all other claims to preeminence and public esteemv-professionals who have somehow managed to avoid corruption. Although meritocracy does not demand all the virtues of democratic government, it too requires an uncommon degree of equality, notably, "moderation on the side of the rich and contentment on that of the poor."74 Like his state of perfect equality, it reflects his life as a misfit; hence the restrictions on acquisitiveness, indulgence, and luxury-unlike the Atlantic model that imposed limits on power, not wealth.

The Jacobins Rousseau was still alive when in 1776 the American Revolution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence of pseudo-Machiavellian inspiration changed the face of the New World. That same year the Order of the Illuminati of neoMachiavellian inspiration began plotting against the Old World. While John Adams and the other Fathers of our country thought of themselves as the world's leading republicans, they failed to qualify as the republican vanguard. That honor was reserved for the Jacobins, who were planning to turn Europe upside down under the influence of Rousseau's subversive doctrines. What were the qualificationsthat Adams and the other Fathers failed to meet? At the very least they had to live up to those sketched by Machiavelli almost three centuries earlier. At best they were Harringtonians like Adams, but they were only a handful. Consideringthat Harrington didnot qualify, neither did they. By allowing the states to impose a property qualification for voting, they failed to extend the

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franchise to the populo minuto; they failed to limit the right to property and to legislate an agrarian law; and they made no provisions for overcoming the dependence of the poor and the landless. They were not Rousseauians. They were liberals instead of democrats. That alone placed them among the rearguard rather than the vanguard of the republican revolutionaries in the eighteenth century. A century and more earlier, Cromwell's followers had failed to qualify as a republican vanguard. A member of the landed gentry, Cromwell thought like one as did the bulk of his followers. In this respect he resembled George Washington, his New World counterpart who was also a member of the landed gentry. He restricted the franchise to freeholders with land of a value of forty shillings or more per year, thereby excluding both tenure-held and leasehold farmers along with nonfreehold artisans and tradesmen; and he vigorously denounced land redistribution as tending "to make the tenant as liberal a fortune as the landl~rd."~' Only the radical wing in the English Revolution of 1640-1660, those to the left not only of Cromwell but also of the Harringtonians, passed muster on this score. The Levellers, as they were called, wanted an extension ofthe franchise to artisans, yeomen, and independent traders; they also demanded land redistribution. Yet they too failed to become arepublican vanguard. To constitutea vanguard one must have not only followers, but access to political power. The Levellers had a huge following, but they were ahead of their time in being "democrats who could never have been returned to power by any possible electorate." They could have put their policies into effect only by capturing control of the army, but Cromwell's generals outmaneuvered and outwitted them. The movement's leaders then relied on conspiracies and intrigues, but their plans to assassinate Cromwell got them nowhere. Meanwhile, some of them drifted steadily to the right, until they were indistinguishable from Harrington's republican^.^^ We turn, then, to the first republican vanguard to duplicate and enlarge upon Machiavelli's political project as transmitted by Rousseau. The two most influential works on political theory in eighteenth-century France were Rousseau's Social Contract and Montesquieu's earlier Spirit of the Laws (1 748). Whereas the former provided fuel for the Jacobin party with the coming of the French Revolution, the latter served the interests of the parties that preceded it in power: the constitutional monarchist Feuillant party and the republican Girondins. Thanks to Montesquieu's two-year visit to England in 1729-1 73 1, the Atlantic Republican Tradition of mixed government took hold on the European continent. His date of birth in 1689nearly coincided with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its model of government of which he became a champion. Against the despotic monarchy of Louis XIV, the liberty he preached was a liberty of the aristocracy. Depending on different customs, climes, and circumstances, he argued that liberty might be achieved under either a constitutional monarchy as in England, or a republic whether democratic or aristocratic, as in ancient R ~ m e . ' ~ The Jacobin Club played only a minor role during the first French Revolution, conventionally dated from the Tennis Court Oath of 20 June 1789 when the bourgeois members of the Third Estate met against the king's orders in a single

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National Assembly as representatives of the French nation. Instead of the old parliament in which the Third Estate had only one-third of the delegates, like the First and Second Estates meeting separately, the National Assembly increased the number of bourgeois representatives to half, thereby making them the equal of the combined representatives of the ancien rkgime, the clergy and nobility. The king and most of the members of the two privileged estates resisted until the armed populace came to the defense of the assembly and seized the Bastille on 14 July. Liberal representatives of the clergy and nobility then sought elective office in the new Legislative Assembly that replaced the National Assembly. This first or bourgeois-liberal revolution, following the account of French historian Albert Soboul, did not overthrow the monarchy and nobility but naively sought an accommodation with them. That was its Achilles Since the king, the court, and the displaced nobility continued to conspire against the new arrangement with the help of foreign powers, the Paris Commune finally intervened by staging an armed coup on 10 August 1792, in which the Jacobins played an important role. The Legislative Assembly was abolished and replaced by a National Convention on 20 September after eliminatingthe property qualification for the suffrage. A republic replaced the monarchy; the titles and privileges of the nobility were abolished. That was the second or bourgeoisdemocratic revolution in which the bourgeoisie continued to rule no longer with the support of liberal-minded aristocrats, but with the backing of the petty-bourgeoisie championed by the Jacobins. (By the petty-bourgeoisie or "middling bourgeoisie" Soboul understands the class of independent artisans and shopkeepers located between those living off their investments-profits, interest, and rent-and the socalled popular classes of hired hands, journeymen, apprentices, and domestic

servant^.)'^ Henceforth, the liberal bourgeoisie had to contend with the Jacobins in the role of opposition instead of the Feuillants, the party of the liberal-minded but royalist nobility. The Girondins, the party of the liberal bourgeoisie, survived the August coup thanks to giving up support for constitutional monarchy and the property qualification for voting. But its support of the democratic republic was at best lukewarm, and it led the country into war under generals who temporized with the enemy. After following the lead ofthe Girondins during the Legislative Assembly, the Jacobins improved their position in the National Convention through an alliance with the Paris commune and the sansculottes-plebeians distinguished by their pantaloons instead of the breeches worn by their social betters. A Committee of Public Safety was created on 5 April 1793, renewable every month and consisting ofnine men authorized in cases of extreme emergency to take appropriate measures for national defense. That same day, the Jacobins sent a circular letter to the popular societies, inviting them to recall all deputies to the convention who were suspected of monarchist sympathies. On 24 April the Jacobins posed another threat to Girondin interests by laying before the convention a new declaration of the rights of man and the citizen that would limit the right of property to considerations of

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social utility and the national interest. Finally, on 26 May they called on the sansculottes to revolt in retaliation for the arrest of their leaders by a commission on which only Girondins sat. For the second time the insurrectionary Paris Commune staged an armed coup, this one on 2 June 1793. Its upshot was that the Girondins, like the Feuillants before them, were arrested and driven from the legislative body. Followed the creation of a revolutionary government on 10 October tantamount to a dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety on which only Jacobins sat, while being carefully watched from the sidelines by the sansculottes and their representatives in the Paris Commune. That was the third revolution in which Machiavelli's and Rousseau's petty-bourgeoisie finally had their turn at ruling.80 On 2 June the insurrectionariespushed through a proposal for a Revolutionary Army under the supervision ofthe Committee of Public Safety-an army that would rid the nation of traitors and quash counterrevolutionary movements in the countryside.Because ofpressure from the sansculotteswho had made the revolution possible, the committee voted to enlarge its membership from nine to twelve delegates and to make it more representative. This entailed choosing from among the Jacobins two "ultras" or firebrands with sansculottist sympathies, and one "citra" as a countervailing force for moderation. The coalition government formed on 6 September was to last throughout the Jacobin dictat~rship.~' The so-called Reign of Terror, or Reign of Virtue, depending on how one looks at it, dates from the popular mob that invaded the National Convention on 5 September with placards threatening war on the enemies of the people. It came about through the same concessions to popular demands that motivated the Committee of Public Safety to include two rabble-rousing Jacobins among its new members. Soon the people's enemies were to be found not only among surviving aristocrats, bourgeois hoarders, and the Girondist counterrevolutionaryuprisings in Lyons, Nantes, and other commercial cities, but also among the Jacobins themselves. Like other political tendencies, the Jacobins were divided into left and right wings manipulated from the center and played off against each other. While the Terror began with a war on the defeated Girondins, it ended in a war against factions. As the Jacobins in the Paris Commune became more vociferous in persecuting the bourgeoisie, the committee responded with a purge ofthe leading champions of the sansculottes. But in an effort to recover their support, it felt obliged to purge the so-called lndulgents favoring an end to the Terror-first the "ultras" and then the "citras." By then, nobody felt secure, including members of the committee known for their sympathies for either the sansculottes or the bourgeoisie. The Jacobin revolution came to a close when the "ultras" and "citras" combined in self-defense to oust the ruling center. That was the secret of Thermidor, or 27 July 1794, when the party's main leaders were in turn dispatched to Mme. G ~ i l l o t i n e . ~ ~ Even before the establishment of the republic in 1792, Rousseau's ideas had become so widely diffused by the political clubs that it was no longer necessary to have read his works to become an ardent follower. The Jacobins were Rousseauists

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down to the last man, but so were the Girondins. Their differences arose over the selective adaptation and uses of his political doctrines. Those better situated economically,or otherwise dependent on bourgeois support as were the Girondins, made a big fuss over liberty but ignored the role of equality in Rousseau's writings. The Jacobins for the most part hued to the letter of his political philosophy. The divisions among the Jacobins were mainly over questions of strategy. At one pole were the "moderates," "indulgents," or "citras," fearful of a complete break with the bourgeoisie; at the other pole, the "extremists," firebrands," or "ultras" allied to the sansculottes.The outstanding figure among the indulgents was Georges Jacques Danton (1 759-1 794), the powerful orator who had initially led the party as a member of the Legislative Assembly in 1791-1792. His counterpart among the extremistswas the physician, publicist, and publisher of 1 'Amidupeuple for whom politics had become an obsession, Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793). A political fugitive during the first years of the Legislative Assembly, he came to prominence only under the National Convention, but was assassinated by a Girondist sympathizer a month after it had convened. The more prudent leaders, who believed in strength through unity and who adamantly opposed the formation of factions, dominated the Committee of Public Safety. The most philosophically oriented member ofthe committee and its most influential voice was unquestionably Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), seconded by the youngest and brightest member of the committee, Louis-Antoine Saint-Just (I 767-1 794). The Terror represented the flowering of Jacobin rule and of Jacobinism as a political philosophy. It was during the Terror that Robespierre delivered his most memorable speeches that had a marked influence on posterity and, as we shall see, on the second republican vanguard during the Russian Revolution. As one historian observes, the August 1794 transfer of Rousseau's remains to the Pantheon, the national mausoleum in Paris where the illustrious dead were buried, signaled that the new state, so far as it came from books, was to draw its inspiration from the Social Contra~t.~' The irony is that Montesquieu too, notwithstanding his preference for constitutional monarchy and for an aristocratic over a democraticrepublic, provided fuel for the Jacobin dictatorship. For in depicting the democratic republic and its spirit of equality, the Spirit of the Laws reproduced almost verbatim Machiavelli's ideal of frugality whereby the state is rich and the citizens are poor. Thus the Jacobins carried out Machiavelli's deep republican project, if not in full, then as far as it could reasonably be implemented under the circumstances. Most writers on the French Revolution have exaggerated the leading roles of Robespierre and Saint-Just in the Committee of Public Safety, not to mention their influence on the National Convention. In his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, historian J.L. Talmon concentrates exclusively on these two figures in treating of the Jacobin improvisation. He virtually identifies the driving power of Jacobinism with Robespierrism-as if Robespierre's political project alone defined it. Next in importance to the "Incorruptible," Talmon focuses on the political thought of the "Angel of Death," the immaculate and no less philosophical Saint-Just, infamous

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for his role in the party's successive purges.84 Because Robespierre and Saint-Just were concerned mainly with the general and more abstract questions posed by the revolutions of 10 August 1792 and 2 June 1793, they were less consequential than others in pushing the revolution to its extreme limits and initiating legislation forthat purpose. The most radical initiatives taken by the Committee of Public Safety were those sponsored by the two "ultras" co-opted in September 1793: the actor, playwright, and agitator Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois (1750-1796) and his sidekick, the lawyer, writer, and sansculottist agitator, Jean-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne (1756-1 8 19). Occupied mainly with political questions having immediate significance, these two indefatigable conspirators spent their days and nights dreaming up new measures for pushing the revolution forward. They are no less important for understanding the role ofthe first republican vanguard than are Robespierre and Saint-Just. I begin with a brief survey of Robespierre's major speeches highlighting his role as the principal voice of Rousseauism during the revolutionary dictatorship: on religious toleration (21 November 1793), on the principles of revolutionary government(25 December 1793),on the principles ofpolitical morality (5 February 1794), and on the religious and moral principles ofrepublicans (7 May 1794Fthis last address on the new civil religion aimed at establishing the Reign of Virtue. As the supreme moralist and philosopher of the Jacobins, Robespierre had no equal. Only the writings of Saint-Just throw some light on Robespierre's ultimate aims. We mainly ignore them because his ideas were almost wholly those of his idol Robespierre, sharpened and simplified but also exaggerated and schematized. In his first speech in defense of religion and against philosophical atheism, Robespierre denied that the National Convention aimed to proscribe the Catholic Church. At most, it intended to establish freedom of religion. On the one hand, Catholicism had no more claim than any other religion to being God's representative on earth. On the other hand, the atheists who wanted to proscribe all religions were presumptuous in denying the people's right to worship as they pleased. Besides, they were naive in believing that religions might be suppressed by decree. "Priests have been denounced for saying the mass; they will say it longer if an attempt is made to prevent them!" Those who deny God's existence are even more fanatical than true believers. "Under the pretense of destroying superstition, they would make a religion of atheism." Although whoever would make a crime of atheism is a madman, "the legislator would be a hundred times madder to adopt such a doctrine." Atheism, Robespierre concluded, is aristocratic and plays into the hands of enemies ofthe republic. Theism has more in common with republicanism and is more popular because of its idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes the unjust.85Just as Rousseau had opposed the Catholic claim of being the only true church while crediting the uplifting role of religious sentiment, so Robespierre distinguished anticlericalism from belief in a Supreme Being. His speech on Christmas Day 1793justified the Terror in what may well have

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been the first important statement in modem times of a philosophy of dictatorship. Revolutionary government is the antechamber to constitutional government, not its opposite. Whereas the aim of constitutional government is to preserve the republic, the aim of revolutionary government is to found it. Whereas the revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies, the constitution is the rule of liberty triumphant. Dictatorship was justified as the force that makes liberty possible. "Under constitutional rule individuals are protected against the abuses of public power; under revolutionary rule the public power must defend itself against the abuses of factions." As the chief menace to revolutionary government, Robespierre declared, factions take two principal forms: "moderatism, which is to moderation what impotence is to chastity; excess, which is to vigor what swelling is to health." These are respectively the Scylla and Charybdis of the revolution between which its helmsmen must steer a narrow course.86Rousseau had shown the way. Factions make for a divided instead of a unitary will, for special instead of common interests. How to follow the straight and narrow-that was the question. Robespierre's speech of 5 February 1794 gave the answer. The time has come, he began, to move from a general concern for the public good to an exact theory and precise rules of conduct. The time has come to mark clearly the aim ofthe revolution, a democratic republic, the only kind of republic that can assure universal felicity. Contrary to ordinary usage, the words republic and democracy are synonyms, he declared: aristocracy is not a republic anymore than is monarchy. Nor is democracy a state where the people are continually assembled and decide on all public matters. Echoing Rousseau, he denied that such a government had ever existed. "Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws of their own making, do for themselves what is within their power, and through delegates what they are unable to do." Its principle is public virtue, love of country and its laws. Consideringthat the essence of democracy is equality, said Robespierre, love of country means love ofequality-another Rousseauian maxim. Not only is public virtue the soul of democracy, it cannot exist without democracy; but the people are prey to corruption, and by degrees they lose their freedom. When the nation passes from democracy to aristocracy or to monarchy, he declaimed, the body politic perishes from decrepitude. Terror against the enemies of the people, against the source of corruption, is their sole defense. Virtue without terror is powerless: "The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny." In republics, only democrats are citizens: everyone else is a foreigner or enemy." (Although the ideas in this speech are unquestionably Rousseauist, the language is not. For Robespierre reverts to the ancient classification of governments according to their class content in place of Rousseau's classification according to size or the number of magistrates.) To his Rousseauist-inspired disquisitionson religious toleration, revolutionary dictatorship, and democracy, Robespierre's speech of 7 May 1794 adds a disquisition on civil religion-the Cult ofthe Supreme Being and ornature. It begins with an allusion to the opening chapter of the Social Contract: "Nature tells us that man was born for liberty; experience shows us man enslaved." His rights are written in

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his heart, but history is the record of his humiliation. Public morality has failed to keep pace with technical progress. Human reason is still like the globe it inhabits: half lit by the sun, the other half shrouded in darkness. What is the remedy? Return to our religious and natural roots: "Think of nothing but the good ofthe country and the interests ofhumanity." What is the point of telling someone that "a blind fate presides over his destiny, and strikes down impartially the sinner and the saint; if you tell him that his soul is a mere breath that is dissipated at the door ofdeath-what does it advantagehim?" Even though based on lies, religious myths are socially useful. "If the existence of God and the immortality of the soul were mere dreams, they would still be the finest creations of the human spirit." None of the great lawgivers of the past made atheism the national credo. Against priestly superstition and divisive faiths it becomes imperative to unite all believers in the universal religion ofNature. "The true priest of the Supreme Being is Nature; his temple is the universe; his worship is virtue."88 Decrees followed this amazing confession, providing for the organization of the new cult and the national festivals to celebrate it. The Revolutionary Calendar was an integral part ofthe Jacobins' civil religion commemorating the new republican era: 1789 was the first year of liberty, 1792the first year ofthe republic. But not until 1793 did the National Convention replace the Christian calendar with a new one in the conviction that the proclamation of the republic on 22 September 1792 marked an even more important turning point in history than the birth of Christ. Designed to weaken the influence of organized Christianity, the new calendar adopted on 5 October 1793, with its republican holidays and national festivals, was to become an official part of the Jacobins' new civil religion. Year One of the revolution was dated from 22 September 1792; Year Two began on 22 September 1794, and so on. Each year was divided into four seasons and into twelve months of thirty days, each month being divided into three ten-day weeks in order to break up the old fixation on Sundays that drew people's minds to church and to holidays for Lent, Easter, and Christmas that were summarily abolished. The five days left over (six during leap year) were called the sansculottides and came at the end of the republican year. The religion of nature informed the revolutionary calendar. The year began with the three months of autumn: Vendemiaire, Brumaire, and Frimaire, named respectively for the wine harvest, foggy weather, and cold weather. The remaining months were similarly named in celebration of nature's changes. The year ended with the three summer months: Messidor named for crops, Thermidor for heat, and Fructidor for the fruit harvest. Because Robespierre and the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety were overthrown on 9 Therrnidor, the word Therrnidor passed into history as a synonym for reaction and counterrevolution. The new civil religion made a fetish of virtue. Following Rousseau, the flipside of virtue was said to be the nefarious effect of Luxuria and Avaritia. The celebration of virtue and the Jacobins' war on corruption went hand in hand. Factions in particular constituted for Robespierre an ever-present source of

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corruption because they substituted private interest for Rousseau's general will. In the ten speeches he delivered after 10 October 1793, the corrupting influence of factions became a mounting obsession. It was not to the friends but to the enemies of the people that he turned his attention. Except for the decrees on foreign policy and the cult of the Supreme Being, the only laws initiated as a result of his last speechesto the National Convention were those against factions and conspiracie~.~~ In his last public performance on 26 July 1794, a most impolitic address, the "lncorruptible" overdid himself by appearing in the role of the Grand Inquisitor. Everyone appeared suspect in Robespierre's eyes. Intoxicated with his virtue and a judge of the vices of others, he launched into a tirade against a conspiracy, a criminal coalition at work within the National Convention against the Committee of Public Safety, a coalition that included members of the Committee of General Security packed with radical anti-Catholics and rabid de-Christianizers opposed to Robespierre's policy of religious toleration. What was the remedy for this evil? "Punish the traitors, renovate the Committee of General Security, purge its members, and subordinate it to the Committee of Public Safety." To this tirade he thoughtlessly added, "purge the Committee of Public Safety itself."90The irony is that both committees were responsible for suppressingcounterrevolution,but ended by targeting each other. Robespierre's suspicions were hlly justified. The extremistson the Committee of Public Safety had taken their quarrel outside its walls. To attain their objectives, they depended for support on the Committee of General Security and on the restless element in the convention. Religion was not the sole issue. "The Robespierrists, when they fell, were not committed to a sweeping program of economic equalization." They were notably less radical toward both property and religion than were the "ultras" on both committee^.^' What were the contributions of the "ultras" to the first republican vanguard, and in what respects did they carry Rousseau's doctrines to extremes? Their most consequential members, Collot and Billaud, had become increasingly important owing to their co-optation by the Committee of Public Safety. They were also its most active members in framing political legislation. Together, they were responsible for most of the convention's decrees concerning property and other matters affecting the sansculottes. The list is impressive. On 26 July 1793 they were responsible for the law on hoarding, which targeted the new bourgeoisie for jacking up prices by making otherwise available goods scarce. On 23 August they were responsible for the law on the mass levy. On 5 September they were responsible for the law setting up the Revolutionary Tribunal and for the law leading to the organization of the Revolutionary Army. On 17 Septemberthey introduced what became the first piece of legislation ofthe Terror-the law on suspects. On 29 September their persistent agitation for price controls was responsible for legislation known as the General Maxim; on 10 October they paved the way for the law recognizing the Committee of Public Safety as the supreme revolutionary government. On 12 October they were responsible for the law on razing the Girondin stronghold of Lyons-a

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commercial city of some 150,000 inhabitants that had rebelled against the Jacobin government. On 4 December they introduced to the convention what became the law on revolutionarydictatorship.And on 26 February they were the principal force behind the law dictating that no enemy of the republic could own property and that the confiscated properties should be redistributed with a view to equality.92 Billaud, ex-schoolteacher and lawyer without clients, had published in 1789 a philosophical tract, The Last Blow Against Prejudice andsuperstition, that defined him as a radical de-Christianizer and enemy of the Catholic Church. "However painful an amputation may be," he wrote in reference to the Church, "when a member is gangrenous, it must be sacrificed if we wish to save the body." This lethal metaphor would subsequently be applied not only to the Church, but also to the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. It became a commonplace in the Jacobin clubs as an apology for the g~illotine.~' Convinced that institutionalized Christianitywas a fraud, Billaud called for the control of the clergy by the state and for the confiscation of all Church property. Religious dogmas, he argued, should be reduced to the only useful myth, that of the immortality of the soul; and ritual should be so simplified that even the most ignorant citizen might understand it. Religious vows should be forbidden, and priests should be allowed to many. "Everything that did not arise from nature and a few simple words of Jesus was to be regarded as my~tification."~~ The ideas were Rousseau's. It was Billaud's proposal for implementing them that was unusual. In 1793, Billaud wrote a second treatise, one of the most advanced documents of the revolution. His Elements of Republicanism supported among other radical measures the equal division of wealth and the right of every man to employment on the grounds that property is a sacred right, so sacred that everyone should have it. The people's welfare, he maintained, should be raised to the supreme law of the land. This law for the public good "will not justify any valid complaint by the capitalists," he wrote in his long-winded manner, if we limit ourselves to "an accelerated redistribution,without leaving the possibility of hrther accumulation." To this allusion to Rousseau's Discourse on Political Economy, he added that the property confiscated from the "capitalists"--one of the earliest references to the new ruling class made up of plutocrats-would be divided into equal portions, no one being permitted to own more than a fixed amount of land. The right of inheritance would be abolished, and every able-bodied person would be required to work instead of living off the labor of others. All this he deduced from a supposed social contract-another allusion to Rousseau-that would serve as an alternative to the existing contract of the rich at the expense of the poor.95 Like Billaud, Collot was partial to a social revolution benefiting mainly the sansculottes. The 12 October law calling for the razing of Lyons, one of the most remarkable pieces of legislation during the revolution, kindled even further his consummate hatred of the bourgeoisie. Directed against the Girondin-sponsored uprising against Jacobin rule, the law stated: "Every habitation of the rich shall be demolished; there shall remain only the homes of the poor, the houses of patriots." The collection of houses left standing would be given another name as a means of

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erasing even the memory of the former city. As Collot raged in the Jacobin club against the Lyonnese bourgeoisie: "Should any man who has his hands and his patriotism depend on another for his living?'While the rich cannot do without the poor, the "poor will do without the rich, and Lyons will flourish none the less." His was the Rousseauist dream of a country of equally small and independent artisans, peasants, and tradespeople whose livelihood did not depend on others-not to be confused with the petty-bourgeoisie. Thus the sacred right of private property became the basis of what amounted to plebeian communism, or "communitism" as it was occasionally called.96 Years earlier, Collot had managed atheater in the nation's capital where he had seen at close hand the snobbery and pretensions of the new monied class. As the only member of the Committee of Public Safety who did not come from a comfortable family, he had personal reasons for targeting the bourgeoisie. In the expectation of a dramatic retribution that would rid the earth of their presence, he went to Lyons with the determination to carry out such a purge. It was not just the homes ofthe rich he intended to destroy. He was prepared to smash the city with mines and artillery. The explosion of mines, he raved, "the devouring activity of flame can alone express the omnipotence of the people; its will cannot be checked like that of tyrants; it must have the effect ofthunder!" Of its 150,000 inhabitants, he estimated that 60,000 consisted of sansculottes whom he planned to uproot from Lyons and transplant to areas where patriotism thrived. Thereby the entire city might be plundered and laid waste.97 Collot was evidently on a collision course in a class war against the bourgeoisie. For him, the hndamental purpose of the revolution was a republic of equals in the name ofthe people, narrowly interpreted as the sansculottesminus the petty-bourgeoisie. "In his mind, more clearly than for most Jacobins, the people meant the proletariat." Accordingly, the bourgeoisie should be liquidated not just in Lyons, but throughout the whole of Fran~e.~' When he arrived in Lyons in the capacity of an avenging angel, he set up a Temporary Commission for carrying out his program that went considerably further than the one authorized by the National Convention. Whether directly or indirectly, he was responsible for the contents of the document drawn up by the commission with the knowledge of the Jacobin representatives of Lyons, if not in Paris. The commission's "Instruction to ConstitutedAuthorities" has been called the first communist manifesto for defending the sansculottes against their bourgeois and pettybourgeois employers. The revolution, it claimed, was made especially for the poor. It noted the shocking disproportionbetween the incomes ofthe different classes and assailed the capitalists in words anticipating those of the Communist Manifesto of 1848: "You have been oppressed; you must crush your oppressors!" The rich were to be expropriated and their wealth placed at the disposal of the republic. The method used to expropriate them was nothing short of original. The rich would be taxed to death at a rate three times their annual incomes. There would be no "mathematical exactness or timid scruples in the levying of public taxes."99 Nor would there be any timidity in applying the death sentence to those even

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distantly involved in counterrevolution. The "Instruction" provided for the confiscation of Church valuables along with those of the nobility and bourgeoisie. Besides members of these two classes, lawyers were jailed as suspects and their properties confiscated. On 27 November Collot organized a revolutionary tribunal for carrying out the sentences. The climax came on 4 December when sixty of the condemned were marched out of the city, placed between open ditches, and dispatched by three cannons. On the next day, two hundred suffered the same fate, followed by another hundred two days later. By April 1794 the death toll had reached two thousand. It was a massacre, a butchery of the Lyonnese bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie for which Collot was mainly respon~ible.'~~ To save themselves after Robespierre had them expelled from the Jacobin club in July and believing that they were next on his list of the proscribed, Billaud and Collot conspired with their fellow extremists on the Committee of General Security and with the moderates on the Committee of Public Safety to accuse him before the convention. They denounced him as a dictator and for plotting against the lives of leading Jacobins. But in August, they too came under attack for having been his accomplices and for their own part in the Terror. Notwithstanding their differences, the members of the ruling committee had too long stood together not to fall together, and in the spring of 1795 Billaud and Collot were put on trial, sentenced to deportation, and shipped off to French Guiana.I0' Having been filled with Robespierre's supporters, the Jacobin club was closed in November. The tide had turned, and not just extremists but Jacobins in general were mistrusted and removed from positions of power and influence.

Plans for a Holocaust While the petty-bourgeois Jacobins were being disgraced and displaced by the bourgeois moderates in the convention, the entire policy of the Terror came into disrepute. During the trials that followed those of Robespierre and Saint-Just, it became evident that the Terror was not only directed at counterrevolutionary elements in the population, but was also designed to eliminate the human scum, "to clear away the rubbish," in the words of one member of the revolutionary government. The scum consisted ofthe entire prison population and also good-fornothings: the millions of unemployed and unemployable, the sick and diseased, beggars, useless children and the aged, the Lazarus-layers of the poor which the revolution was supposed to serve. For what sinister purpose were the indiscriminate and collective drownings, or bathing parties, as they were called, at Nantes? For what purpose were the successive crusades, the conscription en masse of ordinary citizens for the homicidal wars beyond the country's borders? Were they too designed "to clear away the r ~ b b i s h " ? ' ~ ~ There was a secret plan of depopulation at work, wrote the first revolutionary communist, Frangois Noel ("Gracchus") Babeuf. Maximilien and his ministers had

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calculated that the regeneration of France could be implemented only by increasing the amount of land available to the poor or by reducing the size of the population. Otherwise, "they would never realize Jean-Jacques' great objective of a perfect government with all the citizens having enough and none having too much." As Rousseau observed, a body politic may be measured in two ways: by the extent of its territory; and by the number of its people. When there is between these two measurements a right relation, "the land should suffice for the maintenance of the inhabitants," and "there should be as many inhabitants as the land can maintain." The sole condition is that each citizen be "neither rich nor poor, but selfsufficient."lo3 That was the ideal, but France had yet to live up to it. It followed that short of territorial expansion through costly and bloody wars, depopulation was the only viable alternative. Robespierre and his ministers had made the requisite calculations, but had found that a massive redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor would still leave everyone in poverty because the land was not big or fertile enough to provide for everyone. As Babeuf summed up the Decemvirs' policy, it was based on the following premises: first, that in the present state of affairs "property has fallen into a few hands and that the great majority of Frenchmen possessed nothing"; second, that by allowing this condition to continue, "a majority would always be slave to the minority"; third, that in order to destroy the owners of property, "the only way was to place all of it in the government's hands"; fourth, that success depended on "immolating the big proprietors through terror sufficiently powerful to persuade others to give up their possessions voluntarily"; fifth, that depopulation was indispensablebecause "the French population exceeded the resources ofthe soil and usefil industry"; and finally, that a portion of the sansculottes must be sacrificed and that "means must be found for doing it."Io4 The means included not only guillotinades, fusillades, and noyades (wholesale drownings), but also the revolutionary wars. "What is this plan of perpetual crusades, of repulsing peace offers, of universal conquest, of the conversion or subjugation of all kings," Babeuf asked, "if it is not the hidden intention to prevent anyone coming back?"'05 Getting rid of human rubbish! Is that what is meant by cleanliness being next to godliness? In Robespierre's warped mind, was this the underside of his Republic of Virtue? A massacre of killers is one thing, but a massacre of the innocent! Plans for revolution gone mad. There can be no doubt about it. Deep republicanism has its seamy side. Depopulation in the national interest when only the survivors stood to benefit! Babeuf s objection to the scheme was its attack on the sansculottes. Robespierre had confused the national interest with the commonweal. By targeting enemies of the people, the guillotine served both interests, but by no stretch of the imagination were the sansculottes their own sanguinary enemies. As evidence of such a monstrous plan for populicide, Babeuf cited a document by an ex-juror on the Revolutionary Tribunal, an intimate of Robespierre and of

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Billaud and Collot among others. It was far from the sole piece of evidence. The papers seized at Robespierre's house after his execution revealed that he and his ministers wished "to annihilate twelve orfifteen millions of the French people, and hoped after this revolutionary transfiguration to distribute to each one [of the survivors] a plough and some land to clear." Another of Robespierre's intimates and a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal testified to the depopulators' belief that "equality would never be anything but a chimera as long as men did not enjoy approximately equal properties." As for the means thereto, that "could never be established until a third of the population had been suppre~sed."'~~ On the witness stand for his role as the butcher ofNantes, Jean-Baptiste Carrier admitted that "this plan of destruction existed." He had orders to carry it out. Although the depopulators may have shown excessive zeal in acting on such orders, the evidence leading to their indictment supports the charge that there was such a plan. The monstrous phrase of Carrier, "Let us make a cemetery of France rather than not regenerate her after our manner," epitomizedthe thinking ofthe extremists, if not of Robespierre himself. Carrier believed that the population of France should be reduced from twenty-five to barely six million. Collot's figure oftwelve million was positively generous by comparison. Even the moderates on the Committee of Public Safety supported the plan. Andre Jeanbon Saint-Andrd (1749-1 8 13) declared in the convention that "in order to establish the Republic securely in France, the population must be reduced by more than half."'07 (Perhaps so, but by a policy of negative population growth instead of indiscriminate guillotinades, fusillades, and noyades!)

A Tribune of the People Babeuf represented the tail-end of Jacobinism, its saving remnant opposed to the Thermidorean reaction, to the official censorship following the Terror, and to the extermination of militant sansculottes in the name of anti-terrorism. As he complained in his journal, The Tribune of the People (18 December 1794)' the proscription of Jacobins was being followed by a White Terror and the further proscription of everything sansculottism stood for. Five months after Robespierre's demise, he regretted the end to the Red Terror and, in a follow-up article on 28 January 1795, called on the sansculottes to overthrow the overthrowers in a class war against the golden class.'08 Followed Babeuf s arrest and that of other Jacobin extremists. On his release from prison in October he resumed publication of his journal, again calling for "open warfare between patricians and plebeians, rich and poor" (6 November 1795). His arrest was again ordered, but this time he eluded the authorities by going underground. Such were the circumstances leading to the publication of a communist manifesto in the genre made famous by Marx and Engels, his "Manifesto of the Plebeians," which appeared in the 30 November 1795 edition of The Tribune

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ofthe P e ~ p l e . " ~ Babeuf s fame rested not only on his "Conspiracy of Equals" aimed at restoring a republican vanguard to power, but also on his communist manifesto. For the first time during the revolution, it overcame the contradiction between Rousseau's goal of equality of property on the one hand and economic freedom on the other. The agrarian law of an equal division of property in land could hardly last once the more industrious and ambitious cultivators made use oftheir freedom to buy up the plots of the lazy and incompetent. Consequently, the only way to realize the Genevan's goal of perfect equality was 'Yo suppress individual property; to place each man in the occupation or trade he knows best; to oblige each to place the fruits of his work in the common store; to establish a simple accounting ofneeds and supplies; and to distribute supplies according to the most scrupulous eq~ality.""~ Henceforth, the old communism based on private property would be relegated to the museum and replaced by this new communism based on collectiveownership. Babeuf s "Manifesto" of 1795 marked the threshold between an obsolete artisan and peasant communism predicated on simple commodity production and the sansculottist or proletarian communism corresponding to capitalism. Babeufs intimate knowledge of peasant life in his native Picardy gave him an understanding of the limitations of agrarian reform much superior to that of the urbane and bookish Saint-Just. In his Fragments on Republican Institutions, SaintJust said: "I defy you not to have unfortunates, unless you arrange for every man to have his piece of land." Beggary would be destroyed by the distribution of national property to the poor. What was this proposal if not the old saw of an agrarian law? On the contrary, Babeuf argued, socialization is preferable to parcellization. A community of goods and of labor based on common ownership of the means of production is a more effective equalizer than is private property evenly distributed."' As he acknowledged in a letter to Dubois de Fosseaux as early as June 1786, the division of the land could be carried out only at the cost of bloodshed and a terrible upheaval. As for redistribution ofthe land in equal portions, it "would deny all the skills which agriculture itself had had to recognize in its own interest; it would abolish every other profession except that of farmer; it would waste both space and time." The same letter contained an exhortation to replace parcellization with collectivizationthrough the organization offratemal communities or collective farms. If peasants work together on a farm instead of cultivating their plots in isolation, he argued, they would quickly become well-to-do. The agrarian law would reverse the course of industrial and agricultural progress; a community of goods and labor would accelerate it. "Breaking up the land among all individuals into tiny but equal plots is tantamount to destroying the greatest sum of resources which could be derived from it through combined labor."ii2 Instead offollowing Robespierre's example ofswallowing Rousseau wholesale, Babeuf relied on the shadowy figure of Morelly, author of The Code of Nature ( 1 755). No matter how it may be divided, wrote Morelly, private property is the ultimate expression of "the desire to have," in a word, "Avarice"-the root of all

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evil. Convinced that "wherenoproperty exists, none of itspernicious consequences could exist," he concluded that all division of goods, whether equal or unequal, is in all societies a temptation to acquire more. Unlike Rousseau, he held amoderately optimistic view of history because of the benefits of progress in the arts and sciences. Babeuffollowed Morelly on both counts and was further persuaded by his detailed proposals for a centrally planned economy.'" Besides Morelly, Babeuf found inspiration in the work of Nicolas Collignon, another shadowy figure whom he called the "Reformer of the Whole World." Published in London in 1786 to avoid the censor, Collignon7s book bore the pretentious, self-congratulatory title of The Precursor of the Transformation of the Whole World. In his letter to Dubois de Fosseaux (8 July 1787) Babeuf wrote: "It seems to me that our Reformer does better than the citizen of Geneva [who] dreamed well; but our man dreams better." Follows a passage in which he defends the reformer's doctrine, but mistakenly attributes it to Rousseau, the doctrine that "since men are absolutely equal, they must not have any private possessions, but must enjoy everything in common." Far from the humble life praised by Rousseau, "our Reformer has us eat four good meals a day [and] dresses us most elegantly." Such a mean between a life of luxury and one reduced to bare necessities, he believed, had become possible because of progress in the arts and s~iences."~ Babeuf was not an uncritical disciple of Rousseau. The more accurate reading of Babeuf s writings is that they were indebted to Rousseau, but also went beyond him. In a manuscript written during the first French Revolution (1 789-1 792), Babeuf questioned the narrow parameters that led Rousseau to think mainly of Geneva, much as Machiavelli had thought mainly of Florence. The Calvinist from Geneva was locked into "the idea of a small farmer, intelligent, hard-working, thrifty by necessity, who would like to see the destruction of large estates," believing that all that was necessary for prudent cultivation was "his little field, his little meadow, his little vineyard, his little farmyard."Nor was that his only mistake. Rousseau hrther believed that a nonascetic egalitarianism was somehow beyond reach and that "all the acquisitions of human history have only made us less happy than we were in the first state of nature."'I5 Ideologically strengthened by his new plebeian communism that stood the test of credibility better than the artisan-peasant communism of the Jacobins, Babeuf began considering ways of implementing it. Unlike Robespierre, who reserved Machiavelli's name for the abuse he hurled at the enemies ofthe revolution, Babeuf realized that The Prince was a virtual guidebook to revolution. In the spirit of The Prince, he warned his readers to beware of the tactics of Robespierre's successors: "The furious wolves [Machiavelli's lions] have turned into flexible, thoughtful foxes. Don't be deceived. They are still carnivorous animals." Although today they are drawing in their claws, tomorrow they will devour you! As he told the VendBme court at his trial: "Whoever wills the end wills the means. To achieve an end, it is essential to overcome all obstacles to it." As he had noted in the immediate wake of Robespierre's execution and the persecutions of revolutionaries that followed, also in words reminiscent of The Prince: "All means of defeating evil people are

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good, providing you s~cceed.""~ Impressed by Machiavelli's realism, Babeuf revised his original estimate of Robespierre and the Grand Terror. In February 1796, he tried to persuade his former cellmate, the extremist Joseph Dobson, to endorse Robespierre's political strategy of signaling right and turning left. In a letter to Dobson, he praised Robespierre and Saint-Just for being "worth more than all the other revolutionaries taken together" and upheld their dictatorial government as being "devilishly well contrived." Devilish? In other words, Machiavellian! As for Robespierre's purges of extremists in the Paris Commune, Babeuf defended his efforts to steer a middle course between the ultras and the citras. "I won't examine the question whether Hebert and Chaumette [the principal leaders ofthe Left Opposition]were innocent. Even if they were, I still justify Robespierre. He could rightly claim to be the only person capable of driving the chariot of revolution to its true destination." Babeuf concludes his defense of the Incorruptible with another lesson taken from The Prince: "The salvation oftwenty-five million people cannot be balanced against the preservation of a few dubious individuals." A regenerator "must mow down everything that gets in his way.""' Taking still another lesson from The Prince, Babeuf reasoned that it was not enough to be a prophet; one must be a prophet armed. Rousseau's Social Contract was an admirable work, but its author left readers without the means of implementing it. Where was Rousseau's equivalent of Cesare Borgia, far better, of Robespierre? The Jacobin Constitution of 1793 was doubtlessly patterned on the Genevan constitution-maker.Its first article stressed equality before liberty. But the constitution had to be implemented by whatever means; hence, its last article on the right of insurrection. When government violates the rights of the people, a popular insurrection becomes "the most sacred of rights, and the most indispensable of duties.""* Babeuf and the communist nucleus of conspirators known as the "Equals" believed that a successful revolutionarymovement would have to rely on the broad masses-on the petty-bourgeoisie in addition to the sansculottes. A popular front was indispensable, which implied the suppression of factions both right and left. It also implied a tortuous Machiavellism to hold the front together.

The Conspiracy of Equals Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1761-1 837), Babeuf s companion in arms, criticized the ultras who opposed Robespierre for looking to the end only, without adjusting to existing circumstances and the conditions for making a successful revolution. Although good citizens, they were bad pilots. Their communism stared you in the face instead of being masked. An Italian by birth and a French citizen by dint of his support of the revolution, Buonarroti was a convinced Machiavellian and the grey eminence behind Babeuf s conspiracy. Robespierre, he believed, was a closet com-

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munist, a model of Machiavellism, notwithstanding his repudiation and imperfect understanding of it.' l9 The intellectual wellsprings of Buonarroti's republicanism may be traced to three principal sources: to a close reading of Machiavelli, his fellow Florentine; to the citizen of Geneva whom he counted as his mentor; and to the underground Order of the Illuminati, likewise indebted to both. A secret society within masonry founded in 1776 in Bavaria, with proselytizing adepts in Florence as well as Paris, the Illuminati stressed the revolutionary implications of Rousseau's political philosophy. Yet nothing was more frequently discussed among them than "the propriety of employing, for a good purpose, the means which the wicked employed for evil purposes." The preponderance of good in the outcome supposedly consecrated every means employed to that end. Infiltration into high public offices was but one of several Machiavellian schemes favored by them; the masking of their subversive aims was another, as were the pious frauds they used to win over the innocent. Although aiming to abolish Christianity, they believed they were following in the footsteps of Jesus, who deliberately "concealed the precious meaning of his doctrines [of Liberty and Equality], but filly disclosed them to a chosen few."I2O During his trial at VendBme, Buonarroti declared that Rousseau was his favorite author: "The dogmas of equality and of popular sovereignty inflamed my being." What he did not reveal was that as early as 1786, he had joined a masonic lodge in Florence where, under the guise of practicing the Scottish rites of the Masonic Order, the Illuminati "may have been propagating their radical interpretation of [Rousseau]." Although his initiation at this time into the Illuminati remains conjectural, his later familiarity with it is not.I2' In the judgment of one recent biographer of this would-be prince, Buonarroti thought of himself as a secular Loyola, perhaps also as a secular Savonarola, and in any case as a Machiavellian. After Thermidor, the collapse of free institutions, and the general corruption of sentiments following the failure of the Conspiracy of Equals, he wrote, one cannot find future regeneration save in "a secret corps guided by a pure and dictatorial authority." Unlike what the Jesuits did to mislead and enslave men, Buonarroti's 1823 secret society patterned on the Illuminati aimed to enlighten and deliver them. Machiavellian duplicity might be used for good as well as evil: "ifthe end is good and wise, what difference does it make ifthe means have been used in other circumstances for a contrary end!"122 The Conspiracy of Equals represents the first attempt to bring Morelly's collectivistic communism-Buronarroti too had read The Code of Nature-from the imaginary world into the real one, from theory into practice. As one of the organizers of the Secret Directory of Public Safety and of its Insurrectional Committee set up on 30 March 1796, Buonarroti had played a major role in the insurrection. In line with his expertise in masonry, we may attribute to him the organizational structure of the c~nspiracy.'~~ For the conspiracy to succeed, it had to link the sansculottists in the former Electoral Club with the populists in the Jacobin Club. After both clubs were forcibly

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closed by the White Terror in November 1794, Babeuf s underground Tribune of the People became the rallying point of the sansculottists; these he soon won over to the proletarian communism later set forth in his "Manifesto of the Plebeians." The Jacobins rallied around the Pantheon Club; Buonarroti was a member and the vital link to its role in the conspiracy. Since the Babeuvists were outnumbered by the Jacobins, for strategical reasons lip service had to be given to the Jacobins' demand for a return to the principles ofthe 1793 constitution,to the sacred right of private property and the panacea of land redistributi~n.'~~ Organizationally,this meant that the majority in the conspiracy would not be privy to the plans ofthe minority. At the center ofthe organization stood the leading group of Babeuvists backed by a small number of hardened sansculottists; then came the fringe of sympathizers, the former followers of Robespierre and Saint-Just who only incompletely shared Babeuf s revolutionary ideals. Finally, there were the masses of peasants and proletarians who were to be coaxed into participation. Breaking with the tradition of popular insurrections starring the Paris Commune, the conspiracy "postulated that after power had been seized by the insurrection, it would be foolish to return it into the hands of an assembly elected under the principles of political democracy." Thus the consolidation of power was believed indispensable for recasting society and establishingnew institutions. Such was Buonarroti's singular contribution to the pyramidal organization of the conspiracy and its ideology of revolutionary dictatorship predicated on his experience of revolutionary masonry-the seeds of what later would sprout into Lenin's theory and practice of the dictatorship of the pr01etariat.I~~ The conspiratorsknew that to succeed they would have to win over not only the workers in the nation's capital slated to become the center of the insurrection, but also elements in the armed forces. The army's composition had radically changed since 1789: the officers were almost all former common soldiers who had no income but their army pay; they ate from the same mess bowl as did ordinary soldiers; they fraternized with them. Yet most soldierswere illiterate, they came from peasant stock and could not be relied upon to support a sansculottist uprising. So the main thrust of Babeuf s propaganda directed to soldiers was not to enlist them in the insurrection, but to prevent them from shooting down their fellow citizen^."^ The conspiracywas betrayed before the insurrection got off ground and Babeuf was executed; but Buonarroti survived the trial to spread the example, the lessons, and the theory of revolutionary dictatorship to posterity. What were the lessons? The rule of an enlightened vanguard was preferable, he believed, to the unreliable votes of a stupid majority. In order to steer the revolution through to its conclusion, it must be led by "wise and courageous citizens, who, strongly impregnated with the love of country and humanity, have long before fathomed the sources of public calamity, [and] have disenthralled themselves from the common prejudices and vices of their age." Unlike the common herd, these illuminated, superior beings find happiness in "rendering themselves immortal by ensuring the triumph of equality." Therein lay the payoff of the hypothetical vanguard-their revolutionary immortality. They alone could

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be trusted to use dictatorial means befitting a modern prince. "To what can we reasonably attribute the loss of democracy and liberty in France," Buonarroti asked, if not to democracy and liberty themselves, to unenlightened majorities as yet incapable of using the suffrage ~ i s e l y ? ' ~He ' never changed this assessment of the revolution-it was his last word on responsible government and Rousseau's legacy.

Notes 1. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, vii-viii, 85, 545-547. 2. Discourses, Introduction to Book One. 3. Discourses, 1.17; and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 208-2 10. 4. Discourses, 1.2, 3; l .I, 18, 37; 1.37; 2.19; 3.16; 3.25. 5. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 250-25 1. 6. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 251-252. 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Constitutional Project for Corsica, in idem, Political Writings, ed. and trans. Frederick Watkins (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons. 1953). 3 17, 324. 8. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, 128-130, 138; idem, The Machiavellian Moment, 545-547; and Gramsci, The Modern Prince, 137-139, 142. 9. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, 129. 10. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1:7 (18). I 1. Curzio Malaparte, Coup d 'Etat: The Technique of Revolution, trans. Sylvia Saunders (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1932), 212, 213. 12. Curzio Malaparte, lo, in Russia e in Cina (Florence: Vallecchi, 1962),43,47, 124128, 339-342. 13. Charles Blitzer, An Immortal Commonwealth: The Political Thought of James Harrington (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), 293-294. 14. James Harrington, "Preliminaries" of Oceana, ed. S.B. Liljegren (Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winters, 1924), 15; and William T. Bluhm, Theories ofthe Political System: Classics of Political Thought and Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 338. 15. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory ofPossessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1WO), 164, 166, 181. 16. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 168, 185-186, 188. 17. Bluhm, Theories ofthe PoliticalSystem, 330; and Hugh F. Russell-Smith, Harrington and His Oceana: A Study of a 17th Century Utopia and Its Influence in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 139. 18. Richard Ashcraft, "John Locke's Library: Portrait of an Intellectual," in idem, ed. John Locke: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 199I), 1:19; and Cicero, De Re Publica, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952; orig. pub. ca. 51 B.C.), l.xxv.39-xxix.45, l.xxv.54, and l.xliv.68-xlv.69. On Cicero's acknowledged debt to Polybius' theory of political cycles and of the best constitution as a mixed or balanced one, see 1 .xx.34ff.

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19. Richard Ashcrafi, "Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government: Radicalism and Lockean Political Theory," in John Locke: Critical Assessments, 1 :67,69; and John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980; orig. pub. 1690), 19:213. 20. Ashcrafi, "Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises ofGovernment," in John Locke: Critical Assessments, 1:73,82-83, 84,86, 88. 21. Merle Curti, "The Great Mr. Locke: America's Philosopher, 1783-1861," in John Locke: Critical Assessments, 1:304, 322-323, 33 1-332. 22. Russell-Smith, Harrington and His Oceana, 186-189; and John Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States ofAmerica, 3 vols. (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1794; orig. pub. l787), 1:l48-l49, 158-169; 2:9-134. On Adams' use of the four volumes of Machiavelli's works in his personal library, see Prezzolini, Machiavelli, 3 15-316. 23. Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States ofAmerica, 3:2. 24. Russell-Smith, Harrington and His Oceana, 7, 19, 20, 33, 125, 178, 186. See also Bluhm, Theories of the Political System, 347-359. 25. Discourses, 1.2. 26. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, 7, 24; and Garrett Mattingly, "Political Science or Political Satire?'in Jensen, Machiavelli, 100. 27. Cited by Burnham, The Machiavellians, 77, 78. 28. J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 85-87,90-91,94-96,99-102; and idem, The Machiavellian Moment, 194, 197, 2 18. 29. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:181. 30. Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.4; 3.25,28. 3 1. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 208,209; and Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.55. 32. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 2 10; and Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.17. 33. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, 88; and Machiavelli, Discourses, 3.16. 34. J.G.A. Pocock, "1776: The Revolution Against Parliament," in idem, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). 267-268,280-281. 35. Machiavelli, Discourses, 2.19. 36. Machiavelli is directly cited in The Social Contract in 2.3 n.2 (27), 2.7 n.1 (41), 3.6 (71), 3.6 n.l (71), 3.9 n.l (83-84), 3.10 n.1 (85); and obliquely in 3.4 (66). Page numbers are given in parentheses to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1950); idem, Discourse on Political Economy, in The Social Contract and Discourses, 298,306,3 16; and Willmore Kendall, Introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, trans. Willmore Kendall (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1985), xxxv. 37. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Introduction (3), 3.15 (96). 38. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin oflnequality, in The Social Contract and Discourses, 250-255; 281-282 (Appendix). 39. Social Contract, 2.4 (29-30). 40. Social Contract, 2.4 (30); 2.3 (27). 4 1. Social Contract, 2.1 (24). 42. Social Contract, 1.10 (46-49). 43. Social Contract, 2.5 (32-33); 1.7 (18).

The First Republican Vanguard 44. Social Contract, 2.7 (38, 39,40). 45. Social Contract, 2.7 (40,41). 46. Social Contract, 2.1 1 (49-50, and 50 n.1). 47. Social Contract, 3.1 (56-57). 48. Social Contract, 3.2 (61). 49. Social Contract, 3.4 (64-65). 50. Social Contract, 3.5 (67-68,69). 5 1. Social Contract, 3.6 (7 1-72); and 2.6 (36). 52. Social Contract, 3.7 (76). 53. Social Contract, 3.9 (83). 54. Social Contract, 3.10 (84-87). 55. Social Contract, 3.15 (93, 94). 56. Social Contract, 4.6 (123, 124). 57. Social Contract, 4.8 (134, 135, 138-140). 58. Charles W. Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 2:3 14. 59. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 281 (Appendix). 60. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 26, 76. 6 1. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 6-8, 11- 14. 62. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 27,29,30. 63. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 36,52,53. 64. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 68, 69, 79. 65. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 80, 82, 86. 66. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 11- 12, 14, 19, 19-20. 67. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 20,21. 68. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 16-17,67,72. 69. Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 73, 74, 74-75. 70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (New York: Modem Library, n.d.), 29-3 1,95-104, 3 18-320. 7 1. Rousseau, Confessions, 3 1. 72. Rousseau, Confessions, 379, 382. 73. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 3:4 (66). 74. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 3:5 (69). 75. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 112, 129. 76. Hill, The Experience of Defeat, 29, 30, 31,34,35-36. 77. Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 19-20; and Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent, 2 vols. (New York: Hafner, 1962), 1.5: 1-1 1; and 1.11:6, 16. 78. Albert Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1 799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon, trans. Alan Forrest and Colin Jones (New York: Vintage, 1975; orig. pub. 1962), 117-124, 131-136, 182-193. 79. Soboul, The French Revolution, 44,46, 52, 136,2 12-216,246-25 1. 80. Soboul, The French Revolution, 3 14-3 17, 323-335; and R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution, rev. ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989; orig. pub. 1969), 44-53, 75, 127. 8 1. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 54-55. 82. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 44, 57, 127,305-306,3 16-317, 362-378. 83. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 77, 3 10.

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84. J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Norton. 1970), 80, 86. 85. Maximilien Robespierre, "Contre le philosophisme et pour la libertt des cukes (21 novembre 1793)," in Textes Choisis, 3 vols. (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1958), 3234: and Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 121. 86. Maximilien Robespierre, "Sur lesprincipes du gouvemement rtvolutionnaire (25 de'cembre 1793)," in Textes Choisis, 3:98, 99, 101, 102; and Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 264. 87. Maximilien Robespierre, "Sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention nationale dans I'administration inttrieure de la Rtpublique (5fe'vrier 1794)," in TextesChoisis,3:111, 112-113, 114, 116, 118, 119. 88. Maximilien Robespierre, "Sur les rapports des idtes religieuses et morales avec les principes rkpublicaine et sur les fetes nationales (7 mai 1794)," in Textes Choisis, 3: 156, 157, 166, 167, 167-168, 174, 175; and J.M. Thompson, Robespierre and the French Revolution (New York: Collier, 1971), 115-116. 89. See the following works of Maximilien Robespierre in Textes Choisis: "Sur la situation politique de la republique (18 novembre 1793)," 3:59-80; "Sur la Faction Fabre d'Eglantine (mars 1794)," 3: 132-146;"Projet de rapport sur I'affaire Chabet (mars 1794);' 3: 149-154; "Sur les rapports des idtes religiouses et morales avec les principes rtpublicaine et sur les Etes nationales (7mai 1794)," 3: 172-174; and "Discours prononcts dans la stance du 8 thermidor an I1 (26juillet 1794), 3: 181-194. 90. Robespierre, "Discours prononct dans la stance du 8 thermidor an I1 (26 juillet 1794)," in Textes Choisis, 3:193. 91. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 371, 371 -372. 92. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 40-41,43,59,46-48,67-68,68-69,74-75, 156, 126-127, 285-287. 93. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 12; Billaud cited. 94. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 12-13. 95. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 285; Billaud cited. See Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, 306. 96. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 156, 157; Collot cited. 97. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 160, 165; Collot cited. 98. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 166, 167. 99. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 167. 100. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 168, 169, 170. 101. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 376, 382. 102. Bertrand Barkre (1755-1841), one of the few Decemvirs to survive the bourgeois backlash, cited by Gracchus Babeuf, Du systgme de Dkpopulation, ou La Vie et les Crimes de Carrier (Paris: Franklin, 1795), 28; and Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the butcher of Nantes, cited by Nesta H. Webster, The French Revolution (Hollywood, Calif.: Angriff, 1983; orig. pub. 1919), 419. 103. B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuj The First Revolutionary Communist (Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 1978), 199; Babeuf, Du Systgme de De'population, 25-26. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, 2: 10 (46-47). 104. Babeuf, Du Systdme de De'population, 26, 27,28. 105. Babeuf, Du Systgme de De'population, 30-3 1. 106. Webster, The French Revolution, 424-425. 107. Webster, The French Revolution, 426,427; 428, Carrier and Saint-Andrt cited. 108. Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1 799,425,426,439.

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109. Soboul, The French Revolution, 482,483. 110. Gracchus Babeuf, "Le Manifeste des PlbbCiens," in Textes Choisis (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1965), 2 16. l 11. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 284, Saint-Just cited. 112. Ian H. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). 25-26, Babeuf cited; and Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1 799,488, Babeuf cited. 113. Morelly, "Code ofNature (1755): in Socialist Thought: A Documentary History, ed. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor, 1964), 18,20-3 1;and Filippo Buonarroti, Babeufs Conspiracy for Equality, trans. Bronterre O'Brien (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965; orig. pub. 1828), 270; Morelly cited by Babeuf 1 14. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf; 22-23; and "Babeuf to Dubois de Fosseaux (8 July 1787)," in Socialist Thought, 49-50. 115. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf; 21,22, Babeuf cited. 116. Birchall, The Spectre ofBabeuf; 17; 53, Babeuf cited; and 154, Babeuf cited. 117. Gracchus Babeuf, "Au Citoyen Joseph Bodson (28fe'vrier 1796)," in Textes Choisis, 224,225. 118."The French ConstitutionAdopted by theNational Convention"(l793), in Buonarroti. Babeuf s Conspiracy for Equality, 279,282. 119. Babeuf, "Au Citoyen Joseph Bodson," 226; Buonarroti, Babeufs Conspiracy for Equality, 31; and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti (I 761-1837) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 40. 120. Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist, 11; and John Robison, Proofs o f a Conspiracy (Boston, Mass.: Western Islands, 1967; orig. pub. 1798), 61 (quote), 74,85,89, 91 (quote), 92 (quote). 121. Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist, 10 (quote), 35-36. 122. Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist, 40. 123. Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist, 14,76,79; and Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1 799,490. 124. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf; 53-54; and Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1 799,421. 125. Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1 799,490-491 ;and Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf; 54-55,59. 126. Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf; 67-68. 127. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 2 14,215 (quotes).

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The Second Republican Vanguard The first republican vanguard led to a second that further radicalized Machiavelli's legacy. By doing away with Niccolo's subterfuges, his legacy got a new lease on life when Karl Marx adapted it to the lower class of hired hands thrown up by the industrial revolution and by modem capitalism. Both the Communist Manifesto and Marx's Capital are Machiavellian classics adapted to this new mode of production and the new class of proletarians. But they were not the last word. That honor fell to Lenin's republican vanguard and the advent of twentieth-century communism. Although the Marxist beginnings spumed the ascetic trappings of deep republicanism and Robespierre's Reign of Virtue, these were partly revived by the original Bolsheviks. V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky led the way. A Commune State patterned on the 1871 Paris Commune became the express goal of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, a model followed by the early Soviet Socialist Republics and a partial reality under Joseph Stalin-a second Robespierre. But history repeated itself in the split between the Bolshevik Party's left and right wings. Once again a revolutionary center triumphed, leading to a purge of the ultras in the late 1920s and then the citras in the 1930s. Assailed by Hitler's invasion ofthe Soviet Union in 1941, deep republicanism survived with the help of shallow republicanism represented by the Atlantic Model from across the ocean. When the Grand Alliance collapsed after World War 11, the Cold War that followed proved a greater threat to deep republicanism than Hitler's hordes. Because the seeds of shallow republicanism were never fully destroyed in the Soviet Union, they continued to sprout within the Bolshevik Party until a new leadership emerged that scuttled the revolution and made its peace with the West. That is the pleasant way of saying that the Iron Curtain dissolved and corruption became rampant on both sides of the Atlantic. Like the Paris Commune,the Soviet Commune perished from both external and internal forces hostile to republican efforts to transform Russian society in the image of a public monastery. Neither Savonarola nor Machiavelli were its unarmed prophets, and its armed prophets-Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky-were no longer alive. It remained for Mao during the much maligned Chinese Cultural Revolution

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to revive deep republicanism and bring it to full flower. But Asian backwardness proved its undoing when seduced by the fleshpots of the West. Thus a second republican vanguard perished, destroyed by its shallow cousin.

The Machiavelli of the Labor Movement Following in Machiavelli's footsteps, Karl Marx sought to plumb the reality behind the appearances, the practical truth of social relations concealed by political ideologies and official apologetics. "Marx teaches us," wrote Benedetto Croce, "to penetrate to what society is in its actual truth." He was "surprised that no one has thought of calling him 'the most notable successor of the Italian Niccolo Machiavelli'; a Machiavelli of the labor movement."' Croce was not the only one to notice that Marx in effect, if not intention, was a disciple of Machiavelli. Gramsci suggested as much, as did Louis Althusser in reflecting on Gramsci's Notebooks on Machiavelli. Except for Rousseau's Discourse on Political Economy, the role of politics in production had been a neglected dimension of human knowledge until Marx responded to the challenge. Marx had a low opinion of both Robespierre and the ultra-revolutionary Jacobins whom he castigated as crude egalitariansand economic levelers. But there can be no gainsaying his immense contribution to Machiavellism in matters of political e~onomy.~ First, his revision of Machiavelli's political agenda predicated not on a "great man" theory of history but on impersonal economic forces, on mainly objective instead of subjective conditions of revolution, was a major advance over his Florentine precursor. Second, his reinterpretation of fortune as a function of economic-technical rather than climatological and sociological factors was another major advance. Third, the greater weight he assigned to fortune generally, as the arbiter not just of half of our actions but by far the greater part, was another theoretical breakthrough toward a greater sense of political realism. It has gradually come to the attention of the club of neo-Marxists bent on rethinking Marxism that Marx's intellectual debt to Machiavelli may have been even greater than his debt to Hegel. As Gramsci was perhaps the first to note, "the founder of the philosophy of praxis [Marx] has accomplished for a modem social group the same thing that Machiavelli accomplished in his time."3 Gramsci was alluding to Marx's realistic approach to social events shared with Machiavelli-the unmasking ofthe ideological mystifications,justifications, and cover-ups ofthe way things are-n behalf of the modern proletariat. Marx's intellectual pedigree covers not only the period from Hegel to Marx-as in Sidney Hook's 1936 classic study of Marx's intellectual development-but also from Machiavelli to Hegel. As Marx described his dialectical method, it is "not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite." With Hegel it was standing on its head and "must be turned right side up again." Whence did Marx learn to treat social events as a process of natural history governed by

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laws independent of human will, consciousness, and intelligence, while also "determining that will, consciousness,and intelligen~e"?~ Whence did he learn that fortune plays the decisive role in shaping human history and that the conscious element plays only a subordinate role? Although Frederick Engels claims that we owe to Marx the discovery of the materialist interpretation of history, its prescientific formulation may be traced to Machiavelli. As Louis Althusser observes, there is the same critical relation between Machiavelli andtraditional political theory as between Marx and bourgeois political economy. In his posthumously published essay, "Machiavelli's Solitude," he argues that at the level of the economy Marx engaged in unveiling secrets and divulging the truth in the same way that Machiavelli did at the level ofthe state. Both ofthem underscored the role of force and fraud behind the ideologies buttressing the accumulation respectively of political power and material wealth. At the origins of capitalism Marx discovered primitive accumulation in the form of pillage, robberies, and extortions. At the origins of states Machiavelli discovered the primitive accumulation ofpolitical power through conquest and lies of domination in the name of justice and the public intere~t.~ What distinguishes Marx from other political thinkers is that, along with Harrington, Rousseau, and Adams, he belonged to the handful of those who were most conversantwith the Florentine's works. His biographers note that he had pored over The Prince before moving to Paris in October 1843. His first reference to Machiavelli's work appeared as early as 5 May 1842 in an article on freedom of the press in the Rheinische Zeitung: "Machiavelli asserts that for princes the bad has better consequences than the good." Two months later in an article for the same journal, he referred to Machiavelli as having been the first "to regard the state through human eyes and to deduce its natural laws [of development] from reason and experience, and not from theology." Four years later, in a book coauthored with Engels, he wrote: "Starting with Machiavelli, might has been represented as the basis of right. Thereby the theoretical view of politics was freed from m~rality."~ The Florentine History was another of his favorite works. In a letter to Engels dated25 September 1857,Marx noted the humor in Machiavelli's description ofthe tactical tricks ofthe Florentine condottieri."His [Machiavelli's] history of Florence is a masterpiece," he added.' In an article written for the New York Daily Tribune (4 August 1859), he again referred to Machiavelli's Florentine History as having "traced in the papal dominion the source of Italian degradation." Circumstantial evidence indicates that he also delved into Machiavelli's Art of War. He was at least familiar with it from having read Engels' two articles, "Army" and "Artillery," for The New American Cyclopedia written in 1857 and published in 1858.' Still, Marx followed the common usage of "Machiavellian" as a term of abuse for those who defended their political schemes on the presumption that private ends justifL any means. Since Marx's reading of political events combined an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things with the recognition of its negation, of its inevitable breaking up, it can well be called Ma~hiavellian.~ Whereas Machiavelli identified

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the destabilizing elements in successive political formations with the replacement of leaders celebrated for their virtue by those given to greed for wealth and power, Marx focused on class struggles that toppled the parasitic landowning nobility and threatened to do the same to its bourgeois successor. Marx revealed the seeds of self-destruction inherent in successive economic formations. Instead of the sequence from monarchy through aristocracy to democracy and beyond to mixed government and finally to a republic of equals, Marx focused on the sequence from slavery through feudalism to capitalism and beyond to socialism and communism. Private ownership of the means of production, exploitation, and the resulting disparities between rich and poor compounded by resistance to technological change, he argued, were the factors that undermined economic systems. How simpleminded by comparison was Machiavelli's focus on the corrupting effects of pelf and power in dissolving the principal forms of government! Consider the parallels between The Prince and Marx's "Manifesto of the Communist Party." Although the sequence differs, each is logically organized into three major parts. The first and longest section of The Prince on the subjective conditions for seizing and holding power dominates the discussion through chapter 24. The second, on the role of fortune or the objective conditions beyond human control that influence the outcome, is the subject of chapter 25. The third, or final chapter, underscores the national purpose, end, or goal-the liberation of Italy from French domination. That is the task Machiavelli assigns to the prince, a virtual new Moses under circumstancesthat are seemingly favorable for national liberation, provided the prince adopts the methods set forth as examples.1° The Manifesto's opening section on the objective conditions of overcoming wage-slavery corresponds to Machiavelli's discussion of fortune in chapter 25. Unlike The Prince, it receives the most detailed treatment and is by far the weightiest in content. The second, on the program or goal, corresponds to The Prince's final chapter although the emphasis is on proletarian instead of national liberation. The third section, a critique of false prophets and pseudo-freedoms, is the flip side of the foregoing section-an unmasking of alternative goals that are liberating in name only. Rather than an independent contribution, it may be considered an adjunct of the second section. The final section on strategy corresponds to The Prince's first twenty-four chapters. But again, the focus is not on a prospective national savior but on making a revolution and ensuring a democratic road to socialism." Marx completed the edifice that Machiavelli began. He reordered the priorities by assigning first place to historical development or the rule of fortune, and last place to matters of strategy. He explained the development of modern society and examined the conditionsbeyond human control in their three principal dimensions: economic, political, and cultural. His materialist interpretation of histojl did so in breadth as early as the Manifesto, while his exposition of the secret of capitalist accumulation in depth had to wait until the publication of Capital. To this extent

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Marx was a Machiavellian-surely the most consequential one before Lenin appeared on the scene. The Manifsto agrees with The Prince that the affairs of this world are under the direction of fortune and partly escape human control. Consequently, whoever as-pires to rule will be successful who adapts his mode of procedure to the times, but unsuccessful if the times do not accord with his procedure. Thus Marx stresses the objective conditions of proletarian emancipation without which the subjective conditions-the proletariat's efforts to make a revolution-are hopeless. These include commercial crises that put on trial the entire bourgeois society; massive unemployment such that the bourgeoisie has to feed the poor instead of being fed by them; the development of modern industry that replaces the isolation ofworkers with their combination in trade unions; and the "more or less veiled civil war" that ultimately breaks out into open rev~lution.'~ No society can survive without respect for law, morality, and religion, said Machiavelli. The Manifesto says as much. The brutal effects of capitalist exploitation contribute to large-scale crime. Without the security that comes from ownership, wage earners are led "to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property." Subjection to the despotic rule of capital "has stripped him [the wage laborer] of every trace of national character." As a result, "Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices."I3 The communists, writes Mam, have for their immediate aim the same as that of class-consciousproletarians everywhere: "overthrow ofthe bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power." That is the condition of mass redemption; only then does the proletariat constitute itself the nation. Such is the Manifesto's version of Machiavelli's national revolution that is social in content and that legitimates resort to violence.I4 Are there traces of Machiavelli's liberalism in the Manifesto? Although a government balancing class interests is a far cry from Marx's envisioned classless society, his vaunted emancipation of the proletariat is predicated on winning the support of other classes in the battle for democracy. The proletariat is not a homogeneous whole; it includes upper as well as lower strata, "the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science." Their interests may not be antagonistic,but they surely need to be balanced. Nor does the Manifesto rule out a plurality of political parties representing different segments of the proletariat. Although their immediate aim is the same, the communists are distinguished from other proletarian parties by being that segment which pushes forward the others from "clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian mo~ement."'~ Marx follows in Machiavelli's footsteps by welcoming the use of violence, but rejects fraud as a means of liberation because of distrust of conspiracies. Although in the past communists relied on fraud in order to conceal their views and aims, they now "openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions."16 The Manifesto is a political statement founded on an economic appraisal of bourgeois society in the course of destroying itself

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economically, and increasingly incapable of defending itself politically. Marx invokes forcible overthrow only when conditions, which cannot themselves be created, are ripe for success. The Jacobins had failed to take Machiavelli's lessons to heart. In his "Critical Marginal Notes on the Article 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform,"' published in Yomarts (7 and 10 August 1844), Marx faults the Jacobins for not tracing the source of political defects to a definite mode of production. The heroes of the French Revolution further believed they could reform society by a political act. "Thus, Robespierre saw in great poverty and greater wealth only an obstacle topure democracy. Therefore, he wished to establish a universal Spartan frugality." Although politics is the expression of will, Marx contended, social defects are not simply removed by an act of will." It follows that the Jacobins' mainly political approach to social problems threatened to be in vain. Marx feared that the emerging proletarian movement would fall into this egregioustrap. "The more developed and universal the political understanding of a people, the more does the proletariat-at any rate at the beginning ofthe movement-squander its forces in senseless,useless revolts, which are drowned in blood." Because his thinking is narrowly political, "the proletarian sees the cause of all evils in the will, and all means of remedy in violence and in the overthrow of aparticular form of state."" Marx reproved the ultra-Jacobins--Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui-for relying on fraud, trickery, and conspiracy when conditions called for other forms of resistance. In a double review of books by two police agents in the pre-1848 and 1848 secret societies, he faults Babeuf s followers for launching uprisings prematurely: "The desperate recklessness which is exhibited in every insurrection in Paris is introduced precisely by those veteran professional conspirators." They are the first to erect and command the barricades, to organize resistance, to lead the looting of arms shops, to "launch a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a revolution." Since the only condition they recognize is the careful preparation of the conspiracy, Marx called them alchemists of revolution. Hoping to work revolutionary miracles, they leap at the chance to use destructive devices in their battles with the police. All for nothing, since they are easily infiltrated by police spies and represent a lumpenproletarian caricature of a real revol~tion.'~ In his speech at the anniversary of the People's Paper (14 April 1856), a Chartist newspaper published in London from 1852 to 1858, Marx described the Jacobin-inspired revolutions of 1848 as but "small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society." Prematurely, they had proclaimed the emancipation of the proletariat when bourgeois society on the Continent was still in its swaddling clothes. As matters turned out, "steam, electricity, and the self-acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even citizens Barbts, Raspail, and Blanqui." That was because the "new-fangled sources of wealth, by some strange, weird spell, are turned into sources of want." Far more damaging to bourgeois society than movements of overthrow, Marx concluded, were the

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destabilizing effects of machinery on the social relations of p r o d u c t i ~ n . ~ ~ Machiavelli had associated fortune with luck, chance, fate, or accident, with examples of physical nature best exemplified by raging floods that can be managed by constructing dikes. Marx's great improvement was to expand this list to include the mode of production that is not so readily managed. Although a human creation, no act of government or will could alter or manage it beyond certain narrow limits. Marx's tour de force was to associate Mistress Fortune with historical and technological forces beyond human control. It never occurred to Machiavelli that human creations might become independent of their maker, that modem society might resemble "the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world which he has called up by his spells." It never occurred to him that the history of modem industry and commerce might come to resemble the raging seas overflowingthe dikes erected to contain them-the commercial and industrial crises that periodically broke out like epidemics and threatened to engulf the bourgeois mode of production in Marx's day." Of what avail was the Machiavellian reliance on force and fraud when confronted with such epidemics? The idea that "political acts, grand performances of state, are decisive in history is as old as written history itself," wrote Frederick Engels. But the "force theory" accounts only for the icing on the historical cake. A careful investigation of past societies reveals not that politics determines the state of the economy but rather the reverse relationship, that political phenomena grow out of and respond to economic conditions operating "quietly in the background, behind these noisy scenes on the stage."" Machiavelli's historical and political works were flawed for presuming that successive forms of government were founded on force and fraud and must ultimately be explained by political causes. Even granting that all past history can be traced to the early enslavement of man by man, one has still not gotten to the bottom of the matter, wrote Engels. Slavery depends on the possibility of the slave producing not only for his own needs, but also an economic surplus. Otherwise, he is a useless burden on whoever subjugates him. In order to make use of him, his owner must begin by possessing a certain minimum of property that may have been gotten by labor or trade rather than stolen or obtained by fraud: "first, the instruments and material for his slave's labor; and secondly, the means of bare subsistence for him." Before slavery becomes possible, "a certain level of production must already have been reached and a certain inequality in distribution must already have appeared." Force and fraud "may be able to change the possession of, but cannot create, private property as Initially, prisoners of war were killed. It was only when it became possible for them to produce a surplus that slavery on a mass scale appeared: "force, instead of controlling the economic situation, was on the contrary pressed into the service of the economic situation." Nor could it be eliminated by political action, but only by a new mode of production more effective than the old. Slavery was not an unmitigated evil, declared Engels: without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science, no Roman Empire, and no modern socialism. Shades of Mandeville's

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Fable of the Bees and its perverse thesis: "It is requisite that great numbers should be Ignorant as well as Poor." Otherwise, they won't work!24A great step forward, according to Marx and Engels, albeit on the questionable assumption that, thanks to the progress of science and industry, there would eventually be enough wealth to make economic servitude unnecessary. Such an admission was at least one step ahead of Machiavelli. The republic of virtue would have to wait until the virtual end of human history. And it would have to rely on an Invisible Hand, enabling economic man "to promote an end which was no part of his intention." Or as Adam Smith observed, "I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."25 Private vices, public benefits! Smith was familiar with Mandeville's little classic. "Mandeville, an honest, clear-headed man7'-not the wicked person he was believed to be, according to Marx-was fundamentally right. Again, to quote Mandeville, "it is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor should almost never be idle [but should be worked to the hilt], and yet continually spend what they get." That is because those who get their living by their daily labor have nothing to stir them to work but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. Exploitation of the labor force and the corruption that private wealth entails is a small price to pay for the benefits of material progress required for their eventual overcoming-that would be Marx speaking, not Mandeville. As Smith noted in an early draft of the Wealth ofNations, a common day laborer in Britain or in Holland has not only more wealth and goods than the most respected and active savage in North America, but also more than many a savage prince.26 Contrary to Machiavelli, workers generally prefer the loss of their liberties to not being exploited at all. The worst thing that can happen to a day laborer is not to be employed, says Marx. For the greater the reserve army of the unemployed in proportion to the active labor army, "the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labor." Granting that the accumulation of wealth at one pole is "at the same time accumulation ofmisery, agony oftoil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole," still, without capitalism, socialism or communism is impossible. Capitalist development is progressive; it advances the whole of society. The modern wage laborer is indisputably better off and more advanced than the savage described by Smith, writes Lucio Colletti, although "it is also true that his social condition is continually 'getting ~orse."'~' It is one of the civilizing contributions of capitalism, according to Marx, that it enforces surplus labor under conditions that are more advantageousto the development of the productive forces than under the preceding forms of slavery and serfdom. Capitalism reduces the time devoted to material labor in general. It makes possible the sole genuine freedom that "begins only when labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerationsceases." Although people's wants increase proportionately with increases in wealth, Marx argued that parallel to this development "the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase." Thus he believed it possible for workers to escape the economic treadmill. After the blind

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forces of nature and a society out of control are mastered begins the "development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom." The shortening of the working day is its basic premise.28 So much for Marx the political economist. But his masterpiece, Capital, hardly exhausted his role as the Machiavelli of the labor movement. Nor did his corresponding politics of labor receive its final expression in 1848 with the publication of his other masterpiece, the Communist Manifesto. It had to wait for the arrival of the Paris Commune and what Engels described as its wholesome terror inspired by the words: "Dictatorship of the Proletariatv-the "Commune State," as Lenin later depicted it.29 What would the dictatorship of the proletariat be like? It would be an allproletarian adaptation of the French National Convention of 1793-1794 and a reproduction of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx gives a vivid description of the self-government of producers in The Civil War in France. As government by a single class, it dispensed not only with Polybius' model of amixed constitution, but also with the corresponding division of powers, checks, and balances. It was a working, not a parliamentary, body, with both executive and legislative powers. The first act of the Paris Commune was to abolish the standing army of mercenaries and to replace it with a citizens' militia. Instead of a state power independent of and superior to the nation, representation became direct only where it was responsible-at the local level where the citizens know their delegates and can ensure that their interests will be faithfully represented. The rural communes of every district had their common affairs administered by an assembly of delegates in the central town. These assemblies in turn sent deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate being at any time revocable and bound by the mandat impc!ratif(formal instructions) of his constituents. Following Rousseau, the much vaunted and formerly admired heads of state were reduced to the status of servants to local employers. As Lucio Colletti observes, Marx's political theory and its reformulation by Lenin in State and Revolution were "already foreshadowed and contained in The Social C ~ n t r a c t . " ~ ~ The Paris Commune, Marx believed, was the "political form at last discovered under which to work out the emancipation of labor." Hopehlly, it would proceed to expropriate the expropriators,to establish cooperative production by locally selfmanaged societies, and to regulate national production on a common plan. But that, saidthe slaveholders,is "Communism, 'impossible7Communism!" Not impossible, Marx retorted, but "'possible' Comm~nism."~'

Possible Communism? Marx was mistaken.The Paris Commune was crushed by a slaveholders' revolt, and its leading members were hunted down like wild game and then exterm'inated like vermin. But was it communist, and was it really a workers' government?

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The seventy-two days of the commune from 18 March to 28 May 187 1 was too short to carry out any profound measures of social reform, much less to make a communist or even a socialist revolution. At most it created a legend of revolution and the myth of the commune as a workers' government. What kind of workers? Not wage laborers in their majority, as one might suspect from reading Marx's account. After some 227,000 votes were cast the week after the former city government was toppled and after by-elections were held on 16 April to fill the vacancies ofthe few republican moderates who resigned their posts, the commune government numbered eighty-one members. Some thirty delegates were professionals; another thirty-five could be classified as manual workers, but they were mostly craftsmen and artisans in small workshops. Contrary to Marx's portrait of the Communards, only a minority represented what might be called the labor move-ment, the majority consisting of Jacobin hangovers and their Blanquist allies. Except for the takeover of factories abandoned by their owners, the sacred rights of property remained intact.32 Although a commune state served as a model for the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, Lenin subsequently repudiated it. At most, it resurfaced in March 192 1 in the form of the Kronstadt Commune, which survived for sixteen days and was hailed by anarchists as "the Second Paris Commune." Contrary to the Bolshevik government that savagely crushed it, the Kronstadt rebellion was not inspired and led by anarchists, nor was it a right-wing Menshevik plot. Rank-andfile communists seem to have predominated, but with a communist ideology vague and ill-defit~ed.~~ Against opposition from the official Moscow-oriented Communist Party, a Spanish equivalent ofthe Paris Commune appeared during the critical moments of the Spanish Civil War. A commune government was established in Barcelona, lasting from the beginning of September 1936 to May 1937, that went considerably beyond the Paris Commune in legalizingexpropriationsand encouraging collective farms and worker-managed industries. Spurred on by the Communist Party, the republican government in Madrid continued to pressure it to halt the collectivizations, finally deciding to stamp out the nascent proletarian di~tatorship.~~ Defended by workers' militias, it was no match for the central government even in the midst of a civil war. After World War I1 a commune state with workers' self-managementwould become the official system adopted by the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, but only after the 1948 break with the Soviet Union had made it possible. Yet it took only a few years for Milovan Djilas, the disillusioned former vice president, to expose the system as a concession to the lower echelons of the professional bureaucracy, while "only crumbs from the tables and illusions were left to the workers." Workers' management, he observed, "has not brought about a sharing in profits by those who produce, either on a national level or in local enterprises." Through taxes on these enterprises and by other means," the regime has appropriated even the share of the profits which the workers believed would be given to them."35

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During China's Proletarian Cultural Revolution, efforts to set up commune governments appeared in a score of cities. In response to Chairman Mao's call to "Bombard the Headquarters!" the workers in Shanghai seized the initiative by establishing the Shanghai People's Commune in January 1967 after overthrowing the communist municipal authorities. The party's right wing immediately denounced it as an expression of"ultra-democracy" and "petty-bourgeois anarchism." Notwithstandinghis commitment to levelingdownward, even Mao had reservations. Reflected the chairman: "lfthe whole of China were to set up People's Communes, should the People's Republic of China change its name to the People's Communes ofchina?' Would other countries recognize us? he asked. Besides, "Communes are too weak when it comes to suppressing counter-revolution." As he informed his niece years later, what he most disliked about commune government was free elections. Insisting that all major decisions should be taken by the "Center" under his leadership, he could not stomach the decentralization of power that would undermine the authorityofthe Politbureau and raise the possibility that the "Center7' might be outvoted by either the party's right or left wing.36 Marx tried to describe the actual state of affairs. That is what made him a Machiavellian. But like Machiavelli, he did not always succeed. Besides the role of myth in targeting the bourgeois leeches, there was a utopian element in both oftheir political projects. In the Discourses Machiavelli makes use of his political model of a virtuous republic for a comparative purpose, as an index of corruption under the absolute monarchies in Spain and France compared to Switzerland and the German free states that illustrate his ideal. As for Marx, a utopia is the crowning glory of his Anticommunist Manifesto, his tract on humanism known as the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844." After vilifying the communism of the ultra-Jacobins as "the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization," he concludes that "communism as such is not the goal of human development"-humanism is the goaL3' Unfortunately for the labor movement, Marx's utopia would subsequently get the better of his communism. His critics have taken him to task for just about everything except his vaunted humanism. "For centuries," Gorbachev's principal advisor Alexander Yakovlev observed, "prominent humanists called for man's selfimprovement." That is to say, self-fulfillment, not to be confused with Savonarola's or Machiavelli's emphasis on virtue, on voluntary poverty instead ofthe satisfaction of so-called higher needs too expensive to satisfy except through other people's labor. "The sacred socialist principle of universal equality and social justice," according to Yakovlev, "was manipulated to produce crude egalitarianism." But consider the alternative. Thanks to perestroika, or liberal restructuring, selffulfillment was celebrated when refinement was far beyond the wherewithal of the Soviet masses. Unlike crude egalitarianism through leveling downward, refined egalitarianism through leveling upward presupposes the determination to reward "creative attitudes and talent as much as possible"-that is, at the expense of satisfying even the basic needs of those who are neither creative nor talented.38 Under Gorbachev, Stalin was faulted for relying on terror to keep the emerging

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and greedy new class of talented and creative experts at bay. Stalin had placed a lid on humanist selfishness by giving precedence to uncivil "Reds" over civil "Pinks," by tightening instead of loosening the reins on self-gratification. Unlike Marx, a child of the Renaissance who scorned the Puritan virtues, Stalin shared Machiavelli's beliefthat man is inordinately ambitious and acquisitive,thus necessitating austerity. In line with their humanism, Marxists ridicule as subjective the role Machiavelli assigned to corruption in the decay of ancient republics. But ifthey had paid more attention to it, the Soviet Union might not have taken the same downward path. In The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World (1996), British historian Harold Perkin shows how the state-sponsored greed of the Soviet nomenklatura was a key factor in the country's downfall. Citing Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a Soviet economist and advisor to Gorbachev, Perkin shows how the nomenklatura became a new ruling class with privileged access to state property and incomes in kind. The "people's republic" provided its Marxist leaders with sumptuous apartments, dachas in the countryside, domestic servants, big cars, vouchers for scarce goods, and special stores for foreign imports. Exclusive clinics were provided for themselves and their families, "privileged education for their children, private holiday resorts, and even-shades of the aristocratic ancien rkgime-special hunting areas." To this depiction of legal corruption, he adds the semi-legal and criminal corruption of the most naked kind, "bribes of thousands of rubles in unmarked envelopes and 'presents' of gold watches and jewelry, passing upward for every kind of service and promotion, and brothels disguised as country clubs for the entertainment of officials in every region and rep~blic."'~ Is it any wonder that this first professional society in history imploded when its exploited workers failed to rally to its cause? It was not the Cold War, but the "orgy of corruption and self-indulgence at the expense of the mass of people living at Spartan levels of consumption" that accounts for the demise of the so-called workers' state. The lesson to be drawn from its collapse might have been written by Machiavelli: "greed is ultimately self-destructiveand topples the elites that practice it.w40

Faced with the disjunction between the remnants of communist ideology and the blatant inequalities of Soviet society, when belief failed, so did the system. Milking the cow to dryness was the inevitable outcome when the working class responded to the elites' massive corruption with slowdowns and absenteeism on the economic front. Hence the cynical refrains: "If the bosses steal, we'll steal too"; and, "If they only pretend to pay us, we'll only pretend to ~ o r k ! " ~ ' Such was the outcome of the Soviet system of rewards based on the Marxist slogan "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work." As the elites interpreted it, "get out of everybody as much as you can, and give him in exchange as little as possible"-a rationale for upward striving or getting ahead in addition to being paid more than the next Marx's monumental contribution to neo-Machiavellism notwithstanding, his pseudo-Machiavellian celebration of

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upward leveling signified in practice the ruin of the Marxist experiment. Once the professionals succeeded in liquidating the bourgeoisie with the help of organized labor, the scuttling of the communist project became inevitable. The lesson ofmodern history is that humanism is more consequential than communism. Communism turned out to be a means of self-fulfillment by a professional class that grew out of the proletariat and subsequently replaced the bourgeoisie as an even more formidable enemy.43Thus the only part of Marxism salvaged by the Russian intelligentsia was Marx's 1844 Anticommunist Manifesto. What the Soviet intelligentsia (professional elites) adamantly resisted in Mao's Proletarian Cultural Revolution was its revival of the ultra-Jacobins' crude, downward leveling communism. In a collection of Soviet press articles excommunicating the Maoist heresy, Maoism Unmasked(1972), the first part concludeswith an essay by A. Titarenko on Mao's antihumanism. China's barracks communism was the product, the author argues, of a perverted understanding of socialism and of a primitive world outlook that had mistakenly and viciously declared that "humanism is a 'bourgeois' concept."44 As evidence, he cited a Chinese newspaper article of 3 December 1965 denouncing humanism as thoroughly reactionary and incompatible with the class struggle being waged in China against the privileges of its professional elites. That, he claimed, distorted the "communist ideal, which is inconceivable without its genuinely humanist content." He further repudiated Mao's slogan: "In production, we must strive for high indices, and in living standards we must maintain a low level"-shades of Machiavelli's policy of making the state rich and keeping the citizens poor. Mao's unwholesome utterance, the author concluded, "eloquently illustrates the antihumanistic aspects of his ideal of primitive, egalitarian 'comm~nism."'~~ Not for nothing did Boris Yeltsin end his autobiographicalAgainst the Grain (1990) with the ominous challenge to Soviet Marxism that it was hamstringing "the leap out of the past towards a normal, human, civilized society." He had no qualms about accepting its humanist ideology; the obstacle to a "normal" development of professional society he equated with the communist element in Marxism. In his own words, "we are practically the only country left on earth which is trying to enter the twenty-first century with an obsolete nineteenth century ideology."46 Marxism had become an impediment, he believed, to the progress of civilization. Its persistence as an ideology could lead only to "turning back the clock of hi~tory."~'Having served its purpose of propagating humanism, the time had come to dispense with its communist residues. By a strange twist of fate Marxism had played out its revolutionary role. Just as Marx had lambasted petty-bourgeois and artisan (Machiavellian and Rousseauist) democracy as reactionary for holding back the advent of capitalism, so Yeltsin and his fellow technocrats discovered that Marxism was holding back the development and normalization ofprofessional society. Ifthe petty bourgeoisie was a reactionary class after it had served its purpose of overthrowing feudal society, then so was the dictatorship of the proletariat once it had performed its role of overthrowingbour-

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geois society. It followed that communism too was reactionary, which explains the rationale for labeling Yeltsin's reform movement "radical" and the defenders of Soviet communism "conservative." Yeltsin had history on his side. The wheel of progress was being obstructed by Marx's "possible communism." The massive persecution of professionals during Mao's Cultural Revolution, which set back China's development by more than a decade, is a glaring case of what in retrospect became "impossible communism."

The Bolsheviks Following on the heels of the Constitutional Revolution in February 1917, the Bolsheviks who seized the reins of power in October emerged as the second republican vanguard in modern times. To satis@ the conditions of such a vanguard it sufficed, first, that they represented a deep rather than a shallow republicanism and, second, that they did not merely contend for a monopoly of power but acquired it. The leading figures in the Bolshevik Revolution were unquestionably its two Machiavellian princes, V.I. Lenin (1 870-1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940). But Lenin suffered a stroke in 1923 and Trotsky, his presumed successor, became marginalized by the Troika that took over the party and the government when Lenin died in February 1924.Joseph Stalin (1 879-1 953), the party's general secretary and leading member of the Troika-the other two members were Lev Kamenev (1883-1936) and Grigori Zinoviev (1883-1 936)dissolved it in 1925 when he emerged as the party's undisputed leader. He continued in that capacity until his death in 1953. While he did not play a prominent role in the 1917 Revolution, he not only consolidated his party's monopoly of power, but also initiated a second Bolshevik Revolution that effectively establishedthe first socialistrepublic in 1934. The formative influences that gave rise to the Bolsheviks included Jacobinism and Marxism. It was not only a direct reading of the Communist Manifsto and Marx's Capital that guided them, but also the indirect and mediated influence transmitted by the first republican vanguard of 1793-1794. The sources of Lenin's Jacobinism are unearthed in Albert Weeks' The First Bolshevik: A Political Biography of Peter Tkachev (1968). Lenin, it turns out, was a virtual disciple of the allegedly first Bolshevik. Tkachev (1844-1866) was Russia's most influential Jacobin; he was also an exponent of Machiavellism in its deep rather than shallow version. Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, the veteran publisher of clandestine literature in Russia and the unofficial librarian of revolutionary literature in Switzerland after arriving in Geneva in 1895, recalled in his memoirs Lenin's first visit to Geneva in 1905. Lenin examined the contents of the library, "paying particular attention to Tkachev, remarking that this writer was closer to our viewpoint than any of the others." Lenin was already under the influence'of Russian Jacobinism, so he naturally gravitated toward its premier exponent. While his

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acquaintance with Tkachev's works dated back to the time of his brother's execution in 1887, by 1900 he was advising his fellow revolutionaries that they should be made required reading. On the basis of these and other data, Weeks concludes that Lenin began grafting Marxism onto the earlier Russian Jacobin tradition and, by so doing, "revitalized and strengthened Tkachev's thought, imbuing it with the more elaborate 'scientific7 socialism of Marx and en gel^."^' If Weeks is right, then the conventional view of Leninism is mistaken-not Marxism, but Tkachev's sansculottist Jacobinism lies at its core. The failure ofthe Jacobins to retain power weighed heavily on the minds ofthe entire Bolshevik leadership. Lenin, the party's founder, was not alone in being hypnotized by the French Revolution and obsessed by its lessons. "Peppering their articles and speeches with terms like 'Girondists,' 'Jacobins,' 'commissars,' 'Convention,' 'VendCe,' they were not merely paying homage to the French revolutionaries, but were also emulating them as they tried to make history for them~elves."~~ Their principal concern was to learn how the Jacobins propelled themselves into power and, once arrived, how to avoid the mistakes that led to Thermidor. The different political explanations and corresponding strategies that crystallized in the course ofthese efforts focused on the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Terror against enemies ofthe people. According to the citras of Russian Social Democracy-Trotsky initially sided with the Menshevik or minority faction in favor of moderation-the Terror was both excessive and too prolonged. According to the ultras-the Bolshevik or majority faction-the Terror was too feeble to secure its objectives. The Mensheviks believed that the Terror alienated the bourgeoisie and sectors ofthe petty bourgeoisie,thereby leading to the betrayal of the revolution. The Bolsheviks believed that Christian inhibitions and excessive tolerance toward enemies ofthe people were the main factors behind the debacle. There are powerfbl arguments supporting both contentions. On the one hand, terror incited the terrorized to resistance. On the other hand, according to a leading scholar without an axe to grind, the Committee of Public Safety "did not put to death enough of its enemies to establish its rule as a permanent regime." The revolutionary measures contemplated by the Jacobin leadership "could be achieved only by a degree of extermination which revolutionists more often talked about than practiced." It appears that their grisly rhetoric of depopulation, when it came to action, was checked by moral and religious scruples. All told, only forty thousand died in the Terror, barely one-sixth of 1 percent of the French p e ~ p l e . ' ~ Marx's stylistic masterpiece, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), opens with the observation that all great, world-historical events and personages occur, as it were, twice: originally as tragedy, later as farce. During the second French Republic (1848-1852), the Jacobins and their heroes Danton, Robespierre, and Saint-Just followed by the first Bonaparte reappeared in comic costume ending with the second Bonaparte. While the Revolution of 1789 draped itself in Roman dress and in the name of the Roman Republic, the Revolution of

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1848 could do no better than to parody the Revolution of 1789.Just when the living are in the course of awakening from the nightmare of dead generations and bent on creating something new, Marx wrote, in epochs of revolutionary crisis "they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed lang~age."~' Marx could hardly have foreseen that the political parties and personages ofthe First French Republic would reappear not only twice but thrice, and neither in tragic nor in comic mode, but in epic proportions. On the eve of the first Russian Revolution in 1905, the twice-dead Robespierre was conjured up a third time in the person of Lenin at the helm of a revived Jacobin party in a life-and-death struggle against the already twice-dead Girondins. He was again resurrected in the person of Trotsky, who claimed for himselfthe honor ofpersonifying Robespierreby virtue of succeeding Lenin as the number one Bolshevik, then by his ostracism and exile during the pseudo-Thermidorian reaction of the late 1920s.Next came Stalin's turn as he purged the republican vanguard of its ultras and citras in the wake of Trotsky's banishment. Although Lenin had provided the model by his Little Terror of 1918-1919 and by his draft resolutions against factionalism in 1921, Stalin outrivaled him in the Grand Terror and purges of ultras and citras in the 1930s. The 1848 resurrection "created inside France the conditions under which free competition could first be developed, the parceled landed property exploited, the unfettered productive power of the nation employed." The new bourgeois order having been establishedand the petty-bourgeois illusions of agrarian reform having been forgotten, the resurrected Romans disappeared when no longer needed to watch over the bourgeois But ifthe ancient Romans had expired, the ghosts of the sansculottist insurrections of the Paris Commune and the Jacobin Grand Terror still kept passions aflame in the events leading up to the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Although this renewed awakening of the dead served the same general purpose of glorifying a revolution, the Bolshevik republican vanguard was far from being a second edition of the republican vanguard of more than a century earlier. At the Second Congress ofthe Russian Social Democratic party that opened in Brussels in July 1903 but was compelled to move to London, a struggle ensued over matters of organization and program. Lenin's intransigence as the leader of the "hards" left no hope ofreconciliation with the "softs." The Mensheviks (softs) complained of a state of siege in the party because of Lenin's efforts to impose what they feared would be a party dictatorship with himself as Robespierre. They accused him precisely of "Jacobinism." Lenin replied: "In regard to unstable and wavering elements, it is not only our right but our duty to create a 'state of siege."' His inflexibility led the softs-and indeed his own supporters-to compare him to R0be~pien-e.~~ Lenin added fuel to the accusation when in 1905 he referred to his faction as "Jacobins" and stigmatized his opponents as "Girondists." Should the revolutionaries gain a decisive victory, he wrote, "we shall settle accounts with tsarism in the

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Jacobin, or, if you prefer, in the plebeian way," by reviving the Terror and "ruthlessly destroying the enemies of liberty, crushing their resistance by force." That did not mean outright imitation of the views, programs, and slogans of the Jacobins of 1793-1794. Unlike the Jacobin's petty-bourgeois republic, Lenin resolved on a Marxist program of consistent democratism. "We have a new slogan: the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry." A transitional regime, it was in keeping with the aims of the working-class party that was striving, first, for a dictatorship of the proletariat, and second, for a complete socialist rev~lution.~~ The French Revolution, according to Lenin, had advanced on an evolutionary course from a constitutional monarchy under the Feuillants or liberal sector of the nobility to a bourgeois republic under the Girondists, and thence to a pettybourgeois republic under Jacobin leadership. The Mensheviks in Russian Social Democracy adopted a similar course prior to the final stage of a proletarian republic under Marxist leadership. Lenin wanted to accelerate the process. Instead of power passing to the bourgeoisie on the heels of a constitutional monarchy and then to the petty bourgeoisie, he proposed that the Bolsheviks take the lead of the bourgeois revolution. Otherwise, "in fear ofdemocratic progress which threatensto strengthen the proletariat," the bourgeoisie might hold back the development of the revolution even before it reached its petty-bourgeois stage.s5 That was in 1905. A decade later in "Two Lines of the Revolution" (20 November 1915), Lenin recalled that in the French Revolution the bourgeoisie had no fear of losing the leadership and therefore agreed to a strategic alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the monarchy and the nobility. He further noted that Russian conditions in 1905 were more advanced than they were in France in 1789 and again in 1848. In 1905 the proletariat was able to seize the initiative by leading the democratic peasants to overthrow the monarchy and the landowners. But the Mensheviks demoralized the workers by refusing to lead them, while the "lack of power and decisiveness on the part of the two classes [workersand peasants] caused their defeat."56 As early as 1908 in "Lessons of the Commune" [the Paris Commune of 18711, Lenin endorsed the Jacobin Terror of 1793-1794 as indispensable to a revolutionary government. After listing the achievements of this first proletarian revolution, he underscored the proletariat's excessive generosity as its cardinal weakness. "[llt should have exterminated its enemies" instead of trying to "exert moral influence on them." In January 1918 he was careful not to repeat the commune's mistake. Lenin incited the population to take matters into its own hands by eliminating the rich landowners, "bloodsuckers," and "leeches." The resulting terror from below would soon be followed by a systematic terror from above launched during the first week of September 1918.57 "The Jacobins' example is instructive," Lenin wrote in "Enemies ofthe People" (June 1917), except that "it must be applied to the revolutionary class of the twentieth century, to the workers and semi-proletarians." The enemies ofthe people, he added, are no longer the monarchs, but the landowners and capitalists. The new

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terror would target them. As he commented in a telegram to Trotsky on 30 August 1918, "Shouldn't we tell [the army commanders] that from now on we're applying the model of the French Revolution and putting on trial and even executing the senior commanders if they hold back and fail in their actionsYS8 Lenin believed that the Jacobin Thermidor might have been avoided had the enemies ofthe revolution been liquidated to the last man. Nothing better illustrates this conviction than an incident on his first day as head of state. Without his knowledge and on the initiative of a leading Bolshevik, the Second Congress of Soviets on 25 October 1917 abolished capital punishment for front-line army deserters. "Nonsense," Lenin responded to the unwelcome news, "how can you make a revolution without executions!" As for innocent victims of the Red Terror launched in 1918, he asked which is better: "to put in prison a few dozen or a few hundred inciters, guilfy or not," or "to lose thousands of Red Army soldiers and workers?" According to Harvard historian Richard Pipes, at the root of the Terror lay Lenin's Jacobin conviction that, if the Bolsheviks were to remain in power, the embodiment of bourgeois ideas had to be physically liquidated whether or not one happened to be a member of that class. It sufficed to think like one.59 As part of the Terror, Lenin endorsed the taking and executing of hostages. On 11 August 1918 he wrote to the Bolsheviks at Penza: "The uprising ofthe five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed," followed by "Hang (hang without fail, so the people can see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers." Do it in such a way, he enjoined, that for hundreds of kilometers around, people will know that the Bolsheviks are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks. No less murderous were his instructions a year later to a commander ofthe Red Army on the eastern front: "Use both bribery and threats to exterminate every Cossack to a man if they set fire to the oil in Guriev." Priests resisting seizures of church treasures were to be shot on the spot. In the light of these and other examples of Lenin's barbarous orders said to be worthy of Genghis Khan, one is no longer surprised, says Pipes, "to learn that when Molotov, the only Communist official to serve both Lenin and Stalin throughout their political careers, was asked to compare the two, he declared without hesitation that Lenin had been the 'more severe' or 'har~her."'~~ Lenin was the first "Marxist" to announce that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. In a revealing reference to Machiavelli, he noted, "One wise writer on statecraft rightly said [in chapter 8 of The Prince] that if it is necessary to resort to certain brutalities for the sake of realizing a certain political goal, they must be carried out in the most energetic fashion and in the briefest possible time because the masses will not tolerate prolonged applications of brutality." Following the advice of the Florentine Secretary, he urged the suppression of the reactionary clergy in 1922 with speed and ruthlessness, "with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come." To these instructions he added that the greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing, the better. "We must teach these people a less~n."~' That was only part of his direct indebtedness to Machiavelli. In "Left-Wing"

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Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), he invoked the indispensable and constant companion of Machiavelli's lions, the foxes needed to scent out traps, to infiltrate the ranks of the enemy, to mislead them with lies. To ward off enemies, he advised his followers "to resort to various stratagems, artifices, and illegal methods, to evasions and subterfuges." Counseling his republican vanguard to adopt military measures, he noted that "any army which does not train to use all the means and methods ofwarfare that the enemy possesses, or may possess, is behaving in an unwise or even criminal manner." In class warfare, the end justifies the means. Revolutionaries who are "incapable of combining illegal forms of struggle with every form of legal struggle, are poor revolutionaries indeed."62 Unlike the Marxist tradition in the West and that of the Mensheviks in Russia, Lenin grafted onto the Marxist theory a political strategy at odds with Marx's stress on openness as opposed to conspiracies, on a democratic party structure instead of centralized control by the leadership, on electoral politics instead of insurrection by a political-military vanguard, not to mention massive resort to terrorism. Lenin's What Is to Be Done? (1 902) is only incidentally the work of a Marxist-and the same goes for his Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1 905). What defines Leninism is its amalgam of Marxism and Jacobinism. This explains his famous and much criticized statement that "a revolutionary Social Democrat is a Jacobin who is indissolubly bound to the organization of the proletariat and aware of its class interest^."^^ Trotsky was no less obsessed than Lenin with the lessons of the French Revolution. But he arrived at conclusionsthat bore little resemblance to those ofthe would-be dictator and emerging Russian Robespierre. In his report on the proceedings ofthe party's Second Congress in 1903, he assailed Lenin for splitting the party into warring factions. Lenin's "hard" line, Trotsky believed, entitled him to be, not the party's organizer, but its disorganizer. As for himself, he preferred the role of conciliator in the factional quarrels between "hards" and "softs." Like Lenin, Trotsky belonged to the party's center, from where he reproved both right and left extremists. But his position bore little resemblanceto Lenin's. Lenin "opposed both wings, and ran the risk of detaching them from the Party," while Trotsky "dreamed of conciliating all groups, directing his main attack on the Bolsheviks as being the most serious obstacles to unity."64 According to one serious student of Trotsky's intellectual formation, nobody, "not even among those who would become the leading figures of Menshevism, was more adamantly opposed to the organization principles of Lenin than Trotsky." Lenin's Jacobinism was his bugbear. "A system of terror," he wrote, "is crowned by the emergence of a Robespierre. Comrade Lenin made a mental roll-call of the party personnel and arrived at the conclusion that he himself was to be the iron fist-and he alone." The "fist" had taken over the party and transformed the modest party council into "an all-mighty Committee of Public Safety so that he may play the role of an 'incorrupt' Robespierre." Just as Robespierre had planted a republic of virtue and terror, and replaced the holders of distinguished state positions with reliable protegks, so Lenin could be counted on to do the same. Unless Lenin is

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stopped, Trotsky concluded, appointmentsto all official party positions will depend on the discretion ofthe Central Committee whose work is under the vigilant control of Lenin.65 Should the party come to power, Lenin's regime of virtue and terror would end like that of the first Robespierre because of too many executions, argued Trotsky. Excessive repression spelled disillusionment and resistance, fatal not only for the upstart Robespierre, but also for the party. Lenin's policy, he concluded, promises to make him the party's grave-digger. "Then the masters of the situation will be the 'Thermidorians' of socialist opportunism and the doors of the party will be really wide-open"--so much so as to weaken its revolutionary thrust.66 In Our Political Tasks ( 1 904), Trotsky returned to the attack. In part a defense of Menshevism, or orthodox Marxism, it was mainly a demolition job on Bolshevism. Leninism, he claimed, would transform a potentially mass movement into a clique of conspirators, thereby substituting itself for the proletariat. Lenin's vanguard had ridden roughshod over a hndamental tenet of Marxism that only the workers can save themselves. In Marx's words, "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves." A party of professional revolutionaries such as Lenin envisioned in What Is to Be Done? was self-defeating,Trotsky believed, because the workers must be educated to fend for themselves not only against the class enemy, but also against Lenin's party of robots. The issue between Menshevism and Bolshevism reduced to who would constitute the core of the Social Democratic movement: the workers or the party's leaders. As Trotsky concluded in one of his oft-cited critiques of Lenin that was later used against Stalin, "the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a 'dictator' substitutes himself for the Central Committee." Against Lenin's claim that a revolutionary Social Democrat is a proletarian Jacobin, Trotsky retorted that a Jacobin Social Democrat was an impossible hybrid and that one or the other could be expected to gain the upper hand. A choice had to be made between "two worlds, two doctrines, two tactics, two mentalities, separated by an abyss."67 Following Marx, Trotsky called the new Jacobinism a caricature or parody of the original. Robespierre's aphorism, "I know only two parties, the good and the bad citizens," Trotsky commented, was "engraved on the heart of Maximilien Lenin." In effect, Lenin had misconstrued Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat as a dictatorship over the proletariat-a substitution reinforced by the Babeuvist development of Jacobinism pointing toward a conspiratorial seizure of power.68 As is well known, Trotsky later reversed himself in his judgment of Lenin and of Leninism. As the revolutionary situation unfolded in 19 17,he made an about-turn in his political loyalties. From one of the most extreme critics of Bolshevism he became one of its most exaggerated defenders. Prior to 1917 Trotsky's theoretical antiJacobinism and hothouse Marxism merely peered from the revolutionary's ivory tower without descending onto solid ground. The crucible of a real revolution made the difference. Everything Trotsky had stood for was suddenly turned upside down. One explanation of his dramatic volte-face is that he learned firsthand the

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prime lesson of revolution-the need for centralized leadership and authority. Without the leadership of a Jacobin prince like Robespierre or Lenin, he concluded, all would be lost. Looking back on the events of 1917, he concluded in his Diary in Exile (1935) that the October Revolution would not have taken place without Lenin in command. "If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik party [owing to fear and its hesitation to follow Lenin's directives] would have prevented it." Lenin was needed to overcome the resistance ofthe Bolshevik leaders. Not only did Lenin's politicalmilitary vanguard become acceptable to Trotsky, but also its implications for oneman rule: "not even the party, but one individual, Lenin [or, perhaps, Trotsky himselfl became the effective and indispensable instrument of rev~lution."~~ After his conversion Trotsky became so carried away by enthusiasm for Lenin's Jacobin-conspiratorial strategy that he shut his eyes to what he had earlier feared, that Lenin's dictatorship would turn into a dictatorship not of but over the proletariat. During the seven years from the October Revolution to Lenin's incapacitation owing to a stroke in 1923, he became the most insistent apologist of a regime that had become markedly autocratic. With good reason, its enemies dubbed it "the dictatorship of Lenin and Trot~ky.'"~ The first sign of Trotsky's second thoughts about the absence of party democracy appeared after he was relieved of his position as minister of war and head of the Red Army. Having been disarmed, this prophet found himself marginalized from the party leadership. Such were the circumstances in which he formulated a new antibureaucratic policy designed to prevent the Bolshevik Old Guard from degenerating after the manner of the Jacobins in 1793-1 794 and of the leaders of German Social Democracy on the eve of World War I. In The New Course (1 923), he called for a revival of party democracy-also in an effort to save himself. For that purpose he demanded a purge of party leaders, "who, at the first word of criticism, of objection, or ofprotest, brandish the thunderbolts of penalties before the critic." By replacing the entrenched and "mummified bureaucrats," he hoped to ensure that in the fiiture "nobody will dare terrorize the party.'"' By 1927, a Soviet Thermidor had become for Trotsky a danger to be averted, if not yet an accomplished fact. But his persistent sniping at the party's bureaucrats over the issue of creeping bureaucratism counted for little unless it became organized. So despite the party's ban on factionalism, a left opposition came into being. After formally dissolving it under the threat of expulsion in 1926, Trotsky continued to carry the inner-party controversy beyond the party to the Soviet masses. Denounced for disloyalty, he had to answer the charges before the Presidium of the Party's Central Control Commission. He wound up his defense in July 1927 with a forcefid evocation of the lessons of the Jacobin Terror: "In the first chapter [stage], when the revolution moved upwards, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of that time, guillotined the Royalists and the Girondists." But then a second stage opened

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when "the Thermidorians and the Bonapartists, who had emerged from the right wing of the Jacobin party, began to exile and shoot the left Jacobins." History was repeating itself.72 Whereas in 1904 Trotsky had written that "a Jacobin tribunal would have tried under the charge of modkrantisme the whole international labor movement," in 1927 he evoked Jacobinism in his defense. As his leading biographer Isaac Deutscher observes, his revised view of Jacobinism was almost diametrically opposed to his earlier view. Jacobinism was no longer seen as incompatible with Marxism. "Now he dwelt on the affinity of Marxism and Jacobinism; and he identified himself and his adherents with Robespierre's group." It was he who turned the charge of modkrantisme against Stalin by taking exception to the party leadership which looked upon Stalin as the new R~bespierre.~' Having convinced hisjudges that a brewing Thermidor threatened to wreck the party, the trial ended without a verdict. To no avail, for in November he was expelled from the party on patently false charges, and on 12 January 1928,banished from Russia under article 58 of the criminal code. Charged with counterrevolutionaryactivity,he was condemned to internal exile in Turkestan near the Chinese border. A year later, on February 10, he was hauled on board a ship, sent into his final exile, and prohibited from ever returning to the Soviet Union. Trotsky reputedly told one of his followers, "One cannot be both Robespierre and Napoleon. One has to choose." He had in mind the contrast between himself and Stalin. Just as the Jacobin Thermidor ended in Bonapartism, he argued in The Revolution Betrayed (1937), so the Soviet Thermidor threatened to end the same way. Bonapartism is a phenomenon of all modern and contemporary revolutions, he argued, and "enters the scene in those moments of history when the sharp struggle of two camps raises the state power, so to speak, above the nation, and guarantees it, in appearance, a complete independence of classes-in reality, only the freedom necessary for a defense of the privileged." As the prime instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, Trotsky contended, Stalin was the personification of the Russian Thermidor and its Bonapartist sequel rolled into one. Not just Thermidor, he believed, but the era of Bonapartism had opened as early as 1923.74 We have noted Lenin's debt to Machiavelli. Did Trotsky too follow in the footsteps of the Florentine Secretary? As early as 1920 in a polemic against Karl Kautsky, the leader of German Social Democracy, Trotsky first appeared in Machiavellian dress. After a first shot at the Bolsheviks in The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918), Kautsky returned to the attack with his Terrorism and Communism (1 9 19). Trotsky responded with a defense of terrorism in a book of the same title in 1920. The revolutionary class, Trotsky argued, should not be squeamish in its choice of means but should "attain its end by all methods at its disposal." Like war, revolution is founded on intimidation: "it kills individuals and intimidates thousands." In this perspective, the Red Terror of 1918 was the direct continuation of the armed insurrection of 1917. Blood must be shed; the question is whose. To abstain from bloodletting, Trotsky argued, is to favor the stronger party; it can then

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do as it pleases. To permit criticism and a free press under conditions of civil war likewise favors the enemy. "To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him."7s Trotsky pursued this argument further in Their Morals and Ours ( 1 938). It was designed to refute the charge that at bottom there was no difference between himself and Stalin-both were Machiavellians. Yes, but with an important difference, said Trotsky. Both had resorted to lying and worse, violence, murder, and so on. But under what circumstances? Unlike Stalin, Trotsky had never accepted the Jesuit maxim that the end justifies the means.76 It was one thing to believe, as he did, that class war is "unthinkable not.only without violence against tertiary figures but, under contemporary technique,without killing old men, old women, and children." For without lies and deception of various kinds, "war would be as unimaginable as a machine without oil." But it was something else to believe, as Stalin did, that any means might be justified for that purpose. Considering that every end is a means to something else, "the end in its turn needs to be justified." The end must be liberating and the means must be successful. "That is permissible," Trotsky concludes, "which really leads to the liberation of mankind."77 The thorny question is whether Trotsky was not mistaken about Stalin and about the means that really lead to socialism. Once in power, Stalin made doubly sure that his rule would not be a repeat performance of Robespierre's. Although "Trotsky saw only himself in Robespierre," Stalin was the genuine coin. An avid student of the French Revolution, he too studied and assimilated its lessons. In his Siberian exile, according to Dmitri Volkogonov, "Stalin had been impressed by what he read about the French Revolution, especially the decisiveness of Robespierre,who at the critical moment acquired a law to simplify the legal process against 'enemies of the rev~lution."'~~ Lenin's Red Terror was child's play compared to Stalin's, which involved some twenty million Soviet citizens excluding those who survived the several gulags. Unlike Robespierre, Stalin was able to lead his revolution to its partial completion without being overthrown. As a prime example of Stalin's preoccupation with Robespierre's fate, there is the testimony of his nephew Budu Svanidze. In My Uncle Joseph Stalin (1953), Svanidze recalled a mid-1936 conversation that shows Stalin at odds with the profile conjured up by Trotsky. "The danger of loose morals," Stalin reportedly said, "is the gravest threat there is for revolutionary leaders who have passed all the earlier part of their lives in prison or exile, or simply in want and poverty." In a word, they seek compensation for their sacrifices. "The French Revolution collapsed because of the degeneration of the morals of its leaders, who surrounded themselves with loose women from the Palais Royal." Although his enemies had accused him of wanting a Russian Thermidor, a general relaxation of the Terror, "It's the others who would have brought on a Thermidor if they had been allowed to stay in power without being subjected to the effective control of the'Party."79 As in Paris in the 1790s, so in Moscow in the 1920s the leaders of the left opposition had become soft in the hands of loose women and tempted by a life of

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luxury unbecoming to revolutionaries. Stalin acknowledged his decision to root them out: "I'll break the backs of all the rotten riff-raff who want to plunge our country into corruption!" he fumed. "I once read a speech of Robespierre, which he delivered to the Convention shortly before his death," he continued. The "lncorruptible" had taught him "hatred for the vermin which revolutions, unfortunately, bear with them on their crests-vermin which have to be destroyed without mercy in order not to see the same thing happen as at Paris, where the dregs of the Palais Royal became the mistresses and wives of the republican chiefs." What a pity, he exclaimed, that Robespierre was overthrown. "The struggle of humanity toward happiness would have been shortened by centuries if he had stayed in The nephew asked about Trotsky. "He's not corrupt, it is true," replied Stalin. "But he carries within himself another danger that a popular revolution cannot tolerate. He's an individualist to his fingertips." A revolutionary Narcissus, "he thought himself the most intelligent and the most brilliant of us all for the sole reason that he knew how to wield his pen and his tongue cleverly." Later in their conversation, Stalin added: "Getting rid of all the vermin, by themselves would be easy," but there are too many comrades who support them because they don't understand the need for constant vigilance against the enemies of the revolution in their midst. Consequently, we have to get rid ofthem too, even those "who were in the first ranks of the revolution and are personally as pure as rock ~rystal!"~' Robespierre's last speeches focused mainly on the struggle against factions, against both left and right deviations. The conversation with his nephew makes plain that Stalin was familiar with at least some of those speeches. The Jacobins failed, he believed, because they became divided into factions,notjust because they became corrupted. As for the Paris Commune, "The reason for failure in 187 1 lay entirely in the lack of cohesion among the various leaders and in their refusal to agree to a common In 1794 this lack of cohesion led Robespierre to the extreme measure of having the ultras guillotined, followed shortly by the citras. Stalin faced a similar situation until 1936 when he had the leaders of the left opposition tried and executed on false charges followed by representatives of the "right danger." So thoroughly had he learned the lessons ofthe Jacobins' failure that he afterward staged a national witchhunt aimed at eliminating the factionalists' followers. As a guarantee against a second Thermidor, the party's cadres were put on trial wherever there was suspicion of guilt by association. "Hundreds of thousands would be cut down as if by a terrible plague." There is no evidence of a deliberate depopulation policy on Stalin's part, but the country was depopulated nonetheless, and there was to be no Thermidor as long as Stalin lived. Although Trotsky was right in believing that the Bolshevik Thermidor would be a long drawn-out process, he was wrong in believing that by 1939 it had achieved its purpo~e.~' The key figure in the Soviet Thermidor was not Stalin, but Boris Yeltsin. Stalin's next move was to immunize the party against the prospect of a Russian Bonaparte. On the heels of the decimation of cadres came the trials and executions

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of Soviet generals, beginning with the so-called Tukhachevsky plot. A coup was allegedly in preparation by a group of senior officers led by the Soviet hero of 1918, Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky. The plot was foiled by Soviet intelligence,the "conspirators" were expelled from the party, and then from life itself in June 1937. The trials and executions of other army commanders followed throughout 1938. Like Robespierre, Stalin defined the "right opportunist danger" or "right deviation" as the main threat to the party's survival. Unlike Trotsky and the left opposition, the right danger "seemed to the Stalinist leadership to be a permanent enemy that would never be entirely rooted out, one that threatened to undo all of Stalin's work even after his death." And so it did. If Molotov can be allowed to speak for his master: "The right deviation was a permanent temptation that was much more dangerous than the left oppositi~n."~~ Stalin was aware that the left and right oppositions played into each other's hands, that both "lead to the same result, although from different directions." In that respect, he believed, "one is as bad as the other." Although the Trotskyistswere the first to be purged as early as 1927, the right deviation prompted Stalin to call for a general purging of the party as "an essential condition for really putting new life into it." The survival of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois thinking could be successfully countered, he believed, only by the oflensive of socialism against the elements of capitalism that still survived in the Soviet Union. That meant, first, "intensifjing the struggle against Social Democracy, and primarily against its 'Left' wing" identified as the social prop of capitalism, and second, "purging the Communist Parties of Social-Democratic tradition^."^^ In his report to the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, Stalin elaborated on these themes. "We have always said that the 'Lefts' are also 'Rights,' only they mask their Right-ness behind Left phrases." As evidence for this claim he cited the demands of the Trotskyist Bulletin published abroad. How does their "Left" program express itself, he asked. In demanding "the dissolution of the state farms because they do not pay; the dissolution of the majority of the collective farms because they are fictitious;the abandonment of the policy of eliminating the kulaks [because it discouraged farm output]; reversion to the policy ofconcessions, and the leasing of a number of our industrial enterprises to concessionariesbecause they do not pay." What kind of a program is that, he demanded, if not a move toward restoring capitalism in the USSR!86 Trotsky got his historical analogies mixed up. Thermidor signified the triumph of the Jacobin right wing, the moderates or citras, who proceeded to decimate the party's center along with the ultras, thereby ending the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety. How then could Stalin have set in motion a Russian equivalent? Like Robespierre, he stood at the party's center-Trotsky repeatedly accused him of "centrism." Far from representing the party's citras, Stalin targeted the moderates as its principal enemies. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who restored them to power, following which Yeltsin outlawed the Communist Party. Perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) were the consummation of the Soviet Thermidor.

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To be sure, Stalin's critics, both left and right, see in him the worst features of Machiavelli's prince. At least two of his eminent biographers, Boris Souvarine in 1939 and Roy Medvedev in 1989, discovered in the figure of Joseph FouchC, Collot's fellow butcher of Lyons, the closest analogue to Stalin during the Jacobin Terror. An ultra who moved progressively to the right as it became convenient to do so, FouchC is a perfect example of the political turncoat. This "all-powerfd minister of police in Napoleon's government and in the Bourbon restoration, one of the richest men in France," according to Medvedev, had been elected president of the Jacobin Club in 1794. "But ten years later the same FouchC hunted down Jacobins, and ten years after that he pursued Bonapartists." Stalin was familiar with his exploits and after reading Stefan Zweig's book, Joseph Fouchk exclaimed: "There was a man for you. He outwitted everyone, made them all look like fools!"87 Such praise for amonster-opportunist, Medvedev concluded,meant that Stalin was one too. History is filled with such "unstable and dishonorable people who join a revolutionary movement and later degenerate into tyrants." But was it praise for FouchC or contempt for those deceived by him that was the substance of Stalin's remarks? If Stalin was a Soviet Robespierre who had learned in retrospect the lessons of Thermidor, it would be a rare devil who ever managed to fool him. No wonder he was suspiciousof virtually everyone. As Souvarine observed, "He treats all slavish courtiers as 'double-faced,"' as FouchC-types." That qualifies as prudence, but hardly paranoia. It certainly does not make Stalin a Fouche-emulator. Thanks to Stalin's successivepurges, the second republican vanguard lasted as long as it did. Trotsky misjudged the main targets of Stalin's Machiavellism. The fear of both a capitalist restoration and a bureaucratic deformation of socialism that so worried Trotsky haunted Stalin as well. That is why Stalin "raged against his own bureaucracy and, on the pretext of fighting Trotskyism and Bukharinism [the right deviation], decimated it in each of the successive purges." So writes Isaac Deutscher,who on most other matters takes Trotsky's side. One of the effects of the purges was that they prevented the managerial groups from consolidating as a social stratum. Stalin whetted their appetites, their acquisitive instincts, "and wrung their necks." Deutscher continues: "While on the one hand the terror annihilated the old Bolshevik cadres and cowed the working class and peasantry, it kept, on the other, the whole of the bureaucracy in a state of flux." As long as Stalin remained in charge, he prevented the bureaucracy from developing a political identity and power of its own. Stalin was "constantly 'liquidating' the embryo of the new 'bourgeoisie,"' but the way in which he both promoted and repressed it was incomprehensible to Tr~tsky.'~ Besides what he learned from Robespierre, Stalin benefited from a close reading of Machiavelli's Prince. "In exile in Turkhansk," writes Medvedev, "he not only read but studied Machiavelli's Prince with great attention." But Medvedev oversteps himself in declaring that, for Stalin, "the party was alwaysjust an instrument, a means of reaching his own goals." Although indifferent to the fate of individuals, he was not indifferent to the logic of class warfare and its goal of a classless society. In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin for crimes against

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socialist legality, but in his memoirs reminded his readers of Stalin's intransigent "revolutionary spirit." Stalin was not just forceful, Khrushchev recalled, but also persuasive in getting his way on matters of policy. He was not the opportunist depicted by Medvedev. Khrushchev lauded him for being (like Robespierre and Machiavelli) "incorruptible," not to mention "irreconcilable in class questions . . . [and] greatly respected for it."90 D.Z. Manuilsky, Stalin's mouthpiece in the Communist International during the early 1930s, respected Stalin as a Machiavellian and defended the cult of Stalin's personality on Machiavellian grounds. "The propaganda for Comrade Stalin," he observed, "is necessary for the revolution [because the] Russian people are politically very backward, and their general culture is not up to Western standards." Uncultivated people need icons and other concrete symbols to motivate them. "ldolatrous perhaps, but very ~ i s e . " ~Stalin ' apparently concurred. The cult was especially useful because it portrayed the party's and the nation's leader as a figure larger than life. As a prime example of Stalin's Machiavellism, consider the words of his most astute disciple when it came to personal inscrutability and intraparty intrigue. On the eve of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1935, Mao allegedly appeared in a role unrecognizable to those who followed him during the failed Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In a conversation with Eudocio Ravines, secretary-general of the Peruvian Communist Party, Mao reputedly said: "The greatest talent in this work, comrade, is never to be associated with failure, never to defend the weak, even when he is right. Never to attack the pillager of the treasury, if he is the owner of a great fortress. He might crush you, and there is no use being a martyr." In the struggle against fascism, Mao continued, "The end remains the same; the means change according to our power." The strategy of using people who disagree with us is imperative for success: "Either one must lay aside a few principles, or we leave the way open to fascism." He closed his little speech by noting: "These are not the ideas of Mao. These are the weak echoes of the clairvoyance of our distinguished and meritorious Comrade Stalin!'792 The next day the conversation was renewed. "We must capture the petite bourgeoisie," said Mao, "as the Nazis have done." Communists must take advantage of human weakness and the proneness to corruption of all the little people marked by ambition and mired in mediocrity with few means of advancement. Consider the practical aspects, he added, leaving morals aside. In life there are no moral victories. At any price, sympathizers and especially nonsympathizers "must become our servants, yes, servants!" he screamed. "People who serve us, through greed, through fear, inferiority, vengeance, what have you, but who serve us7'-because they are needed for the revolution. Never mind that they are mostly scum and that the immense mass of our friends consist of opportunists-complete opportunist^.^^ What should communists do where there is no democratic' life, no civil liberties, but a dictator? asked Ravines. Mao sighed, "Fight and lose." For the blow of the dictator will be on your head, and he will torture you and your friends. The police will crack your skull. "You will be alone-for no one cares to share blows."

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There is no point in asking for heroes or for self-sacrifice-ther methods are required. "If you give tacit support to the dictator, he will give you political jobs in exchange. He may launch terrible diatribes against communism; he may even outlaw the party." But if you have become his friend, he will not touch a hair on your head. He will use you against his political enemies. So if you are useful to him, he will become useful to you. As for the workers, they will be with you only if you get something for them. They will abandon you if you do not. "Get the dictator to give them advantages at your request, and they will love you." Push them to attack the well-off, and the dictator may satisfy them to gain popularity." What Ravines does not tell his unsuspecting reader is that these conversations with Mao were a forgery. Although elected to the Executive Committee of the Seventh Congressthat took place in August, Mao was still heading the six-thousand miles' march from Juichin in Southeast China to Yenan in the Northwest. It had taken him an entire year when he finally arrived in October. So he could not possibly have been in Moscow as reported. No matter! Ravines is a liar who tells the truth. Until shortly before the congress, the pragmatic Mao was being censured for right-wing opportunism; he was restored to Stalin's grace only because of the comintern's about-face and shift to a popular front line. The words fit even though Mao never uttered them.

Folding Curtains The myth of deep republicanism best thrives on hope, promise, and fulfillment. But as Machiavelli would say, for every climax there is an anticlimax. The wheel of fortune keeps turning until history passes us by. That is also true of deep republicanism. In considering its anticlimax already in gestation, let us briefly review its maximum twentieth-century expressions: Occidental, Russian, and Chinese Communism. That was the historical order of their appearance. Communism in the West barely got a foothold, while the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China outdistanced its Russian progenitor by introducing communism in the present instead of postponing it to an indefinite future. Although all three had their intellectual roots in Marxism, Occidental Communism alone proved faithful to the spirit and letter of the Marxist canon, its self-styled humanism as the end, communism as the means. As Marx summarized the essence of communism in the West, "Communism is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development." Communism is at most a destructive movement. If capitalism is considered as the negation of human fellowship, then communism is the "negation of the negation . . . the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation." This higher stage culminates in individual self-fulfillment, the cultivation of each person's faculties

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to the utmost through "the multiplication of needs and of the means for their sati~faction."~~ Russian Communism belongs to a different genre. Ugo Spirito, the leading exponent of Red Fascism or Fascist Bolshevism in Mussolini's Italy-with the Duce's permission-acknowledged the difference following a two-month visit to the Soviet Union in Septemberand October 1956. He was especially struck by what Soviet Communism shared with Italian Fascism. The Soviet Union, he believed, represented the fulfillment of the Fascist goal of a corporative state aimed at transcending the divided world of private and public interests. Class antagonism had seemingly been overcome: "Russian communism is rooted in the reality of a people that conceives the values of collective life as constituent elements of its own life."96 As the philosophical heir ofGiovanni Gentile, Italy's foremost philosopher and Mussolini's minister of education, Spirito accepted his mentor's humanism of labor that he found to be more fully realized under Soviet Communism than under Italian Fascism. As Gentile formulated it, "Value is labor, and a man's worth is to be measured according to the quantity and quality of his work."97 That was Marx's formula and the oficial version of socialist distribution in the Soviet Union. Wrote Spirito as early as 1933, "One does a disservice to Fascism in perceiving it as antithetical to Bolshevism." A radical corporativism and community of interests, he contended, demanded that each enterprise should become the property of its workers. They would then become owners with direct participation in management. The overall result can well be imagined-the establishment of socialism and the presumed abolition of class antagonism^.^' What did Spirito think of the Italian Communist Party? It reeked of bourgeois individualism and the struggle to share in the material possessions of the bourgeoisie. Its philosophy of comfort, he believed, was destined to bourgeoisify the workers. In proclaiming that nothing is too good for the proletariat, Italian Communists made a bourgeois existence their goal. "Far tiom teaching love and community, Occidental Communism teaches the recovery of what is mine by right through struggle." Having been ruined by bourgeoisdom, Occidental Communism is "not a new philosophy, a new faith, or new conception of life." Instead of questioning the old way of life in favor of a different ideal, it perpetuates bourgeois decadence by making it universal. That explains why communist parties in the West are communist in name only.99 In his first significant work on communism, LaJilosoJiadel comunismo (1 948), Spirito asks, "Will communism triumph?" Not if one takes Western Communism as the model, he argues. Unlike Russian Communism, it lacks a religious impulse, a transcendental or spiritual faith capable of changing the world. Marxist materialism can at most bring comfort to the workers along with a bigger slice of the social cake. Under Marxist influence, the proletariat in the West strives to overcome exploitation in the effort to enjoy the same advantages as the bourgeoisie. That is "an extension of the bourgeois ideal, not its overc~rning."'~~ As Spirito sums up his anti-Marxist critique of Occidental Communism, "The Italian Communist Party may be dependent in everything on the Soviet Communist

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Party, but it will always differ from the latter because of its characteristically irreducible anticommunism." That is because each individual's comfort is its goal. Unlike Marxist Communism, Christian Communism is the most perfect expression of the communist faith."' Christianity, Spirito contends, is total communism. It is a gross mistake to counterpose Christianity to communism, for "if Christian civility had developed historically following the example and humble life of its founder, Communism would have no reason for being and for constituting a new faith." As the greatest revolutionary movement in the history ofthe world, it owes its deformation to the Church of Rome.'02 That might have been Machiavelli speaking. Russian Communism was the radical antithesis not of Christian Communism, Spirito argued, but of Occidental Communism. Unlike the communist parties in the West, Soviet Communism was comparatively free of bourgeois residues. That is because the bourgeois revolution in Russia came only in passing and failed to consolidate its influence over the working masses. Since the Soviet Union had done away with capitalistsand capitalism, a homogeneous community without bourgeois gentlemen was finally assured along with the conditions for building "an authentic communism." As long as the Iron Curtain was in place, there was little danger of contamination from the West. But with its folding and Khrushchev's new policy of opening the country to the West, he warned, there was the ever-present danger that Marxist Communism would be its undoing.lo3 In September and October 1960,Spirito visited the Chinese People's Republic. This experience made him aware of the profound difference between Chinese and Russian Communism. Unlike the deep religious feeling, mysticism, and Messianic faith of the Russian people still under the influence of Orthodox Christianity, Chinese Communism was set in a Confician ethical and predominantly lay culture. While Russian Communists seemed to be fiture-oriented, Chinese Communists were bent on making communism a present reality. That explains Mao's impatience during the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, his preference for "Reds" over expert^,'^ and his policy of building communism and socialism simultaneously instead of separately by stages.'04 As in the West, the so-called good life is the Chinese ideal, but with the difference that it is conceived as a shared instead of narrowly individual experience. Hence Spirito's depiction of Chinese Communism as convivial. The Chinese cuisine played a central role in this commensal or kitchen communism, while the sacrifice of present consumption for hture production as in the Soviet Union was virtually inconceivable.Io5 Life in the communes, Spirito concluded, was the distinguishing feature of Chinese Communism. Unlike Western bourgeois communism and Russian workers' communism, in China peasant communism was the rule, but a peasantry in the course of becoming industrialized.The commune had the advantageover the Soviet factory and agricultural collective of integrating production and consumption, of developing them together instead of separately. No wonder that they spread so rapidly throughout the countryside without peasant armed resistance as in Russia!

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Traditional Chinese lay culture, Spirito believed, accounted for the difference.'06 As Marxist philosophy is taught in Chinese universities, Spirito observed, it is invariably presented in ignorance of its historical context. "What is taught in its name is mainly a collection of basic principles having direct applicationto problems ofthe Chinese revolution." That is how other scholars had depicted the sinification or de-Europeanization of Marxism in China-a Marxism without Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian traces, totally abstracted from the influence of Renaissance humanism and bourgeois individualism. As Spirito summed up the Confucian heritage that makes Chinese Communism a virtual integration of individual and social life: "Think together, act together, live together. That is the Chinese ideal." Thus the Chinese "live like a family, like a group, like a commune, like a republic, and not as single persons who claim an autonomous value and life of their own."lo7 Would the Chinese People's Republic be able to ward off contagion from the West? In the case of Russia, Spirito feared the outcome. Regarding China, he was more sanguine in his expectations for the reasons just expressed.'08 What, then, was the outcome of the folding of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains? Two palace coups changed the course of both countries. The first in June 1957, less than a year after Spirito's visit to the Soviet Union, followed on the heels of Khrushchev's break with Stalinism. The second in October 1976 came as a total shock when, within only a month of Mao's death in September,the coup against his chosen followers opened the door to Western influence. With their protective curtains drawn, the demise of deep republicanism in the two great countries promising to turn the world right-side-up was only a matter of time. What brought about the coups that led to this change of course? As Lazar Kaganovich, leader of the Soviet "Gang of Four," explained to his nephew and biographer Stuart Kahan, collective leadership following Stalin's death could not work. "They would fix an agenda or select a topic, and then the wrangling would start." Shades of Romulus and Remus as Machiavelli presented them! "Everyone had a different idea of what should be done, in what degree and when." No wonder Machiavelli had cautioned that revolutionary power should be concentrated in one person. "Without any single, strong personality controlling the discussions, or at least the outcome, the meetings came full circle on any one issue." Talk was endless. "Shouting, name-calling, political jockeying, deals, plots, arrangements were the order of the day3'-so unlike the highly disciplined meetings when Stalin was in power.lo9 Consisting of Kaganovich, Molotov, Malenkov, and Shepilov, the "Gang of Four" emerged in an effort to block Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign. The power struggle came to a head in June 1957 at a meeting of the Presidium that handled legislation between sessions of the Supreme Soviet. Although the Stalinists counted on a majority of its thirty-three members, their support dissolved when Khrushchev launched a head-on attack against Kaganovich for being the wolf in the Kremlin. As Khrushchev wound up his indictment of Stalin's closest collaborator, "Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was responsible for the death of twenty million Russians"! That sufficed to crumple the "antiparty group" and its presumptive

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majority. Khrushchev remained in power, Molotov was effectively exiled as ambassador to Mongolia, and Malenkov was downgraded to the head of a power station in Siberia. Kaganovich managed to save his life when Khrushchev offered to make him manager of the Potash Works in the Urals."' As the top leadership ofthe Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Chinese "Gang of Four" consisted of Mao's wife Jiang Qing, his security chief and member of the Politbureau Kang Sheng, the head of espionage operations for the "Gang of Four" Zhang Chunqiao, and the third ranking member of the party at its Tenth Congress in April 1973 Wang Hongwen. With Mao's death in September a power struggle ensued between party moderates led by the acting Premier Hua Guofeng and the party's radicals led by Mao's widow. In October with the support of Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, Hua staged a palace coup by rounding up and imprisoning all four members of the opposition before they were alerted to the danger."' Arrested for planning a coup, their trial in November 1980 has been compared to that of German war criminals in Nuremberg following World War 11-a trial of the vanquished by the victors. For conspiring with the commanders of the urban militia in Shanghai to take over that city and then the capital, Mao's widow was sentenced to die-a sentence temporarily suspended and then commuted to life imprisonment in 1983."' Thus China ended up following the road charted by Khrushchev in the Soviet Union-the road from deep to shallow republicanism. Unexpectedly, a semblance of virtue politics survived under conditions in which a re-emergent bourgeoisie was tolerated by the ruling expertoisie, but the dominant ideology was still communist. The irony is that by then the Atlantic Model had become more closely approximated in China than in North America or Western Europe.

Freedom Misunderstood A pluralist democracy and a free-market economy reasserted themselves when the Iron and Bamboo Curtains folded-"After the Fall" when "The Walls Came Tumbling Down."Il3 In the West the kinds of freedom that counted were the "freedoms for": freedom ofthought, expression,and association along with the right to private property and the free pursuit of wealth, power, and the full development of human potentialities. But freedom is misunderstood if one assumes that there are no other freedoms than these. These were not the freedomsofparamount importance in communist countries, nor were they the freedomsmost extolled by Machiavelli. Such were the "freedoms from" want, domination, and exploitation by the powerful and wealthy and from the terrifying experience of war. Without these fundamental freedoms, one may be better off dead than alive. By comparison, the other freedoms are superfluous, the freedoms ofthe well-situated and comfortable, who would rather be dead than Red. These freedoms operate at loggerheads. Freedom for the avaricious and

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ambitious to pursue "greatness," be it wealth or power, is irreconcilable with the freedom from domination by the rich and mighty. The more there is of one kind of freedom, the less there is of the other. This polarity is barely recognized in the literature. Freedom is doubly misunderstood in the conviction that all freedoms are consistent with one another. In his first considered treatment of corruption in Discourses 1.17, Machiavelli sets forth the rudiments ofhis sociology of freedom. The ruin of republics is due not just to generalized wickedness, he argues, but also to the absence of equality. "For such corruption and incapacity to maintain free institutions results from a great inequality that exists in such a state; and to reduce the inhabitants to equality requires the application of extraordinary measures3'-a theme that recurs in Discourses 1.18, 37, 46, 55; and 3.16, 25. But what does Machiavelli mean by "inequality," "equality," and "perfect equality"? Consistent with his defense of shallow republicanism and the civic humanism of the Renaissance, Pocock refuses to believe that Niccolb could mean by "perfect equality" anything more than equal concern for the public interest reinforced by equality under the law. But as Robert Kocis argues in Machiavelli Redeemed (1998), by perfect equality he meant killing all gentlemen and those who live like gentlemen "if that were required for human freedom." Following Machiavelli's usage, Kocis means by gentlemen the nobility, the owners of feudal wealth; and by those who live like gentlemen, the owners of commercial or bourgeois wealth.'I4 Contrary to Pitkin, it was not "an ever increasing social inequality" that ruined the Roman Republic according to Machiavelli, but resistance by the wealthy to the increasing demands of the plebs for economic equality under the agrarian law. Although "the populist hatred of the privilege and economic power attendant to wealth may or may not have intellectual origins in The Discourses," writes Kocis, "the raw emotional power of that hatred is certainly as alive there as in any populist propaganda." Nor is such a reading politically biased since, far from sharing Niccolb's populism, Kocis favors a middle course between shallow and deep republicanism,including both the "negative" freedom from government interference that protects the wealthy, and the "positive" freedom of government protection on behalf of the poor.115Of course, Kocis' terminology is misleading since what he calls "negative freedom" others call "freedom for," and what he calls "positive freedom" is generally acknowledged to be "freedom from." Machiavelli's ideal republic, as Kocis presents it, was the "government of the petit bourgeois led by Piero Soderini," precisely the republic in which he served as secretary. But the gentlemen of Florence headed by the Medici used their commercial wealth to overthrow it. Since this cost the secretary his public career and led to his arrest and torture, one can understand his abiding hatred ofgentlemen and his commitment to "democratic equality, like that of the populists . . . [who] attribute illegitimacy to the property of the rich."116 But can one credibly call "free" a closed society like the former Soviet Union under Stalin's iron dictatorship? Isn't communist totalitarianism the antithesis of human freedom and everything Machiavelli stood.for? Formulated in keeping with

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the premises of shallow republicanism, Stalin was a Machiavellian only in caricature. We have seen that for Machiavelli shallow republicanism was a prelude to deep republicanism. By freedom in Discourses 1.2-5, he understood not a static balance between nobles and plebs, but a movement from class to a classless society without nobles and those who live like them. Although freedom under a mixed constitution is compatiblewith inequality, its fulfillment presupposes a condition of perfect equality. That means the repression of the ambitious and avaricious and their corresponding freedoms. The early chapters of the Discourses cannot be read intelligently in abstraction from the later ones that qualifjl Machiavelli's initial discussion of freedom. A clue to his deeper meaning occurs as early as chapter 5 in which freedom means resistance to domination and the overcoming of oppression. As Machiavelli notes, a most difficult task for which ordinary means will not suffice. To ensure freedom, "it becomes necessary to resort to extraordinary measures, such as violence and arms, and above all things to make one's self absolute master ofthe state, so as to be able to dispose of it at That requires a revolutionary dictatorship during the transition from shallow to deep republicanism. Certainly, Stalin fits that bill. "And as the reformation ofthe political condition of a state presupposes a good man, whilst the making of himself prince of a republic by violence naturally presupposes a bad one," the chances are that only a violent person will be equipped to do the job. For a corrupt people "whose turbulence could not be combated by the simple force of law can be controlled in a measure only by an almost regal power . . . [while] to attempt to restore men to good conduct by any other means would be either amost cruel or an impossible undertaking." Machiavelli's two exampleswere the Spartan Cleomenes who had all the nobles slain and all such others who might oppose his project, and the Heraclean Clearchuswho did as much.'I8 So why should Stalin not qualifjl as both a great reformer and defender of freedom-freedom from corruption? Gramsci likened the modern prince not to an individual but to a collective entity-the vanguard party. He would have been closer to the text of both The Prince and the Discourses by likening it to a single person, to the general secretary of the only significant vanguard party at the time. Although discredited as a Cold War historian, Talmon at least had the merit of acknowledginganother kind offreedom besides the demoliberal variety in the West. Far from being of recent growth outside the Western tradition, he argued, "totalitarian democracy" has its roots in the common stock of eighteenth-century ideas. Although it evolved into a system of coercion, that was not because it rejected the values of liberal individualism,but because it was ultra-democratic and had a too exalted conception of freedom. Thus BabeuVsaw the essence of freedom in ownership of everything by the State and the use of public force to ensure a rigidly equal distribution of the national in~ome.""~ But the yearning for equality of conditions and the love of freedom, Talmon concludes, are ultimately contradictory."Freedom has no meaning without the right

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to oppose."'20Yes, but the right to oppose not equality, but inequality ofconditions. Unlimited freedom of opposition is a recipe for license and a breeding ground of corruption, as Machiavelli well understood. In Wealth and Democracy (2002), Kevin Phillips charts the history of the American rich since 1790 with the help of an index of corruption: the ratio of the largest single fortune to median family income. By this measuring rod, corruption increased steadily from 1790 when the ratio was 4,000: 1 , to 1912 when it was a whopping 1.2 million to 1. The astonishing fact is that Teddy Roosevelt's attack on America's big corporations followed by FDR's New Deal, Truman's Fair Deal, and Johnson's Great Society saw the ratio steadily fall until it bottomed out at 60,000: 1 in 1982-roughly where it had been before the Civil War in 1861. Yet it took less than 20 years for the new wave of corruption to reach record heights when it mushroomed to 1.4 million to 1 in 1999.'" These figures tell us that the progress of corruption not only slowed but went into reverse in response to the populist backlash and the third-party progressive movement in which professionals took the lead against capitalist laissez-faire, the new robber barons, and conspicuous consumption during and following the Gilded Age. As Lee Atwater, 1988 campaign manager for George H.W. Bush, summed up the political danger from public outrage over the new imbalances arising from the Reagan presidency: "The way to win a presidential race against the Republicans is to develop the class warfare issue. To divide up the haves and have nots and to try to reinvigorate the New Deal He failed to add that the class warfare issue contributed to the victory against corruption in Russia as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin's subsequentstruggle against his right-wing opponents among the Communist Old Guard. Pace Professor Talmon, the impact of Lenin's and Stalin's examples on the United States and its freedoms has been mainly beneficial. It was the army of professional travelers to the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1932-the pragmatic philosophers, educators, social workers, economists, engineers, labor bureaucrats, industrial managers, agronomists, writers, artists, university professors, and liberal spokesmen-that "constructed in the American intellectual consciousness . . . a status for the Soviet Union as the conscience-model of social experiment." It remained only for FDR's Brain Trust to translate the Soviet Union's commitment to freedom through social engineering and national planning into reality through the New Deal's Public Works Admini~tration.'~~ In a message to Congress on 6 January 1941, Roosevelt said that any settlement made after World War I1 should be based on "four freedoms." The first and second derived from America's legacy of shallow republicanism: the freedoms for speech and religious worship. The third and fourth showed traces of a different legacy, that ofdeep republicanism and its freedoms from: freedom from want translated into full employment and social security;and freedom from feartranslated into a worlwide reduction in armaments that might reduce the possibilityofa third world war. As Frederick Pike portrays the maverick president in FDR 's Good Neighbor

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Policy, Roosevelt wanted the best ofboth laissez-faireand social engineering. John Maynard Keynes, with whom Roosevelt conferred in the White House in 1934,had charted a middle course between the interests of labor and capital through a system of deficit spending and countervailing powers involving checks on both. As Roosevelt adapted and reformulated this middle course, it amounted to a social pact that lasted more than thirty years. Pike attributes it to the influence on Roosevelt of the "socialist-populist extremists" in his entourage, the Brain Trust and the likes of Henry Wallace, John Collier, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, and Eleanor R o ~ s e v e l t . ' ~ ~ Roosevelt's Brain Trust foreshadowed the replacement of capitalism by professionalism. The first New Deal (1932-1936) called into question the republicanism of Wall Street and America's unregulated capitalism. Although the structural reforms and national planning advocated by the populist-extremists in the Brain Trust failed to get Roosevelt's approval, the New Deal legislated a series of partial reforms that greatly curbed the advance of corruption in America. "I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does," F.D.R. confessed to his treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., in 1942. "I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths." Well said, by an American president who took Machiavelli's advice to heart, says Pike. Unlike the Florentine Secretary, he believed it was possible to reconcile opposites, a trait that suggested to Rexford Tugwell a penchant for "holistic" instead of "linear" thinking. Yet Machiavelli also knew how to temporize, as in his support of a Polybian mixed constitution when a more extreme solution was unfeasible. As Pike sums up his portrait of the president, he was a latter-day Machiavellian "in preaching the populist creed of redirecting governmental priorities so as to provide security and dignity for ordinary people."'25 Yes, but he also deceived the people into believing that Japan's attack on America was unanticipated when a virtual state of war existed with Japan prior to Pearl Harbor. Nor was F.D.R. the only trickster at the helm. People's historian Howard Zinn provides a multitude of examples of how ordinary citizens were tricked into supporting wars supposedly in the national interest under Roosevelt's successors. Like earlier crusades,the crusade against communism was built on a lie. Machiavelli had encouraged lying and other forms of deception in defense of deep republicanism, not for the purpose of targeting or arresting it. But beginning with Hitler's crusade, his American counterparts aimed at removing every last trace of communism from the face of the earth. No full-fledged republican could support America's strategy. The war in Vietnam was a turning point.126 Critics of the lack of freedom under communism need to distinguish communists with a monopoly ofpower from communists on the road to power. Out of power, they carried the torch of freedom. In power, almost all their leaders have betrayed it, but never to the extent that shallow republicans have. That is because communism frees workers from capitalist exploitation, if not from professional exploitation. Shallow republicans tolerate both. Contrary to widespread opinion, America is not the "land of the freew-although neither was the Soviet Union.

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It takes a people's history of the United States to present the truth about the communist contribution to basic freedoms. During the wave of rank-and-file strikes and insurgencies in the 1930s, Communist Party militants were in the forefront. They pushed the leaders of the American Federation of Labor and its Congress of Industrial Organizations into organizing the unorganized during the Great Depression. The Communist Party also played a key role in bringing about racial equality in the South, where its members "earned the admiration of blacks by their organizing work against enormous obstacles."127 President Harry Truman had to reckon with the prospect of black insurgency dangerously linked to the Communist Party, writes Howard Zinn, "especially as the cold war rivalry with the Soviet Union began and the dark-skinned revolt of former colonies all over the world threatened to take Marxist form." Without government action the United States would be unable to "counter the continuing Communist thrust at the most flagrant failure of American society-the race question." In late 1946 he appointed a Committee on Civil Rights to meet the communist threat. As the committee explained its purpose: "Those with competing philosophies have stressed-and are shamelessly distorting-our shortcomings." The communists "have tried to prove our democracy an empty fraud, and our nation a consistent oppressor of underprivileged people." The stakes were high during the Cold War-nothing less than world supremacy on an abominable civil rights record with far-reaching effects.Iz8 "Class interest," continues our historian, "has always been obscured behind an all-encompassingveil called the 'national interest."' With this veil as justification, Truman launched a "police action" in Korea that killed millions of people on the pretext of defending human freedom. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon carried on a war in Indochina in which millions more were slaughtered, mostly civilian men, women, and children. But is there a "national interest"? Zinn asks. Or is it the interest of a ruling class that represents only a small part ofthe nation?'29And aren't the fundamental freedoms from death and physical injury violated when a handful of professionals in power decide when and where to launch a war without consulting the nation in advance? The most surprising data comes from the massive resistance to the Vietnam War. A survey by the University of Michigan showed that "Americans with only a grade-school education were much stronger for withdrawal from the war than Americans with a college education." Although the media had persistently presented the opposite picture, in June 1966, 41 percent of those with only a grade-school education favored withdrawal compared to 27 percent with a college education. Sociologist Richard F. Hamilton in his June 1968 survey of public opinion found that preferences for tough policy alternativeswere more frequent among "the highly educated, high-status occupations, those with high incomes." Harlan Hahn, a political scientist, "found support for withdrawal from Vietnam highest in groups of lower socioeconomic status." Bruce Andrews, a Harvard student of public opinion, found in 1964 that 53 percent of the college-educated favored sending troops to Vietnam compared to only 33 percent of grade-school graduates.I3OAs

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Machiavelli observed, the poor are the defenders of basic freedoms, not the rich. America's "national interest" was presumably the interest of professionals, those with college degrees rather than those without. On the plea that the most important freedoms are those to "get ahead" and to "make it," the American underclass was being forced to risk death in a war for its social betters-r suffer the consequencesby resisting. Since its share in the American way of life was only token, the "freedoms for" in the "national interest" were not for them.

Machiavelli's New Moses and Plebeian Catiline In his book Machiavelli (1998), Maurizio Viroli quotes from a letter to Francesco Vettori (1 8 March 1513) only a few days after Niccolo's release from prison. "I was born in poverty and at an early age learned how to scrimp rather than to thrive." As Viroli comments, Niccolb's letter also disclosed his way of looking at the world. "He was telling his friend that very early on in his life he had accus-tomed himself to look at men and life from the side of poverty, exclusion, and ad~ersity."'~' May this not account for his persistent hostility toward gentlemen and those who lived like them? Ambition and avarice, power for the purpose of domination and riches for a soft and comfortable life were his declared enemies. As the principal causes of war, they "deprive men of the most precious benefit of peace." Contrary to those Machiavelli scholars who stress his concern for "greatness" and "empire," he believed wars to be "the greatest evil that afflicts the human condition." As he wrote in his poem "Ofthe Blessed Spirits," war is a "pitiable and cruel affliction of miserable mortals." Rather than an inescapable and grandiose force, it is displeasing to God. Civil war is even worse. Niccolo's description ofthe ferocity of his fellow Florentines was designed to arouse repulsion rather than admiration, according to Viroli. Because men fight from ambition for power and over property like nothing else, war is anything but noble.I3' Although one must be prepared for war at any cost, and the nobles excel all others in the art of war, so much the worse for them. These remarks may seem inconsistent with Niccolo's endorsement of the martial virtues, but one must consider their purpose. They were for the sake of patriotism, not empire; for national liberation, not domination. His objection to the popular notion of Christianity is that it "places the supreme happiness in humility," has discouraged "great deeds," "made men feeble, and caused them to become an easy prey to evil-minded men, who can control them more securely." All for the sake of going to Paradise instead of fighting to overcome corruption in this world. But this reading of Scripture, he tells us, comes from a "false interpretation of our religion." While "the world has become effeminate and Heaven disarmed, yet this arises unquestionably from the baseness of men, who have interpreted our religion according to the promptings of indolence rather than those of virtue." ?;he truth of the matter, he adds, is that "our religion permits us to exalt and defend our country."

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It encourages instead of discourages the love of liberty.I3' Was this a reading into Christianity of the classical virtues, or was it a return to Christianity's original foundations?Niccolb insists it was a return to the original doctrines of Jesus and the disciples. So interpreted, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher like Savonarola intent on taking political matters into his own hands. Like John the Baptist, he preached "the kingdom of heaven is at hand" and warned of "the wrath to come" (Matt. 3:27). These words signified that the kingdom of God was not in Heaven, as the phrase suggests, but on earth in the form of the City of God-that of the Chosen People and the Temple in Jerusalem under Roman occupation. John the Baptist was acting in tandem with Jewish Zealots who planned to liberate the city by violence, and Jesus may have followed suit. How else interpret his condemnation ofthe Jewish partiespharisees, Sadducees,Herodians-without even a word censuring the Zealots? As S.G.F. Brandon concludes in Jesus and the Zealots (1967), the Gospels' silence about the Zealots must "surely be indicative of a relationship between Jesus and these patriots which the Evangelists preferred not to dis~lose."'~~ In Machiavelli S Three Romes (1 996), Vickie Sullivan questions Niccolo's "less than sincere appeals to a purer Christianity." Perhaps that is because she is unfamiliar with biblical scholarship. But she inadvertently undermines her case in stressing the superior strength of the second Rome that emerged from the ruins of the first Rome it subverted."Through the force of arms, the Romans amassed a vast empire, but ultimately their arms were ineffectual when the Christians confronted them with unfamiliar weapons-with the arts of peace rather than the art of war."I3' Jesus launched a cultural revolution in the name of a strange new creed that challenged the greatest power on earth. He defied the rule of gentlemen and those who lived like them by relying on the virtues of manliness, heroism, and audacity that Machiavelli admired. Jesus was no cloistered monk preaching a monastic withdrawal from the world, but an advocate of driving the money-changers from the temple. His martyrdom testifies to the danger he represented to both the Roman occupation and the Jewish sell-outs, the Herodians. The so-called prince of peace was not that peaceful. In denouncing every conceivable form of corruption, he made enemies wherever he went. To help his disciples survive in the midst of wolves, he advised them to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves," to persevere in the face of persecution, to preach his message of subversion without fear of kings and governors-manly counsels all. "Think not that I came to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword (Matt. 10:34). Jesus was bent on making trouble. "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household (Matt. 10:35-36). Such is the language of civil war. Thus Jesus' sermon on the plain depicts his kingdom as fit only for the poor, targets the rich as the enemy, suggestingnotjust a brewing civil war, but also class warfare (Luke 6:20,24). Ditto

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Luke 18:22 and 25. Instead of being insincere, Niccolb may have detected in Jesus a dangerous man, brave and politically active, as was Savonarola who also took up the cross of freedom at his peril and followed him to the stake. As Jesus summed up his political message: "Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down" (Mark 13:2). As noted by more than one biblical scholar, the original sources ofthe Synoptic Gospels "point back to a revolutionary movement led first by John the Baptist and then by Jesus." Jesus' movement "aimed at the overthrow of Roman and Herodian rule in Palestine and the establishment of an earthly 'Kingdom ofGod' in which the first would be last and the last first, the rich sent empty away and the poor filled with good things and given houses and land." In this perspective he was a second Moses, a Jewish patriot and leader of a struggle for national liberation. But his attempt to seize Jerusalem on Passover failed and resulted in his crucifixion along with others involved in the insurrection. As John Dominic Crossan notes, a close reading of the Synoptic Gospels confirms their presentation of Jesus as "the new and greater M ~ s e s . " ' ~ ~ That may well have been Machiavelli's view. As a second and even greater Moses, Jesus would have ranked in Niccolo's pantheon above the other liberators and legislators of mankind. But it would have been heresy to portray him as such. Ugo Dotti is among the handful of scholars who stress Machiavelli's private war against gentlemen and those who live like them. The centerpiece of his much neglected study of Machiavelli and the phenomenology of power is the speech by a "plebeian Catiline" in the Florentine Histories. Put in the mouth of a disgruntled leader of the insurgent woolen guilds in 1378, it is a treasure-house of Machiavellian wisdom targeting the powerful and wealthy. Pace Pocock, it represents for Dotti "the fundamental moment of Machiavelli's political thought . . . the moment of extreme and desperate resolution: the moment ofrebellion . . . the poor man's offensive against the opulent squandering of wealth by the 'great."'137 Dotti underscores Niccolo's intellectual debt to Sallust's Bellum Catilinae, composed shortly after Catiline's conspiracy in support of plebeian demands in 63 B.C. The widespread discontent in ancient Rome provoked by excessive inequality in the distribution of wealth had become a grave danger to the Republic. Excluded from office as a patrician, Catiline espoused the cause ofthe plebs and called for the cancellation of debts. Machiavelli had Catiline in mind, says Dotti, in claiming that well-ordered republics are rich and the citizens poor. In Discourses 1.46 and 3.6, he shows familiarity with Sallust's work, with the conditions leading up to the conspiracy, and with Cato's speech in the senate complaining that his fellow citizens had fallen in love with luxury. Cited by Sallust, the speech denounces the corruption in Rome from aspiring after riches and leisure, as a result of which "we had a poor State and private wealth."'38 As Machiavelli explains, the class struggle in Rome culminated in efforts by the Gracchi to correct the disparities of wealth. But the revival of the agrarian law further increased the hostilities, as a result of which the Gracchi "wholly destroyed

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the Roman republic." But were the equalizers the main cause of its ruin? The agrarian law was favorable to liberty, says Niccolo, and "if the contentions about the agrarian law needed three hundred years to bring Rome to a state of servitude, she would have been brought there much quicker if the people . . . had not for so great a length oftime kept the ambition ofthe nobles in check"-just as the Gracchi and Catiline attempted through rebe1li0n.l~~ Dotti stands virtually alone among Machiavelli scholars in defending a populist reading of the Discourses. Unlike other readings, he associates Machiavellian "greatness" and "heroism" with a concern for the "common good" interpreted as "the equalizing ofthe patrimonial foundation of democracy." By that he means not the equality of monastic life, of ascetics who wear the same kind of clothes, eat the same kind of food, and occupy the same living space in their tiny cells. He means a "relative" or "general" equality that would prevent anyone from becoming either rich enough to acquire a servant or so desperately poor as to have to serve an employer. Such was the petty-bourgeois panacea envisioned by Machiavelli and rehabilitated by Rousseau in the maxim that the greatest good of all reduces itself to two main objects, "liberty and equality . . . because liberty cannot exist without it.m140

Notes 1. Benedetto Croce, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, trans. C.M. Meredith (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 118. 2. Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, 4 vols. (New York: Monthly Review, l977-1990), 3: 121-122, 361-362, 364-366; and Donald Clark Hodges, The Literate Communist: 150 Years of the Communist Manifesto (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 20-28. 3. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, 4 vols., ed. V. Gerratana (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1975), 2: 1315. 4. Karl Marx, Preface to the second edition of Capital: A Critique ofPolitical Economy, vol. 1, Kerr edition (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 23, 25. 5. Louis Althusser, "Machiavelli's Solitude," Appendix to Machiavelliand Us, 124-125. On this essay and its importance for understanding Marx's intellectual debt to Machiavelli, see Emmanuel Terray, "An Encounter: Althusser and Machiavelli," trans. Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio, eds., Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 257-277. 6. Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale, Marx Without Myth: A Chronological Study of His Life and Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 3 1; P.N. Fedoseyev, Irene Bakh, L.I. Golman et al, Karl Marx: A Biography, trans. Yuri Sdobnikov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 47; and Karl Marx, "Debates on Freedom of the Press," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, 46 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1975-1 992), 1:1 6 1; idem, "The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kolnische Zeitung," in Collected Works, 1:201; idem, The German Ideology (with Engels), in Collekted works, 5:322.

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7. Marx to Engels (London, 25 September 1857). in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 1 19; Karl Marx, "The Treaty of Villafranca," in Collected Works, 16:419; and Frederick Engels, "Army" and "Artillery," in Collected Works, 18:107, 191. 8. Marx to Engels (London, 3 July 1852), in Collected Works, 39:125; and Karl Marx, "Affairs in Prussia," in Collected Works, 17:491. 9. Marx, Preface to the second edition of Capital, 1:25-26. 10. Machiavelli, The Prince, 26: 1,2. l I. Hodges, The Literate Communist, 68-70. 12. Machiavelli, The Prince, 25:1, 3; and Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Frederic L. Bender (New York: Norton, 1988), 60, 63,66. 13. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 65. 14. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 67, 72-73; and Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (cited by Walzer in Exodus and Revolution, 54). 15. Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 58,67. 16. Machiavelli, The Prince, 18:3; 6 5 ; and Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 86. 17. Karl Marx, "Critical Marginal Notes on the Article 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform.' By a Prussian," in Collected Works, 3: 197, 199. 18. Marx, "Critical Marginal Notes," 3:204. 19. Karl Marx, "Les Conspirateurs, par A. Chenu. . . . La Naissance de la R6publique en Fkvrier 1848 par Lucien de la Hodde, Paris, 1850," in Collected Works, 10:3 18. 20. Karl Marx, "Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978; orig. pub. 1972), 577,578. 21. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 60. 22. Frederick Engels, Anti-Diihring: Herr Eugen Diihring 's Revolution in Science, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), 219,220. 23. Engels, Anti-Diihring, 221,222,223, 224. 24. Engels, Anti-Diihring, 249,250; and Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 6th ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 40. Marx cites the same passage from Mandeville in Capital, vol. 1, 674. 25. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Modem Library, 1937), 423, 742, 771. On Smith's indebtedness to Mandeville, see Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Merrington and Judith White (New York: Monthly Review, 1974), 194,196- 199, 200, 202-2 16. 26. Smith cited by Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, 157; see the comparable passage in Smith's Wealth of Nations, 12. 27. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 707, 709; and Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, 162. 28. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, ed. Frederick Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962), 799, 800. 29. Frederick Engels, "Introduction" to Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 2 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958, 1962), 1.485; and V.I. Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution" (April Theses), in V.I. Lenin, The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 298. 30. Marx, The Civil War in France, 1.5 19, 520; and Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, 185, 186. 3 1. Marx, The Civil War in France, 1S22, 523.

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32. Stewart Edwards, ed., The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), 26-28, 33, 34-35. 33. Paul Avrich, ed., The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), 156, 157-161. 34. On the Barcelona Commune, see Victor Alba, El marxismo en Espafia (1919-1939). 2 vols. (Mexico City: Costa-Amic, 1973), 1:3 l8-325,335-35 1; and 2:439-464. 35. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Praeger, 1957), 63,67-68. 36. Clare Hollingworth, Mao and the Men Against Him (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), 155-156; Mao cited, 157. 37. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 83,84,93. 38. Yakovlev cited by Hodges, The Literate Communist, 183. 39. Harold Perkin, The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1996), 24. 40. Harold Perkin, The Third Revolution, 24,41. 41. Harold Perkin, The Third Revolution, 126-127, 141. On milking the cow to dryness, see Michael Voslensky, La Nomenklatura: Los privilegiados en la U.R.S.S., trans. Mario Morales, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Argos Vergara, 198I), 152-179. 42. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Merit, 1965; orig. pub. 1937), 259. 43. Hodges, The Literate Communist, 171- 198. 44. A. Titarenko,"Maoism: Anti-Humanism and Adventurous Policy Making," in Maoism Unmasked, ed. V.F. Krivtsov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 97-98, 104. 45. A. Titarenko, "Maoism," 104. 46. Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain: An Autobiography, trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Summit, 1990), 261, 262. 47. Yeltsin, Against the Grain, 262. 48. Albert Weeks, The First Bolshevik: A Political Biography of Peter Tkachev (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 152 n.22, 167; and 5 (Lenin cited), 7 n.3, 8 n.6, 32 (quotes). 49. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography, trans. Harold Shukman (New York: Free Press, 1994), 68. 50. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, 362. 5 1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Bonaparte, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 594, 595 (quote). 52. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Ibid., 595 (quote), 596. 53. Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey ofBolslrevism, trans. C.L.R. James (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939), 53-57, 58 (quote); and Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1WO), 349, 36 1, 790. 54. V.I. Lenin, Two Tactics ofsocial-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1975), 132, 133. 55. V.I. Lenin, Two Tactics, 123-125, 126 (quote). 56. V.I. Lenin, "Two Lines of the Revolution," in Collected Works, vol. 18 (New York: International Publishers, 1930), 359-360 (quote), 360 (quote), 361. 57. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 790 (quote), 790-791 ;and V.I. Lenin, "Document 28," in The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive, ed. Richard Pipes, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 56.

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58. V.I. Lenin, "Enemies ofthe People," in The Lenin Anthology, 305; and Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography, 201 -202. 59. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 791, 793, 794. 60. Lenin, "Document 24" and "Document 37," in The Unknown Lenin, I I, 50 (quote), 69 (quote). 61. V.I. Lenin, "Document 94," in The Unknown Lenin, 153, 154. 62. V.I. Lenin, "Lej-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, in The Lenin Anthology, 578, 61 1,612. 63. Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 199; from the final chapter of Leon Trotsky's Our Political Tasks (London: New Park Publications, 1904). 64. Knei-Paz, Leon Trotsky, 180; and Souvarine, Stalin, 122. 65. Knei-Paz, Leon Trotsky, 180; 183, Trotsky cited; 184-185, Trotsky cited. 66. Knei-Paz, Leon Trotsky, 185, Trotsky cited. 67. Karl Marx, "General Rules of the International Working Men's Association," in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 2 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), 1:386; and Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, 193-194; 199, Trotsky cited; 200, Trotsky cited. 68. Knei-Paz, Leon Trotsky, 202; 203, Trotsky cited; 204. 69. Knei-Paz, Leon Trotsky, 230, Trotsky cited. 70. Knei-Paz, Leon Trotsky, 37 1. 7 1. Leon Trotsky, The New Course (New York: New International, 1943), 92,93 (quote), 94 (quote). 72. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed. Trotsky: 1921-1929 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 339,341, 343-344, Trotsky cited. 73. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, 346; 346-347, Trotsky cited; 347. 74. Knei-Paz, Leon Trotsky, 560 11.218, Trotsky cited; and Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Merit, 1965; orig. pub. 1937), 277,278,283. 75. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963; orig. pub. 1WO), 58, 59,63. 76. Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours (New York: Merit, 1966), 30-3 I . 77. Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours, 3 1 (quote), 33,39,40 (quotes), 41 (quote). 78. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, ed. and trans. Harold Shukman (Rocklin, Calif.: Prima, 1992), 139, 279. 79. Budu Svanidze, My Uncle Joseph Stalin, trans. Waverly Root (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1953), 128. 80. Svanidze, My Uncle Joseph Stalin, 128, 129 (quotes), 130 (quote). 8 I . Svanidze, My Uncle Joseph Stalin, 130, 131 . 82. David M. Cole, Josef Stalin Man of Steel (London: Rich & Cowan, 1942), 97. 83. Volkogonov, Stalin, 306; and Leon Trotsky, "The USSR in War," idem, In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pioneer, 1942), 5. 84. Stalin 's Letters to Molotov, ed. Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov, and Oleg V. Khlavniuk, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 49. 85. Joseph Stalin, "The Right Danger in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (October 1928), in Leninism: Selected Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1942). 83; and "The Right Deviation in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (April 1929), in Leninism, 90,92. 86. Joseph Stalin, "Report on the Work of the Central Committee ofthe Communist Party of the Soviet Union (January 1934)," in Leninism, 349; italics deleted.

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87. Souvarine, Stalin, 476,590; and Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences ofStalinism, rev. ed., trans. George Shriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 596-597; 597, Stalin cited. 88. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 596; and Souvarine, Stalin, 649. 89. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast. Trotsky: 1920-1940 (New York: Vintage, 1965), 306,307. 90. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 600, 601; and Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 2 vols., ed. and trans. StrobeTalbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970,1974), 1:4-6, 222 (quote). 91. Eudocio Ravines, The Yenan Way(New York: Scribner, 195I), 144, Manuilsky cited. 92. Ravines, The Yenan Way, 151, 152, 153. 93. Ravines, The Yenan Way, 153, 155, 156. 94. Ravines, The Yenan Way, 157, 157-158. 95. Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 93,95. 96. Ugo Spirito, 11 comunismo (Florence, Italy: Sansoni, l965), 199,210. 97. Giovanni Gentile, Genesis and Structure of Sociefy, trans. H.S. Harris (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961; orig. pub. 1946), 171f.; and O.K. Kuusinen, Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, 2nd ed., trans. Clement Dutt (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1963; orig. pub. 1959), 584. 98. Ugo Spirito, Capitalismo e corporativismo (Florence, Italy: Sansoni, 1933), 14-15, 55, 59, 120. 99. Ugo Spirito, Comunismo russo e comunismo cinese (Florence, Italy: Sansoni, 1962), 37-39. 100. Ugo Spirito, Lafilosofia del comunismo (Florence, Italy: Sansoni, 1948), 86,89,92. 101. Spirito, Comunismo russo e cornunismo cinese, 40, 41, 42, 58-59; and idem, Cristianesirno e cornunismo (Florence, Italy: Sansoni. 1958), 41 -42. As Alexander Tsipko observed in "The Roots of Stalinism," neither Stalin nor the Russian working class was able to avoid the "Christianization of Marxism." See Robert V. Daniels, ed. and trans., A Documentary History of Communism in Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993), 370. 102. Spirito, Cristianesimo e comunismo, 40,41-42, 103. Spirito, Comunismorusso e comunismo cinese, 42-43,44,47-48,60-63. Concerning the threat to Russian Communism posed by Khrushchev's opening to the West, see idem. Cristianesimo e comunismo, 1 1 8- 120. 104. Spirito, Comunismo russo e comunismo cinese, 66-70. 105. Spirito, Comunismo russo e comunismo cinese, 70-75. 106. Spirito, Comunismo russo e comunismo cinese, 75-78. 107. Spirito, Comunismo russo e comunismo cinese, 87, 89,90,91; italics mine. 108. Spirito, Comunismo russo e comunismo cinese, 45,46, 5 1-52, 109-110. 109. Stuart Kahan, The Wolfof the Kremlin (New York: William Morrow, 1987), 283. 110. Kahan, The Wolfof the Kremlin, 292-296,297,300. For a summary of other accounts of Khrushchev's coup, see Martin Nicolaus, Restoration of Capitalism in the USSR (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1975), 63-69. 11I. Roxane Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch 'ing(Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 3-5,475-476; and Clare Hollingworth, Mao and the Men Against Him (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985). 307. 1 12. Hollingworth, Mao and the Men Against Him, 307-309, 339.

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113. Robin Blackburn, ed., AJier the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism (London: Verso, 1991), ix-xi, 4-5; and Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5-6,253-254. 114. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 209, 537; and Robert A. Kocis, Machiavelli Redeemed: Retrieving His Humanist Perspectives on Equality, Power, and Glory (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press; and London: Associated University Presses, 1998), 178, 181-184. 1 15. Kocis, Machiavelli Redeemed, 182 (Pitkin quoted), 183-184, 189, 190. 116. Kocis, Machiavelli Redeemed, 189. 1 17. Discourses, 1.18. 118. Discourses, 1.9, 16, 18. 119. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 1-2,202-203,249,250. 120. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 253,254. 121. Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 38, Chart 1.5. 122. Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, xiii (Atwater quoted). 123. Lewis S. Feuer, "American Travelers to the Soviet Union 1917-1932: The Formation of a Component ofNew Deal Ideology," in idem, Marx and the Intellectuals: A Set of PostIdeological Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1969), 136, 137-140; and Elliot A. Rosen, Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Brains Trust: From Depression to New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 162, 165, 166, 362,380,405 n.2 1. 124. Frederick B. Pike, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 153, 154, 157,203. 125. Pike, FDR 's Good Neighbor Policy, 10, 140, 143, 157 (Roosevelt quoted). 126. Howard Zinn, A People S History of the United States (New York: Harpercoilins, 2001), 410-41 3,421 -426,438-441,475-476,483-484. 127. Zinn, People's History, 399,402,447. 128. Zinn, People's History, 448,449. 129. Zinn, People 's History, 658, 659. 130. Zinn, People 's History, 491,492. 131. Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 12. 132. Viroli, Machiavelli, 15, 16, 34. 133. Discourses, 2.2. In Machiavelli 's Three Romes (DeKalb: Northern lllinois University Press, 1996), 40-41, Vickie B. Sullivan dismisses Niccolb's claim that unworldly Christianity rests on a false interpretation of Scripture. In view of Discourses, 1.12 and Machiavelli's interest in his earthly homeland, she rejects his claim as "incredible" and as a mere pose aimed at serving his political purposes. 134. Archibald Robertson, The Origins of Christianity (New York: International Publishers, 1954), 93-95; and S.G.F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), 325-326,327,350-353. 135. Sullivan, Machiavelli's Three Romes, 100, 103. 136. Robertson, The Origins of Christianity, 93; Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, 17-18, 65,280-282,326-327; and John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 15. 137. Ugo Dotti, Niccold Machiavelli: La jkomenologia del potere (Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1979), 9-10. 138. Dotti, Niccold Machiavelli, I 16(Sallust quotingcato); Discourses, 1.46,3.6 (~atiline cited). 139. Discourses. 1.37.

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140. Dotti, Niccold Machiavelli, 1 15-1 16, 1 19, 122; and Rousseau, The Social Contract, 2.1 1 (49-50).

Chapter 5

Prelude to Professionalism James Burnham's Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom begins by contrasting Dante's politics as wish with the Florentine Secretary's politics as power. The ideal government sketched in De Monarchia, he argues, conceals and disguises its real significance, whereas The Prince and the Discourses present the nominal meaning and the underlying meaning as one. "That is why, where Machiavelli is wrong, it is easy to correct him, and why he cannot deceive us."' On the contrary, the divergence between the overt and the covert significance of De Monarchia is transparent precisely because it appeals to an ideal. Machiavelli was also committed to an ideal, but without presenting it as such. That makes it doubly difficult to discern. That is why so many have misread him and why the poisonous seeds they have planted in the name of scholarship should be dug up and fumigated. We have already unearthed a sampling of these misreadings, but have yet to probe the covert significance of Machiavelli's state ofUperfectequality." Alongside his nominal egalitarianism is a defense of meritocracy or government by experts. They are supposed to be poor, but we are repeatedly told that power corrupts. This suggests that meritocracy has a built-in tendency toward inequality. Knowledge is power, but power opens the door to wealth. The temptation is ever-present, so that doing away with one kind of corruption is the beginning of another. In the real world, Machiavelli's egalitarianism spells the ruin of a landed aristocracy and its bourgeois successor, but to the benefit of a class of professionalswho end up taking their place. Ifwe call the new social orderprofessionalism, then deep republicanism is its prelude.

Weeding out Corruption In his autobiography,Out ofstep: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century, Sidney Hook, well-known philosopher, educator, and propagator ofthe philosophy of John Dewey, acknowledged that his early commitment to democratic socialism took the form of an ersatz religion.' Like Dewey, he was drawn to socialism for ethical

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reasons, and knew of nobody who had become a socialist on economic grounds. This may account for his holier-than-thou attitude toward the world-famous dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht when Brecht visited Hook at the latter's home in lower Manhattan in 1935. Shocked by Stalin's persecution of members of the Bolshevik Old Guard and their dependents, he asked why Brecht continued to collaborate with German and American Communists. Brecht replied, "As for them [members of the Old Guard], the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot!" Hook was stunned. Could Brecht possibly be serious? When Brecht replied with a smile, Hook fetched his guest's hat and coat, and escorted him to the door. That was the end of their relationship. Hook cites other cynical remarks attributed to Brecht by those who knew him. It seems that Brecht was a tough, Machiavellian, unsentimental revolutionary who, when Stalin's excesses were criticized, coolly replied: "Yes, it is terrible-but do we have anything besides the Soviet Union?" In short, is there anything better? His denunciations of the defendants brought up on false charges at the Moscow Trials in 1936-1 937 were almost as fierce as the prosecutor's. "They have to be shot," was his response to still others who refused to accept Stalin's role as hangman.3 On humane grounds, the innocent should not be shot. Yes, but innocent of what? Of not only the crimes imputed to them, but also of the urgency of eschewing pelf and privilege as an example to the masses, maintaining ranks and party discipline, and avoiding factionalism in a class war against a superior enemy. Hook could not have known that members of the Old Guard had become Sybarites and that no less a person than Trotsky, Stalin's mortal enemy, agreed with the general secretary's assessment of them as corrupt. Citing their inordinate privileges, an automobile, a spacious apartment, regular vacations, and the party maximum in salary, he further notes that they took for their wives and lovers the former young ladies of the upper classes whose expensive tastes they had come to share. As the Sovietjournalist Sosnovsky summed up the role ofthis "automobile-harem factor," a whip was needed to put an end to its demoralizing effects. Stalin was that whip. Not for nothing did he launch a reign of terror against the party's professionals patterned on Robespierre's efforts to stamp out a similar source of c~rruption.~ Although virtue was hardly his sole concern, Stalin was a far cry from that other monster, Cesare Borgia-Machiavelli's original choice for the princely role of liberating and unifying Italy. Like other tyrants in positions of power, Stalin sought to destroy those who opposed his authority. But as Machiavelli observed, "We must assume, as a general rule, that it never or rarely happens that a republic or monarchy is well constituted, or its old institutions entirely reformed, unless it is done by only one individual." It follows that a sagacious statesman and legislator of a new consti-tution, whose objective is to promote the common good and who prefers his country to his rivals and successors, "should concentrate all authority in himself." Nor will anyone wise in political matters ever censure him for having employed extraordinary means for that purpose. It is well said that, in the case of Romulus, who killed his brother in order to rule alone, "when the act accuses him, the result should ex-cuse him." For if the result proves beneficial, the means "will

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always absolve him from blame."' But was the outcome worth the suffering in the Soviet Union? In The God That Failed, six internationally famous writers motivated by compassion forthe poor and exploited tell why they changed their minds about Communism. They had been attracted by what the Communists promised, but were bitterly upset by the deception and cruelties practiced not just on innocent bystanders, but also on the party's rank and file. As for the country as a whole, "Did the promise equal the cost?" Louis Fischer, the American correspondent in Russia, believed he had forgotten the human being in the course of glorifying the material progress achieved. In the end he questioned whether all the shoes, schools, books, electric lights, tractors, and the Moscow subway were worth the price of so much cruelty. That bullets had replaced ballots in deciding the relentless intraparty struggle for power was censurable, but tolerable. What was intolerable was that, among loyal Communists, anybody "who had uttered a dissenting view in the past or whose independence and originality might some day nurture unorthodoxy received a 2 A.M. visit from the secret police and soon joined the involuntary 'builders of socialism' in Siberia and the Arctic ~ a s t e s . " ~ Still worse were the innumerable executions in which punishment failed to fit the crime, real or imagined. In December 1934 in retaliation for the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the boss of Leningrad and the Number Four Bolshevik, the Communist Secret Police executed 103 persons who were in jail and only indirectly, if at all, associated with the crime. For Fischer, the Moscow Trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938, followed by the pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, proved too much to bear. The Soviet dictatorship, he concluded, rested on "a sea of blood, an ocean of tears, and a world of suffering-the result of its cruel means." His mistake had been to believe, like Machiavelli, that "a system founded on the principle of 'the end justifies the means' could ever create a better world."' Yes, but did Fischer or anybody else have access to all the relevant data for making such ajudgment? They did not. Then how could they have weighed the pros and cons? They could not. It was all guesswork supported by appeals to conscience and the prevailing Christian morality in the West. The truth of the matter, as Machiavelli would say, is that nobody knew. It was either on faith or on grounds of class interest that one took a position, like Brecht in support of Stalin's dictatorship, or like Fischer and the other fellow travelers and ex-Communists, against it. To suspend judgment was the only rational course. But political allegiances supersede academic scruples, not just moral considerations, in such matters. The five-hundred years' contest between deep and shallow republicanism bears testimony to this hndamental premise. While most readers of this work may be expected to share the same antipathy for deep republicanism as they have for "that monster Stalin" who so well exemplifies it, they should at least know the facts, and learn from them to be more tolerant of intolerance. A student of Marxism, Hook never came to terms with ~achiavelli:His 1936 studies on the intellectual development of Karl Marx began with Hegel instead of Rousseau, not to mention the latter's dependence on the illustrious Florentine. It

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may never have occurred to him that Marx shared the same scorn as Machiavelli for privately held moral scruples that uphold personal interests and the rights of the individual above the public interest. Take section 2 of the Communist Manifesto: if, as Marx claims, the ruling ideas at any time are those of a ruling class of exploiters, then so are the prevailing moral ideas concerning what is right and just. Why, then, observe them? An avid reader of The Prince, Marx heaped ridicule on the use of moral phrases like "equal right" and "fair distribution" on the grounds that they undermined the realistic (Machiavellian) outlook with obsolete trash and ideological nonsense common among democrats and French So~ialists.~ The student of Machiavelli faces greater obstacles than the student of Marx. Consider the Florentine's repeated appeals to virtzi. Translated as "virtue," one usage denotes individual prowess, ability, strength, vigor, intelligence-the powers associated with masculinity from the Latin vir (man). The competing usage stands for civic virtue or patriotism, love of country and one's fellow citizens, tantamount to working and sacrificing for the common good-the attributes associated with morality from the Latin mores (manners, morals). Whereas the first usage is opposed to fortune, chance, or accident, to whatever defies human control, the second is opposed to corruption, greed, selfishness,and the subordination ofpublic to private interest^.^ The first meaning has been misconstrued as support for the Devil's maxim, "the end justifies the means." But as individual prowess, virtzi signified for Machiavelli the use of force and fraud, not for personal benefit, but to tame for public use the vagaries of Mistress Fortune." Are the two meanings of virtzi related? Machiavelli affords a clue by distinguishing between prowess with and without glory, that is, without the civic virtue for which princes are praised. "True prowess," he repeats, depends on using one's abilities for the common good. Precisely that is the difference between the heroic deeds of a Moses or Cyrus, which "bring good to the people of the land," and those of scoundrels and tyrants like Agathocles, Prince of Sicily, who gained power by killing innocent civilians and betraying his friends, a man "without faith, without pity, without religion."" Contrary to those who read Machiavelli as the Devil's advocate, he would have agreed with Bertrand de Jouvenel's assessment ofthe corrupting influence of power and wealth. For what purpose are wealth and power pursued, asks de Jouvenel, if not "to hold in disposition a mass of human labor and energies"? What else, if not to reap without having sown? "A rich man is one who can draw benefit from the mass. A strong man is one who can harness these energies to impose his will. The word 'wealth' calls up the idea of a retinue of servants, 'strength' that of an army of soldiers." Ifpower corrupts, so does wealth. That is why Machiavelli insists that in virtuous or well-regulated republics the state ought to be rich and the citizens poor.'2 Deep republicanism raised the prospect that corrupt states in which the wealthy and powerfid govern and benefit at the expense of the poor can be reformed by revolution. Since ordinary means will not suffice, extraordinary measures become

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necessary, "violence and arms, and above all things to make one's self absolute master of the state." That requires either a virtuous man ready to use violent means or a corrupt person willing to labor for the well-being of all-hence the difficulty or impossibility of making this kind of rev~lution.'~ If not impossible, Machiavelli adds, to make the revolution would be a most cruel undertaking. A virtuous republic being a republic of equals, the rich and those who aspire to riches are bound to resist. Consequently, whoever undertakes such a task in countries where there are many gentlemen, or people who live like gentlemen, "will not succeed until he has destroyed them all."'4 The promise was liberation from corruption. And the fulfillment? Madame Guillotine duringthe great French Revolution was hardly a utopian experiment. The heads rolled, and the class of gentlemen who owned castles and large estates no longer exists. A second revolutionary vanguard, patterned on that of the Jacobins, liquidated not only gentlemen but also those who lived like them. Whereas the Jacobin Reign of Terror lasted barely two years, the Bolshevik Terror lasted from roughly 1918 under Lenin and Trotsky to Stalin's death in 1953. Although a new class with privileges emerged under Stalin, deep republicanism in principle if not in fact was the rule, at least during his lifetime-and the same may be said of the fathers of the Chinese, Korean, Cuban, and Vietnamese revolutions. As a mirror to the corruption of the Atlantic Model, its animosities, pervasive selfishness, and perpetual wars, deep republicanism also served a humane purpose. Without the intransigence of republican extremists, even moderate change might have been stopped in its tracks. The promise of deep republicanism was that the world might be changed, and so it has been-thanks in part to political extremists. Half-measures, Machiavelli forcefidly argued, tend to boomerang. Laws are changed in response to people breaking them. When bullying is rife, according to George Orwell, "the weak in a world governed by the strong" must "break the rules, or perish." They must "make a different set of rules for them~elves."'~ The Bolsheviks began as rule breakers and lawbreakers. Ostensibly the champions of working stiffs, they ultimately sought power for themselves. Their vaunted dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of its privileged stratumthe new class of salaried professionals. The Terror began by decimating landowners,capitalists,petty-bourgeois, and rich peasants. "Bourgeois specialists," professionals who had served the bourgeoisie and also lived like them were next in line. Then came the turn of those Bolsheviks suspected of being the carriers of "critical" and "dangerous" thoughts, deviants from the party line or those who "vacillated" in accepting it, whether they lived like gentlemen or not. Yet the outcome proved beneficial to the class as a whole. That the expertoisie replaced the bourgeoisie at the helm was among the lasting contributions of the Communist ideology and the Bolshevik Terror of which Machiavelli was a forerunner.

Chapter 5

Terror's Shifting Targets The Bolshevik Terror's opening salvos against purported enemies of the people began in March 1918. As the terror of professionals in power against defenders and representatives of the old order, it was professionally organized in line with professional standards. As Trotsky laid down the criteria forjudging its success, "It is a question of expediency . . . terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operation^."'^ Yes, but to be "justified" it must succeed in its objective. Not all terror is permissible, Trotsky argued; ameans can only be justified by its end. Consequently, the only justification for terror is that it "really leads to the liberation of mankind." But were the chosen means capable of leading to the goal? The first terror led to a second targeting Stalin's rivals in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. Stalin's "false trials" and purges of Old Bolsheviks, Trotsky believed, "cannot serve to liberate the masses." Unlike Lenin's earlier terror, the Stalinist terror promised to be counterproductive and reactive." We turn, then, to the verdict ofhistory. Did the Stalinist Terror achieve its goal of developing the Soviet economy as a prior condition of building socialism in one country and fortifjling it against external aggression? And, a question Trotsky failed to ask, did it do so economically or in a wasteful and harmful manner beyond what was needed to ensure rule by professionals and the weeding out of corruption? The Old Russia of the Czars acquired the stigma of a prison-house of nations. Under Stalin the new Russia of the Commissars became, according to its critics, both a "prison-house of nations" and a vast concentration-campsociety founded on "slave labor" and "administrative mass murder." In the first society of, by, and for professionals,terror was used "to destroy any possibility of political opposition and [to] intercept any attempt at dissidence." As Michael Tomski, the top labor bureaucrat and head of the Soviet trade unions until 1929, declared when still in power: "Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, there can be two, three, or four parties, but only under the condition that one party will be in power and all others in prison." Second, terror evolved into a separate country behind barbed wire, a virtual state within the state "driven primarily by economic concerns." It came to play an essential role in the forced industrialization and violent collectivization. A cheap and massive supply of slave labor was its ultimate rationale, aimed at building the Soviet economy and "making the system of concentration camps economically self~upporting."'~ The building of socialism became an excuse for torture. The purges and forced confessions of the 1930s testify to it, as do the beatings in prison and in the labor camps. Some 10 percent of the Soviet people passed through Stalin's penitential machinery. The former czarist prisons were placed into service again. "Churches, hotels, even bath-houses and stables were turned into jails." Dozens ofnew prisons were built. But the horrendous feature was not imprisonment but the revival of torture on a scale that, accordingto Stalin's enemies, even the Nazis failed to match.

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"Men and women were mutilated, eyes gouged out, eardrums perforated." As recorded by Roy Medvedev, recruits of the Communist Secret Police were "taken to torture chambers, like medical students to laboratories to watch dissection^."'^ Communists in the West remained blind to these atrocities. Few knew anything about them until Khrushchev's Secret Speech at the party's Twentieth Congress in February 1956 leaked out, followed by the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich with Khrushchev's blessing. To cement his victory over the Old Guard's left and right wings, Stalin had lashed out at every conceivable source of opposition in Soviet society. "In 1937 alone he killed three thousand senior secret policemen and 90 percent of the public prosecutors in the provinces and constituent republics." The managerial elites were purged and as many as thirty thousand Red Army officers were shot, most of them within hours of their arrest. At least a million party members were mercilessly executed, including Communist refugees from Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Korea, India, China, and Western Europe.'' In every case the motive is believed to have been the same: If you are not with us, you are against us! And if you are against us, you deserve to die! In the conviction that all gentlemen and people who lived like gentlemen had been wiped out, the crucial question for dissenting Communists was no longer that of weeding out corruption. The thorny question became: Whose side are you on-that of the tortured, or that of the torturers! Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is a book of tortures authorized by a new breed of gentlemen with Stalin's permission. Contrary to the exaggerations and condemnations circulating in the media, torture in the Soviet Union was for the most part neither deliberate nor cruel. Instead of medieval methods, a forced condition of privation sufficed to achieve the desired results. Solzhenitsyn gives a plethora of examples of unintentional torture without cruelty. If by cruelty one means a disposition to cause pain or anguish, then "No one, no one at all, ever set out to torture us on purpose." It was the suffering in the labor camps that was unendurable, not the causes. "After all, was it because Pontius Pilate wanted to humiliate him that Christ was crucified between two thieves? It just happened to be crucifixion day-and there was only one Golgotha, and time was short." Thus it came to pass that "he was numberedwith the transgressors." For Solzhenitsyn,to be cast living among thieves and criminal recidivists who are more cruel than the guards is an even worse fate. "They are not people" but "vermin"-the "tattooed chests" were the political prisoners' worst enemies." Deliberate torture was confined almost exclusively to interrogations. New "civilized" methods were devised to extract confessions of guilt where there was no guilt. The Spanish Inquisition had relied on dramatic but cumbersome devices to squeeze out the desired information: the rack, the wheel, impalement, hot coals. But in the Soviet Union it was tacitly understood that torture should leave no physical traces: "an eye gouged out, an ear torn off, a backbone broken, even bruises." Enforced sleeplessnessmight achieve the same results. The preference was for light methods, such as friendly '>ersuasion," 'you1 language," "humiliation," "intimi-

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dation," deafening"soundeffects,""tickling,"blinding "lighteffects," "water"deprivation, "continuousinterrogation," the "bedbug-infestedbox," the "cold' cell, the "hot" cell, "starvation."Yet not even the lightest methods were needed to wring testimony and incriminating confessions from the majority of those interrogated. The odds were so stacked against them that, from fear and frustration, "they simply confessed to what they were told to confess." Make life easy for yourself! All you have to do is to sign the prepared document.'' Thanks to Communist ideology and the belief in "equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations," Solzhenitsyn reflects, "the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions." The evildoers were but an infinitesimal number among the victims ofthe Terror. But wasn't the Terror expedient? Perhaps, he concedes, yet "no one dares say a word about vice." So many millions mowed down, but citizens were told that "no one was to blame for it," even though 86,000 Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany for similar offenses. Too few, say the Communists, while for the same crimes in their own country only "ten men have been convicted." On the basis of comparative population figures, Solzhenitsyn estimates that the 86,000 Nazi murderers translates into "one-quarter of a million" Communist torturers who have been permitted to go free.') Not that they personally tortured anybody. It was enough that they threw political prisoners into the jaws of thieves, thugs, and murderers who tortured them on a daily basis. All in the name of socialism! Yet even before the October Revolution and the ensuing civil war, it was evident that Russia was "not suited for any sort of socialism whatsoever." Why was that? Because it was "totally polluted." In his chapter on "The History of Our Sewage Disposal System," Solzhenitsyn estimates in the millions the number of Soviet citizens who were "swept bodily down the sewer hatches," while the real polluters were those who had consigned them to oblivion. Even the workers voted 'tfor" sewage disposal, so they share responsibility for it. Even before the court verdicts, workers were mobilized and ''wrathfilly voted for the death penalty for the scoundrels on The reader of The Gulag Archipelago senses that Solzhenitsyn may have been overcome by collective guilt. To have voted "no"to the sewage disposal system was the only decent response to its horrors. But how many voted "no" compared to those who voted "yes"? One is led to believe that none of the trials should have happened and that the socialist revolution should have gone down the tube instead. Yet as Solzhenitsyn depicts the victims of the Terror, they were typically educated people, critical, reflective, and able to think for themselves--except under torture. Most of them were Communists who believed in Terror for others, not themselves. As educated people, they were presumably professionals, at least most of them. They were the darlings of the new order; many of them lived like gentlemen. As if they were not the carriers of corruption! As if there were no positive achievements chalked up by the revolution-and lasting ones at that! In The Origins of TotalitarianismHannah Arendt examines successive stages in the development of terror under the Bolsheviks. "After the extermination of real

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enemies [the first stage] has been completed and the hunt for 'objective enemies' [the second stage] begins does terror become the actual content of totalitarian regimes." The end of the first stage, "the liquidation of open and secret resistance in any organized form," is set at approximately 1930 at the beginning of Stalin's dictatorship. The second stage corresponds to what Arendt calls the second claim of totalitarianism, the claim to total domination. Henceforth, the objective enemy, a carrier of tendencies like the carrier of a disease, replaces the suspect-the possible crime replaces the suspected crime. No matter that terror precedes instead of following the crime: its excuse is that it lessens the number of crimes. The Moscow Trials of Old Bolsheviks is a classic example of punishment for possible crimes-the culmination of totalitarian terror and also its justification. Terror becomes total, Arendt believes, because the category of the possible enemy embraces under totalitarian conditionsthe total p~pulation.'~ Dangerousthoughts become any thoughts that deviate from the oficially prescribed but continually changing party line. Arendt7s caricature of Soviet society under Stalin stems from her failure to consider the enormous success of Soviet "brainwashing" that only highly educated and reflective people in the Soviet Union were in a position to question. Even more than in the liberal democracies of the West, the vast majority of Soviet citizens believed what they read in the newspapers and what they were told in school. In the final analysis, her depiction of slave labor as serving "no other purpose but the financing of the huge secret apparatus [of terror]," and therefore as a "radical evil," borders on the hysteri~al.'~ As if Stalin's Terror were not also responsible for constructing entire cities, dredging canals, opening new highways, building factories, and developing an otherwise backward economy. How often were working stiffs awakened by the ominous knock at the door? They were the ones who were typically spared, if only because they could not think for themselves. "The fact that the 'great terror' of the late 1930s was directed mainly at the party itself [and that its leading cadres under Stalin came almost exclusively from the professions] was obvious even to most ordinary people, who slept far more peacefully by night than the Communists did in those years." Hence the joke that passed from lip to lip: "A knock comes on the door at night, and a voice bellows out roughly, 'NKVD! Open up!' 'But we're non-Party people,' they answer from behind the locked door. 'The Communists are the next flight up! "'" That makes a difference. The evidence indicates that the tortured were mostly educated, whether in party schools, technical institutes, or universities. Unlike ordinary citizens, they were both reflective and critical. That was their undoing. An unwavering commitment to the construction of socialism inevitably led Stalin to adopt a hostile attitude toward this New Class of professionals that the enormous economic buildup had produced in its train. His total disgust with their privileges was recorded by his daughter Svetlana during World War 11. When informed by her of the special arrangements made for the education of h e children of Moscow's upper crust, he was furious. "Ah, you damned caste!" he exclaimed. Stalin's nephew Budu Svanidze also testified to Stalin's unremitting enmity toward

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these pampered professionals. His uncle had taken Robespierre as a model of revolutionary virtue. By virtue he understood not just fidelity to the revolution, but also purity in sexual morals and a simple life devoid of luxuries. "He's the simplest man in the government," Budu was informed. "He's still living in the same little apartment in the Kremlin that he has had since the start of his career." Despite his depiction of Stalin's crimes against socialist legality, Khrushchev also described him as he might have depicted Robespierre, "incorruptible and irreconcilable on class questions . . . and greatly respected for it."28 This profile of Stalin is confirmed by other sources. Fyodor Raskolnikov, a hero of the October Revolution, Soviet diplomat, and outstanding political analyst, wrote in his diary in 1939 that Stalin lived as if he were still a political exile. "He lives very simply and modestly, because with the fanaticism of an ascetic he scorns the good things of life: life's comforts, such as good food, simply do not interest him." Unlike the revolutionarieswith bourgeois and professional backgrounds who made the October Revolution and who began to live like gentlemen once they rose to positions of power, Stalin came from a rustic background and preferred the company of peasant upstarts he had raised to power-the new generation of party hacks envious ofthe power and moral authority ofthe Leninist Old Guard. Stalin was their man, according to Medvedev. It is significant that he replaced the older generation of revolutionaries with "less experienced, less reliable, less educated cadre^."'^ As the first apparatchik from humble origins raised to power by Lenin, Stalin was more than resentful of the superior education, erudition, refined manners, and superior airs of Lenin's old comrades. Unlike them, he had played only a subordinate role in the events leading up to the October Revolution. The Soviet historian Michael Voslensky claims that in destroying Lenin's followers Stalin was not just fighting a rearguard action against the Old Guard. By the mid-1930s a large group of ambitious and extremely aggressive young leaders had arisen, friends of Stalin with similar backgrounds and impatient to replace the older generation monopolizing top positions in the party and the government. They were not only pushed up-ward by Stalin; they also pushed him as a means of satisfj4ng their base

ambition^.^' "The Leninist Old Guard, exhausted from long years of difficult revolutionary militancy," writes Voslensky, "soon found itself assailed by a wave of arrivistes," who constituted "a massive new generation of Communist functionaries pounding on the doors of power attracted by positions of responsibility." Lenin had been responsible for creating a vanguard of professional revolutionaries, the so-called Old Guard. Stalin's claim to fame was to replace it with the Nomenklatura of apparatchiks recruited from the new generation of humble upstarts. The arrivistes "coveted the leading positions occupied by these old revolutionaries." How to replace them? Individual Leninists might be downgraded for moral laxity or incompetence, but there was no normal procedure by which they could all be eliminated. The only way to displace them was to destroy their moral authority and to brand them as counter-revolutionariesunder false charges." "Stalin was aware of the envious glances the Nomenklatura cast at Lenin's

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former comrades . . . old men who still preserved some loyalty to the revolution despite their good jobs, their prestige, and the good life they enjoyed." All the arrivistes needed was a signal from Stalin "to fling themselves like apack of wolves on the extravagant but enfeebled ones who occupied the best positions." The signal was given following the murder of Sergei Kirov, a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Committee, in December 1934.32 Even more popular than Stalin among the new apparatchiks, Kirov represented a threat to Stalin's continued leadership. If he was in fact dispatched on Stalin's orders, then his murder effectively killed two birds with one stone: Stalin's principal rival for power and the Leninists who escaped his control. The arrivistes jumped at the opportunity of blaming the Old Guard for the assassination. Hence the startling conclusion of Voslensky: "It is a mistake to see in the purges the work of Stalin alone. . . . Stalin fulfilled the wishes of his creatures by giving the green light for exterminatingthe Leninist Old Guard." As Medvedev explainsthe popularity ofthe purges for the new generation of Communists, the massive liquidation of Leninists accelerated the process of upward mobility, "when hundreds ofthousands of people made lightning careers, ending up in positions they could not have dreamed of before."33 The Terror that struck Lenin's comrades in the 1930s may be attributed to the ferocious intraclass struggle for power with throwbacks to earlier class struggles and ethnic rivalries. It can hardly be explained by personal animosities between Stalin and the Old Guard. "Under the purges' mantle there took place a profound social and (no less important) national transformation," writes Moscow scholar Mikhail Agursky, "as a result of which there came to power a new stratum of people, mostly ofpeasant origin, among whom there were virtually no aliens." That is to say Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, and other non-Russians. Thanks to the purges, the revolution's leaders became Russified. "This was the reaction of a vast Slavonic country to the internationalist,cosmopolitan experimentsofthe 1920sand 1930s, which ignored the national factor. Stalin merely summoned the new stratum to Resentment against alien domination was widespread among the party's Russian rank and file. Jews controlled the most important commissariats well into the mid-1930s. It is common knowledge that the party had a disproportionately large number of Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians, Finns, and Poles among its members and in positions of leadership. What a relief to get rid of them! Stalin's rationale for making the Terror permanent was not so much its original purpose-to catch actual and potential "spies" and "wreckers7'-but "to remake entirely the instruments of power: the Party, the army, and the security forces, as well as the nation's intellectual and artistic elites." He did not want a party of intellectuals who had mastered Marxism-Leninism, he remarked at the FebruaryMarch Plenum of 1937, but a party with transmission belts, a party of doers who would carry out directions by their leaders. "And so by 1939 some 850,000 Party members had been purged, more than one-third ofthe 1937membership." By doers

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Stalin meant cadres who would not think independently but would uncritically accept what they were told. As for the party's bosses, Stalin also sought to discipline them as a guard against corruption. To a man, they too began to fear for their lives and their jobs. "A ruling class without tenure-this was the system Stalin created for them, and it was far from palatable."35 In a perverse way the labor camps turned out to be schools of communism, indeed, the only such schools in the Soviet Union. "In the camps we are all equal," observed the former railworker Anatoly Marchenko. "Our garb's the same; the rations and the punishment cells are the same; the bunks. . . are the same; the guard detachment is the same." What distressed him was that the camps were not only for professionals critical of the system, corrupt apparatchiks, and common criminals. Ordinary workers also got caught in the dragnets, and for what trivial offenses! It was enough to complain that "Communists have sucked out all my blood" to be guilty of slandering the Soviet Republic and sentenced to two years at hard labor. Women were sent to the gulag for "stealing from their workplace a spool of thread, a pair of stockings, or two or three dozen cigarette^"!^^ What Stalin feared most would ultimately happen, not just the corruption, but the systematic corruption of the New Class of professionals following his death. Contrary to Trotsky's reading of Soviet history, the Thermidorian reaction did not begin under Stalin. It began under Khrushchev. The irony is that corruption became universal precisely within the rules and limits of socialist legality. Stalin had violated the rules in an effort to prevent such an outcome; Leonid Brezhnev and his entourage obeyed the rules that made systematic corruption possible. From a system of rulers without tenure, the Soviet Union degenerated into a system of lifelong tenure for the Nomenklatura, but also "almost automaticjob security for countless officials in the middle and lower levels of the burea~cracy."~' We arrive, then, at our final assessment of the Stalinist Terror-its boomerang effect. Although fully evident only in the long run, to an increasing extent the Terror had an effect opposite ofthat intended. The main arguments in its defense were that it contributed to a single will at the top, that of the most enlightened and least corrupt among the party's leaders, and that the labor camps performed an invaluable service in contributing some 10 percent of the gross domestic product. These arguments are outweighed by those usually summoned against them. The system of slave-labor camps was notoriously inefficient. Prisoner output was typically half of what could be expected from freely contracted workers; an average of one guard was needed for every ten prisoners, which made the administrativecosts of operating the camps exorbitant; and the camps were not selfmaintaining but depended on additional government subsidies. To these objections might be added the mounting resistance to the Terror that undermined respect for the Communist Party because oftortures and false confessionsduring interrogations and canceled whatever positive contributionsthe camps made in building the Soviet economy. The outcome is clear. The ten million or so prisoners who passed through the camps over a period of almost fifty years got their revenge when Boris Yeltsin made

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a comeback from enforced obscurity, outlawed the Communist Party, and dismantled the Soviet Union. Stalin may have been the wisest among his colleagues, the most intransigent in class matters, but he was less than farsighted. The practice of surplus terror became counterproductive. To sentence citizens to a minimum of two years of hard labor for remarks critical of the Soviet Union, not just openly but in private correspondence as in the case of Solzhenitsyn,contributed to the movement of Soviet dissidents who began looking to the West as a model of human freedom and respect for human rights. In sum, the Terror contributed not only to building the Soviet Union, but also to destroying it. And that meant the demise of deep republicanism in the only country on earth with a nuclear arsenal capable of defending it.

Negative Fulfillment In modern times, Machiavelli was among the first champions of equality to favor leveling downward instead of upward. Following in the footsteps of Savonarola,he pinpointed private wealth and economic inequality as the objective conditions responsible for individual corruption, and the citizens' poverty as the corrective and indispensable condition of public virtue. In warning his compatriots about the corrupting influence of foreign contacts and customs, he praised the German city-republics for erecting the equivalent of a Berlin Wall between themselves and the outside world. The presumed absence of corruption among the Germans he traced to two causes. The first was that "the Germans have no great commerce with their neighbors, few strangers coming amongst them, and rarely visiting foreign countries." Consequently, they are prevented from adopting French, Spanish, and Italian customs that are the great corrupters of the world. The second was that they do not permit any of their citizens to live in the manner of gentlemen, but maintain among themselves a perfect equality. The Germans "keep the state rich and the individual citizens poor," thereby ensuring that riches may neither corrupt themselves nor enable them to corrupt others.38Although his perceptions ofthe Germans were not based on any hard evidence, they helped to shore up his deep republicanism. In the eighteenth century this Machiavellian gospel was perfected by an obscure tutor known as Morelly in his Code ofNature (1755). According to Talmon, it was "the first book in modem times to put fully fledged communism on the agenda as a practical program and not merely as a Utopia." Morelly distinguished himself by seeking the root of all evil in the desire for riches, and its principal sustenance in private ownership. Hence his conclusion, "where no [private] property exists, none of its pernicious consequences could exist."39 Morelly did not pretend to reform mankind, knowing full well that to establish a republic of equals would be next to impossible. At most, he spoke out against the

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deceivers by making known their errors and proposed a series of laws for future legislators who might have the opportunity of reforming their peoples. Three "Fundamental Laws" sufficed,he proclaimed,to tear out the roots of selfishnessand to establish the reign of virtue: first, nothing would belong to anyone "except the things ofwhich the person has immediate use, for either his needs, his pleasures, or his daily work"; second, every citizen would have a public office "supported by, and occupied at the public expense"; third, every citizen would be obliged to contribute to the community "according to his capacity, his talent, and his age."40 Although there is no indication that Morelly was familiar with Machiavelli's writings, his proposed legislation was formulated in the same public spirit. This accounts for the remarkable congruence of the Code ofNature and the Discourses. Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, appearing in the same year as Morelly's Code of Nature, was more modest in its proposals for a social transformation. But it had more lasting and greater import for the deep republicanism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Too much has been made of Marx's philosophical debt to Hegel, thereby obscuring his political debt to Rousseau as an alternative to Locke's shallow republicanism. The English Glorious Revolution, its constitutional monarchy dating from 1689, and its demoliberal counterpart in the former British colonies in North America had to contend a century later with the republican model favored by the Jacobins during the final phase ofthe French Revolution. Henceforth, according to Galvano Della Volpe, there would be "two faces, 'two souls' of liberty and democracy in the modern world: civil liberty represented by parliamentary democracy and theorized by Locke, Montesquieu, Humboldt, Kant, Constant; and egalitarian liberty represented by social democracy, explicitly theorized by Rousseau, and implicit in Marx, Engels, and Leni~~."~' The civil liberty enthroned by the Anglo-American model was essentially bourgeois. Based on free competition among individual entrepreneurs, on the security of private property, on habeas corpus, on freedom of consciousness, association, and the press, it was implemented by the separation of powers, checks on the abuses of each, and the organization of a legislative assembly as the national representative of bourgeois interests. In contrast, the liberty prioritized by the Franco-Prussian model was essentiallyprofessional. It signified the right of each to "the social recognition of his personal talents," says Della Volpe, to "the democratic recognition of merit and, therefore, to the guaranteed right to work."42 The latter freedom to develop one's potential has the advantage over the former in eliciting mass support in the expectation of upward mobility. As a democracy of merit, it passes for social justice in providing a broader basis of social security than that afforded by private property. "'I believed that to be endowed with talent,' wrote the citizen of Geneva, 'was the most secure of all the recourses against misery."' As Engels added with Marx's approval, each individual should be given the opportunity "to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full." Only then will productive labor become a pleasure instead of being a burden.43

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This prevailing twentieth-century ideology of professional society or meritocracy had its origins in Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Marx. As Machiavelli and Rousseau initially presented it without the qualifying term "socialist," it justified a hierarchy ofrank only. Later, meritocracyalso became an excuse for corresponding economic pelf and privilege. Mam contributed to this development. By identifying socialism with ameritocracy ofreward for talent, he opened the door to an eventual takeover of the socialist and communist movements by a professional elite.44 Marxism was the first modern ideology able to recruit professionals into supporting communist and socialistmovements aimed at overturning bourgeois society. But as the prototype of professional societies to have done away with bourgeois gentlemen, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics shelved Machiavelli's goal of perfect equality as a mirage on the political horizon. We have seen that Stalin was alerted to the temptations and corruption of the second republican vanguard, but settled for what was possible under the circumstances. The practical truth of the matter was that even socialism encountered obstacles under the conditions of economic scarcity prevailing in Russia after the October Revolution. In an address at a conference of business managers in June 1931, Stalin faced up to the obstacles of socialist construction by calling for new methods of management. In response to labor shortages under conditions of h l l employment, a heavy turnover of labor power in industry, and inefficiency from lack of a permanent personnel, he demanded an end to '"Leftist' practices of wage equalization" that discouraged unskilled workers from studying to become skilled workers, and encouraged skilled workers to keep shifting jobs in the search for better pay. "We cannot tolerate a situation where a rolling-mill hand in a steel mill earns no more than a sweeper. We cannot tolerate a situation where a railway locomotive driver earns only as much as a copying clerk." Such practices were incompatible, Stalin argued, with industrial development and the interests of Soviet workers as a whole. Remember what Marx and Lenin said, that under socialism wages must be paid according to work performed and not according to needs. So, "Who is right, Marx and Lenin, or the equalitarian^?"^^ The Soviet Union desperately needed millions of new skilled workers. But in order to get them, "we must give the unskilled worker a stimulus and prospect of advancement." And in order to discourage skilled workers from shifting from job to job, we must begin "promoting them to higher positions, by raising the level of their wages." No longer under the capitalist yoke and in fear of unemployment, the Soviet worker is not what he used to be, said Stalin, but wants to live so as to have all his material and cultural needs satisfied. He demands this in exchange for the new demands imposed by the Soviet government: "labor discipline, intense effort, emulation, shock work." And he demands it in return for being held personally responsible for the work assigned to him, including care in handling machinery and tools.46 If one is to believe Trotsky, Stalin's new managerial policy was responsible for the Soviet Thermidor. That wage differences in the Soviet Union had become "not less, but greater than in capitalist countries" amounted to a betrayal of the October

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Revolution. Soviet workers had lost all influence in the management of factories, conditions of work, and wage scales, Trotsky insisted, and were no longer either free or equal. The upper stratum of professionals living in bourgeois conditions testified to anew crop ofpostbourgeois exploiters who lived like gentlemen. "When the new [Stalin] constitution announces that in the Soviet Union 'abolition of the exploitation of man by man' has been attained, it is not telling the truth." The Soviet principle of payment according to work, Trotsky concluded, is "in reality, payment to the advantage of 'intellectual' [professional] at the expense of physical, and especially unskilled work. . . [hence] oppression and compulsions for the majority, privileges and a 'happy life' for the few."47 Whether the revolution had or had not been betrayed rested on an ambiguity in the socialist formula "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work." If work were measured in clock hours conformable to the norms and requirements ofeach job, then socialism was betrayed because the hours were equal and the pay was not. But if work were measured by responsibility, professional training, expertise, and the presumptive importance of each job, then Trotsky was mistaken. In fact, the Soviet Union under Stalin was a meritocracy at variance with deep republicanism and Machiavelli's principle of keeping the citizens poor. Still, Trotsky was right in claiming that only capitalist exploitation had been abolished. In keeping with the changed conditions of a postbourgeois society, Soviet professionals had replaced capitalists as a new ruling class. One should not expect more traffic than the socialist road is able to bear. After all, it was a tour de force for the Bolsheviks simply to abolish capitalism. As the first society to have done so, the Soviet Union led the way by replacing the old cleavage between bourgeois and proletarians with a new division between professional workers and working stiffs. We may call this tour de force the negative fidfillment of deep republicanism. By getting rid of the bourgeoisie who lived like gentlemen, the second republican vanguard opened the way to targeting their successor as the principal enemy-the new class of professionals who took their place. Without having realized the goal of a republic of equals, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union achieved at least the minimum condition of a socialist society without capitalist exploitation. The Social Democratic parties of Europe-a mix representinga middle or third way between shallow and deep republicanism--can boast of no comparable achievement. If Trotsky thought Stalin had betrayed the Marxist project, what are we to think of its betrayal by social democracy? "The historical trajectory of social democracy," writes Gerassimos Moschona, "is made up of renunciations and betrayed loyalties" along with "programmatic 'overhauls' and a demonstrable ability to modernize itself." Capitalism transformed social democracy more than social democracy transformed capitalism, and creeping professionalism in the West did more to transform social democracy than conversely. From a revolutionary force, social democracy abandoned its founding project of socialism to become an essential component of capitalist societies. "Social democracy has abandoned its anti-capitalist vocation, and did so long ago;

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leads to the inescapable conviction that unlike the communist parties, it is a "political force torn between two versions of modernity: at the same time it has chosen largely to renounce its own version in the name of its opponent'^."^^ With the professional revolution virtually won in Western Europe, the labor and social democratic parties have adopted what is called the "new politicsmconsensual instead of adversarial. To take the British Labour Party as a leading example, its "new politics" consists of the following principal revisions: first, the abandonment ofpolitics tailored to the trade unions and the party's membership in favor of across-the-board appeals to the values of the electorate as revealed through successive opinion polls; second, "the substitution of electoral for ideological criteria in policy-making"; third, the reliance on image-making as the centerpiece of the party's communication strategy with an emphasis on competence, responsibility, and respectability; and fourth, the adoption of a program for modernizing the economy and making it competitivewith a "markedly technocratic connotation and social-liberal overtones, in line with the spirit of the age." In sum, a complete metamorphosis tantamount to a policy of "programmatic minimalism" and "electoral ma~imalism."~~ Unlike the communist parties that took the lead in the struggle to transform their economies by a political revolution, the labour and social democratic parties in the West followed the lead of an economic revolution in slow motion that took place independently of their initiatives and over which they had no control. That explains why capitalism survives in Western mixed economies even though capitalists now play second fiddle to the New Class of professionals. That is the sense in which the revolution was negatively fulfilled by communism, but betrayed by social democracy. The representation of labor's interests has ceased to be of concern in both the East and the West. Having won the battle for professionalism, professionals no longer need to tame the bourgeoisie. Thanks to the forces unleashed by the Bolshevik Revolution, the promise ofdeep republicanism has in some measure been firlfilled-if not positively, at least negatively.

The Age of Deep Republicanism The twentieth century was evidently an Age of Revolution. Eric Hobsbawm calls its history from 1914 to 1991 the "Age of extreme^."^^ But its main claim to fame was the flowering of deep republicanism. No other century can boast of as many national revolutions of the people in arms leading to independence and to the demise of European colonialism.No other century contained as many accomplished revolutionaries of the status of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Kim I1 Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara.

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The twentieth century was a century not only of national liberation movements on an unheard of scale, but also of movements leading beyond political liberalization to socialism and communism, to a world revolution begun by the Soviet Union that gradually spread to the West. In sum, it was the Machiavellian Century par excellence, during which the Florentine Secretary's political agenda achieved its most complete fulfillment. To begin with the first item on Machiavelli's republican agenda, the twentieth century will be remembered as the Age of National Liberation. The Bolshevik Revolution led the way by establishing fifteen Union Republics along ethnic lines followedby several others between 1922and 1940.The VersaillesTreaty remapped Europe after raising national self-determination to amajor issue and border changes benefiting ethnic minorities. Fascist Italy followed suit by raising the related issue of irredentism in an effort to recover Trieste and the Italian enclaves on the coast of Dalmatia, and Nazi Germany went to war over the issue of German reunification. The biggest rash ofnational liberation struggles came after World War 11. It led to the breakup of the British Empire in India, Burma, and Africa; of the French Empire in North Africa and Indo-China; of the Belgian Empire in the Congo; ofthe Dutch Empire in Indonesia; ofthe Japanese Empire in Korea, Manchuria, Formosa, and the South Pacific; and ofthe Portuguese Empire in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. National liberation movements also surfaced throughout the Middle East. In Latin America the struggle against U.S. neocolonialism came to a head. North America saw the appearance of a Quebeqois Liberation Front in Canada, of the Black Panther Party and Pan-African Junta of Militant Organizations in the United States, and of a Pro-Independence Movement in Puerto Rice.'' Turning to the second item on Niccolb's agenda, it is noteworthy how many newly liberated peoples in the Third World followed the Fascist and Communist examples that leap-fi-ogged over the stage of political liberalization. Military dictatorships, open and veiled, became the rule throughout most of Africa. In East Asia Marxist-Leninist political-military vanguards made short shrift of the mixed constitutions in the so-called new democracies initially establishedwith the support of a nationalist bourgeoisie. Latin America witnessed a rash of guerrilla movements unleashed by the Cuban Revolution. Although Mexico was touted as a model democracy, it waged a secret "dirty war" against a half-dozen guerrilla movements of its own. Only in North America, Western Europe, the former British dominions and protectorates, Japan, South Korea under U.S. occupation, and Taiwan under U.S. protection did shallow republicanism pro~per.~' The twentieth century was the century par excellence of the third item on Machiavelli's agenda-the people in arms. It took a variety of forms: popular militias during the Spanish Civil War, insurrectionary movements throughout the globe, rural and urban guerrillas, people's armies, and people's wars. Che Guevara's Manual of Guerrilla Warfare,in a first edition of fifty thousand copies, set the pace for rural guerrilla warfare in Latin America. No less influential was Vo Nguy&nGiap's People's War, People's Army, a handbook for underdeveloped peoples fighting imperialism. Urban guerrilla warfare also found an important work

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witness to raids by the Viet CBng guerrillas during the Vietnam War, Franqois Sully in The Age of Guerrillas ( 1 968) concluded that the safest prophecy concerning the remaining decades of the twentieth century was that they would be remembered as the "Age of Guerrilla Wars."" As the fourth item on Machiavelli's list, a religious reformation took hold in the twentieth century that was no less profound than that launched by Martin Luther. Going beyond the Protestant Reformation that marked a return to the pristine origins of Christianity in the Fathers of the Church and the doctrines of Paul the Apostle, Liberation Theology made a stab at resurrecting the teachings of the historical Jesus. That signified not just antipapism and anticlericalism, but also a revival of Jesus' commensal and convivial communism as depicted in Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-35. In addition to being a model of voluntary poverty and relief for the needy, Jesus became pictured as a revolutionary communist with a political-military vanguard and a secret doctrine of subversion expressed in parables. A second Moses, according to Augusto CCsar Sandino, "the revolutionary communist Jesus of Nazareth" became a model in his open war against the U.S. marines in Nicaragua-a politicized version of the first significant school of liberation theology in the twentieth century, the Argentine based Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune. Although Liberation Theology had to wait until the publication of Gustavo GutiBrrez' A Theology of Liberation to become a mass movement, its intellectual precursors can be traced back to the dawn of the twentieth century in Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus.54 Finally, coming to the last item on Machiavelli's agenda, the twentieth century more than any other in the history of the world was distinguished by the rise of communist parties to power in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Worldwide communist subversion had materialized with the overthrow of demoliberal regimes on four continents. There was a brief moment when a third of mankind lived under Marxist-Leninist regimes. Although by century's end communism was no longer the prevailing ideology in Russia and the former Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern Europe, communist regimes survived in isolated spots of the Third World. Contagion with the Atlantic Model had yet to be their complete undoing. Although socialism invariably stopped short of the communist goal of perfect equality, it was at least approximated in Cuba, in China during the Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.55 The twentieth century was also the century in which a new class of professionals made their political debut in the West. Once the feudal gentleman gave way to the bourgeois gentleman, capitalism became threatened by professionalism. A ruling class of capitalists who live like gentlemen off income from property instead of useful work has passed or is passing into the dustbin of history. Their professional replacements are no doubt privileged and live like gentlemen, but they perform useful work and cannot readily be replaced without damage to the economy.56That meritocracy proved victorious over both aristocracyand plutocracy

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was the undisclosed significance of Machiavelli's demand for equality. No longer a balance of social classes, each checking the power of the others, the various organs of mixed government have become increasingly the possession ofthe new mandarins. Here too Machiavelli's republican agenda has been fulfilled. Meanwhile, states have become rich but their citizens are not poor. The greatest frustration of deep republicans is their failure to achieve economic equality. Corruption has been magnified several times since Machiavelli's day, mainly in response to increasing inequality. There is no disputing the fact that on this score deep republicanism has failed. But why? As Machiavelli notes, the faults of the people spring from the faults of their rulers. When the party's leaders provide examples of cupidity, the people are sure to follow. If the Communist Nomenklatura insists on living in luxury like the former bourgeoisie, why shouldn't others do likewise? "The example of the prince is followed by the masses, who keep their eyes always turned upon their Marx was a political realist. Communism is impossible, he contended, except under conditions of widespread affluence. He expected the development of modem science and industry to make such affluence possible, but failed to note that population growth undercuts the per capita share required for communism. Instead of an ally, Malthus became his bogey. At least Robespierre acknowledged the problem in formulating his drastic depopulation policy-but on the basis of an agrarian instead of industrial society. Poverty becomes an obstacle to corruption when it is imposed by nature rather than by design. If by design, those in power are positioned to exempt themselves. That is what happened in the Soviet Union afier Lenin and Stalin, and in China afier Mao. Power corrupts when there is not enough wealth to go around and each person's share depends on everybody else's. Cupidity becomes rife, initially among the elites and ultimately among the masses. How, then, does the record of deep republicanism compare with that of shallow? That modest achievements require extreme measures is one of history's many ironies. Shallow republicans failed to challenge the capitalist system. It was not because of them that a functionless bourgeoisie of absentee proprietors became museum pieces. To deep republicans alone belongs the honor of having installed a meritocracy. That deep republicans failed to abolish economic inequality has to be weighed against their success (and the failure of shallow republicans) in bringing about a postcapitalist order. With the bourgeoisie out and the expertoisie in, Machiavelli and Marx's goal of meritocracy has finally become a living reality. There is surely nothing utopian about this latest revolution-first in Russia and Eastern Europe, then in China, and now in America and the major metropolises of Western Europe.

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Professionals Unmasked On scrutiny, deep republicanism turns out to have been more, not less deceptive than shallow republicanism. In promising more than its rival, it also delivered proportionately less. The deep-republican appeals to the common good, the common interest, the public interest, the general interest, and the national interest were masks behind which lurked the private interest of professionals as a class. Machiavelli is a prime example of why it is more difficult to discover what lies at the bottom of a deep pool than a shallow one. Twice in his Discourses on Livy he uses the phrase "perfect equality" with approbati~n.'~ He understands by it both economic and political equality. His model of a republic of virtue illustrates both, which places him in the company of communists and the most extreme revolutionaries of modem times. But that is only half the picture. The other half is meritocracy, rule by persons of superior accomplishments, not amateurs but professionals in their several fields and those who have distinguishedthemselves in public service. In republican Rome, says Machiavelli, "age never formed a necessary qualification for public office; merit was the only consideration." Birth and pedigree were also irrelevant. Even the poorest were considered for high office. As one who became consul at the tender age of twenty-three declared, "the consulate was the reward of merit, and not of birth." Extraordinary accomplishments do not come easily, but are the h i t of arduous work and personal sacrifices. Consequently, they have to be rewarded as inducement to their achievement: "For men cannot be made to bear labor and privations without the inducement of a corresponding reward, nor can they be deprived of such hope of reward without danger."59 Notice the veiled threat. Although the exercise of power is supposedly its own reward, the inducement to great works may include wealth in addition to rank. Then we have a corrupt state instead of a virtuous one. And who is to prevent those in power from becoming rich? Machiavelli's ideal is one thing, but what is the reality? Machiavelli tells us that wherever possible, men seek to reap what others sow and that not even the best republic can maintain itself forever. It lasts only about as long as the generationthat has established it. The less experienced children succeed their fathers but, ignorant of the changes of fortune, have never experienced its reverses. They follow their ambitions and give themselves up to all manner of vices and corruption. Even with all gentlemen and those who live like them killed, they are bound to aspire to the same privileges. Thus political realism teaches that "all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it."60 It follows that the fate of deep republicanism parallels that of shallow republicanism. In effect, a republic of virtue is a mask for meritocracy in which professionals end up not only as a ruling class, but also as a wealthy class. On scrutiny a republic of equals turns out to be a negative rather than positive ideal, in reaction to the privileges and selfishnessofa traditional landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie in its train. It is the equivalent of the leveling-down process

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Marx referred to as crude communism. If not founded on envy, as Marx suggests, it is the progeny of suppressed and sublimated rage-the righteous indignation of accomplished professionals at the spectacle of conventional elites whose sole claim to superiority is their property. Machiavelli thinks and writes as a professional, and his writings testify to a professional interest in politics. That explains his bias in favor of meritocracy in opposition to both the landed nobility and the monied interest. It accounts for his reading of history and praise for the great statesmen of republican Rome who, in serving their country instead of being self-serving, were models of professional conduct. And it firther explains what Marxist students of Machiavelli call his precocious Jacobinism, his outbursts of anger in which he commends the killing of gentlemen. He is the first spokesman of the New Class in the modem world united in spirit with his revolutionary successors who, in the name of communism and socialism, also struggled for a republic of equals in name if not in substance. Festering outrage in Machiavelli's case came from having been falsely accused of conspiracy and then interrogated under torture, compounded by the loss of his job as Florentine Secretary and banishment from his native city. Losing his job meant not only lost income. "The favors he could do for friends and relations, these were gone, the company and standing he enjoyed with them dissipated." The loss of honor was a still greater cause of desperation. Niccolb's image of his place in the world was that of Florentine Citizen and Secretary, the titles he clung to a halfdozen years later on the title page of his book on the art of war. He had been deprived of his political career that he loved above everything else, his grave and grand profession concerned with affairs of state. As a private person he had been reduced to nothingness. In vain he hoped The Prince would accredit him toward renewed empl~yrnent.~' Meritocracy became his professed ideal; promotion, his path to greatness; dismissal, his road to hell. The title of Sebastian de Grazia's Machiavelli in Hell refers among other things to Niccolb's personal hell after being fired and prevented from further practicing his statesmanlike profession. Gloomily, he recalled the causes of his misery. In looking over his ofticial papers, he wrote on the cover page of one of them the ominous year "1 5 12," his fall from grace. "After [that] everythingwas totally wrecked," he refle~ted.~' It was then that Machiavelli became a dangerous man. Humiliation at the hands of the Medici opened the valves of a suppressed rage that found an outlet in The Prince and the Discourses. As a professional, Machiavelli believed that only the most knowledgeable and demonstrablycapable members ofhis class should rule, and that the office of statesman was its own reward. Rather than tempting him, riches he regarded as a mark of corruption. To do his job well and to be promoted to a higher position-that is all he asked from his profession. "Any privileged class which is defined by knowledge and the virtues of the intellect," observed Raymond Aron, "must subscribe to the belief in promotion by merit." Meritocracy is the ideology par excellence of a professional class distinguished by performance rather than by birth or property. Competitive examinations,

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credentials, a graded society, and movements up and down the career ladder are its sine qua non. Although "only a minority can attain to the sphere in which he moves," once established in his profession the professional's only hope of preeminence is a distinguished ~areer.~' Machiavelli is a classic example. Yet he hardly represented the interests ofprofessionals in the matter of income. A republic of equals is not for them, as Niccolo well knew, except as a stepping stone to pelf in addition to power. A republic of virtue is their mask. In reality, they are corrupt like those they seek to replace. Why, then, the pretense? As Damocles' sword over the heads of the nobles who had abused him, it served Niccolb well. Such is the undisclosed and hidden meaning of his repeated appeals to virtue.64 How many professionals acknowledge their longing to replace Mr. Landowner and Mr. Moneybags at the helm? At least Machiavelli acknowledged his ultimate aim ofreplacing the propertied classes with the rule ofprofessionals. Yes, but as an ideal rather than a feasible reality. His followers among twentieth-century socialists and communists mask the reality by invoking the ideal. Unlike the truth-telling Machiavelli, the communist's appeal to a dictatorship of equals is protective coloring for the potential privileges of a new class, a republic of unequals to the benefit of professionals. In the conviction that science is mightier than the sword, professionals stake their claim to rule. When frustrated in their ambitions, their heightened aggression is periodically redirected against themselves. The self-aggression of professionals is manifest in their denunciation of vice, corruption, riches, and the incompetence of rulers whose claim to rule is based on property instead of expertise. In the name of a republic of equals, they vent their hatred of superiors. Again, Machiavelli is a classic example, except that he was aware of the difficulty of passing off his ideal republic as anything more than myth. The professionals' mask consists of an apparent objective that makes them appear worthier than they are in the light oftheir undisclosed objective hidden even to themselves. The mask takes the form of appeals to the common interest, the general interest,the national interest,the general will, empty words that camouflage their self-interest as a class. In the twentieth century the mask typically found expression as the "dictatorship of the proletariat," the stepping stone to communism. The professionals' mask was not always the result of a deliberate effort to deceive. Machiavelli believed in a republic of virtue, but only after his downfall in 1512! Before his great humiliation, there is no evidence that he associated meritocracy with a republic of equals. Notwithstandinga spiritualkinship with Savonarola, he had few illusions about a republic in which the state is rich and the citizens are poor. That gentlemen and those who live like them are the principal source of corruption in all republics became an abiding concern only after his fall from grace. Sociologist Lewis Feuer classifies Machiavelli's contemporary equivalents among communist professionals as alienated intellectuals. Like Machiavelli, they feel alienated from a political environment that blocks their upward mobility. Professionals take a natural interest in radical politics because they feel estranged from a society that fails to honor knowledge as the single most important factor in

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human progress and social well-being. "The new intellectuals, often displaced and misfitted in the capitalist order, compelled to work for employers they despised or to submit politically to cultural illiterates," were naturally attracted to Marx's prophecy of an army of proletarians marching under their leadership. "Thus it was that Marxism became the ideology of the emerging intellectual elite . . . their 'false consciousness7because they could never avow to themselves that their latent aim was to rule as philosopher-kings." Behind the self-delusion of a classless society was their rage against those who failed to honor them.65 In their urge for promotion to posts of honor, professionals are typically "impatient with the slowness of social evolution." They look to social disturbances, to wars and civil wars to hasten the process that might give them the opportunity to rule. How explain, for example, the rash of rural guerrillas and the national liberation struggles of the 1960s? "A new version of Promethean mythology," Feuer suggests, sees advancement for these alienated professionals as "emanating from a war of the countryside-Asia, Africa, Latin America-against the cities-North America and Europe." As Fidel Castro acknowledged on the occasion of a speech before a Cultural Congress on the role of intellectuals in the revolution (January 1968): "To be quite honest, we must admit that, often before now, when it came to crucial issues . . . it was the intellectual workers who showed the greatest determination, and not those political organizations [of the masses] whom one might in all conscience have expected to take the lead."66 Why do professionalsjoin a communist movement that is ostensibly not in their interest but that of working stiffs? To believe Marx, they do so because they have "raised themselves to the level of comprehendingtheoretically the historical movement as a whole." Contrary to Marx and Engels7basic premise of the materialist interpretationofhistory-that social existencedeterminesconsciousness-this passage from the Communist Manifesto affirms the opposite. In Feuer's words, "a purely theoretical consciousness determines existence." Hence the dilemma of contemporary Machiavellians who have attempted to change the world. On the one hand, they could never formally affirm as political realists that ethical values in history are determining factors accounting for human actions. That would be pure idealism. On the other hand, "to have said that the revolutionary intellectuals were moved by the desire for power or economic self-interest would have meant raising a new specter to confront the proletariat-a new ruling class of intellectuals which availed itself of the workers' unrest to place itself in p~wer."~' In later years, Engels half-heartedly recognized the danger that professionals represented in a proletarian movement ofthe exploited. In hisjudgment the English Socialists "planned to establish the rule of intellectuals over the proletariat," says Feuer. The Fabians, Engels wrote, "have understanding enough to realize the inevitability of the social revolution," but their chief concern is "making their own leadership secure, the leadership exercised by the 'eddi~ated."'~~ Although committed to human emancipation, they acknowledged their professional interest in a socialist victory at the polls. Historically, according to Feuer, professionals have conceived of themselves

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as meant to rule other men. Deprived of this prerogative, they have "reinforced the role of ideas as the aggressive vehicles of dominance over others." While proclaiming that the pen is mightier than the sword, they have periodically suffered from what Feuer calls prolonged deprivation from action. Prolonged frustration supposedly underlies their aggressiveness. Thinking that does not culminate in action is a psychological anomaly, he adds, "a life in which important initiating stimuli are presented without any of the . . . consummations."69 When pent-up aggressive energies seek an outlet in revolution, they "drive ideas to an extreme they would not have reached if those energies had been expended in action." The history of political sects, according to Feuer, testifies to the alienated professionals' penchant for extremism compounded by authoritarianism. As James P. Cannon reflected on a lifetime as the leader of American Trotskyism, "the greater a party's isolation from the living labor movement. . .the more radical it becomes in its formulations." The less effect its leaders have on the course of human events, the more unreasonable and hysterical they become. The revolutionary intellectual is especially prone to sectarian behavior, Feuer concludes, because an intolerant "purity of principle enables him to make a virtue ofhis actioninhibited asceticism." His authoritarianism is the eruptive obverse of his impotence-an impotence magnified by a surplus of professionals that the economy cannot absorb." The festering aggressiveness of professionals explains why they favor ruthless modes of action. Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses reek with examples of such iron-fisted behavior. When unemployed, the professional feels the keenest and most dangerous discontent. He becomes hatehl of his social betters and finds a vicarious revenge in calling for egalitarian schemes that would deprive them oftheir comforts and possessions. Such was the reality concealed by Machiavelli's mask of deep republicanism. At the core of deep republicanism has been the "labor-intellectual alliance." But after professionals abruptly seized power in the East and crept into power in the West, their ambitions became satisfied and they lost their former interest in equality. They no longer felt alienated in the new professional societies that harbored them. "Every movement of social reform has been characterized by a 'back to the people' ethos," Feuer observes; hence, "the end of such a movement has always been accompanied by an 'away from the people' mentality."" Instead of deep republicanism openly acknowledged, self-satisfied careerism takes its place. Once they discover that power, possessions, and status are what they wanted all along, professionals no longer have need of a mask. As for professional critics of the New Class-anti-professional professionals-they can afford to be critical since they have already "made it." Sociologist Alvin Gouldner also accounts for professionals' self-deception by invoking their alienation, the most important causes of which are "the blockage of their opportunities for upward mobility" and "the disparity between their income and power, on the one side, and their cultural capital and self-regard, on the other." The first republican vanguard staunchly committed to professional interests sur-

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faced in response to blockage, according to Gouldner. The Jacobins were "blocked by aristocratic preemptions; they were 'blocked ascendants."' A similar blockage confronts intellectual workers in today's Third World because "their growing numbers exceed the career chances open to them." "A trained and articulate elite of dimmed prospect (except that provided by revolution) is thus created7' with the corresponding mask of national and social liberation. Blocked ascendance, Gouldner believes, results in increased political activity by professionals. Open acts ofdefiance may be expected "not only when the economic interests of intellectuals are restricted, but also when their opportunities to exercisepolitical influence are blocked." Alienation results when their opportunities for upward mobility are restricted either politically or ec~nomically.~~ Status disparity magnifies their sense of alienation, "a disparity between their great possession of culture and their correspondinglylesser enjoyment of incomes." Professionals in the liberal arts experience an especially sharp status disparity because their incomes are typically lower than those of technical specialists. "The New Class believes that its high culture represents the greatest achievement of the human race, the deepest ancient wisdom and the most advanced modem scientific knowledge." For that, they believe, "they should receive correspondingly greater rewards." They feel insulted and aggrieved when those who employ them fail to understand the simplest features of their professional expertise, and when the politicians who rule them, in Edmund Wilson's words, are "unique in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated, and incompetent all at once."74 Professionals, accordingto Gouldner, constitutea separate speech community, another distinguishing feature of the New Class. Besides being experts in rational discourse, they excel at critical discourse. "The culture of critical speech requires that the validity of claims be justified without reference to the speaker's societal position or authority." Critical discourse "forbids reliance upon the speaker's person, authority or status in society to justify his claims," and is inherently subversive in de-authorizing all speech grounded in the folkways or in the values of ruling classes. Hence the profile of the intellectual as someone who is socially irritating, nonconformist, and malcontent about the way things are. "There is the obligation to examine what had hitherto been taken for granted, to transform 'givens' into 'problems."' Again, Machiavelli is a prime example in having set out in the Discourses to open a route that had yet to be followed by any one-the same motive that led Marx to discover the materialist interpretation of history and to reveal in Capital the secret of capitalist wealth through e~ploitation.~' Since meritocracy has been the exception rather than the rule throughout history, writes Raymond Aron, "the tendency to criticize the established order is, so to speak, the occupational disease of the intellectuals." Present realities judged by meritocratic standards seldom pass muster. Besides comparing present realities with earlier ones and noting the difference, intellectuals compare them to a model of rationality that represents professional interests rather than those of other classes. "No human institution can stand up to such a test," Aron notes, "without suffering some damage."76

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Meritocracy reigns supreme in universities, the breeding ground of professionals. The culture disseminated by academics is an eminently professional one. It is both critical of the past and optimistic about the future because of the absence in the former and the preparation for the latter of a clear-sighted plan of action. Outside the walls of academe rules the capricious hand of Fortune, while inside everything is under control. While the future offers the prospect of order, the professional is "all too ready to pass a final judgment on the 'established disorder.'" Whether the critique of existing society is narrowly technical, moral, economic, or political, the fact that those in power seldom respond favorably to reproof ignites professional hatred of the establishment. According to Aron, the more remote professionals are from the centers of power, the more do they vent their anger and show contempt for the way things are. This supposedly accounts for the revolutionary ideologies of professionals in the Third W~rld.'~ Thanks to the English Reformation, professionals in England and its former colonies found themselves closer to the centers of power than those in the Latin countries where Catholicism remained intact, according to Aron. In the former, the conflict between free-inquiring intellectualsand a dogmatic clergy, between reason and faith, expired as a result of the separation of church and state and the reconciliation that followed. Thanks also to the early success of a bourgeois revolution in England, "the British intelligentsia never found itself in permanent conflict with the Church and the ruling class." Never completely removed from the rich and powerful, their demands for reform were met soon enough for the established order not to be called into question. As a result, professionals in England and its colonial and postcolonial offshoots "rarely dreamed of total upheaval."'* Unlike the British Labour Party whose annual congress opens with aprayer, its socialist counterparts on the Continent generally regard the Church as an enemy. In England the conflict between liberalism and democracy, Aron argues, failed to develop with any intensity, whereas resistance to democracy by the privileged classes on the Continent encouraged professionals to be dissidents. While the British, German, and Scandinavian intelligentsia had access to the halls of power because of the Reformation, in France, Italy, and Spain they were never broadly accepted but led a marginal existence hostile to their respective governments and ruling classes. In Britain the debate between tradition and revolution became a museum piece, whereas in the Latin countries it continued unabated.79 That may explain why shallowrepublicanism triumphed where the Reformation took hold, while deep republicanism became the professionals' credo where anticlericalism was their response to the traditional Church. As we have seen, political extremism comes in response to a blockage in the circulation of professional elites. Although there are individual exceptions to these and other generalizations concerning the professionals' underlying and undisclosed motives, collectively professionals are not the dispassionate and neutraljudges they claim to be.

Chapter 5

The End of Deep Republicanism In light of the foregoing, what does the radicalism of professionals boil down to? Being against the nobility and bourgeoisie was entirely feasible; beingfor the sansculottes and the industrial proletariat was another matter. In any grand alliance, the combination dissolves when the stronger party achieves power and no longer depends on its former allies. In the case of professionals, their principal concern was "mobilizing those below to drive out those above."80The Bolsheviks, like the Jacobins they took as models, faithhlly represented the interests of ordinary workers as long as they lacked power. But shortly after October 1917, they dumped by degrees the exploited workers they claimed to represent. Since the writers of political tracts are almost invariably professionals, it is a fair guess that in one way or another all political isms defend in some measure professional interests. Simply put, either they advance their own interests in conjunction with the classes they represent; or they advance professional interests independently. Until recently professionals were a class subordinateto landowners and capitalists, so it is understandable that their political writings and what passes for political theory served the interests mainly of their superiors. Political treatises and manifestos defending the interests of the proletariat constitute a separate case because professionals were in a position superior to the class they represented and on whose backs they empowered themselves. In each case the general interest, the common interest, or the common good masked the interests being served. That there is a general or common interest is widely conceded, but that it is in the best interests of all classes is disputable. So why prefer it to one's class interests, especially when one can override the interests of a class enemy unable to defend itself effectively? Generosity and charity toward adversariesmay be commendable on moral grounds, but they become self-defeating politically. In reviewing the rise of professionals as a class-for-others and then as a classfor-themselves, three stages are conspicuous. The first was one of impotent but unsuppressed rage against the nobility as a class of gentlemen, and secondarily against the bourgeoisie who lived like gentlemen owing to privileges based on ownership instead ofmerit (Machiavelli,Rousseau, Robespierre). Once the nobility was downed, the second stage targeted its successor, the money lords and professionals who spoke for their interests and shared some of their superfluities (Marx and Engels). The third stage demanded for professionals a place in the sun in the name of socialism against the leveling tendency among those excluded from pelf and power (Stalin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev). Such was the prelude to professionalism followed by itsjustification on grounds ofmeritocracy in the East and the operation of impersonal market forces in the West. Desperately in need of support from other disgruntled classes, professionals during their rise to prominence, power, and pelf masked their self-interests in the

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name of other interests. During the first stage they claimed to benefit the mass of ordinary self-supporting citizens-artisans, peasants, small traders, and shopkeepers. During the second stage they directed their appeals to plebeians and the new class of industrial and commercial wage-laborers. During the third stage they spoke in the name of a mixed bag called the working class. Once entrenched in power, they turned their backs on their former allies. Bureaucracy was the peculiar blight of professionalism as it developed in the Soviet Union. Lenin had no respect for majority representation. "He destroyed representative institutions, not only the parliament but the Soviets." He treated intellectuals and those who demanded the right of free criticism and opposition as demagogues and ~arasites.~' But he had to rely on them to get rid of their common enemies-the parasitic landlords and bourgeoisie. "If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Bolsheviks in responsible positions," wrote Lenin in 1922, "and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine [commandeered by non-Party professionals],that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom?" Are Communist directives being obeyed, or are they being side-stepped? "To tell the truth, they [the Communists] are not directing, they are being directed." Communist professionals had not yet mastered the details of government, they lacked administrative ability and know-how, and they were easily duped by their s~bordinates.~' Concerned with undermining communism, the vanquished segment of the professional class exercised a corrupting influence on those in power. Lenin had to wage a war on too many fronts simultaneously. Besides the rich and the crooks, "the two principal categories of parasites which capitalism fostered," he confronted the army of unreconstructed professionals in control of the state apparatus. Their "slovenliness," "carelessness," "untidiness," "unpunctuality," "haste," their tendency to favor discussion instead of action and to undertake everything without finishing anything became a major headache for the republican vanguard. But Lenin could not dispense with them as he could with the rich and the It took more than a decade to replace them with a new breed of professionals, the new generation of Red or workers' intelligentsiathat had never served bourgeois interests. In a report read at the Eighth Congress of the Soviets in November 1936, Stalin underscored the changes among Soviet professionals that supposedly identified their interests with those ofthe working poor. It is no longer the old hidebound intelligentsia that served the landlords and the capitalists, he announced. It is "an entirely new intelligentsia, bound up by its very roots with the working class and the peasantry." Its composition had changed. "People who come from the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie contribute but a small percentage of our Soviet intelligentsia." Some 80 to 90 percent come from the working class and peasantry, he reported, or from the revolutionary vanguard of intellectuals. Because it no longer serves the class enemies of the people, "it is now an equal member of Soviet society." Having been in the doghouse as a bourgeois intelligentsia, it would henceforth enjoy an exalted place under socialism.84 Stalin omitted to report that the composition of the Communist Party had also

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changed along with its earlier commitment to a republic of equals. Based on official figures from the Mandate Commission of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Party Congresses, the percentage of manual workers among party delegates had declined to the point that they were no longer a majority. Old Communists who had joined the party before 1919 also represented a declining fraction. At the Seventeenth Congress (1934), only 9.3 percent of the delegates were manual workers even though 80 percent of the delegates were old Communists. "Until 1932,65 percent of the students in technical institutions had to come from unskilled working class families. A decree of 19 September 1932 tacitly abandoned the principle of the 'Workers' Nucleus."' That opened the way for special schools for the children of

professional^.^^ Fortune determinedthat after Stalin's death in 1953 followed by a palace coup, Khrushchev called a halt to the dictatorship of the proletariat after which the new generation of Communist professionalstook command. The checks on professional ambitions continued to be undermined until a third generation ofso-called new men not only outlawed the Communist Party, but also privatized an important segment of the Soviet economy, thus moving forward by going backward to a rehrbished shallow republicanism no longer bourgeois but professional. This acclaimed new Red intelligentsia scuttled the Communist Party of the Russian Republic and then the Soviet Union in 1991! In 1989, Gorbachev's chief adviser Alexander Yakovlev, in an article entitled "The Humanistic Choice of Perestroika," acknowledged that democratizing the Soviet Union meant rejecting Stalin's "crude egalitarianism3'-as if Stalin had not already dismissed it in practice. Henceforth,Communists would "reward hard work, creative attitudes, and talent as much as possible." Because of his alleged unnatural opposition "to the creative interests of the intelligentsia," wrote Yakovlev, Stalin failed to understand that "Socialism Is Knowledge3'-a meritocracyoftalent rather than labor to be rewarded according to its importance to Soviet society. Democratization W h e r signified an "opening to the intelligentsia as a whole," a sharing of power by the middle and lower registers instead of its monopoly by the Nomenklatura. No longer would rule by professionals be concealed behind the mask of c ~ m m u n i s m . ~ ~ Mounting opposition to communist ideology among the new breed of professionals led to the "500 Days Plan" of August-September 1990 for renovating and modernizing the economy. Although rejected by Gorbachev, it became the basis of Boris Yeltsin's reforms after his dismantling of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Presented by a group of party professionals, it called for an end to the antipopular policy bequeathed by Stalinism: "a rich state with a poor people." (Shades of Machiavelli's republic of equals in almost the same words.) Instead, the "program sets the task of taking everything possible away from the state and giving it to the people." Economic freedom and equality of opportunity would ensure that each citizen might become either "an entrepreneur, a hired employee in state structures or a manager in a joint-stock enterprise, or become a member of a cooperative." Instead of wage-leveling, the plan would guarantee that "the more highly skilled employees at new, high-efficiency production facilities would earn

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more money." Finally, the bottom line included the right to private property and stockholder ~wnership.~' The Soviet Union had never been a democracy as defined by professionals in the West. The marginalized sector of professionals demanded political as well as economic freedom. That meant the right of opposition and the end of the Communist Party's monopoly of power. Contact with the West had led them to demand the same privileges enjoyed by professionals in the United States and Western Europe. Eventually, they also adopted a similar ideology opposed to totalitarianism. The advantage of political freedom was that it might contribute to restraining the Nomenklatura's ambition for pelf, power, and prestige. In the words of a former fellow traveler who sympathized with their plight, although people become free to do as they please in a democracy, "their appetites nevertheless are contained; law restricts them." Machiavelli's lesson is finally confirmed by history, writes French philosopher Claude Lefort: arepublic of virtue, arepublic ofequals, is practically unrealizable. "From the destruction of a dominant class arose not a homogeneous society but a new . . . social division." Reflecting on the Soviet Union's demise, he notes that the supposed triumph of the poor and exploited was "accompanied by a new split between a small number who desire to command, to oppress, to possess, and the others." So, if one cannot have equality, then at least choose freedom. "As people have become aware of the fact of totalitarianism, this awareness has fostered the conviction that the struggle against dictatorship passes by way of the defense of human rights." Like other exCommunists and Trotskyists, Lefort calls for a rebirth of democracy, the virtues of a regime that are "so precious to those who have known only the vices oftotalitarian power or di~tatorship."~~ "To leave Communism is to enter back into history," says Lefort's colleague Andre Glucksman. Leaving ideology aside, it means to go forward by moving backward, by returning to the system of representation, universal suffrage, individual liberties, open and public political debate, and the right of a majority to decide. But democracy as an ideology is in turn a mask for special privilege. Thus Lefort and his ilk offer little more than a high-flying, empirically empty, and ethically motivated "true meaning" of democracy that is hardly less illusory than the deep republicanism that failed.89 Lenin's argument against democracy was sound as far as it went. There is no pure democracy, only "class democracy." "History knows of bourgeois democracy which takes the place of feudalism, and of proletarian democracy which takes the place of bourgeois democracy." (Lenin failed to note that proletarian democracy was another counterfeit.) Bourgeois democracy was invariably "restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor."90Whether bourgeois or proletarian, the institutional backbone of democracy-effective freedom and effective opposition for working stiffs-was stymied from the start. So why expect anything different from a rebirth of democracy, especially in the service of a new class of professionals? It was enough that totalitarianism was destroyed, we are told. But by whom?

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By professionalswho identified with their colleagues undernontotalitarian regimes. For the great majority of citizens life went on as usual regardless of the nature of the political order. Since the successor Communist Party in the Russian Republic became the single largest party and the choice of some 25 percent of the voting electorate, the ordinary citizen's life under totalitarianism may not have been as burdensome as professionals depict it. How else should one account for the continued popularity of the Communists in Russia? In the parliamentary elections in December 1995 the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) was the big winner, garnering 22.3 percent of the votes and winning 157 of 450 seats in the new Duma-a gain of 112 seats compared to its showing in the 1993 elections. The CPRF's Duma takeover made it the principal threat to the corrupt Yeltsin mafia and its dirty tricks in the presidential electionsthat followed in June 1996, in which the CPRF placed second with 32.04 percent of the votes compared to Yeltsin's 35.28 percent. Although in the run-off election in July Yeltsin won with forty million votes, the CPRF polled a respectable thirty million in round number^.^' Freedom is a perilous choice for people because it signals the possibility of unemployment. Security is what they long for. The title of Marchenko's novel, To Live Like Everyone, is taken from his mother's advice that he should live and think like the vast majority of Soviet citizens, who minded their own business and kept out of trouble with the authorities. Deep republicanism may be dead, but actually existing democracy-shallow republicanism-is the professionals' rather than the people's choice. The outcry against totalitarianism in conjunction with the Nazi-Bolshevik and Fascist-Communist equations may be traced to the writings of New York intellectuals who had previously been supporters of the Soviet Union and active in Communist and Trotskyist circles. Arendt provided the ammunition for these parvenu recruits to liberal anti-communism. The opening paragraph in part 3 of The Origins of Totalitarianism begins with the unprecedented and risky equation of Stalin and Hitler. Notwithstanding Mussolini's and Hitler's rejections of the legacy leading from the French Revolution and the first revolutionary vanguard to the second, Arendt identifies Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as "two essentially identical systems." In the cultural hysteria that followed the beginning of the Cold War and the witchhunt for Communists and fellow travelers, the once careful distinctions made by New York intellectuals between criticizing communism from the left and criticizing it from the right dissolved into epithets: "Red Fascism," "Communazis," and the ambiguousterm "totalitarianism." In lockstep they followed Arendt's lead in underthinking and conflating Stalinism and Hitleri~m.~' Hook is a prime example of this style of reasoning and uncritical thinking. He stubbornly reksed to acknowledge that the change in his and his fellow intellectuals' views might be more credibly explained by the social pressures brought on them by the threat of discreditation and the firing of suspected Communists from their teaching positions. To these apprehensionsshould be added "the postwar prosperity that resulted in a loss of ability to view the world from the

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class per-spective of the oppressed'-from Machiavelli7sperspective at society's bottom instead of top. During the postwar witchhunt Hook fantasized that he and a few stalwart colleagues were standing almost alone as defenders of the liberal "heresy" against political extremists of both the right and the left. A self-proclaimed "socialist7' to the end, he came to believe that colonial rule was less harmfil to natives in the Third World than the radicalized movements of national liberation that allegedly threatened their freedoms.93As if he spoke in the interests of human beings in general instead of a pampered few with university sinecures in metropolitan New York! The major vehicles of this renewed faith in democracy and of a democratic rebirth were the two organizations sponsored by New York intellectuals: the Congress for Cultural Freedom founded in New York City in 1949, and among its national affiliates the American Committee for Cultural Freedom founded in 1951. Aimed at creating a broad-based antiCommunist movement among American intellectuals, the ACCF made Hook its first chairman. The most prominent activities of the American affiliate included a series of public forums and the sponsorship of professional journals and publications celebratingAmericanism as the institutional embodimentof democracy and as amodel for the rest ofthe world. Partisan Review became the principal mouthpiece ofthe ACCF, and the British Encounterthe CCF's most widely respected and influential journal. Hook's self-congratulatoryHeresy, Yes-Conspiracy, No was initially published as a pamphlet by the ACCF.94 Thanks to the influence of these two organizations and their principal journals, antitotalitarianism became the unofficial creed of professionals throughout the Atlantic community. Yet it rested on a fabrication, the spurious identity of Nazism and Communism. Notwithstanding similarities in their methods of political organization and reliance on terror to achieve their goals, Nazi and Communist economic policies diverged as did their respective ideologies. As confessed Machiavellians, both Hitler and Mussolini stressed government by the boldest and most capable meritocrats, the natural or born leaders of the masses. Their shared ideology of a new race of supermen, a natural aristocracy as opposed to a conventional one based on property, shared features with communist dreams ofkilling all gentlemen. But Germany's Fiihrer and Italy's Duce rejected the legacy of Rousseau carried forward by the French Revolution along with the demoliberal current ofthe Atlantic community.95Precisely that is where the AngloAmerican liberals and Second and Third World Communists parted company with the Nazi and Fascist roads to professionalism. Like Stalin, Hitler adhered to the performance principle: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work." The task of the folkish state, he declared, is first to wed ability and knowledge, and second, to "give this earth to the bestpeople." Its goal is "not to preserve the decisive influence of an existing social class [bourgeoisie], but to pick the most capable kinds from the sum of all the national comrades and bring them to office and dignity." As formulated by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister in the Third Reich, "We say, 'to everyone his due' . . . not according to property or rank, but according to ability and achieve-

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ment." When it came to replacing capitalism with professionalism, Communists and Nazis shared common ground. To this extent we agree with Arendt. But don't ignore the difference! For Hitler, professionalism was a goal rather than a reality. For Stalin, professionalism was only a makeshill arrangement, the final goal being to give this earth to the masses.96 Although Arendt acknowledged that both Nazism and Fascism were revolutionary movements opposed to bourgeoisdom, the fact that Communism targeted the same enemy in the form of shallow republicanism is hardly evidence that all three movements were essentially the same.97It was mainly from the perspective of the Atlantic Model, assailed during World War I1 and then by the Cold War, that the differences between totalitarianisms became blurred. Where, then, do the Nazi and Fascist regimes fit in the polar struggle between shallow and deep republicanism? Germany's Fiihrer and Italy's Duce were hardly less indebted to Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses than were their republican rivals. But what most impressed them were the depictions of personal "greatness" in The Prince and Roman "greatness" in the Discourses. Inspired by Machiavelli's account of great men and bold deeds, they became obsessed with the vision of founding a Third Reich and a Third Rome. Machiavelli's works became a recipe for imperialism. In their unquenchable thirst for power at any price, they discounted the political liberalization measures in Machiavelli's republican agenda. Unlike the Third Way of Swedish Social Democracy and the British Labour Party--a middle way hsing together elements of both capitalism and socialism-Nazism and Fascism were not hamstrung by countervailing power and democratic gridlock. Rather than a halfway house between capitalism and socialism, they favored a so-called Third Position going beyond liberal capitalism and Marxist socialism to a meritocracy unencumbered by either. More aggressivethan social democracy's middle way and vigor-ously opposed to both capitalism and communism, they were transitional rather than intermediate regimes on the road from capitalism to professionalism.

The Atlantic Model Deformed Meanwhile, a differentrevolutionaryprocess was occurring in the West but with the same general outcome-the replacement of the formerly ruling bourgeoisie by a professional class that had taken over the reins of power and pelf. Without benefit of a political-military vanguard and the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, socalled creeping socialism-better still, professionalism-was leading to a similar result without expropriating, much less physically liquidating, the capitalists. To his great credit, Pocock underscores the common ground of Machiavellism and the American republican tradition, but also a hndamental difference.Although the efflorescence of the Machiavellian model of a mixed constitution took place in the American colonies, "the American Revolution and the Constitution in some

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sense form the last act ofthe civic Renaissance." By that, Pocock means the end of classical politics predicated on a mixed constitution of the few and the many, the rich and the poor. What followed was a deformation of shallow republicanism founded on interest politics instead of virtue or a semblance thereof.98 In this perspective John Adams' Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, a vindication of Machiavelli's model of shallow republicanism as a blend of aristocracy and democracy, may be considered the last major work of political theory written within the unmodified tradition of classical republicanism. Henceforth, interest would crowd out virtue as the foundation of free government. Post-Independence republicanism in America would no longer be a simple instance of arrested republicanism-arrested after arriving at political liberalization and a popular militia or people's army-but of deformed republicanism. In a commercial society, according to Pocock, virtue politics is dismissed as a historical freak. Noah Webster of dictionary fame summarized his misgivings about liberal democracy as we know it: "Virtue, patriotism, or love of country, never was and never will be, till men's natures are changed, a fixed, permanent principle and support of goven~nent."~~ Deformed republicanism rested on an undifferentiated and supposedlyclassless electorate and a governing elite responsive to the monied interest. As a classic example of corruption-a standing army in place of a citizen militia, and paid politicians instead of citizens directly sharing in legislative power-the new paradigm signified that "the people had withdrawn from government altogether." Supposedly, the plurality of functions exercised by people's representatives "ensured the existence between and among them of a system of checks and balances, so that it could be said they were prevented from becoming corrupt or corrupting other But there is an implicit contradiction in asserting the existence of government of, by, and for the people when the people never directly govern, when society is class-based rather than classless, and when the monied interest almost invariably prevails-a government ultimately unchecked although formally checked by the division and separation of powers. Such was the skewed Atlantic Model that had broken with the Machiavellian tradition. Laissez-faire was one name for it; freedom to pursue one's interests was another. A republic is a commonwealth, but how much common wealth is there when the word republic is interpreted metaphorically instead of literally? Where is the balancing and checking of class interests when the system of checks and balances is confined to government agencies--executive, legislative, judicial-under conditions of rule by the bourgeoisie without a countervailing aristocracy, much less a proletariat with a chamber of its own? With only nominal representation in government by the underlying class, the Atlantic Model had degenerated into a caricature of its former self. Elections, pressure groups, and lobbies are weak substitutes for the direct exercise of power. The monied interest, consisting initially of people of property and then of professional magnates, determined the outcome of any elections no matter who won. That is because in interest politics, the golden rule prevails. You

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get what you pay for: "to discover who rules follow the gold"!'0' But after capitalism-professionalism. Although the monied interest was still the key to power, it had ceased to be mainly bourgeois. With the rise of a professional class siphoning off the economic surplus as privileged salaries, expense accounts, stock options, and merit increases-instead of bourgeois profits, dividends, interest, and rent-a skewed version of countervailingpower appeared under conditions in which the people were only nominally represented. Although interest politics was still the norm, an informal system of checks and balances marked a return to the Polybian model. Under the heading o f the Machiavellian moment," Pocock makes a strong case for the limits Machiavelli placed on political action. The phrase denotes not only the moment and circumstances in which Machiavellian thought made its appearance, but also the moment and circumstances when republican virtue in modern times first confronted its temporal finitude in political reality-its confrontation with "fortune" and the forces making for "corruption." This was a moment that re-curred in the continuinghistory of Machiavelli's legacy, a problem in mutability that might be overcome only by the "triumph of republican virtue over historical fortune."'02 But was that not asking too much of mere mortals? Machiavelli believed the problem to be unsolvable.

Confronting Reality "Man is born free," Rousseau quipped, "and everywhere he is in chains."lo3 An obstacle course stands in the way of getting what we want. The barriers are insurmountable when one attempts to impose a political solution on a resistant population. Why go to the trouble of plotting and risking human life in a political coup when a countercoup is likely to follow? Or in attempts at revolution without the capability of destroying one's enemies to the last man? Political prudence counsels caution because such matters are beyond anyone's control. A century later Marx was to face the same problem. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves." Breaking with the past by treading new ground is fraught with unsuspected dangers from a social environment that blocks the best of human intentions. "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."'04 Machiavelli's Discourses advances different models of government suited to different conditions. Extreme measures may be called for: "if any one should wish to establish a republic where there are many gentlemen, he will not succeed until he has destroyed them all." But will such measures work? Similarly, "whoever desires to establish a kingdom or principality where liberty and equality prevail, will equally fail, unless he withdraws from that general equality a number ofthe boldest and most ambitious spirits, and makes gentlemen of them."'05

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The choice of republics faces the same test. Where there are long established social classes as in Rome, the only viable option is shallow republicanism ir la Polybius-representative government under conditions of a balance and sharing of power among gentlemen and plebeians, rich and poor. Only where there are no established classes, as in Machiavelli's idealized image of Germany whose peoples did not engage in extensive trade and were still living in rustic simplicity without ladies and gentlemen, does deep republicanism become feasible. We can readily imagine Machiavelli's conclusion. By all means found a republic of equals where equality exists; but beware of doing so where inequality prevails. Although he preferred a deep to a shallow republicanism, he was acutely aware that subjective preferences by themselves carry little weight. Rather than forcing the gates of heaven on earth, he settled for what was politically feasible. Re-examining the opening chapters of Book 1 of the Discourses in the light of the politically inflammatory chapter 55, we see that Machiavelli presents his readers with more than one political option. Where the people's manners and customs are notoriously corrupt and nobles and gentlemen abound as in France, Spain, and Italy, a monarchy is needed to control and discipline them. It is the best government under such circumstances. But where manners and customs are only partly corrupt as in ancient Rome before the creation of the Tribunes, aristocracy is the best form of government. Unfortunately, neither form of government is durable. To escape the Polybian cycle that leads from monarchy to tyranny, from aristocracy to oligarchy, from democracy to mobocracy and back to monarchy, a different model is required. Therefore, sagacious leaders have settled for a mixed government that combines "under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people." These three powers will then watch over and keep each other reciprocally in check.lo6 But being the most stable and solid does not make mixed government the most perfect. Although stability qualifies as a political virtue, Machiavelli deemed the absence of corruption to be more important. Could it have been because avarice is a mortal sin, but instability is not even sinful? Whatever the reason, the rooting out of greed depends on keeping the citizens poor and the state rich, so that people corrupt neither themselves nor others from desiring more at another's expense. As Machiavelli presented the social question, "nature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable to attain it." While some men desire to have more, others fear to lose what they have. Thus "enmities and war are the consequences."Notjust war between hostile states, but also class war. The Roman people were not content with having secured themselves against the nobles by the creation of the Tribunes. They "soon began to fight from ambition, and wanted to divide with the nobles their honors and possessions, being those things which men value most"-a class war that "finally caused the destruction of the Roman Rep~blic."'~' Machiavelli was cognizant ofthese and other obstacles to deep republicanism. "Let republics, then, be established where equality exists, and, on the contrary, principalities where great inequality prevails; otherwise the governments will lack proper proportion and have but little d~rability."'~~ A major contribution, we add,

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to apolitics without illusions! A skewed republicanism in both Eastern and Western Europe testifies to it. What, then, survives of Machiavelli's solution to the social question? That the state ought to be rich and the citizens poor proved unrealizable in economically advanced societies. Ditto that republics should not permit any oftheir citizens to be or to live in the manner of gentlemen. The only realistic measure was that, for a republic to be well-governed, only men ofmerit, reputation, and ability should rule. Machiavelli suspected that meritocracy was the wave of the future and that professionals marked by superior ability were eventually destined to rule. But meritocracy has a different meaning for shallow and for deep republicans. For shallow republicans there must be economic in addition to political incentives for those aspiring to leadership and positions ofresponsibility. (On this score Marx was a shallow republican.) For deep republicans that becomes a license for corruption in high places destined to spread throughout the rest of society. (On this score Machiavelli was more radical than Marx.) It is as if Niccolb were saying to those in authority: "You have rank. You don't need wealth as an added incentive to rule!" Although a political extremist in his preference for a republic of equals, Niccolb was a political realist. It was not enough for a republic to be virtuous; it would have to be both feasible and durable. And those prerequisites effectively ruled out the prospect of deep republicanism except for the few isolated cases he mentions. His second best republic would thereby become his first option in application to the modem world. His ultra-republican followers showed a lack of political savvy in trying to impose virtue by force and trying to force men to be free. The Bolshevik republic of equals, like the Jacobin republic of virtue, collapsed when its leaders too fell prey to corruption and the temptation to live better than others'09-a phenomenon whose traces became visible during the late 1930s and provided fie1 for Stalin's purges. We have seen that meritocracy in the Soviet Union became tainted almost from the start by the so-called automobile-harem factor and the rise ofthe Nomenklatura. The professional elites claiming for themselves privileged salaries and other material benefits became increasingly steeped in corruption. That this deformed meritocracy was nonetheless widely applauded may be attributed to the filly planned economy and to the high growth rates achieved that transformed the Soviet Union into the second of the world's great superpowers-testimony that expertise was king and that professionals were its ministers. Although a far cry from Machiavelli's republic of equals,the Soviet Union was still enough of a challenge to shallow republicanism for statesmen in the West to intermittently try to destroy it. As the culmination of five centuries of republican development, the confrontation between Machiavelli's split legacies of deep and shallow republicanism took on heroic proportions. In this final denouement worthy of a Homeric epic, the objective was the complete eradication from the living of a second Troy represented by the Soviet Union. For nearly three quarters of a century this Homeric battle raged until a Trojan Horse destroyed the enemy from within. The origins of this titanic battle date from the Soviet Union's separate peace

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with Germany in March 1918, followed by civil war and Western intervention in support of the czarist generals intent on overthrowing the Bolshevik regime. The second intervention occurred during World War I1 when Hitler's hordes invaded the Soviet Union intent on dismembering it. The third intervention began with the Cold War in Europe and East Asia when the United States faced up to the "Red peril." Although pressured at home to liberate Eastern Europe from the occupying Red Army, the United States chose to confront the Soviet Union indirectly. The war would be fought not on Soviet soil but in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, the Congo, Angola, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. As a result, what little remained of Machiavelli's ideal meritocracy became the victim.

Goodbye, Niccold! The promise of deep republicanism was a society of equals, of equality both economic and political, under a meritocracy whose sole privilege was to rule. The result was a republic of unequals in which economic inequalities were even greater than before, but in which professionals had replaced property holders in the privileged perches. It was a society of, by, and for the meritorious-in other words, professionals. Although token political equality became the norm, political power was far from being equally distributed, and the New Class in power was even more firmly entrenched than the Old Classes had ever been. Deep republicanism turned out to be a hoax. Plenty of promise, but only negative fulfillment along a road that failed to reach its destination. There was reason for hope only as long as progress was being made toward the promised goal. The guillotinewas one reason for hope; the gulags were another. That the first revolutionary vanguard removed gentlemen from positions of power was a giant step toward the day of deliverance. That the second revolutionary vanguard liquidated their bourgeois successors was another giant step promising a brighter future. Despite the gloomy critics in The God That Failed, there was hope for the Soviet Union as long as the revolutionary core of Marxism-Leninism was a going concern. But then came doomsday and the scuttling of the communist experiment. All for nothing! Deep republicanism was a lie, and all those who believed in it paid dearly for the deception. Hope has since become the great imposture. No more great expectations! Only the monster careerism-the ladder leading upward through a series of degrees to the Ph.D. and its certified equivalents in the fields of law, medicine, and theology. Unlike the power of the sword and what money can buy, there is no resisting the influence of education. "Support Education!" What is this slogan if not groveling submission to professionalism? Although the underground history of higher education has yet to be told, support for professionalism means kneeling before new masters who live like gentlemen, but cannot be removed like the old. Michael Bakunin (1814-1876), Marx's great rival for control of the First

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International, had warned about the possible outcome of the struggle for a postcapitalist social order. In "The International and Karl Marx," he wondered whether scientific socialism might be a hoax, whether the coming postbourgeois society under the rule of owners of knowledge might be "the worst of all despotic governments." Dr. Marx, a fraudulent "new Moses," had officially taken control of the international workers' movement by purging Bakunin and his following. He had "inscribed the commandments of his new decalogue on our banner, in the official and binding program of the International." All of this boded ill. For it was not a political program the workers needed, but an end to all political program^!"^ Had politics ever done anything positive for working stiffs? "All the so-called revolutions of the past," wrote Bakunin, despite the magnificent concepts that inspired them, were not what they appeared to be. Rather than emancipatingthose down under, "all these revolutions have been nothing but the struggle between rival exploiting classes for the exclusive enjoyment of the privileges granted by the State." And for the future, a dire prophecy: "when all the other classes have exhausted themselves, the State then becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic [professional] class." All that the New Order requires for its creation is "an immense knowledge and many heads 'overflowing with brains."' That means "the reign of scientiJic intelligence,the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes." Beware of the plague to come! "There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!"'" In sociologist Michael Young's fictional account, The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-2033, the rise of meritocracy is synchronouswith the rise of professionalism and the rule of Bakunin's new class overflowing with brains. Improving on Bakunin's account, he foresees that equality of opportunity, upward mobility, and access to higher education by the poor portends a brain-drain ofthe lower class that deprives it of intelligent leaders. "The last century has witnessed a far-reaching redistribution of ability between the classes in society, and the consequence is that the lower classes no longer have the power to make revolt effective." Without intelligence in their heads they are reduced to the status of a mercurial and disorganized rabble, less menacing than s ~ l l e n . " ~ Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-196 I), medical doctor by profession and writer by avocation, visited the Soviet Union in 1936 to spend the royalties from the Russian translation of his widely heralded and pathbreaking novel, Journey to the End of the Night. Back in France a month later, he penned Mea Culpa that arrives at virtually the same conclusion as that drawn earlier by Bakunin though he had never read the works of the Russian anarchist. Until then, he had been closely associated with the lefi and its promise of proletarian emancipation. He had expected more from the greatest revolution of all time, but had been thoroughly deceived. The supreme imposture, he believed, is hope, the hope that inspires revolutions. For the worst had happened. We now know that "Man was cursed," that "Progress was a mirage."'13

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CCline and George Orwell (1903-1 950) were passionate believers in a republic of equals. Like Bakunin, they belonged to that strange crew of professionals who are opposed to professionalism. They too became disillusioned with Marxism and its promise ofa new world. Both revolted against the institutional embodiments and deceptions ofthe New Class in power. Although deep republicanism had put an end to the despotism of the lords of land and capital, they had been replaced with new lords of expertise. Old masters had been exchanged for new who, if not exactly gentlemen, lived like them. "Down with the bosses," shrieked CCline in Mea Culpa, "a slow death or a bloody one! It's all the same to me." Concerning the privileged classes, "1 swear you could not squeeze one little tear out of my eye over the fate of such lousy carrion." The old bosses, respectable burghers, had never "held anything back from King Profit." "The whole breed must be stamped out!" As for the new bosses in the USSR, "the others over there are just as bad; it's the same old story all over again-those 'righters ofwrongs'--at 75,000 francs ayear!"'14CCline was the deep republican, the genuine coin, opposed to the counterfeits who called themselves Communists. When it comes to the bottom line, what passes for communism might as well be capitalism. Both exploit Mr. Drudge Furlyfe. Once Mr. Moneybags is removed, Mr. Professional will do the fleecing and pocket the pelf. "Capital! There's no use howling about it any longer." A professional degree is where it's at! "Why does this tine engineer earn 7,000 rubles a month? I am speaking about over there in Russia. The charwoman only 50?" Answer: "Because swine are everywhere, there as well as here [in ~rance].""~ Praise communism for getting rid ofthe bourgeois vermin, but who is going to stamp out the new pests? The great advantage of Christianity is that it told the truth, says CBline. "The practical superiority of the great Christian religions was that they did not try to sugarcoat the pill." They were not looking for voters, 'Yhey did not wiggle their tails in an effort to please." They broke the bad news: "You little shapeless stinker, you, you can never be anything but filth. By birth you are nothing but merde.""6 To believe the Communists, they had brought paradise on earth, and Communist man was the "new Adam." Ha! "They try to dress up a turd, to pass it off as a caramel." So beware ofwolves in sheep's clothing. "'Commiseration ofthe fate and the condition of the down-at-heel? I tell you, worthy little people, life's riffraff, forever beaten, fleeced, and sweating, I warn you that when the great people of this world start loving you, it means that they are going to make sausage meat of

YOU.""'^

No doubt about it! CCline smelled a rat behind every political project. "I've always been an anarchist, I've never voted," he tells us. And he adds: "I don't believe in mankind. . . . The Nazis hate me as much as the Socialists, and the Communists the same. . . . All is allowed except lack of faith in mankind." He despised humankind, first, because the Communists are no less deceptive and grasping than the capitalists they replaced; second, because the proles are no better than their masters. A letter to Elie Faure (2 March 1935) tells it all. "There is no

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people," he complains, "there are simply exploiters and exploited." That should make a difference, but it doesn't. For the "egalitarian proletariat does not exist." It is a pipe dream to believe otherwise. The working stiff is not the hero oftomorrow, but dreams of becoming a capitalist. "One is as big a shit as the other. The worker is a failed bo~rgeois.""~Today we would say he is unable to "make it" as a professional. In Mea Culpa CCline tells us that genuine communists don't wait for conditions to ripen before commiserating with their fellow workers. "Above all else, still more than the sharing of wealth, Communism means the sharing of all troubles." Why should brotherly feelings have to wait for another factory to be built? If men wanted to share their wealth there was no need of waiting. "They could have divided it up in the age of agriculture, in the dawn of human history." The same sentiment shows up in his 1937 Bagatellespour un massacre. "I'm all in favor, me, of sharing! I've never wanted anything else!" But only ifthere's a "total share-out.""9 The proles have other ideas. In L 'Ecole des cadavres, he adds that awareness of class, class consciousness,is a load ofrubbish. "Every worker asks nothing more than to get out of his working class, to become middle class . . . the most ardent militant has about as much desire to share with his luckless brother worker as has the winner of the national lottery to share with those who have lost." He'll share the shit, but not the cake. There is "no more real communism in the proletariat than there are daisies in the Sahara."lZ0 So why take sides in the coming war? Why bother defending the supposed workers' homeland? Af€er all, "[Wlhen it comes to battle, fascism is the same as communism. . . . In the next version of the Walkyrie you can be dead sure of one thing, whether it's Hitler who wins or his cousin Stalin . . . it will amount to the same thing." Overstated, to be sure. But understandable, given the main purpose of his political pamphlets to warn against and hopefully prevent the outbreak of another Great War, the climax of absurdity, "even if concretely peace meant permitting Hitler to triumph." Milton Hindus compares Celine to the nuclear "better Red than dead" objectors to the Cold War threatening to break out into a hot war. Meanwhile, in order to avoid the bloodletting of 1914-1 9 18, CBline believed it would be "better for France to go the way of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany."12' CCline had declared himself a pacifist and a patriot. Hindus wonders how he reconciles these two "when they are in contradictionto each other, as they must be." Must be? On the contrary, the patriot worth his salt cares for his fellow citizens as ifthey were members of the same family. He does not want his brothers and sisters to be endangered over a piece ofnational real estate! As CCline confessed to Hindus in a letter dated 20 August 1947, he considered himself a follower of Gandhi, "the one great man of our time." Understandably so. CCline too was a nonviolent, nonconsuming, nonsmoking, nondrinking, ascetic.I2' Like CCline, Orwell lost faith in the Soviet Union's promise of a glorious future. But unlike CCline, he retained his faith in the proles and the prospect of a future classless society along democratic lines. Animal Farm (1944), a political

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20 1

satire in the form of a fable, had two guiding impulses. The first, which he shared with Celine's Mea Culpa, was to expose the false claims about the Soviet Union as a workers' socialist and classless society; the second, which he did not share with Celine, was to assist in the recovery of the ailing socialist movement in the West.Iz3 Although Trotsky's theme of a revolution betrayed has been mistaken for his main theme, Orwell was a long way from sharing Celine's dark pessimism and misanthropy. He never relinquished the hope that a future revolution might alter the course of human history. As his friend and biographer Bernard Crick points out, the thesis of Animal Farm is not that every revolution is betrayed. Orwell had said, "All revolutions are failures [referring to the past], but they are not all the same failure." The anarchist uprising in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War was a glaring exception to communist betrayal because it was crushed from without rather than from within the revolution. Orwell "had a curious relationship with Anarchists and Anarchism," according to Crick. The Spanish Anarchists had shown him that socialism was possible. Although he rejected their "revolutionary defeatism" and "plague upon both your houses" during World War 11, as if it were a repetition of World War I, after the war "he resumed a general, if critical, sympathy with them."Iz4 History was one thing, Orwell believed, the fiture something else. People learn from their mistakes, and there is no reason to think the proles an exception. Throughout history, every successful revolution has "led to a change of masters, because no serious effort has been made to eliminate the power instinct." Because of this failure or omission, "In the minds of active revolutionaries, at any rate the ones who 'got there,' the longing for a just society has always been mixed up with the intention to secure power for themselves." But the fiture is an open book, and one should take care not to graft the past upon it.Iz5 Orwell's 1984 should be read in the same light. Although a fictionalized account of James Burnham's theory ofthe managerial revolution in both its original and revised versions-The Managerial Revolution (194 1) and The Strugglefor the World ( 1 9 4 7 b h e only half-agreed with Burnham's twin theses: "Capitalism is doomed, and Socialism is a dream." The first half he conceded: "as an interpretation of what is happening, Burnham's theory is extremely plausible." But only in its general outlines because ofthe number of false predictions Burnham mistakenly derived from it. As for the future, the professional managers did not appear to Orwell to be as invincible as Burnham painted them.'26 The heart of the novel is the book within the book, a replica of Bruno Rizzi's theory of bureaucratic collectivism and Burnham's theory ofmanagerial revolution under the cover of Emmanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Although filtered possibly through other sources, Trotsky's "The U.S.S.R. in War" (September 1939) was the original source of Orwell's knowledge concerning Rizzi's theory that preceded Burnham's reformulation of it in The Managerial Revolution.12' "Throughout recorded time," writes Goldstein, "there have been three kinds of people, the High, the Middle, and the Low." Their aims are irreconcilable. No

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amount of facilitation, or conflict resolution, or human resource management can overcome built-in class antagonisms. "The aim ofthe High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High." (Shades of Burnham's "circulation of elites7'in his second book, The Machiavellians.) The aim of the Low is to "abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall (Shades of Machiavelli's republic of virtue.) be Throughout history, this struggle recurs. Eventually, the High are overthrown by the Middle, "who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice." Not just pretending, but initially believing in these ideals. But as soon as power passed into their hands, "the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude and themselves became the High." A new Middle then appears of split-offs from one or both of these other classes. But from the perspective of the Low, no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality any nearer-no historic overthrow has ever amounted to more than a change in masters.'29 What were the new masters like who overthrew the lords of capital? "The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians." Professional is their common denominator along with privileged salaries instead of wages. Professionalism or professional society is the new economic and political order that replaced bourgeois society and modern capitali~m."~ Who, if not the proletariat, has taken power? asks Bruno Rizzi, the grey eminence behind Emmanuel Goldstein. Answer: The new lords ofexpertise, power in the highest degree. "The functionaries, the technicians, those who carry out this process, unite and form a new ruling class." The new order is bureaucratic, "because it was born of the bureaucracy." A vanguard of professional revolutionaries made the advance and reaped the rewards. But the beneficiaries of their rule also included professionals generally,"from the free professions, and even the labor Trotsky was mistaken. The Soviet Union was not a transitional state between capitalism and socialism, but a new professional society. But was Goldstein's "Oligarchical Collectivism," Rizzi's "bureaucratic collectivism," or Cornelius Castoriadis' "third historical solution" the end product?I3' The demise of the Soviet Union, the dismantling of people's democracies in Eastern Europe, and China's opening to the West tell a different story. 1984 was written in 1948, and there's the rub. Since then, an updated New Class version of shallow republicanism emerged the victor in a Cold War in which capitalists are permitted to play a countervening butjunior role. The theory of oligarchical collectivism has been replaced by the theory of professional society. Such was the judgment of history, the outcome of a legacy traceable to the writings of the Florentine Secretary. A republic of virtue, a republic of equals? For that, a biological mutation is needed, the coming of superman. Contrary to the prevailing image, Machiavelli turned out to be a dreamer after all.

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Farewell, Niccolo!

Notes 1. Burnham, The Machiavellians, 27, 55. 2. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper & ROW,1987), 492-493. 3. Hook, Out of Step, 494-495. 4. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Merit, 1965; orig. pub. 1937), 102, 103; and Budu Svanidze, My Uncle Joseph Stalin, trans. Waverly Root (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1953), 128-13 1. 5. Discourses, 1.9. 6. Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender, The God That Failed, ed. Richard Crossman (New York: Bantam, 1950), 21 1,215. 7. Koestler et al, The God That Failed, 215, 228. Neither Fischer nor the other exCommunists were privy to the still greater crimes, horrors, and betrayals being perpetrated behind the scenes by the infamous OGPU and its immediate successor, the NKGB. This top secret material, known as the Mitrokhin Archive, was finally released by a KGB defector in 1992 to British authorities. See Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokihn, The Sword and the Shield (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 8. Karl Mam, "Critique of the Gotha Programme," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 53 1. 9. On virtzi as prowess, see Prince, 1:1; 6:2-5; 15:1-3; 21 :I; and on civic virtue, Discourses, 1.18; 2.2; 3.16,41. 10. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, 2 12-2 13. 11. Prince, 8:3; 26: 1. 12. Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: Its Nature and the History of its Growth, trans. J. F. Huntington (New York: Viking, 1949), 159; and Discourses, 1.37; repeated in 2.19; 3.16, 25. 13. Discourses, 1.18. 14. Discourses, 1.18, 37, 55. 15. Bernard Crick, George Orwell, A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), 29; Orwell quoted. 16. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 58. 17. Trotsky, "Their Morals and Ours," 40, 41,42,43. 18. Anatoly Marchenko, To Live Like Everyone, trans. Paul Goldberg (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), 1; and Galina Mikhailovna Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism, ed. Donald I. Raleigh, trans. Carol Flath (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000; orig. pub. 1997), 20-21,67, 93-94, 105-106, 126, 185-186. 19. Kenneth Murphy, Retreat From the Finland Station: Moral Odysseys in the Breakdown of Socialism (New York: Free Press, 1992), 88; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 382-383,485-498; and idem, "New Pages from the Political Biography of Stalin," in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), 214, 215. 20. Murphy, Retreatfrom the Finland Station, 87.

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21. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 498, 499, 500-506. 22. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 101-102, 103, 115, 1 17, 121. 23. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 175, 176. 24. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 26,47,48. 25. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958; orig. pub. 195I), 422,423,424,426,430. 26. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 444,459. 27. Medvedev, "New Pages from the Political Biography of Stalin," 214, 215. The Old Bolshevik Sergei Pisarev recalled that during his years in four major Moscow prisons, "I had approximately four hundred cellmates, prisoners like myself. Except for two men, all were Communists." Quoted by Medvedev in Let History Judge, 482-483. 28. Robert H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 183; Svanidze, My Uncle Joseph Stalin, 128-130, 140; and Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Strobe Talbott(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 1 :222. 29. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 553, 592-593. 30. Michael Voslensky, La Nomenklatura: Losprivilegiados en la U.R.S.S., trans. Mario Morales (Barcelona, Spain: Argus Vergara, 1!%I), 55-56. 31. Michael Voslensky, La Nomenklatura, 54, 57,63. 32. Michael Voslensky, La Nomenklatura, 64. 33. Michael Voslensky, La Nomenklatura, 65; and Medvedev, Let History Judge, 554555. 34. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 556-557. 35. Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking, 1973), 440; and Moshe Lewin, "The Social Background of Stalinism," in Tucker, Stalinism, 130. 36. Marchenko, To Live Like Everyone, 189, 190, 199; and Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism, 5 1. 37. Dusko Doder, Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev (New York: Penguin, 1988), 174; also 38.53-60,62,200,275. 38. Discourses, 1.55; 2.19; 3.16. 39. Morelly, "Code of Nature," in Socialist Thought: A Documentary History, 18; and Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 17. 40. Morelly, "Code of Nature," 19, 20. 41. Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin, 184-186; and Galvano Della Volpe, Rousseau y Marx, rev. trans. A. Mkndez (Barcelona: Martinez Roca, 1969), 57. 42. Della Volpe, Rousseau y Marx, 57-58; italics deleted. 43. Della Volpe, Rousseau y Marx, 58 (Rousseau cited); and Engels, Anti-Duhring, 406. 44. Karl Marx, "Critique ofthe Gotha Programme," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 530-53 I . 45. Joseph Stalin, "The Tasks of Business Executives," in Leninism, 203-206, 206-207. 46. Stalin, "The Tasks of Business Executives," 207,208,209. 47. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 240, 241-242, 243, 244,259. 48. Gerassimos Moschonas, In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation: 1945 to the Present, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2002), 2-3, 328. 49. Moschonas, In the Name of Social Democracy, 158-159,255, 3 19. 50. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 5-1 1 , 14-17.

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51. On the role of nationalism at the core of national liberation movements, see Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 32-33, 116-121, 126-127,202-212,218-222.425-430. The high point ofthese struggles occurred during the 1960s. See the documentation covering Asia, Latin America, Black Africa, the Arab World, and North America in National Liberation Fronts, 1960/1970, ed. Donald C. Hodges and Robert Elias Abu Shanab (New York: William Morrow, 1972). 52. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 109-141 (chapter 2 on "The Fall of Liberalism"). Among the military regimes that for more than two decades dominated Latin American politics in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, the most repressive was the Argentine. See Donald C. Hodges, Argentina's "Dirty War": An Intellectual Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). On Mexico's "perfect dictatorship," see Donald C. Hodges and Ross Candy, Mexico, the End of the Revolution (Westport, ~ o n n . Praeger, : 2002). 53. Che Guevara, La guerra de guerrillas (Havana: I.N.R.A., 1960); Vo NguyCn Giap, People's War, People's Army: The Viet C6ng Insurrectional Manual for Underdeveloped Countries (New York: Praeger, 1962); Abraham GuillCn, Estrategia de laguerrilla urbana (Montevideo: Manuales del Pueblo, 1966); and Franqois Sully, Age of the Guerrilla (New York: Avon, 1970), 9. The literature on rural guerrillas and the people in arms beginning with the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and followed by Sandino's struggle in Nicaragua, Mao's revolutionary war in China, and the popular militias during the Spanish Civil War is too vast to cite. As for urban guerrilla war, see the author's English translation of Abraham GuillCn's political writings in Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla (New York: William Morrow, 1973); and idem, The Legacy of Che Guevara: A Documentary Study (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). 54. Quoted in Donald C. Hodges, Sandino 's Communism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 184; and idem, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 281; and Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 1969). That Jesus was a communist and that the Gospels portray him as such are ably documented by the former Jesuit priest JosC Porfirio Miranda in Comunismo en la Biblia (Mexico City: Siglo, XXI, 1981). For the latest attempt to establish the nature ofJesus' communism, see John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). 55. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, chapter 2 passim and chapter 13 passim. At the heart of Marx's communism are traces of Renaissance humanism, bourgeois individualism, and a bourgeois ideology of material progress and the multiplication of human needs that also played a role in the moral breakdown and rampant corruption in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe following Stalin's death. On this score, see Donald C. Hodges, The Literate Communist (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 1-14, 171-199. 56. After capitalism, professionalism. See the statistical evidence in support of this conclusion in Donald C. Hodges, America's New Economic Order (Aldershot, U.K.: Avebury, 1996), 50-67, 77-80; and idem, Class Politics in the Information Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 104-1 13, 120-122. 57. Discourses, 3.29 (Lorenzo de' Medici cited). 58. Discourses, 1 5 5 and 2:4. 59. Discourses, 1:60. 60. Discourses, 1:2,3. 61. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, 45, 50. 62. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell, 46.

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63. Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Norton, 1957), 209. 64. Burnham underrates Machiavelli's capacity for self-censorship: "It is characteristic of Machiavelli's writings, as of all scientific discourse, that this distinction [between disclosed and undisclosed meaning] is inapplicable. . . . There is no hidden meaning, no undisclosed purpose." See his Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (Chicago: Gateway, 1963; orig. pub. 1943), 55. 65. Lewis S. Feuer, "Marxism and the Hegemony of the Intellectual Class" (1963), in idem, Marx and the Intellectuals: A Set of Post-Ideological Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1968), 5 1, 52. 66. Feuer, "Marxism and the Hegemony of the Intellectual Class," 52; and Alvin Gouldner, The Future oflntellectuals andthe Rise of the New Class (New York: Continuum, 1979), 53-54 (Castro quoted). 67. Feuer, "Marxism and the Hegemony of the Intellectual Class," 53, 54. 68. Feuer, "Marxism and the Hegemony of the Intellectual Class," 55 (Engels quoted). 69. Feuer, "Marxism and the Hegemony of the Intellectual Class," 60,61. 70. Feuer, "Marxism and the Hegemony of the lntellectual Class," 61, 64, 66 (Cannon quoted). 71. Lewis S. Feuer, "What Is Alienation? The Career of a Concept" (1962), in Marx and the Intellectuals, 96,97, 98. 72. Gouldner, The Future of lntellectuals, 58, 60. 73. Gouldner, The Future of lntellectuals, 63. 74. Gouldner, The Future of lntellectuals, 65 (Wilson quoted). 75. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals, 28, 29, 32, 59, 60; and Frederick Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 700, on Marx's two important discoveries that, like Machiavelli's, led to the introduction of "new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents" (Discourses, 103). 76. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 210. 77. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 2 10,2 14-2 15. 78. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 215. 79. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 2 15, 2 16. 80. Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, 96. 81. Claude Lefort, "Reflections on the Present," in Writing: The Political Test, trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 263-264. 82. V.I. Lenin, "Communism and the New Economic Policy," in The Lenin Anthology, 527. 83. V.I. Lenin, "How to Organize Competition," in The Lenin Anthology, 428,429,430. 84. Joseph Stalin, "On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R.," in idem, Leninism, 384. 85. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O'Neill (Boston: Beacon, 1969; orig. pub. 1947), 138, 139. 86. Alexander Yakovlev, "The Humanistic Choice of Perestroika," in World Marxist Review (February 1989), 8-10, 10-13, 13. 87. Stanislav Shatalin et al, "Man, Freedom, and the Market" (in Russian), Izvestiya (4 September 1990), included in Daniels, A Documentary History of Communism in Russia, 371-371. 88. Lefort, "Machiavelli and the Verita Effetuale," in Writing: The Political Test, 135, 136; and idem, "Reflections on the Present," in Writing: The Political Test, 261.

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207

89. Lefort, "Reflections on the Present," 262-263; and idem, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1988), 6,9-19,224-229. 90. Lenin, "State and Revolution," 381; and idem, "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky," in The Lenin Anthology, 467,468. 91. Joan Barth Urban and Valerii D. Solovei, Russia's Communists at the Crossroads (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1997), 165, 172, 173. 92. Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 215-219 (Arendt cited); Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1987), 268,269; and Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 305-306, 389-419. 93. Wald, The New York Intellectuals, 293, 294. 94. Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 259-265. 95. See the section on "The New Machiavelli" in the final chapter of Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1940), where Hitler acknowledges his indebtedness to The Prince and defines himself as "a disciple of Machiavelli"; and chapter 17 on "Mussolini and Machiavelli," in MargheritaG. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, trans. Frederic Whyte (London: Thornton Buttenvorth, 1925), where Mussolini openly acknowledges his debt to The Prince and to those chapters in the Discourses useful to contemporary rulers of states. Thus, "1 affirm that the doctrine of Machiavelli is more living today than it was four centuries ago" (Mussolini quoted, page 129). 96. Adolf Hitler, Mein KampK trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton MiMin, 1943; orig. pub. 1925, 1927), 430, 443, 431 (italics deleted); Max Nomad, "Masters--Old and New," in The Making of Society: An Outline of Sociology, ed. V . F. Calverton (New York: Modem Library, 1937), 876-877n (Goebbels quoted); and Svanidze, My Uncle Joseph Stalin, 131. 97. For the characterization ofNazism as fundamentallyrevolutionary, Arendt is indebted to Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West, trans. E.W. Dickes (New York: Alliance, 1939),85-90. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,463468. 98. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 462. 99. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 526; and Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 1970), 230, n. 104; Webster cited. 100. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 5 17. 101. Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 8, 328, 355. 102. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, vii-viii, 84-85. 103. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1. I . 104. Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in The Marx-Engels Reader, 595. 105. Discourses, 1.55. 106. Discourses, 1.2-4, 55. 107. Discourses, 1.37. 108. Discourses, 1.55. 109. Donald C. Hodges, The Literate Communist: 150 Years of the Communist Manifesto (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 185-198.

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1 10. Michael Bakunin, "The International and Karl Marx," in idem, Bakunin on Anarchv. ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Knopf, 1972), 295,299. l l I . Bakunin, "The International and Karl Marx," 309, 3 18,3 19. 112. Michael Young, The Rise ofthe Meritocracy 1870-2033 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), 189, 190. 1 13. Merlin Thomas, Louis-Ferdinand Ce'line (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), 129; and Frtdtric Vitoux, Ce'line: A Biography, trans. Jesse Browner (New York: Paragon, 1992), 316-317. 114. Louis Ferdinand Ctline, Mea Culpa, trans. Robert Allerton Parker (New York: Howard Fertig, 1979; orig. pub. 1936), 4, 5,6,8-9. 115. Ctline, Mea Culpa, 3 1. 1 16. CCline, Mea Culpa, 19. 1 17. Ctline, Mea Culpa, 33-34; and Cdine, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. J.H.P. Marks (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), 308. 118. Thomas, Louis Ferdinand Ce'line, 135, 136 (Ctline quoted). 1 19. CCline, Mea Culpa, 25,30; and Thomas, Louis-FerdinandCe'line, 40 (Ctline quoted). 120. Thomas, Louis-Ferdinand Ce'line, 157 (CCline quoted). 121. Thomas, Louis-Ferdinand Ce'line, 142 (CCline quoted); and Milton Hindus, The Crippled Giant: A Literary Relationship with Louis-Ferdinand Ce'line (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986), 77. 122. Hindus, The Crippled Giant, 19, 77, 117 (CCline quoted); and Thomas, LouisFerdinand Ce'line, 165, 168- 169, 183. 123. Richard I. Smyer, Animal Farm: Pastoralism and Politics (Boston: Twayne, 1988), l l , 12. 124. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), 338,339, 343 (Orwell quoted). 125. George Orwell, "Catastrophic Gradualism," in idem, In Front of Your Nose 19451950, vol. 4 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 18. 126. George Orwell, "James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution," in In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950,162,165,166-172,179;and idem, "Burnham's View ofthe Contemporary World Struggle," in In Front of Your Nose, 313-326. 127. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1%O), 153- 156. On the theories of a new world order, see James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution, 7 1-76,172273; Leon Trotsky, "The USSR in War," in idem, In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pioneer, 1942), 10-15; and Bruno Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World, trans. Adam Westoby (New York: Free Press, 1985; orig. pub. 1939), 35-95. 128. Orwell, 1984, 153. See Burnham, The Machiavellians, 230-237, 253-255. 129. Orwell, 1984, 153-154. 130. Orwell, 1984, 156. 13 1. Rizzi, The Bureaucratization of the World, 87,96. 132. Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Problem of the USSR and the Possibility of a Third Historical Solution" (February 1947), in idem, Political and Social Writings, 2 vols., trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minneapolis Press, 1988), 1:48-52. For a critique of Castoriadis', Burnham's, and Rizzi's theories of a new world order, see Hodges, Class Politics in the Information Age, 124- 138.

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CWine. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986. Hitler, Adolf. Mein KampJ:New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1940. . Mein KampJ trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1943. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World,1914-1991. New York: Vintage, 1996. Hodges, Donald C. The Legacy of Che Guevara: A Documentary Study. London: Thames and Hudson, 1977. .Intellectual Foundations ofthe Nicaraguan Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. . Argentina S "Dirty War ":An Intellectual Biography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. . Sandino's Communism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. . America's New Economic Order. Aldershot, U.K.: Avebury, 1996. . The Literate Communist: 150 Years of the Communist Manifesto. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. . Class Politics in the Information Age. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Hodges, Donald C., ed. and trans. Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla: The Revolutionary Writings of Abraham Guill&. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hodges, Donald C. and Abu Shanab, eds. National Liberation Fronts, 1960/1970. New York: William Morrow, 1972. Hodges, Donald C. and Larry P. Lustig. "Bourgeoisie Out, Expertoisie In: The New Political Economies at Loggerheads." Pp. 367-381 in The New Political Economies: A Collection of Essays From Around the World, ed. Laurence S. Moss. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Hodges, Donald C. and Ross Gandy. Mexico, the End of the Revolution. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. Hollingworth, Clare. Mao and the Men Against Him. London: Jonathan Cape, 1985. Hook, Sidney. Out ofstep: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Horowitz, Irving Louis. Radicalism and the Revolt Against Reason: The Social Theories of Georges Sorel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. Hulliung, Mark. Citizen Machiavelli. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Huntington, Samuel P. "No Exit: The Errors of Endism" The National Interest, no. 17 (Fall 1989): 3-1 1. . The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Ivanova, Galina Mikhailovna. Labor Camp Socialism, ed. Donald J. ~ a l e i ~trans. h, Carol Flath. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Jensen, De Lamar. Machiavelli: Cynic, Patriot, or Political Scientist? Boston:

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Index Achilles, 41 Acton, J.E.E. Dalberg (Lord), 66 Adams, John, 73,74,86, 113, 193 Adams, Robert, 20 Adams, Samuel, 73 AFL-C10, 147 Agathocles (Prince of Sicily), 162 Age of Deep Republicanism, 175 Age of Extremes, 175 Age of Guerrilla Wars, 177 Age of National Liberation, 176 Age of Revolution, 5, 175 Agursky, Mikhail, 169 Alexander VI (Pope), 43,55 Althusser, Louis, 15, 16, 18, 19,32, 113 American Committee for Cultural Freedom, 191 American republican tradition, 193 American Revolution (l776), 6,8,9,72, 73, 76, 86, 193 Andrews, Bruce, 148 Anglo-American model, 172 Appius, Claudius, 56,57 Arendt, Hannah, 23, 166-167, 190, 192 Aron, Raymond, 180-181, 184-185 AshcraR, Richard, 7 1, 72 Athens, 10,47 Atlantic Model, 142, 163, 191, 193; declined, 69-77; deformed, 192-194 Atwater, Lee, 145 Augustus Caesar, 10-1 1 Babeuf, Franqois Noel (Gracchus), 32, 97-104, 116, 144-145 Babylon, 53 Bacon, Francis, 27

Bakunin, Michael, 198, 199 Bamboo Curtain, 141, 142 Barbh, Armand, 1 16 Barcelona Commune, 120 Berlin, Isaiah, 24.25 Biblical Flood, 54 Billaud-Varenne, Jean-Nicolas, 91, 95, 97,98 Black Panther Party, 176 Blanqui, Auguste, 116 Bolshevik Old Guard, 145 Bolshevik (Red) Terror, 163-167, 169 Bolsheviks, 124-138 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 125, 132, I36 Bonch-Bruyevich, Vladimir, 124 Book of Exodus, 42 Borgia, Cesare, 10, 29, 30, 41, 42-43, 102, 160 bourgeois democracy, 189 bourgeois intelligentsia, 187 Brandon, S.G.F., 149 Brecht, Bertolt, 160 Brezhnev, Leonid, 170 Brissot, Jean Pierre, 67 British Labor Party, 185, 192 British tradition of parliamentary democracy, 9 Buonarroti, Filippo Michele, 102-105, 116 Burke, Edmund, 3 Burnham, James, 27, 28, 42, 159, 201202 Bush, George H. W., 145 Camillus, M. Furius, 10-1 1 Cannon, James P., 183

Index capitalism, 6, 16, 100, 11 1, 113, 114, 118, 123, 135, 138, 174, 175, 177, 187, 192, 194, 199,20 1,202,205 n.56 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste, 99 Cassirer, Ernst, 28, 29 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 202 Castro, Fidel, 176, 182 Catilina, Lucius Sergius (Catiline), 150 Cato, Marcus Portius (Cato the Younger), 150 Ckline, Louis Ferdinand, 198-200,201 Charles I1 of England, 72 Charles VlIl of France, 41, 54, 55 Chartist, 116 Chaumette, Pierre-Gaspard, 102 China, 65 Chinese People's Republic, 140, 141 Chinese Revolution (191O), 4, I63 Chinese vs. Russian Communism, 140141 Christian morality, 161 Christianity, 11, 21, 22, 24, 25, 50, 51, 82, 93, 95, 148-149, 199: and communism, 140 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 71 Cincinnatus, L. Quintus, 11, 75, 76, 77 class interest, 147 Classical humanism, 22 Clearchus of Heraclea, 39, 144 Cleomenes of Sparta, 144 Coby, J. Patrick, 3 Cohn, Norman, 53 Cold War, 68, 1I 1, 190, 197,200 Colletti, Lucio, 118 Collier, John, 146 Collignon, Nicolas, 101 Collot d7Herbois,Jean-Marie, 91,95-98, I36 Communards, 120 Communist parties in power, 177 Communist Party of the Russian Federation, 190 communists: genuine, 200 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 191 Constant, Benjamin, 172 constituent power, 19 Corcyra, 11 Corsica, 82

Crick, Bernard, 201 Croce, Benedetto, 23, 1 12 Cromwell, Oliver, 9, 15, 70, 7 1, 87 Cromwell, Thomas, 2 1 Crossan, John Dominic, 150 Cuba, 65 Cuban Revolution, 163, 176 Curti, Merle, 73 Cyrus the Great (King of Persia), 54,162 Danton, Georges Jacques, 90, 125 Declaration of Independence, 72 Deep Republicanism: Age of, 175-178; anticlimaxof, 138-142; the Atlantic Republican Tradition vs.. 1, 63; betrayal and outcome of, 179-181, 197-199; dictatorship of professionals and, 6; downward leveling of, 6; end of, 186-192,194-203; the European Republican Tradition and, 1; the French Revolutionary Tradition and, 63; Machiavellism as, 1,4-5,63; meritocracy and, 178; myth of, 138; negative fulfillment of, 173-174; as a republic of virtue, 6; Savonarola as a prophet of, 5; socialist and communist development of, 1 deformed republicanism, 193 Della Volpe, Galvano, 172 democracy, l9,92 demoliberalism, 6 Deng Xiaoping, 67, 142 Deutscher, Isaac, 136 Dewey, John, 159 Diderot, Denis, 15, 16 Djilas, Milovan, 120 Dobson, Joseph, I02 Donoso Cortks, Juan, 20 Dotti, Ugo, 150 Dubois de Fosseaux, 100, 101 Egypt, 10 Engels, Friedrich, 5, 113, 1 17, 1 18, 172, 182, 186 English Glorious Revolution (1688), 5, 76,87, 172 English Puritan Revolution (1642), 5,9, 76

226 Harrington, James, 70, 71, 73, 74, 86, I13 HCbert, Jacque-RenC, 102 Hebrews, 46,48, 83 Hegel, G.W.F., 43, 112, 161 Hendel, Charles, 82 Hindus, Milton, 200 Hitler, Adolf, 23, 11 1, 146, 190, 191192, 197,200 Ho Chi Minh, 176 Hobbes, Thomas, 3,20, 71, 85 Hobsbawm, Eric, 175 Hook Sidney, 112, 159-162, 190-191 Hua, Guofeng, 142 Hulliung, Marc, 25, 26 humanism, 123, 128, 138 Humboldt, Alexander, 172 Ickes, Harold, 146 Illuminati, 5, 86, 103 Industrial Revolution, 6 Iron Curtain, 140, 142 Italian Communist Party, 139 Italians, 41, 52, 73, 84 Italy, 16,38,43,48, 51, 55 Jacobin Reign of Terror, 163 Jacobinism, 130 Jacobins, 5, 9, 53, 63, 86-97, 99, 101, 104, 112, 116, 120, 121, 125-127, 129-132, 134, 136 James I of England, James I1 (Duke of York), 72 Jefferson, Thomas, 73 Jesuits, 21 Jesus Christ, 3, 15, 25, 26, 51, 54, 93, 95, 103, 149-150, 165, 169, 177; class warfare of, 150; cultural revolution of, 149; as a second Moses, 149, I50 Jews, 23, 169 Jiang Qing, 142 John the Baptist, 149-150 Johnson, Lyndon, 145, 147 Johnson's Great Society, 142 Jouvenel, Bertrand de, 162 Judea, 48 Kaganovich, Lazar, 141, 142

Index Kahan, Stuart, 141 Kamenev, Lev, 124 Kang Sheng, 142 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 172 Kautsky, Karl, 132 Kerensky, Alexander, 67 Keynes, John Maynard, 146 Khmer Rouge, 177 Khrushchev, Nikita, 137, 140-142, 165, 168, 186, 188 Kim I1 Sung, 176 Kingdom of Naples, 52 Kirov, Sergei, 161, 169 Kocis, Robert, 143 Korean Revolution, 163 Kronstadt Commune. 120 Latin America, 176 "law of the balance," 70 Lefort, Claude, I89 Lenin, V.I., 19, 68-69, 145, 162, 163, 168, 169, 172, 176, 178, 187; builds a party of professional revolutionaries and a political-military vanguard, 130, 13 1; compared to Robespierre, 126, 129, 130; deep republicanism of, 11 1, 119; endorses the Jacobin Terror of 179394, 127-128; extreme socialism of, 67; as the first Marxist to declare that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, 128; initially accepts but later rejects model of commune state, 120; Jacobinism of, 124-125; LittleTerror of 1918- 1919 and draft resolution against factionalism by, 126; as Machiavellian prince, 124; Machiavellism of, 128-129; as master conspirator, 129; outrivaled by Stalin's Grand Terror in 1930s, 126; proposes that Bolsheviks lead the bourgeois democratic revolution, 127; for ruthlessly destroying the enemies of liberty, 53, 127-128; stigmatizes the Mensheviks as "Girondists," 126 Leninist Old Guard, 165, 168, 169 Leo X (Pope), 44,46,74 Leonardo da Vinci, 3

Index Levellers, 15, 87 liberalism, 1, 5, 23, 69, 115, 185 Liberation Theology, 177 Lillburne, John, 15 Livy (Titus Livius), 10-12,40, 56, 58 Locke, John, 3,67,71-73,78,85, 172 London, 116 Louis XI of France, 54 Louis XI1 of France, 41 Louis XIV of France, 87 Loyola, Ignatius, 103 Luther, Martin, 9,22 Lycurgus (Lawgiver of Sparta), 10, 47, 82,85 Lyons, 89,96-97 Machiavelli, Niccolb, 1-7, 9-32, 37-59, 63-77,79-80,82-86,112- I 19, 121, 123, 132, 142-144, 148-151, 159163, 171, 173, 174, 176-181, 183184, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193, 194196,202-203 Machiavelli's republican agenda: Age of National Liberation and, 176; arming the people, 146-149, 176177; class war, 56-59; communism and, 177; death to all gentlemen, 38-39, 52-53, 55-56; economic equality, 5 1, 54-55, 178; meritocracy, 5, 12, 20, 40, 51-52, 55, 75, 80,82,86, 159, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180, 184, 185, 186, 188, 196, 197; mixed government and, 44-45; national liberation and unification, 40-43; professionalism and, 177178; religious reform, 50-5 1, 177; role of the prince and, 38-40; struggle for political freedom, 43-46; war on private property, 54-55 Machiavelli's vs. Dante's politics, 159 Machiavellian Century, 176 Machiavellian moment, 64-65 Machiavellism: arrested, 63, 69-70; as an attempt at scientific politics, 28; championing of professional interests by, 5; class struggle and, 32, 44, 56-59; committed to killing gentlemen and those who live like gentlemen, 38-39, 52-53, 55-56;

227 contradictory and deceptive meanings of, 1, 2, 20; critique of Christian morality by, 21, 24-25; Dante's politics and, 159; deep vs. shallow republicanism of, 1, 4-5; the free states of Germany and, 4647; in French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, 4; guidelines to, 4; for Italian national liberation and unification, 38-39, 40-43; of the labor movement, 1 12-1 19; Lenin's, 128; Marx's, 1 12-1 19, 121; opposed to Church, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie, 3; for apeople'smilitia, 46; political extremism of, 3; as a prelude to professionalism, 173-174, 175; provisional support for mixed government by, 43-46,52-53; religious reform and, 50-51; as response to Machiavelli's torture and banishment, 6, 13-15; on the role of the prince, 41 -43; Rousseauism and, 5, 17, 77-86; Savonarola's execution and, 2; in search of a New Moses, 29,32,41-42; Stalin's, 133, 137; subversive and revolutionary project of, 6, 10-13, 1720,27,28-3 I; support for economic equality by, 46-47, 51-55; Trotsky's, 132-133; unmasking of political hypocrisy, lies, and halftruths, 20, 27 machismo, 4 Macht-politik, 22 Macpherson, C.B., 71 Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune, 177 Maistre, Joseph de, 20 Malaparte, Curzio, 69 Malenkov, Georgi, 141, 142 Malthus, Thomas, 178 Mammonism, 26 Mandeville, Bernard, Manuilsky, D.Z., 137 Mao Zedong, 4, 6, 7, 1 l I, 176, 178: antihumanism of, 123; for building communism and socialism simultaneneously, 140; censured for "right-wing opportunism," 138;

Chinese "Gang of Four" and, 141, 142;convivial communism of, 140141; deep republicanism of, 123; Machiavellism of, 137-138; massive persecution of professionals under, 124; on power growing out of the barrel of a gun, 128; prefers "reds" over "experts," 140; Proletarian Cultural Revolution of, 120-121, 123, 124, 137, 138, 140, 142, 177; rejection of a commune government by, 120-121 Marat, Jean Paul, 90 Marchenko, Anatoly, 170, 190 MarCchal, Sylvain, 32 Marx, Karl, 3, 68, 111, 112-119, 120126, 161, 162, 172, 173, 182, 184, 186, 194, 196, 198 Marxism, 161; Bolsheviks' debt to, 124; consistent democratism of, 127; on emancipating politics from ethics, 113, 114; as an example of Machiavelli's deep republicanism, 1l l , 112, 114; Lenin'samalgamof Jacobinism and, 125, 129; rethinking of, 112; revolutionary role of, 123; the road to professional society and, 123, 173; salvaging, 123 Masters, Roger D., 23 Mattingly, Garret, 29, 30 Maximilien I, Emperor, 53, 83 Medici, 13-15, 17, 26, 29, 30, 37, 38, 39,46,64, 74, 143, 180 Medici, Catherine de', 20 Medici, Giuliano de', 14, 17,29,30,37, 38,41 Medici, Lorenzo de', 29,37,39,41 Medici, Piero de', 4 1, 54 Medvedev, Roy, 136, 137, 165, 169 Meinecke, Friedrich, 22 Menshevism vs. Bolshevism, 130 meritocracy, 4, 5, 12, 20,40, 51-52, 55, 75, 80, 82, 86, 169, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180, 184, 185, 186, 188, 192,196,197,198 Mexico's "dirty war," 176 Michele di Lando, 18 Middle East, 176

milking the cow to dryness, 122 Molotov, V.M., 128, 135, 141, 142 Montesquieu, Baron de, 67, 87.90, 172 Morelly, 100-101, 103, 171-172 Morgenthau, Hans, 20 Morgenthau, Jr., Henry, 146 Mosca, Gaetano, 27 Moschona, Gerassimos, 174-175 Moscow, 69 Moscow Trials, 161, 167 Moses, 10, 29, 41, 42, 48, 82, 83, 150, 162, 177 Miinzer, Thomas, 26 Mussolini, Benito, 23,69, 139, 190-192 Nantes, 89 national interest. 147 Nazi Germany, 161, 1 76 Nazi-Bolshevik and Fascist-Communist equation, 190 Nazism, 1 9 1 Negri, Antonio, 18, 19 New Class, 165, 167 New Deal coalition, 145 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 24,25,67 Nixon, Richard, 147 Nomenklatura, 122, 168, 169, 170 North Korea, 65 Numa, Pompilius, 12,23, 56 Nuremburg war criminals, 142 oligarchy, 70; Aristotle on, 58; commercial, 20; corrupted form of aristocracy, 16; in Polybian cycle, 195 Orwell, George, 163, 199,20 1,202 Otis, James, 73 Palmer, Michael, 14 Pan-African Junta of Militant Organizations (U.S.), 176 Papal States, 4 1,46 parallels between The Prince and the Communist Man&to, 191, 193 Paris Commune (1871), 11 1, 119-120, 127, 134 patriotism, 193; civic virtue.as, I62 peace, 12, 22, 23, 24, 25; ambition and avarice as enemies of, 148; among nations, 85; over another Great

230 90-93, 97-99, 101-102, 104, 11 1112, 116, 125, 126, 129-136, 160, 178, 186 Roman Empire, 12,47,48, 1 17 Roman Republic, 10, 11, 16, 18,47,50, 56,58, 143, 151, 179 Romans, 15, 16,56 Rome, 10, 12,23,26,28,29, 43,44,45, 47,48, 69 Romulus, 12 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 146 Roosevelt, F.D.R., 145, 146 Roosevelt, Theodore, 145 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 2, 3, 5, 17, 19, 39,63,65-68,89-93,95, 100, 103, 112, 113, 151, 161, 172, 173, 186, 194; basis of the social contract according to, 78; class background of, 85-86; deep republicanism of, 77-78, 79, 80, 82-84, 86; for elective democracy as the best form of government, 80, 82; on individual and collective self-sumciency, 79, 80; as Machiavellian law-giver, 82-86; Machiavellian prqject of, 87; opposed to luxury, 80, 84; opposition to mixed government by, 81; on the religion of man and the citizen, 82; on the sovereign as the general will, 77, 78,82 Rousseauism, 5 Russell-Smith, Hugh F., 71, 74 Russian anarchists, 120 Russian Bolshevik Revolution ( I 917), 4, 9, 67, 68, 90, 11 1, 131 Russian Civil War, 166 Russian October Revolution, 4, 9, 131, 145, 168, 173 Russian Social Democracy, 127 Russian Thermidor, 131, 132. 133, 134 Russian vs. Occidental Communism, 138-140 Saint-AndrC, AndrC Jeanbon, 99 Saint-Just, Louie-Antoine, 90, 91, 100, 125 Sallustius Crispus, Caius (Sallust), 150 Sandino, Augusto CCsar, 177

Index Sasso, Gennaro, 38 Savonarola, Girolamo, 2, 3, 9, 11, 14, 15, 26, 41, 50, 51, 53-55, 64, 65, 74, 103, 150 Schmitt, Carl, 20 Schweitzer, Albert, 177 Seneca, Lucius Anneus, 7 1 Servilius, Caepio, 56 Sforza, 14 shallow republicanism, 176; Atlantic Model of, 69-77, 163, 176; Atlantic Model declined and, 69-77; Atlantic Model deformed and, 192194, 196; Atlantic Republican Tradition of, 63,68,69,70,72,87; checks and balances and, 5; as civic humanism, 1; Machiavellism and, 1, 4-5; and New Class of professionals, 6; Polybius and, 3; postclassical development and, I; and verdict of history, 6 Shepilov, D.T., 141 Shklar, Judith, 2 Sidney, Algernon, 73 Skinner, Quentin, 75 Smith, Adam, 78, 118 Soboul, Albert, 82 Social Democracy, 135, 174 Social Democratic parties, 174, 175 socialism, 164 "Socialism Is Knowledge," 188 socialist construction, 173 Soderini, Piero, 143 Solon (Athenian statesman), 10 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr I., 165-166 Sorel, Georges, 3 1,32 Souvarine, Boris, 136 Soviet Union, 69, 11I, 188-189 Spain, 55 Spanish Anarchists, 201 Spanish Civil War, 120, 176, 201 Sparta, 10, 19 Spirito, Ugo, 139-141 St. Bartholomew's Night, 20 St. Dominic, 11,25, 50, 53 St. Francis, 11, 15,25, 50, 54 St. Jerome, 54 St. Paul, 25, 177 Stalin, Joseph, 23, 65, 67, 69, 121-122,

23 1

Index

124, 126, 130, 134, 135, 141, 144, 145, 161, 176, 178,200; abandons the principle of a "Workers' Nucleus," 188; "centrism" of, 135; Civil War under, 166; Constitution of 1936, 174; as a critic of "loose morals," 133, 160; criticized for "crude egalitarianism" and a "rich state with apoor people," 188; final goal of, 192; on "Lefts" as also "Rights," 135; Leninist Old Guard and, 165, 168, 169; Machiavellism of, 136-137; "negative fulfillment" of deep republicanism by, 174,187; opposed to equal wages and leveling downward, 173-174; purges by, 136, 160, 161, 165, 169-170; Red Terror of, 163-167, 169, 170171 ; "Right opportunist danger" according to, 135, 136; Russian Thermidor and, 132,133, 134, 173, 188; as a second Robespierre, 111, 133; totalitarianism of, 166-167 Stalin, Svetlana, 167 Strauss, Leo, 14, 15,25,26 Sullivan, Vickie, 149 Sully, Franqois, 177 Sun Yat-sen, 67 Svanidze, Budu, 133, 167-168 Switzerland, 47, 83, 84 Sybarites, 160 Synoptic Gospels, 25, 150 Tacitus, 10 Talmon, J.L., 90, 144, 145, 171 Theseus, 42 Third Reich and Third Rome, 192 Third World, 176 Third World communists, 191 Thucydides, 10, l l Titarenko, A., 123 Titus Livius (Livy), 10, 11, 12, 40, 56, 58 Tkachev, Peter, 124, 125 Tomski, Michael, 164 totalitarianism, 190 Trotsky, Leon, 111, 1 12, 124-126, 128, 160, 176; antibureaucratic policy of, 131; deep republicanism of,

173-174; in defense of "Red Terror," 132-133, 163, 164; early opposition to Lenin's Jacobinism and organizational principles, 129, 130; hothouse Marxism of, 130; identifieshimselfwith Robespierre, 132, 133; as leader of the Left Opposition, 131; Machiavellism of, 133; marginalized from the party leadership, 131; mistaken concerning a Stalinist Thermidor, 134135; obsessed by the lessons of the French Revolution, 129, 131; reverses his original judgment and criticism of Lenin, 130-13 1 Trotskyism, 183 Truman, Henry, 146, 147 Truman's Fair Deal, 142 Tugwell, Rexford, 146 Tukhachevsky, M.N., 135 U.S. neocolonialism, 176 urban guerrilla warfare, 177 Vandals, 48 Venetian republic, 52 Venice, 58 verdict of history, 5 Versailles Treaty, 176 Vettori, Francesco, 38, 4 1, I48 Vietnam, 65 Vietnam war, 146, 148, 177 Vietnamese revolution, 163 Villari, Pasquale, 43 Viroli, Maurizio, 148 virtli: translated as "virtue," 162 virtue(s), 4, 10, 22, 49, 51, 57, 58, 64, 65, 68, 82, 86, 93, 114, 121, 189, 193; action-inhibited asceticism as a, 183; ancient, 78, 84; Atlantic Model as enemy of, 67; Cincinnatus as paragon of, l I; civic. l I, 162; classical and Christian, 149; equality as condition of, 19, 86; faith of Christ founded on one, 54; flip-side of, 93; force and fraud the cardinal, 24; of the fox, 14; the fundamental principle of republics, 80, 86; heroic, 28; hidden meaning of

232 appeals to, 181; imposition by force, 196; intellectual, 180; of kings and citizens, 40; Lenin's regime of, 130; Machiavellian, 68, 77; martial, 148; meritocracy of, 75; military, 49; needed to tame Mistress Fortune, 162; politics, 142, 193; poverty as condition of, 12; powerless without tenor, 92; public, 92, 171; Puritan, 122; reign of 77, 89,91, 1I I, 172; republic(s) of, 6, 13,32,46, 52,55,77,82,98, 118, 129, 179, 181, 189, 196,202; republican, 76, 78, 194; Robespierre the apostle of, 63; Robespierre intoxicated with his, 94; stable governmentsthe basis of, 66, 195; Stalin and Cesare Borgia compared, 160-161 ; Stalin's revolutionary, 168; vice and, 29,30,57; virtti translated as, 162; Volkogonov, Dmitri, 133 Voslensky, Michael, 168-169 Wallace, Henry, 146 Wang Hongwen, 142 Washington, George, 73, 87 Webster, Noah, 193 Weeks, Albert, 124 Wilson, Edmund, 184 World War 1, 131, 201 World War 11, 120, I76 Yakovlev, Alexander, 121, 188 Yeltsin, Boris, 67, 123-124, 134, 135, 188,190 Yeltsin mafia, 190 Young, Michael, 198 Yugoslavia, 120 Zaslavskaya, Tatyana, 122 Zhang Chunqiao, 142 Zinn, Howard, 146, 147 Zinoviev, Grigori, 124 Zweig, Stefan, 136

Index

About the Author Donald Clark Hodges was born in Texas in 1923 but grew up in Argentina. He returned to the United States in 1941,majored in economics and philosophy at New York University, and completed his doctoral studies at Columbia. A past director of the Humanities Program at the University of Missouri and of Latin American Studies at Florida State University, he is currently a professor of philosophy and an affiliate professor of political science at Florida State University. The recipient of numerous grants and research awards, he was a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska in 1963 and the University of Hawaii in 1965, and taught politics for two semesters at Mexico's National University in 1982. He has lectured widely throughout Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Australia, and accepted a Soviet Academy of Science Research Appointment in 1985. The founder ofSocial Theory and Practice and a past member ofthe editorial boards of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and Latin American Perspectives, he served as secretary-treasurerof the Society for the Philosophical Study of Marxism from 1963 to 1987. He is the author of more than 100 articles on labor and socialism and of numerous books, the more recent ones including Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1986), Argentina's "Dirty War" (199 l), Sandino 's Communism: Spiritual Politics for the Twenty-First Century (1992), America's New Economic Order (1996), The Literate Communist: 150 Years of the Communist Manifesto (1999), Class Politics in the Information Age (2000), Mexico: the End of the Revolution (2002), and Mexico Under Siege: Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism (2002).