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The Friendless Republic: Freedom, Faction, and Friendship in Machiavelli's Discourses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2018

John M. Warner
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Abstract

Civic republicans have traditionally appealed to friendship as a means of preserving popular liberty, but Machiavelli is a notable exception to this rule. In fact, I argue, he views efforts to reconcile friendship and politics as (1) philosophically dubious, because grounded in false conceptions of person and society, and (2) practically harmful, because they perpetuate patterns of asymmetric dependence that are inconsistent with a free way of life. Machiavelli's neglected skepticism about the political potential of friendship deepens his critique of the Ciceronian concordia, reveals a diminished idea of the common good, and distances him from the civic republican tradition to which he is so often said to belong.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 81 , Issue 1 , Winter 2019 , pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2018 

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Footnotes

Many thanks are due to the UC Davis Political Theory Forum, and particularly to John T. Scott, Andi Rowntree, and Matthew Perry, for their helpful comments and suggestions.

References

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5 I focus on Cicero specifically because his conceptions of friendship and social concord were, as Viroli, “Machiavelli and the Republican Idea of Politics,” 146–52, and Skinner, Quentin, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher,” in Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 6Google Scholar, and “Machiavelli's Discorsi,” 122–23, both recognize, extremely influential for civic republicans of Machiavelli's own age. What is more, Machiavelli himself directs us to De amicitia by referring to it directly in the midst of his critique of the concordia.

6 While there is in Machiavelli's political vision room for something like Aristotelian utility friendship (NE 1155b16–1156b35), it will become evident that he excludes—or at least does not depend on—all other types of friendship.

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19 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 40, 164–65; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, 164, 176.

20 Skinner, “Machiavelli's Discorsi,” 138, 140; cf. Maher, “What Skinner Misses about Machiavelli's Freedom.”

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24 Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:181; Viroli, “Machiavelli and the Republican Idea of Politics,” 160.

25 See McCormick, “Machiavellian Democracy,” 302.

26 See Rahe, “Situating Machiavelli,” 305.

27 Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 1:181.

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33 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 40, 156, 165.

34 Maher, “What Skinner Misses about Machiavelli's Freedom,” 1009; cf. DL 3.28.