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Il principe and lo stato

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

J. H. Hexter
J. H. Hexter*
Affiliation:
Queens College
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Extract

A scholar who has given much of his life to the study of Machiavelli and Machiavellianism, Prof. Giuseppe Prezzolini, recently observed that Machiavelli himself is partly responsible for the weird interpretations of which he has been victim, ‘because he did not take pains to express himself in a systematic form and with a coherent vocabulary. His way of writing is cited in the history of Itahan literature for its perspicuity, simplicity, absence of rhetoric. But it could not be cited for its precision … Machiavelli uses the same word for different concepts and expresses the same concepts with different words.' Prezzolini offers confirmation for his remarks from the corroborative reports of other explorers who wore themselves out slogging through the swamp of Machiavelli's vocabulary.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 4 , 1957 , pp. 113 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1957

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References

1 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, Machiavelli Anticristo (Rome, 1954), p. 3 Google Scholar. Italics mine.

2 Quoted in Prezzolini, p. 4.

3 Ibid.

4 Several writers have tried to come to grips with Machiavelli's terminology or with certain key words in his vocabulary. There are only two works that attempt to deal comprehensively with his use of language, Chiappelli, Fredi, Studi sul linguagio del Machiavelli, and Sciullo, John di, Il vocabolario politico di Niccolò Machiavelli (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1950)Google Scholar. The latter work provides handy examples, drawn from all Machiavelli's works, of the uses of the most important substantives in Machiavelli's political vocabulary. Mr. di Sciullo, however, has been too easily satisfied to pigeonhole those substantives in compartments provided by a modern Italian dictionary, a procedure which obscures the ambiguities in Machiavelli's language and gives an appearance of exactitude and fine distinction to his terminology which it did not always possess. Moreover, by concentrating entirely on substantives and omitting verbs and modifiers, di Sciullo misses the environment, as it were, that determines the complexion of the substantives. Chiappelli alone among those who have written on Machiavelli's use of words has paid some heed to his verbs and modifiers. Other writers have concentrated their attention on a few recurrent and key words in Machiavelli's writings, especially on virtù, fortuna, necessità, and stato. Among the most important works treating one or several of these words are Meinecke, Friedrich, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (3d ed., Munich, 1929), PP. 39—56 Google Scholar; Ercole, Francesco, La politica di Machiavelli (Rome, 1926), pp. 20–196 Google Scholar; Whitfield, J. H., Machiavelli (Oxford, 1947), pp. 92–105 Google Scholar; Mayer, E. W., Machiavellis Geschichtsauffassung und sein begriff ‘Virtù’ (Munich, 1912)Google Scholar, passim; Condorelli, Grazio, ‘Per la storia del nome “Stato” (il nome “stato” in Machiavelli)', Archivio Giuridico LXXXIX (1923), 223–235 Google Scholar; XC (1923), 77-112. Burd, A. L. in his excellent edition of II principe (Oxford, 1891)Google Scholar has included in his notes comments on several of the key words in that work. Some observations by Gilbert, Felix and MacKinney, Loren C. on the meaning of virtù in Machiavelli will be found in Renaissance News IV (1951), 53–55, and V (1952), 21-23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 There are some indications on the use of the term before Machiavelli's time in Mayer, pp. 108-109, Ercole, pp. 67-72, and Condorelli, pp. 77-112.

6 This is essentially the question recently posed and answered in the affirmative by Fredi Chiappelli, a careful student of Machiavelli's traits of style and expression. For analysis of the consequences of starting with this question mal posée, see Appendix A.

7 For the hammering out of a juridical conception of the state in the sixteenth century, beside general treatises on political theory, see Allen, J. W., A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1928)Google Scholar, and Church, W. F., Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass., 1941)Google Scholar.

8 Both the number of editions of Il principe in general use and the monstrous elaboration of apparatus that full documentation of the study would demand has led me to limit my general indications on the occurrences of lo stato to the list in Appendix B, where the number of occurrences in each chapter and in each column in the Mazzoni and Casella edition of Tutte le opere … di Niccolò Machiavelli (Florence, 1929) is given in tabular form. Each specific quotation is identified in a footnote which gives first the chapter of Il principe and second the page and column in Mazzoni and Casella in which the quotation occurs, e.g., I; 5a.

9 The following three paragraphs on the use of lo stato and its equivalents in the middle ages is based on the studies of Condorelli and Ercole cited in n. 4, on the dictionaries of Tommaseo, La Curne de Ste. Palaye, and Godefroy, on du Cange, on the Oxford English Dictionary, and on such impressions as the present writer has picked up from his reading.

10 2; 5b. Italics mine.

11 19; 38a-b. Italics mine.

12 15; 31a.

13 Ibid. Italics mine.

14 4; 10b. Italics mine.

15 10; 22a. Italics mine.

16 12; 26b. Italics mine.

17 24; 47b. Italics mine.

18 4; 10a.

19 5; 12a.

20 4; IIa .

21 3; 8b.

22 10; 22a.

23 5; 12a.

24 9; 22a.

25 12 ; 26b.

26 15; 30b.

27 I; 5a.

28 E.g., 10; 32a.

29 3; 7a.

30 12; 26b.

31 3; 10a.

32 21; 43b.

33 19; 40b.

34 3; 8a.

35 7; 14b.

36 18; 35a-b.

37 12; 24b.

38 21; 43b.

39 5; 11b-12b.

40 7; 15a.

41 18; 35b.

42 12; 24b.

43 Ibid.

44 9; 21b.

45 21; 45a.

46 Discorsi I, 9; Mazzoni and Casella, pp. 720-738. Italics mine.

47 E.g., Discorsi 1,2, 3, 5, 6,7,9; Mazzoni and Casella, pp. 62a, 62b, 64b, 68a, 69b, 72a.

48 Vivere appears with libero several times in Il principe, but not as a substantive, only with the meaning ‘to live in freedom’.

49 18; 35b.

50 7; 14b-15a; see also 3; 7b and 5; 12a.

51 11; 22a; see also 6; 14a and 7; 15b.

52 3; 10a.

53 12; 24b.

54 19; 36a.

55 20; 41a.