Paul A. Rahe

Thomas Jefferson's Machiavellian Political Science

On the face of it, there would seem to be little evidence suggesting that the political science of Thomas Jefferson owed much, if anything, to the speculation of Niccolo Machiavelli. The Virginian appears to have mentioned the Florentine by name but once, and he did so in a manner conveying his disdain for the author of The Prince . And yet, as I try to show in this article, Jeffersons commitment to limited government, his advocacy of a politics of distrust, his eager embrace of a species of populism, his ultimate understanding of the executive power, and the intention guiding the comprehensive legislative program that he devised for Virginia make sense only when understood in terms of the new science of republican politics articulated by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy .

MONTESQUIEU'S NATURAL RIGHTS CONSTITUTIONALISM

When Woodrow Wilson, in the course of his campaign for the Presidency in 1912, attacked Thomas Jefferson and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, he knew what he was about—for the constitutionalism articulated by the latter and embraced, in turn, by the Framers of the American Constitution was a systematic attempt to put into practice something very much like the first principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. Montesquieu was not a doctrinaire. He feared that, in his own country and elsewhere, revolution would eventuate in the establishment of a despotism, and so he gently, quietly promoted unobtrusive reform. But the cautious, prudential political science that he outlined in his Spirit of Laws was anything but value-free. If the American framers found his legislative science of use, it was because the hatred of despotism and love for liberty animating its author was grounded in an account of natural right closely akin to the one, espoused in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government , that had inspired their revolution.

Montesquieu's anti-Machiavellian Machiavellianism

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, mentions Niccolò Machiavelli by name in his extant works just a handful of times. That, however, he read him carefully and thoroughly time and again there can be no doubt, and it is also clear that he couches his argument both in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and in his Spirit of Laws as an appropriation and critique of the work of the predecessor whom he termed ‘this great man’. In this paper I explore the manner in which the Frenchman redeployed the arguments advanced by the Florentine for the purpose of refuting the latters conclusions. ☆ In citing Machiavelli, I employ N. Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. M. Martelli (Florence, 1971), and I refer to the divisions within each work provided by the author. To make my references to Machiavellis Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio more precise, I sometimes also employ the paragraph enumeration added by the editors of N. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, tr. H. C. Mansfield and N. Tarcov (Chicago, 1996). In citing Montesquieu, wherever possible, I have employed the splendid new critical edition being produced by the Société Montesquieu: Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. J. Ehrard, C. Volpilhac-Auger, et al., 22 vols. (Oxford, 1998-), which I cite as VF. I cite Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734), ed. F. Weil and C. Courtney, as CR by chapter and, where appropriate, line from VF, ii, 89–285. I cite Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois (1757), as EL by part, book, chapter, and, where appropriate, page from Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. R. Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris, 1949–51), ii, 225–995, and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, Mes pensées as MP by number from Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. A. Masson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1950–5), ii, 1–677.

Liberty and Property in Classical Antiquity

I know histhry isn’t thrue, Hinnissy, because it ain’t like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that’ll show me th’ people fi ghtin’, gettin’ dhrunk, makin’ love, gettin’ marrid, owin’ th’ grocery man an’ bein’ without hard-coal, I’ll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure. Historyans is like doctors. They are always lookin’ f ’r symptoms. Th os iv them that writes about their own times examines th’ tongue an’ feels th’ pulse ‘an makes a wrong dygnosis. Th’ other kind iv histhry is a postmortem examination. It tells ye what a counthry died iv. But I’d like to know what it lived iv. —Finley Peter Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley 1

Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, and the Executive Power

Very little has been written presuming a connection between Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. The latter never once mentions the former by name; and, among historians, a certain prejudice prevails. The absence of evidence is often, without reflection, taken as evidence for absence. After all, historians tend to suppose, if Machiavelli was of any importance to Hobbes, the monster of Malmesbury would have mentioned the Florentine, who was thought to have given the devil his moniker “Old Nick.”1

Thucydides on Strategy: Grand Strategies in the Peloponnesian War and Their Relevance Today (review)

“allies” to contribute a head of cattle per city. But still private donation and public purchase (perhaps from Boeotia, “Cattle Land,” as the name translates) were required to fill Athens’s sacrificial needs (p. 177ff.). Indeed, the demand created by the sacred economy may have even led to the commercialization of the meat supply in Attica (p. 195). The historian will find all this information very useful, and it certainly helps shed light on certain episodes in Greek history, like the Megarian Decrees (only barely mentioned by McInerney on p. 150 but now begging to be reinterpreted) and the struggle over the Krisaean Plain at Delphi in the (so-called) First Sacred War (pp. 150–153). McInerney closes with a final “body” chapter (chapter 10) on the role of cattle and sacrifice-related activities in the development of a monetary economy for the Greeks (e.g., the Greek monetary denomination of the “obel” was originally a spit of iron used to roast meat; images of cows on coins harken back to a time when ownership of cattle was proof of wealth, etc.). A concluding chapter summarizes McInerney’s arguments, pushing for recognition of the pervasive influence of cattle and cattle culture on the Greek mind, and even for influencing Greek democratic principles. In sum, this is an excellent book in many regards. For understanding Greek religion and sanctuaries and the Greek economy, and as a contribution to the growing field of studies on animals in historical contexts, I think it should assume a central place. The only weaknesses, in my opinion, are with McInerney’s insistence in presenting speculation and interpretation as fact, especially in his chapters dealing with Bronze Age Crete, myth, and literature. But it is still a work of great value that contributes much to ancient Mediterranean studies. gary d. farney Rutgers University at Newark

Montesquieu and the Constitution of Liberty

Thirty-five years ago, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn surveyed the intellectual traditions that exercised influence in the American colonies on the eve of the American Revolution and argued that the English commonwealthmen identified by Caroline Robbins had a greater substantive impact than did the writers of classical antiquity and the Enlightenment, the exponents of the common law, and the Puritan divines. Of the writers who fell within the last three categories, he did not repeat what he had said concerning “the classics of the ancient world”—that they are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought. They contributed a vivid vocabulary but not the logic or grammar of thought, a universally respected personification but not the source of political and social beliefs. They heightened the colonists’ sensitivity to ideas and attitudes otherwise derived. To the Enlightenment, the common law, and the colonists’ Puritan heritage he attributed greater substantive influence.

Political History's Demise?

Declaration (written by Jefferson on behalf of a notional American people) is a breath of fresh air, an invitation to scholars to mobilize once again for a proper study of the Revolution. But she was not working in a historiographical vacuum or wasteland when she wrote Scripture, nor is she doing so now in her current work on the ratification ofthe federal Constitution. Complementary efforts by students of civic life to move beyond—or beneath—abstract formulations of the bour-