The Machiavellian Moment Returns

In the third book of the Discourses on Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli argues that republics “do not last if they do not renew themselves” by recourse to their origins, when they were at their most pure. “Because in the process of time that goodness is corrupted, unless something intervenes to lead it back to the mark, it of necessity kills the body.”

Historian J.G.A. Pocock elaborates on this idea, arguing for a “Machiavellian moment” (the title of his sprawling and majestic book on the subject) in which a republic must act to save itself by returning to first principles. Per Pocock, the Renaissance Florentines, the Commonwealthmen of 18th-century Britain, and the Revolutionary-era Americans all faced such a moment and were forced to act against the corruption of their regimes. These moments, however, are not always successful. The Florentines lost their republic, and the Commonwealthmen remained a minority in Britain, whose legacy was predominantly to influence the American patriots at the end of the century.

I was strongly reminded of Machiavelli and Pocock while reading Spencer Klavan’s meditation on America on its 250th birthday. “Americans will need to recover a sense of their country as an era-defining project,” Klavan writes, “forward-looking but steeped in ancient traditions of faith and law—not just a Western nation, but the Western nation par excellence.” This is the language of Pocock, of Machiavelli, and even of Polybius, the Greek-born historian whose history of Rome influenced James Madison and the American founders.

History is not, as Francis Fukuyama declared, at an end. Though Americans have always been forward-looking, we remain sensitive to a lingering threat of what Polybius termed the anacyclosis—history’s tragic cycle of birth, zenith, and decay. There is a persistent doubt that everything we have built not only can be destroyed but will be, if history is any guide. Corruption is the natural consequence of all human institutions. The Revolutionary generation, after all, was obsessed with the Roman Republic, and they well understood that it devolved into empire.