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Machiavelli will not save democracy

On a populist reading of Machiavelli (L’Espresso, 7 March 2021)

Machiavelli will not save democracy On a populist reading of Machiavelli (L'Espresso, 7 March 2021)
Sandro Landi
p. 167-175

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Ciurmatori

  • 1 Alle bocche della piazza. Diario di un anonimo fiorentino (1382-1401), edited by Anthony Molho and (...)
  • 2 Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere, edited by Franco Gaeta, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1981, p. 308: “e’ si trov (...)
  • 3 See Michele Lodone, I segni della fine. Storia di un predicatore del Rinascimento, Rome, Viella, 20 (...)

1One could say of Machiavelli what has been said of an anonymous Florentine chronicler of the late fourteenth century: his was a “public” culture, “of the square”1. From this crowded public space, of which Machiavelli was a participating spectator, several fragments emerge, especially in his letters. The letter of 19 December 1513 to Francesco Vettori reports the presence of a friar preacher in Florence: “a friar of St Francis is in this city of ours, magnet of all the enchanters (ciurmatori) of the world”2. The author of this apocalyptic sermon has been identified with Francesco da Montepulciano3. Machiavelli defines him as a “mezzo romito”, i.e. an itinerant hermit, as well as a “prophet” (“in order to have more credit in preaching, he professes to be a prophet”). Perhaps it is precisely the spectacular nature of the sermon, the unusual effects it provoked even in those who, like him, were only indirect witnesses (“these things astonished me...”), which justifies the first attribute Machiavelli uses to describe the friar: a “ciurmatore”, that is, an enchanter.

2Ciurmatore or ciurmadore is one who makes public and fraudulent use of his own word; ciurmare, according to the Vocabolario della Crusca, “are those acts, and those false statements, which come out of the ciurmadori”4. Florence, Machiavelli points out, seems to exert a particular influence on this type of character. This is perhaps an allusion to the preaching of Savonarola, whose case, as we shall see, may fall into this category. Ciurmare, a term attested since the 15th century, is the italianisation of the French charmer. In a study on charlatans in early modern Italy, David Gentilcore recalled that ciurmatore is a term referring in particular to the snake charmer5. Itinerant characters of this type, halfway between medicine and ancestral practices, the rural and the urban world, were very frequent and popular in the Italian squares of this period. Machiavelli himself met these characters and was certainly so impressed by them that he dedicated a carnivalesque composition to them: the Canto de’ ciurmadori. “Ciurmador siamo che ciurmiàn per natura...” (“We are enchanters who enchant by nature...”)6. Probably written in 1509, the composition is a burlesque disguise of this itinerant profession, dedicated, in this case, to seducing the female public with prodigious remedies. However, behind the obscene subtexts, the parody hints at something that distinguishes these street healers and which Machiavelli seems to grasp: the natural and mysterious ability to influence and enslave not only wild animals but also gullible onlookers.

“Machiavelli salverà la democrazia”

  • 7 “Machiavelli salverà la democrazia. Colloquio con John P. McCormick di Gabriele Pedullà”, L’Espress (...)

3To address the question of the populist interpretation of Machiavelli, I would like to start with an interview with John McCormick published in the Italian weekly L’Espresso on 7 March 20217. It is rare for Machiavellian criticism to address a non-specialist readership, which is why it is interesting to dwell on this text. Indeed, consistent with its principles, one of the characteristics of Machiavelli’s populist criticism consists in proposing popular theses, that is to say, not only democratic but also within the reach of a non-academic audience. Conversely, as we shall see, popular representations and slogans can feed and legitimise this current of interpretation. The title of the interview conducted by Gabriele Pedullà is “Machiavelli salverà la democrazia” (“Machiavelli will save democracy”). Just imagine for a moment the surprise of the typical Espresso reader, who has been pondering the darkest scenarios of Italian democracy for years, when confronted with this astonishing claim. In the interview, McCormick explains how Machiavelli could achieve this prodigy.

  • 8 Ibidem, p. 77.
  • 9 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker, London, Penguin Books, 2003, p. 486.
  • 10 “Machiavelli salverà la democrazia”, cit., p. 77.
  • 11 Ibidem.

4First of all, there is a problem of reading. “Anyone who reads Machiavelli with the attention he deserves”, McCormick explains, “can see that modern democracies allow elites to avoid paying for behaviour that he believed should be punished with the utmost severity”8. However, what does it mean to read Machiavelli “with the attention he deserves”? This hermeneutical injunction is reminiscent of the one we find in the third book of the Discourses (chapter 30) “He who reads the Bible with discernment […]”9. In the case of populist exegesis, it is a matter of reading Machiavelli in the light of the contemporary situation, namely the US situation: “I believe that any reader of Machiavelli has been led at least once to see in Barack Obama a kind of reincarnation of Piero Soderini, the Gonfaloniere of Justice in Florence with whom Machiavelli worked for ten years and who was defeated because, against Machiavelli’s advice, he sought compromise with the elite at all costs, even when it was clear that his opponents were unwilling to negotiate, until the Florentine oligarchy got rid of him in a coup d’État10. On this reading, if Barack Obama is a “reincarnation”, Machiavelli can only be a precursor: “I believe that Machiavelli’s writings anticipate left-wing populism because they encourage the plebs to challenge the elites and demand an ever greater share of economic and political power from them”, McCormick says11.

  • 12 John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. I.

5Populist exegesis is thus, without doubt, a presentist exegesis, in the double sense that the present suggests the themes and vocabulary for re-reading Machiavelli, while Machiavelli reciprocally provides examples and keys to legitimise the populist reading of the present. The book that introduced McCormick to the public at large (Machiavellian Democracy) begins with this sentence: “the political impact of economic inequality is an increasingly vexing problem in contemporary democracies, especially the United States”12. Believing that a “sensible” reading of Machiavelli provides the solution to the crisis of contemporary democraciesis not, therefore, a mere journalistic boutade, but is, more seriously, the purpose of the populist rereading of Machiavelli. In order for populist exegesis to perform this soteriological function, certain conditions are necessary:

  • 13 Ibidem, p. 3.
  • 14 See John P. McCormick, Reading Machiavelli. Scandalous books, suspects engagements and the virtue o (...)
  • 15 On “tumults” as a key to an “operaist” reading of Machiavelli, see Pier Paolo Portinaro, Le mani su (...)
  • 16 As already observed by Ryan Balot and Stephen Trochimchuk, « The Many and the Few: On Machiavelli’s (...)
  • 17 Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations. The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London and New Yor (...)

6(a) A corpus. The populist corpus results from a selection of texts in which it is possible to find the demonstration of the general postulate always expressed in Machiavellian Democracy: “Machiavelli’s political theory was more popularly participatory and empowering than was republicanism, generally, and, for that matter, than democracy as generally conceptualised and practised today”13. This corpus includes preferably those texts in which Machiavelli is interested in the people as an institutional actor, especially the first chapters of the Discourses (I, 2-8), the Discursus florentinarum rerum and, most selectively, the Florentine Histories. In the populist exegesis, the popolo, which according to Machiavelli is one of the “humours” of the city, is identified without hesitation as a social class14. This class is opposed to another collective subject: the Senate, in the case of Rome, synonymous with the “nobles” or “great” (Grandi) in the case of Florence, generically qualified as the “elite”, i.e. the holders of economic and political power, in the populist lexicon. The characteristic dynamic of these two actors is conflicting, as Rome and Florence are, according to a commonplace of recent criticism, “tumultuous” republics15. In the populist interpretation, this dynamic necessarily leads to the creation of institutions whose purpose is to safeguard the freedom of the people and the democratic control of the elites. Populist exegesis always proceeds by selection and deduction: it excludes or minimises all texts that might contradict the general postulate16. In other words, this is a classic case of tautological exegesis, as Popper says: “it is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory, if we look for confirmations”17.

  • 18 See Christiane Klapisch Zuber, “La construction de l’identité sociale. Les magnats dans la Florence (...)
  • 19 “Machiavelli salverà la democrazia”, cit., p. 76.

7b) A lexicon. Machiavelli’s populist lexicon is the result of an actualisation and radicalisation of the Machiavellian lexicon. This lexicon is extraordinarily poor and revolves around two terms: “people” and “elites”. In the populist lexicon, “the people” are a social class and even more an ethical community, a repository of values of equality, social justice and collective prudence. The populist lexicon is essentially indifferent to the numerous studies carried out in recent years that have demonstrated the great complexity of the term “popolo” in Machiavelli’s historical context and its inadequacy in contemporary categories18. The populist lexicon deliberately practises anachronism and decontextualisation by winking at the lexicon of contemporary populist movements. For example, the antinomy “people”/“elites” is constitutive of the discourse of the gilets jaunes, whom McCormick unsurprisingly cites in the interview as a model of “progressive populism”19.

  • 20 See John P. McCormick, Reading Machiavelli, cit., p. 111.
  • 21 Ibidem, p. 145.

8c) A genealogy. In populist exegesis, the reference to Machiavelli has an instrumental value: to replace Machiavelli with Rousseau as a heroic figure in the history of modern democracy20 and to provide contemporary democratic theory with a more solid model because it is older, more in line with the Roman republican example and, above all, more radical. This genealogy allows McCormick to construct an autonomous narrative with respect to the grand narrative of Skinnerian republicanism, which represents one of his main polemical objects (the other being Leo Strauss, singled out and discredited in Reading Machiavelli as a “devotee” of Heidegger in his youth)21. If the democratic genealogy differs from the republican one, it is not entirely clear how the democratic method differs from the republican one. Like Skinner, McCormick seeks (and necessarily finds) precursors and reincarnations in the history of thought. Establishing genealogies and designating precursors, privileging the description of the linearity of a work rather than dwelling on its hapax and contradictions is a typical method of the history of ideas. Populist exegesis, alien to the debates and developments in contemporary intellectual history, is methodologically out of date.

9d) An ideology. The populist reading of Machiavelli is the exegetical disguise of an ideology: left-wing populism. In his interview, McCormick states: “I am an advocate of populism, of left-wing populism. The difference between left and right is simple: progressive populism is a movement that challenges the real unfair advantages enjoyed by a minority. Right-wing populism is a movement that challenges the imagined privileges enjoyed by the most vulnerable minorities (religious, ethnic...)”22. The progressive meaning of “populism”, which may seem suspicious to a European reader, is instead understandable in the light of the US experience and, in particular, of the distinction between “good” and “bad” populism which allows, among other things, to explain Obama’s famous “populist” statement: “I am the real populist, not Trump”23. In reality, the distinction between the two types of populism is by no means simple and can hold unpleasant surprises in store, as demonstrated by one of McCormick’s own models, the gilet jaunes movement, whose fierce contestation of the elites led it, through a sad but predictable parabola, to dissolve, in the recent French presidential elections, into the ranks of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national.

10At the end of this short analysis, a doubt and a question arise: are we sure that populist exegesis is really interested in Machiavelli and not in Machiavelli as a mere pretext or icon? If we leave populist exegesis aside, is it possible to establish a relationship between Machiavelli and the characters historically attributable to the phenomenon defined as “populism”?

Machiavelli and “populism”

  • 24 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, cit., p. 142.
  • 25 See Sandro Landi, Lo sguardo di Machiavelli. Una nuova storia intellettuale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 20 (...)
  • 26 See Sandro Landi, “Gli incantatori. Un archetipo politico (La Boétie, Pomponazzi, Machiavelli)”, St (...)

11To try to answer this question, I would like to begin precisely with the ciurmatori, that is, those figures endowed, according to Machiavelli, with the singular virtue of enchanting animals, men and crowds. At the origin of enchantment is the wonder, that is, the presumption of a privileged relationship with the supernatural that translates into a promise of salvation, individual or collective. Savonarola certainly belongs to this category, capable of enchanting the mass of Florentines with the power of words alone (“vast numbers believed […] without having seen him do anything out of the common whereby to make them believe”24). It is very likely that Machiavelli interpreted the figure of Savonarola in the light of the category of incantatio, which he may have found in an opuscule by an Avicennian physician, Andrea Cattani, the Opus de intellectu et de causis mirabilium effectuum25. It is very likely, moreover, that in the light of this model, Machiavelli identified a whole series of similar cases, starting with Numa, a prodigious king, who believed himself capable of conversing with the nymph Egeria, that is, of qualifying himself before the Roman people as a mediator of the divine, and therefore endowed with the authority to introduce political reforms26. The relationship that military leaders establish with armed multitudes is also thaumaturgical in nature. Machiavelli understands, in short, that the presumption of the miracle produces, with a human group, an emotional vacuum: the enchantment necessary to welcome order and the authority that introduces it. What is the relationship between the political model of the ciurmatore and modern populism? I identify two points:

  • 27 See Vittoria Perrone Compagni, “Maghi, demoni, profeti: alcuni temi del De incantationibus”, in Pie (...)
  • 28 Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges. Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale (...)

12(a) The reversal of the thaumaturgical model. The trivialisation of the prodigy in the practice of the government of large human aggregates constitutes a new fact, which breaks with the traditional thaumaturgical model associated with monarchs of divine right. In the figure of the enchanter identified by Machiavelli, this model is reversed: where, in the first case, it is dynastic, ancestral and legitimate authority that generates the power to perform miracles, in the second it is the ability to publicly produce prodigies and astonishments that becomes absolute proof of authority, that is, of a direct relationship with the supernatural. None of the enchanters described by Machiavelli is a thaumaturge because he is a king. Machiavelli is not an isolated case. In the varied typology of enchanters found in a contemporary text, Pietro Pomponazzi’s De incantationibus (1520), the power to influence, even on a large scale, the minds of others is essentially found in the individuals of the people27. In fact, people tend preferentially to place their trust in figures who share their fears, beliefs and hopes. Anyone who demonstrates the charisma to charm (and heal) can become prince of multitudes. The crowd charmer is thus a new political type resulting from an inversion of the thaumaturgical model described by Marc Bloch in his classic work (1924) on the healing power attributed to the kings of France and England28.

  • 29 José P. Zúquete, “Populism and religion”, in Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina (...)
  • 30 The people, for example, are capable of discovering, behind the manifestation of oracles, a ventril (...)

13b) Enchanting the world. In the vast bibliography devoted to populism, studies that attempt to investigate its modern roots are practically lacking. Among the elements that seem to legitimise this approach is, precisely, enchantment. In a recent synthesis devoted to the relationship between populism and religion, José Pedro Zúquete highlighted the thaumaturgical character of populist movements: “religious populist movements serve to re-enchant the world and demonstrate the belief that human and divine agency are interrelated”29. “Re-enchantment” (in the double sense of resacralising politics and seducing the people) is the main task of populist leaders who, in order to do so, must necessarily show a privileged relationship with salvific rather than human figures (“avatars of the essence of the respective communities”). For example, the foundational reference to Joan of Arc in the case of French far-right populism is well known. According to the model identified by Machiavelli, one of the essential tasks of rulers is not only to charm, but also to avoid disenchantment. This is a key point: contrary to his libertine and neo-libertine interpreters, Machiavelli attributes to the people the ability to read the signs and understand that the king is naked30.

Academic enchantment

14In conclusion, I believe it is necessary to distinguish the populist exegesis of Machiavelli from a historical approach to populism that finds in Machiavelli some essential keys to its understanding. Although populism, as a political experience, only emerged in the twentieth century, its roots are to be found in the transformations that authority, that is, the capacity to subdue vast, consensual human aggregates, underwent at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Machiavelli is probably capable of seizing and bearing witness to this transformation.

  • 31 Jean Balsamo, “Le plus meschant d’entre eux ne voudroit pas estre Roy. La Boétie et Machiavel”, Mon (...)

15The roots of Machiavelli’s populist interpretation must be sought elsewhere, in a set of concomitant causes. Among them, I would identify the inexhaustible tendency of Machiavellian criticism to question Machiavelli’s political identity, without being constructive. The “populist” Machiavelli enriches a long gallery of illustrious forgeries whose archetype is represented by Innocent Gentillet’s “machiavellian” Machiavelli. In fact, it was the Protestant Gentillet (Contre Machiavel, 1576), in the context of civil wars of religion, who inaugurated a selective reading of Machiavelli’s texts in order to resolve irreconcilable internal contradictions and, as observed, “making them say what would confound his opponents”31. In other words, inaugurating a long tradition of partisan exegesis of which the populistic one is onlythe most recent (but probably not the last) variant. From a formal point of view, to say that Machiavelli is populist or that he is machiavellian is equivalent because both assertions rest on an ideological and unprovable postulate.

16If, therefore, the populist interpretation is based on principles and objectives alien to Machiavelli’s scientific knowledge, it is still interesting in a perspective of the history of Machiavellianism, if by Machiavellianism we mean the innumerable cases of manipulation and ventriloquism that tend to render inoperative any attempt at dialogue with his texts. Finally, the populist interpretation of Machiavelli is a typical product of the contemporary American university, not only because the “populist Machiavelli” is a brand that works, capable of mobilising networks, publishing houses, newspapers, and attracting wealthy students to elite campuses, but because presenting Machiavelli as a virtuous defender of oppressed minorities is perhaps one of the few ways to treat this complex and (truly) scandalous author in a context of cancel culture. The question remains as to why a part of Machiavellian criticism pays attention to these theses today and whether we are facing a phenomenon of transient or permanent academic enchantment. Wake up! Machiavelli will not save democracy.

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Notes

1 Alle bocche della piazza. Diario di un anonimo fiorentino (1382-1401), edited by Anthony Molho and Franek Sznura, Florence, Olschki, 1986, p. XXIX, (translation mine).

2 Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere, edited by Franco Gaeta, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1981, p. 308: “e’ si trova in questa nostra città, calamita di tutti i ciurmatori del mondo, un frate di S. Francesco”, (translation mine).

3 See Michele Lodone, I segni della fine. Storia di un predicatore del Rinascimento, Rome, Viella, 2021.

4 http://new.lessicografia.it/Controller/?entry_id=38956211abb64978a783a30149180897

5 David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 56.

6 Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere letterarie, edited by Luigi Blasucci, Milan, Adelphi, 1964, p. 336-338.

7 “Machiavelli salverà la democrazia. Colloquio con John P. McCormick di Gabriele Pedullà”, L’Espresso, 7 March 2021, p. 74-77 (translation mine).

8 Ibidem, p. 77.

9 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker, London, Penguin Books, 2003, p. 486.

10 “Machiavelli salverà la democrazia”, cit., p. 77.

11 Ibidem.

12 John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. I.

13 Ibidem, p. 3.

14 See John P. McCormick, Reading Machiavelli. Scandalous books, suspects engagements and the virtue of populist politics, Princeton & Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2018, p. 12, 23, 32.

15 On “tumults” as a key to an “operaist” reading of Machiavelli, see Pier Paolo Portinaro, Le mani su Machiavelli. Una critica dell’“italian theory”, Rome, Donzelli, 2018, p. 46.

16 As already observed by Ryan Balot and Stephen Trochimchuk, « The Many and the Few: On Machiavelli’s “Democratic Moment” », The Review of Politics, 74, 2012, p. 559-588, p. 573.

17 Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations. The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, p. 47.

18 See Christiane Klapisch Zuber, “La construction de l’identité sociale. Les magnats dans la Florence de la fin du Moyen Âge”, in Bernard Lepetit (ed.), Les Formes de l’expérience : une autre histoire sociale, Paris, Albin Michel, 1995, p. 151-164 ; Ennio Igor Mineo, « Preminenza e distinzione in Italia tra XIV e XV secolo. Alcuni problemi »,

in Jean-Philippe Genet e Ennio Igor Mineo (dir.), Marquer la prééminence sociale, Paris/Rome, Éditions de la Sorbonne/École française de Rome, 2014, https://books.openedition.org/psorbonne/3344

19 “Machiavelli salverà la democrazia”, cit., p. 76.

20 See John P. McCormick, Reading Machiavelli, cit., p. 111.

21 Ibidem, p. 145.

22 “Machiavelli salverà la democrazia”, cit., p. 76 (translation mine).

23 Barak Obama, “I’m the real populist, not Trump”, https://www.politico.com/video/2016/06/obama-im-the-real-populist-not-trump-059801; on this meaning of populism, see Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured. Opinion, truth and the people, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 146-147.

24 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, cit., p. 142.

25 See Sandro Landi, Lo sguardo di Machiavelli. Una nuova storia intellettuale, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2017, p. 251.

26 See Sandro Landi, “Gli incantatori. Un archetipo politico (La Boétie, Pomponazzi, Machiavelli)”, Storia del pensiero politico, 10, 2021, p. 377-400.

27 See Vittoria Perrone Compagni, “Maghi, demoni, profeti: alcuni temi del De incantationibus”, in Pietro Pomponazzi, Le incantazioni, Pisa, Edizioni della Normale, 2013, p. 9-89.

28 Marc Bloch, Les Rois thaumaturges. Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre, Paris, Armand Colin, 1961 (1924).

29 José P. Zúquete, “Populism and religion”, in Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Pierre Ostiguy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 445-466

30 The people, for example, are capable of discovering, behind the manifestation of oracles, a ventriloquism phenomenon: “but when the oracles began to say was pleasing to the powerful, and this deception was discovered by the people, they became incredulous, and inclined to subvert any good institution”, Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, cit., p. 143. For the libertine interpretation of the people in Machiavelli, see in particular Gabriel Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les coups d'État (1638), Paris, Éditions de Paris, 1988. The libertine clichés of religion as a 'necessary imposture' and the passivity of the manipulable people are echoed by Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes. Nine Reflections on Distance, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 45.

31 Jean Balsamo, “Le plus meschant d’entre eux ne voudroit pas estre Roy. La Boétie et Machiavel”, Montaigne Studies, 11, 1999, p. 5-27, quoted p. 16. Translation mine.

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Sandro Landi

Professeur, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Bordeaux (UAR 2004)
Sandro.Landi[at]u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr

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