Machiavelli's Republicanisms: Society, Discord and the Politics of Equilibrium in the 'Florentine Histories'

The purpose of this project is to show that Niccolo Machiavelli's Florentine Histories (1520-24), represents a departure from earlier Machiavellian conceptions of liberty, power and authority toward an attraction to Venice, collective structures of power and constitutional mechanisms to create stability. In this later writing, which Anglo-American scholarship has largely overlooked, we see a republicanism built on different conceptual and theoretical foundations than the Roman model introduced in Machiavelli's most famous republican treatise, the Discourses on Livy (1513-17). This transformation indicates Machiavelli's rejection of the assumptions of classical republicanism and marks a crucial transition in his own analysis of power and authority. Contrary to received wisdom, I demonstrate that in the Histories and other key post-1520 works, we can observe Machiavelli's rapprochement to the Venetian style of "institutional virtu" and his consequent eloignement from the Roman model of civil discord and popular "guardianship of liberty." In a word, while the Florentine Histories confirms that Machiavelli was a devoted republican thinker, it also shows that his preference for a collective form of self-government underwent some integral alterations from the earlier political works -- with the late Machiavelli coming increasingly closer to the Venetian form of republicanism advocated by his intellectual contemporaries.