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Influence or Coincidence—a Question for Students of Machiavelli?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Caroline Robbins
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Extract

The historian, most especially the historian of ideas, since he cannot undo the processes of time, is always in difficulties over problems of causation, transmission, and migration. Hume determined to leave speculation aside and observe only sequence. We cannot decide what the intellectual climate of Stuart England would have been like without the Advancement of Learning, or the Authorized Version, or of Western Europe without The Discourse on Method. Yet certain coincidences tempt investigation. Machiavelli, for two or three centuries a familiar name of both authority and reproach, was very widely read, if even more widely misrepresented and oversimplified. Scholarship has been occupied with his legend. Yet little attention has been focused on the identity of many of the ideas of the Discorsi with the commonplaces of political writers between the Renaissance and the French Revolution in England and France.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , Winter 1961 , pp. 243 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1961

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References

1 Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince and the Discourses, with an introduction by Max Lerner (Modern Library, New York, 1940), p. 216 Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 397.

3 Ibid., pp. 118-121.

4 Ibid., pp. 83, 371.

5 Ibid., pp. 44, 175-176.

6 Ibid., pp. 115-116.

7 Ibid., pp. 149-153, 284-285.

8 Ibid., pp. 288.

9 Ibid., pp. 9, 10.

10 Hume, David, Essays, edited by Green, T. H. (2 vols., London, 1875 Google Scholar), II, 68. Vico, Giam-battista, The New Science, tr. Bergin, T. G. & Fisch, M. H. (Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca, 1948 Google Scholar), pp. 4, 92. C. K. de S. Montesquieu, Grandeur and Decadence, tr. J. Baker (New York, 1882), p. 23. Ferguson, Adam, Institutes of Moral Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1769), p. 313 Google Scholar.

11 Montesquieu, op. cit., p. 173. Sidney, Algernon, Works (London, 1772), p. 406 Google Scholar. Moyle, Walter, Works (London, 1726, 2 vols.)Google Scholar, 1, 1-148, ‘An Essay on the Roman Government’, the whole of which is interesting in the present context. Though Moyle (1672- 1721) as a disciple of Henry Neville (1620-94) might be thought an example of direct influence by Machiavelli, a study of the notes of his essays reveals that he got most of his excellent if biased history directly from the classical authorities. Andrew Marvell, ‘The Rehearsal Transpros'd’, Works, (edited Alex. B. Grosart, 4 vols., 1875), III, 381. Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Philadelphia, 1819), p. 506 Google Scholar.

12 Burke, Edmund, An Appealin. Works (London, 1887), III, 1–115 Google Scholar. Thomas Burton's Diary, ed. J. T. Rutt in 4 vols. (London, 1828), III, 557 (a long speech by Col. Gibbons urging the men of the Cromwellian Parliament not to build with green timber). Machiavelli, pp. 182-183.

13 See article by present writer, ‘Discordant Parties’, PSQ, LXXXIII, No. 4, 505-529, where a number of examples of a defense and acceptance of party may be found. For another see H. Wansey, Journal of an Excursion, (Salisbury, 1796), p. 91.

14 Marvell, op. cit., p. 89; Sidney, op. cit., II, XXII; Gibbon, Edward, The Decline and Fall, ed. Bury, J. B. (7 vols., 6th ed., London, 1925)Google Scholar, II, chapters 15 and 16 (1-70, 71-139). For Gibbon's optimism see rv, 166-169.

15 Examples of the standing army versus militia controversy are John Trenchard (1662- 1723), A History of Standing armies, (1698), and An Argument showing that a standing army is inconsistent with a Free Government, (1697); Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), A Discourse concerning Militias and Standing Armies, (1697); Edward Wortley Montagu (1713-76), Reflection on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics, (1759). All these were reprinted and reached a wide public on both sides of the Atlantic. The same moral is given by Charles Forman, the Translator to Boulainvilliers Ancient Parliament of France, particularly to XII.

16 Marvel, Works, III and IV, ‘The Rehearsal Transpros'd’, ‘A Short Historical Essay’, all anticlerical. Cf. John Hales, ‘Of Schism’, Tracts, 1677, and Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, (tr. Boston, 1836), pp. 41, 281-282, and throughout. Moyle as above, p. 87, on ‘Diviners’ and Romans. Gibbon as above, n. 14.

17 Moyle cites liberal naturalization policy at Rome in the essay noted above, note II. Roger Coke, A Detection of Church and State, (3rd ed., 1697), pp. 556, 607-608; McCulloch, J. R., Early English Tracts (reissue Cambridge, 1952)Google Scholar, in works by William Petyt (1626-1702) and others, pp. 219-224, 251-274, 358.

18 Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus, (1681, 2nd ed.), pp. 50-51.