PhilosophersNicolas Machiavel

Nicolas Machiavel

Power is judged by its effects, not good intentions.

Political realism · Humanism1469 – 1527 ItalyPolitical realistRepublicanDiplomat and civil servantHistorian
Discourses on Livy, I, 4 and I, 37

Conflict between the people and the great made Rome free

What it claims

The conflicts between the people and the Senate, channelled by law, made Rome free: they produced the laws of liberty, and without them the ambition of the great would have enslaved it.

Why

The quarrels between people and elites, fought through legal channels, produced laws that protect freedom.

Valid

Almost every author saw the quarrels between the people of Rome and the Senate as a weakness. Machiavelli argues the opposite: channelled through legal ways, these conflicts produced the laws that protected liberty. The liberty he means is that of a people that is not dominated, more than the rights of the individual.

P1In every republic there are two opposed humours: the people want not to be oppressed, the great want to command and oppress.
P2The ambition of the great is so strong that, unless the people constantly fight it, it soon brings the city to servitude.
P3In Rome, the people and the Senate clashed constantly, from the fall of the kings to the Gracchi.
P4Rome had set ways for these conflicts (assemblies, tribunes, refusing to enlist): the people could voice their ambition without taking up arms. And the desire of a free people not to be oppressed is rarely dangerous to liberty.
P5Conflicts waged through these ways produce neither exiles nor violence against the common good, but laws favourable to liberty. In three centuries they exiled only eight or ten citizens and shed very little blood.
Therefore the conflicts between the people and the Senate, channelled by law, made Rome free: they produced the laws of liberty, and without them the ambition of the great would have enslaved it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
The argument is valid and every premise is essential, with no hidden premise: Machiavelli writes every step himself. The weak point is P4: everything rests on the conflict staying within legal channels. When it leaves them, as with the agrarian law in the time of the Gracchi, it ends in civil war. Machiavelli admits this (Discourses, I, 37), and that is where Hobbes's objection strikes.
Analogy. In a school, the student representatives often argue with the administration. It is noisy, but that is how fairer rules are born: the administration cannot decide everything alone. As long as the dispute goes through the school council and not through a fight, it protects everyone.

Objections

2

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Objection anticipated by Machiavelli attacks premise 5

But in Rome the quarrel over the agrarian law degenerated: Marius, Sulla, civil war, then Caesar, Rome's first tyrant. These conflicts ended by destroying the republic.

Machiavel replies
Machiavel
I do not change my view for all that. The ambition of the great is so strong that, unless it is fought in every way, it soon ruins the city. The agrarian law took three hundred years to make Rome a slave; without the people's resistance, Rome would have fallen into servitude much sooner.
Hobbes 1651 · attacks premise 4

To divide power is to dissolve it: powers divided mutually destroy each other. Those who admire the Greek and Roman republics forget their frequent seditions and civil wars, born of the imperfection of their regime. The English civil war proves it.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1651, after the author's death (1527).
The debate goes on (our summary) The disagreement is precise. Machiavelli grants that conflict turns bad when it leaves legal channels and becomes a matter of armed parties (Discourses, I, 37). Hobbes thinks it always leaves them sooner or later, and that a single, undivided sovereign is the only remedy.