I do not want to miss discoursing on these tumults that occurred in Rome from the death of the Tarquins to the creation of the Tribunes; and afterwards I will discourse on some things contrary to the opinions of many who say that Rome was a tumultuous Republic and full of so much confusion, that if good fortune and military virtu had not supplied her defects, she would have been inferior to every other Republic.
I cannot deny that fortune and the military were the causes of the Roman Empire; but it indeed seems to me that this would not happen except when military discipline is good, it happens that where order is good, (and) only rarely there may not be good fortune accompanying. But let us come to the other particulars of that City. I say that those who condemn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs, appear to me to blame those things that were the chief causes for keeping Rome free, and that they paid more attention to the noises and shouts that arose in those tumults than to the good effects they brought forth, and that they did not consider that in every Republic there are two different viewpoints, that of the People and that of the Nobles; and that all the laws that are made in favor of liberty result from their disunion, as may easily be seen to have happened in Rome, for from Tarquin to the Gracchi which was more than three hundred years, the tumults of Rome rarely brought forth exiles, and more rarely blood. Nor is it possible therefore to judge these tumults harmful, nor divisive to a Republic, which in so great a time sent into exile no more than eight or ten of its citizens because of its differences, and put to death only a few, and condemned in money (fined) not very many: nor can a Republic in any way with reason be called disordered where there are so many examples of virtu, for good examples result from good education, good education from good laws, and good laws from those tumults which many inconsiderately condemn; for he who examines well the result of these, will not find that they have brought forth any exile or violence prejudicial to the common good, but laws and institutions in benefit of public liberty. And if anyone should say the means were extraordinary and almost savage, he will see the People together shouting against the Senate, The Senate against the People, running tumultuously throughout the streets, locking their stores, all the Plebs departing from Rome, all of which (things) alarm only those who read of them; I say, that every City ought to have their own means with which its People can give vent to their ambitions, and especially those Cities which in important matters, want to avail themselves of the People; among which the City of Rome had this method, that when those people wanted to obtain a law, either they did some of the things mentioned before or they would not enroll their names to go to war, so that to placate them it was necessary (for the Senate) in some part to satisfy them: and the desires of a free people rarely are pernicious to liberty, because they arise either from being oppressed or from the suspicion of going to be oppressed. And it these opinions should be false, there is the remedy of haranguing (public assembly), where some upright man springs up who through oratory shows them that they deceive themselves; and the people (as Tullius Cicero says) although they are ignorant, are capable of (appreciating) the truth, and easily give in when the truth is given to them by a trustworthy man.
Alan Ryan calls attention to the significance of the quoted passage in his On Politics (386). Machiavelli defends the idea that a certain amount of uproar is conducive to liberty. That is, unlike the conservative critic who claims that undesirable disorder is a consequence of (too much) liberty, Machiavelli notes that there can be a certain amount of (what we may call) creative turbulence* conducive to freedom (and power). Machiavelli defends such turbulence on consequentialist grounds.
The underlying claim seems to be that class conflict is endemic (in republics). This is dangerous, of course, because it could lead to revolutions or oppressive. But there are ways in which class conflict can be productive in that it generates better laws and institutions; these in turn are the source of good soldiers, and so increased power. In the right circumstances this can generate a virtuous cycle of ongoing political improvement, and (with luck) increased power, etc. He suggests a similar analysis in The Prince: “there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws” (chapter 12; p. 48 in the Mansfield translation).
What Machiavelli notes is that the lack of escalation of these class conflicts is not a pure accident. He makes two explicit claims: first, that the powerful show restraint in punishing ringleaders of dissent; second, that there were established norms/traditions of expressing dissent that could simultaneously be very rowdy, yet be understood as part of the normal/traditional way of life. That is, the Romans developed a kind of civic or patriotic moderation that need not look moderate at all (at first sight).
Of course, that conflict can be productive need not have been the original intent of any angry Roman. That it would have been a means to develop better laws may, in fact, have struck them as implausible or unlikely. But while the consequence was originally unintended, once the norms and traditions that are constitutive of patriotic moderation became widely recognized, it is possible that roman agents could discern the good-making features of creative turbulence. These good-making features are a mixture of personal and class interest and the public's interest. So, this would generate further entrenchment of creative turbulence, which Machiavelli notes also made the state more powerful relative to its enemies/competitors.
Machiavelli presents here the structure of what I have called Smithian Social Explanations:*
–(i) It takes a long period of time (“ from Tarquin to the Gracchi which was more than three hundred years,”)
–(ii) It’s causal (e.g, "chief cause")
–(iii) Good social outcomes are not foreseen (and thus not intended)
–(iv) Small gains along the way reinforce the process along the way and make it irreversible
The nice feature of this form of social explanation is that one can act on it: to reinforce the pattern or to undermine it.
*The nod to Schumpeter's creative destruction is deliberate.
**I distinguish this sharply from Smith's accounts of invisible hands. I am not the first to note that Machiavelli anticipates Scottish thinkers's fondness for unintended consequence explanations, but I am unfamiliar with any account that points to this pattern of explanation. Obviously I am not claiming Machiavelli invented this form of explanation (Livy and Polybius are, in turn, his inspirations.)
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