“Gli umori delle parti”: Humoral Dynamics and Democratic Potential in the Florentine Histories

• Date: 01 December 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720914410
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Author: Christopher Holman
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720914410

Political Theory

2020, Vol. 48(6) 723 –750

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720914410

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Article

“Gli umori delle parti”:

Humoral Dynamics and

Democratic Potential

in the Florentine Histories

Christopher Holman1

Abstract

In this essay I consider the potential of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

to contribute to the enrichment of contemporary democratic theory. In

opposition to both of the major groups of current interpreters of this text—

those who see it as representative of a conservative turn in Machiavelli’s

thought grounded in a newfound skepticism regarding popular political

competencies, and those who see it as merely a re-presentation of the

republican commitments of the Discourses on Livy—I argue that it reveals to

us a unique political potentiality, but one that is essential for the construction

of an internally consistent Machiavellian theory of democracy. Specifically,

through disclosing the historicity and contingency of the humors of the parts

of the city, the Histories suggests the possibility of concretely actualizing a

condition of social equality, thus overcoming the main democratic deficit

of the Discourses—the perpetuation of inequality, as represented in the

preservation of the existence of a class with a desire to oppress.

Keywords

Niccolò Machiavelli, democracy, Florentine Histories, humors, equality, freedom

1Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological

University, Singapore

Corresponding Author:

Christopher Holman, Associate Professor, Public Policy and Global Affairs Programme,

School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, HSS-06-04, 48 Nanyang Avenue,

Singapore 639818, Singapore.

Email: cholman@ntu.edu.sg

914410PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720914410Political TheoryHolman

research-article2020

724 Political Theory 48(6)

Introduction

After decades of relative neglect in relation to his other major political works

(at least within Anglophone scholarship), recent years have seen a growing

number of political theorists and historians of political thought turn to the

study of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories and its place within his overall

intellectual trajectory. One of the most significant normative issues around

which debate has crystallized is the democratic or nondemocratic character

of this text, particularly in relation to the increasingly recognized populist

commitments of the earlier republican histories presented in the Discourses

on Livy. The majority judgment thus far tends to posit the relationship

between the Discourses and the Histories primarily in terms of break or tran-

sition, Machiavelli’s normative political goals having been redirected to the

extent that he is seen as coming to adopt a far more pessimistic position

regarding the political competencies of the commonality of citizens. The later

Florentine works are thus seen as characterized by a newfound elitism. On

the other side of the debate are democratic readers, who see in these works

the perpetuation of Machiavelli’s popular egalitarian commitments. These

commitments are seen as expressed in a continuing adherence to an intrinsi-

cally disputatious class analysis, in which the people’s desire for freedom is

articulated negatively in relation to the great’s desire to dominate.

In this essay I position myself in opposition to both of these interpretative

tendencies, although from different theoretical standpoints. I suggest that the

advocates of the conservative thesis err in uncritically accepting as a general-

izable empirical fact Machiavelli’s immediate depiction of the people and/or

the plebe in the Florentine Histories. They forget, on the contrary, that every

Machiavellian depiction of civic behavior refers us not to a positive concep-

tion of human nature but only to the particular and contingent institutional

configuration that marks the precise social-historical context under consider-

ation. The democratic readers, on the other hand, err not as interpreters of

Machiavelli but rather as interpreters of democracy. Specifically, affirming the

natural bifurcation of the humors of the people and the grandi as well as their

mutual co-constitution, Machiavellian democracy is articulated in terms of the

perpetual struggle of the former against the oligarchic drives of the latter. The

popular realization of freedom is thus seen to depend upon an apparently onto-

logical division of the social field. In other words, Machiavellian democracy

affirms popular freedom but at the cost of eternalizing social inequality,

inequality in fact being the very condition of possibility of freedom.1 In a

sense, if the neo-Roman republican readers of Machiavelli want equality with-

out freedom – that is to say, the protection of a sphere of negative liberty in

which each is equally able to pursue their private goods independently of