Paul A Rahe

How did Montesquieu, born into a noble family in rural Bourdeaux, become a world-historical figure? In what particulars was he a man of his own times? That he lived when he did and where he did is obvious. How he managed to escape the limitations imposed upon him by time and place is not. The volume opens with a chapter introducing the reader to the development of Montesquieu’s thought throughout his literary and philosophical career. The essay will situate this account within the relevant biographical and historical context. It will consider the relationship between the major works and pursue insights into Montesquieu’s intellectual development derived from the study of minor works such as his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe and Pensées.

Machiavelli was not the only humanist who discussed principalities early in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Erasmus was at work on the subject at that time, as was Castiglione. It is instructive to compare their books with his. If, as J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner argued, Machiavelli is best understood in the context of the humanists' enthusiasm for classical republicanism, The Formation of a Christian Prince and The Book of the Courtier should fit neatly together with The Prince. In fact, however, the author of this last volume is the odd man out. Erasmus and Castiglione speak the same language - one largely derivative from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero - and, although they address monarchs and their courtiers and echo what these ancient writers had to say in praise of rule by the one best man, they join their predecessors in making it perfectly clear that, in practice, the mixed regime is nearly always a better option. In this, in particular, in according primacy to education and character, and in preferring elective to hereditary monarchy, they have more in common with their scholastic contemporary Savonarola than with the Florentine supposed to have given the devil his nickname "Old Nick."

If there is one thing that in our time everyone knows concerning Niccolò Machiavelli, it is that he favoured the establishment of a citizen militia. Aristotle had made the case for a citizen army in his Politics. In his De militia, Leonardo Bruni had advocated the establishment of an order of civic knights composed of the leading citizens of Florence (although not, as some suppose, a civic militia, including a large body of infantry, of the sort that had existed in the thirteenth century). Machiavelli followed these predecessors. So at least we are told by luminaries such as Hans Baron, Cecil H. Clough, J. G. A. Pocock—who made ‘arms-bearing citizenship’ the mainstay of his argument concerning the so-called civic humanist tradition—and Quentin Skinner in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought; and on their authority, this claim has been bandied about ever since.However, as I have noted in passing more than once, the claim does not survive close scrutiny. Machiavelli agreed with Aristotle and Bruni that mercenary soldiers are unreliable. He firmly favoured reliance on ‘populations armed’ (‘populationi armate’), but nowhere in any of his correspondence or works did he ever insist that those armed be drawn from the citizenry or that they be made citizens.In Florence, when he was secretary of the Second Chancery, Machiavelli championed the institution of a popular militia, as is well known. He proposed and succeeded in securing the passage of what came to be known as the ordinanza. He personally oversaw the militia's establishment. He hired a mercenary captain to see to its training, he selected the officers, he managed this little conscript army throughout its existence, and he was justly proud when his ordinanza secured the surrender of Pisa and brought that city back into the Florentine territorial state.Moreover, nine years after the Medici had been restored to power and his militia been partially disbanded, reconfigured, and reconstituted by the city's new masters, Machiavelli published his dialogue The Art of War, where he had his chief interlocutor, a distinguished mercenary captain named Fabrizio Colonna, defend the ordinanza and lay out his understanding of the manner in which a popular militia along such lines should be organized, trained, and deployed in battle. It would be fair to say that arming the population was for Machiavelli a persistent or even a central concern.