A Great & Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli’s Florentine Political Thought, by Mark Jurdjevic

Abstract

A Great & Wretched City: Promise and Failure in Machiavelli's Florentine Political Thought, by Mark Jurdjevic. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014, 295 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). Mark Jurdjevic focuses on two texts written by Machiavelli in the 1520s--the Discourse on Florentine affairs after the death of the younger Lorenzo [de ' Medici] and the Florentine Histories--contrasting their political thought with his two most famous political works, The Prince and the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, both written between 1513 and 1519. Jurdjevic's thesis is that the two later works represent a new direction: rejecting the individualistic emphasis of The Prince and the ancient Roman model advocated in the Discourses, Machiavelli now proposed a reform scheme based on radical institutional change. Much of Jurdjevic's argument is correct. Neither The Prince nor the Discourses is a text exclusively or even extensively focused on the particular problems of Machiavelli's native Florence: the former is directed to a potential Medici new prince in the Papal States, while the latter offers ancient Rome as a standard by which to judge modern politics (therefore including several discussions of Florence, as one among many modern states compared with the Roman paradigm). The Histories provide numerous specific examples of the disastrous institutional structures lambasted on a general level in the Discourse. Following the lead of Francesco Bausi and Humfrey Butters, Jurdjevic documents a sympathy for the traditional Florentine aristocracy in the two later works, absent from the populism dominant in The Prince and the Discourses. The most original contribution of Jurdjevic's book is a revealing demonstration that, in the Histories, Machiavelli is just as critical of the Florentine populace as he is of the Florentine elite (who replaced the ancient nobility), revising an interpretation by John Najemy, who had emphasized Machiavelli's populism in contrast to the aristocratic penchant of earlier Florentine political thinkers such as Leonardo Bruni. Nevertheless, Jurdjevic's analysis is sometimes misleading. Machiavelli did not reject reform initiatives by individuals in the two later works: in both, the reform scheme had to be implemented by Florence's Medici rulers (Pope Leo X explicitly in the Discourse, Pope Clement VII implicitly in the Histories [III. 1]). There is no evidence that Machiavelli was a friend or ally of the pro-Savonarolan leader Francesco Valori (p. 44), opposition to whose party helped Machiavelli gain appointment to the Florentine chancery in 1498. Jurdjevic repeats a blunder (p. 69) that vitiated two of his earlier publications: all Machiavelli scholars agree, on orthographical and palaeographical grounds, that the text now known as The Natures of Florentine Men was not written as a draft for unfinished chapters of the Histories but rather dates to 1506-1508. …