Review: The Machiavellian Moment by J.G.A Pocock, Part Three
Third Installment of a Three-Part Review; Part of an Ongoing Book Review Series
The final third of Pocock’s The Machiavelli Moment is the most satisfying of the book. It reminds me in no small way of Melville’s Moby Dick. Whereas one reads Melville’s dense and substantial tome in order to fully appreciate the last seven pages, Pocock’s white whale similarly doesn’t have its day—as it were—until arguably the last two chapters, indeed maybe not even until the last few pages. That said, some discussion of some the chapters in the final third of the book which precede the last two chapters is appropriate.
Pocock begins the final third of the book with an analysis of the outbreak of civil war in England in the first half of the seventeenth century. An important historic detail is that Charles I issued a proclamation two months prior to the outbreak of the war in which he “took the step of declaring England a mixed government rather than a condescending monarchy… here… was a new formulation of a kind” (Pocock, 361). This was too little, too late, but the fact that Charles I, finding himself precariously losing his hold on authority, saw this as a possible way of ameliorating conditions is telling.
Soon enough, Pocock notes a difference between the origins and motivations of Florentine republicanism and the English variety. “Florentines opted for republicanism because it was in their nature, while the English took up the rhetoric of balance and republic only because their traditional constitution was threatened by disorder” (Pocock, 365). This seems rather a cynical view regarding the birth of English republicanism and whether or not Pocock means it this way is somewhat unclear. He nonetheless appears to see the grasping at republicanism by the English as a sort of saving construction rather than an organic evolution.
When James Harrington published Oceana in 1656, it was informed by the increasing discontent of some in the circles of military power with the way the Protectorate had developed since 1654. The English found themselves engaging in republicanism essentially by accident, in the absence of a monarchy which they had overthrown, even as Lord Protector Cromwell himself became more of a monarch in practice if not in name. Harrington’s Oceana, it is interesting to note, when describing locally run assemblies and advocating for rotation in the aristocracy, he advocates for a rotation of 1/3 of the assembly on a routine basis. This reminds one of the election of 1/3 of the U.S. Senate every two years (under a system where Senators serve six-year terms). It cannot be helped but to wonder if this was an influence on the practice of 1/3 of Senators facing election every two years under the American constitutional system.
Another important figure to mention in Pocock’s analysis is Andrew Fletcher, whose compelling analysis included the assertion that the loss of arms among the people in the Gothic age (roughly between the years 1000 – 1500, according to Fletcher) overlapped with the building of a standing army by the English King and the facilitation of modern commerce and international trade. As Pocock puts it, “Once the armies were paid for by taxes, taxes were collected by armies and the liberties of nearly all Europe were at an end” (Pocock, 430). The most powerful aspect of Fletcher’s analysis is his interpretation that freedom had been traded for culture, knowledge, and commerce, and that this was a sort of devil’s bargain. Freemen “must desire nothing more than freedom… once he could exchange this freedom for some other commodity, the act became no less corrupting if that other commodity were knowledge itself” (Pocock, 431).
Other important thinkers of this time and a bit later include Defoe, who saw liberty and balanced government as a modern idea, not an ancient one. He differed with Fletcher in the desire to return to a citizen militia and a pre-commercial age. Another person worth mentioning in this context is Davenant, who “was engrossed in the problem of war’s ability to generate corrupting forms of finance” (Pocock, 437). It is around this part of the book that Pocock appears to take some aim at Marxist scholarship, arguing that economic interpretations of history do not originate with Marx but with the kinds of figures mentioned above and their intellectual descendants:
The deep concern felt by eighteenth-century philosophers with the relations between reason and the passions would seem to have something to do with the conflict between the landed and monied interests… Rather than performing an exercise in Marxist analysis, it would seem, we have been studying the historical beginnings of the sort of thought found in Marx. The Augustan journalists and critics were the first intellectuals on record to express an entirely secular awareness of social and economic changes going on in their society, and to say specifically that these changes affected both their values and their modes of perceiving social reality (Pocock, 461).
Not long after this powerful assertion, Pocock moves on to the American founders and the antecedents which contributed to an explosion of republican sentiment in British North America. He echoes the thesis of Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic when he states that the American founders “occupied a ‘Machiavelli moment’—a crisis in the relations between personality and society, virtue and corruption—but at the same time stood at a moment in history when that problem was being either left behind or admitted insoluble; it depended on the point of view” (Pocock, 462). He tracks the influence of republicanism on the colonists by Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters. Some of the arguments expressed in Cato’s Letters are far from the liberal economics of Locke, which became associated with the United States of the early nineteenth century. Instead, Cato reasons for a level of equality of land ownership and warns of the threat of industrial and commercial monopolies. Unlike defenders of liberal capitalism today who are sometimes wary of being overly critical of corporate dominance, these republican writers understood that “exclusive trading companies… reduce the landowner to debt, bring about the destruction of trade and corrupt government by introducing inequality” (Pocock, 469). The republican writers of the eighteenth-century, and their supporters, understood that a market economy is like that of salt applied to a meal. Understanding that a difference of degrees can make all the difference in the world is an important distinction of difference between republican economic thought and the liberal strain that followed it. The followers of a more republican form of capitalism recognized that governmental favoritism and the growth of monopolies were an unfavorable, even dangerous form of a market economy which should be avoided. Add to this a distaste for extravagance and a suspicion of monetary self-interest and one can even more readily see the difference between eighteenth century republican thought and nineteenth century liberalism.
Interesting, then, that Pocock points to David Hume as an influence on the liberal thought that took over in the United States in the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. He does so by noting that Hume accepted patronage and influence in government in the same way he had accepted commerce: “as a liberating force which enlarged men’s minds through the nourishment of their appetites” (Pocock, 495). Indeed, Hume saw commerce and passion “as dynamic forces contributing both to the construction of political society and to an active and kinetic history” (Pocock, 497). These are familiar to arguments in favor of the liberal economy of the nineteenth century and beyond, as well as the arguments for an energetic government by Hamilton and Madison in The Federalist. It is especially similar to Madison’s assertion in “Federalist No. 10” that the dynamism of faction versus faction will be beneficial to a prosperous and free society. Pocock, in paraphrasing Madison, asserts that there is “no interest which cannot be represented and given its place in the distribution of power” (Pocock, 523).
During this part of early U.S. history, when Pocock references Wood’s thesis of American republicanism being replaced with liberalism in the 1780s and 1790s, he compares Alexander Hamilton with Machiavelli, which does not seem to be an inappropriate analogy to make. The crucial difference is Hamilton’s support of a standing army. He notes that Hamilton was no free trader and that he sought power and expansion. Undertaking these tasks necessitated “a powerful military, because there would be war, and there must be strong government” (Pocock, 531). Hamilton followed the line of thinking centuries old at this point that international trade required a powerful military. He did not see trade as a means of establishing peace and forwarding a system of mutual benefit. Instead, trade was an aspect of a military state which sought expansion in territory, influence, and power.
Pocock, then, sees Hamilton’s quest for empire as a challenge to Madison’s federalism. He appears to draw an important distinction between Hamilton’s approach of a top-down system of government, where influence is exercised by force, especially abroad, and Madison’s conception of competing interests finding compromise by necessity. I think there is something to this thesis, but I am not entirely convinced that these approaches are as oppositional or contradictory as Pocock asserts, especially since these conceptions vary in their agenda: Hamilton’s is largely international while Madison’s primarily focuses on governance domestically.
It is worth mentioning that although Pocock clearly agrees with Wood’s thesis regarding American republicanism mutating into modern liberalism, he doesn’t spend much time explaining how or why this happened. Perhaps he thought Wood’s thesis spoke for itself and needn’t be retread. It is nevertheless a little strange considering how much time is spent tracing republican thought in the book, just to let its disappearance be taken for granted. At the end of the book, Pocock states that the Andrew Jackson “of legend has a good claim to be considered the last of the Machiavellian Romans and the warlike, expanding, agrarian democracy he symbolized” (Pocock, 535). If true, where does republicanism, as has been defined and explored throughout The Machiavelli Moment, fit into Jacksonian democracy? Pocock doesn’t say, and perhaps that’s because he is not speaking to the actual Andrew Jackson of history, but the legend. This is, of course, a crucial distinction, but it doesn’t answer the historical question. The fact that the legend of Jackson fits as a last example of Pocock’s thesis does not make the question of the real Jackson unimportant. What differences between the truth of Jackson and the legend say about the American people in the nineteenth century? What does it say that the republicanism of the Jackson legend doesn’t fit with the historical reality of the man and the age he defines? If Pocock is not interested in addressing these questions, it becomes confusing as to why the Jackson era, even the one of legend, is mentioned at all.
“We have found areas of eighteenth-century thought in which the partial withdrawal from citizenship to pursue commerce appeared as a rebellion against virtue and its repressive demands,” Pocock states, echoing the thoughts of Fletcher regarding an earlier age in Europe. The republic “asked too much of the individual” (Pocock, 551-552). Pocock is right about this and here draws the connection between the corruption of republican thought in Europe (according to Fletcher) and its decline in the early American republic. This is the white whale. This is what, in my estimation, The Machiavellian Moment ultimately leads up to: marking the end of republicanism in the American context and associating it with its ancient and European forebears.
Pocock situates Gordon Wood’s thesis regarding the loss of American republicanism in the late eighteenth century into the broader context of the corruption of republican virtue throughout history. Doing so, Pocock demonstrates that republicanism has a history, time and again, of rediscovery, practice, and celebration, only to be unable to maintain its precarious position and is corrupted and replaced with something more expedient, convenient, or self-serving.
[James M. Masnov is a writer, historian, and lecturer. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Rights Reign Supreme: An Intellectual History of Judicial Review and the Supreme Court. His first book, History Killers and Other Essays by an Intellectual Historian, is available here.]