Liberty and Punish: Machiavelli on Anti-oligarchic Penal Practices

• In Event: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on Equality, Liberty, and Popular Power

Abstract

The transformation of practices of punishment was of pivotal importance in the historical shift in Europe from the communal states of the late medieval era to the territorial states of the early modern period. It is therefore no surprise that punishment is a prominent theme in Machiavelli’s work, in his theory of the state, in his theories of popular government, and in his reconstruction of Florentine history. Whereas some commentators attribute to Machiavelli a quasi-utilitarian theory of punishment, I contend that he understands punishment as a mechanism to advance and defend political liberty. This article examines practices of punishment from the perspective of Florentine constitutional history. By tracing the transformations of punishment in Florence from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, as described in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, I show that penal practices correlate with regime transformations of the Florentine republic, from aristocratic to popular and back to oligarchic regimes. Against decontextualized and fragmentary readings of The Prince and the Discourses that might suggest that Machiavelli put forward a theory of punishment purely oriented toward political stability, I argue that Machiavelli understood penal practices as central to the class conflicts of that period as well as of his own historical moment. Most significantly, he associated the transformation of punishment—for example the increasingly dramatic penalties against magnates and the establishment of new penal institutions, such as the Florentine prison at the turn of the thirteenth century—with the enfranchisement of the Florentine popolo and the flourishing of political liberty.

Author

• Yves Winter, McGill University