The power of “wealth, nobility and men

Inequality and corruption in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

Bibliographic Data

ID6259840
AuthorsAmanda Maher (University of Chicago, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume19
Issue4
Pages512-531
Publication date2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEuropean Journal of Political Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1474-8851 • E-ISSN: 1741-2730
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1474885117730673
OpenAlexW2754893727
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited31

This article draws a connection between socio-economic inequality and political corruption based on a reading of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. Prevailing interpretations of the Histories attribute the moral corruption and civil conflict Machiavelli condemns as the source of Florence’s republican failure to the unique historical conditions of early-modern Florence. In this article, I trace Florentine corruption and factionalism to the perennial problem of inequality. Through his narration of the two centuries of Florentine history leading up to Cosimo de Medici’s ascent to first citizen, I contend, Machiavelli demonstrates the deleterious effect of inequality on the social relations, organizational forms, and modes of collective action in Florence. At the same time, his depiction of Florence’s transformation from a quasi-feudal commune dominated by a nobility with private armies to a modern commercial city ruled through patronage illustrates the contingent modality of inequality and the particularly subversive way it can manifest in the more civil republics of the modern era

Art · Democracy · Economic history · Elite · Feudalism · Inequality · Language change · Literature · Narrative · Nobility · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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