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social research Vol. 81 : No. 1 : Spring 2014 217

Miguel Vatter

Republics Are a Speciesof State: Machiavelli and

the Genealogy of the

Modern State

INTRODUCTION: GENEALOGIES OF THE STATE AND THE

CRISIS OF THE MODERN STATE

Today it has become a commonplace to assert that the “sovereignty” of

the modern state is eroding and, indeed, may be on its way to extinction.In the age of global capitalism, the state finds it ever more difficult to

dig itself out of fiscal and financial crises. At the same time, neoliberal

models of governance and new forms of global constitutionalism are

clamoring for the state to scale down or give up its Leviathan-like power

and authority. Much current political theorizing gives the impression

that today we face a simple choice with regard to the state: either we

adopt the brave new world of neoliberal and cosmopolitan anti-statism(“governance”), or we rally behind the Hobbesian idea of the state

(“sovereignty”). This choice is an unfortunate one, but it need not be a

forced choice.

The precariousness of the once all-mighty state, signaled by the

emergence of new constitutional vocabulary such as “failed state” or

“regime change,” is the context within which one should place new

“genealogies” of the modern state, most famously in the late work of

Michel Foucault and Quentin Skinner (Foucault 2009, 2010; Skinner

2009). Hegel remarked that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Is it only


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218 social research

because we sense that the state as we have known it in modern Euro-

pean public law may be dying out that we are once again interested

in its meaning? Genealogies show that what we take to be a unitary

political concept (like “modern state” or “liberal democracy”) and per-

haps a destiny, in fact is nothing more than a contingent assemblage

of traits and vocabularies. The point of such genealogies is to reveal

the roads not taken, the alternatives that lost out for contingent rea-

sons, not because the dominant conceptions were more legitimate or

necessary than the others.

In this article I wish to discuss Machiavelli’s idea of stato in The

Prince in this genealogical light. I shall argue that in this treatise on

principalities Machiavelli sets the groundwork for a republican con-

ception of the state that emerged only much later, in the Atlantic rev-

olutions of North and South America, France and Haiti. The recent

“Arab Spring” revolts show how difficult it is to move from a successful

popular uprising against an oligarchical regime to the establishment

of a republican state. Maybe The Prince still withholds useful pointers

on how to chart a path through the Scylla of neoliberal antistatism

and the Charybdis of absolute sovereignty.

For many theorists and historians of political ideas, the expres-

sion “republican state” poses a conceptual conundrum insofar as “re-

public” and “republicanism” refer us to the classical world of Athens

and Rome, where politics was the activity of a free demos or populus

and lacked the “impersonal” and “representative” conception of the

modern state. On the other hand, the term “state” in the expression“republican state” is conceived within the long tradition of modern

European public law as a juridical person that stands over and apart

from the people, and is “neutral” or “tolerant” vis-à-vis the interested

pursuits of its subjects, protecting their right to exercise life choices as

long as they respect those of others.

That the terms “republic” and “state” should be hard to think

together, and in some respects appear to exclude each other, is en-

tirely due to the success of Hobbes’ conception of the state (see Skin-

ner 2009 and Duso 2003, and for a discussion of these interpretations,


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Republics Are a Species of State 219

see Vatter 2010). It was Hobbes who denied that a people could be

free independently of the artificial person of the sovereign. Hobbes

claimed that the only existence a people could have was the one given

to it in the form of the juridical person of the state. On this Hobbesian

view, apart and against this artificial person of the state, there could

be no free people but only individuals pursuing their own particular

interests within a civil society thanks to the security provided by the

state. Obviously, this conception of the state could not have been the

one that inspired, first, the Atlantic republican revolutions, and then,

by way of the Russian Revolution, all subsequent establishment of re-

publics in the postcolonial period (see, in this respect, the still valid

thesis of Pocock 1975). Unlike the Hobbesian idea of the state, modern

republican theory holds open the possibility that a preexisting people

gives itself the form of a state in order to achieve a revolutionary goal:

that no part of society, no estate, should be in a position to rule over

others. The “republican state” represents the conditions of no-rule or

nondomination of a free people. My claim is that Machiavelli’s The

Prince was the first text in which this conjunction of ancient republicand modern state was shown to be possible.

MODERN REVOLUTIONS AND THE COINCIDENCE OF

REPUBLIC AND TYRANNY

During most of the last century, it was assumed as a basic axiom that The

Prince had set the basis for, if not invented, the modern concept of the state,

as it would later be canonically defined by Max Weber for political science:the modern state is an institutional association of rule

( Herrschaftsverband) which has successfully established the

monopoly of physical violence as a means of rule within

a territory, for which purpose it unites in the hands of its

leaders the material means of operation, having expropri-

ated all those functionaries of “estates” who previously had

command over these things in their own right, and has put

itself, in the person of its highest embodiment, in their

place (Weber 2000, 316).


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Machiavelli’s principe seemed to be the prototype of Weber’s political

entrepreneur, who expropriated and centralized “in the person of its

highest embodiment” the means and allegiances of the “estates” intothe new form of state. There’s nothing suprising in this since Weber

formulated his definition no doubt with Machiavelli’s treatise in mind,

and the secondary literature has shown that many of the features that

Weber attributes to the modern state are undoubtedly to be found in

the way the term stato is used in The Prince.1 However, Weber’s definition

does not explain the plurivocity of the term “state” found therein: how

does the “modern state” relate to “estates” as well as to “the person of its

highest embodiment”? And, furthermore, what if any relation does this

state, as an “association of rule” or domination ( Herrschaft), have to the

republican ideal of freedom as nondomination?

Weber understood the construction of the modern state as part

of a process that changed the meaning and reality of politics in mo-

dernity. This process consisted in the identification of an entire people

with a state. Throughout the medieval period, the “state” effectively

referred only to that part or estate of the city or republic that ruled

over the others. At some point during the late Renaissance, however,

the term “state” began to acquire an entirely new meaning, referring

to a new reality, namely, that a people as a whole undertook to govern

itself in order that no one part (or “estate”) of society could be said

to rule over any other parts. Thus, in some general way, the modern

state emerges within a revolutionary process as an agent for establish-

ing conditions of “no-rule,” to employ Hannah Arendt’s expression, orconditions of “nondomination,” to employ Philip Pettit’s more recent

vocabulary (Arendt 1990; Pettit 2012). It is not coincidental that Weber

gives his canonical definition of the state precisely in that section of

the lecture “Politics as a Vocation” in which he is trying to delineate

a major new shift in the meaning of politics that he saw happening in

the Russian Revolution, the intention of which was to “expropriate”

the modern state or prince, as original expropriator of the estates, and

thus “return” power back to the people (here, specifically, in the form

of the soviets).


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Indeed, all great modern revolutions entail a “change of state,”

what Machiavelli refers to as mutazione di stato, and the ancients called

metabole politeion. The important question, though, concerns which

meaning(s) of “state” is being toppled and which meaning(s) (re-)instated

in such revolutionary changes. The point is best illustrated by consider-

ing the “change of state” that took place with the French Revolution. In

his pamphlet entitled What is the Third Estate? Sieyès argued that a part of

society which had previously been called the “third estate” (tiers état) in

reality stood for the whole “nation” (2003). As a consequence, Sieyès af-

firmed that this tiers état deserved a “state” ( État) of its own, represented

by the assembly of all French people. This new state, because it was to

be the property of the entire French people, should be called, in all pro-

priety and perhaps for the first time, a true republic. In proposing this

change of state that moves the tiers état into the position of État and thus

expropriates the État from the king (one recalls Louis XIV’s absolutist

formula, “ L’État c’est moi”), the first and second états (the nobility and the

clergy) were excluded from forming a state: henceforth, neither monar-

chy nor aristocracy would be considered legitimate forms of state. The

only legitimate state is the one formed by the tiers état. However, such a

state represents “all” Frenchmen and not just “les miserables.” Thus, the

only legitimate state was a republican state.

If one translates this complex example of a modern “change

of state” or metabole politeion back into the vocabulary of classical re-

publicanism, then one would not err if one concluded that Sieyès was

advocating the coincidence of tyranny with republic: a coincidenceof opposites that would have been, for classical republicans, hardly

fathomable. Indeed, what the tiers état does is “tyrannical” because it

excludes some parts or estates of society (états) from ever forming a

state ( État). However, from the perspective of the French revolutionar-

ies, this “exclusion” was merely the consequence of a far more basic

“inclusion”: noblemen and clergy, just like any other citizens, would

simply become part of the French nation, equally represented by the

assembly of the people, and with the same right to one vote for each

person as any other citoyen.2


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There is a further, paradoxical twist to the story. As is well

known, the French revolutionaries dressed themselves in Roman garb,

and this despite having overturned entirely the main idea behind the

ancient doctrine of forms of government. Was this moment of histori-

cal repetition a farce, an illusion? I think not. Speaking in the idiom of

classical republicanism, one can say that this revolutionary moment

of tyranny is instrumental in founding a politeia or res publica, much in

the same senses of the term found in Aristotle and in Cicero. In the

Politics, after all, Aristotle notoriously employs the term politeia in two

different ways: first, in a generic sense to mean “constitution” or “re-

gime,” and second, in a specific sense, where politeia names that spe-

cific form of government corresponding to the “virtuous” rule of the

people or many (which, in the case of the French Revolution, would

correspond to the state established by the tiers état). Similarly, what

the French Revolution called “republic” could also claim to refer to

Cicero’s understanding of res publica, since by giving back the state to

the “third estate,” what were the French revolutionaries doing if not

realizing Scipio’s definition, in On the Commonwealth, that res publica. . . populi res est (that is, the government of public affairs is the business

of the people)?

My thesis is that the kind of conjunction of ancient republi-

canism with modern state that one finds in Sieyès, but also in Jeffer-

son, Adams, and Madison, became thinkable thanks to Machiavelli’s

The Prince, more specifically in the idea expressed in the first sentence

of the treatise: “All states, all dominions that have had and do havecommand over men, have been and are either republics or principali-

ties” (2005, chap. 1). By claiming that a republic is a species of state,

and then by proceeding to argue, over the 26 chapters of the book,

that such a state can be achieved only by “expropriating” the power

of “estates” through the exclusionary qua inclusionary logic I identi-

fied above, Machiavelli opened the path to conceive of republics in the

modern, revolutionary way while, at the same time, he made it pos-

sible to give this modern state back to the people and, in this sense,

remain faithful to ancient republican intuitions. With each iteration,


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modern republican revolutions become progressively more inclusive

of peoples, as they become progressively more exclusive of “estates”—

where “estates” refers to the Roman law sense of statu hominum, name-

ly, the division of one humanity into the “estates” of the free and those

of the enslaved, of priestly and lay, of husbands and wives, of adults

and of children, and so on. The linchpin of Machiavelli’s logic lies in

the “coincidence of opposites,” of a tyrannical moment with a repub-

lican moment. This coincidence takes place in the very construction

of the idea of lo stato, whose features are shared both by republics and

principalities and, more important, allow for certain traits of one to

pass into the other and vice versa.3 Without such a mutual contamina-

tion of republic and principality, it would be impossible to effect the

inclusive exclusion of “estates” that characterizes any modern, demo-

cratic revolutionary political process.

To illustrate my hypothesis, in the next three sections I shall

discuss three different constellations in which “republic,” “species,”

and “state” have come together in the history of western political

thought. My intention is to show the new way in which Machiavelli weaves these three roots of the modern concept of state in The Prince,

as expressed in his famous definition of republics as a species of state.

During the twentieth century, positivist political science lost interest

in the theory of constitutional forms that classical and medieval po-

litical theory bequeathed the moderns. This loss may have impaired

its capacity for the accurate analysis of current political phenomena.

For if the exercise of genealogy shows anything, it is that subtle shifts

in the meaning of constitutional terms like “republic” or “state” have

momentous political consequences.

THE ANCIENT ROOT OF THE MODERN STATE:

STATE AS STATUS REI PUBLICAE

Two Harvard intellectual historians have recently coined a new term for

the kind of modern, revolutionary concept of the state that I discussed

above in relation to Sieyès: they have claimed that modern republican-

ism and its new ideal of political freedom as nondomination is an “exclu-


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224 social research

sivist republicanism” not found previously in the classical tradition of

republicanism represented by Aristotle and Cicero (Hankins 2010; Nelson

2010). James Hankins and Eric Nelson suggest that the republican politi-cal logic exemplified by Sieyès is the product of a new, religiously based

“fanaticism” that sees the republic as the only legitimate species of state

and rejects all principalities as illegitimate.4 For these two Harvard histo-

rians, the originary meaning of republic ( politeia, res publica) in the Greek

and Roman traditions is “pluralistic” because it recognizes monarchies

as being species of republics. Only at the dawn of modernity does repub-

licanism become simultaneously democratic and “exclusivist.”

Hankins situates the crucial, epochal difference between ancient

and modern republicanism in the different ways that Cicero translates

Aristotle’s notion of politeia compared to Leonardo Bruni’s humanist

translation of the same notion in the fifteenth century. Cicero translates

politeia by res publica and, according to Hankins, this means that Cicero

preserves the equal validity of the three species of politeia (monarchy,

aristocracy, and politeia as a virtuous form of democracy) found in Ar-

istotle’s Politics. On this account, the traditional Roman understandingof republic has no privileged connection to democratic or popular gov-

ernment. It was only thanks to Bruni’s translation of the genus res pu-

blica by one of its species, namely, politeia as a good form of democracy,

that republics came to mean “governments by a plurality of persons”

and were opposed to princely governments ruled by one only (Hankins

2010, 453). For Hankins, Machiavelli’s opening sentence of The Prince

popularizes this modern usage of republic and thus was instrumen-tal to the later “polarization of constitutional and absolutist govern-

ments in the early modern period—and ultimately, two centuries later,

to the classing of monarchy as an illegitimate form of government”

(454). If we accept Hankins’s thesis, we would have to acknowledge that

Machiavelli and his republican followers simply “invented” their own

Roman tradition. “Neo-Roman” republicanism, to employ Skinner’s

term for modern republicanism, would be all “neo” and zero “Roman.”

Hankins’ hypothesis that, for the Romans, monarchies are spe-

cies of republics, hangs essentially on a few passages in Cicero’s On


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the Commonwealth where a distinction is made between good and bad

“royal republics” (Cicero 1999). In III 47 Scipio, the protagonist of the

dialogue, distinguishes between a just king (he mentions Romulus and

Numa) and a tyrant, and speaks of a “monarchic form of common-

wealth” or regali re publica as opposed to populari rei publicae, giving

praise for both. Hankins’s reading of the passage assumes that the

Latin expression status designates something like the “form of govern-

ment” of a people, which can be royal [regali] or popular [ populari], and

thus he surmises that for Cicero a republic could also be a governed by

a monarch, as one of its species.

However, it is doubtful that the Roman term status can be con-

nected in this way to the institutions of government. In Roman legal

and political usage status refers to the “condition” of the res publica or

to the “state” of the people’s affairs and not to the body of magistrates

that runs ( gerere) these affairs.5 The expression status rei Romanae found

in Digest 1.1.1.2 refers to the condition of the affairs of the Roman

people; the term status does not refer to what in the medieval period

is designated as regimen or form of government. We still employ theterm “state” in this archaic Roman sense, as when the President of the

United States gives his speech on “the State of the Union” or when we

say that such and such a thing embodies “the state of the art”: in nei-

ther usage is there any reference to the species of government.

The fundamental Roman political idea behind the concept of

status, correctly rendered by Cicero among others, is that the people’s

law, in the first place, and the people’s magistrates whose office is toimplement these laws, in the second, is what preserves the condition,

the well-being, the status of the Roman republic: there is no “govern-

ment” (regimen) of the republic in the sense of something that is found

above and beyond the welfare of the Roman citizens.6 To ask after

the status of the Roman republic means to ask whether the affairs of

the people are being run in the best manner, whether the condition

of the public life is healthy. The expression status does not designate

those charged with running these affairs—that is, the form or species of

government.


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226 social research

Hence, in the above passage cited by Hankins as evidence of

ancient republican “pluralism,” Cicero is not saying that a monarchy

is a species of republic. He is merely saying that the “affairs of the Ro-

man people” can also find themselves in a good condition when the

people are led (mostly into battle) by an able king in conjunction with

the counsels of the Senate,7 and not only when these affairs are run by

the conjoined authority of the Senate (auctoritas in senatu) and the as-

semblies of the people ( potestas in populi), as happened after the expul-

sion of the Tarquin dynasty. In other words, Cicero’s point is that the

republic always belongs to the populus no matter whether it is a regali

or populari rei publicae, no matter whether the affairs of the people are

overseen by a single monarch or by a majority of citizens. The mon-

archies and aristocracies of the early modern period, against which

modern republicanism fights its battles by “excluding” their claims

to legitimacy, have nothing in common with Cicero’s so-called royal

republic. These modern monarchies and aristocracies do not require

at all the consensus of an armed people to their laws, as in Rome. Most

important, as I discuss below, in these modern monarchies, the kinglyestate absorbs the republic or body of the people, in a sense that would

have been entirely unthinkable in Rome, where at best one can say

that the kingly function is absorbed by the republic or body of the

people in the form of the dual consulate.

But, if Machiavelli’s notion of stato does not come from the Ro-

man idea of status rei publicae, then what did Machiavelli seek and find

in the Roman conception of politics? In a recent article, Peter Stacey

suggests that behind Machiavelli’s claim that a republic is a stato libero

(a free state) lies a more primordial conception of the state in terms

of a corpo misto or mixed political body.8 This is a point that is well

taken, since in both Aristotle and Cicero the constitutional terminol-

ogy is overwhelmingly dedicated to describe the political character

of an autarchic people or body politic, and only rarely does it develop

terminology apt to describe the independent existence of institutions

through which this people is governed.


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In Aristotle, politeia, which is usually translated into English as

“constitution,” derives from a verb, politeuein, which means to be a

citizen or to participate in political activity. The term politeia there-

fore denotes more a common form of life than a form of government.

Aristotle places emphasis on the common form of life, the bios politikos,

which characterizes human beings as a species of political animals,

zoon politikon (for Aristotle, bees and ants are other species of politi-

cal animals). From this perspective, Cicero’s translation of politeia by

res publica is less an attempt to apply the Greek typology of forms of

government to the Roman constitution and much more an attempt to

bring together the idea of politeia as a common form of life with the

Roman idea of a people as a function of the consent they give to be

ruled by laws of their own making. This idea of politeia or res publica as

a form of free life is preserved by Machiavelli in his conception of a vi-

vere politico, which is characterized by the law before which citizens are

equal (in Greek isonomia; in Latin equus ius); and, still more important,

by a continuous social struggle to attain such equality under law. The

Roman people do not “own” the republic as a private person “owns”property. The case is instead the opposite: the affairs of the people

remain in the hands of the people when orders and laws are set up

that keep any group of citizens from managing what are collective af-

fairs. Machiavelli understood this point well when he highlighted the

function of “veto powers” in the Roman constitution (on this point see

Vatter 2000 and Raimondi 2013).

Understood in this light, Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s typol-

ogies of constitutions was an attempt to recapture the fluidity of Ar-

istotelian politeuein and render the idea of state less as a static “form”

of government and more as a temporal process of living politically. After

all, as Baron and Pocock have correctly pointed out, Bruni’s innovation

was primarily a historiographical, not a politicotheoretical one (Baron

1988). What Machiavelli discovers, over and above the historicization

of political form already found in Bruni, is that the “purity” of politi-

cal form dissolves into the currents of historical becoming due to the


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228 social research

causal role played by social conflicts, above all by the fundamental

conflict between the people who “desire to be neither commanded

nor oppressed by the great” and the great who “desire both to com-

mand and to oppress the people.” That is why in chapter 9 of The Prince

Machiavelli says that the unfolding of social conflict always gives rise

to one of three species of government: principality, liberty, or license.

These refer to the government by one, to the government by many, and

to the government by none. But with this typology, Machiavelli is no

longer operating within the semantic space of the Roman idea of status

but has shifted into the semantic space of the medieval conception of

status as regime, or specie politia, which I address in what follows.

THE MEDIEVAL ROOT OF THE MODERN STATE:

STATE AS SPECIE POLITIA

In the literature on Machiavelli’s constitutional terminology there exists

a widespread claim that in Machiavelli stato is always the state of some-

one, and it refers to the domination (dominio, signoria, imperio) exerted by

that person or group over the rest. Mansfield and Skinner, for instance,

both agree that when Machiavelli speaks as if the stato were a possession

of the prince, he falls behind “the distinctively modern idea of the State

as form of public power separate from both the ruler and the ruled,

and constituting supreme political authority within a certain defined

territory” (Mansfield 1996, 281–2). On this account, Machiavelli’s stato

translates the idea of status as specie politia, referring to the form of polit-

ical regime of a community. In the medieval period, and particularlyin the Italian communal tradition, city governments sought to distin-

guish their “state” or regimen politicum from the kind of monarchical rule

or regimen regale exercised by both empire and church. For Aquinas, a

monarchical regime is one in which he who governs the city has plenar-

iam potestatem, full or absolute powers, whereas a political regime is one

in which those who govern the city have their powers limited by the

laws of the city (Mager 1968, 416ff).

In his genealogy of the modern state, Wolfgang Mager calls

this identity of state with political regime the “republican root” of


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the modern idea of state, although it should perhaps best be called

the “Aristotelian” root since it refers to the Aristotelian identification

of “constitution” ( politeia) with “governing part” ( politeuma); that is, it

refers to those who hold the supreme magistracy in a city. Thus, in

his commentary on the Politics, Aquinas says that for Aristotle polit-

eia (in the generic sense of state) refers to whatever estate occupies

the highest instance of rule (maximum principatum) so as to impose a

form of government on all others. If the estate of the people rules or

is “prince,” then the state or republic becomes popular; if the estate

of the nobles or of the rich manages to rule or is “prince,” then the

state or republic becomes oligarchic, and so on (Aquinas 2007, cited in

Mager 1968, 418 fn.1).

Aquinas’s terminology clarifies an important point: that the

medieval idea of status as regimen politicum, although supposedly “re-

publican,” in reality designates what could be more appropriately

termed a “civil principality.” The so-called republic ( politia) is always

already a form (specie) of domination exerted by whatever part happens

to be “prince.”10 The “princely” function is the primordial political

function in the idea of state as regime. At the same time this regime

is also “civil” in the sense that whichever part functions as princeps is

obligated by the laws of the community, which are of different kinds:

divine, natural, and civil or common laws. By collapsing the state onto

the regime, the laws that are supposed to regulate the exercise of pow-

er do not issue from a politically unified people. That is the reason the

government or regime of this people is always inherently “partisan”and thus takes up a “princely” form.

In The Prince Machiavelli will try to subvert this medieval idea

of state as regime by proposing his own conception of the “civil prin-

cipality.” He conceives of a “new” prince whose exemplar is an ideal-

ized Cesare Borgia, whose function is the establishment of the political

unity of a people rather than the reflection of the might of one or the

other estate. This people, in turn, he conceives along neo-Roman lines

in the sense of a people that understands its political life ( vivere politico)

in terms of the social struggle for equal law and sees as its enemy


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230 social research

whoever seeks to deny it this equality. But in order for Machiavelli to

achieve this overturning of the medieval identity of state with regime,

he had to recover an entirely different meaning for the term of stato,

no longer tied to the power of the estates in society, but rather linked

to the regimen regale and its princely expropriation of “estates.” Where

does this other meaning of stato come from?

THE MODERN ROOT OF THE MODERN STATE:

STATE AS STATUS REGALIS

The received thesis—according to which the modern state entails a

depersonalization of the state that takes it away from the possession

of the prince—needs to be carefully analyzed. It is true, of course, that

there is a depersonalization of the state insofar as the stato attempts to

emancipate itself from the medieval sense of regimen, which, as I just

showed, is partisan and reflects the attempts to rule by the various

estates in the political body. However, the question remains open as to

what other root of the concept of state is relied upon in the construc-

tion of the “impersonal” modern state. I follow the interesting hypoth-

esis proposed by Mager, according to whom the modern stato has a third

root, apart from the Roman and the medieval one, which derives from

the Renaissance conception of a “royal status,” or status regalis. It is this

root that allows the stato to free itself from its dependency on the estates

and allows it to represent itself as the political unity of a people. Thus,

paradoxically, the impersonality of the modern state requires a massive

personalization of office, the effects of which I analyze in what follows.My hypothesis is that Machiavelli’s distinction between republic

and principality as species of stato is not the application of the medieval

idea of regimen as specie politia, but rests on his creative appropriation of

the idea of status regalis. In this way, the distinction between republic

and principality in Machiavelli refers to whether the body of the people

can become “sovereign” (this is the case for a republic) or whether the

head of the principality can give itself a “people” (this is the case of

a “civil” principality). Machiavelli’s operation in The Prince, therefore,

consists in rephrasing the Roman reliance of politics on the people—


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more specifically, on the orders of its popular army—and on the social

conflict around equality as source of law, within the new vocabulary

of status regalis. It is this conjunction of Roman republican vocabulary

with the much more recent vocabulary of modern monarchic regimes

that leads to the modern idea that a people gives itself the form of a

state or becomes a state, in the way exemplified in Sieyès’s pamphlet.

Mager argues that in the expression status regalis, the concep-

tion of status has no relation to the Roman public law understanding

of status as status rei publicae, which as I have said, refers to the “condi-

tion” of the Roman political body or people. Nor does it have a rela-

tion to the Aristotelian root of status as specie politia prevalent in the

medieval period, which is dependent on the desire to rule of any given

estate. Instead, Mager claims that the root of status regalis derives from

Roman private law, namely, from the law of persons and its foundational

idea of a “human status” or statu hominum ( Digest I, 5). Unlike in the ex-

pression of public law discussed above, status refers here to the role of

a “head” in a group (family, city, church) as a dominus (as in the father

of the family).

We have before us an entirely different idea of “species” of

state: we are not referring to a specie politia, a species or form of gov-

ernment, but instead to a species or form of human being or person.

An example is the office of the pope as head of the clerical status, much

like the emperor is head of the lay status. Mager’s claim is that, during

the late medieval and early modern period, this idea of a human or

personal status is linked with the Roman law idea of dignitates or hon-ors attached to public offices. The new category of status regalis gives a

“public function” or office to the “head” of a group: the personal has

become political. With the status regalis we have a personalization of of-

fice, or, perhaps better, the officialization of personal status, in a new

synthesis between ideas of public officium, honor, dignitas coming from

imperial Rome and ideas of private status regalis, pontificalis, ducalis that

have a feudal origin.

Mager shows that this “monarchic root” of the modern state

first emerges in the young monarchies of Spain, France, and England,


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232 social research

where there occurs a transition from the nonpublic person of a noble-

man, with all of his belongings (wealth, family, servers, followers),

to the public idea of office and dignity as a king of a national terri-

tory (Mager 1968, 438–9). Anyone who has read Machiavelli’s The Prince

knows that these new kings of Spain and France figure crucially in the

thinking of the Florentine secretary of state. After all, in chapter 3

Machiavelli wants to teach the French king a lesson in his arte dello sta-

to by castigating him for not following the Roman Republican military

orders in his conquests. In chapter 21 Machiavelli refers to “Ferdinand

of Aragon, the present king of Spain” as an exemplar of what a “prince

should do to be thought outstanding.” These new monarchies are the

background against which he constructs his own conception of a new

“civil principality.”

If Mager is correct about status regalis, then there would be two

hypotheses as to how a category of Roman private law is given a new

public law usage at the start of modernity. On the hypothesis put

forward by Skinner and Stacey, neo-Roman republican thinkers like

Machiavelli would have applied the distinction coming from the law of persons between the status of a freeman and the status of a slave to the

public law distinction between forms of government, so that republics corre-

spond to free states and principalities to unfree or enslaved states. On

Mager’s hypothesis, instead, the transfer of Roman private law catego-

ries to the sphere of public law does take place in early modernity, but

in relation to the construction of a status regalis, the state of the mon-

arch, and not in relation to the discourse on “republican” freedom as

nondomination. On the first hypothesis, Machiavelli’s “civil principal-

ity” has no positive function whatsoever to play in the establishment

of a republican state. On the second hypothesis, on the other hand,

things look different: The Prince turns out to offer a revolutionary us-

age of the personalization of power in status regalis for the construction

of a depersonalized public idea of a republican state. Rousseau’s quip in

The Social Contract that Machiavelli’s treatise is a secret handbook for

republicans would in this way receive an entirely new meaning. But

how does this work?


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Mager is careful to point out that while the personal status of the

king becomes public, and as a condition for this passage, there must

obtain a moment of depersonalization in which the new status regalis

is separated from the physical body of the king and gets attached to

the political body of the people. Thus, status regalis or regnum comes to

stand in for the res publica. This transition is registered already in the

dualistic reading of potestas found in Aquinas when he distinguishes

a regimen politicum from a regimen regale. The difference between them

is that in the regimen politicum it is the body of the people that gives

power to some representatives or delegates (their “head”), whereas in

the regimen regale it is the “head” of the king (status regalis) that obtains

the body of the people.11

In the status regalis the king becomes head of the entire body (of

the republic), and is no longer just a part of the body (an estate) that

rises to government (the king is no longer just one of many noble-

men selected to be king). Mager illustrates this shift by analyzing the

idea of status regalis in Gerson, who writes in 1413 (100 years before

Machiavelli’s The Prince) about the king’s three forms of life: physical,political, and spiritual. By the king’s political life is meant a king who

is united with his subjects by one law, as head is to body, such that the

interests of the head become identical to those of the body. In this uni-

ty of the civil life of the king with the life of the community is found

the beginning of the modern “impersonal” state: here the laws of the

king become the laws of the land, and we have the fundamentally

modern idea that the king or sovereign, as representative of the entire

people, becomes the sole source of public law. This idea is opposed to

the medieval conception of a body of public laws (all of them originat-

ing anywhere but in the will of the monarch) keeping the king’s power

under a yoke. Thus, with the idea of status regalis one has another kind

of reunification of regnum with res publica, the mirror opposite of that

found in Aquinas: with the status regalis the “republic” is represented

by the principality, whereas with status as specie politia the principality

is embodied by the “republic.”


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234 social research

MACHIAVELLI’S CIVIL PRINCIPALITY AND MODERN

REPUBLICANISM

How does Machiavelli’s The Prince weave together these three roots of themodern state? Machiavelli’s Roman conception of the “political life” of

a body without head, found throughout the Discourses on Livy, is a direct

critique to the sacralization of “the king’s two bodies” that is found in

the modern “divine right” monarchies. Likewise, his insistence at the

start of The Prince that the use of violence can extirpate a whole dynasty

is intended to show the ludicrous idea of a “second” immortal body of

the king. However, this does not mean that Machiavelli has no use for

the new conception of principality as status regalis. In The Prince chapters

8 and 9, Machiavelli develops an original discourse on the figure he calls

“civil principality.” I would argue that this constitutional form takes up

the status regalis insofar as the “civil” prince needs to become the “head”

of a free and armed people if he is going to found a stato that lasts in time

and is not dependent on his own “person.” Mager also argues that traces

of this other root of stato can be found in The Prince, where it does not

refer, subjectively, to the form of rule exercised by one person in power

but, objectively, to the whole that is ruled by one head: “state” as regnum or

res publica embodied by the prince. Mager’s example is found in chapter 2

of The Prince, when Machiavelli writes: “I say therefore that in states that

are hereditary and accustomed to the lineage of their prince there are

many fewer difficulties in maintaining them.” Mager claims that here

stati does not mean rule of prince, but refers to the unity of head and

body, the ruled as unity under a head, as principality, as objective statusregalis (Mager 1968, 445).

I think that the account of the civil principality in chapters

8 and 9 gives a much clearer example of the “objective” conception

of the state in Machiavelli. Within the narrow confines of chapter 9

Machiavelli moves between the three roots of stato that I have dis-

cussed so far. The Roman sense of stato as referring to the primacy of

a people, of a body politic, with respect to the “form” of its govern-

ment, or “head,” is clearly visible when Machiavelli argues against the

widespread oligarchic belief that “he who builds on the people builds


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on mud.” To the contrary, a wise (civil) prince will always “build on

the people” and do everything that is needed to “have his people as a

friend” (The Prince, chap. 9). The same thesis is defended innumerable

times in The Discourses on Livy. The modern state needs to be founded on

the “universality” of the people.

But it would be a mistake to believe, as the prevalent view has

it, that Machiavelli is talking here of a regime based on the popular

estate, of the status popularis, to use Bruni’s expression. The proof is

that chapter 9 moves on to defend a second thesis, which is that a civil

prince has to “ascend from a civil to an absolute order.”12 By “civil or-

der” Machiavelli refers to the fact that this principality, when viewed

as a function of how the prince acquires his dominion, is an elective

one and remains “civil” as long as the prince sticks to the preestab-

lished orders of the city, which have been determined, more or less

consensually, by the different estates of the city, represented by the

different magistracies of the city. Thus, with respect to the manner of

acquiring power, the “civil principality” fits with the second root of

stato as a specie politia, an estate-based regime.But the novelty of this chapter is that Machiavelli advocates

for a civil prince who is willing to break free from its dependency on

these estates; that is, on the oligarchic factions that ruled over com-

munal life in Italian city-states for centuries, and which Machiavelli

will accuse, in Florentine Histories, of having ruined the cities that they

have governed, having made them incapable of rising to the level of

the Roman Republic. What Machiavelli means is that the oligarchicalestates have made it impossible to construct a veritable state of the

people, a modern republic. Only in this context does it make sense

to argue, as he does at the end of chapter 9, that the civil prince—in

order to maintain “his” stato, here in the sense of regime or rule—will

necessarily have to “ascend” from a civil status to an absolute status.

The latter idea of status does not refer to a specie politia but to the status

regalis. Machiavelli hints as much by opposing the civil “status” to the

absolute “status” in a veiled citation to the lex regia, which contains

the famous phrase concerning the legibus solutus condition of a prince.


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236 social research

Now, in the lex regia the prince is “absolved” from the civil laws

only because the (Roman) people passed its potestas entirely into the

princely hands. Machiavelli thus argues that a prince will need to be-

come “absolute” (and in so doing break off the yoke of the customary

laws) if he wants to keep the magistrates from taking “the state away

from a prince.” Only by “expropriating” the political power and au-

thority of the estates, to use Weber’s language, will the “new” prince

be able to maintain the citizens in “need of his state and of himself.”

Here the very dualism between “objective” state and “subjective”

prince characteristic of the status regalis appears clearly in Machiavel-

li’s language.

The way I understand Machiavelli’s point in chapter 9 is as

follows. Throughout The Prince, and climaxing in chapters 12–14,

Machiavelli argues that a modern stato needs to be “republican” in the

sense that it must find its sole support on a free, because armed, peo-

ple. But in The Prince he also argues that a free people, in turn, stand

in need of a modern stato whose “personal embodiment”—the “new”

prince—fights for their interests as a whole (and not for the interestsof the particular estates). In this sense, a modern republic is character-

ized by its being a species of stato, the meaning of which Machiavelli

derives, partially, from the more or less recent creation (in the four-

teenth century) of the idea of a modern princely or royal estate (sta-

tus regalis). This hypothesis accounts for the expression employed by

Machiavelli in chapter 9: “in need of his state and of himself.” The

princely or royal estate is attained by “expropriating” the means and

authority of the lower “estates” (the “magistrates” mentioned in chap-

ter 9), by the civil prince “ascending” to an absolute, legibus solutus con-

dition (status). Thus, what is radically novel in Machiavelli’s The Prince is

the attempt to place the status regalis to an antimonarchic purpose and

build the concept of a republican state that will come to fruition only

later in the Atlantic revolutions.

What significance does this genealogical exercise and this read-

ing of The Prince have for contemporary political thought? According

to Skinner, “if we reflect on what I have been calling the absolutist


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and populist theories, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are

nowadays of exclusively historical interest. If we turn, however, to

the fictional theory [of Hobbes], we come upon a way of thinking that

ought never to have been set aside” (Skinner 2009, 361–2). From this

judgment it would seem to follow that all modern republican thinkers

subsequent to Hobbes, starting with Spinoza, through Rousseau, Jef-

ferson, and Madison, and on to Sieyès and Kant, have been captured

by the Hobbesian construction of sovereignty and lie under its spell.

But on this view a new paradox emerges: whereas there is a clear dis-

tinction between a republican and a Hobbesian idea of freedom, there

appears to be no republican idea of the state that can counter-balance

the Hobbesian one.

The dualistic approach to the question of the modern state ad-

vocated by Skinner, according to which states divide into republics,

which are free, and principalities, which are unfree, makes it difficult

to conceive a “republican state” because, as Machiavelli teaches, such a

state is necessarily related to a “personal embodiment” (to use Weber’s

phrase) in the form of a prince. Contrariwise, by adopting the gene-alogy I have proposed, one can think the “coincidence of opposites”

between republican freedom and “tyranny” (which I have discussed

under the rubric of the ascent of a civil prince to an “absolute” status

regalis), and in that way give republicanism not only its own conception

of freedom as nondomination, but also its own conception of a non-

Hobbesian, republican state. Machiavelli’s revolutionary intervention

in The Prince kept the status regalis from being the exclusive preserve of

modern absolutism (in the thought of Bodin and Hobbes), and opened

its use for modern republicanism (in the figures of Spinoza, Rousseau,

Jefferson, Sieyès, and Kant). By seeing the continued vitality of the dif-

ferent roots of the modern state in the modern republican tradition

we may still be able to counteract the ravages of neoliberal antistatism

without having recourse to the Hobbesian, antirepublican idea of the

state as fictional person.


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238 social research

NOTES

1. See here the latest treatment of the question, “Note intorno al termine

‘stato’ in Machiavelli” in Vivanti (2008, 196–226). Vivanti recapitu-

lates the result of the research on Machiavelli’s constitutional termi-

nology of last century, all of it essentially assuming that Machiavelli

understood the state in these Weberian terms. These treatments

are not genealogical ones. They boil down to the claim that by stato

Machiavelli refers to regime or government; persons who govern; and

territory over which a regime governs.

2. I have discussed the logic of exclusion and inclusion with respect to

radical republicanism in Vatter (2012). For another interpretation of

“tyrannical” tendencies in Machiavelli’s “democratic” discourse, see

McCormick (2011).

3. Mansfield is generally correct in pointing out that “for Machiavelli

principalities are as much states as are republics,” (1996, 294).

However, this does not mean that “a republic is the stato of a certain

group as a principality is the stato of the prince” (293), as I show below.

4. Hankins situates the claim that monarchies are not republics andhence are illegitimate with Milton (Hobbes still called monarchy a

form of republic or commonwealth): “the political thinkers of the

Enlightenment had forgotten that their exclusivist republicanism had

had its origins in a godly republic of seventeenth-century ‘fanatics’”

(475), referring to Milton’s use of the model of the “Hebrew Republic.”

5. See the evidence brought out by Mager (1968). For a different inter-

pretation of status in the Digest and its role in the origin of the modern

idea of state, see Post (1964). I believe that Post’s genealogy is useful

to understand the origins of “public reason” as standard for legiti-

mate government, but Mager’s genealogy is useful to understand the

origins of the modern state. On why the two should not be collapsed,

see Vatter (2008).

6. This is the meaning of Cicero’s definition of the res publica as res populi

(III 43), where the “people” is a function of the “bond of law or agree-

ment or association of the group” (unum vinculum iuris . . consensus ac

societas coetus, quod est populus) (III 43).


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7. One should not forget, as Machiavelli emphasizes repeatedly, that

Romulus needed to “remain alone” in power (and thus killed Remus)

only in order to set up a Senate, on whose counsel he proceeded to rulehis people (Machiavelli 1996, Book I, chap. 9). Kings were never “abso-

lute” in Rome; they never ruled “alone.”

8. I find myself in sympathy with Stacey (2013), who argues that

Machiavelli is innovative also in the doctrine of state, and not only

in the doctrine of government, but on different grounds than those

adduced by Stacey.

9. The idea is that the constitution ( politeia) is determined by that part

which dominates (or is prince); hence, the expressions like politia

democratica or politia aristocratica or respublica popularis, paucorum,

optimatum. Aquinas translates the three good forms of political or

constitutional government as: monarchy equals regnum, potestas regia;

politeia (as good rule by many, or by soldiers) equals res publica; and the

corruption of “republic” in narrow sense equals popularis status.

10. In his genealogy, Skinner also makes the point that modern monar-

chies rely on the belief that a political body forms a political unity

or state only in and through its “head,” namely, through the kingly

estate (327–28). For modern monarchies, without kingly head there

is no state or political body. Contrariwise, for the medieval “populist”

conception of the state or regimen politicum the body of the people is

both “anterior” to and, collectively speaking, “superior” to its head

(the magistrates, of which one may be a king) (337–39).

11. This thesis has given rise to a large secondary literature especially inthe Italian and French scholarship. I refer here in particular to the

polemic between Paul Larivaille and Gennaro Sasso on the “civil prin-

cipality.”

REFERENCES

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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France 1977–1978. New York: Picador.

——— . 2010. Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–1979.

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Hankins, James. 2010. “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-

Monarchical Republic.” Political Theory 38 (4): 452–82.

Justinian. The Digest. 1998. Translated by Alan Watson. Philadelphia:

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——— . 2005. The Prince. Edited by William J. Connell. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.

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Post, Gaines. 1964. Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State

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——— . 2008. “The Idea of Public Reason and the Reason of State. Schmitt

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——— . 2010. “Republicanism or Modern Natural Right? The Question of

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