“Greater, more honorable and more useful to the republic”: Plebeian offices in Machiavelli's “perfect” constitution

© The Author 2010. Oxford University Press and New York University School of Law. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: . .......................................................................................... John P. McCormick* The tribunes were ordered with such eminence and such reputation that henceforth they mediated between the plebs and the senate, and halted the insolence of the nobles. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.3 This article is part of a larger project that seeks to retrieve a forgotten or lost form of constitutionalism, one which aspires to prevent socioeconomic inequality from translating into political inequality and, hence, better to ensure the liberty of average citizens.1 This more democratic constitutional model does not presuppose “the people” to be a unitary, homogenous sovereign subject, and it does not fix general election as the primary means of appointing public officials. This alternative constitutional model differs markedly from post–eighteenth-century constitutionalism in three primary ways: it excludes wealthy citizens from important legislative assemblies and executive offices; it appoints public magistrates through a lottery or through a mixture of lottery and election; and it leaves to the ultimate judgment of the entire citizenry the punishment of public officials or private individuals indicted for political crimes. Niccolò Machiavelli, virtually alone among all the major advocates of republican government from Aristotle, Cicero, Guicciardini, and Montesquieu through Madison and beyond, argued that common citizens, in order to live free from oppression by * 1 Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago. Paper presented at the Cardozo/NYU Law School Colloquium on “Global and Comparative Public Law Theory,” January 20, 2010. I thank Matthias Kumm, Michel Rosenfeld, and Joseph Weiler for the invitation and for their incisive comments, as well as the audience on that occasion for its critical feedback on the paper. Email: This essay is based on chapter 4 of the forthcoming book John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge Univ. Press 2010). I•CON (2010), Vol. 8 No. 2, 237–262 doi: 10.1093/icon/moq006 “Greater, more honorable and more useful to the republic”: Plebeian offices in Machiavelli’s “perfect” constitution 238   I•CON 8 (2010), 237–262 political and socioeconomic elites, needed offices and assemblies that were exclusively their own, and, further, that they ought to exercise direct, collective judgment over political cases of malfeasance, corruption, and abuse of power. In contemporary circumstances, where growing inequality threatens the political freedom of citizens in even “advanced” democracies, I deem it worthwhile to reexamine Machiavelli’s institutional recommendations for forestalling or correcting such a state of affairs. The constitutions of modern republics attempt to keep public officials accountable and responsive in three principal ways: through the reward/sanction scheme of election and prospective reelection; the institutional counterposition of functionally separated powers; and, in extreme cases, the threat of removal through impeachment procedures conducted by other public officials. All citizens are formally eligible to hold office in such schemes, and the category “elite” applies, technically, only to those who do. These constitutions posit a sociologically anonymous political subject, “the sovereign people,” out of which political elites are made and unmade through general elections. These institutional arrangements and the principles underlying them would strike many adherents of premodern popular government as odd, unjust, and dangerous. From their viewpoint, if wealthy citizens are free to stand for all magistracies, if they can participate in every public council, and if unqualified election is the only device that determines officeholding or assembly attendance, the wealthy would hold distinct and persistent political advantages over poorer citizens. The rich would simply overwhelm the political process. After all, wealth enables such citizens to cultivate greater reputation, a more distinctive appearance, and better public speaking skills such that voters almost inevitably choose them in electoral contests.2 In addition, financial resources allow the wealthy to fund, groom, and/or bribe nonwealthy candidates to serve their interests at the expense of broader constituencies. Put simply, election is a magistrateselection method that directly and indirectly favors the wealthy and keeps political offices from being distributed widely among citizens of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Ancient democracies assumed that law and public policy would not serve the common good unless large numbers of nonwealthy citizens participated in government by holding office themselves. Wealthy citizens, despite habitually florid promises to the contrary, were expected to pursue their own interests and not those of the general populace upon ascending to office—a danger obviously exacerbated in electoral systems where the wealthy monopolize offices. To avoid the “aristocratic effect” of election,3 ancient democracies assigned most magistracies by citizen-wide lotteries or “sortitions” and observed frequent rotation in office.4 In keeping with the egalitarian aspirations 2 3 4 Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government 132–160 (Cambridge Univ. Press 1997). Id. at 42–93. Mogens H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes 230–231 (Blackwell 1991); Neil Duxbury, Random Justice: On Lotteries and Legal Decision-Making (Oxford Univ. Press 1999). 1. Introduction Greater, more honorable and more useful to the republic   239 2. Class-specific magistrates: The tribunes of the plebs Machiavelli’s Discourses reconstructs the history and constitution of the ancient Roman republic, reviving and revising it as a model for present and future popular governments.6 Machiavelli was especially concerned with the ambition and behavior of the wealthiest and most powerful segments of a republic, the grandi, whose unquenchable appetite to oppress motivates them to acquire the socioeconomic and political advantages they enjoy in such regimes (D I.5; P 9). In the Roman context, the grandi were the republic’s wealthy nobility who constituted the Senate and monopolized terms in Rome’s major magistracies—especially the consulship, its annually elected, two-member chief executive. Machiavelli, standing virtually alone in the history of intellectual reflection on republics, favors Roman institutions and practices that excluded wealthy and prominent citizens, that operated as much as possible beyond their influence, or that directly opposed their power and privilege. 5 6 Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (Princeton Univ. Press 1993). See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi, in Opere I (Corrado Vivanti ed., Einaudi-G (...truncated)