Discourses on Livy, Book I, Niccolò Machiavelli: Chapter III – What Kind of Events Gave Rise in Rome to the Creation of Tribunes of the Plebs, Whereby that Republic was Made More Perfect
Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are too free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become everywhere rampant. Hence it is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and that laws make them good.
Commentary on Chapter III – What Kind of Events Gave Rise in Rome to the Creation of Tribunes of the Plebs, Whereby that Republic was Made More Perfect
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Themes
While The Prince is doubtless the most widely read of Machiavelli’s works, the Discourses on the Ten Books of Titus Livy perhaps most honestly expresses his personal political beliefs and commitments, in particular, his republican sympathies. A minimal constitutional order is one in which subjects live securely (vivere sicuro), ruled by a strong government which holds in check the aspirations of both nobility and people, but is in turn balanced by other legal and institutional mechanisms. In a fully constitutional regime, however, the goal of the political order is the freedom of the community (vivere libero), created by the active participation of, and contention between, the nobility and the people.
Machiavelli’s account of human nature — that “men never do good unless necessity drives them to it” represents a common sentiment today, but also a departure from the views of the pre-modern world.
Prior to the rise of capitalism, for example, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that “we were born for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows up upper and lower teeth.” Aurelius’s view is more in line with the account of human nature required for a hunter-gatherer society, which was the social norm for most of human history.
The notion that laws make men good exerted a profound influence on the Western political tradition, appearing for example, in Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government.
Locke wrote that “Law, in its true notion, is not so much the limitation as the direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest.” While this expresses a sentiment at odds with contemporary ideas that consider laws in opposition to freedom, its reception into the Western political tradition is moderated by a change in the nature of liberty brought about by civilization.
Civilization’s influence on the character of liberty was addressed by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his book On the Social Contract, where he contrasts “natural liberty” with “civil liberty.”