Chapter 8 focuses on Machiavelli’s mature theory of the state in the Discorsi. It begins by drawing attention to the extent to which his theory continues to be mounted as an attack upon the prevalent pattern of neo-classical political discourse in the humanist writings of his predecessors, which had defined and explicated the civitas, the populus, and the res publica as forms of civil association. Their political arguments had been predicated upon a belief in natural human sociability. As in Il Principe, so in the Discorsi, Machiavelli’s theory of the state involves him in rejecting these philosophical presuppositions entirely and in supplying a new philosophical picture of the state as a body. After identifying some new challenges which now face Machiavelli in his account of ‘the free state’, this chapter shows how Machiavelli uses Book 1, chapter 2, to furnish two novel pieces of his theory. The first consists in a conjectural history of the state; the second articulates a genealogy of virtue. That Machiavelli’s explanation of the generation of a moral vocabulary among humans is ensconced within his account of the formation of the state is of lasting significance for our understanding of the architecture of his philosophy.

The Introduction examines the historiography of the idea of the state in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Machiavellian scholarship. It analyses the empirical and methodological problems associated with this specialist literature, before then outlining a new way of reconstructing Machiavelli’s theory of lo stato – and of interpreting it as the very crux of his political philosophy – by laying out a new intellectual basis upon which to reorient our present understanding of the foundations of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of the state from his earliest writings onwards. It draws new attention to the formative role in Renaissance political discourse of a sequence of theories – subsequently discussed in each chapter of Part I of the book – which were drawn from classical Roman political, moral, rhetorical, and aesthetic thought and which came to shape decisively Machiavelli’s own theory. And it forwards the contention, substantiated in detail in Part II, that his theory underwent two redactions, first in The Prince and then in the Discourses. The Introduction closes by broaching the crucial question of whether, in classifying Machiavelli as a singularly pioneering theorist of the state in the early modern period, we should also see him as a theorist of state personality.

The protagonist of Chapter 4 is the Ciceronian concept of the persona civitatis, an idea which comes to be associated with the ‘person of the state’ in Renaissance political philosophy. The first section of this chapter identifies the firmly theatrical role which this idea delineates in Cicero’s political thinking about the character of civil associations and the duties of the executive magistrate in the Roman Republic. It also illuminates how Cicero derives the idea from the same Stoic theory of personae which is subsequently developed by Seneca in a more markedly monarchical vein. The second section of the chapter then recounts the historical career of the persona civitatis, which comes to act as the pivot of a highly influential theory of representation in Renaissance political thought – a theory which proved indispensable to the humanist task of sustaining classical claims about liberty and the res publica in this transformed post-classical environment. In Renaissance Florence, Bruni, Palmieri, Manetti, and Alberti all recur to this theory to talk about how the republic can be embodied and articulated as a person. This is a line of thinking which Machiavelli will refuse to endorse: he never accepts that the state can be represented.

Chapter 9 continues to explicate Machiavelli’s theory of the state in the Discorsi, showing how he avails himself of many of the conceptual materials whose place in his earlier thinking has now been observed. It illustrates how Machiavelli continues to conceptualize the state as a body and to understand the work of state formation as an aesthetic process which involves carefully shaping its human material, although he now tracks that process across the course of centuries in a complex account of the phenomenon of corruption within the career of the Roman state. The chapter also underlines how Machiavelli continues to insist that benefits are a powerful way of generating obligations to the state, although he is now noticeably more concerned about the effects of ingratitude upon beneficiaries who are prone to forget or renege upon their debts. And, as the chapter further emphasizes, he continues to maintain that those who hold office within the state should not be mistaken for representative figures in any capacity whatsoever. This point raises a fundamental problem in how to construe his overall theory: is the state a person as well as a body? The chapter culminates in an attempt to resolve this complex question.

Chapter 6 is Senecan in theme. While it includes some discussion of various classical concepts – casus and occasio in particular – which are picked up by Machiavelli to talk about the effects of chance and contingency in the world of states which he wishes to analyse, the chapter is mainly devoted to staking out the philosophical opposition which Machiavelli’s contentions about fortuna in his theory of the state are designed to overturn; and that opposition is deeply Senecan. The chapter lays out an account of the role of fortuna in Seneca’s moral philosophy. It illuminates the providentialism and determinism underpinning all his thinking about the concept, and draws particular attention to Seneca’s persistent tendency to personify Fortuna as a mistress of slaves and to pictorialize a tyrannical realm under her arbitrary government. The chapter then shows how this Senecan treatment becomes central to humanist thinking about Fortuna from Petrarch onwards and explains why Machiavelli is profoundly bothered by its currency in his own day. Machiavelli takes it as a form of delusion emanating from beliefs about a providentialist world emptied of all the contingencies which must be countered by any truly virtuoso agent in charge of governing the state.