Discourses on Livy

What It Is

Three books, around 140 short chapters, written roughly between 1513 and 1517 — the same years as The Prince — and published in 1531, four years after Machiavelli's death.

The frame is a commentary on the first ten books of Livy's history of Rome, but Livy is a diving board rather than a subject. Machiavelli takes an episode from the Roman republic — a law, a mutiny, a conspiracy, a reform — and asks what it teaches about how free states are built, defended, corrupted and lost. The examples jump forward fifteen hundred years to Florence, France and the Swiss without apology.

It grew out of conversations in the Orti Oricellari, the Rucellai gardens in Florence, where young men with republican sympathies met to argue politics. Machiavelli dedicated it to two of them rather than to a ruler, and said, with some acid, that he was dedicating it to men who deserved to be princes rather than to princes who happened to be in power.

Why It Matters

This is the republican Machiavelli, and this is the one that shaped actual institutions.

His central claim about what actually keeps a free state strong was scandalous then and is not comfortable now, and it does not depend on anyone in power being good.

That argument runs straight into Harrington and the English commonwealthmen, into Montesquieu and Rousseau, and into the men who wrote the American constitution and read Machiavelli far more carefully than they admitted in public.

Also here: what makes free states rot, what actually kills them, and whether a people can be saved once the rot has set in. Read The Prince and you learn what Machiavelli thought power was. Read this and you learn what he wanted it for.

Before You Read

Fifteen to twenty hours, and rougher going than The Prince. It circles, repeats itself and contradicts itself, and the chapter headings often promise more than the chapter delivers. It is not a finished book, and reading it as if it were will only frustrate you.

Read The Prince first. Then this.

You do not need to have read Livy; a good edition gives you the relevant episode in the notes. Some grasp of Roman republican history will roughly double what you get out of it.

Do not read it straight through in a fortnight. A chapter or two a night suits it: he wrote it in fragments and it survives being read that way. Book One, on the internal ordering of a republic, is the heart of the thing. Book Two is on war and expansion, Book Three on individual leadership.

Which Translation to Read

• Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (University of Chicago Press, 1996) — recommended. The most careful English version there is. It holds Machiavelli's technical vocabulary steady across the whole work — virtù, ordini, stato, corruption — so that an argument built over 140 chapters can actually be tracked, which looser translations make impossible. Substantial introduction, full notes, a glossary of key words, an annotated index. The cost: exacting rather than graceful, and Mansfield's Straussian reading shapes the introduction and notes throughout. Take them as an argument, not as neutral assistance. View on Amazon →
• Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford World's Classics, 1997). The most readable modern version, with a clear introduction and sensible notes. The right choice if you want to enjoy the book rather than dissect it. The cost: the fluency is bought with inconsistency. Key terms get rendered several ways, and the argument blurs where it should sharpen.
• Leslie J. Walker (Penguin Classics, revised by Brian Richardson, with an introduction by Bernard Crick). The version generations read, still sound, and Crick's introduction is one of the best short essays on Machiavelli's politics in English. The cost: Walker's English has dated, and the notes are lighter than the work needs.

Take Mansfield and Tarcov to study it, Bondanella to read it.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it against The Prince, with both open. The same man, the same years, the same vocabulary, reaching conclusions that appear to pull in opposite directions. No serious reader of Machiavelli gets past that fact, and everyone who has tried to explain it has told you more about themselves than about him.

Read the chapter titles as an argument in themselves; they carry his thesis in compressed form.

Notice how often the reasoning comes back to one test: does this arrangement survive a bad man holding office? He designs for the worst case, always, which is what makes him useful and what makes him hard to like.

The common mistake is to skim, hunting for lines as quotable as The Prince. It does not supply them on demand. It supplies a political theory, and it expects you to work for it.