When most people hear the name Machiavelli, they picture the ruthless adviser of The Prince who taught rulers to lie, manipulate, and seize power. But there is another Machiavelli, one who spent far more pages defending a very different political ideal: a free republic where citizens govern themselves. In his Discourses on Livy, written around 1517 during his exile from Florence, he argued that liberty is not a luxury but the engine that makes states powerful and citizens great. To understand this side of his thought, we have to look at the same place he looked – ancient Rome – and ask why he believed freedom and greatness were inseparable.
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Two faces of Machiavelli
It is impossible to understand Machiavelli on liberty without first clearing up a common confusion. The Prince is a manual for a single ruler holding on to power in dangerous times. The Discourses on Livy, by contrast, is a long meditation on how republics achieve freedom, stability, and greatness. Unlike The Prince, the Discourses praises shared power over the rule of one person.
This is why scholars place Machiavelli firmly in the republican tradition of political thought. The historian Quentin Skinner identifies Machiavelli as a central figure in a tradition that conceives of individual freedom as not being dependent on others. The contrast with The Prince is not a contradiction so much as a difference of purpose: one book asks how a ruler survives, the other asks how a free people endures.
What liberty meant for Machiavelli
For Machiavelli, liberty was not an abstract philosophical value. It was a concrete political condition: a state was free when it governed itself, made its own laws, and was not subject to a master, whether a domestic tyrant or a foreign power. According to the analysis of the Discourses, a republican government involves decentralized and balanced powers along with free speech, and the freedom of a republic is what maintains its internal security.
There is a long-running scholarly debate about exactly which kind of freedom Machiavelli championed. Skinner famously argued that Machiavelli’s idea of liberty is a form of negative freedom, best maintained through the coercive force of law. Other readers, however, stress the active, participatory dimension – that citizens have a moral duty to take part in public life. This tension is part of what makes Machiavelli endlessly interesting, and it is worth keeping in mind that he does not fit neatly into any single modern category.
Freedom as self-governance
The core of Machiavelli’s vision is that true freedom comes from self-governance. A people that makes its own laws and shapes its own destiny is free in a way that subjects of even a generous king can never be. Machiavelli observed that citizens who have tasted liberty cling to it fiercely. In The Prince itself he noted that republics carry a greater desire for vengeance and will never let the memory of their former liberty rest. This is why conquered republics are so hard to hold – the habit of freedom does not die quietly.
The lessons of Rome
Machiavelli built his entire argument on the example of ancient Rome. The Discourses takes the form of a commentary on Livy’s history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, using the Roman experience as a laboratory for republican politics. He saw Rome’s mixed constitution and civic virtue as models for enduring liberty, and he believed the love of freedom was the motivating force behind Rome’s rise to greatness.
Why Rome and not, say, contemporary Florence? Because Rome had achieved exactly the combination Machiavelli wanted to explain: it was both free and enormously powerful. For him these were not separate achievements. The freedom of the Roman people was precisely what generated their energy, their willingness to fight, and ultimately their empire.
Why conflict can strengthen freedom
One of Machiavelli’s most surprising claims is that internal conflict can actually protect liberty. Where many thinkers see social discord as a disease, he saw the tensions between the common people (the plebeians) and the nobility (the patricians) as a source of strength. These class tensions produced stronger laws and preserved freedom because each group checked the ambitions of the other.
The danger, in Machiavelli’s eyes, came from a particular direction. The grandi, or great men, driven by ambition, will always seek to subjugate their fellow citizens. A healthy republic does not eliminate this ambition but channels it through laws and institutions, so that the desire for power serves public ends rather than private domination. Conflict that is contained by institutions strengthens liberty; conflict that breaks free of them destroys it.
Liberty demands active citizens
Self-governance is impossible if citizens are passive. Machiavelli insisted that liberty has to be defended through active participation in institutions and shared responsibility, because a republic depends on the engagement of its members in a way that a monarchy never does. This is the demanding side of republican freedom: it is not something you simply receive and enjoy, but something you must continually maintain.
The threat of corruption
The greatest internal enemy of liberty, for Machiavelli, was corruption – the decay of public-spiritedness into selfishness. He warned that unchecked power or a long period of comfortable peace could quietly erode civic virtue and breed corruption. Once a people loses its capacity for self-sacrifice, no constitution can save it.
This points to a sobering insight in Machiavelli’s thought. He did not believe people are naturally drawn to liberty; the spirit of liberty has to be awakened and cultivated rather than assumed. Free institutions and free habits sustain each other, and when one weakens, the other soon follows.
Why citizens must bear arms
Perhaps no element of Machiavelli’s republicanism is as distinctive as his insistence on a citizen army. He had watched the cities of Renaissance Italy hire mercenaries – paid soldiers with no loyalty to the states that employed them – and he considered this a fatal weakness. In his Art of War, he argued for a well-organised citizen militia as the backbone of a stable and prosperous republic, rejecting mercenary and auxiliary forces as unreliable and dangerous to a state’s independence.
The logic of the citizen-soldier
Why are citizen-soldiers better than hired ones? Machiavelli’s answer connects directly to liberty. A mercenary fights for money and will flee or switch sides when the price is wrong. A citizen fights for his own home, his own laws, and his own freedom. Machiavelli observed that citizen soldiers were more loyal and obedient to the state they fought for, partly because they had ordinary professions and wanted wars to end quickly so they could return to peaceful life.
This was not merely theory for Machiavelli. As a Florentine official, he personally helped create a citizen militia, which was realised in 1506 when Florence began training and arming its first batch of recruits. He drew on Rome’s example, where soldiers were farmers by day and warriors when called, to argue that arming the people both defended the republic and deepened their stake in it. It is worth noting, however, that some recent scholars question how original or central this “citizen militia” idea really was, pointing out that Aristotle and earlier Florentine writers had made similar arguments before him.
Liberty as the source of greatness
All these threads come together in Machiavelli’s central conviction: liberty makes states strong. He believed it was in a state’s own interest to grant its citizens a great deal of freedom, because citizens who enjoy liberty feel attached to their state and are more willing to fight and die for it. Free citizens contribute willingly to the common good and to the glory of their state, and they do so without the constant fear of tyranny that haunts subjects of a despot.
This is the deep unity in Machiavelli’s republican thought. Freedom, civic participation, military strength, and political greatness are not four separate goals – they are aspects of a single system. A free people governs itself, defends itself, channels its conflicts into good laws, and grows powerful precisely because its members are invested in their shared political life. Take away the liberty, and the energy that produces greatness drains away with it.
What do you think? Does Machiavelli’s claim that freedom and military strength reinforce each other still hold true in an age of professional armies and global alliances? And if liberty has to be actively defended by engaged citizens rather than simply guaranteed by a constitution, what does that mean for the responsibilities we carry as members of a democratic society today?
References
- https://gertitashkomd.com/discourses-on-livy-c-1517-a-blueprint-for-republican-liberty/
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Quentin-Skinner
- https://study.com/academy/lesson/discourses-on-livy-by-machiavelli-summary-analysis-quotes.html
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9256.00179
- https://democracyparadox.com/2020/08/29/niccolo-machiavelli-discourses-on-livy/
- https://amc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/www.sas.upenn.edu.andrea-mitchell-center/files/uploads/Rosenblum_RepublicanismDCCWorkshop.pdf
- https://minervawisdom.com/2019/07/17/machiavellis-discourses-on-livy-5-5-why-does-machiavelli-favor-republicanism/
- https://thegreatthinkers.org/machiavelli/major-works/art-of-war/
- https://www.armstrong.edu/history-journal/history-journal-war-and-politics-in-the-thought-of-machiavelli
- https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1333&context=student_scholarship
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