The power of “wealth,nobility and men:” Inequality and corruption in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

Abstract

This article draws a connection between socio-economic inequality and political corruption based on a reading of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. Prevailing interpretations of the Histories attribute the moral corruption and civil conflict Machiavelli condemns as the source of Florence’s republican failure to the unique historical conditions of early-modern Florence. In this article, I trace Florentine corruption and factionalism to the perennial problem of inequality. Through his narration of the two centuries of Florentine history leading up to Cosimo de Medici’s ascent to first citizen, I contend, Machiavelli demonstrates the deleterious effect of inequality on the social relations, organizational forms, and modes of collective action in Florence. At the same time, his depiction of Florence’s transformation from a quasi-feudal commune dominated by a nobility with private armies to a modern commercial city ruled through patronage illustrates the contingent modality of inequality and the particularly subversive way it can manifest in the more civil republics of the modern era.