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PARTISAN Rf,VIEW
times should permit it and when his narrow cultivation of his own
private interests had borne fruit--one might expect a deep renewal
which at a bound would revive the entire nation. "Render unto
Caesar what is Caesar's," Guicciardini seems to want to say: but is
this not also the reply of Christianity to all those who would like
to settle public affairs before private ones? The
particulare
has no
passions, and certainly no political passions; his chief end is to save
himself; the man of Machiavelli no longer has anything to save,
and the political passion, for want of real individual interests, is his
last remaining lifeline. Not being free within himself, as a result
of corruption or spiritual impoverishment, he must of necessity make
freedom consist of an illusory participation in political affairs. In
short, man as seen either by Guicciardini or by Machiavelli is far
removed from the ideal which tempers private life with public service.
The first sacrifices all other values to the
particulare,
the second to
politics. But the first at least, as Voltaire says at the end of
Candide,
"cultivates
his
garden."
Accordingly for Machiavelli, so emotionally dried up and ex–
hausted, worn out and weakened, politics meant much more than a
simple occupation and duty, much more than an intellectual pastime;
politics were a goad and a reason for living- an artificial means of
feeling morally alive. This desperate clinging to political life, now
that the moral and religious life was dead, explains first of all the
,abstract thought in Machiavelli, which was not nourished by any
deep ethical feeling; and it explains also the particular form Machia–
velli had to adopt to express his thought.
Think about it: Machiavelli was a republican, and had, further–
more-as is obvious in every passage of the
Discourses
and the
Prince
-a very clear idea, absolutely firm and irreducible, of what free–
dom was, what its advantages were, what eviJ effects could result
from its suppression.
If
this were not enough, the torture to which
he was subjected at the time of the Boscoli and Capponi con–
spiracies must have rekindled in him, with unforgettable physical
arguments, his convinced and reasoned appreciation of the free life.
And yet it is precisely this same Machiavelli, esteemer of liberty
and defender of the republican regime, who offered his services to
the Medici immediately after their return to F1orence, and who in
