I went to Barnes and Noble and bought Machiavelli’s Discourses about a week ago. I’ve been reading it consistently over the past seven days and I have finally finished the introduction.  This may sound diminutive, but it was 50 pages long. I guess it suits the length of Machiavelli’s book, which is 500 pages long.

The introduction was a great start to my project, and I feel I will be quoting its author Bernard Crick extensively in my final project. I found his style of writing to be very complex, and often convoluted. He burdens his sentences with so many independent clauses I often had to reread paragraphs because I became lost in his rhetoric. I feel his style of writing mirrors that of Machiavelli, who also wrote in long, serpentine sentences that connects many independent clauses with commas, colons and semicolons. It will prepare me for the large volume of information I will have to decipher in the near future.

Interestingly, according to Crick’s introduction Machiavelli predicts many of the components of the US political system. Here are some examples:

1. “The basic point is that he [Machiavelli], as it were, a three rank scale for his general analysis of political systems- upper (as aristocratic), middle (bourgeois?) and lower, but advocates ‘looping off’ the top when it comes to ensuring stability in a republic, and thereafter uses a two-rank scale. Hence he either uses ‘Grandi’ (which can mean nobility even) very loosely when discussing a republic, or is flattering ‘the cits’, or is using it to mean something like ‘ruling class’ irrespective of which social group is in the saddle.”

Machiavelli seems to predict the two-party system (Democrats vs. Republicans).

2. “nor do they realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the populace and that of the upper class and that all legislation favorable to liberty is brought about by the clash between them”

Sounds like the House of Representatives and the Senate.

3. “since they[prudent legislatures] thought that such a government would be stronger and more stable, for if in one and same state there was principality, aristocracy and democracy, each would keep watch over another”

Sounds like the three branches of government: principality=executive, democracy=legislative and aristocracy=judicial

4. “the art of war is an extension of the whole social condition of a society. In other words, much of what he[Machiavelli] has to say about military technology and its relationship to politics can be boldly and roughly, but helpfully, translated into modern terms of industrial technology. He even assumes for military factors (as Marx did for economic) that decline and eventual collapse must follow failure to expand: one can never stand still, expansion and production have mastered us.”

It sounds like Machiavelli predicts the power economics grants a political system. In fact economics was the main reason the North won the Civil War and the Allies won WWII.

I think the writers of the constitution definitely borrowed many of Machiavelli’s ideas. I find his ideas to be very applicable to today’s world. It amazes me that someone could predict the above four things 250 years before the US Constitution was ratified and nearly 400 years before the industrial revolution.