Machiavelli Discourse On Livy

Today we often associate stability of states with their ability to protect the freedom of its citizens. Political scientists constantly turn to democracies that guarantee the freedom of religion, press, and speech as the model form of government. However, some may argue stability is dependent on institutions and the alignment of national/public interests. Thomas Hobbes and Niccolo Machiavelli, two prominent philosophers that engaged in this discussion, held strikingly different views about the relationship between individual interests and the preservation of civic order. Machiavelli in his work, Discourses on Livy, expand the scope of the argument, stating that public interests are critical to the establishment, organization, and preservation

Machiavelli argues not only of its inevitability but also its necessity. This clash of classes and ideas serves a very crucial role. Machiavelli implies that the people must check on the interests of nobles. In additions, tumults engage the populace to perform its most important duty – active civic participation. Therefore, tumults, clashes of noble and public interest, is absolutely essential to the preservation of civic order. These political disunions display the importance of opinion and discourse in a republic. Finally, Machiavelli stresses that tumults, although chaotic, achieve a necessary purpose – to benefit public liberty. Machiavelli develops a chain reaction, arguing that tumults lead to good laws which then leads to good education and subsequently leads to good examples of

Hobbes makes a clear distinction between civil society and the state of nature. Although everyone has total liberty in the state of nature, Hobbes argues that this isn't a rationally desirable choice. Nature, as he explains it, "hath made men so equal in the faculties of the body and mind, as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he” (Hobbes 183). This equality, Hobbes states, induces chaos and fear. Since every man is equal in strength to one another, then it is possible for men to be enticed to take one another’s life, liberty and/or property. Hobbes best explains it by the following, “From this equality of ability ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore, if any two men desire the same thing which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies” (Hobbes 184). This state of war is characterized as a period of total, chaos, fear and liberty. Hobbes believes that