Republic and Constitution in Machiavelli’s Discourses

In Machiavelli’s Discourses “republic” does not indicate an abstract concept, but it always refers to a specific place and to a well-defined life practice which differs radically from other forms of political organization, such as the principality, the kingdom, and the empire. Analysing the ancient Roman Republic and other realities such as Sparta, Venice, or the Swiss, Machiavelli states that the republics have their ultimate purpose in the freedom of citizens and in the autonomy of the city which implies its defence and its expansion. The achievement of this goal depends on their “constitution” that Machiavelli conceives in the medical sense of the term: as when we speak of “good or bad constitution of the body”. It is a meaning not only juridical and quite different from the constitutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The typical form of the republican constitutions is the mixed form. But the analysis of the republican constitution of Rome leads Machiavelli to a different reading from that of traditional reflection on the “mixed government”. Through struggles a republic fuses among them not only the three forms of government and numerous other institutions, but above all the humours, modifying the human nature.