How Original is Machiavelli?

M ACHIAVELLI'S UNDERSTANDING OF virtue and fortune is central to his originality as a political philosopher, but the degree and character of that originality is a much debated question. In one of the most influential recent interpretations, Quentin Skinner argues that the context for Machiavelli's discussion of virtue and fortune is provided by the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Augustinian Christianity, Skinner argues, had viewed fortune as a lawlike force of divine necessity that left little or no room for human freedom.' According to Skinner, the humanists by contrast reverted to the belief that the human predicament is best seen as a struggle between man's will and fortune's willfulness. 2 In this view, Skinner claims, fortune is no longer seen as the inexorable force of providence, but as a capricious power of irrational happenstance. By exerting the creative powers of his will against this flux, man is able to shape and control his own destiny, mould his own fate, and remake his social world to fit his own desires.3 Understanding the humanists' revival of this classical theme compels us, Skinner believes, to abandon the textbook view that Machiavelli's argument is entirely sui generis. But this will also enable us to see Machiavelli's originality clearly, as when, for example, he departs from the more orthodox defenders of republican liberty by rejecting the conventional Christian meaning of virtue.4