Machiavelli’s Critique of Leonardo Bruni: The Problem of Political Speech in the Florentine Histories

Recent scholarship has shown the centrality of factionalism and conflict to Machiavelli’s understanding of political life. The present essay builds on this literature by showing that Machiavelli’s view of political speech precludes that it may be a moderating medium for political conflict, as had been hoped by his classical and neoclassical predecessors. Machiavelli brings this theoretical issue into focus in the Florentine Histories through his serpentine and sometimes parodic critique of the great humanist man of letters, Leonardo Bruni. Reading the work this way uncovers a layer of Machiavelli’s theoretical understanding which is otherwise concealed. In what follows, by reading selective episodes drawn from the second book of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, I show his dissent from the ‘neoclassical’ understanding of the foundation of the city – as argued by Aristotle and Bruni – and then show that the attempts at political dialogue depicted by Machiavelli (parodying episodes in Bruni) exhibit the inefficacy of political speech to unify the city. The payoff is then evident: the classical and neoclassical attempt to unify the city through the cultivation of the rational virtues, elevated in depictions of gossamer rhetoric, is doomed to failure.