The Concept of ‘Imperio’ in Machiavelli’s Political Philosophy

• In Event: Machiavelli Mini-Conference: Machiavelli’s Freedom, between State and Empire

Abstract

This paper aims to refine our understanding of one fundamental piece of the conceptual architecture of Machiavelli’s political philosophy, namely his concept of ‘imperio’. Machiavelli’s ‘imperio’ tracks closely the Latin imperium, a term which by the Late Roman Republic had accrued two salient layers of meaning: the power of a Roman magistrate to command individuals and groups in both civil and military contexts, and the sovereign power of command held by the Roman people as a collective agent; it was only in a later semantic development that the term also came to refer to a territory.
Although Machiavelli does use ‘imperio’ in a territorial sense, and speaks of the ‘imperio’ of individuals and social groups, this paper is concerned with his application of the term as denoting the sovereign power of command exercised by princes and by peoples, a power lodged in the body of the state itself. This conception of ‘imperio’ is highly conspicuous in both Machiavelli’s major works of political philosophy. It is integral to his definition of the state at the opening of “The Prince” (c. 1513): “All the states, all the dominions that have had and have ‘imperio’ over men, have been and are republics or principalities.”
As I indicate, the prince’s task in acquiring and maintaining a state largely consists in prudently dismantling existing relationships of command and obedience and re-centering them on the new princely person. I then turn to the “Discourses” (c. 1518), in which Machiavelli continues to conceptualize the state as a body formed by ‘imperio’, but here his concern is to explain how a people can establish itself as the locus of sovereign command, and thus maintain the state in a free condition. While we can detect a degree of conservatism in the prince’s aims as described in “The Prince”––new princes generally seek merely to obtain and then hold on to imperio––in the “Discourses” Machiavelli wants us to consider a people’s imperio as an expansive power. I conclude by outlining the basic shape of Machiavelli’s complicated thoughts about the consequences that the enlargement of one people’s imperio has for those foreign peoples brought under it.

Author

• Adam Woodhouse