Returning to First Principles - America's Machiavellian Moment?

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America’s Machiavellian Moment: When Republics Must Return to First Principles

Niccolò Machiavelli is best known to most readers for The Prince, the short and unsettling treatise on power that gave the English language an adjective for cunning. But in his longer and more searching work, the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli offered a different kind of warning. Republics, he argued, are like bodies. They decay. Left to themselves, the habits and institutions that once made them vigorous grow soft, corrupt, and forgetful of their own purposes. The only remedy is a periodic return to first principles, a deliberate act of recovery that reaches back to the founding moment and renews the convictions that animated it.

That diagnosis is not merely Florentine antiquarianism. It is the lens through which the historian J.G.A. Pocock, in his 1975 book The Machiavellian Moment, traced a continuous republican tradition running from Renaissance Italy through the English Civil War and into the American Revolution. A “Machiavellian moment,” in Pocock’s phrase, is the instant at which a republic first confronts the problem of its own preservation in time. The question for Americans in 2026 is whether we are living through such a moment now, and whether we still possess the means to respond to it.

The Cyclical Logic of Republican Decay

The intuition that political orders rise and fall is older than Machiavelli. The Greek historian Polybius, writing in the second century before Christ, argued that every regime moves through a natural lifespan of birth, zenith, and decline. The Romans, Polybius believed, had partially arrested this cycle by mixing monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements into a single constitutional structure. Machiavelli inherited this framework and added an innovation: the cycle can be interrupted, but only by conscious civic action. Periodically, citizens and statesmen must drag the regime back toward the ideals of its founding before corruption hardens into permanence.

The American founders absorbed this argument, often without naming its source. They were obsessive students of the Roman Republic, not chiefly for its institutions, which they considered partly outmoded, but for its biographies. The Federalist essays were signed Publius, after the Roman who helped overthrow the Etruscan monarchy. Washington was praised as a new Cincinnatus. John Adams was called the American Cicero. These references were not affectation. They were a way of saying that public life requires exemplars, and that the character needed to sustain a republic is best learned from those who have already done it.

Renewal in the American Tradition

If Pocock is right, the Revolution itself was an act of conservative recovery. The colonists revolted not to invent a new political order, but to preserve an older Whig inheritance of self-government and popular sovereignty that the British Crown had begun to dismantle. The American Revolution was, in this reading, almost a sequel to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a defense of long-standing liberties against an encroaching corruption.

The pattern recurs. Lincoln, in the crisis of secession, framed the Civil War as a return to the proposition that all men are created equal, the proposition the founders had embedded in the Declaration but failed to consummate. Theodore Roosevelt confronted a Gilded Age in which concentrated wealth was producing concentrated political power and threatening to convert the republic into an oligarchy. Franklin Roosevelt, however one judges the New Deal, framed his reordering of federal power as a fulfillment of Gouverneur Morris’s promise in the Preamble that the Constitution had been ordained for posterity. Ronald Reagan insisted that the contest with the Soviet Union was not merely strategic but moral, an argument that liberty itself is good, drawn directly from the Declaration of Independence.

What these episodes share is a common structure. Each begins with a sense of drift, the suspicion that the country has wandered from convictions it once held without quite noticing. Each is led by statesmen who insist that what looks like radical change is in fact restoration; would might seem revolutionary is actually conservative. And each succeeds because the underlying argument is persuasive: the principles being recovered are recognizably the country’s own.

The Signs of a Contemporary Crisis

There are reasons to suspect that the United States is approaching another such moment, though not yet through it. The signs are visible in the eagerness with which partisans of both sides propose to dismantle the traditional rules and norms of the republic. Some Republicans advocate eliminating the Senate filibuster. Some Democrats advocate the National Popular Vote Compact, the expansion of the Supreme Court, or other workarounds to constitutional structure and limits. These are not equally consequential, but they share a common logic. They treat the small-r republican character of American government as an obstacle to be removed rather than as the very thing that makes our constitutional order unique in the world.

The United States is a democratic republic. The democratic half means that the people are sovereign and that elections determine who governs. The republican half means that sovereignty is exercised through rules and institutions that no momentary majority is entitled to suspend. The nine-member Supreme Court is not in the Constitution, but at this point it is constitutive of American practice. The filibuster, likewise, can be seem in a similar light. When these rules come to be seen as tactical inconveniences, the regime is closer to Machiavelli’s definition of corruption than its participants tend to realize.

Educating Citizens for a Republic

The harder question is what a return would require. Part of the answer is institutional renewal, of the kind being attempted at programs like the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State, or the Hamilton School at the University of Florida. These efforts work around the edges of existing universities to reconstitute departments that take the formation of statesmen seriously, rather than treating higher education as a credentialing service for ambitious young people.

The deeper failure, though, is one of imagination. The founders looked to Roman statesmen because they needed exemplars of civic conduct under republican conditions. Americans today have their own treasury of figures whose lives could serve the same purpose: Washington, Lincoln, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, the last a model of compromise as a republican virtue. That so few graduates of the country’s most prestigious universities could say anything substantive about Clay is itself a measure of what has been lost.

Whether the United States can recover its first principles is not a question any single essay can answer. What can be said is that the country has done it before, and more than once. The republic has survived the spoils system, the Civil War, the Depression, and the Cold War. It has done so each time by remembering, often at the edge of forgetting, what it was originally for.

Read Jay Cost’s article about this topic here.