Debating the Republic: The Expression of Political Opinion in Sixteenth-Century Florence

In the Discourses, Machiavelli suggested that civic conflict, that is the clash between competing interests, was healthy and indeed had protected the liberty of the Roman republic. This paper proposes that this suggestion was not the result of abstract theorizing by Machiavelli, but rather that such expression of opinion and ideas—what Phil Withington has identified as a civic public sphere—formed a constituent element of the civic republican tradition of Renaissance Florence. The civic public discourse of the republic was, above all else, an interested one. The participants staked out, pursued and defended individual, familial, and corporate interests. Many of the networks by which such politico-intellectual exchanges occurred were face-to-face, as such they remain beyond the reach of historians, but the records of the consulte e pratiche and also personal correspondence provide opportunities to examine how this civic public sphere operated. This paper examines the opportunities and obstacles to freedom of speech in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Florence and discusses how certain networks operated to facilitate or impinge on the exchange of opinion.