请将“This assessment founds an argument that becomes continually more refined until the end of the first book: the people, despite their widespread image, are not the force that puts the republic in danger. Assuredly they are credulous and susceptible to being co-opted by the ambitious, but their success is a consequence of the failure of governments in power who have not been able to win their confidence. Certainly they are unreliable when a crisis convulses the state, but that is because the institutions and magistrates are discredited to the point of dashing any hopes of change. On the other hand, as long as they are enlightened and rendered capable of developing a well-informed opinion, their participation in public affairs goes in the direction of the best decision. And even at those moments when they are moved to extreme acts, the intervention of a man of virtù can still put an end to this turmoil. In any event, their behavior depends on that of the men who hold political responsibilities. Considered as a mass of individuals, they have the same qualities and defects as every other human collectivity, but considered as a class, they do not make mistakes; for they are not the knowing subject; the knowledge they have is engendered from the twofold relation instituted with law and authority, and they remain ever caught up in sensible experience, tied to perception and divination—a knowledge of appearances and portents—whereas the knowledge possessed by those who govern, or more generally by the members of the dominant class, implies calculation and foresight. Thus only the dominant class makes mistakes, for its members, who are in a position to maneuver in the interests of their private ambition, are inclined to ignore the imperatives of the preservation of the state. Hence the political action that is justly founded is the one that takes class difference into account—not the one that pretends to be brought to bear from a point that is at a distance from the adversaries, for beneath that fiction it would remain within the limits of the dominant interest, but the one that, in taking up an authority that can only be located at a distance from the people, seeks its direction in popular consensus, that is, bears testimony to the desire for freedom. Freedom alone can keep the two halves of the social body from collapsing inward onto one another, from shutting down the swirling movement of appetite and fear, and thus maintain the division between civil society and the state.
The interpretation of the character of the people, already adumbrated in the three chapters I have referred to, continues in Chapter 53, which claims to establish “that a people often desires its ruin, fooled by a false good appearance; and that it is often affected by great expectations and magnificent promises.” This argument, supported by Roman, Greek, and Florentine examples, would seem to confirm the view of those who accuse the dominated class of thoughtlessness and blindness. But already, while the writer brings out, in terms well chosen to please conservatives, the propensity of the people for giving in to the seduction of demagogues, he elucidates their relation to authority. After having observed that the people, frequently fooled by false appearances, desire their own ruin, he immediately adds: “if what is good and what is evil is not incul-cated by someone in whom it has confidence, republics are exposed to the greatest dangers.” And then he goes a step further: “But when by chance the people have confidence in no one, which happens sometimes when they have been deceived, either by events or by men, the state must perish.” Thus the critique of the behavior of the populace turns out to be inseparable from the critique of the behavior of the directors of the city. It makes one begin to think that the author proceeds toward his adversary as he thinks a capable politician must proceed with respect to the ambitious citizen: he cuts the ground from under his feet, by preempting the arguments that might be seductive, and by redirecting them so as to serve his own cause. The transfer that is carried out from the question of the people to that of authority is reinforced in Chapter 54, in which we see “how powerful the authority of a grave man is in restraining an excited multitude.” It does not escape us then that in substituting the term multitude for that of people, Machiavelli again uses the language of the conservatives the better to combat the thesis they maintain. Then placing himself beneath the authority of Livy, and asserting that “the populace is strong (gagliarda) collectively, biit individually weak,” he espouses the common opinion that the multitude shows its cowardice the moment it feels the fear of punishment, but uses the argument to suggest that therefore there is no reason to fear its outbursts, and establishes, in passing, that when the outbursts are provoked by the loss of freedom, or by the love of a prince who is still alive, the people are fearsome. The support sought in the tradition turns out to prepare the most daring movement to break away from it, since in the following chapter, which the author dares to tide “The Multitude Is Wiser and More Constant than a Prince,” he attacks “our Livy and all the historians” head on. Such here is the ostentation with which he claims novelty for his remarks in which he announced, in the first lines of the Proem, the discovery of an unknown continent. “As for me,” he writes, “I do not know whether, in wanting to defend a cause that all the historians, as I have said, have opposed, I will conquer a rugged land (provincial and encounter so much difficulty there that I will have to abandon it shamefully or laboriously maintain it. But in any event, as for me, I do not judge, nor will I ever judge it to be a fault to advance reasons in defending an opinion (con le ragionî), as long as one does not resort to either authority or force.”
How can we not recognize, then, that the same necessity commands discourse to establish the truth of democracy and to win its own freedom of movement with the destruction of established opinion? Machiavelli lets it be understood that there is, beyond political thinking—shrewd and calculating—a thinking politics that makes common cause with the people’s desire for freedom; like the latter, though at a distance from its action, it brings into play the question of the being of the city: a question that is veiled in the place occupied by the prince and the prince’s discourse. This thought is not a class thought, the thought that gives expression to the people’s demands; it is not subservient to the image of the goodness of the people or the wickedness of the Grandees. It does not deny the function of authority, nor does it fail to recognize the place in which it is exerted. It looks into class division, the division of class desire, and the history in virtue of which the unity of a city is instituted as a result of the division. A thinking politics, it does not think about politics, detached as such thinking would be from its object; if that were the case, looking down from above on the conflict of the classes and claiming to determine their nature, it would again be the thought of the prince; what thinking politics thinks is what it discovers in the interpréta- tion of the dominant discourse that is being held on politics, under the authority of Livy and of all the historians, in a reading of this discourse as political discourse. Moreover, the chapter we are now discussing leaves no doubt about its being such a reading, since in its conclusion it gives us the motivation of the antidemocratic thesis. After having rejected one by one the arguments discrediting the role of the people, he adds: “but the opinion that is unfavorable to the people is bom of the circumstance that everyone speaks evil of them fearlessly and freely, even when living under their power; one speaks of princes with the greatest trepidation and the greatest reserve.” Thus we can no longer think that Livy makes an erroneous assessment; his judgment proves servile with respect to the principi—who are not only monarchs, but by and large directors of a city, the principi of the Roman or the Florentine republics.”翻译为中文