classes and that such a struggle may actually strengthen a state and promote the cause of liberty. He notes the belief among historians that Rome was a disorderly republic beset by confusion because the plebeians and patricians were in a constant state of strife:
Critics, therefore, should be more sparing in finding fault with the government of Rome, and should reflect that the excellent results which this republic obtained could have been brought about only by excellent causes. hence if tumults led to the creation of the tribunes, tumults deserve the highest praise, since, besides giving the populace a share in the administration, they served as the guardian of Roman liberties. . . (Machiavelli, Discourses 115).
Machiavelli is here more accepting of public "tumults" than he seems to be in The Prince, where maintaining order is given high priority.
Machiavelli shows in his discussion of the transition from servitude to freedom that a republican form of government is to be preferred if the human beings who make up that form of government are sufficiently good, while a system given to corruption needs a stronger hand. For that matter, there are always those in society who are not sufficiently good to be trusted to perform rightly without coercive control over their actions. A shift in how the state was viewed had taken place in the Roman era and would be continued in Machiavelli's era. The republican form of government was developed during the era of the Roman Republic and then revived during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Niccolo Machiavelli celebrated this revival in his The Discourses when he argued with those who believed that the people acting collectively were less wise than a single king or prince. Machiavelli found them subject to the same pressures and the same errors, of which a leading one is the pressure to change the laws in order to produce a more effective system giving mo...