Theorizing the multitude before Machiavelli. Marsilius of Padua between Aristotle and Ibn Rushd
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851221074104 |
| Author | Alessandro Mulieri |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theorizing the multitude
before Machiavelli. Marsilius
of Padua between Aristotle
and Ibn Rushd
Alessandro Mulieri
Research Foundation Flanders & Institute of Philosophy, KU
Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
Abstract
Even if political theorists rarely read him, Italian political thinker, Marsilius of Padua, pre-
sents one of the most radical theories of the multitude prior to Machiavelli and Spinoza.
This article reconstructs Marsilius of Padua’s political theory of the multitud e in his
Defender of Peace and pays special attention to two main sources from which
Marsilius frames his theory: Aristotle and Ibn Rushd. Compared to Aristotle , Marsilius
advances a more epistemic view of the multitude as a lawmaker. Marsilius’ideas on
the multitude also depend on Ibn Rushd’s theory of collective knowledge and, to a
certain extent, on his position on natural law.
Keywords
Aristotle, collective prudence, Ibn Rushd, Marsilius of Padua, multitude
The concept of the multitude takes centre stage in many important contemporary studies
in political theory. For example, in their trilogy on the multitude, Negri and Hardt (2004)
have pioneered efforts to reflect upon the multitude and on how it is a key factor of social
and political change in domestic and transnational settings. Many authors have followed
them in once again placing the multitude centre-stage in political theory. Reflection on
this concept has also recently overlapped with the debate on the complex relationship
Corresponding author:
Alessandro Mulieri, Research Foundation Flanders& Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Kardinaal Mercierplein
2, Leuven, Belgium.
Email: alessandro.mulieri@kuleuven.be
Article
European Journal of Political Theory
2023, Vol. 22(4) 542–564
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851221074104
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
between the people and the plebs (Vatter, 2012; Rancière, 2019). Contemporary theorists
of the multitude have now established what could be defined as a proper “canon”of thin-
kers who are regarded as theorists of the multitude in the history of political thought. In
Antiquity, long-standing and complex genealogies of the subject of the multitude go back
to the analysis of the problem of the double meaning of the idea of the demos, which can
refer either to the whole of the people or to one component of it, i.e. the poor (Kalyvas,
2019; Rancière, 2019; Vatter, 2012).
In the early modern period, theorists of the multitude have focussed extensively on the
work of Baruch Spinoza who affords a central role to the multitude in the idea of dem-
ocracy that he defends in his political treatise and in other works (Balibar, 2011; Negri,
2000). Moreover, an increasing number of theorists from Marxist and Althusserian back-
grounds have devoted fundamental work to treating Machiavelli as a thinker of the multi-
tude (Del Lucchese, 2009; Del Lucchese et al., 2015), a topic that is now the object of
heated debate both in political theory and in the history of political thought.
1
While
some theorists of the multitude have made scattered references to late medieval theories
of the multitude (Vatter, 2012), most interpreters do not extensively engage with such
references. For example, Marsilius, and in fact any medieval political authors, have
been largely or even completely ignored in contemporary genealogies of the multitude
proposed by radical democrats such as Negri and Hardt (2004), Del Lucchese (2009)
but also in recent studies on the contemporary relevance of Ibn Rushd and Averroist phil-
osophy (Agamben, 2007; Coccia, 2005; Vatter, 2020). Therefore, in surveying the
growing literature on the topic, one cannot help but notice the striking absence of
studies on medieval thinkers’accounts of the multitude.
This lack of scholarly engagement with medieval thought on the multitude is at odds
with the fact that numerous medieval thinkers systematically theorized the problem of the
multitude, which took centre-stage especially after the rediscovery and translation(s) of
Aristotle’sPolitics into Latin in the 1260s
2
. Aristotle’s defence of the multitude in
book 3 of the Politics especially became a topic of commentary for several theorists.
Among them, 14th-century political theorist Italian theorist, Marsilius of Padua, was
the thinker who most extensively dealt with the problem of the multitude and, based
on Aristotle, developed a radical theory of the function of the multitude in the political
community. As we will see, Marsilius broke with many previous authors’assumptions
on the theory of the multitude and developed them into a coherent and comprehensive
democratic theory.
In order to fill the gap in the scholarly literature that ignores theories of the multitude
prior to Machiavelli, the present paper aims to investigate how Marsilius of Padua theo-
rized the multitude in his political thought, focussing especially, but not exclusively, on
his main work, the Defender of Peace (1324). This investigation is important not simply
because of the radicalism of Marsilius’account of the multitude but also because of the
way Marsilius handled the main sources that dealt with the multitude in his own context.
In designing his theory of the multitude, Marsilius broke with all of the previous inter-
preters of the political Aristotle and, as I will attempt to show, also drew not only on
sources from his immediate context, but also on sources from outside the Latin and
Christian world. In fact, I will show that Marsilius’ideas on the multitude resulted
Mulieri 543
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