Decentralized Civics

Machiavelli on statecraft, from The Discourses, section "How many Kinds of States there are and of what Kind was that of Rome"

He then goes on to advise a mixture of the three, in the spirit of checks and balances. Elsewhere in the discourses he says that a certain degree of conflict between the plebs and the aristocracy is necessary to legislatively ensure liberty.

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Here is one bit of him making this claim:

Great passage! 

Seeing good political design as a “balance of conflicts” is even more radical than the related observation of Montesquieu and the US Founders:

Bc Machiavelli is not only claiming that institutional powers must be allowed to fight each other, but that classes of *actual people* must be as well.