Machiavelli’s Militia and the Difference Between a Crowd and a Team
A shared purpose starts the conversation. An organization still has to make cooperation possible.
A leader announces an ambitious goal. Everyone agrees that it matters. The meeting ends with enthusiasm, and the work begins to stall.
One person is waiting for a decision. Another lacks the equipment. Two departments have accepted responsibility for the same task while a third task has no owner. The leader sees uneven execution and asks why people are insufficiently committed.
Before answering that question, it is worth asking whether the organization has supplied what commitment needs.
Machiavelli encountered a far more consequential version of this problem while helping organize Florence’s militia. Men had to be selected, assembled, trained, supplied, and placed within a functioning command structure. The government’s intention to maintain a force of its own required an extraordinary amount of ordinary work.
That administrative and behavioral work is central to my argument for Machiavelli as the father of organizational psychology through intellectual parentage.
The military project behind the famous advice
The militia created in 1506 generated records at several levels. Muster rolls, lists, and notes served daily military operations. Correspondence linked governing authorities and officers. Historian Andrea Guidi’s research restores these documentary practices to the picture of Machiavelli’s military undertaking and explains the difficulties created by uneven preservation. Guidi, “Per peli e per segni”.
A list of personnel is easy to overlook when reading about power. Yet organized action depends on knowing who is available, who is responsible, and what has actually been supplied. Records allow an institution to retain information beyond one person’s memory or one conversation.
The familiar description “citizen militia” also needs care. As the book’s historical analysis explains, the early infantry drew heavily on Florence’s rural subjects. These men did not all possess the political standing of the citizens who governed the city. Common service existed alongside unequal authority and local obligations.
That distinction matters when interpreting loyalty. Recruiting people from a territory does not establish that they share one understanding of their obligations. A public institution must still deal with the different relationships and demands its members bring into it.
Confidence can depend on knowing what others will do
In Book II of The Art of War, the dialogue’s principal military speaker, Fabrizio, connects a soldier’s confidence with the organization around him. A man who knows where to withdraw and who will take his place has a different basis for action from someone who expects to be abandoned. Training includes understanding signals, maintaining formation, and recovering order after disruption. These are prescriptions in a literary dialogue, rather than proof that the Florentine militia achieved every proposed capability. Read The Art of War, Book II.
The organizational insight reaches beyond military formations. Consider an employee responsible for a demanding customer problem. Confidence may depend partly on knowing who can authorize a remedy, when specialist help will arrive, and whether another person can take over if the problem exceeds the employee’s role.
A motivational speech leaves those questions unanswered. A workable arrangement gives the person something dependable to act within.
This is a contemporary application, and its limits matter. A workplace is not a battlefield. Military coercion and violence do not supply a legitimate management template. What transfers is the question of how interdependent people gain a usable understanding of one another’s responsibilities.
Teamwork requires behaviors that can be observed
Modern teamwork research gives that question more precise language. Eduardo Salas, Dana Sims, and C. Shawn Burke proposed five central components: team leadership, mutual performance monitoring, backup behavior, adaptability, and team orientation. Their framework also emphasizes coordinating mechanisms such as shared mental models, mutual trust, and closed-loop communication. It is a research synthesis and theoretical framework, not a claim that one checklist guarantees success. Salas, Sims, and Burke, “Is There a ‘Big Five’ in Teamwork?”.
The comparison with Machiavelli is intellectual rather than genealogical. We do not need to claim that these researchers inherited their model directly from him. We can examine why people working centuries apart attend to the relationship between individual conduct and collective arrangement.
For a present-day team, the practical questions become concrete. Do colleagues notice when someone is overloaded? Can they help without creating another failure? Does the person receiving an instruction confirm what it means? Do people understand how their work connects to the next person’s task?
These questions turn “team spirit” into behavior that can be examined and improved.
A serious account must include failure
Machiavelli’s military project should never become a leadership success story with the difficult ending removed. The Florentine militia was part of the republic’s military effort, and the disaster at Prato in 1512 remains an essential test of its limitations. My book considers that failure alongside the earlier recovery of Pisa, asking what each outcome can establish about organization, resources, command, and circumstances.
The practical militia and the later dialogue also belong to different moments. Mikael Hörnqvist’s historical treatment examines both the military project and The Art of War, helping preserve the relationship between practical experience and later prescription. Hörnqvist, “Machiavelli’s Military Project and the Art of War”.
A favorable outcome cannot certify an entire design. A disastrous outcome demands investigation of the design and the conditions under which it operated. Defending a preferred system by saying it was never implemented perfectly can make that system impossible to evaluate.
The leadership implication is demanding: responsibility includes asking whether the organization can realistically supply the people, time, resources, and coordination its strategy requires.
Before asking for more effort
A useful team review can begin with one important piece of work and follow it from intention to completion:
- Identify its owner and the decisions that owner can actually make.
- Verify the resources and information required, including dependencies outside the team.
- Rehearse the handoffs and the response to a foreseeable disruption.
- Check that support exists when the first plan fails.
- Compare the finished result with the intended result, including the burden placed on the people doing the work.
These are proposed applications of the organizational questions developed here. They invite observation rather than assuming that a weak result reveals a weak character.
Machiavelli’s importance becomes clearer when we see him among lists, dispatches, competing obligations, and imperfect arrangements. His work continually returns to the gap between wanting collective action and making it possible.
In The Psychology of Machiavelli: How Human Behavior Became a Science of Power, that gap helps explain both the formation of his mind and the substance of his organizational inquiry. Understanding it remains useful whenever a leader is tempted to demand commitment before examining the conditions in which people must act.
Explore the book’s central argument in The Psychology of Machiavelli.
Published 2026-10-21. Last updated 2026-10-21. For attribution and republication guidance, use the newsroom story desk.