Emily "Sal" Salamanca

Title: No One Is King: Machiavelli on Exile and Republican Self-Defense

Abstract: When can political exclusion strengthen rather than undermine democratic self-government? Contemporary theories of militant democracy largely treat exclusion as a defensive restriction imposed on actors who threaten democratic institutions. This article recovers a different account from Machiavelli. Across his discussions of Camillus, Scipio Africanus, the Tarquins, and Cosimo de’ Medici, exclusion serves not only to remove dangerous individuals but to regulate relations between powerful citizens and the political community. Its effects depend on whom it addresses: the excluded leader, the citizenry, other elites, or a factionalized public unable to recognize exclusion as legitimate judgment. These cases reveal a common republican principle: no citizen—however virtuous, useful, popular, or powerful—can acquire immunity from public accountability. Machiavelli thus expands democratic self-defense beyond the problem of identifying antidemocrats, directing attention instead to reintegration, political dependence, elite deterrence, and the institutional conditions under which exclusion can credibly affirm that no one is king.

Title: Aristocratic Moderation and The Politics of Stealth Wealth

Abstract: How do wealthy elites make their fortunes less offensive in republics characterized by entrenched inequality? This article identifies an underexamined mechanism: stealth wealth, the political management of elite visibility. Rather than altering institutions or beliefs about legitimacy, stealth wealth reduces the salience of economic distance. Drawing on Montesquieu’s analysis of aristocratic republics, I develop two mechanisms: perceptual equalization, which compresses visible distance between mass and elites, and contained signaling, which limits status competition within the elite. First, I show how these mechanisms were institutionalized through law in the Venetian Republic’s sumptuary regime. Then, I trace how they operate through informal norms in the United States via “quiet luxury,” performed proximity, and discursive ordinariness. Ultimately, the argument establishes the management of visibility as an additional dimension of elite power—alongside institutional and ideological capture—revealing how elite compliance with egalitarian aesthetic norms can paradoxically serve to stabilize plutocratic advantage.

Title: Beneficium sine Gratia: Pseudo-Sallust and the Institutionalization of Beneficence

Abstract: Scholars typically analyze Roman beneficence through two frameworks: Seneca’s De Clementia, which relies entirely on the princeps’ personal virtue without structural checks, and Cicero’s De Officiis, which frames beneficence as a Stoic, universal social duty. This paper argues that the pseudo-Sallustian Letter to Caesar presents a distinct third view ignored by existing literature. Writing as an adviser recommending structural reforms—such as expanding citizenship, redistributing land, randomizing jury selection, and using sortition for voting—the author grounds beneficence in institutional design rather than ruler character. The text's vocabulary reflects this shift: all four uses of beneficium denote concrete, legally binding grants (such as political rights or land) rather than a virtuous disposition. Ultimately, the Letter departs from both Seneca and Cicero by transforming beneficence from a ruler’s personal virtue into a guaranteed outcome secured through constitutional architecture.

Title: Beyond la Verità Effettuale: Machiavelli, the Etruscans, and Political Myth

Abstract: Why did Niccolò Machiavelli call the Etruscans “Tuscans”? This paper takes that terminological oddity as the entry point for a new reading of the relationship between the Discourses on Livy and the humanist tradition of Renaissance Florence. By the time Machiavelli was writing, the name “Etruscan” had been invested, through more than a century of humanist elaboration, with a dense set of political associations—autochthony, republican liberty, anti-Roman independence—that served to legitimate successive Florentine regimes. From Dante and Giovanni Villani through Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and the Medici-sponsored Accademia Fiorentina, Florentine writers had constructed an elaborate foundation myth grounding the city’s claims to self-governance and regional sovereignty in the prestige of an ancient autochthonous civilization. To invoke the name “Etruscan” was to activate this entire constellation of meaning. Machiavelli’s refusal to use it in his own analytical passages was therefore a strike against the myth’s capacity to do its work. The further claim, however, is that this deflationary move does not constitute a departure from political myth as such. Rather, drawing on Gramsci’s account of Machiavelli's “living” political writing, the paper argues that the verità effettuale clears space for Rome to perform the same functions that Etruria had been performing for the humanists: providing significance, motivating collective aspiration, and constituting a horizon of political possibility. Machiavelli’s verità effettuale, then, is not a neutral methodological principle but is itself organized around a prior mythic commitment.

Title: Christian Equality and Social Distinction: The Politics of Sumptuary Law in Puritan New England

Abstract: How did Puritan communities reconcile spiritual equality with visible social hierarchy? This article examines sumptuary legislation in colonial New England to argue that Puritan regulation of dress and consumption was not simply an expression of hostility to luxury. Rather, these laws articulated a distinct political theology of social order. By restricting costly apparel and ornament according to wealth, office, and social condition, colonial governments treated excessive display as a form of misrepresentation: an attempt to appear above the station that providence, property, or public standing had assigned. Sumptuary law therefore linked Christian concerns about pride, vanity, and worldly excess to a civic project of making social distinctions publicly legible. The article shows how Puritan political thought could affirm equality before God while legally preserving inequalities of rank, and argues that sumptuary legislation offers an overlooked site for understanding the relationship among religion, hierarchy, and experiments in self-government in early America.