Dear Editor:
I’ll bet many historians were as surprised as I was to read A. J. Pansini’s letter in the December 1987 Perspectives, which asserted that ”The basic idea of a mixed type of government with a divided power arrangement, of checks and balances between three branches, of fragmented sources of power, adopted by the Convention in 1787 was not originated by its delegates; it was the brainchild of Niccolo Machiavelli in 1517.”
In the mid-second century BC, the historian Polybius described the Roman system of government as “three kinds of constitutions, which they designate kingship, aristocracy, democracy. But in my opinion the question may be fairly put to them, whether they name these as being the only ones, or as the best. In either case I think they are wrong. For it is plain that we must regard the best constitution as one which partakes of all these three elements.”
Having established a mixed government as the best, Polybius went on to delineate the checks and balances which protected the people from arbitrary power: “Each of these elements possesses sovereign powers; and their respective share in the power of the whole state had been regulated with such a scrupulous regard to equality and equilibrium, that no one could say for certain, not even a native, whether the Republic as a whole were an aristocracy, or democracy or despotism.
“For when any one of the three classes becomes puffed up,” concluded the Greek born Polybius, “the mutual interdependency of all the three, and the possibility of the pretensions of any one being checked and thwarted by the others, must plainly check this tendency; and so the proper equilibrium is maintained by the impulsiveness of the one part being checked by its fear of the other.” (The Histories, Book VI, tr. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh).
Pansini’s letter concluded, “None of this is new. It is time for the public to be informed and preconceptions discontinued that do not conform to reality.” I could not agree more.
Stuart McGehee
Bluefield Coltege
