The republic as it was understood from Machiavelli to the American founders has both institutional and moral aspects. Its institutional existence serves to regulate through law the relations of the citizens to one another, and the polis to foreign powers. And yet these institutions are also conceived as a site of moral development and the cultivation of virtue. The connection between the institutional and moral elements of the republic is a central republican claim, and whether or not one calls it prudence, interest properly understood, or just virtue, the moral relations of the republic transforms men into citizens.

The category of intérêt éclairé (clarified interest) or intérêt bien entendu (interest properly understood) in France is an important part of the French ‘Machiavellian Moment.’ French republicans used it as a means of articulating a vision of prudence more accommodated to Christian notions of justice. It has a distinguished intellectual history running from seventeenth-century Jansenist moralists to eighteenth-century philosophes like Helvétius and even Tocqueville's great-grandfather Malesherbes. In the eighteenth century, the kind of hiding or covering of self-love described by the seventeenth-century Jansenists remained prominent in the vision of the honnête homme; but at the same time it took on a second set of meanings used to reconcile the interests of subjects and sovereigns.