Abstract
Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser encountered Machiavelli’s work and they both attempted to rethink the very possibility of political practice through their respective readings of the Florentine thinker. In a certain way for both Gramsci and Althusser, the reading of Machiavelli was the experimental site where they elaborated their own conceptions of politics, either in the form of Gramsci’s quest for the ‘modern Prince’, the political and organizational form of a potential hegemony of the subaltern, or in the form of Althusser’s constant redefinition of a potential new practice of politics in a communist perspective. The reading of Machiavelli was for Althusser also one of the terrains upon which he attempted to confront Gramsci, something that is particularly evident in a series of Althusser’s texts in the 1970s from Machiavelli and Us to the recently published Que faire? The aim of this article is to do a comparative reading of the approaches to Machiavelli offered by Gramsci and Althusser, focusing in particular on the tensions running through Althusser’s reading of Gramsci’s writings on Machiavelli. In particular, I will offer a reading of Althusser’s extensive criticism of Gramsci in 1977–1978, linking it to his critique of Eurocommunism. Then, I will go back to Gramsci, and in particular Notebook 13, in order to bring forward not only the aspects of Gramsci that Althusser tended to overlook but also how Gramsci is in fact thinking the very question that Althusser attempted to pose, namely that of a new practice of politics for communism.
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Notes
‘I discovered Machiavelli for the first time in August [1961], at Bertinoro, in an extraordinary and large house on a hill dominating the plain of Emilia. Franca lived there and I had known her for hardly a week’ (Althusser 1994, 481).
In Althusser 2006a.
In Althusser 1969.
For a presentation and criticism of Althusser’s critique Sotiris 2017.
Althusser takes up this point also in his 1977 lecture on ‘Machiavelli’s Solitude’: ‘I should rather say that he is a theoretician of the political preconditions of the constitution of a national state, the theoretician of the foundation of a new state under a new prince, the theoretician of the durability of this state; the theoretician of the strengthening and expansion of this state. This is a quite original position, since he does not think the accomplished fact of absolute monarchies or their mechanisms, but rather thinks the fact to be accomplished, what Gramsci called the ‘having to be’ of a national state to be founded, and under extraordinary conditions, since these are the conditions of the absence of any political form appropriate to the production of this result’ (Althusser 1999, 121).
Gramsci 1975.
Althusser and Balibar 1970, 45.
‘The common notions are an Art, the art of the Ethics itself: organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting’ (Deleuze 1988, 119).
Monstesquie: Politics and History in Althusser 1972.
This is the title of a collection of texts by Marx and Engels on the Paris Commune, with an introduction by Daniel Bensaïd (Marx and Engels 2008)
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Sotiris, P. Gramsci and Althusser Encountering Machiavelli: Hegemony and/as New Practice of Politics. Jus Cogens 3, 119–139 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42439-020-00030-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42439-020-00030-1