Abstract
The interpretation I offer of Machiavelli calls for a redefinition of the terms in which his legacy to modernity has been understood to date. I take as my starting point Strauss’s interpretation of this legacy because he proposes one of its strongest version, and one which is adopted, in its central points, even by thinkers who wish to defend, rather than reject, the project of modernity. Stated baldly, Strauss argues that modern political thought, from Machiavelli and Hobbes, through Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, culminating in Nietzsche, is thoroughly historicist,1 by which he means that it cannot “answer the question of right and wrong or of the best social order in a universally valid manner, in a manner valid for all historical epochs, as political philosophy requires.”2
“Il nome della libertà, il quale forza alcuno non doma, tempo alcuno non consuma e merito alcuno non contrappesa.”
Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine, II 34
“It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again.”
Foucault, What is Enlightenment?
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References
As Strauss argues: “Machiavelli rejects the whole philosophic and theological tradition…. One must start from how men do live; one must lower one’s sights. The immediate corollary is the reinterpretation of virtue: virtue must not be understood as that for the sake of which the commonwealth exists, but virtue exists exclusively for the sake of the commonwealth; political life proper is not subject to morality; morality is not possible outside of political society; it presupposes political society; political society cannot be established and preserved by staying within the limits of morality, for the simple reason that the effect or the conditioned cannot precede the cause or condition. Furthermore, the establishment of political society and even of the most desirable political society does not depend on chance, for chance can be conquered or corrupt matter can be transformed into incorrupt matter.” (Strauss, “Three Waves of Modernity,” 86–87).
Luc Ferry, Political Philosophy 1. Rights: the New Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
See the argument in Luc Ferry, Political Philosophy 2. The System of Philosophies of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Jürgen Habermas, “The classical doctrine of politics in relation to social philosophy,” in Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 54. See also his claim that “if the theoretically based point of departure of the Ancients was how human beings could comply practically with the natural order, then the practically assigned point of departure of the Modems is how human beings could technically master the threatening evils of nature.” (Ibid., 51).
Habermas illustrates the internal relation and “radical tension between facticity and validity,” as follows: “validity claims are Janus-faced: as claims, they overshoot every context; at the same time, they must be both raised and accepted here and now if they are to support an agreement effective for coordination — for this there is no acontextual standpoint. The universalistic meaning of the claimed validity exceeds all contexts, but only the local, binding act of acceptance enables the validity claims to bear the burden of social integration for a context-bound everyday practice.” (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 21).
My usage of the term “facticity” is close to Heidegger’s employment of the term Faktizität in his writings around Being and Time. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1995).
“Chance is not simply the drawing of lots, but raising the stakes in every attempt to master chance through the will to power, and giving rise to the risk of an even greater chance. The world we know is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value. On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events.” (Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader [New York: Penguin, 19911, 89).
Similarly, Stuart Hampshire argues in Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) that Machiavelli, more so than Nietzsche, poses the most intractable problems for a moral view of politics.
One can say that Machiavelli is simply drawing the consequences of Plato’s belief that “those who practice philosophy in the right way [i.e., in order to live the good life] are in training for dying.” (Plato Phaedo 67e).
Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 112–113.
Jürgen Habermas, “Law and Morality,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values VIII (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 217–279.
“In the legal mode of validity, the facticity of the enforcement of law is intertwined with the legitimacy of a genesis of law that claims to be rational because it guarantees liberty.” (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 28).
As Foucault says, politics “is war, a war continued by other means.” (Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 [New York: Pantheon, 1980], 90).
“Not only being known is present in the things known as a consequence of the good, but also existence and being are in them besides as a result of it, although the good is not being but is still beyond being [epekeina tes ousias], exceeding it in age and power.” (Plato Republic,509b-c).
Plato Laws 710a-d; Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1109a25–30.
Strauss, “Three Waves of Modernity,” 86. Strauss also says that for the ancients justice is “compliance with the natural order.” (Ibid., 87).
Aristotle expresses the doctrine that “to rule and be ruled” (to command and to obey) is something good because it allows for the attainment of a virtuous character: “It has been well said that he who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander. The excellence of the two is not the same, but the good citizen ought to be capable of both; he should know how to govern like a freeman and how to obey like a freeman — these are the excellences of a citizen. And, although the temperance and justice of a ruler are distinct from those of a subject, the excellence of a good man will include both.” (Aristotle Politics 1277b 12–20).
One can object that in Aristotle the good is situational, in the sense that for every situation, what is good changes. Indeed, Aristotle deflates Plato’s chorisnws between the idea of the good and the situation, and that is why it is difficult to draw a “principled” or metaphysically-derived distinction between ends and means in Aristotle’s ethics. From here the famous problem of whether phronesis ranges over the means only or over both means and ends. Nonetheless, Aristotle maintains the transcendence of the good over the situation because there is an unbridgeable gap between the claim that for every situation the good changes and Machiavelli’s idea that the good is itself situated.
Aristotle employs the expression: “the goal of an action reflects the occasion [to de telos tes praxeus kata ton kairon estin].” (Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1110a14).
Machiavelli, Prince, IX. Needless to say, the primacy of discord and conflict in modern political life has been admitted unanimously: from Hobbes’s insistence that political unity must be thought starting from the possibility of a “war of all against all,” to Kant’s “social unsociability,” Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic,” Marx’s “class conflict,” etc.
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 57. Kant derives this idea from Rousseau: there the system of rights finds its origin in the general will or sovereignty of the people. But in the sovereign, facticity and validity are united: “The sovereign by the mere fact that it is, is always all that it ought to be.” Precisely because of this unity, the concept of right is a priori linked to the possibility of coercion: “in order that the social contract [instituting the sovereign] shall not be an empty formula, it is tacitly implied in that commitment — which alone can give force to all the others — that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free.” (Rousseau, Social Contract, I,7).
Kant, An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in Political Writings, 55. See also Kant’s other formulation: “Thus freedom of the pen is the only safeguard of the rights of people, although it must not transcend the bounds of respect and devotion towards the existing constitution, which should itself create a liberal attitude of mind among the subjects.” (Kant, On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice,’ in Political Writings, 85).
Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972), 150.
I borrow the idea of a “condition of possibility and impossibility” from Derrida, who speaks about structures that are originary without exhibiting “the simplicity of a logical or transcendental principle…. One must speak of… a double root [that] cannot play the role of philosophical radicality. All problems emerge from the fact that this non-simplicity at the same time permits and limits.” (Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc [Paris: Galilée, 1990], 171).
I refer to two versions of the text “What is Enlightenment?” The first, “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?” in Dits et écrits, 4: 679–688 was first published in Magazine littéraire 207 (1984), and is an extract of Foucault’s course at the Collège de France, January 5, 1983. It precedes the English version of “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader prepared by Foucault in 1984.
This move is evident in Habermas’s description of “self-realization”: “To put it briefly, in place of exemplary instructions in the virtuous life and recommended models of the good life, one finds an increasingly pronounced, abstract demand for a conscious, self-critical appropiation, the demand that one responsibly take possession of one’s own individual, irreplaceable, and contingent life.” (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 96). The reduction of the concept of freedom as virtù to the domain of particularism is not only applied to the self but also to the community. Hence the “self-realization” of a community, the search for the “common good,” etc. are also seen as instances of particularism. (See the discussion of republicanism in Rawls, Political Liberalism.) The problem does not consist in the claim that discourses on the “good,” whether communal or individual, are particularist. Rather, the problem lies with the employment, in authors like Rawls or Habermas, of the term “ethical” exclusively to qualify such moral particularism, making it harder to employ the term for an extra-moral discourse on freedom, as I am advocating here.
In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that appeared two years later Habermas agrees in principle with Foucault’s point regarding the historical situatedness of philosophy in modernity. The disagreement between them is whether this situatedness of philosophy should be understood in accord with the Hegelian strategy whereby philosophy, through a phenomenological reconstruction of modernity, has the “task of grasping its own time… in thought” (Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 16); or whether it is better understood in accord with the Nietzschean attempt to provide a genealogy of modernity, i.e., what Foucault calls “a critical thought that takes the form of an ontology of ourselves, of an ontology of the present [une ontologie de nous-memes, d’une ontologie de l’actualitel.” (Foucault, Dits et écrits, 4: 687).
This argument against historicism is found, among other places, in Leo Strauss, “Political Philosophy and History,” in What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 64. Karl-Otto Apel has formulated it more recently as follows: “die (transzendentale!) Abhängigkeit der Gültigkeit des Denkens und Erkennens von irgendeiner Form der Innerzeitigkeit — dies wird noch anhand des postheideggerschen Panhistorismus der gegenwart zu zeigen sein — lässt sich nicht einmal selbst als gültig denken bzw. aussagen.” (Karl-Otto Apel, “Sinnkonstitution und Geltungsrechtfertigung. Heidegger und das Problem der Transzendentalphilosophie,” in Martin Heidegger: Innen-und Aussenansichten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 150.
“In the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events.” (Ibid.).
Ibid. This entails rejecting what Foucault calls the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment that he associates with the critical theory of Habermas and its Hegelian derivation: “you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism… or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality.” (Ibid., 43).
See Ferry, Rights, 124. The sense in which the moral presupposition of a horizon of common humanity allows for the self to open itself to the selfhood of the other, is nicely captured by Alain Renaut: “[Autonomy] supposes that I am ‘source of myself’ only be elevating myself, as practical subject, beyond the immediacy of the empirical subject and by integrating in my ipseity the presence of the other: the subject that gives himself the law, in order to elevate himself to this auto-nomy, has had to transcend the identity to itself of the subject of inclinations (individuality) and open itself to the alterity of the human species…. this perspective, by installing intersubjectivity (in the form of what I designate as the horizon of common humanity) in the heart of subjectivity, orders, amidst the Same, the Same to the Other.” (Alain Renaut, “Kant et l’humanisme,” Revue de philosophie politique 2 [Paris: PUF, 1992]).
“Thus far no one has succeeded in satisfactorily reconciling private and public autonomy at a fundamental conceptual level, as is evident from the unclarified relation between individual rights and public law in the field of jurisprudence, as well as from the unresolved competition between human rights and popular sovereignty in social-contract theory.” (Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 84).
Michael Walzer refers to the “thick” and “thin” reconstructions of the liberal system of rights that correspond, respectively, to the two opposite senses in which “human nature” as subject of natural rights can receive a culturally predetermined interpretation. See Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) and Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 296.
Some motifs of this logic of responsibility have been lately explored in Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
In 1798 [in Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties] Kant will offer a continuation to the text of 1784. In 1784, he tried to answer to the question that was posed to him: ‘What is this Aufklärung of which we are a part?’ and in 1798 he answers to a question that actuality posed him, but that had been since 1794 already formulated by the whole philosophical discussion in Germany. This question was: ‘What is a Revolution’.“ (Foucault, Dits et écrits, 4: 682).
Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, 4: 683. Foucault is referring to Kant’s claim that “in human affairs, there must be some experience or other which, as an event which has actually occurred, might suggest that man has the quality or power of being the cause and (since his actions are supposed to be those of a beign endowed with freedom) the author of his own improvement…. We must therefore search for an event which would indicate that such a cause exists and that it is causally active within the human race, irrespective of the time at which it might actually operate.” (Kant, Political Writings, 181).
Foucault’s reading of Kant in terms of the event of freedom or republican event has a certain affinity with, and may possibly owe its inspiration to Lyotard’s re-elaboration of this theme in L’enthousiasme. La critique kantienne de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 1986). Lyotard was at work on these issues already by 1980, as can be seen from his “Introduction à une étude du politique selon Kant,” in Rejouer le politique. Both Lyotard and Foucault were anticipated, in this respect, by Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), which were given at the New School for Social Research in 1970.
See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 105–106.
Some critics of Foucault point to the lack of an answer in his discourse to the question “why ought we to revolt?,” i.e., they demand a justification for the event of freedom in terms of “reasons” or within the logical space of the redemption of validity claims. (See Richard Bernstein, “Foucault: Critique as Philosophical Ethos,” in Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of the Enlightenment, eds. A. Honneth, T. McCarthy, C. Offe, A. Wellmer [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992]: 280–310). From Foucault’s perspective this question is not a good one because the possibility of raising such a validity-question, according to Kant himself, requires the event of factical freedom and therefore cannot presuppose it.
Walter Benjamin, Letter to Scholem, April 14, 1938, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (1932–1940), ed. G. Scholem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
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Vatter, M.E. (2000). The Machiavellian Legacy: Origin and Outcomes of the Conflict between Politics and Morality in Modernity. In: Between form and Event. Topoi Library, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9337-3_16
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