Machiavelli and Us

Machiavelli's Solitude\ First of all, allow me to thank the Association Française de Science Politique and Jean Charlot for the great honour they have done me in inviting me to this exchange. And I should also express to you straight away a first scruple I have about this invitation. Your Association is primarily interested in the major political issues of the present day, whereas I have proposed a subject which may perhaps be judged to lack actuality: Machiavelli. Moreover, and this is my second scruple, you are used to hearing either well-known political figures, or historians, or political scientists. But I am only a philosopher, and it is as a philosopher that I want to approach with you what I have called Machiavelli's solitude. To tell you that I am a mere philosopher is to say that there are many questions I should find it very hard to answer, but I hope you will forgive me this if I manage at least to make myself clear about the few points I wish to raise. I hope that, despite the difference of our formations, competences, and interests, an exchange will be possible, an exchange from which, personally, I have great expectations.\ speaker replies to questions that have been communicated to him in advance. I believe the lack of actuality and slightly offbeat character of my subject must have inhibited my interlocutors. For I have only received three questions. One of these, from Pierre Favre, concerns the epistemological conceptions I have outlined in essays which are already rather old. He will permit me to reserve this question for a private conversation, because it is too personal and would take me too far from my subject. The second question, from Colette Ysmal, concerns Gramsci's assessment of Machiavelli: yes, I do think, as Gramsci did, that Machiavelli is a theoretician of the national state, and hence of absolute monarchy as a transitional state between feudalism and capitalism, but I believe he is so under very exceptional conditions, which I will discuss later. The third question, from Hugues Portelli, concerns the relationship between Machiavelli's thought and the Marxist tradition: yes, I do think there is such a relationship, but it seems to be one of coincidence and repetition, rather than one of direct descent. I may also be discussing this point.\ discussion with a few reflections on my chosen theme: Machiavelli's solitude. It cannot but be objected that it is paradoxical to talk of solitude vis-à-vis an author who has constantly haunted history, who, from the sixteenth century to the present day, without interval, has been ceaselessly either condemned as the devil, as the worst of cynics, or else practised by the greatest statesmen, or again praised for his daring and for the profundity of his thought (under the Aufklärung, the Risorgimento, by Gramsci, etc.). How can one claim to speak of Machiavelli's solitude when he is seen to be constantly surrounded in history by a vast crowd of irreconcilable opponents, supporters and attentive commentators?\ the division Machiavelli's thought imposes on everyone who tries to deal with him. The fact that he so much divides his readers into supporters and opponents, and that despite changing historical circumstances, he continues so to divide them, shows how difficult it is to assign him to one camp, to classify him, to say who he is and what he thinks. His solitude first of all consists in this fact, that he seems unclassifiable, that he cannot be ranged in one camp alongside other thinkers, in one tradition, as other authors can be ranged in the Aristotelian tradition, or the tradition of natural law. No doubt it is also because of this unclassifiability that such different parties and such great authors have not succeeded either in condemning him or in adopting him. without a part of him having eluded them, as if there were always something unassimilable in Machiavelli. If we set aside his partisans, if, from our present vantage point, we consider the commentators who have been working on his writings during the last century, we find something of this truth once again in their surprise. A moment ago I was talking of Machiavelli's thought. Now the great modern commentators have in fact adopted for themselves, but in a reflected way, as a component part of Machiavelli's thought, one feature capable of explaining the violent divisions which Machiavelli has aroused in history. His thought does indeed have all the appearances of a classical system of thought, one which proposes for itself an object, for example the prince, the difference species of principalities, the way to conquer and keep them, the way to govern them. To have all the appearances of a classical system of thought is to have all the appearances of a recognizable, identifiable and reassuring system of thought, all the appearances of a system of thought that can be understood unambiguously, even if it leaves unsolved problems. But almost all the commentators are in agreement that in Machiavelli we find something quite different from unsolved problems - a riddle - and that this riddle is, as it were, indecipherable. At the end of his life, Croce said that the Machiavelli question would never be settled. This riddle can take different forms, for example, the form of the well-known dilemma: is Machiavelli a monarchist or a republican? It can take subtler forms: how is it that his thought is both categorical and elusive? Why, as Claude Lefort has brilliantly demonstrated in his thesis, does it unfold via interruptions, digressions, unresolved contradictions? How is it that a system of thought apparently under such tight control is in fact both present and fleeting, complete and incomplete in its very manner of expression? All these disconcerting arguments support the notion that Machiavelli's solitude lies in the unwonted character of his thought.\ witness to this. Even today, anyone who opens The Prince or the Discourses, texts now 350 years old, is, as it were, struck by what Freud called a strange familiarity, an Unheimlichkeit. Without our understanding why, we find these old texts addressing us as if they were of our own day, gripping us as if, in some sense, they had been written for us, and to tell us something which concerns us directly, without our exactly knowing why. De Sanctis noted this strange feeling in the nineteenth century when he said of Machiavelli that 'he takes us by surprise, and leaves us pensive'.Why this seizure? Why this surprise? Why pensive? Because his thought goes on inside us, despite ourselves. Why pensive? Because this thought can go on inside us only if it disturbs what we think, having taken us by surprise. As a thought that is infinitesimally close to us, and yet which we have never hitherto met, and that has over us the surprising power to take us aback. By what are we taken aback?\ of the supposed founder of modern political science, the man who treated politics, as Horkheimer states, for example, in the later Galilean manner, seeking to establish the variations of elements united in a constant relationship, thus treating it in the positive mode of 'that is how things are' and 'here are the laws' that govern the government of states.\ in so far as this discovery has passed into our culture and propagated itself in a whole scientific tradition, it is familiar to us, and can in no way surprise us, 'take us by surprise'. And yet Machiavelli himself proclaimed himself the inventor of a new form of knowledge, in the manner of all the great political explorers, as Vico and Montesquieu were to do: but this form of knowledge is precisely quite different from Galileo's, and his thought has remained, as it were, without succession, isolated in the time and the individual that saw its birth and gave birth to it.\ unwonted character of Machiavelli. But before going on to this point, and in order to be able to do so, I should like to prove that it is first necessary to dissipate the classical form of the Machiavellian riddle.\ Was Machiavelli in his heart of hearts a monarchist, as The Prince seems to suggest, or was he a republican, as the Discourses on the First Decad of Titus Livy seem to suggest? That is how the problem is generally posed. But to pose it in this way is to accept as self evident a prior classification of governments, a classical typology of governments going back to Aristotle, which considers the different forms of government and their normality and pathology. But Machiavelli precisely refuses to accept or practise that typology, and does not require his reflections to define the essence of any given type of government. His purpose is quite different. It consists - as De Sanctis and, following him, Gramsci realized not so much in theorizing the national state as it existed in France and Spain in his own lifetime in the form of absolute monarchy, but in asking the political question of the preconditions of the foundation of a national state in a disunited country, in Italy, prey to internecine divisions and invasions. Machiavelli asked this question in radical, political terms, that is, by observing that this political task, the construction of an Italian national state, could not be carried out by any of the existing states, whether governed by princes, or republics, or finally Papal States, for they were all old, or - to put it in modern terms - all still enmeshed in feudalism - even the free cities. Machiavelli asked this question in radical terms by stating that 'only a New Prince in a New Principality' would be capable of carrying out this difficult task.\ principality could not achieve anything, since it would keep him the prisoner of its oldness. I believe it is crucial to have a proper grasp of the political meaning of this rejection and the indeterminacy in which Machiavelli leaves his readers. It is clear that Machiavelli sought the prince of his hopes, but he shifted from prince to prince, and in the end knew he would never find him. He was convinced by the urgency of the task, by the political misery of Italy, by the quality of the Italian people, and the cries rising from all sides, that such a prince would be welcomed by popular accord, and he found pathetic accents to express this urgency. That it was necessary and possible had already been proved to him by Cesare Borgia's adventure: he had almost succeeded in founding a new state, but this was because he was nothing to start with, because he was the prince of no state, and hence not the prisoner of the old political forms of the state with which feudalism and the papacy had covered an Italy ravaged by invasions. Convinced by the urgency of the political task and of the means abounding in Italy, Machiavelli was also convinced that the prince to come would have to be free of all feudal fetters, and be able to undertake the task from scratch. That is why he speaks in general of 'the New Prince in a New Principality', in general, in the abstract, without naming anyone or any place. This anonymity is a way of denouncing. all the existing princes, all the existing states, and of appealing to an unknown to constitute a new state, ultimately as Cesare Borgia had carved out his, starting from a fragment of a province that was not a state and which his father the Pope had given him for his amusement. If an unknown were thus to start from nothing, and if fortune favoured his virtù, then he might succeed, but only on condition that he founded a new state, a state capable of lasting, and a state capable of growing, that is, of unifying the whole of Italy, by conquest or other means. The whole much debated question of whether Machiavelli was a monarchist or a republican is superseded in the face of this alternative, and can be illuminated starting from these preconditions. For to found a new state, says Machiavelli, one must 'be alone'; one must be alone to forge the armed forces indispensable for any politics, alone to issue the first laws, alone to lay and secure the 'foundations'.\ the work of a single man who rises from private individual to prince; it is thus, if you wish, the monarchist or dictatorial moment.\ formed is monstrously fragile. It is prey to two dangers: its master may fall into tyranny, which is as execrable to Machiavelli as despotism was to be to Montesquieu, since tyranny unleashes popular hatred, resulting in the destruction of the prince - and it may be torn by internecine factions, leaving it at the mercy of an external attack.\ last. To make this possible, the prince, who was alone in its foundation, must, as Machiavelli puts it, 'become many', and set up a system of laws protecting the people against the excesses of the nobles, and a 'composite' government (his term) in which the king, the people and the nobles are represented. This is the second moment, the moment of the rooting of power in the people, to be precise, in the contradictions of the struggle between the people and the nobles, for scandalously, in defiance of the established truths of his time, Machiavelli defends the notion that the conflict of humours, of the lean against the fat in short, the class struggle - is absolutely indispensable to the strengthening and expansion of the state.\ Machiavelli's republican moment. But when you compare what he says about the advantages of the government of France and the formidable historical example of Rome, which presents the paradox of being a republic founded by a king and preserving monarchy in the institutions of the republic, it is clear that it is not possible to separate the monarchist and the republican in him, or rather, that the alternative of these two positions does not suit his mode of thought. For what he wants is not monarchy or republic, as such - what he wants is national unity, the constitution of a state capable of achieving national unity. Now, this constitution is first achieved in the form of an individuality, call him a king who is capable of founding a new state and making it durable and apt to grow by giving it a composite government and laws: a government that gives scope for the struggle of the popular classes, in which the king and the people are on the same side in order to strengthen the state and make it ready for its national mission. Such, I believe, is the profound originality of Machiavelli in this matter. He cannot be accurately described as a theoretician of absolute monarchy in the sense of a modern conception of political science. He does, of course, think in terms of absolute monarchy; he bases himself on the examples of Spain and France. 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.\ thought.\ For the short sentence he was so fond of, that 'one must be alone to found a state', has a strange resonance in his work once one has understood its critical function. Why alone? One must be alone to be free to carry out the historical task of the constitution of the national state. In other words, one must turn out, in fortune and virtù, to be, as it were, torn up by one's roots, cut off from them, irredeemably cut off from the political forms of the world of Italy as it exists, since they are all old, all marked by feudalism, and nothing can be hoped for from them. The prince can be new only if he is endowed with this solitude, that is, this freedom to found the new state. I say turn out in fortune and virtù to be, as it were, torn away from all this past, its institutions, its mores and its ideas, turn out, since, paradoxically, Machiavelli, who seems, in the manifest content of his arguments, to appeal to the consciousness of his contemporaries, lays no store by the coming to consciousness of the individual. If the individual has virtù, this is not ultimately a matter of consciousness and will; if he has virtù, it is because he turns out to be possessed and seized by it. Machiavelli did not write a Treatise on the Passions, nor one on the Reform of the Understanding. For him, it is not consciousness but the coincidence of fortune and virtù that causes a particular individual to turn out to be cut off from the preconditions of the old world in order to lay the foundations of the new state. Yes indeed, this sentence does resonate strangely in Machiavelli's work. Just as he said 'one must be alone to found a new state', so I say Machiavelli had to be alone to write The Prince and the Discourses. Alone - that is, he had to turn out to be, as it were, cut off from the self-evident truths dominant in the old world, detached from its ideology, in order to have the freedom to found a new theory and to venture, like the navigators he mentions, into unknown waters.\ themes of Aristotelian political ideology, revised by the Christian tradition and by the idealism of the ambiguities of humanism, Machiavelli broke with all these dominant ideas. This rupture is not explicit, but it is all the more profound for that. Has attention been paid to the fact that in his works, where he constantly evokes antiquity, it is not the antiquity of letters, philosophy and arts, of medicine and law, which is current in all the intellectuals that Machiavelli invokes, but a quite different antiquity, one discussed by nobody else, the antiquity of political practice? Has sufficient attention been paid to the fact that in these works that speak constantly of the politics of the ancients, there are hardly any references to the great political theoreticians of antiquity, no discussion of Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and the Stoics? Has attention been paid to the fact that in these works there is no trace of the influence of the Christian political tradition or the idealism of the humanists? If it is evident that Machiavelli radically marks himself off from all this past, a past which nevertheless dominates his own time, have we paid attention to the discretion with which he does so: without fanfares? He just says that he preferred to appeal to the actual reality of the matter [della cosa] rather than to its imagination. He did not call the imagination he rejected by its name, but we know that in his day it bore some very great names. He surely did have to be alone to conceal his discovery as he did, and to remain silent as to the names of his opponents.\ Machiavelli. The fact that he was alone in stating a new truth is not enough to leave him in his solitude. All the great inventors have become famous for us, and their reasons are now clear to us. But such is not the case with him.\ remained isolated because, although there has been ceaseless fighting over his thought, no one has thought in his thought. And no one has done so for reasons pertaining to the nature of his thought, but also for reasons pertaining to the thought in which others thought after him. As everybody knows, from the seventeenth century on the bourgeoisie elaborated an impressive political philosophy, the philosophy of natural law, which blocked out everything else, naturally including Machiavelli. This philosophy was built up from notions deriving from legal ideology, from the rights of the individual as a subject, and it attempted to deduce theoretically the existence of positive law and the political state from the attributes that legal ideology confers on the human subject (liberty, equality, property). As compared with Machiavelli and his particular problem, this is quite another world of thought. But it is also quite another ideological and political world. For the number-one object and stake of the philosophy of natural law is absolute monarchy: whether the theoreticians want to give it a rightful basis (like Hobbes) or to refute it by right (like Locke and Rousseau), absolute monarchy is their starting point and their subject of discussion; it is what is at issue, be it its justification or its condemnation. Here the difference becomes glaring. Machiavelli does speak of the absolute monarchy to be found in France or Spain, but as an example and an argument to help in dealing with a quite different object: the constitution of a national state in Italy; he is therefore speaking of a fact to be accomplished. The theoreticians of natural law speak in the accomplished fact, under the accomplished fact of absolute monarchy. They ask questions of right because the fact is accomplished, because the fact is disputed or problematic and must therefore be founded by right, because the fact is established and its rightful status must be disputed. But in doing so they block out every other discourse about absolute monarchy and the state, and in particular Machiavelli's discourse, which no one ever thinks has any philosophical consequences, because Machiavelli at no point speaks the language of natural law.\ the fact that he occupied a unique and precarious place in the history of political thought between a long moralizing, religious and idealist tradition of political thought, which he radically rejected, and the new tradition of the political philosophy of natural law, which was to submerge everything and in which the rising bourgeoisie found its self-image. Machiavelli's solitude lay in his having freed himself from the first tradition before the second submerged everything. Bourgeois ideologists have long situated themselves in this second tradition to tell, in the language of natural law, their fairy-tale history of the state, the history that begins with the state of nature and continues with the state of war, before pacifying itself in the social contract that gives birth to the state and positive law. A completely mythical history, but one that makes pleasant listening, because in the end it explains to those who live in the state that there is nothing horrific in its origins, only nature and law; that the state is nothing but law, is as pure as the law, and as this law is in human nature, what could be more humane than the state?\ Capital in which Marx tackles so-called 'original accumulation' (usually translated as 'primitive accumulation'). In this original accumulation, the ideologists of capitalism told the edifying story of the rise of capital just as the philosophers of natural law told the story of the rise of the state. In the beginning there was an independent worker who worked so enthusiastically, intelligently and economically that he was able to save and then exchange. Seeing a poorer passer-by, he helped him by feeding him in exchange for his labour, a generosity which found its reward in that it enabled him to increase his acquisitions and help other unfortunates in the same way out of his increased goods. Hence the accumulation of capital: by labour, thrift and generosity. We know how Marx replied: with a story of pillage, theft, exaction, of the violent dispossession of the English peasantry, expelled from their lands, their farms destroyed so as to force them on to the streets, with a quite different story and one far more gripping than the moralizing platitudes of the ideologists of capitalism.\ rather in the same way to the edifying discourse maintained by the philosophers of natural law about the history of the state. I would go so far as to suggest that Machiavelli is perhaps one of the few witnesses to what I shall call primitive political accumulation, one of the few theoreticians of the beginnings of the national state. Instead of saying that the state is born of law and nature, he tells us how a state has to be born if it is to last and to be strong enough to become the state of a nation. He does not speak the language of law, he speaks the language of the armed force indispensable to the constitution of any state, he speaks the language of the necessary cruelty of the beginnings of the state, he speaks the language of a politics without religion that has to make use of religion at all costs, of a politics that has to be moral but has to be able not to be moral, of a politics that has to reject hatred but inspire fear, he speaks the language of the struggle between classes, and as for rights, laws and morality, he puts them in their proper, subordinate place. When we read him, however informed we may be about the violences of history, something in him grips us: a man who, even before all the ideologists blocked out reality with their stories, was capable not of living or tolerating, but of thinking the violence of the birth throes of the state. In doing so, Machiavelli casts a harsh light on the beginnings of our era: that of bourgeois societies. He casts a harsh light, too by his very utopianism, by the simultaneously necessary and unthinkable hypothesis that the new state could begin anywhere, on the aleatory character of the formation of national states. For us they are drawn on the map, as if for ever fixed in a destiny that always preceded them. For him, on the contrary, they are largely aleatory, their frontiers are not fixed, there have to be conquests, but how far? To the boundaries of languages or beyond? To the limits of their forces? We have forgotten all this. When we read him, we are gripped by him as by what we have forgotten, by that strange familiarity, as Freud called it, of something repressed.\ evoking what is perhaps the most disconcerting thing about his discourse. A moment ago I signalled the effect of surprise that reading him provokes. Not just what does he mean? But also why does he argue in this way, so disconcertingly, moving from one chapter to the next without any visible necessity in the transition, interrupting a theme which has to be picked up again later, but transposed, and never finally dealt with, returning to questions, but without ever giving them answers in the expected form? Croce said that the Machiavelli question would never be settled: it might perhaps be advisable to wonder whether it is not the type of question asked of him which cannot receive the answer that this type of question requires and expects.\ political science, and there have been many commentators who have been pleased to discover in him one of the first figures of modern positivity, along with those of Galilean physics and Cartesian analysis, illustrating in all sorts of domains a new typical rationality, that of the positive science by which the young bourgeois class acquired the ability to master nature in order to develop its productive forces. In taking this road, it is only too easy to find certain passages in Machiavelli's writings, certain forms of mental experiment, certain forms of generalization established to fix the variations of a relationship, to justify this point of view. For example, it can be said of The Prince that in it Machiavelli proceeds by the exhaustive listing of the different principalities, thus anticipating Descartes's rule of complete enumerations; it can be said that in the relations between virtù and fortune Machiavelli is establishing a kind of law analogous to those that mark the beginnings of modern physics, and so on, and that in general, if, as he says, he has abandoned the imagination to go straight to the actual truth of the matter, this is to proceed in the spirit of a new positive science that can arise and grow only on the absolute precondition of no longer taking appearances at their word.\ of pure positivity always fails in the face of a disconcerting lack, of the suspended character of his theses, and the interminable character of a thought that remains enigmatic. I believe Machiavelli has to be approached from a different direction, following thereby an intuition of Gramsci's.\ it is the peculiarity of a political manifesto, if the latter can be considered in its ideal model, that it is not a pure theoretical discourse, a pure positive treatise. This does not mean that theory is absent from a manifesto: if it contained no positive elements of knowledge, it would be no more than words in the wind. But a manifesto that is political, and thus wishes to have historical effects, must inscribe itself in a field quite different from that of pure knowledge: it must inscribe itself in the political conjuncture on which it wishes to act and subordinate itself entirely to the political practice induced by that conjuncture and the balance of forces that defines it. This might be said to be an utterly banal recommendation, but the question becomes seriously complicated when it is remarked that this inscription in the objective, external political conjuncture also has to be represented inside the very text that practises it, if the intention is to invite the reader of the text of the manifesto to relate to that conjuncture with a full awareness and to assess accurately the place the manifesto occupies in that conjuncture. In other words, for the manifesto to be truly political and realistic - materialistic - the theory that it states must not only be stated by the manifesto, but located by it in the social space into which it is intervening and which it thinks. One could show how this is the case with the Communist Manifesto: after giving a theory of the existing society, it locates the theory of the communists somewhere in that society, in the region of other socially active theories. Why this duplication and double envelopment? In order to locate in the historical conjuncture under analysis, in the space of the balance of forces analysed, the ideological place occupied by that theory. We are dealing here with a twofold intention: the intention to mark clearly the kind of effectiveness to be expected of the theory, which is thereby made subject to the conditions of existence of theory in the social system; and the intention to describe the sense of the theory by the position it occupies in class conflicts.\ simple and is implied by everything Marx wrote, and was well understood by Gramsci. I mean that if Machiavelli's thought is entirely subordinated to his reflection on the historical task of the constitution of a national state, if The Prince is presented as a manifesto, if Machiavelli - who knew from his own experience what political practice was, not only from having toured the embassies of Europe, advised princes, known Cesare Borgia, but also from having raised and organized troops in the Tuscan countryside - if Machiavelli is taking political practice into consideration, then his thought cannot be presented in the simple guise of the positivity of a neutral space. On the contrary, it is arguable that if Machiavelli's thought is disconcerting, it is because it assigns to the theoretical elements it is analysing a quite different dispositive from that of a simple statement of constant relations between things. This different dispositive is the one we see in The Prince and the Discourses, a dispositive constantly obsessed, not only with the variable preconditions of political practice and its aleatory character, but also with its position in the political conflicts and the necessity that I have just indicated to reinscribe the theoretical discourse in the political arena it discusses. That Machiavelli was perfectly aware of this exigency is evidenced by too many passages for me to quote them all. I will give only one, to be found in the dedication of The Prince:\ \ I hope it will not be considered presumptuous for a man of very low and humble condition to dare to discuss princely government, and to lay down rules about it. For those who draw maps place themselves on low ground, in order to understand the character of the mountains and other high points, and climb higher in order to understand the character of the plains. Likewise, one needs to be a ruler to understand properly the character of the people, and to be a man of the people to understand properly the character of rulers.¹\ \ If we remember that Machiavelli did not write a treatise on the people but, rather, one on the prince, and that he proclaims without shame, on the contrary, as a positive argument, his 'low and humble condition'; if we consider everything to be found in The Prince and the Discourses in the light of these claims, it is clear that Machiavelli speaks of the prince by locating himself as part of the people, that he calls wholeheartedly for, and thinks, the practice of a prince who will establish Italian unity from the standpoint of the 'popolare'. From all these analyses, we know that to invoke the people is to invoke struggle, and this struggle is a class struggle between the people and the nobles, so it is to invite the prince to carry out his historical mission by gaining the people's friendship - that is, to speak plainly, an alliance with the people against the nobility, the feudatories Machiavelli very harshly condemned because they did not work.\ Machiavelli. He is one of the first to have related the unwonted character of The Prince, which he described as a kind of manifesto, a living and non-systematic discourse, to Machiavelli's political position and to his awareness of the political task he was advocating. I say awareness advisedly, for it was because he knew his own position in the Italian political struggle and took the consequences in what he wrote that Machiavelli treated theory as he did treat it, both as something which would cast light on the major social realities that dominated that struggle, and as a subordinate moment in that struggle, inscribed somewhere in that struggle. Somewhere: no more than he could say who would found the new state or in what place in Italy, Machiavelli could not say where his work would be inscribed in the Italian struggles. At least he knew that it was somewhere in the background, that it was no more than a piece of writing, which he too abandoned to the chance of an anonymous encounter.\ thought contributed at all to the making of history, he would no longer be there. This intellectual did not believe that intellectuals make history. And he had said too much, via his utopia, about the beginnings of the bourgeois national state, not to be denounced by that history. Only another system of thought, close to his by its rejections and its position, might save him from his solitude: that of Marx and Gramsci.\ Translated by Ben Brewster\ Note:\ \ \ The Prince, p. 4.\

Editorial NoteIntroduction: In the Mirror of MachiavelliMachiavelli and UsForeword31Theory and Political Practice52Theory and Theoretical Dispositive in Machiavelli333The Theory of the 'New Prince'534The Political Practice of the New Prince81Notes104AppMachiavelli's Solitude115Index131

\ Wisconsin Bookwatch[S]howcases the richly complex thought of Althusser and will be much appreciated by students of Machiavelli.\ \ \ \ \ The Front TableThis is a fascinating and original work that provides a new perspective on the equally enigmatic figures of Althusser and Machiavelli.\ \ \