1 See, for example, Dante Germino, “Second Thoughts on Leo Strauss’s Machiavelli,”
Journal of Politics 28, no. 4 (1966): 815. For a study of Machiavelli’s relation to the philosophical tradition and the degree to which he can be situated in it see Gaille, Machiavel et la tradition philosophique .
2 As Agnès Cugno notes, “The thought of Machiavelli takes the human as its theme, but in the very specifi c mode of homo politicus .” Agnès Cugno, “Machiavel et le problème de l’être en politique,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’ ê tranger 189, no. 1 (1999): 19.
44 Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation
to any surplus reality beyond that which we are capable of experienc-ing as sensuous beexperienc-ings. In particular, Machiavelli is interested in the question of the form of political action as a modality of human creation.
I argue in this chapter and the following one that Machiavelli pro-vides us with a very precise model of the human essence. His concept of human essence, however, is a negative as opposed to a positive one.
A positive essence would refer us to a perpetually fixed set of natural human properties whose objective contours could be determined and mapped in systematic fashion, thus producing an architectonic model of humanity. A negative essence, on the contrary, rejects attempts to theorize all elements of human being in terms of such positive determi-nations, seeing one of the fundamental components of essence instead in the specifically human ability to transcend many merely immediate and conventional forms of doing and being. A negative essence refers us, in other words, not to a specifically human content, but rather a specifically human capacity, that is, the capacity for creativity. The human being is that which is capable of, through its life activity, per-petually remaking itself and its social world, although in a form that is obviously delimited by certain biological and historical constraints.
Negative models of essence that emphasize the creative potential of human beings to shape their own nature have been developed in differ-ent ways by a variety of the canonical thinkers of the tradition of mod-ern political thought. The significance of Machiavelli, however, lies in the fact that he was the first to interpret such creation as manifesting itself in the specifically political field, providing a model of an explicitly political form of the realization of the negative human essence. In chap-ter 3 I will examine in more detail this political form of realization through a study of the ethics of creation as articulated in The Prince . In this chapter, however, I will first provide an overview of those philo-sophical assumptions that for Machiavelli provided the conceptual background for the theorization of the human being in terms of a fun-damental creativity. In the first part of the chapter I will detail Machia-velli’s thoughts on the contingent and chaotic structure of the world.
This structure of the world, lacking any positive organizing form, is mirrored in the indetermination of the individual human being. In the second part of the chapter I will thus begin to provide an initial account of this indetermination, specifically as it is represented for Machiavelli in both the diversity of modes of human doing and being, and the openness of human being to change and alteration.
The Contingency of Being 45 Worldly Indetermination and the Rejection of Metaphysics
It has become increasingly common for readers of Machiavelli to stress the extent to which he not only engaged with but was significantly influenced by the Epicurean philosophical tradition, whose rediscov-ery in the Florentine context took on an especially acute form. 3 Machia-velli was very familiar with the Epicurean tradition, having transcribed Lucretius’s De rerum natura and having known Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers , as revealed for example in his redeploy-ment of various of the stateredeploy-ments found in this text in “The Life of Cas-truccio Castracani.” 4 Paul Rahe notes that “by 1517 or so, if not well before, Machiavelli had made Lucretius’ repudiation of religion and his rejection of natural teleology his own.” 5 In this section I will be con-cerned with outlining the main contours of this rejection of natural tele-ology, demonstrating how Machiavelli theorizes the fundamentally inconstant, irregular, and chaotic form of being of the world. This out-line will certainly not be sufficient to construct a comprehensive phi-losophy of world in Machiavelli, a phiphi-losophy that he clearly never attempted to analytically define, but will hopefully suffice to demon-strate the extent to which Machiavelli understands temporal being in
3 See, for example, Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
4 Machiavelli, “La vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca,” in Tutte le opere , 613–28.
On Machiavelli’s annotations of De rerum natura see Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance , 81–8.
5 Paul A. Rahe, “In the Shadow of Lucretius: The Epicurean Foundations of Machia-velli’s Political Thought,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 1 (2007): 44. For further studies of the infl uence of Lucretius on Machiavelli see Louis Althusser, “The Under-ground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” in Philosophy of the Encounter:
Later Writings, 1978–87 , ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G.M. Gos-hgarian (London: Verso, 2006), 163–207; Vittorio Morfi no, “Tra Lucrezio e Spinoza:
la ‘fi losofi a’ di Machiavelli,” in Machiavelli: immaginazione e contingenza , ed. Filippo Del Lucchese, Luca Sartorello, and Stefano Visentin (Pisa: Edizioni Ets, 2006), 67–110;
Rahe, “In the Shadow of Lucretius”; Robert J. Roecklein, Machiavelli and Epicureanism:
An Investigation into the Origins of Early Modern Political Thought (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012); Alison Brown, “Lucretian Naturalism and the Evolution of Machia-velli’s Ethics,” in The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy, and Language , ed. Filippo Del Lucchese, Fabio Frosini, and Vittorio Morfi no (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 105–27; Del Lucchese, The Political Philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli , 32–6.
46 Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation
terms of non-determination, such non-determination being ultimately the very condition of possibility of human freedom. 6
I am thus attempting to provide an alternative to those readings of Machiavelli that locate in his thought an affirmation of a natural or ontological stability that gives a consistency and uniformity to tempo-ral being. 7 It is certainly true that there seem to be some passages in the Machiavellian texts that suggest the belief in the type of patterned order that certain commentators perceive. One chapter commonly cited, for example, is Discourses 3:43, where Machiavelli writes that “anyone who wants to see what has to be considers what has been; for all the things of the world, in every time, have their counterpart in ancient times.” 8 Nevertheless, Machiavelli’s seeming affirmation of the constancy of the world through time is immediately problematized, as he goes on to make clear that such constancy is by no means the product of natural movement, but rather is socially constituted and highly contextual.
Speaking of the identity of past worldly being and present worldly being, he continues: “This arises because, being caused by men, who have and always have had the same passions, they of necessity result in the same effect. It is true that their works are now in this province more virtuous than in that, and in that more than in this, according to the
6 This relationship between worldly contingency and free human action that this contingency has opened has, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty has noted, puzzled many of Machiavelli’s readers. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “A Note on Machiavelli,” in Signs , trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 218.
The extent to which the latter leans upon the former, however, has certainly been noticed by some commentators. See, for example, Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publish-ers, 2000), 133. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State , trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 38. Dick Howard, The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 199.
7 Anthony J. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Sammy Basu, “In a Crazy Time the Crazy Come Out Well: Machiavelli and the Cosmology of His Day,” History of Political Thought 2, no. 2 (1990): 213–39; John H.
Geerken, “Elements of Natural Law Theory in Machiavelli,” in The Medieval Tradition of Natural Law , ed. Harold J. Johnson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1987), 37–65; Graham Maddox, “The Secular Reformation and the Infl uence of Machi-avelli,” Journal of Religion 82, no. 4 (2002): 539–62; Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 154.
8 Machiavelli, “Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio,” in Tutte le opere , bk. 3.43.
The Contingency of Being 47
form of education in which those people have taken their mode of liv-ing.” 9 The affirmation of stability of worldly being, however, is not here simply displaced onto another register, the fixity of the world being a consequence of the fixity of the universal nature of the species, as rep-resented in the claim regarding the identity of the passions. On the con-trary, Machiavelli makes clear that in this discussion he is presuming a continuity in the precise forms of education and socialization that a community utilizes through time: “It is easy to know the things to come from the past, if a nation for a long time keeps the same customs, being continually avaricious or continually fraudulent, or having some other similar vice or virtue.” 10 As I will argue in chapter 6 , the republic is that form of regime that is capable of breaking out of this continuity and institutionalizing innovation, thus making it possible to reflectively and self-consciously remake the world. The identity and constancy of worldly things as presented in 3:43 is historically contingent, an artifi-cial result of a precise form of soartifi-cial organization, one which in the final instance Machiavelli will reject on normative grounds. Indeed, in this chapter Machiavelli will proceed to associate the impoverishment of the contemporary Florentine political situation with that type of uncrit-ical approach to history that generates the very sense of temporal uni-formity. Machiavelli says that in their dealings with external nations the Florentines, criticized for being avaricious and lacking in faith, failed to learn from past lessons, failed to recognize the modes which these nations have historically acted in. He writes, “if Florence had not been compelled by necessity or overcome by passion, and had read and understood the ancient customs of the barbarians, it would have been deceived by them neither this nor many other times, since they have always been in one mode and have always used with everyone the very same terms.” 11 Florentine virtue would here lie precisely in the aboli-tion of the presumpaboli-tion of historical constancy, perpetually affirmed by its enemies. The Florentines’ own corruption would be overcome through the transcendence of the belief in the continuity of time. Their recognition of the universality of the modes of others is the means by which the Florentines might overcome their own current, although by no means natural or inevitable, nature.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
48 Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation
Although initially it might suggest a belief in the stable being of the form of the world, 3:43 in the end actually affirms the opposite. There are many other passages in the Discourses that lend further evidence to the argument that Machiavelli thinks of the being of the world in terms of contingent movement and flux. Here I will highlight just some of these passages, although in a necessarily, given Machiavelli’s own form of presentation, non-systematic way. 12 The most notable such passage is 2:5, where, according to Antonio Negri, Machiavelli “tries to define the Heraclitean flux of becoming as an experience of freedom.” 13 The title of 2:5 is “That the variation of sects and languages, together with the accident of floods or plague, extinguishes the memories of things.” This title points us toward a dual concern with both conventional human variation and physical worldly variation via accidental natural events, and hence a simultaneous affirmation of natural and social flux. Indeed, Machiavelli begins the chapter by stating: “To those philosophers who determined that the world was eternal, I believe that one could reply that if such antiquity were true it would be reasonable that there should be memory of more than five thousand years, except it is seen how the memories of times is extinguished by diverse causes, of which part come from men, part from heaven.” 14 First, the diversity of human beings is located in “the variations of sects and of languages.” 15 Sectar-ian division here refers us to variation in religion, religion having been earlier identified as the primary mode of human socialization, the diversity of sects thus referring us to a larger diversity of culture. 16 If
12 Indeed, the apparently non-systematic structure of Machiavelli’s work can be seen as representative of the non-systematic structure of reality. See, for example, Gennaro Sasso, Niccolò Machiavelli: storia del suo pensiero politico (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1980), 520; Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “The Poetry of Power: Machiavelli’s Literary Vision,” Review of National Literatures 1, no. 1 (1970): 48; Filippo Del Luc-chese, Confl ict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza (London: Continuum, 2009), 47.
13 Negri, Insurgencies , 70. On the Heraclitean dimension of Machiavelli’s thought see also Neal Wood, “Some Common Aspects of the Thought of Seneca and Machia-velli,” Renaissance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1968): 19.
14 Machiavelli, “Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio,” bk. 2.5.
15 Ibid.
16 On the signifi cance of religion as a comprehensive mode of socialization for Machiavelli, as opposed to a one-sided and instrumental compulsion to obey the law, see, for example, John M. Najemy, “Papirus and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Intepreting Religion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 4 (1999):
The Contingency of Being 49
knowledge of past cultures is inadequate – that is, if individuals do not adequately recognize the fact of social difference across time and space – it is because succeeding cultures undertake active war on them in the attempt to eliminate all memory of different modes of doing and being.
Thus, for example, Christianity’s war against the Gentiles: “It erased all its orders, all its ceremonies, and extinguished every memory of that ancient theology.” 17 Machiavelli, however, goes on to note that it is not possible to completely eliminate remembrance of such prior modes, and hence the perpetuation through time of various cultural remnants, preserved, for example, through the continued use of Latin, and so on.
Significantly, after detailing the contingency of human custom, Machia-velli proceeds to detail a seemingly analogous contingency of physical nature, suggesting the former is merely one element of a much more comprehensive philosophy of natural history. He writes that “as for the causes that come from heaven, they are those that extinguish the human race, and reduce to a few the inhabitants of part of the world, this com-ing through plague or through famine or through an inundation of water.” 18 Machiavelli thus explicitly rejects belief in a regular and pre-dictable movement of natural history, going so far as to partially locate cultural variation in the displacements that result from contingent natural events that interrupt the apparently static and regular being of the world.
Machiavelli can be seen to locate the chaotic structure of reality in a quasi-dialectical understanding of the objects of the world. This is cer-tainly not a positive dialectical understanding that, in teleological fash-ion, assimilates historical events into a logical or causal time continuum culminating in the actualization of a synthetic end, but rather a negative dialectical understanding that emphasizes the internal non-identity of objects. Objects are subject to a play of different forces whose interaction and interpenetration generate a multitude of unique potentialities.
Hence Machiavelli’s characterization of the process of unpredictable objective movement in Discourses 3:37: “near the good there is always some evil, which arises so easily with that good that it seems impossible to be able to miss the one while wanting the other. And this is seen in all
659–81; Benedetto Fontana, “Love of Country and Love of God: The Political Uses of Religion in Machiavelli,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60, no. 4 (1999): 639–58.
17 Machiavelli, “Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio,” bk. 2.5.
18 Ibid.
50 Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation
the things that men work on. Therefore one acquires the good with dif-ficulty, unless fortune aids you in such a way that it and its force defeat this ordinary and natural inconvenience.” 19 One must know not to put all of one’s force behind one mode, thus exposing oneself to ruin should the form of the arrangement of those internal tendencies structuring the being of the object shift. Even if we presume that the form of the object will remain relatively stable over a period of time, the elements consti-tuting it are so closely intertwined that human investigation will never be sufficient to conceptually parse them one from the other, for things
“have bad so near to the good, and so much are they joined together, that it is an easy thing to take the one, believing one has seized the other.” 20 And what is more, any human intervention will necessarily upset the composition of elements, thus contributing to the emergence of unforeseen and necessarily unconsidered permutations. Hence in 1:6 Machiavelli states that “in all human things he who will examine them well sees this: that you can never remove one inconvenience without another one emerging.” 21 The world provides no opportunity for indi-viduals to initiate modes which will produce assured ends: what is
“entirely clear, entirely without uncertainty, is never found.” 22
As will be elaborated on later, in the final instance it is the fact of worldly contingency that makes impossible the thought of a political project that looks to the instrumental mastery of human reality. No virtue is compelling enough to provide a stable direction to the non-determined movement of objects through the flux of time. Such is made explicit in Discourses 2:29, where Machiavelli notes that this project of mastery was impossible even for his largely fictional and idealized Romans: “If you consider well how human affairs proceed, you will see that many times things emerge and accidents take place that the heav-ens did not want to provide for at all. And if that which I say occurred in Rome, where there was so much virtue, so much religion, and so much order, it is not surprising that it occurs far more often in a city or in a province that lacks the things said above.” 23 Even the most virtuous
19 Ibid., bk. 3.37.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., bk. 1.6.
22 Ibid. See also Machiavelli, “L’Asino,” in Tutte le opere , 967; “Istorie fi orentine,” in Tutte le opere , bk. 5.1.
23 Machiavelli, “Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio,” bk. 2.29.
The Contingency of Being 51
of cities is thus incapable of definitively stabilizing the unstable and
of cities is thus incapable of definitively stabilizing the unstable and