With the exception of Benedetto Croce, Niccolò Machiavelli is the Italian most frequently mentioned in the Prison Notebooks,76 despite the fact that four centuries of history, innumerable institutional forms and diverse systems of political power separate the age of Machiavelli from that of Gramsci. This objective gap notwithstanding, there is one specific element that permits not only communication, but also a political dialogue between the two writers and their respective conditions. This element is, in fact, the particular form that modern politics has taken in Italy, a place that is fully integrated into Western modernity – in a Europe where the bourgeoisie have triumphed and where first liberal, then democratic conceptions have come to the fore – but that continues to preserve its own specific backwardness, as a result of which each innovation that emerges is of a dubious, mediated, ‘corrupt’ form compared to the ideal (and idealized) model of development. This backwardness is in turn the product of a gap that is, paradoxically, due to the precocity of certain developments – such as economic growth, the history of Italy’s Communes, the Renaissance – that has destroyed the possibility of any political development in the ‘classical’ sense such as that seen in France and Britain. This backwardness/precocity has conditioned Italy’s entire political history (and that of the dominions prior to Unification), thus providing a unique field of application for concepts that lie within the bounds of modern development, but are decentralized in relation to its principal axis. Machiavelli and Gramsci thus formulated a politics that could be said to lie at the edge of modernity, forced by history, as Althusser puts it, ‘to think the conditions of possibility of an impossible task, to think the unthinkable’,77 by elaborating the conceptual instruments of
modern politics within a terrain that lies outside the traditional sphere of European modernity.
Machiavelli and Gramsci can also be perceived as sharing a common ground in terms of their respective conditions for potential political action: Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks at a time when he could no longer be a ‘politician in action’,78 finding himself in a Fascist prison following an epochal defeat, that of the working class in the face of Fascism; Machiavelli wrote his most important works after having been expelled from the Florentine Republic’s political sphere. This potential identification with Machiavelli, together with the recouping of a politics aimed at the mobilization of the popular strata, establishes Machiavelli as a benchmark over and beyond his classical status as a political thinker. In fact, in the Prison Notebooks Machiavelli is first a heading title grouping together a series of notes on political matters, and then the name of an entire notebook79 in which Gramsci collects and reformulates many of his previous notes; finally, Machiavelli is the inspiration for Gramsci’s proposed solution to the problem of the relationship between individuals and collective organisms in the age of mass politics, with the formulation of a conception of the party as the modern Prince.
The interpretation of Machiavelli over the course of centuries has constituted the focal point of a genuine political challenge, ranging from the inclusion of The Prince in the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) to Frederick II’s Anti-Machiavel, up to its ‘republican’ re-reading in recent times.80 Gramsci mentions the liberal-romantic interpretation of The Prince offered by Ugo Foscolo in his work Sepulchres, in which Foscolo perceived The Prince’s main aim as being that of exposing the secrets (arcana) of power: ‘that great man, who even as he tempers the sceptre of the rulers, strips them of their laurels, and lets the people see how it drips with tears and blood’.81 Machiavelli was thus deemed to have spoken to the people and to have taught them not to fall into the trap of the powers that be, thus implementing a form of negative education whilst falling short of dealing with the problem of the positive organization of political power by the emerging classes. Gramsci likened this reading of Machiavelli to the one offered by Rousseau:
Rousseau saw in Machiavelli a ‘great republican’, who was forced by circumstances – without his moral dignity suffering as a consequence – to ‘déguiser son amour pour la liberté’ [disguise his love of liberty], but while feigning to give lessons to monarchs, he had really given
them to the people. Filippo Burzio has noted that such an interpreta-tion, rather than morally justifying Machiavellianism, in truth foresaw a ‘Machiavellianism to the n-th power’: since the author of The Prince not only gave advice on fraud, but also fraudulent advice, to the detriment of those at whom such advice was aimed.82
These interpretations, although having the merit of reassessing Machiavelli after centuries of oblivion, during which the Florentine secretary had been perceived exclusively as an extoller of the Princes’
unscrupulousness and ferocity, in Gramsci’s view fail to give due credit to Machiavelli’s position. While it was true that Machiavelli spoke on the people’s behalf, he did not do so in a negative manner. On the contrary, he alluded to the potentially positive form that a ‘people’s politics’
could take:
One may therefore suppose that Machiavelli had in mind ‘those who are not in the know’, and that it was they whom he intended to educate politically. This was no negative political education – of tyrant-haters – as Foscolo seems to have understood it; but a positive education – of those who have to recognise certain means as necessary, even if they are the means of tyrants, because they desire certain ends.
Anyone born into the traditional governing stratum acquires almost automatically the characteristics of the political realist, as a result of the entire educational complex which he absorbs from his family milieu, in which dynastic or patrimonial interests predominate. Who therefore is ‘not in the know’? The revolutionary class of the time, the Italian ‘people’ or ‘nation’, the citizen democracy which gave birth to men like Savonarola and Pier Soderini, rather than to a Castruccio or a Valentino.83
Savonarola was, for Machiavelli, a model of political abstraction, whereas Pier Soderini had come to symbolize the Florentine Republic, that is, its first incarnation, a ‘son of the people’ who as such lacked the
‘characteristics of the political realist’; as was seen at the siege of Prato in 1512, where he failed to take advantage of a possible agreement with the Spanish troops who were threatening the town, thus exacerbating matters and provoking the ransacking of Prato. This, in turn, was to lead to the fall of the Florentine Republic and the return of the Medici.84
Machiavelli thus wished to teach the people about the reality of modern politics, not in order to warn it of the injustices of tyrants, but to educate the emerging classes, and in particular their leaders, in the use of such politics. In Machiavelli’s mind, this was the only way of fighting the all-important battle for political power and for an organization of society that was in keeping with the interests of the emerging classes. In this regard, Gramsci wrote:
For Machiavelli ‘educating the people’ could only have meant convincing it, and making it aware, that there can only be one politics, realistic politics, to achieve the desired end, and thus it is necessary to gather around, and obey, that very Prince who uses such methods to achieve the end, because only he who wants the end wants the means required to reach that end.85
The Prince, Gramsci continues, ‘is written for a hypothetical “Man of Providence”’ who is capable of understanding people’s demands; it is written for the people, as is manifested in the final part thereof: ‘The conclusion of The Prince justifies the whole book, also in the view of the popular masses who in reality forget the means employed to achieve an end if this end is historically progressive’.86 Thus, Machiavellianism may be valuable both for the emerging classes and for the ruling classes.
However, in its disenchantment with the mechanisms of modern politics, it acts as a driver to the emerging classes, who of course do not acquire, through the continuity of the ruling classes, the knowledge required to govern.
Gramsci continues by arguing that ‘This position in which Machiavelli found himself politically is repeated today for the philosophy of praxis’, which develops ‘a theory and technique of politics which – however strong the belief that they will in the final resort be especially useful to the side which was “not in the know”, since that is where the historically progressive force is to be found – might be useful to both sides in the struggle’.87 Machiavelli thus becomes the forerunner of the philosophy of praxis as far as regards the emerging classes’ means of political education, and also the source, rediscovered by Gramsci, by which new instruments can be conceived that are capable of fighting the political battle to govern society.
The theorists of the philosophy of praxis, just like Machiavelli, ‘have tried to construct and divulge a popular, mass “realism”’,88 as a living
force for a new type of Prince. Thus, Gramsci believed that the time was due for
a study of the real connections between the two [Marx and Machiavelli] as theoreticians of militant politics, of action; and a book that extracts from Marxist thought an orderly system of actual politics along the lines of The Prince. The topic would be the political party in its relations with the classes and with the state – not the party as a sociological category but the party that wants to establish the state.89 While the new twentieth-century Prince’s task remains the same, namely, to embody the political aspirations of an emerging class, this new Prince can no longer be the charismatic figure portrayed in Machi-avelli’s writings. Mazzini was no such Prince, nor could Marx himself play such a role:
The modern Prince, the myth-Prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a social component […]. Historical development has already produced this organism, and it is the political party – the modern formation that contains the partial collective wills with a propensity to become universal and total.90 Thus, if the ‘“Prince” could be translated in modern terms as “political party”’,91 in Gramsci’s view a new The Prince needed to be written as a basis for Marxism. Such a study ‘must have a section devoted to Jacobinism […], as an example of how a concrete and operative collective will is formed’.92 The Jacobins, in fact, ‘were a “categorical” “incarnation”
of Machiavelli’s Prince’.93 They were capable of creating a collective will that worked, that was politically effective; they were realists, political militants, partisans with weighty passions, just as the leadership of the working-class ‘modern Prince’ party should be. Here, Machiavelli is once again, in Gramsci’s view, the symbol of modern politics, of that leadership of an emerging class that on the contrary, by its very nature, should not be a leading class.
Society
But society, like Man himself, always remains an irreducible historical and ideal entity which develops by continually contradicting itself and surpassing itself. Politics and the economy, the human environment and the social organism are one and the same thing, and always will be.
Antonio Gramsci 9 February 1918