In the previous chapter I noted how Machiavelli’s account of the revolt of the Ciompi suggested a co-determination of political and economic equality, the actualization of the former being seen as inconsistent with the preservation of the latter. In this chapter I will further explore this idea through situating Machiavelli’s contention that the healthy repub-lic must aim to equalize the distribution of economic resources – classically expressed in the formulation that maintains the necessity of keeping the public rich and the citizens poor – within the context of what remains a largely underdeveloped potentiality in his thought: that of the elimination of the grandi as an organized social class embodying a particular shared humour. Contrary to those readers, democratic and otherwise, who seemingly eternalize the existence of the grandi , defining popular participatory activity negatively in terms of its oppo-sition to the activity of the great, I argue that Machiavelli unhinges the being of the great from any natural psychological considerations. If it is true that the people and the great share the same nature then there can be no essential ground distinguishing them, their opposition on the contrary being merely conventional. Machiavelli ultimately theorizes the grandi not in terms of a particular psychic orientation unique to them, but in terms of a contingent class composition. The great are those individuals who are able to consolidate themselves into a social group united in their end, which consists in leveraging their economic wealth to advance their own particular position within the city through excluding others from political modes and orders. The noble humour – the will to dominate expressed through conscious social action – only emerges with this consolidation. As I will stress below, the grandi ’s desire to oppress considered as a humour only emerges in a class
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context, the concept of umore not referring to the direction of individual will. 1 The elimination of economic inequality thus presupposes the elimination of the grandi as a social class. After outlining the democratic deficits of those readings that eternalize the noble humour, and outlin-ing some of the manifestations of Machiavelli’s defence of economic equality, I will conclude this chapter by gesturing toward the potential for the abolition of the grandi , and hence the conflict between it and the people. As I will again stress, however, such is not to suggest that all conflict itself may be eradicated. The persistence of conflictual relations between particulars is ultimately a necessity given the fact of human difference and the plurality of modes of human doing and being.
Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 6 , Machiavelli’s democratic politics derives its energy precisely from such conflictual relations.
The Originary Division of the Social in Democratic Readings of Machiavelli
For several decades the dominant democratic interpretation of Machia-velli was that initiated by Claude Lefort, which achieved its most com-prehensive form of expression in his Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel . 2 Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli must be understood in light of his cri-tique of the impulse to totalitarian domination, the latter being an attempt to in a sense recolonize the space of sovereignty, although in a now limitless form, after the emergence of modern democracy and the disentaglement of the principles of power, law, and knowledge. 3 With the breaking apart of the medieval order the concept of sovereignty, which had previously been incarnated in the body of the monarch, was disincorporated of right and emptied of its positive content. Power
1 Such is implicitly suggested by Étienne Balibar when he writes that the term umori is
“notoriously diffi cult to translate in modern languages since it refers at the same time to classes, interests, and regimes of passions.” Étienne Balibar, “ Essere Principe, Essere Populare : The Principle of Antagonism in Machiavelli’s Epistemology,” in The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy, and Language , ed. Filippo Del Lucchese, Fabio Frosini, and Vittorio Morfi no (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 354.
2 Throughout this study I have been citing the slightly abridged English translation.
Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making .
3 For a brief attempt to situate Lefort’s reading of Machiavelli within his overall politi-cal and philosophipoliti-cal trajectory see Knox Peden, “Anti-Revolutionary Republicanism:
Claude Lefort’s Machiavelli,” Radical Philosophy , no. 182 (2013): 29–39.
Social Equality and the Contingent Being of the Great 187
took on the appearance of an empty place, a symbol of the non-identity of the social order. In Lefort’s words, “Democracy inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in which the peo-ple will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will con-stantly be open to question, whose identity will remain latent.” 4 Totalitarianism is the attempt to refill this space, to embody sovereignty through the imposition of a new identity on the social order via the construction of an image of the People-as-One, a people escaping inter-nal division or differentiation. 5 The significance of Machiavelli for Lefort lies in the former’s effort to give an account of the perpetually divided being of the political community. On Lefort’s reading, though, this division is articulated through the opposition of society’s two pri-mary classes – defined in terms of the orientation of their humour:
toward oppression and toward the avoidance of oppression – which co-constitute each other through the mutual implication of their desire.
Lefort claims that the division between those whom Machiavelli labels the people and the grandi is an originary one present in every social order, and thus has “universal application.” 6 The key question resulting from the perception of this universality is that regarding the negotiation of the conflictual bifurcation: “Either it engenders a power that rises above society and subordinates it entirely to its authority – as in the princedom – or it is regulated in such way that no one is subject to anyone – legally at least – as in liberty – or it is powerless to resolve itself into a stable order – as in license.” 7 What the political observer is incapable of hoping to achieve, however, is a termination of the conflict between the humours through the reduction of the social order to a homogeneous unity grounded in a universality of desire. Society can never be reduced to such a unity precisely because each class’s desire – the one to oppress and the other to not be oppressed – is insatiable and ineradicable. Indeed, it is the dynamic relation between these two
4 Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism , ed. John B. Thompson (Cam-bridge: MIT Press, 1986), 303–4.
5 Claude Lefort, “The Logic of Totalitarianism,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society:
Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism , ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 287.
6 Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making . 7 Ibid., 139.
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desires that structures the existence of each class. The grandees are the
“ natural adversary” of the people, “the Other who constitutes them as the immediate object of its desire.” 8 If originary division is a universal-ity inscribed into every political society, we nevertheless can analyse the precise form of its articulation in specific social-historical contexts:
hence Machiavelli’s typology of regimes in chapter 9 of the The Prince . If in the principality it is subordinated to the authority of the prince and in a state of licence it is desublimated independently of political order, in the Discourses originary division is the condition for the actualization of a concrete freedom, through the institution of a political life in which each person or faction is incapable of appropriating power for itself, and in which human desire is able to be expressed through law.
It is the conflictual interaction of desire between the co-constitutive classes that prevents the closure of society via one party’s occupation of a site of power. Instituted in this movement, law is not that which restricts the expulsion of desire, but rather that which gives it an expres-sion through the creation of a space that allows for the actualization of the will to freedom. In Lefort’s words, “Law cannot be thought beneath the emblem of measure, nor traced to the action of a reasonable author-ity, which would come to put a limit to the appetites of man, nor con-ceived as the result of a natural regulation of those appetites imposed by the necessity of group survival. It is born of the excessiveness of the desire for freedom, which is doubtless linked to the appetite of the oppressed – who seek an outlet for their ambition – but does not reduce to it, since strictly speaking it has no object, is pure negativity, the refusal of oppression.” 9 Precisely because the people’s desire is to not be oppressed, there is no potential for the objective satisfaction of it: “it detaches the subject from any particular position and binds him to an infinite requirement.” 10 The universality of originary division is located in this articulation: the conflict between the classes is incapable of being definitively reconciled to the extent that it is not a contestation over an exterior object whose possession is capable of terminating desire. To the
8 Ibid., 141.
9 Ibid., 229. On the negativity of desire see also Miguel Abensour, “‘Savage Democ-racy’ and the ‘Principle of Anarchy,’” in Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment , trans. Max Blechman and Martin Breaugh (London: Polity Press, 2011), 122.
10 Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making , 455.
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degree that the conflict of desire cannot be eradicated, political struggle is a permanent condition of human reality. In the Discourses on Livy this conflict serves as the foundation for a specifically democratic practice:
the existence of modes and orders that allow the plebs to respond to the actions of the grandees permits for the perpetuation of a power open to contestation, the dynamic relation of desire serving as the ground for the production of the new through its continual negotiation and rene-gotiation in law. Democratic activity, rooted in the non-identity of the social order, in an irreconcilable economy of desire, is presented as a form of perpetual interrogation, a refusal to yield to a static order of things that would freeze the political field, terminating that explicit conflict of humours which is the source of the liberty of the people. The city must thus be structured so as to give an expression to this double movement or division of desire. The ethical question is not whether desire is abolished, an impossibility, but whether desire is given a pro-ductive expression through ordinary modes: “What makes the virtue of the institution is not, then, that it eliminates error and injustice at the same time that it disarms instinct; it replaces private with public violence.” 11
What later radical democratic readers of Machiavelli influenced by Lefort would more clearly articulate than the latter is one of the conse-quences of such a theorization of originary division. The polarization of the multiplicity of desire that characterizes life in a shared world into what might appear as a quasi-metaphysical opposition between two transhistorical terms present in every society seemingly universalizes an oppressive humour, reactively defining the will to freedom in its opposition to this former tendency. The democratic non-occupation of the site of power does not exclude, in fact cannot exclude, the perpetu-ation of oppression, and hence Lefort’s claim that the people can never become free of domination. 12 Because of the always-present opposition of the two primary desires, freedom and domination are inseparably linked, freedom in fact emerging in opposition to the desire for domi-nation. In the words of Miguel Abensour, “In short, for Machiavelli politics and domination are at once different and closely interrelated;
the one, in its negativity, born from the fact that it resists and opposes
11 Ibid., 236.
12 Lefort, “Machiavelli and the Verità Effetuale ,”” 135.
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the other and, in its affirmation, asserts that a human world is possible, provided that the many cease being oppressed by a minority of the great.” 13 To the extent that the plebeian will is oriented toward resisting the encroachments of the grandees – that is, to breaking up the attempt at unifying the conflict of humours through fixing the form of society under one law – its orientation is essentially negative. It is realized not through institution, but rather through the struggle against all institu-tionalizing tendencies, which attempt to schematize the social field via the distribution of places and functions in the name of an artificial har-mony that legitimates the domination of many by some.
The contemporary interpreter who has done the most to advance the non-institutional reading of Machiavelli’s democratic theory is Miguel Vatter, who like Lefort grounds his analysis in a recognition of an origi-nary social division between the desires of the great and the people. He thus speaks of the “two totally heterogeneous desires with totally opposite relations to the principle of rule.” 14 The significance of the relation between the trajectory of desire and rule is here essential. The republic cannot be thought of in terms of the institutionalization of the rule of the people because the people do not desire rule, but only no-rule. Machiavelli’s account of social discord, then, does not refer us to a positive institutionalization of a state form now able to provide a space for regulating competition: “the republic, as a political form, does not exist and will never exist because the res publica is not a political form ( res ) at all but denotes an iterable event in which forms of legitimate domination are changed in a revolutionary fashion.” 15 The people’s very real and active desire for freedom is the desire to replace rule by no-rule, and is thus a negative one eschewing a positive instauration in an order of things: “the desire for freedom as no-rule transcends every given social and political form that imposes a distinction between who commands and who obeys. In a literal sense, the people’s desire not to be commanded or oppressed is an extra-constitutional desire that can never be integrally realized in any form of government or stabilized in any legal order of domination.” 16
13 Miguel Abensour, “Machiavel: le grand penseur du désordre,” Le Monde , 11 April 2006, 8.
14 Vatter, Between Form and Event , 101.
15 Ibid., 6.
16 Ibid., 95.
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Even though the multiplicity of negative desire cannot be positively organized into a political form capable of realizing it, it nevertheless can lead to the demand to reorder the political form, exposing the being of the latter as merely contingent and subject to history. What must not be forgotten is simply that there is no end to any chain of reorder, no ultimate discovery of a political form capable of actualizing political freedom as a permanent condition of existence: “every realization of freedom as no-rule is also its reification, that is, any given form is bound, in the course of time, to stop counting as an acceptable response to the question posed by the desire for freedom as no-rule.” 17 Vatter thus concludes that Machiavelli’s republic cannot be interpreted as a form of state, even if its constitution allows for the expression of popu-lar desire through specific counter-institutions: “The people enter polit-ical life through special institutions, like that of the Tribunate, that contrast the proper activity of the state, i.e., the administration of rule.
These institutions of political contrast, or counter-institutions, carve up the state so as to clear a space in which to voice and act out the demands of no-rule.” 18 The particularity of such counter-institutions can be seen, for example, through examining the function of the Tribunate. The Tri-bunate is the society’s guard of freedom because its function is to sus-pend the relation of rule. 19 For Vatter all counter-institutions operate in this way: all are opposed to the positive force of the established law of the state, the corruption of the free society occurring precisely where the people are used as a ground for the construction of a government:
“To make the people serve as the foundation of the state is equivalent to the process of giving substance or reality to the desire for freedom as no-rule, thereby denying what is most proper to this desire: its capacity to transcend factual political and legal order and suspend its validity.” 20 Again, the desire of the people is incapable of being embodied in a posi-tive order of law, for its free expulsion is articulated in its confrontation with and interruption of the noble desire to rule. Hence, “the political body is alive only when it is discordant with itself, when it makes space for the people and their desire for freedom in opposition to the desire for domination expressed by the noble elements of the body.” 21 Vatter
17 Ibid., 96.
18 Ibid., 99.
19 Ibid., 104.
20 Ibid., 122.
21 Ibid.