On Althusser's Machiavelli, and on Machiavelli as educator.
Machiavelli is domesticated by Althusser in his riveting booklet, translated by Gregory Eliott (1999) as Machiavelli and Us. (This Verso edition received a subsidy of the French Ministery of Foreign Affairs.) The material in this works seems to date from the early 1970s.
Althusser’s Machiavelli is (not implausibly) a theorist of class struggle as an engine of history (pp. 58-62) and the philosophical prophet of “the national and popular state.” (p. 27) This state can only be founded by a new Prince; such a prince will for his contemporaries be, if they were able to see through his disguises, necessarily criminal in character (p. 96). But once the new Prince had succeeded, he will institute a state “equipped with laws expressing the balance of forces in the class struggle between [oligarchs]* and people; in this struggle the Prince must rely on the people” (p. 62). This is only possible if the ruler can rely on the national army, which is simultaneously a source of the ruler’s power and the means to emancipate educate the people in a state ideology; it is “the training school of the people, the becoming people of the people.” (p. 102). Althusser’s Machiavelli has “the popular Prince circumscribe[d] the class struggle between nobles and people, to the advantage of the latter.” (p. 103)
That is, the crimes of a new Prince, which will seem to found an absolute monarchy (of the sort familiar from Ferdinand’s Spain) will de facto actuate the glorious revolution of an enduring, mixed republic (p.40 & pp. 47-9)) To put this as a serious joke, while relying on Gramsci, Althusser turns Machiavelli into the company of Polybius and Montesquieu and simultaneously Lenin and Marx.
I want to make two critical observations on Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli. First, he often seems to write as if for Machiavelli the criminality ends with the founding of the enduring state (e.g., p. 93). As Althusser puts it, “He is the founder of a state (worthy of the name) only if he gives it laws and, through these laws, resigns his exclusive powers and emerges from his solitude.” (p. 64 [I return to this ‘solitude’ below.]) That is, this version of Machiavelli anticipates Spinoza, Hume, and Kant for recognizing that force and fraud are the original foundation even in legitimate states, but then such force is forgotten or turned into taboo as the people enjoy the fruits of law-governed-ness. To put it in Marxian terms society becomes without history (p. 46).
This is a defensible, albeit odd reading of Machiavelli. If we look at the end of chapter 19 of The Prince, Machiavelli writes
Though a man who has seized power and is establishing a new monarchy cannot imitate the likes of Marcus Aurelius, that doesn’t mean he has to behave like Severus. What he must take from Severus are the policies you need to found a state, and from Marcus the policies that bring stability and glory once the state is firmly established. [Tim Parks translator]
At first this seems to support Althusser’s reading. According to Machiavelli, Septimus Severus was an usurper of legitimate government. In fact, in chapter 19 he is introduced among the bad list of Roman emperors who in power “committed every crime a leader can commit against his people.” (emphasis added) As I note shortly, Severus is actually called a tyrant by Machiavelli.
But if we look at the details of the discussion of Severus doubts creep in. For, in the previous (18th) chapter, Machiavelli notes that “since a ruler has to be able to act the beast, he should take on the traits of the fox and the lion; the lion can’t defend itself against snares and the fox can’t defend itself from wolves.” (emphasis added.) And lest we fail to understand what this means, the first example mentioned is Pope Alexander VI, who “never did anything but con people.” (This Pope is the father of Cesare Borgia.)
In fact, among a long list of bad emperors, Severus is held up as a positive exemplar: he played “the ferocious lion and the cunning fox very well; he was feared and respected by all parties and he managed to avoid being hated by the army.” Machiavelli explicitly notes that “he tyrannized the people to keep the army friendly he was always able to govern with success; his qualities amazed and awed the people, impressed and pleased the army, so that both groups in their different ways admired him.” Unlike most of the bad emperors Severus died peacefully. So, what Machiavelli says might supportsAlthusser’s case, but what he shows not (see also Discorsi 1.10)
As an aside, on January 9, 1980, while drawing on Dio Cassius, Foucault starts his 1979-1980 lecture series (translated as On the Government of the Living) with an elaborate and quite memorable example of an emperor who knew judiciously how to exercise power with what he calls alethurgy. Foucault pretends as if he hears about Severus from Dio Cassius for the first time. But we know that he had lectured on and engaged with Machiavelli throughout the Winter of 1978.
My second critical observation is slightly more recondite. As should be clear from above, Althusser treats Machiavelli as a kind of anticipation of Lenin’s avant-gardism. The new Prince must act alone (recall the solitude above). In fact, tacitly, Althusser picks sides against Luxemburg and for Lenin, when he quotes Machiavelli “[T]he many are not capable of instituting anything, being unable to recognize its goodness because of the diversity of opinions that exist among them.” (p. 64)
The quoted passage is from the Discourses on Livy, Book 1 Chapter 9. In fact, in immediate context Machiavelli is defending Romulus’ fratricide at the founding of Rome. So, it seems to support Althusser’s interpretation, especially because Romulus kept command of the armies to himself. But rather than relying on the people’s judgment, Machiavelli’s Romulus immediately organizes a Senate, “with which he could consult and according to the opinion of which he would decide.” (Discorsi 1.9) While relying on his own soldiers, Machiavelli’s wise prince does not govern against or despite the oligarchs, but with them.
It is worth noting that Machiavelli’s Romulus quietly departs from Livy’s Romulus, who, after killing Remus, “His first act was to fortify the Palatine, on which he had himself been reared. To other gods he sacrificed after the Alban custom, but employed the Greek for Hercules, according to the institution of Evander.” (Livy 1.7). Machiavelli writes as if the absence of Gods in Romulus’ Rome is completely self-evident.
It is especially peculiar that Althusser misses all of this. Because just before (on p. 63) Althusser alerts us to the fact that at Discorsi 1.10, Machiavelli is a fierce critic of Caesar and compares Caesar unfavorably to Romulus (“Truly if a prince is seeking glory in the world, he should wish to possess a corrupt city, not to ruin it wholly like Caesar but to reform it like Romulus.”) After all, Caesar breaks the power of the senate and, purportedly, governs in favor of the people.
To put the point anachronistically. Althusser misses that where Machiavelli departs from Livy (who is rather critical of Rome’s elites) it is precisely in Machiavelli’s image of how Rome’s elites acted on (Machiavellian) Virtu.+ Where Althusser imagines Machiavelli as willingly abolishing propertied elites, I think it’s more apt (with Burnham) to understand Machiavelli as educating them.
*Althusser has “Nobles” instead of ‘oligarchs.’' However, he goes on (correctly) to emphasize that “Machiavelli can set up his political problem only condition of making a clean sweep of existing feudal forms as incompatible with the objective of Italian unity.” (p. 70, emphasis in original.)
+An alert reader may note that on this point, I am in agreement with Strauss In Thoughts on Machiavelli, p. 134.