ABSTRACTS
Thomas Berns
KNOWING THE OCCASION IN MACHIAVELLI'S THOUGHT
My goal is to show that Machiavelli proposes an original form of knowledge about occasion : knowledge of the encounter of the occasion. This means more generally, the development of a form of knowledge understood as encounter.
Victoria Kahn
MACHIAVELLIAN RHETORIC REVISITED
This lecture reconsiders the role of rhetoric in Machiavelli’s work and the relevance of Machiavelli’s analysis to 21st-century politics. I begin with Ernst Cassirer’s analysis of Machiavelli in his last published work. The Myth of the State inadvertently raises questions about the relation between Machiavellian technique and fascist technique. I argue, against Cassirer, that this is not only the question that Machiavelli implicitly raises in The Prince; it is also question that is central to the rhetorical tradition. And it is a question that faces us today as we see the manipulation of putatively neutral technologies such as the internet in support of authoritarian politics. I suggest that Machiavellian rhetoric provides a paradigm for thinking about and trying to address this problem.
Paul Rahe
THE ANATOMY OF AN ERROR: MACHIAVELLI’S SUPPOSED COMMITMENT TO A ‘CITIZEN’ MILITIA
It is a dogma, echoed nearly everywhere, that Machiavelli, as a republican, favored the formation of a citizen militia. I propose to show that this was not the case. I will trace this error back to its source, and I will outline its significance for our larger understanding of Machiavelli’s political thought.
Doyeeta Majumder
MACHIAVELLI AND TYRANNY
The centuries-long association of Machiavellism with tyranny (founded upon Gentillet’s amazingly tenacious Anti-machiavel) has, despite the best efforts of scholars of politics and history, proved well-nigh impossible to break. Machiavellism has been vulnerable to appropriation by despotic, fascist regimes right up to the present day. Yet, the Machiavellian tyrant cuts a protean and elusive figure. In the early modern Europe, ‘tyrant’ is an appellation applied indiscriminately to both the illegitimate monarch and the unfit monarch. The twinned visage of tyranny resulted in an inevitable conceptual and representational overlap between the tyrant and the usurper, which had important consequences for political theory as well as the literary and cultural milieu. This paper argues that it is in Machiavelli’s political writings that we find the most significant theoretical distinction between usurpation and tyranny. The Machiavellian principe nuove, whose rise to power is marked by Benjaminian ‘law-making violence’, is most emphatically not a tyrant by default. By investigating the contours of this distinction between illegitimate rule and misrule, this paper seeks to understand Machiavelli’s conception of tyranny. Further, through a reading of his political treatises and private letters, this paper will investigate whether, following his own advice to the prince, Machiavelli too adapts his portrait of the tyrant in order to navigate socio-political contingencies.
Swapan Chakravorty
MACHIAVELLI READING
In a letter to Francesco Vettori written in 1513, Machiavelli, then in exile, spoke of how he prepared himself for his evening studies. Putting off the day’s clothing covered in mud and dirt and changing into regal and courtly attire, he sought the company of ancient courts and great writers who in their turn received him with affection and answered his questions (Opere, vol. 3, Lettere). Reading as conversation with absent presences was not an unfamiliar motif: we have instances in the first scene in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and in Donne’s Satire 1. Robert Burton cites Heinsius, the librarian of Leiden who, upon entering the library, took his seat ‘amongst so many divine souls’ (The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 2). The paper would examine the letter to Vettori and other examples from Machiavelli’s works as instances of reading where the ethical and political dimensions of the reader are constituted by the act of reading, understood as a species of performance.
Jean Louis Fournel
MACHIAVELLIAN WORDS: LANGUAGE AS A TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING AND ACTING
This speech will first address the highly political impact of writing, that Machiavelli experienced since his Chancery years (1498-1512), which deeply marks the form and content of his thoughts. Secondly, it will propose a number of reflections on language peculiarities in the texts of his maturity (The Prince, Discourses on Livy, The Art of War, Florentine Histories) caught between technical language, uses of everyday jargon, Latinising tradition, hapax and re-semantization of some crucial concepts.
Machiavelli needed a language to express politics and war and made it a tool for understanding the world and having an impact on it.
Erica Benner
HOW PRINCES STEAL REPUBLICS: IRONY AND SATIRE IN MACHIAVELLI’S PRINCE AND MANDRAGOLA
Most readers today see Machiavelli’s Prince as a dispassionate ‘treatise’ that teaches princes how to acquire and hold power. On this view, the book simply shows princely readers the means needed to get what they want, never questioning their power-seeking ends. If a prince longs to possess a great empire like the Romans, or to gain ‘absolute’ control over a republic, Machiavelli coolly describes how he can gratify these desires, if necessary by violating oaths, betraying allies, and subverting established laws. His comedy Mandragolahas a similarly amoral theme: a rich young Florentine returns from abroad and conceives a passion for another man’s wife, Lucrezia, whose virtue he contrives to steal by weaving an elaborate web of deceptions. This paper compares the theme of republic-stealing in both works. It argues that comparisons with the openly satirical Mandragola help bring out the Prince’s subtly ironic criticisms of princely rule.
Shirshendu Chakrabarti
MACHIAVELLI AND THE QUESTION OF THE SELF IN RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND ART
In recent times, the notion of the assertive and aggressive self as distinctive to the European Renaissance and often associated with the historian Jacob Burckhardt, has recovered much of its prominence due to the theoretical popularity of power.
For Machiavelli, it is not important for the Prince actually to have the qualities held to be laudable but it is necessary for him to appear to have them. This deception, which necessarily involves self-deception, is the reality of politics exposed by Machiavelli, but the implications for art are worth exploring.
Without challenging the theoretical popularity of power, I shall try to argue, with suitable instances from literature and art, that assertive individualism ultimately takes us to the brink of dissolution of the self. The impulse to dominate in turn traps us into enslavement to diminishing selfhood.
The argument is not offered as valid for all Renaissance art, in which disguise often plays a self-revelatory role. It is crucial, however, to our understanding, say, of the Mannerist portrait of painters like Bronzino, Salviati and Coello. While the draughtsmanship is striking, we may ask ourselves if there is any self—not just any person—that lies behind the glassy mask of the portrait. Is it also possible to extend the inquiry to the Histories of Shakespeare, the second tetralogy in particular, and even to the tragedies? Do the common man and woman, free from the games of power, hold the key to authentic selfhood anchored in community?
Rajeev Bhargava
MACHIAVELLI ON THE RELIGIOUS AND THE SECULAR
Severely critical of Christianity as, among other things, undermining republican values, Machiavelli is widely seen as among the first to advocate the idea of a secular state- a state run in accordance with its own internal values and system of justification rather than by religion. The paper will examine this view and shall argue that Machiavelli's own views were more complex, less rigid and therefore it is not all that easy to see him as one the foundational thinkers of modern secularism.
Sukanta Chaudhuri
MACHIAVELLI AND GANDHI
It may seem perverse to link the first great theorist of realpolitik and militarism with the apostle of ethical politics and non-violence, across two continents and four centuries. I will argue that, though the two might differ in the conclusions they reach, they contribute to a rare and challenging discourse on the place of ethics in public life, and the structure, relations and ends of private and public value-systems.
Far from disregarding ethical issues in public life, Machiavelli engages with them. Most notably in the Discourses on Livy, he proposes an ethical order of statecraft, drawing on though crucially diverging from the ancient Romanitas. The Machiavellian order of public ethics clashes with the private. Again, Machiavelli examines rather than ignore the implications of this conflict. All this places his political thought on a totally new plane; moreover, with the ideal of the liberation and unification of Italy as its end, as most eloquently expressed at the end of The Prince.
The intellectual issues that engage Machiavelli are of the same order as those addressed by Gandhi, however different the resolution. Gandhi profoundly realizes the binary value-systems in social andpolitical life: his genius is to place the contraries in a different relation. Given the disempowered situation of the colonial subject, he makes private ethics the instrument of realpolitik by incorporating its premises in public conduct,thereby resolving the Machiavellian dialectic. Machiavelli and Gandhi are like two scientists probing the same problem with reference to similar datasets, but coming up with different solutions.
Yves Winter
MACHIAVELLI'S LUCRETIA
According to Livy’s History of Rome, the rape and subsequent suicide of Lucretia in 509 BC was a turning point in Roman history, triggering the popular uprising that dethroned the Etruscan kings and established the Roman republic. Roman historians, medieval philosophers, and Renaissance humanists tend to follow Livy in emphasizing Lucretia’s role in this political transition. Not so Machiavelli. Unlike his ancient sources and contemporaries, he downplays Lucretia’s rape and disavows her suicide as a causal factor in the Roman revolution. My paper offers an interpretation of this peculiar disavowal. Machiavelli’s treatment of Lucretia raises questions about the place of sexual violence in narratives of political founding; about the relation between sexual and political virtue; and about what a feminist historiography of the Roman founding might look like.
William Connell
MACHIAVELLI AMONG THE FRANCISCANS
Much has been written about Machiavelli’s evolving view of the Dominican friar Savonarola. Missing from this discussion has been a realization that within the Machiavelli family there was a tradition of allegiance to the mendicant order that in Florence fiercely opposed to Savonarola: the Franciscans. Both the formal writings and the correspondence of Machiavelli betray an interesting familiarity with Franciscanism that sheds light on his original views concerning Christianity, religion, acquisitiveness and happiness.
Marcello Simonetta
LETTERS AS ORACLES: MACHIAVELLI’S FORESIGHT IN HIS LAST YEARS (1525-1527)
From 1513 to 1525 Machiavelli was forced to be professionally inactive, and we owe to his joblessness the writing of most of his major works. Once he delivered the Florentine Histories to Pope Clement VII, a new phase of his life began. He swung back into action and was charged with several diplomatic and military tasks. During these two last intense years he faced hard international challenges that eventually resulted in the Sack of Rome and the removal of the Medici from Florence.
The gap between his theoretical work and his practical action has never been studied at this dramatic juncture. In this paper I aim to delve into Machiavelli's official and private letters (defined as oracles by a young humanist friend who admired him) to gauge his foresight and effectiveness in dealing with the "effectual truth of the thing".
From his attitudes we may draw some comparisons with our own "virtue" in facing and tackling today’s local and global emergencies.
Vittorio Morfino
THE PRINCE BETWEEN GRAMSCI AND ALTHUSSER
The history of 20th-century Marxism presents the positions of Gramsci and Althusser almost in the form of a symmetrical opposition, between the model of an absolute historicism and a theoretical antihistoricism. One might therefore think that the reading the two authors propose of Machiavelli's the Prince of profoundly marked by this theoretical opposition. In reality, analyzing the interpretations that they propose, it will be possible to find a point of convergence concerning the conceptual nexus of temporality, history and politics. Not only that, taking into consideration the Althusserian interpretation, it will emerge that what Althusser says at the beginning of his book, Machiavelli and us, namely that he reads Machiavelli as being contemporary with his first readers, is not true at all. Althusser's Machiavelli is actually the Machiavelli of Gramsci, and if we want to see the novelty of Althusser's reading in the right light, it is necessary to begin from Gramsci and the internal work Althusser carried out within this reading, a work that perhaps allows us today to read Gramsci differently, reactivating his force.
Prasanta Chakravarty
THE MONASTIC DISCIPLINE OF HUNTING
Hunting is hardly a diversion. It is a poetic task, a tactile drama. In Chapter 14 of The Prince, Machiavelli mentions hunting and its necessity during peacetime. He says, perhaps more than literally, how the Prince ought to 'know' his 'terrain.' Similarly, in Discourses III, 39, topography is considered a scienza, one that requires constant practice. And hunting is the prime source of such knowledge. Machiavelli is indebted to Xenophon and Flavius Arrianus for providing him with an arche notion and structure for hunting that suffuses some of his most important works, including Mandragola and The Golden Ass. What are the codes of ethics for a hunter? Why may hunting differ from fighting? More importantly, how may it differ from its obverse: lynching? What are the series of technical qualities required to accomplish genuine hunting? What mysterious communication does man accomplish with his own self and his prey in the very conceptualizing of hunting? How do we understand our assassins?
One does not hunt to kill. One kills in order 'to have hunted.' The animal can never come down to the level of man. But man, in a manner of conscious and spiritual humbling, can curtail his superiority and bring himself to the animal.
Catherine Zuckert
MACHIAVELLI’S BELFAGOR: GOOD GOVERNMENT, DOMESTIC TYRANNY, AND FREEDOM
Few scholars have paid much attention to the one short story by Niccolô Machiavelli that has come down to us. Those who do tend to take it merely as additional evidence for the misogyny he displays most dramatically in Chapter 25 of The Prince when he declares that “fortune is a woman; and it is necessary, if one wants to hold her down, to beat her and strike her down.” This very short, witty little “fable” is much more, however, than an expression of its author’s misogyny or complaints about the institution of marriage. In Belfagor Machiavelli first challenges traditional views of the relations between heaven and earth by depicting the government of hell by the pagan god Pluto as a model of justice and prudence. He then presents the pride of the devil’s wife Onesta (decency) as the source of her husband’s oppression and misery. Finally, he shows that a peasant knew better than a devil how to free himself from oppression and live happily. In sum, Machiavelli humorously exposes the pretensions of conventional “Christian” morality in favor of a shrewd unassuming democratic ethos.
Rinku Lamba
MACHIAVELLI AND WEBER ON RULE, LEADERSHIP AND POLITICS
Many contemporary political jurisdictions are witness to populisms marked by an ascendance of charismatic leaders. Such developments raise questions about the appropriate role of leadership in sustaining normatively desirable visions of political community. The proposed paper seeks to address questions in this regard by returning to the perspectives of Niccolo Machiavelli and Max Weber. Machiavelli and Weber are separated by a gap of four centuries. But, in their own ways, both thinkers contribute to spelling out key elements of modern political rule and especially to reflections about the significance of leadership for political community. As such, the paper seeks to engage the conceptual resources for the theme of political leadership ensconced within the notions of modern rule advanced by the two thinkers.