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Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation MACHIAVELLI AND THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION CHRISTOPHER HOLMAN Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0393-2 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Holman, Christopher, 1979–, author Machiavelli and the politics of democratic innovation / Christopher J. Holman. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0393-2 (cloth) 1. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527 – Political and social views. 3. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527. Principe. 4. Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527. Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. I. Title. JC143.M4H65 2018 320.1 C2018-902598-0 CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Tor onto Press. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the fi nancial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 Part One: Methodology 1 Machiavelli and the Constellative Mode of Historical Appropriation 15 Part Two: Philosophical Anthropology 2 The Contingency of Being: On Worldly and Human Indetermination 43 3 Politics and the Human Essence: The Prince as a Model of Human Subjectivity 75 Part Three: Political Ontology 4 Ambition and the People: The Popular Form of the Desire for Creation 131 5 Social Equality and the Contingent Being of the Great 185 6 Institutionalizing Ambitious Expression: The Republic as the Self-Overcoming Regime 217 Works Cited 275 Index 301 Acknowledgments My thanks to the anonymous reviewers of earlier versions of this man- uscript for their detailed critical commentary, which improved the fi nal product immensely. I am grateful to the entire staff at the University of Toronto Press involved in the production of this book for their contri- butions, in particular Daniel Quinlan for providing his usual editorial expertise throughout the entire publication process. James Leahy, fur- thermore, provided comprehensive and detailed copy editing, greatly improving the readability of the book. Material from this book has been presented at various meetings of the Western Political Science Association, the Canadian Political Sci- ence Association, and the International Herbert Marcuse Society, as well as the 2015 conference “Radical Democracy and Utopia” at the University of Paris Diderot, and the 2014 workshop “Moral Revolu- tions: Institutional and Ideational Dimensions” at Nanyang Techno- logical University. The questions from many of the participants at these meetings were helpful in clarifying certain issues for me, and orienting the direction of the project. Finally, my thanks to all of the usual friends, colleagues, and teach- ers from York University, Stony Brook University, NTU, and elsewhere with whom I have discussed Machiavelli and democratic theory over the years. Abbreviated versions of chapters 1 and 2 appeared earlier as “Machi- avelli’s Constellative Use of History,” Theory and Event 19, no. 2 (2016), and “Machiavelli’s Philosophical Anthropology,” European Legacy 21, no. 8 (2016): 769–90. MACHIAVELLI AND THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION Introduction This book has a double aim. On the one hand, it looks to contribute to the history of political thought by providing a new interpretation of the political theory of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose perpetually studied works have garnerned even more recent attention as a result of the quincentenary of the production of several of them. On the other hand, it seeks to develop a new theoretical model and ethical defence of dem- ocratic practice, of radical democracy in particular. Specifically, the new method for thinking radical democracy will be mediated through a detailed consideration and reinterpretation of the texts of Machiavelli. The deployment of a five-hundred-year-old oeuvre for the sake of advancing a contemporary theoretical tradition that, even if it may trace its roots to ancient Athens has only emerged as a somewhat uni- fied philosophical field recently, will no doubt strike some as a suspi- cious intellectual endeavour. The fact that this oeuvre is the Machiavellian one may only add to the suspicion. After all, the subject of Machiavelli studies is a notoriously partisan one. Claude Lefort does not overstate the case when he writes that here “the variety of interpre- tations and opinions, the depth of conflict, as well as the intensity of the critical passions, reach their highest degree.” 1 The Machiavellian text is not so much an object of disinterested scholarly interpretation as a field in which contending forms and traditions of political thought, with their own ontological and normative assumptions regarding the being of politics, deploy the Florentine secretary in an effort to advance their particular commitments. 1 Claude Lefort, “L’oeuvre de pensée et l’histoire,” in Les formes de l’histoire: essais d’anthropologie politique (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 144. 4 Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation I make no claims to being able to symbolically rise above this realm of appearance, with its conflicting images and perspectives, in order to touch the truth of Machiavelli’s political thought. In this book I thus aim not at producing a systematic explication of the whole of Machia- velli’s oeuvre, or an intellectual history schematically tracing the devel- opment of his thought through time, or a contextual situation of his work within the overall environment of the Cinquecento , and so on. On the contrary, I will adopt an interpretative methodology that I believe is much more consistent with Machiavelli’s own approach to the doing of political theory, an approach that I argue is the very source of the inten- sity of the debates over Machiavellian meaning. Machiavelli’s norma- tive political theory proceeds mainly through an analysis of various historical events and personages drawn from ancient and modern Ital- ian history, but focusing particulary on the ancient Roman republic and recent Florentine experience. As is often pointed out, however, Machia- velli’s historical method is highly atypical. Rather than seek to repre- sent the trajectory of past events in a linear and straightforward mode, he selectively alters, elides, and invents lessons and events in order to invest them with a specific political meaning, a meaning that is then redeployed in his own context for the sake of achieving a contemporary political goal: the unification and liberation of the Italian peninsula. Machiavelli’s use of history is thus characterized by an imaginative and creative redistribution of historical meaning. This study asks what it means to read Machiavelli in the same way that Machiavelli read his historical sources, applying Machiavelli’s method for the interpretative analysis of history to the interpretative analysis of Machaivelli. Just as Machiavelli’s historical examples become, through their critical juxta- position with one another, other than what they originally were, so too does Machiavelli become other than himself, depending on how we choose to read him in the moment. In this sense there are, potentially, innumerable Machiavellian moments. 2 My emphasis will be on what Machiavelli has to contribute to demo- cratic theory, specifically, to a radical democratic theory grounded in an affirmation of the universal capacity for creative innovation. There is certainly nothing original about suggesting that Machiavelli is capable 2 On the existence of more than one (if not innumerable) Machiavellian moments see Marie Gaille, Machiavel et la tradition philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), 121–49. Introduction 5 of contributing important content to a theory of radical democracy. This has indeed been recognized for over forty years, such readings flourish- ing in particular in France and Italy. 3 Despite important contributions by figures such as Miguel Vatter, Filippo Del Lucchese, and others, however, within the Anglo-American world the democratic Machia- velli has come to be appreciated within mainstream political science only recently, in particular as a result of the many publications of John McCormick on the subject. 4 What I argue that existing democratic readers – radical and otherwise – have failed to fully appreciate, how- ever, is the extent to which Machiavelli’s normative commitment to a specific modality of political existence is ethically grounded in a par- ticular understanding of the ontology of the human, and its relation to the form of existence of worldly being. In evaluating republican politi- cal life within the context of the affirmation of a precise philosophical anthropology, Machiavelli generates an entirely unique defence of democratic rule. Just as Machiavelli creatively appropriates elements of ancient and modern history
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