Machiavelli and the Politics of Democratic Innovation

Front matter

MACHIAVELLI and the Politics of DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION

CHRISTOPHER HOLMAN

CHRISTOPHER HOLMAN

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 manuscript for their detailed critical commentary, which improved the final product immensely. I am grateful to the entire staff at the University of Toronto Press involved in the production of this book for their contributions, in particular Daniel Quinlan for providing his usual editorial expertise throughout the entire publication process. James Leahy, furthermore, 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 Science 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 Revolutions: Institutional and Ideational Dimensions” at Nanyang Technological 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 teachers 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 “Machiavelli’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.

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 democratic 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 unified philosophical field recently, will no doubt strike some as a suspicious 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 interpretations and opinions, the depth of conflict, as well as the intensity of the critical passions, reach their highest degree.”' 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.

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 Machiavelli’s oeuvre, or an intellectual history schematically tracing the development 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 intensity of the debates over Machiavellian meaning. Machiavelli’s normative political theory proceeds mainly through an analysis of various historical events and personages drawn from ancient and modern Italian history, but focusing particulary on the ancient Roman republic and recent Florentine experience. As is often pointed out, however, Machiavelli’s historical method is highly atypical. Rather than seek to represent 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 juxtaposition 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.”

My emphasis will be on what Machiavelli has to contribute to democratic 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.

of contributing important content to a theory of radical democracy. This has indeed been recognized for over forty years, such readings flourishing in particular in France and Italy.’ Despite important contributions by figures such as Miguel Vatter, Filippo Del Lucchese, and others, however, within the Anglo-American world the democratic Machiavelli 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. What I argue that existing democratic readers — radical and otherwise — have failed to fully appreciate, however, is the extent to which Machiavelli’s normative commitment to a specific modality of political existence is ethically grounded in a particular understanding of the ontology of the human, and its relation to the form of existence of worldly being. In evaluating republican political 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 in order to articulate a new national project, so will I attempt to creatively appropriate elements of Machiavelli’s thought in order to articulate a new model of democracy. Machiavelli is the ideal figure to work with in this respect because not only are there such elements in his work to be located, but also he is one of the few thinkers in the tradition of political thought to affirm the openness of political theory to such a form of investigation. Although I will draw extensively from Machiavelli’s entire body of writing — including his major and minor political writings, historical studies, poetry, comedies, diplomatic

3 Perhaps the key point in this trajectory is the 1972 publication of Claude Lefort, Le travail de l'oeuvre Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

4 Although McCormick aims to articulate the participatory democratic commitments of Machiavelli, he explicitly contrasts his reading with those in the radical democratic tradition, which tend to de-emphasize the role of the institution in mediating democratic self-expression, locating the latter precisely in the interruption of instituted political forms. See, for example, John P. McCormick, “Defending the People from the Professors,” ed. John Swadley, The Art of Theory, 27 September 2010, www.artoftheory .com/mecormick-machiavellian-democracy. Although I agree with McCormick that most radical democrats obscure the institutional form of Machiavelli’s project, I will ultimately argue that it is possible to appreciate the radical content of his democratic theory by grasping the specific form of articulation of Machiavellian institutions, as institutions that are perpetually open to their own interrogation and interruption.

dispatches, personal correspondences, and more — at the heart of my analysis will be a reconsideration of the substance of and relationship between his two most well-known major political works, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy.” Without attempting to close off certain other readings, I will propose a new method for thinking the relationship between these two works, seeing each as one moment of a comprehensive normative project affirming a specific ethics of political creation. Each of the two works is aimed primarily at articulating a figure of thought that contributes to the revelation of the human capacity for creativity or innovation. The first figure is to be found in The Prince, Machiavelli here being concerned with presenting not only the mechanics of a certain type of regime, but also those elements that structure a specific model of human subjectivity: Machiavelli is telling the reader what it means to be a creative subject. In the Discourses, meanwhile, Machiavelli presents a second figure of thought, this one aimed at outlining a form of political regime that is capable of generalizing the model of human subjectivity detailed in The Prince. The Machiavellian republic can be read in democratic terms as the form of regime in which all citizens are able to actualize their potential for political creation. The difference in the objects of the two works does not express a discontinuity or non-correspondence, but rather is a manifestation of their very unity: The Prince as a treatise on what it means for an individual to be a creative subject, and the Discourses as a treatise on the possibility of conceptualizing a political regime in which this capacity for innovation is democratically institutionalized. Machiavelli’s theoretical project can thus roughly be divided into two parts. On the one hand he develops a philosophical anthropology. Machiavelli radically destabilizes all

5 Throughout the study I will cite Niccolò Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Firenze: Sansoni Editore, 1971). I have also consulted the following English translations: Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C.

Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Niccolo

Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Laura F. Banfield

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Niccolo Machiavelli, The Art of War,

trans. Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Niccolò

Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, volumes 1-3, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham:

Duke University Press, 1989); Niccolo Machiavelli, Machiavelli and His Friends: Their

Personal Correspondence, ed. and trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices (DeKalb:

Northern Illinois University Press, 1996).

positive models of the human essence that attempt to outline a fixed structure of the human being, and instead interprets the essence of the latter negatively in terms of the ability to creatively shape the self and the world. Such a model of essence has been developed by a variety of the canonical thinkers in the history of political thought, but I will argue that Machiavelli is the first one who sees the actualization of this essence as being achieved primarily through political activity. Hence the second part of Machiavelli’s project: the development of a political ontology in which he tries to think about a form of political life that is capable of affirming this fundamental human creativity. Machiavelli’s ethical commitment to a form of democratic republic in which all citizens are capable of expressing their political will is a result of his perception of a universal human desire for creative self-expression. We are thus ultimately presented with a new normative foundation for democratic life, one grounded not in any judgment regarding the competency of popular decision making, nor one regarding the fundamental natural rights of individuals, but rather the orientation of individual beings toward creativity and innovation.°

As Ihave mentioned, the justification for such a reconstruction of the Machiavellian oeuvre is to be found in Machiavelli’s own practice of writing. I thus begin in chapter 1 by providing a new analysis of what I take to be the unique character of Machiavelli’s methodology, specifically his political deployment of ancient historical examples, and how it will inform my own reading of Machiavelli’s texts. Although commentators have often pointed out the extent to which Machiavelli’s affirmation of an active history oriented toward political creation is distinguished from a passive one in which historical events are treated merely as objects of contemplation, they have not gone far enough in describing how the precise form of Machiavelli’s historiography is a necessary element of his valorization of political creation. I attempt to demonstrate how this is the case by arguing that Machiavelli’s historical method can be thought of as an aesthetic practice of thinking in

6 Although he takes a different approach, Emmanuel Roux similarly interprets Machiavelli as initiating a new genealogy of democracy (which includes Spinoza, Montesquieu, and Rousseau), a genealogy that “does not speak of the individual, of natural right, of the separation of powers.” Emmanuel Roux, Machiavel, la vie libre (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2013), 16. Democracy, instead, is thought of in terms of mutation and perpetual change.

constellations, such as was most famously articulated in the twentieth century by Walter Benjamin. Machiavelli critically and selectively juxtaposes conceptual elements in order to generate figures of thought that reveal the potential to transcend the existing political organization of things. I argue that this method has important implications for how we think about both the means and ends of political theory, and my own approach to interpreting Machiavelli will take it as its model.

In part 2 I attempt to reconstruct from Machiavelli’s thought a consistent philosophical anthropology. Chapter 2 details Machiavelli’s rejection of positive models of human nature. This rejection is seen as a correlate of his theory of worldly being. Under the influence of the Epicurean philosophical tradition, Machiavelli provides a cosmological account of a world that is considered in terms of its fundamentally chaotic and indeterminate being, an account that rejects all transcendental attempts to absolutely ground the world and structure its being in a deterministic way, such as via theology, natural law, laws of history, and so on. This worldly indetermination also extends to the human being, and is represented in Machiavelli’s rejection of the attempt to thematize human nature in terms of a perpetually fixed set of properties whose form could be objectively grasped and schematized. Such a rejection is demonstrated in two primary ways: through an account of the radical diversity of human forms of doing and being, and through an explanation of the fundamental openness of human being to change and alteration through subjection to processes of socialization. In the final instance Machiavelli theorizes a radical indetermination of human being, this indetermination being expressed in the multiplicity and non-identity of human desire, a fact that closes off in advance the potential for a stable reconciliation or harmonization of human interest. Human difference, and subsequently conflict, thus remain an ineradicable feature of social existence.

In chapter 3 I provide, through a reinterpretation of the mode of being of Machiavelli’s ideal prince, an account of what I take to be Machiavelli’s negative model of the human essence. Such negative models reject attempts to theorize all elements of human being in terms of a system of positive determinations, seeing one of the fundamental components of essence instead in the specifically human ability to transcend merely immediate and conventional forms of doing and being. A negative essence refers us, in other words, not to a specifically human content, but rather to a specifically human capacity, that is, the capacity for creativity, to generate new values and orders. The human being is that which is capable of perpetually remaking itself and its social world through its life activity. This capacity is expressed in Machiavelli’s concept of ambition, which is identified in terms of a fundamental human striving to transgress existing forms and construct new realities. I argue that princely creation is exalted by Machiavelli to the extent that it is seen as providing a model for a political form of creative self-activity, for the realization of the human desire for value formation. What Machiavelli’s idea of the new prince reveals, what the specific constellation of thought articulated through the juxtaposition of conceptual elements drawn from a variety of historical experiences and actors discloses, is the image of the prince as an ambitious creator: a model of the form of a fully realized human subjectivity.

According to my interpretation, Machiavelli’s Prince may be read not only as a treatise on politics, but also as one on the nature of human subjectivity. In part three I turn to look more closely at the relation between this understanding of subjectivity and Machiavelli’s conception of the being of politics. In chapter 4 I attempt to demonstrate that the psychic ambition which was seen in chapter 3 to stimulate virtuous political creation is one that belongs not only to princes and other social elites, but to all citizens. It is common for readers of Machiavelli — whether Straussian, republican, or democratic — to bifurcate human desire into two opposed poles: whereas the great or noble are seen as possessing a fundamental desire to dominate others through the expulsion of their ambition, the people are seen as passively desiring not to be dominated. I will argue that this distinction Machiavelli makes, however, does not refer us to an essential or originary opposition, but rather to two different forms of appearance of the single desire for ambitious creation. I show that, according to Machiavelli, all human beings, not just the great, possess ambition, as can be seen through a variety of episodes Machiavelli details that reveal the popular desire for creative self-expression. Machiavelli in fact goes to great lengths, both in the Discourses and in the Florentine Histories and the “Discourse on Florentine Affairs,” to outline not only the popular desire to express ambition via participation in political modes and orders, but also a popular capacity to do so that is not differentiated in quality from that of any other groups in the city. There is not, in other words, a unique political skill, orientation, or knowledge that belongs to and can be exercised by only a minority of individuals. In recognizing both this political will and political capacity Machiavelli makes a simultaneous affirmation of a radical human freedom and equality, the latter residing not in the establishment of a self-identical common interest, but rather in the equal capacity of always distinct individuals to express their particular political desire in speech. The fact that particular individuals always remain particular, that human multiplicity is incapable of being effaced, renders the political sphere one of inevitable difference and conflict. Machiavelli’s ultimate goal will be to think the means by which this difference and conflict may be agonistically expressed through democratic channels (as in the Discourses), as opposed to antagonistically and violently expressed (as in the Florentine Histories), or simply repressed (as in The Prince).

In chapter 5 I demonstrate how the full manifestation of human equality in the political sphere necessitates the establishment of concrete economic equality in the social sphere. The establishment of such economic equality depends on, above all, the elimination of the grandi as an organized social class embodying a particular shared humour, a unified desire directed toward command and oppression. If there is no essential distinction grounded in human nature between the people and the great, the contingency of the form of being of the grandi allows for the latter’s elimination. Although Machiavelli only rarely acknowledges this potential, he nevertheless provides us with significant clues suggesting it remains a very condition of possibility for the institution of democratic life. Positioning myself against those democratic readers who understand popular freedom as being only articulated against an already existent desire to oppress, I show how the seemingly originary division between the people and the great may be overcome through the establishment of a general economic equality. Although it is impossible to structure a city such that insolent individuals never emerge, it is not impossible to structure a city in which these insolent individuals are incapable of consolidating themselves into a class that is able to leverage their disproportionate economic wealth for the sake of the advancement of their particular interests. For Machiavelli, humours — umori — do not have a natural biological foundation, but rather are the contingent result of the constitution of particular social relationships. To this degree the particular being of any social umore is not inexorable, even if the appearance of particular individual wills — be it a will to domination or otherwise — is. Theorizing the potential to terminate the conflict between the great and the people, furthermore, does not entail the termination of all conflict itself, for, as I show in chapter 2, human multiplicity is not exhausted by the division between the great and the people. Even if a social situation is instituted such as to militate against the emergence of those with a humour to oppress, such would not thereby instaurate a political site characterized by consensual relations, for human difference would continue to manifest itself inevitably in a variety of spheres and in a variety of modes.

Finally, in chapter 6 I turn to the question of the form of political regime that is capable of generalizing this creative self-expression, thus providing spaces for all citizens to have the opportunity to act on their innate ambition. The defence of democratic institutionalization is rooted in the recognition that all individuals share a negative human essence, an orientation toward political creation that is realized in the controlled expulsion of ambitious energy. The democratic ethical imperative is grounded in both the perception of the universality of the human desire for self-creation, but also the recognition of the need for the productive rechannelling of this desire into socially useful ends via a project of autonomous institutionalization. If the latter is not achieved, if desire is not institutionally mediated, the society will regress into a form such as is detailed in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories, where individuals attempt to advance their own private interests at the expense of other citizens, who are not seen as possessing a right to political self-expression. It is precisely because the human desire for creative expression is insatiable, however — that is, that the human is constantly redefining the nature of itself and its world through its self-activity — that the form of the political regime is never capable of becoming permanently fixed. Machiavelli’s republic is thus unique in that it is oriented toward its own perpetual interrogation and possible overcoming. Machiavelli’s project is to think a system of institutions that is capable, through harnessing the creative energy of the people who constitute the society, of continually calling itself into question, and through reinstituting itself provide a means for the actualization of that creative human desire that is detailed in The Prince. It is in this sense that the republic is, as Machiavelli says, the regime in which all the people “can, by means of their virtue, become princes.””

7 Machiavelli, “Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio,” in Tutte le opere, bk. 2.2.

Chapter One Machiavelli and the Constellative Mode of Historical Appropriation

It is common for readers of Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought to begin their inquiries by noting the diversity of interpretative conclusions that have been drawn regarding his writings, as well as the multitude of oftentimes mutually irreconcilable philosophical and political positions that he has been forced into. It seems that the Machiavellian oeuvre can be deployed in the service of any number of theoretical paradigms.' And yet few of these readers attempt to critically scrutinize the foundation of such interpretative operations, assuming on the contrary that their own specific methodological modes — from precise contextual analyses of the historical environment in which Machiavelli’s work was produced to deep textual readings emphasizing the esoteric or concealed content open to the eye of the sensitive interlocutor — are

1 See, for example, Rafael Major, “A New Argument for Morality: Machiavelli and the Ancients,” Political Research Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2007): 172; Raymond Aron, “Machiavelli and Marx,” in Politics and History, ed. and trans. Miriam Bernheim (New York: Free Press, 1978), 87. For a summary of just some of the modes of reading and appropriating Machiavelli see Felix Gilbert, “Machiavelli in Modern Historical Scholarship,” Italian Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1970): 9-26; Mary Walsh, “Historical Reception of Machiavelli,” in Seeking Real Truths: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Machiavelli, ed. Patricia Vilches and Gerald Seaman (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 273-302; Victoria Kahn, “Machiavelli’s Afterlife and Reputation to the Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John M. Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 239-55; Jérémie Barthas, “Machiavelli in Political Thought from the Age of Revolutions to the Present,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John M. Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 256-73; Giovanni Giorgini, “Five Hundred Years of Italian Scholarship on Machiavelli’s Prince,” Review of Politics 75, no. 4 (2013): 625-40.

capable of penetrating to the truth of Machiavelli.” It is curious that, as John Plamenatz observes, it seems as if “none of his interpreters writes about him as if he were seriously puzzled, or had come to his conclusions with difficulty or held to them tentatively.”? It is thus, for example, not a problem for such a close reader of Machiavelli as Harvey Mansfield to write, in reference to the interpretative work of Leo Strauss, that “as far as I know, among hundreds of statements in Thoughts on Machiavelli susceptible of mistake, not one single mistake has yet been exposed.” The possibility of an objectively correct reading of the intrinsic meaning of the Machiavellian texts is not only achievable, but perhaps already achieved.

What I would like to suggest in this chapter, however, is that the very effort to read Machiavelli in terms of the schematic representation of a fixed meaning or intention itself constitutes a violation of the spirit of the Machiavellian project. Critical reflection on the nature of the Machiavellian methodology, specifically on Machiavelli’s unique deployment of those historical examples that form the background to his political thought, opens up to us a unique vantage point from which to evaluate the meaning of his theoretical project. This chapter will attempt to reassess the well-known tension in Machiavelli’s thought between the claim to novelty and the appeal to the wisdom of the ancients. Rather than implore the contemporary actor to uncritically repeat established

2 Yves Winter and Filippo Del Lucchese are two of several recent exceptions to this tendency. Winter, for example, recognizes that “the question of Machiavelli’s ‘true intentions’ has no determinate answer, for the polysemy of his text makes securing a single meaning unfeasible.” Yves Winter, “Plebeian Politics: Machiavelli and the Ciompi Uprising,” Political Theory 40, no. 6 (2012): 738. On the variety of secondary interpretations of Machiavelli, meanwhile, Del Lucchese writes that “the diversity of points of view and perspectives is not only the work of the centuries; it was implied since the beginning in Machiavelli’s methodology.” Filippo Del Lucchese, The Political Philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 168. For a discussion of the multiple potentials contained within the Machiavellian oeuvre that are articulated within the context of the specifically Left appropriation of Machiavelli (Althusser’s and Lefort’s in particular), see Warren Breckman, “The Power and the Void: Radical Democracy, Post-Marxism, and the Machiavellian Moment,” in Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics, ed. Gregory Smulewicz- Zucker and Michael J. Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 237-54.

3 John Plamenatz, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, ed. Mark Philp and Z.A. Pelczynski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 18.

4 Harvey C. Mansfield, “Strauss’s Machiavelli,” Political Theory 3, no. 4 (1975): 379.

modes of doing and being, Machiavelli encourages him or her to redeploy the principle of creativity that lay at the source of those examples that are highlighted for the sake of the stimulation of political activity in the present. Aiming not at a literal representation of the sequence of historical events, Machiavelli selectively reappropriates ancient and modern examples and arranges them in specific organizations of thought in order to affirm the uniquely human capacity for political creation. This methodology, I suggest, is best thought of as a type of thinking in constellations, such as was most significantly articulated in the twentieth century by Walter Benjamin. This approach, whereby Machiavelli imaginatively constructs universals through the juxtaposition of conceptual particulars, is considered by Benjamin as the most effective strategy for countering the type of uncritical historicism that assumes a determinate trajectory of events foreclosing the possibility of meaningful human intervention in the world. Machiavelli’s appeal to the past is in the final instance made for the sake of a breaking free from the past, for the sake of the affirmation of the human potential to upset the order of things through the institution of the new.

Active vs Contemplative Historical Appropriation

It is by no means original to point out the apparent contradiction in Machiavelli’s use of history as a means to articulate a political ethos that emphasizes the virtues of novelty and innovation. In the words of Claude Lefort, “the thinker who was aware of innovating absolutely and whom posterity has indeed judged to have opened a new path to political thought, this man wished to erect Antiquity into a model.”° Hence in the Preface to the Discourses on Livy Machiavelli simultaneously proclaims his decision to “enter upon a road untrodden by anyone,” and criticizes the inability of contemporary actors to properly imitate ancient examples.° The contradiction between novelty and imitation in Machiavelli’s exhortation to return to the study of ancient

5 Claude Lefort, “Machiavelli and the Verita Effetuale,” in Writing: The Political Test, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 109. As Lefort writes elsewhere, “It is as though the discovery of the New and the Unknown coincides with the rediscovery of the past.” Claude Lefort, “Machiavelli: History, Politics, Discourse,” in The States of Theory: History, Art, and Critical Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 113.