Machiavelli’s Conflictualism and Its Afterlives

“Tumult and Tragedy.  Machiavelli’s Conflictualism and Its Afterlives” by Alberto Toscano was first published in December 2024 in Spanish translation for the volume Maquiavelo contemporáneo. La materialidad de la teoría política, edited by Ricardo Espinoza Lolas and Jordi Riba for Bellaterra Edicions. It is being published now for the first time in its original version with the kind authorization of its author.

“The present I want to confront with Machiavelli, and with his contemporary readers, is a present of conflict and division, but one that is largely incapable of thinking conflict, in the sense of giving it form, and perhaps also of instituting it.”

Alberto Toscano

What if, instead of asking the rather philistine question “what is the meaning of Machiavelli today”, we ask “what the present means in the face of Machiavelli”? I adopt and adapt here Theodor Adorno’s suggestion on the 125th anniversary of Hegel’s death, hoping that it may serve to mobilise the radical difference and distance of Machiavelli from the very terms of our political order, the better to problematise it with some of the disabused intensity that he visited on his own conjuncture.

The present I want to confront with Machiavelli, and with his contemporary readers, is a present of conflict and division, but one that is largely incapable of thinking conflict, in the sense of giving it form, and perhaps also of instituting it. This is the present that is perhaps best captured, which is also too obfuscated, by the ubiquitous notion of polarisation. This highly mediated and highly impoverished surrogate of the struggles (of classes, blocs, nations, ideologies) that marked the “age of extremes”, already includes within itself the supposed liberal wisdom of the mean and the middle, namely the notion that conflict is a social pathology (in this sense echoing the everyday language of counterinsurgency, encapsulated in the notion of “radicalisation”). Those positions that simply wish polemically to affirm political polarities – as in variants of populist reason articulated against financialised neoliberalism, pitting the 99% against the 1% – generally fail truly to break with a thinking of conflict haunted by the desideratum of unity, concord, consensus, or harmony.

Where our public discourse and social-scientific “expertise” is often ill-prepared to give conflict theoretical and practical determinacy, what remains of critical theory, of the thinking of crisis, has not shied away from this challenge. Efforts to revitalise the epistemic and political virtues of partisan thought or to think political subjectivation as inextricable from a moment of dissensus or disagreement come to mind, as do varieties of “agonism”. But perhaps the most striking symptom of a drive to put conflict at the fore of our political questioning has been the increasing preoccupation with civil war as a term that is not simply reducible to the negation of the political, but which must instead be rethought as an abiding potential, perhaps even a resource, of social life in common. The field of these problematisations is diverse. It ranges from Nicole Loraux’s pioneering investigations in The Divided City into the foreclosure of conflict in Ancient Greece – a work that influenced further explorations from Derrida’s Politics of Friendship to Agamben’s recent Stasis – to the valorisation of civil war in the writings of Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee. But we can also think of Enzo Traverso’s historical analysis of the European Civil War of 1914-1945, David Armitage’s history of ideas Civil Wars, or the powerful counter-history of neoliberalism by Pierre Dardot and his co-authors, Le choix de la guerre civile, which presents the past half-century in terms of the capitalist choice for a kind of creeping but at times overt civil war. The recovery of Michel Foucault’s own valorisation of civil war in his Collège de France lectures of the early 1970s, ranging from the study of class struggles in Ancient Greece to the anatomy of “punitive power,” is also part of this moment.

The impetus of many of the explorations and experiments in political thought I’ve just mentioned is evidently that of countering the neutralisation of conflict understood as the signature of modern and liberal political philosophy. We may want to periodise these critical theories of conflict in terms of efforts, after the planetary tumults of ’68, to think the exhaustion and/or intensification of the dominant model of socio-political conflict, namely class struggle grasped through a Marxian lens. In different ways, the contemporary readings of Machiavelli I’d like to draw on here all relate to this moment and this problem. While in no way presenting Machiavelli as forecasting contemporary patterns of conflict or as the originator of a paradigm to be mechanically applied to the present, they draw from their commentaries on Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio the materials for asking the question: what does the present theory and practice of conflict mean in the face of Machiavelli? In the texts by Claude Lefort, Roberto Esposito, Filippo Del Lucchese and Gabriele Pedullà that I draw on, two particular passages in the Discorsi recur, as pivotal moments in Machiavelli’s argument and signs of a thinking of conflict that marks a scandal and an alternative within the political discourse of modernity. They appear in Book I, respectively in chapters 4 and 37. I quote them here in the translation by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov.

First, the crucial and scandalous thesis of chapter 4:

the disunion of the plebs and the Roman Senate made that republic free and powerful … I cannot deny that fortune and the military were causes of the Roman Empire; but it quite appears to me they are not aware that where the military is good, there must be good order; and too, it rarely occurs that good fortune will not be there. But let us come to other details of that city. I say that to me it appears that those who damn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs blame those things that were the first cause of keeping Rome free, and that they consider the noises and the cries that would arise in such tumults more than the good effects that they engendered. They do not consider that in every republic are two diverse humors, that of the people and that of the great, and that all the laws that are made in favor of freedom arise from their disunion, as can easily be seen to have occurred in Rome.

Now, the incisive and instructive conclusion to chapter 37:

Such, thus, were the beginning and the end of the Agrarian law. And although we have shown elsewhere that the enmities in Rome between the Senate and the plebs kept Rome free by giving rise to laws in favor of freedom,” and although the end of this Agrarian law appears not to conform to such a conclusion, I say that I do not, because of this, abandon such an opinion. For so great is the ambition of the great that it soon brings that city to its ruin if it is not beaten down in a city by various ways and various modes. So, if the contention over the Agrarian law took three hundred years to make Rome servile. It would perhaps have been led into servitude much sooner if the plebs had not always checked the ambition of the nobles, both with this law and with its other appetites. One also sees through this how much more men esteem property than honors. For the Roman nobility always yielded honors to the plebs without extraordinary scandals, but when it came to property, so great was its obstinacy in defending it that the plebs had recourse to the extraordinary[means) that were discoursed of above to vent its appetite.

For Claude Lefort, in his 1972 Le travail de l’oeuvre, Machiavelli’s conflictual hypothesis about the positive role of tumults in Roman republican history suggests the truly singular hypothesis that it is in disorder itself that we find the materials for the production of order, and that class appetites, and their clashes, are not to be repudiated or repressed, since they can enhance rather than sap the power of the city (namely in its expansive relations to its outside). These clashes are also, crucially, not a matter of the intentional design of a sovereign legislator but constitute accidents. We could add that a political history that valorises conflict also valorises the necessity of contingency as the other side of the contingency of necessity.

Machiavelli’s reflections on the tribunate and the agrarian laws, though very different in tenor, also tell us that conflict and law are intimately interwoven. As Lefort explains, for the Florentine thinker, the first order is not necessarily the good one, orders are the contingent and temporary products of a history from which struggle cannot be expunged, and juridical statutes are outcomes of this conflictual history, and should not be imagined as primarily emitted by a wise and sovereign law-giver (indeed, though such a legislated order, like that of Lycurgus in Sparta, may promise greater stability, it is ultimately doomed by its constitutive inflexibility). The fetish for unity, its praise and desire, is not just based on masking the division of classes, it is ultimately liberticidal. As Del Lucchese details in his Tumulti e indignatio (where Machiavelli is paired with Spinoza as a thinker of conflict breaking with the pacifying traditions of possessive individualism and the modern thinking of sovereignty), there is a “recursiveness” between law and conflict such that tumults justify the birth of laws but – in order not to be destructive, they imply the existence of laws (or institutions) capable of regulating them or even fostering them. This recursiveness finds its most incisive allegory in the figure of the Centaur Chiron as deployed in Il Principe, articulating without easy demarcation humane law and bestial force.

Here it may be interesting to recall Lefort’s suggestion that the institutions of popular liberty, like the Roman tribunate, are organs of negativity. Law establishes itself in, through and from the ordeal of the class struggles that call upon it. In this regard, Lefort argues, law has to be thought of not under the aegis of measure but as both the mismeasure or measurelessness of the popular desire for freedom, and it is this desire that keeps open the question of the unity of the state. The question is how to make place for this mismeasure, how to dare luogo a tumulti e alle dissensioni universali, in the belief that any political greatness is the product of a living with and giving form to intense and asymmetrical struggles.

In his brilliant and pioneering study Machiavelli in Tumult, Gabriele Pedullà has developed insights into Machiavelli’s tumultuous republicanism present in the writings of Lefort, Del Lucchese, but also scholars like John Najemy and John McCormick, to further specify the terms of Machiavelli’s conflictualism. In his analysis, Machiavelli is not a fomenter of discord but rather shifts the boundary between concord and discord such as it was imagined by Renaissance humanism and policed by modern political philosophy, “in order to admit into normal civic life a whole series of non-violent forms of dissent: outcries, bloodless riots in which nobody is hurt, secession, detraction militia, and, of course, popular trials” (61). Attending to the interplay between collective affects and political institutions, we can see how tribunes, as representatives of the plebs, play a key role in maintaining the health of the Republic by the “fear-inhibition they induce as public accusers” (106) – a fear felt by elites which, as Machiavelli proposes in his comments on the agrarian laws in Discorsi I.37 is a conditio sine qua non of the health of a Republic. As Pedullà reminds us, this also relates to Machiavelli’s praise for Athenian ostracism, as the pre-emptive exile of the powerful (in Discorsi I.28). (Incidentally in this “purgation [of political corruption and elite arrogance] through popular trials” [58] we may sense resonances with E.P. Thompson’s reflections on the moral economy of rioting English crowds in the eighteenth-century, or even of Foucault’s 1970s debates with French Maoists about the virtues of popular justice.)

Pedullà, however, is also keen to remark the distance between Machiavelli’s conflictualism and modern or contemporary perceptions of constituent struggles or indeed of civil war as a horizon of social transformation. Drawing on the critical role of medical discourse in Machiavelli, he stresses the relation of conflict to a theory of humours and to one of the channelling, release or purgation of conflicts. As he puts it: “Because they are largely innocuous, popular uprisings appear to be less a sign of collapsing civic concord than a precious safety valve for a flow that, according to the hydraulics of the humoral theory, must be channeled – not suppressed” (50). This hydraulic-medical model is also one that allows Machiavelli note to presume the negativity of division: “conflict is a neutral event” (53). In the end, the key question is not whether there is to be conflict in the polity but what its modes will be. The Roman examples dear to Machiavelli are secession (“fleeing” of the plebs to the hills of Rome until patricians respond), and detractio militia (refusal to lend one’s name to going to war); broadening his vision into the present, the question is “how can the conflicts that inevitably accompany the life of every community be prevented from harming it?” (58)

Here it would be fascinating to reflect on analogies, resonances and legacies of this tumultuous republicanism in the modern period. In what ways, for instance, did revolutionary movements consider the possibility of institutionalising conflict in ways perhaps comparable to those sketched by Machiavelli, before the imperatives and terrors of unanimity set in? We may think here for instance of the debates over factions, trade-unions, and political pluralism that wracked the early days of Soviet Bolshevism. It is striking in this respect that in his note on Machiavelli, Merleau-Ponty explicitly articulated this problem in a brief consideration of the potential lessons that the Florentine’s political thought may harbour for Marxism, formulating it in particular as that of the constitution of a power of the power-less [un pouvoir de sans-pouvoir]. Explicitly noting 1917 as the opening and rapid closure (with the repression of the Kronstadt sailors’ rebellion) of this problematic, Merleau-Ponty stresses the need to “invent political forms capable of controlling power without annulling it”.

Returning to Pedullà, what may be gleaned from his work for a more contemporary questioning is the signal problem of how to foster and specify a political culture of conflict. For Pedullà, who wishes to also stress the distance from the political problematics of critical and radical thought, his “bewildering otherness” and refractoriness to being turned into a “precursor”, Machiavelli’s “approval of civil conflict” is neither constituent (as advanced by De Lucchese) nor populist (McCormick) but “expansive”, i.e. linked to the war aims of the Republic – a dimension of his proposal that is difficult to project into our present. What is more, by contrast with a vision of Machiavelli as a thinker of constituent power, for Pedullà the tumults are not a vehicle for novelty, but rather a safety valve for an inevitable conflict (and an irreducible if not static inequality). Behind this lies Machiavelli’s political classicism – the recovery of “the actual political prudence of the Romans through a hermeneutics of the ancient historical narratives” against the approach of the humanists with their privileging of philosophical positions (Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, etc.), and with their minimization or denial of discord. This political classicism – and this may be its abiding lesson for radical political thought as well – broke through humanist ideas on the primacy of concord.

What Machiavelli allows us to subject to pitiless criticism is the pervasive institutionalisation of the common good with its cult of unity and concord, revealing the way in which both political humanism and sovereign reason are underwritten by techniques of political exclusion. In this respect we can even gain insights into contemporary “polarisation” as the effect or appearance of discord dictated by the ideological primacy or fantasy of concord. The result of the humanist cult of concord and unanimity has been, as Pedullà states, ‘the progressive inability to think about conflict between citizens as something fundamentally different from the fight against an external power. And, pushing any form of dissent into the realm of illegality, such a view paradoxically led to the radicalization of civil strife’ (68).

As Discorsi I.37 makes particular evident the key question for political order – for the imperative of mantenere lo stato – in societies marked by irremediable conflictuality and (class) division, is that of making the great afraid. Machiavelli’s conflictualism, at the level of the passions, aims to reconcile liberty and fear (something which also transpires from his theory of dictatorship in I.33-35). Against the transcendence of a sovereign One which is always also a kind of Third party, “in Machiavelli there are checks but no balance: conflict is always omnipresent” (124). This challenge both to concord and (pre-emptively) to modern sovereignty “reposition[s] of political theory from philosophy to history” (133). This historical gaze and recovery of Rome’s tumultuous institutions, its dynamic and expansive unity-in-division teaches us that “absolute concord turns out to be weaker than well-managed discord”, so that tumults are “a necessary inconvenience to achieve Roman greatness” (D I. 6) (171). Where Greek political thought, as Nicole Loraux has explored, is in many regards based on the negation of conflict, on the inability to “accept the conflictualism intrinsic to associative life” (222), with Machiavelli’s Roman detour we can begin to imagine and problematise the institutionalization of conflict (181).

As Esposito has suggested, Hobbesian modernity instructs us that we must choose between order and conflict; Machiavelli explores an order that can only exist in conflict, and a conflict transits through order. For Pedullà, even modern revolutionary thought, in the arc from Rousseau and Marx to our present (with perhaps the exception of the Foucault of the early 1970s) has never truly raised itself up to Machiavelli’s challenge, manifesting an unstable attitude towards conflict, which praises civil war while promoting unanimistic dreams of the general will; both liberalism and Marxism seem to immunise the polity from conflict (through revolutionary unity or non-conflictual competition). This is one of the questions that these debates on the figure of tumult in the Discorsi bequeath to us: Is Machiavellian ‘conflictualism’ compatible with a Marxian perspective on class struggles that envisages their end? And what of visions not of the abolition but of the transfiguration of conflict (e.g., Trotsky’s take on the post-capitalist aestheticization of struggle, as organised struggle of taste, in Literature and Revolution). More broadly, with and beyond Machiavelli we can begin to think about the nature of conflict in post-revolutionary and post-capitalist societies, conflict not merely as a motor for a change between states but as something that can be given form in projects of transition.

As the greatest thinkers of revolutionary transitions in the twentieth century discovered – from Lukács to CLR James – those transitions are, to quote Trotsky writing in 1920, ‘in the highest degree tragic’. To the extent that Machiavelli’s conflictualism is not, as Esposito suggests in Pensiero vivente, a political philosophy stricto sensu but a radical thinking of existence in its irreducible dimension of contrast, its antinomic character, it can be perceived as tragic (though it is also a thought in which the dramatic and literary registers of tragedy and comedy intermingle in striking ways). This is a thought in which the number of politics is Two, not One. It can be noted that Machiavelli’s tragic vein has been mined by various commentators, including Adriano Sofri and Gennaro Sasso. Tragedy here encodes the ineliminable character of conflict, contrast, contingency. In Esposito it can also be connected to a specifically Italian philosophical sensibility for a plane of immanence, understood in the interlocking registers of life, history, and politics, which is both made possible and threatened by its conflictual constitution. This thinking of Antagonism and immanence, of immanent antagonism and antagonistic immanence, is also, for Esposito, a thinking of the origin that is not one of foundation – one in which Machiavelli is joined by Giordano Bruno and especially by Giambattista Vico, a thinker whose affinities with the author of the Discorsi was already advanced by Benedetto Croce, who spoke of the Machiavelli’s unwitting Vichianism and of Vico’s undesired Machiavellianism. In his book on Vico’s philosophy, Croce would write of how Vico anticipated Marx and other nineteenth century thinkers in shining a crude light on the class struggle – something that he did by treading some of the same terrain as Machiavelli, namely that of the class struggles in Rome and their dramatization of the desire to escape subjection as an engine of social transformation, juridical struggles and political transitions. As Georges Sorel remarked in his study of Vico, this is a thinking from which one could draw lessons about ‘the class struggle for the conquest of rights’, one which aims to ‘put conflicts in juridical form, to specify them, to recognize exactly the forces at work and to define them’.

As Merleau-Ponty argued in his 1949 ‘Note on Machiavelli’, by putting conflict and struggle at the origins of social power, the Florentine thinker was not stipulating the impossibility of agreement but rather underscoring the preliminary conditions for a non-mystificatory approach to political power, namely the participation in a common situation – common to the extent that it is divided. And, as Merleau-Ponty’s one-time disciple Lefort argued, in no longer reading politics in terms of the signs deployed on a historical surface by a project of domination, the Discorsi, unlike Il Principe, “institute a movement such that the exploration of the social space and its division is simultaneously that of time and its division, and that of political discourse and its division” (464).

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Works cited and referenced

Filippo Del Lucchese, Tumulti e indignatio: Conflitto, diritto e moltitudine in Machiavelli e Spinoza (Milan: Mimesis, 2022)

Roberto Esposito, Pensiero vivente: Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 2010) [Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012)]

Claude Lefort, Le travail de l’œuvre: Machiavel (Paris, Gallimard, 1972) [Machiavelli in the Making, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012)]

Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘A Note on Machiavelli,’ in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964)

Gabriele Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumult: The Discourses on Livy and the Origins of Political Conflictualism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

 

Featured image: Potterry showing a battle in Ancient Greece. (G. Dagli Orti / Getty Images).

Alberto Toscano