Machiavelli and Us: Louis Althusser chapter 1

Machiavelli and Us
Louis Althusser

A review on Amazon (Dave Death):
This book is a must read for anyone interested in Machiavelli, Lenin, Gramsci, or Althusser. Althusser reads Machiavelli's *philosophy* - which, for Althusser, is always the intervention of politics into theory - and specifies what exactly made Machiavelli such a solitary, singular thinker. For those of you who associate Althusser with structuralism, you are in for a big shock. It is here that Althusser develops his 'aleatory materialism' and theory of the conjuncture to the utmost, reading Machiavelli together with Epicurus to delineate Machiavelli's materialist position in philosophy as a thinker of the conjuncture. But he also specifies the necessity for an encounter to endure, and it is here perhaps that a non-structuralist, non-economistic reworking of his theses on the 'last instance' and 'reproduction' in the famous ISAs paper might become possible.

In this book Althusser argues that there is no contradiction between the Prince and the Discourses, that Machiavelli is neither monarchist or republican but instead that he observes power from the perspective of the people, and that Machiavelli's problem is the problem of the constitution of Italy as a national-popular state out of the 'void' of the then-existing mess that was Italy's political landscape. His analysis of Machiavelli's concepts of fortuna and virtu is very important, and too nuanced to summarise here. It's only 100 pages of main text plus endnotes, then another essay 'Machiavelli's Solitude' (an earlier version of which appeared in the journal _Economy and Society_ in 1988) which is 15 pages, and the translator Gregory Elliott provides an worthwhile introduction of 9 pages + notes, where, among other things, Elliott contrasts Althusser's book with that of Skinner for the benefit of English readers.

SO - it's short, but well worth reading. Keep an eye out for the next volume of Althusser writings, due out soon, which contains other important writings from the period 1978-86 (including much more in the way of insights into the development of Althusser's materialism), including 'Marx in his limits', where Althusser develops his theory of the state and provides a strident critique of Gramscian discourse on hegemony and the state that informed the political practice of the Eurocommunists.

xii Althusser's "royal road to Marx": Spinosa, Epicurus & others

In Le courant souterrain du materialisme de la rencontre (1982) Machiavelli pertained to "a materialist tradition almost completely unrecognized in the history of philosophy" issuing from Epicurus:
a materialism of the encounter, hence of the aleatory and of contingency, which is completely opposed ... to the various registered materialisms, including the materialism commonly attributed to Marx, Engels, Lenin which, like every materialism in the rationalist tradition, is a materialism of necessity and teleology, that is to say, a transformed and disguised form of idealism.

pg xiii Machiavelli ... a philosophic theory of the encounter between fortune and virtù.

pg xiv Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" the New Prince

pg xvii Machiavelli's solitude, between the Classical/Christian on one hand, and the modern tradition of natural law on the other hand.
pg xviii Machiavelli's "theoretical utopia": a monarchy is foundation, republic is the duration; the national-popular state.
fruitful encounter between virtù (the political agency of the Prince) and fortune (or the contingency of the real)
pg xix Louis de Villefosse wrote Machiavelli et nous (1937) identified the armed prophets: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin. as the makers of 20th century history.

pg xxii leo Strauss Thoughts on Machiavelli: Teacher of evil and Machiavellianism as the antithesis of Americanism.

Armed prophets: also see Issac Deutscher's bio on Trotsky,

Foreword: Pg 3: Claude Lefort "Le Travail de l'oevre" read it.
pg 4 Machiavelli grips us. But if by chance we want to grasp him, he evades us; he is elusive. His "Strange Familiarity".
pg 5 Theory and Political Practice
pg 7 Machiavelli himself supplies the formula that sanctions this beginning and this rupture. It is famous: mi è parso più conveniente andare dietro alla verità effettuale della cosa, che all' immaginazione di essa.
it seems to me better to represent things as they are in actual truth, rather than as they are imagined.
objective knowledge rather than subjective representation (an ideology of politics)
pg 8 Machiavelli does not invoke the great political texts of Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, Stoics or Cicero. Nor from Christianity.
pg 9 Hegel "On the German Constitution": formulation of a political problem that confronted Germany in 1802 in terms analogous to Italy in 1513. Politics - not for its own sake, but in the shape of the formation of a problem and the definition of a historical task.
pg10 Gramsci: True unity has not been achieved, even with the formation of a national government. True unity = true equality.
pg11 class struggle, new means of production pitted against old. Class struggle is at the heart of the constitution of nations: the nation represents the form of existence indispensable to the implantation of the capitalist mode of production in its struggle against the feudal mode of production.
pg12 An instrument is required to forge national unity. In the 14th - 18th century this was the absolute monarch. necessary for the development of economic, political, judicial, reform.
pg13 machiavelli's New prince is a specific political form charged with executing the historical demands: the constitution of a nation. Gramsci's Modern Prince is the proletarian party charged with the transition to a classless society. Gramsci: The Prince is a utopian, revolutionary Manifesto.
pg14-15 the difficulty of identifying Machiavelli's political theory.
pg16 what interests Machiavelli is not the "nature of things in general (Montesquieu) but "la verità effetuale della cosa." - the singularity of the case. Formulation of the problem of political practice is at the heart of everything.
pg17 political practice alone fixes the modality of the relationship to the elements of political theory and the modality and dispositive of the elements of political theory itself.
pg18 M is the first theorist of the conjecture, making an object of an abstract and systematic reflection.
pg19 Althusser affirms that M saw Borgia as the The Prince to unite Italy, who only failed because of sickness caused by riding in the marshes.
pg23 The Prince is a manifesto because M is trying to win partisans to his cause.
pg24 emphasis on Class
I hope it will not be considered presumptuous for a man of very low and humble condition to dare to discuss princely government, and to lay down rules about it. For those who draw maps place themselves on low ground in order to understand the character of the mountains and other high points, and climb higher inorder to understand the plains. Likewise, one needs to be a ruler to understand properly the character of the people and to be a man of the people to understand properly the character of rulers.

The implication that there is a choice between rulers from the viewpoint of the people.
pg25 Gramsci says: in his manifesto, Machiavelli becomes the people.
pg29 Machiavelli makes religion an instrument of politics, subordinates morality to political practice, and defends the prince's right in certain circumstances, to resort to cruelty, guile, bad faith ...
The Jesuits declared that The Prince had been written "with the Devil's hand" and that its author was "the supreme craftsman of the Devil's thoughts"
pg30 Rousseau: He professed to teach kings but it was the people he really taught. His Prince is the book of republicans.
pg32 Double viewpoint internal to the text. He is gripping because ... his text practically, politically implicates and involves us. He hails us from a place that he summons us to occupy as potential subjects (agents) of a potential political practice.