REVIEW

ARTICLES

ACTUALITY
AND ILLUSION
IN THE POLITICAL
THOUGHT
OF MACHIAVELLI
THOMAS
O. HUEGLIN
Laurier
Canada
University,
Wilfrid
Miinkler, Herfried, Machiavelli:Die BegrndungdespolitischenDenkensder Neuzeit
aus der Krise der RepublikFlorenz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Wissenschaft,
1982), 506 pp. DM 24.90 ISBN 3 596 27342 0 (paper)
Deppe, Frank, Niccolo Machiavelli:Zur Kritik der reinen Politik (Kln: PahlRugenstein, 1987), 511 pp. DM 24.80 ISBN 3 7609 1126 9
He haunts us still: 471 years after his death in 1527, Machiavelli
remains perhaps the most enigmatic figure in European intellectual history. The main interpretative
camps are well enough known. On the
one hand, there are those who see him as the devil incarnate, and his
work as the timeless justification of amoral power politics. Already in
1609, the German political theorist Johannes Althusius claimed that a
copy of The Prince in the possession of his provincial lord was proof of
the latter's absolutist intentions. Still in 1958, the American political
theorist Leo Strauss would insist on comparing the United States as
"the bulwark of freedom" to Machiavelli as "the fallen angel" because
Machia"one cannot understand Americanism without understanding
vellianism which is the opposite." On the other hand, Machiavelli has
also been celebrated as the very founder of modern and rational (rather
than idealist) political thought. In the view of Jurgcn Habermas, he
provided a "manual for the technically correct calculation of power"
which would alone ensure survival in a modern competitive world.
similar terms,
Understood as a theorist of realpolitik in unintentionally
Machiavelli has even surfaced in seminars for industrial managers.
To be sure, there are more balanced accounts in between, and they
can now be regarded as conventional wisdom. Perhaps best typified
by the work of Quentin Skinner, these accounts suggest that Machiavelli
the classical doctrine of the mixed polity. From the crisis
reinterpreted
of the Florentine Republic which ended his political career, Machiavelli

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that stability and liberty could only stem from a politically
engineered balance among opposed social forces. The ruthlessness of
the Prince, according to this interpretation,
was only a last and most
extreme measure of engineering such stability when the social balance
of the mixed republic had irreparably broken down.
If this is now the state of the art in interpreting Machiavelli, the
question arises why two books are reviewed here of which one is fourteen, the other nine years old. Apart from the suspicion that these
books may not have been widely read outside the German-speaking
world of academia, it is the opinion of this reviewer that they indeed
constitute two of the most important works ever written on Machiavelli.
While one of them (Munkler) can be regarded as a brilliant summation of the conventional view, the other (Deppc) must be seen as a
provocative and successful attempt at breaking new ground.
Munkler argues that the development of political theory is always
linked to social as well as intellectual history (15-16). Central categories
in Machiavelli's thought, such as necessita, fortuna, and virt, can only be
understood in the context of "the socio-economic dynamic of Florentine
commercial capitalism and its political consequences." However, equal
attention must also be paid to the intellectual context, Machiavelli's
critical reading of classical political thought as a tool for his "radical
rejection of the theological normativism of the Middle Ages." Only in
this way, Munkler insists, can a balance be struck between a "vulgar
Marxism" that would reconstruct political theory solely from the material circumstances of the time, and a "purely intellectual" exercise that
would reduce the history of political thought to "a dialogue among
great minds in thin air."
So far so good. What Miinkler proposes here, beyond the grand
rhetoric, is in fact not much more than what by now constitutes (almost)
conventional wisdom: intellectual history needs to be properly contextualized in order to make sense. Otherwise, Plato's "state" (still the translation most widely in circulation), Machiavelli's "lo stato," and Hegel's
"Staat" congeal into one and the same meaningless fuzz.
Munkler also delivers on his methodological
promise, and does so
impressively. In the first part of his book, he focuses on Machiavelli's
"selective recourse" to theories of the mixed polity in classical political
thought as a response to the breakdown of medieval scholasticism. In
the second part, he describes the socioeconomic and political crisis of
Florence from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. And in the third
and weightiest part, he then acrimoniously reconstructs Machiavelli's
concluded

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political thought as a consequence of both, or, more specifically, as a
combination
of a "philosophy of history" and a "political theory of
action."
Machiavelli's starting point for both is Polybius's theory of constitutional cycles. Mixed polity and princely rule are not alternative options
but sequential phases in political history. The prince does not act in
order to destroy social balance but to restabilize it when it has collapsed under the weight of political corruption. The means are different
under republican and princely rule, but not the ultimate goal. The virtuosity (uomo virtuoso) of the new prince (nuovo principe) consists of the
fact that he understands the historical necessity (necessit) of his action
and acts with the kind of political energy (virt) that alone has a chance
to make historical chance ( fortuna) its ally.
All this is argued and elaborated at length and with eloquent erudition. But Munkler wants to achieve much more: he wants to demonstrate that this is indeed, as the subtitle of his book suggests, "the very
beginning of modern political thought," born out of the "crisis of the
Florentine Republic."
This modern political thought, according to
is
based
on two fundamental ideas in Machiavelli's
Munkler,
essentially
the
traditional
idea of social balance in a mixed conpolitical thought:
stitution which is "not an expression of certain [dominant] class interests"
(l l l); and the radically new idea of the "actuality of the state" as an
autonomous enforcer of that stability in a modern world of capitalist
competition (395).
This is exactly the point where Deppe begs to differ. "What is the
actuality of the state anyway?" he asks, and, can "evidence of the state's
de facto self assertion" suffice as political theory (21 )? This is of course
first of all a general attack on the attempt in liberal political theory at
"bringing the state back in" as an autonomous actor, an attempt to
which he sees Munkler firmly committed. Instead, he argues, no doubt
from a profoundly Marxist perspective, that this recourse to "pure politics" is always an attempt to suggest that destabilizing social conflicts
can be neutralized at the level of state power. The actuality of the
state becomes an ideological formula for the stabilization and legitimization of existing class relations (23). Deppe's entire book is thus a
subtly provocative and for the most part convincing demonstration that
Machiavelli's political thought constitutes the first modern bourgeois
crisis theory in these terms.
Like Miinkler, Deppe reconstructs this political thought within the
context of the intellectual tradition as well as social circumstances of

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the time. A historical chapter on the rise and fall of Florence is placed
in between two chapters discussing Machiavelli's historical diagnosis
("The decisions of weak states are always fraught with ambiguity, and
the slowness with which they arrive at them is harmful," Discorsi 11.15)
and therapy of action ("It behooves one to adapt oneself to the times
if one wants to enjoy continued good fortune," Discorsi 111.9). From
there, Deppe proceeds to outline the main elements of Machiavelli's
of "things
political theory intended by its author as a representation
as they are in actual truth" ("la aerita iffetuale della co.sa," Principe XV).
But just how are things in factual truth, or, rather, how does Machiavelli perceive them to be? Munkler and Deppe agree that Machiavelli
correctly perceived the Florentine crisis as an early-capitalist conflict
among opposing social forces. But from then on, their interpretations
are diametrically opposed. Munkler follows the conventional path, arguing that the mixed constitution serves to balance and neutralize these
opposed social forces, and that the cause of crisis is political corruption which destroys that balance. Denying his earlier methodological
intelpromises, he presents Machiavelli as a socially decontextualized
lectual whose autonomy from class ties allows him to propose the mixed
polity as a compromise (I I I).
For Deppe, the mixed constitution,
embedded in the context of
Florentine patrician capitalism, is a political tool for exercising hegemonic control-precisely
by stabilizing social conflict with the illusion
of political participation, however limited. And this illusion of political
compromise, Deppe suggests, is at all times typical for the middle classes
to whom Machiavelli belonged himself. They fear power usurpation
from above as much as popular discontent from below, and therefore
generally opt for the stabilization of extant class relations, which offer
them, as did the Florentine Republic to Machiavelli, limited access to
political power in return for their loyalty (336-38). The crisis occurs,
on the other hand, when none of the principal social forces or classes
is capable of political hegemony any longer-and
hence precisely when
the republic slips into a state of paralyzing balance. In a particularly
insightful passage, drawing from F. Chabod,
Dcppe reconstructs
Machiavelli's faith in the stabilizing powers of a "new prince" as a
tragic appeal to the past, conjuring up a solution that would restore
the lost glory of Florence and Italy and, in so doing, only reproducing the hopelessness of the situation (224). The extreme personalization of the political situation in the figure of the prince suggests that
Machiavelli was well aware of the fact that there was little or nothing

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neutral in the mixed polity. Rescue could only come from a carefully
crafted hegemonic solution which was nowhere in sight. The introduction of a "new prince" as the desired solution was a desperate act
of intellectual utopianism, and a departure from Machiavelli's own promise to represent "things as they really are in actual truth." As Deppe
observes, he never came back to it in later works. In other words,
strongly suggests that Machiavelli ultimately
Deppe's interpretation
knew that the realm of actuality was occupied by the polarizing dynamic
of socioeconomic relations, and that "pure politics" belongs to the realm
of illusion.
Ultimately, all interpretation is driven by the bias of the interpreter.
Althusius was a Calvinist city politician who battled against a Lutheran
prince. Leo Strauss clearly was under the spell of postwar Cold War
rhetoric. Habermas sought to enlist the great Florentine for his lifethat social science can be objective if
long obsession of demonstrating
it is based on strict empirical observation. Munkler obviously sees himself as that autonomous intellectual who, unbound by class ties, can
advise his fellow citizens about the kind of social compromise under
which the postwar West German republic flourished. And Deppe,
the postwar welfare
finally, still discerns in that social compromise,
state, the same hegemonic construction of a mixed polity that provided
the Florentine Republic with a period of precarious stability.
This reviewer happens to share Deppe's bias. Machiavelli's timeless
originality is therefore seen as lying in the merciless consistency with
which he outlined the limits of social liberalism under crisis conditions, that is, when economic decline destroys the dominant ideology
of social compromise because social inequality becomes excessive and
the ruling elites themselves divided. Like modern-day neo-conservatives,
Machiavelli had no social solution to the crisis and therefore took refuge
in the advocacy of more authoritarian
forms of governance. But his
of
human
affairs
at least prevented him from
cyclical understanding
this
as
the
end
of
seeing
history.