John Rawls: Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Elizabeth H. Wolgast: “The Demands of Public Reason.” Columbia Law Review. Volume 94, Number 6 (October 1994), 1936-1949.

 

John Rawls distinguishes public discourse—in which the only legitimate appeals are to be consonant with the overlapping consensus of what’s held to be reasonable—from private discourse—discussion among family members, friends, and other groups that do not represent the public at large. Private discourse may rightly include appeals to ultimate ends and comprehensive doctrines not shared by the general public. Public-discourse appeals, by contrast, must be stated in rational terms, terms by nature open to public inspection in the sense that they presuppose no special revelation or exclusive knowledge. Democratic discourse must be rigorously exoteric.

In her lucid critique, Elizabeth H. Wolgast raises a concern that Rawls also sees. Does democratic public discourse as Rawls defines it not yield a sort of forced Averroism? The “demands of public reason” seem to require an unnatural or even hypocritical separation of “the values leading to one’s position from the public argument given for them. How, one asks, can a person’s responsibilities as a citizen require this?” (1939)

It’s clear, I take it, that it is often prudent to argue in the manner Rawls commends. If I am a Hindu and you are an evangelical Christian, I cannot persuade you to ban meat eating by appealing to the doctrine of reincarnation. I will need to say something consistent with your principles as well as mine. Vegetarianism will solve many public health problems (I might argue); it will end much cruel treatment of animals; it will help to save the ozone layer from dangerous bovine omissions. Et cetera. Wolgast concedes this point: “Rawls’s proposal does reflect the real world of public debate,” in which “a wise citizen often will refrain from invoking parochial religious and moral values… in order to maintain communication with and even persuade someone who holds different views” (1948). But neither Rawls nor Wolgast can rest content with prudence. Rawls wants a ‘freestanding’ political argument that has the same legal features as Kantian morality and politics (without the need publicly to invoke Kantian morality and politics). Wolgast seems morally and politically dissatisfied with Rawlsian liberalism, claiming that without moral integrity the public sphere will break down, undermining the stability of the overlapping consensus of rational public discourse. Toleration of opposing views is at most a feature of democratic praxis, but it can have no rational foundation in a theoretical sense.

I shall focus on Wolgast’s concerns about “personal integrity in debate” (1941). She asserts that “the representative who recasts his objections to conform to public reason… argues with less than maximum force” (1943). That is, the integrity of the argument is compromised inasmuch as the speaker cannot fully integrate all of his objections into one coherent statement. She also asserts that such a representative “speaks disingenuously”; his personal integrity is also compromised (1943). I shall argue that Rawls’s argument can be defended from this two-pronged criticism on principled as well as on the above-mentioned prudential grounds, without conceding that prudence itself stands as a central moral virtue in politics.

Wolgast gives the example of a Congressman who is a Christian Scientist. Under the Rawlsian regime he is stymied from objecting to a public inoculation program on religious grounds. He must argue not that inoculation is against the law of God but that inoculation violates his First Amendment right of free exercise of religion. “Framed in this cooler, more legalistic way, some of [the argument’s] power has been lost” (1943).

Not necessarily. Some of the passion has been lost but, given the fact that few people share that passion, the only persuasive power that seems lost is the inability to rally believers. Even this power has not been lost; the Congressman can rally his co-religionists in communications to them, without violating the rules of public discourse. Further, Wolgast does not show that there exists any principled civic obligation to encourage a citizen to maximize the rhetorical effectiveness of his argument. To rule out publicly unreasonable arguments does not necessarily “vitiate just the kind of open and rational atmosphere that Rawls, among others, identifies with liberal society” (1942). To the contrary, it may make such a society practicable by cooling passions and forcing each citizen to think about others outside his own group.

Wolgast also claims that “the religious argument [against inoculation] raises the First Amendment issue in its full power and necessity, refreshing one’s sense of its importance, while the other does not” (1943). Again, not necessarily. The Congressman can paint an attractive and affecting picture of life according to the precepts of Christian Science in terms consistent with the overlapping consensus. He can appeal to citizens’ sympathy for the underdog, saying, ‘Do not compel us to compromise our religion, for your religion might be the next one on the chopping block.’ The “full power and necessity” of the First Amendment lies there, else it never would have made it into the Constitution in the first place. To defend free religious exercise one need not absolutize it. Religious absolutists may drift away from modern republicanism, toward theocracy.

With respect to the integrity of the Congressman himself, Wolgast argues that a Christian Scientist who makes appeals not based on Christian-Science doctrines speaks “disingenuously” (1943). “[I]t is dishonest to misrepresent our reasons for a view” (1944); dishonesty undermines public discourse itself by concealing true intentions, harboring secret doctrines.

It would indeed be dishonest to misrepresent one’s reasons for a view. But there is no reason why a Rawlsian citizen would need to do so. An openly Christian-Science Congressman would not be misrepresenting his views at all if he argued against inoculation on public health grounds, if he sincerely believed that inoculations are medically unnecessary or harmful. Nor would he misrepresent his view if he hung his argumentative hat on the First Amendment. He could simply say: ‘I personally am opposed to inoculation first of all on religious grounds, but I recognize that most of my fellow citizens do not stand with me on those grounds. I hold that they should oppose inoculation on public-health and Constitutional grounds.’ It is precisely an instance of integrity to admit personal reasons for advocating a given policy and then to argue in terms that others can accept as well, if you also believe in those terms.

“Who,” Wolgast asks, “being persuaded to a position by his moral and religious values, would not believe that these values have the greatest persuasive power and thus greater power for change?” (1944) No one, I reply, except two types of people: those who assume that the “values” that resonate most powerfully with themselves necessarily resonate most powerfully with everyone else; and those who are convinced that such values, once stated and defended, can and will persuade most people. The first type of person makes an unreasonable assumption that will quickly yield to real-world experiential refutation, if only in the form of ending the Congressman’s career. The second type of person will not be precluded from making ‘conversion’ arguments under the Rawlsian regime, so long as he does not make them in public policy debates. In a Rawlsian republic, the Reverend Billy Graham could still bring his crusade to Madison Square Garden and a television near you. If he converted a workable majority of any political community to his views, many of these would then become part of the overlapping consensus. Rawls makes this point in Chapter 6, where he cites Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, with its invocation of Biblical themes. “Lincoln does not violate public reason as I have discussed and as it applied in his day—whether in ours is another matter—since what he says has no implications bearing on constitutional essentials or basic justice” (254). This implies that the overlapping consensus, the sphere of public reason, is open to change as demographics and private convictions shift. What was reasonable in 1865 is not necessarily reasonable in 1997. Increasing secularization—or the reverse—can occur in civil society before it is expressed in public discourse. The overlapping consensus isn’t an unchanging quasi-Platonic essence but a matter of circumstance, given the existence of the intermediate, third ‘sphere,’ civil society.

What about Wolgast’s hard case, that of the challenging the modern republican regime itself? The regime could not, on Rawlsian grounds, be challenged immediately in public discourse. But it could surely be challenged in private and civil-society discourse. If fundamentalist Islam swept through American civil society—as it could do, given the First Amendment—and in the year 2065 there came to be the same percentage of Muslims as there were Christians in 1865, why could some new Lincoln not appeal to Islamic themes in public discourse? More radically, if the citizens were by then convinced that republicanism is an unreasonable regime, given these new terms of public discourse, why could they not introduce new modes and orders, ending republicanism altogether? This would run afoul of Rawls’s neo-Kantianism, but that is a moral not a political theory. Rawlsian liberalism is thus indirectly open to change, even to its own replacement by consensual means.

Jacques Derrida: “History of the Lie.” In Without Alibi. Peggy Kamuf translation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Hannah Arendt: “Lying in Politics.” In Crises of the Republic. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972.

 

Derrida wants to defend ‘deconstructionism’ from Plato, lurking in the guise of Hannah Arendt. But, for political purposes, he also wants to be able to say, ‘J’Accuse!’ from time to time. This is a dilemma.

The sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity did not find this to be (how-you-say?) problematic until Socrates came along and spoiled the party. Now that Socrates has come along, his spirit lingering despite his execution, he pesters word-manipulators and world-manipulators like, well, a gadfly. Not Athenian poison, not Machiavellian stilettos, not the heavy artillery of Hegel or Nietzschean firebombs can quite transport the old boy’s shade to the Blessed Isles.

Derrida wants to historicize, first, the concept of lying—contrast it with non-Western traditions—and, second lying itself—its genesis and peregrinations within the Western tradition. Together, these historicizations will amount to “a true history” of the lie, for which his essay will serve as prolegomena. This may of course turn out to be an unfinished work.

He discusses Arendt, who discusses a new kind of lie, “the absolute lie,” the lie used deliberately to erase and replace what everyone knows to be true. ‘Image’ no longer refers to ‘Original’ but destroys and replaces it like a Social-Darwinian survivalist. Derrida worries that the Absolute Lie might merely shadow Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, and be equally vulnerable to Nietzschean ripostes.

On the other side, Arendt also discusses the Kantian absolute—not cognitive but moral—never to lie. The truth is “the trace of fugitive gods,” original and sacred. A lie is always harmful, polluting the spring of right, ruining the social bond. Lying is not universalizable (if you want society—a point Kant elides, in his attempt to dump teleology). Derrida, with Arendt, prefers not to be so severe.

Getting down to cases, Derrida looks at France’s then-president Jacques Chirac’s public acknowledgment of French guilt for the deportation of Jews under the Vichy regime. Derrida rightly sees that Charles de Gaulle, in studiously ignoring this French crime, refused to recognize the Vichy regime as genuinely French. (To be sure, it was headed by no less a French hero than Marshall Pétain, de Gaulle’s former mentor, but it was forced upon France by the Nazi conquerors.) In light of this, who is lying? De Gaulle or Chirac? Derrida makes a Socratic move by means of a French proverb: “It is not good to tell every truth.” Truth-telling is not always good because the knowledge of the truth may in some circumstances dispirit citizens, make them incapable of getting on with their lives in a none-too-friendly world, a world that might use not ideas but truth itself as a weapon, injuriously. This means that truth-telling is not always good. It may also mean that the truth itself is not always good—that, contra Nietzsche, Socrates is neither a nihilist nor an optimist. Derrida wants an idea of the good, but as a historicist he knows no stable one, and as a deconstructionist he wants no such stable good to await us at ‘the end of History.’ Therefore, he is forced, reluctantly, to treat what he calls “performative truths—conventions settled by force—as truths simply, rather than as facts. With no real idea of nature, much less of natural right, for Derrida conventions become more formidable. By what can one call for their change? And was not the Vichy regime a “performative truth,” as long as the Nazis made it so?

(Before leaving this topic, Derrida makes the eminently Socratic (and also Hegelian) point that the city risks “perverting” the truth into “dogmatism or orthodoxy.” Now there is a legitimate target for deconstructionists: but only in the sense that the city is perverse and not necessarily in the sense that the city necessarily lies. Again, Derrida offers no transhistorical—and, therefore, no genuinely transconventional criterion with which to criticize conventions. Is he left with the triumph of the will, as is Nietzsche? Or must he wait for Godot, at some Heideggerian station?)

Derrida’s next move is to settle a score with his critic, Tony Judt. He may be said to be motivated by the Socratic quest for justice, although, unlike Socrates, he is demanding justice for himself, and, also unlike Socrates, he can point to no stable definition of justice. Judt had accused Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida himself of failing to protest against the longtime ‘ignoring’ of Vichy’s crimes by subsequent French authorities. Calumny! Derrida charges. He had signed a petition in 1992 calling upon then-president Mitterand to come clean. Judt stands convicted not of lying but of another kind of moral failure: lack of assiduousness in seeking the truth. This failure is related to self-deception, so-called, which rests on an unconscious aversion to the truth. Judt’s soul is insufficiently—or at least inadequately—erotic, Socrates would say.

Thus Derrida suggests, both that truth-telling is not always good, and that truth-telling about Derrida is. He holds journalists not to higher standards than politicians, but to more rigorously factual ones. How, then, can deconstructionism give a history of veracity and the lie without collapsing the distinction between them?

He begins (as Arendt did, years before) with a consideration of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’ Totalitarianism (as Dostoevsky foresaw) is utilitarianism or pragmatism absolutized. Totalitarians use ideas as weapons, call upon us not to understand the world but to change it. (Thus Derrida silently rejects the core of Marxism, while applauding, later on, Marx’s critique of ‘ideology.’) Derrida evidently sees that ‘deconstructive’ techniques might easily serve a ‘totalizing’ agenda, and that’s one ‘prolegomena’ he’d rather not see written. Similarly, Nietzsche sees that the bland demi-relativism or soft nihilism of late nineteenth-century Europe might easily be kayoed by some forthright nihilism, itself the prelude to some ‘totalizing’ superman. Derrida differs honorably from Nietzsche in not licking his chops at this prospect. “Ethical, juridical, or political responsibility, if they exist [!], consists in deciding on the strategic orientation to give in this problematic….” (emphasis added). It sure does. It even burdens ‘totalizing’ tyrants with the problem Arendt sees: You can’t utterly reconstruct the world without deceiving everybody, at lest initially. So how will you keep your story straight?

Insofar as he acknowledges the need for an orientation (strategic or otherwise), Derrida rediscovers a Platonic thought. The remedy for the Absolute Lie cannot be the Absolute Truth. Given the inevitable dogmatization of Absolute Truth in politics, a ‘totally’ transparent society would leave no place to hide. (Unless the philosophers were kings, in which case they could hide behind the purple, in the Nocturnal Council. This is a highly unlikely outcome.) Derrida very sensibly objects to Alexandre Koyré’s lumping-together of the Marranos with Spartan and Indian warriors, and with Jesuit warriors-of-the-Spirit. The transparent society, perhaps in contrast with the ‘open society,’ would make the self-defense of the heterodox impossible.

In order to vindicate the truth, one should not expand the political realm but delimit it. In this enterprise Derrida holds the solitary philosopher on the one hand and (following Arendt) such institutions as the judiciary and the universities on the other. Judging from his occasional hints, he knows very well that these institutions cannot be apolitical, and that even the solitary philosopher must understand politics well enough to know how to govern his solitude (and perhaps his dialogues, with philosophers living and dead).

For all his (somewhat surreptitious) Platonizing, Derrida wants to hold onto his anti-Platonic ontology. As a historicist, Derrida denies the stability of truth. To believe in the stability of truth is to be too optimistic, he writes, following Nietzsche. To believe in the stability of truth “makes of history, as history of the lie, the epidermic and epiphenomenal accident of a parousia of truth.” But (in truth) Plato never makes much of “history.” History, in the sense of a pattern of events rather than an account of events, does not exist in Plato. Plato makes myths, not histories. Further, if lies are as enduring as Derrida says (and maybe they are), might that not mean that they track the truth, like a shadow, and thus bespeak the stability of truth? Or, alternatively, might such perdurable lies not have some truth mixed in with them—and therefore not be lies at all, but myths or fables? Without examples, it is hard to judge.

Well, after all, it’s only a draft of a prolegomena to a history of the lie. I solemnly swear not to treat Derrida as Tony Judt does, or to behave like a captious book reviewer who complains that a 400-page book doesn’t tell ‘the whole truth.’ Surely ‘the whole truth’s’ very wholeness suggests limits? Truth may be ‘tyrannical’ in the sense that it dictates to us, telling us that such-and-such is so, like it or not. But it cannot be ‘totalitarian’—else there would be no need for the notion—of truth, of totalitarianism, or of any other notions, which after all require definition.

Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Leo Strauss: Thoughts on Machiavelli. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969.

 

In his Epistle Dedicatory to Lorenzo the Magnificent, he comes across as a plain-spoken man, a veritable Harry Truman of Renaissance Florence. No pomposity, no verbal ornamentation, here. Like many late-twentieth-century historians, he makes a point of writing ‘from below,’ looking up at the lofty Lorenzo. But in Chapter XXIII, he advises the prince to take counsel only from those asked for counsel. In offering evidently unsolicited counsel to Lorenzo, he implicitly questions Lorenzo’s virtù. Such anomalies compel a certain distrust of our author by his cautious reader. Machiavelli invites distrust, quite in contrast to (for example) priests, who are inclined to insist upon it. A prince might well turn on such a dangerously intelligent adviser (III. 16).

The Prince has fared variously at the hands of Fortuna, but has always survived her vicissitudes. The Catholic Church abominated it, placing it on the Index. Secular intellectuals have often praised its realism. Patriots and nationalists have thrilled to the republican patriotism of its final chapters, especially the peroration quoting Petrarch’s patria mia. Machiavelli does indeed speak ‘realistically’ of politics. As a plain-spoken man addressing a real-world prince, he prefers not to come off as a priest or a head-in-the-clouds philosopher, and he does not.

Why, then, bother to read the Prince? Realism and patriotism are nothing so exceptional. Telling a politician to grasp power and hold it, and to profess patriotism all the while, seems quite superfluous—rather like telling Madonna to call attention to herself. Reading The Prince at this late date only makes sense if Machiavelli is much more Machiavellian—more ambitious, and more deceptive—than he seems.

Gazing up from below may well be covetous gazing. Machiavelli immediately speaks of acquiring principalities. This political science guides thumoerotic desire. Machiavelli asks the same ‘regime question’ Plato and Aristotle ask—Who rules?—but with a very different intent: hostile takeover. “Truly it is a very natural and ordinary thing to desire to acquire, and always, when men do it who can, they will be praised or not blamed; but when they cannot, and want to do it anyway, here lie the error and the blame” (III. 14-15). Socrates turns Glaucon’s thumoerotic soul from tyranny toward philosophy, or, more modestly, toward friendship with philosophers. Judaism liberates Glaucon by binding him with wise laws. Christianity’s truth makes him free by replacing the noetic beholding of the Good with active goodwill, agapic love infused into his soul by the Holy Spirit. Machiavelli does not want to convert Glaucon. Machiavelli lauds the tyrannical character of any young Glaucon who reads him. He wants Glaucon to remain tyrannical, but to be much more intelligently so. He offers Glaucon a ring of Gyges; Glaucon may or may not have the virtù to grasp and hold it.

Acquisition by means of the armaments of others is acquisition by grace of Fortuna. Acquisition by means of your own armaments is acquisition by virtù. Machiavelli tells us, in advance, why the Leninists murdered the Romanovs (Iv. 18), and why the Stalinists murdered Ukrainians (V. 20). So far, this is little more than straightforward ‘realism.’ But in Chapter VI things get more interesting. There Machiavelli tells us of men ‘from below’ who became princes by means of their own virtù: Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus. One must not speak of Moses as if he were a pagan, Machiavelli allows, but one can speak of pagans as if they were “no different from Moses” (VI. 23). One may be forgiven, perhaps, in taking this to be a distinction without a difference? The difference between the sacred and profane is nothing other than publicity.

There is more. Moses and his semblables introduced new “orders”—new regimes—in the world. Nothing is more difficult, doubtful, and dangerous than the attempt to introduce a new order. Nothing is more glorious than succeeding. New orders have hot enemies (those of the old, superseded order) and “lukewarm” friends (no yet fully attached to the new). Machiavelli repeats the word “lukewarm” three times. His readers who remember their New Testament (another new order) might see why: In Revelation 3:16 Jesus, speaking through John of Patmos to the church at Laodicaea, threatens to respond to the church members’ lukewarmness by spitting them out of his mouth. Jesus, the Founder of new modes and orders, knew the danger of lukewarm friends. But Jesus was an unarmed prophet. Unarmed prophets are easily ruined—burned at the stake, like Savanarola, or sometimes crucified. “Thus things must be ordered in such a mode that when [the people] no longer believe, one can make them believe by force” (VII. 26). “Make them believe by force”: a fascinating locution. Example: Hiero of Syracuse, the tyrant-interlocutor in Xenophon’s dialogue, who provides the virtuous example of having the recalcitrant “cut to pieces”—with, we later learn (XIII. 36) his own arms. (Immediately after this second ‘mention’ of Hiero, Machiavelli teaches another Bible lesson: his re-write of I Samuel 17, the story of David and Goliath. In Machiavelli’s version a knife appears in David’s hand, replacing God, Who appears only in the Old Testament version.)

The way to ‘renew’ Christianity is to follow the example of Pope Alexander VI, who appears often in The Prince, never more tellingly than in Chapters VII and XI: Far be it from Machiavelli to speak of ecclesiastical principalities exalted and maintained by God; “nonetheless,” Alexander, proceeding via force and fraud, did a fine job. Machiavelli writes a new Old Testament, the Discourses, and a new New Testament, The Prince. He too is an unarmed prophet. He too will have armed followers. but his armed followers will not contradict the Founder’s spiritual teachings. Machiavelli will not be burned or crucified because his armed and unarmed followers will be hot, not lukewarm; they will have their tyrannical or thumotic passions liberated. That is how the Prince of War will conquer the Prince of Peace, along with the designedly impotent philosophers of antiquity, in their castles in the clouds.

“Thus, a prince should have not other object, nor any other thought, nor take anything else as his art but the art of war and its order and discipline; for that is the only art which is of concern to one who commands” (XIV 58). There are two kinds of virtù. there is the virtù of deeds, developed by military exercises, hardening the body, and not incidentally teaching the mind the lay of the land. There is the virtù of the mind: reading histories, especially the military histories of “excellent men” who won territory, states, and glory. Put aside your Plato, your Augustine. Read Xenophon on Cyrus, and learn “the effectual truth of the thing.” Effectual truth differs from conventional, or false, ‘truths’ by being, precisely effective. In addition, effectual truth is what you effect. What is called goodness is very often bad—bad for you, you who want to survive and conquer. What is called badness is very often good. Reputation is the key. Reputation is the way to be, Gyges-like, visible and invisible, as needed. What they will see is what you want them to see; what you are is what you alone will see—or, more precisely, feel.

Here is the radical teaching of the new morality for the new order. Do not be virtuous, in the conventional sense. What is more, do not be vicious, either. Use virtue and vice. Do not express a passion of the head or the head of a passion; use your passion. (Hence Benjamin Franklin’s advice, “Use venery”—a suggestion that sends the thumoerotic moralist D. H. Lawrence into a paroxysm of indignation). Draw back from being-according-to-morality. Be beyond good and evil. Do not be liberal (for example) or parsimonious; such effects should be used virtuously (XVI. 63). Spend liberally, with other peoples’ money, but not with your own peoples’ money, inasmuch as “men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony” (XVII. 67). Know how not to be the beast and the man, but how to use the beast and the man. What is more, use both the relevant beasts: the courageous lion and the wily fox. (This is an important lesson for the thumoerotic men Machiavelli advises, who are too ready to roar,, too impatient to think.) So teaches the teacher of princes, the centaur Chiron. The beast-man Chiron replaces the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth. He who uses but is not animated by the virtues and vices, the man and the beasts, “needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and the variations of things command him” (XVIII. 70)—a lesson from the chapter titled, “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes.” The prince should “change his nature with the times” (XXV.100), but, more impressively, he will also change exterior nature or fortune—beating her, striking her down. He stoops to conquer. Or, as Bacon teaches, he obeys nature to master nature, setting nature against herself, dividing (analyzing) and conquering.

Nothing is more necessary than to appear to have religion. By “necessary” Machiavelli again means useful, the effectually true. Most men judge by their eyes, not by their hands. What an instrument is the hand! It both knows and does, fusing theory and practice. The hand grasps. The hand caresses or annihilates, as (known) advantage dictates. Preach peace and faith; be hostile to both. Practice multiculturalism (XXI, 91), to your advantage. Let some men offer advice without fear, but not just any man. You make the decisions; once they are made, you execute them without wavering, audaciously mastering the woman, Fortuna. Machiavelli’s epistemology of touch is more than materialism, though it is that. It is more than anti-religious, though it is that, too. What the epistemology of touch lets you know is the effectual truth. The effectual truth is the truth of utility, the truth of him who is not anything or anyone but pure thumos, pure libido dominandi, pure will-to-power, beyond all ‘being.’ It is the truth of him who creates new modes and orders out of the chaos of malleable matter. It is the truth of the real god of this world.

The only book Machiavelli published in his lifetime was The Art of War. Central to its final chapter is a discussion of invisible writing. Invisible writing is thought, inasmuch as writing is thought made visible. The visible can be the deceptive. The whole of The Art of War is, in one sense, an essay on the art of writing as war, the art of seeming, of deception, of camouflage, the war of enacting secret thoughts. Machiavelli’s writing-war or polemic against the writing of writings, the Bible, won many followers. Generals in this spirited war against the spiritual warfare of the Church included Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, who systematized, in different ways, the Machiavellian project of nature-conquest. as for the moralizers of modernity, they come, in most instances, out of Rousseau, whose critiques of the bourgeoisie and the Enlighteners replicate the Machiavellian critique of Christians who fail to follow Alexander VI. Such men are neither here nor there, neither full-hearted citizens nor solitary philosophers. they soften or effeminize public life, leading cities to ruin. Later moderns, Hegel and Marx, seek to synthesize the Rousseauian opposites. Nietzsche tries to make Machiavellianism noble. (Ah, the Germans: They add that earnest Lutheranism to Machiavelli; Protestants generally have more trouble with the Florentine than Catholics do. Catholics often mix their devotion with a strong dose of cynicism toward the Church.) More recent thinkers strut forth, preening themselves on their radical or subversive character; at best, they rise to the rank of corporal in the army of the Florentine. (For an unsparing critique of ‘traditional family values’ whereby a woman of virtù asserts her ‘reproductive freedom,’ anticipating the soi-disant radicalism of latter-day feminists, consider the Countess of Forli in Discourses III. 6.)

Machiavelli greets all these efforts with a smile, often an ironic one. By telling men (and women) to aspire, to change constantly while remaining constant only in the will to power, Machiavelli ensures that his spirit will renew itself perpetually by the very struggle of one thinker against another, one would-be founder against existing modes and orders and indeed against other would-be founders. Machiavelli masters Fortuna by encouraging the tyrant in every Glaucon, in writing visible and invisible, by setting one Glaucon against another in an endless, self-renewing war. Then you may be sure that even those who would overthrow you are still playing your game by your rules, whether they are fellow-spiders or flies in the web, more entangled the more they struggle.

Really to rival Machiavelli, one would have to begin by observing (as someone once did) that Machiavelli allows his anger against God to become anger against the good, and in that a great political philosopher allowed himself to be unphilosophic.