Who Are the True Machiavellians? Althusser and Merleau-Ponty Reading The Prince

Abstract

This essay examines Machiavelli's dissonant relationship to the liberal tradition by drawing on the interpretations of Althusser and Merleau-Ponty. Reading The Prince following these critics allows us to see that, in an important sense, the ostensibly non- or anti-Machiavellian character of the liberal classics is nevertheless Machiavellian in an inadvertent way. In other words, liberal political theory is Machiavellian in form, even if anti-Machiavellian in content; the distinctive movement of The Prince is to reinscribe the form in the content. The essay begins by describing one plausible perspective on Machiavelli's distinction in the tradition, drawing mostly from Althusser's Machiavelli and Us. Then, after a brief gloss on the standard Marxist critique of liberalism, it uses Merleau-Ponty's “Note on Machiavelli” and Humanism and Terror to develop an understanding of Machiavelli as restoring to political theory what is left out by the liberal canon, revealing that liberalism's disavowal of Machiavellianism is itself a Machiavellian undertaking.