A Machiavellian Perspective on Hard Times

The paper intends to address Machiavelli’s political thought and to point out the «enlightening contradictions» it is able to rise in who decides to engage with it. Machiavelli’s argument presents a dimension that is now relevant and constitutive in the reflection on politics: the dimension of conflict, a dimension that, firstly emphasised by Machiavelli, has proved capable of subverting any platonic aspiration at order. From Machiavelli’s perspective, conflict is not a slag to be eliminated, but it is rather the irreducible core of politics: conflict is not a remainder or a too extreme risk politics should remove. Conflict is rather the fact of the matter of politics, it constitutes its substance. No attempt at giving shape or order to politics can dismiss conflict, unless it is available to completely dry up the political itself. This perspective turns out to be particularly useful both to put forward a theoretical proposal in order to fitting «hard and dark times» in politics, to thinking and judging about some answers, solutions, and to finding a way out. The point is not simply that conflicts and divisions are intrinsic features of human existence, but rather that the very concept of division and disagreement, as rendered by Machiavelli, may become an operational principle for politics, namely a principle capable of promoting a new kind of political acting. Machiavellian reflection is political because it addresses the dramatic tension between politics and contingency, a tension which raise both the problem connected to the necessity of evil and the dilemma of responsibility. Is it possible to measure evil in politics? How to reconcile the two main constraints of politics, the notion of responsibility and the use of force in its many and diverse forms? How to address the question of dirty hands? Machiavellian thought will be useful, firstly, in order to reason about the dissolving character of political philosophy with respect to its own object. Secondly, a Machiavellian political philosophy will reveal its distinguishing character precisely in dark times – no wonder Machiavelli’s one of the arendtian guiding light -, not by thematising (re)conciliations, but by envisaging the endurance of places for resistance and by defining them as places of activities, not of identity, and by providing peculiar public attitudes, which are cognitive rather than affective, which are political rather than social and which are world-oriented rather that individually self-oriented.