Reading Machiavelli by McCormick John P.;

Author:McCormick, John P.; [McCormick, John P.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691183503
Publisher: PrincetonUP
Published: 2018-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

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Leo Strauss’s Machiavelli and the Querelle between the Few and the Many

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES Leo Strauss’s engagement with the democratic elements of Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought; specifically, Machiavelli’s self-avowed departure from the ancients in favoring the political judgment and participation of the many over the few and in recommending the people, rather than the nobles, as the ultimate foundation for political authority.1 I identify several of Strauss’s misinterpretations of Machiavelli’s democratic, anti-elitist republicanism and explore tensions and discrepancies within Strauss’s reconstruction of Machiavelli’s political-philosophical project.2 In the staggeringly impressive and ceaselessly provocative Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss argues that Machiavelli, while seeming to praise the people’s political role in a democratic republic, actually levels an “unsparing analysis of the defects of the common people,”3 thus implicitly, but deliberately and definitively, undermining his otherwise explicit praise. To make this case, I argue that Strauss exaggerates Machiavelli’s criticisms of peoples and underplays his criticisms of the nobilities within republics. Strauss marshals instances of elite-popular interactions in the Discourses that purportedly demonstrate Machiavelli’s preference for elite intervention and manipulation over popular participation and judgment. Strauss insists that Machiavelli actually endorses this kind of elite initiative precisely because it circumvents the ostensibly democratic institutions and practices that the Florentine’s writings otherwise recommend, and that Machiavelli’s rhetorical strategy subtly signals his lack of genuine commitment to popular government. In rebuttal, I will highlight some of the fallacious assumptions, questionable interpretive moves, and tendentious conclusions operating within or exhibited by Strauss’s approach to Machiavelli’s political thought.

My motivation, of course, is not merely to show that Strauss was wrong about a particular if crucially significant facet of Machiavelli’s political thought. I hope to better illuminate the fundamental philosophical-political commitments driving Strauss’s critique of modernity. In his earliest books, Strauss, the young devotee of Martin Heidegger, excavated the prerational foundations of the ostensibly rationalist philosophical systems of Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes: Strauss endeavors to uncover the “basic and ineradicable interest springing from [Spinoza’s] heart” and to uproot Hobbes’s “fundamental moral attitude.”4 In these writings, Strauss unearthed the psychological, affective, and ethical motivations that drove the intellectual projects of these illustrious founders of what Strauss considered the hopelessly misnamed “Age of Reason.”5

I deem it apposite, then, to delineate and identify the nonobjective, prerational, moral commitments of Strauss’s own intellectual project through a similar reading of his masterful study of Machiavelli—commitments inherited, wittingly or unwittingly, by his many disciples. Strauss, as we know, came somewhat late in his career to the view that Machiavelli, and not Hobbes or Spinoza, was the legitimate founder of modernity and the true initiator of the Enlightenment.6 A painstaking comparison of what Machiavelli actually wrote about elites and the people, about aristocracy and popular government, with what Strauss claims that the Florentine wrote about them proves to be, I believe, illuminating of Strauss’s own moral attitude and, indeed, his entire philosophical-political project.

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