Renaissance Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Political Theorists

Machiavelli and Us

Name: Machiavelli and Us
Author: Louis Althusser
ISBN: 9781844676750

by Louis Althusser, Francois Matheron (Editor), Gregory Elliott

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Overview

Displacing traditional controversies over the Florentine diplomat, Althusser argues for the profound unity of the Machiavellian problematic, as deployed in the revolutionary manifesto of The Prince and the experimental historical comparisons of the Discourses. Machiavelli's apparent theoretical object - the laws of politics or history - is revealed to be a determinate practical objective: the foundation and preservation of a national-popular state. But if Machiavelli can specify the conditions for a fruitful encounter between virtu (political agency) and fortuna (the contingency of the real), his grasp of the necessity of contingency renders him the supreme artisan of an aleatory materialism. Shedding new light on the richly complex thought of its author and his subject, Machiavelli and Us will be welcomed by students of Machiavelli and Althusser alike.

Synopsis

“Althusser, poised between modernism and postmodernism, meets Machiavelli, poised between the Middle Ages and modernity.”—Antonio Negri.

About the Author, Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His books include For Marx; Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar); Essays in Ideology; Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx; Machiavelli and Us; and The Spectre of Hegel.