Stated at a higher level of abstraction: a concrete and historically bound socio-political constellation, new social types—as bearers of ideas—and intellectual currents cohere to generate a set of interrelated questions. This whole gives a distinct and unique shape to an epoch. This shape is apparent to the historian in the space of questions he surveys. But the historical actors encounter these questions in concrete situations through concrete friends and foes. Passing through these actors, the epochal shape is refracted and mixed with their idiosyncrasies, so that the answer each gives bears the stamp of their individuality. The actors, however, are often unaware of the specific shape or unity of their epoch.2

In Renaissance Italy, contemporaries had an awareness of participating in a rebirth,3 though not of the specific question-structure that gave their epoch its shape. That structure has to be reconstructed—and one strand permits it: the Humanists. At the tail end of the Commercial Revolution, as communes developed and universities in Northern Italy grew, a new mercantile bourgeois stratum emerged from which many Humanists came.4 They did not form a distinct philosophical school opposed to scholasticism as scholars once assumed, but were unified by a set of disciplines and an emphasis on a specific kind of education. They focused on rhetorical and philological studies, working most often as teachers or public servants, and many were amateur, part-time writers.5 They shared in addition an intellectual orientation towards the vita activa, towards public civic life—if we contrast it to the ideal-typic Medieval orientation towards the vita contemplativa.6 And finally they inherited a common problem. Reacting to the political and spiritual crises unfolding on the cusp of the Renaissance, the Humanists attempted to answer the question: how to remake political life through the reformation of Man? They emphasized rhetoric, and particularly the study of ancient litterae to morally elevate Man through a synthesis of Christian virtues and classical ideals. They firmly believed that only through character formation, through soulcraft, could Italy and Western Christendom at large be saved.

Machiavelli appears on stage in the early 16th century during the calamità d’Italia, when Humanist notions—having become largely commonplace by his time—are overturned. It has been argued—most forcefully by Hankins—that Machiavelli abandons soulcraft in favor of statecraft, and thus completes a radical break with the Humanists.7 Against this, I argue that he is no less concerned with the formation of character. There is a real divergence, and it is anthropological. From that follows a different political ontology and a different standard of political knowledge. He radicalizes the Humanist questioning to arrive at different conclusions: as such, he is a singular figure of the Renaissance, in some ways emblematic of its political age, in other ways sharply distinct from its philosophical or literary commonplaces. He reconceptualizes the familiar topoi of Humanist political thought: virtus, prudentia, the role of history and exempla—now in the vernacular as virtù, prudenza, and esempli—but all this in service of his own soulcraft, and a new conception of politics.

The desire for renewal springs from the womb of deep cultural pessimism and a sense of profound loss. The Humanist movement was born from such a sense of longing for something greater. They lived among ruins of a disfigured landscape of vanished glories. They walked the Roman roads, they saw striding above them massive aqueducts that had once watered cities, they prayed at churches standing among the carcasses of temples and amphitheatres; they read poetry, philosophy and history in the Latin language as the glory of Rome and the deeds of her men shone through the words and they wept.8

More concretely, the acute civilizational crisis of the late Middle Ages “that shook confidence in medieval culture and undermined the legitimacy of key institutions” was provoked by the collapse of the universal authorities of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, the devastation of the Black Death, the descent of Northern Italian communes into warring tyrannies and the destruction and pillaging of the lands by roaming mercenaries and bandits. The gradual awareness of the distance—both in material, temporal, and spiritual terms—between classical antiquity and western Europe brought about a drive towards a new cultural and educational program.9

The Humanists believed that medieval institutions had failed in their role to guide Man towards a moral life, and that the proliferation of laws and legalistic thinking, coupled with scholastic studies and their dry method of formal disputation proved insufficient to alleviate the crisis. What was required was nothing less than a total moral reformation of Man’s character. Their guiding ideal, borrowed from Thucydides, was “men, not walls, make the city”—that the character of rulers and subjects made the health of the state, rather than constitutional arrangements and strict adherence to legal norms of rulership.10

To reverse the downward cycle of history, they proposed a new educational program—the studia humanitatis—designed to reform the human heart and mind through the study of ancient literature, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. Antiquity was no object of mere admiration but the ground in which active imitation was rooted. The humanity of the ancients became a pattern for perfection and a “programme of life”.11 Initiated by Petrarch in the 14th century, “the new paideuma aimed at nothing less than a comprehensive revival of the lost Graeco-Roman literary and philosophical culture as it had existed in the ancient world”.12 It is this program—the reformation of the soul as the route to political health—that Machiavelli would inherit, and transform.

Soulcraft rests on a set of assumptions about human nature and the cosmos. The foundational belief is that Man has a natural end in the full development of his capacities, and virtue is the name for reaching it. As the Humanist Alberti sums it up at the end of The Family dialogue, virtus “is nothing else than perfect and well-developed nature” (80). The cosmos itself sets that end: the Humanists lived in an animated, moralized world, where the Good is built into the order of nature, and social order corresponds to the hierarchical ordering of the cosmos. Each kind of thing has a proper condition it is directed towards, and Man’s end is his place in that world. Heat, for example, is not just pleasant, but a productive and expansive force, and thus morally good. Cold, by contrast, is bad. Rest is better than motion. The motionless heavens are better than the changing Earth.13 An acorn is the seed of a potential oak that actualizes itself into that oak, and Man too contains a seed—the seed of felicity. But his rational faculties imply the possibility of choice, and capacities exercised through choice must be acquired by exercising them, contrary to the automatic self-actualization of the acorn into an oak. This implies the inherent plasticity of human character. As Hankins paraphrases the Humanist Patrizi, “the thirst for goodness and felicity is rooted in ­human nature, even if the desire for good must be cultivated and directed:”14 Patrizi himself affirms that:

Nature begets human beings who are neither good nor bad; it renders them fit for goodness yet inclined to what is bad. Reason persuades us of this, intelligence reveals it, experience teaches it, and Aristotle, basing himself on proofs of the Old Acad­emy, bears witness to it. Nature herself has sown in us ­little celestial fires and seeds, as it ­were, of the virtues, which if allowed to grow quickly bring forth the finest fruit, as Plato says. From ­these are born a pattern of acting well and living with rectitude, which represses all turbulent affections, orders the human faculties and strengthens habits of virtue. These paths lead us to felicity, desirable for its own sake, supplying us with every­ thing we need, lacking nothing.

(De Regno 1.7)

The Humanist movement rejected the strict Augustinian view of human nature as fundamentally corrupted by original sin, which held that the pursuit of virtue in this life was futile, and any virtue or excellence in this life came only from the grace of God. Rather, man was dignified in their eyes in his ultimate capacity to attain excellence and even glory in this-worldly life.15 By cultivated habit, the dignity of the human soul could shine forth, and a shared divine element gave access to an intelligible moral order.16 Now Christian piety was not altogether rejected. The reversal to a classical understanding of human nature did not entail a return to pagan values, as Burckhardt assumed, and the Humanists, following Petrarch, were still firmly rooted in a Christian framework, where wisdom was equated with piety, and the pursuit of excellence, bequeathed to men’s souls by God, was to be turned towards commending their Maker.17 These two understandings were, however, in tension, and Machiavelli would eventually exploit this tension. The Humanists did hold a this-worldly ideal of virtue, excellence, and glory, but it was in constant struggle with this Christian frame they never abandoned, and they never fully reconciled the two.18

The Humanists believed that character is formed by the study of ancient litterae. As teachers of the studia humanitatis and inheritors of the medieval dictatores specialized in the arts of writing and speaking,19 they pursued that tradition, polemicizing against the dry technicalities of medieval scholasticism, developing a clearly defined cycle of disciplines: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.20 They developed a keen interest in practical arts and sciences—knowledge “for use” towards virtue,21 and this intellectual attitude should be kept in mind to understand their fundamental aims.

As Skinner notes:

The first and fundamental move the humanists made was to spell out the sequence of assumptions underlying the Ciceronian concept of virtus: first, that it is in fact possible for men to attain this highest kind of excellence; next, that the right process of education is essential for the achievement of this goal; and finally, that the contents of such an education must centre on the linked study of rhetoric and ancient philosophy.

The fundamental aim of this education was to cultivate “single virtue” that outshines the rest, and the development of a manly man in character. Petrarch takes this up from Cicero’s Tusculan disputations, where the philosopher claims that it is through the study of philosophy and rhetoric that virtue is to be cultivated. Philosophy for wisdom, rhetoric for the practical aim as a citizen.22 Concretely, the combination of wisdom and eloquence—sapientia et eloquentia23—produces the “good man skilled in speaking”—vir bonus dicendi peritus—who could build social consensus and persuade others to follow the path of virtue through speech.24

Students were expected to master Latin, and eventually Greek, as an instrument of eloquence and active engagement with ancient authors. Once the “doorway” of language was mastered, the student entered into a lifelong conversation with the ancients, whose precepts and examples would provide a school of practical wisdom, or prudentia.25 The Roman republic in particular was the wellspring from which ancient virtue rose, and the Humanists’ study was shot through with the exhortation to restore the ancient glories of their native land. The admiration of glory begets emulation and spurs men to action: they hold the deeds of eminent men from the Classical world before them and strive to reach those giants.

Honor, glory, and worldly fame were the purpose of pursuing excellence. And virtus was itself conceived as a creative social force that allows man to overcome any obstacle—to master his own fate by cultivating manly virtue against the turning wheel of Fortuna, and to mold the social world to fit his desires.26 Ultimately, because the cosmos was ordered toward the Good, the pursuit of virtue and the pursuit of advantage did not finally diverge—the honorable, honestum, and the useful, utile, coincided, and where they appeared to conflict, one had mistaken an apparent good for a real one (De officiis III). Moral goodness, excellence in action, and a flourishing life could all be combined.

This educational program was in service of a fundamentally political goal. The paideuma, as Hankins puts it, was the intentional molding of the character of rulers through soulcraft.27 Laws and institutions, on their own, were insufficient, since they could be twisted by powerful and wicked men—as they had been by the Signori who took over the communes starting in the 13th century.28 The Humanists’ favorite Tacitean maxim was: Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges, “The state at its most corrupt ­will have innumerable laws” (Annals 3.27). Thus soulcraft must necessarily come prior to statecraft. This new approach to politics stemmed from a psychological insight, borrowed from the Greek understanding of tyranny: it was not unjust law that was at the source of tyranny, but a disordered soul and a thirst for power.29

Since the roots of tyranny were located in the heart of men’s souls, civic humanism, and liberty, in the sense of non-domination, were not exclusive prerogatives of republics.30 Soulcraft was not an ideological project associated with a particular regime type. A republic could be just as tyrannical as any monarchy, and a monarchy just as virtuous as any republic. “Where there are no tyrants, the people tyrannize”, claimed Petrarch in his Invective Against a Man of High Rank with No Knowledge or Virtue (§ 33-34).

Soulcraft rested thus on this educational institutio of the Humanists, and went beyond letters. Ritual, public oratory, the use of historical examples, and a culture of praise and blame sought to mold the soul’s dispositions towards excellence. The Humanists, alongside artisans, sought to saturate the atmosphere with Rome rebirthed—through architecture, painting, music, theater—to create a “virtuous environment” with a moralizing message that would remind the elite of the rewards of excellence and the infamy of vice.31 As an example, we can look to the uomini famosi fresco cycles of Roman republican heroes in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, which would overlook the city’s magistrates as they passed, with inscriptions exhorting them to imitate the heroes.

Ultimately, soulcraft aimed at securing the willing obedience of the ruled by providing them with just and virtuous leaders whose moral authority made coercion and fear unnecessary. In the Humanist conception, soulcraft rests on two linked assumptions: the educability of man’s character and teleology. It is these two assumptions that Machiavelli will sever.

It is hard to overstate the stimulating effect that the crisis of 1494 had on Renaissance political and historical thought. Two figures stand out as most notably affected: Guicciardini and Machiavelli. The French invasion and the occupation of formerly free cities, the collapse of the Medici regime in Florence—which had ruled under a republican facade for sixty years—exposed the absolute impotence of moralistic Humanist rhetoric against raw kinetic force. The illusion of Christian unity under Pope or Emperor was long dead. Petty interests, city-state squabbles, and new forms of political power—national states such as France—brought to light two fundamental factors: the importance of centralized state authority and the importance of military force. Both now had an expanded geographical scope that forced the adoption of a wider European perspective. Historical writing could no longer follow the models of Livy and Sallust, which had dominated the writings of Humanists, who adopted the narrow and moralized perspective of the city-state as such. Broader political constellations had to be taken into account. Pragmatic and causally sensitive historical thinking shifted the inquiry from moral teleology to the causal mechanics of political ruin.32

If we move back to Florence, the failure of Savonarola—Machiavelli’s “unarmed prophet”—in his campaign to reform the regime and in his fight against papal corruption, the failure of the Humanists to reform the princes and the people, the dashing career of Borgia and the contrasting career of Soderini, and Florence’s military weakness all prompted Machiavelli to consider the interrelation between military and political organization, and to reach for broader conclusions about the nature of the political and of Man.

It is always tempting to exhaust the thought of an author in his biography, but I believe that far more than for most, Machiavelli’s biography is particularly illuminating. He spent many years engaged in practical affairs as diplomat and bureaucrat in the second chancellery of Florence, and then spent years in exile courting the ancients through his readings. This combination of practical experience and mostly autodidact learning—he, after all, did not receive a professional Humanist training—left a discernible shape to his thought. Its unsystematic nature, organized around piecemeal observations, is what makes it effective for the quick seizure of relevant factors in the constellation of a concrete situation. In his reading, he turns antiquity from an object of pure reverence to a yardstick for action. He reads Livy as a practitioner and thus reads him with a critical eye.

The difficulty with treating Machiavelli lies in the fact that he is no initiator of a science of politics or of systematic naturalistic science on the model of Galileo, as some have read him.33 He is fundamentally a worldly man, oriented towards action, who wants to inspire his readers to action. This is not to deny any theoretical insights that may be gleaned from his works. But these must be reconstructed, and any logical structure extracted must not be taken for the foundation of Machiavelli’s own thinking, but rather an artificial imposition by the reader in order to simplify and to go beyond Machiavelli’s own words or intentions. A work can outleap its creator and his intentions and provide us with crucial elements for constructing a science of Man. We have a tendency to get trapped in simple textual analysis—but, as Machiavelli himself insists, it is the effectual truth of the thing that matters—it is always how close to the mark it comes.

Anthropology underlies the biggest conceptual shifts, and tracking it like a seismograph lets us follow the tectonic movements in the consciousness of men, as they register in their thought-structures. Tracking Machiavelli’s anthropology is how we register his break. And where he differs most from the Humanists is fundamentally at this level. While he does believe in the plasticity of the human character, as we will get into shortly, we can detect a streak of what has often been called “pessimism” in his thinking, with regard to human nature; I prefer to follow Kondylis and read him as adopting a “phenomenological”34 outlook: Machiavelli takes men and their behavior as they appear to be, in search of the “effectual truth” of the thing, rather than what has been imagined or dreamt up by all strands of artists and philosophers [P15]. Here he sharply stakes out his contrast with the Humanists. Concretely, what the imagined thing names is the ordered, moralized cosmos of the Humanists, the world where the Good is built into nature. This is not, however, the world that Machiavelli observes. Once one denies the moralized cosmos, the path of moral reformation, of remolding the soul towards the Good for political effectiveness is a doomed one. Machiavelli’s own bitter political experience testifies to this, and so does the fate of Italy at large. The Humanists had taken the castles they built in the air for reality, and this is why they had lost Italy and had not truly restored it to its former glory. On his account, antiquity too has been misread, because it was read with a moral aim in mind. But its lessons are for action.

Ultimately Machiavelli’s thought reflects the turbulent world of Renaissance politics, rather than the ordered moral universe of the Humanists focused on wisdom and rhetoric. Machiavelli’s world is much closer to the world we find in Cellini’s Florence, where men murder, cheat, and steal, where Fortuna reigns supreme and only bravery and flexibility guarantee survival.35 He is thus not concerned with some profound metaphysical “essence” of man, in the theological sense, but how human nature shows up to us in concrete political action.36 This is the starting point of the anthropological factor in his thought.

The Humanist ascent of Man in the 14th and especially 15th centuries displaced the old Theological conception of Man as fallen creature and replaced it with Promethean self-confidence. Gradually, a new anthropology of drives developed in the 16th century.37 Machiavelli is one of the first to work within this intellectual current. Drive theories hold that Man’s behavior can be explained by impulses or passions that bubble up beneath the surface of the ego and project outwards into the world as fundamental causes of action. These passions are active and dynamic, kinetic forces that set the whole world into motion. “Man is a hearth of condensed energy that is latently present or erupts and unfolds like in a chain reaction to lift man from the level of simple physical force to the status of a conscious and rational individual.”38 To be clear, this drive-language used here is a compressed description of the observed regularities of conduct rather than claims about sub-surface causal psychology. The fundamental, recurring passions, which form the building blocks of behavior are fear, desire, and ambition. [P17/P18]. The sharpest break Machiavelli makes with the Humanists, and what distinguishes his anthropology, is that the desires are insatiable. Desire outruns the possibility of acquisition and causes permanent discontent, while those that have more live in perpetual fear that what they already have may be taken from them [DI.37]. For the Humanists, Man had the seeds of virtue which needed to be kindled. But Machiavelli’s Man has no end other than satiation of appetites. These drives are thus latent, and activated under the pressures of necessity: a change of one’s fortune, a mishap, an opportune moment that presents itself. Ultimately, they are grounded in self-interest, in the form of self-preservation. Man’s behavior is constant enough to be worked, the way an artist works metal when heated: animated by virile ferocity, men are the raw material of statecraft. But nature is not fully plastic, and Machiavelli is at pains to repeat that men are obstinate and the times change quicker than their nature can [P25].

These drives are not merely private, psychological drives, and here is where Machiavelli enters the sociological register. Machiavelli himself never quite aggregates individual appetite into humors. If we take his analysis of the acquisitive drive, it is wholly individual [DI.37], while his analysis of the constitution of polities [P9/DI.4-5] is immediately social. Yet they share a vocabulary of appetite and fear as magnitudes of human behavior, and so we can reasonably infer that one can cross from the individual dynamic to the social, without needing to settle the causality or underlying ontology.

Machiavelli notes that every body politic is composed of two humors (here borrowing freely from the medical sciences and showing the tight conceptual unity and flexibility before the siloing of social-scientific disciplines into separate domains): the popolo and the grandi—nobility. The same acquisitive appetite we find in general in men, alongside fear, is found in the body politic at large. The grandi want to command and oppress, while the popolo desire to not be oppressed [P9, DI.4-5].

Now, within this sociological register, there is a fundamental structural asymmetry: the popolo’s desire has no specific object, since it is a negative desire: the freedom from domination, which requires simply for domination to be absent, and is hence satisfiable; the grandi’s, by contrast, is unbounded. The desire to dominate is never satisfied, and the greater the domination, the greater the acquisitive appetite grows. And the popolo’s desire is negative only in the first instance, and turns into acquisitive ambition once secure [DI.37]. We can take as an example the agrarian laws. Once the plebs were secure against the nobles, they pressed for the redistribution of land, and in time this led to the republic’s ruin. Since the division is structural, Machiavelli hints at the fact that it is the form of the social itself, and not its breakdown, as it has been conceived in Aristotelian-Ciceronian political philosophy. Strife and conflict are primary to politics, even within a polity, if we set aside inter-polity struggles. Stasis is not a pathology, one where citizens form factions rather than defend the common good. Rather, the common good is illusory, used to obscure the fundamental disunity at the heart of politics, because there is an irreconcilable conflict of interests, and given men’s constitution, no amount of rational persuasion will let them set aside their own self-interest in favor of some imagined fictive good for all.39

Because the drives can never be fully satisfied, since the wanting never terminates, the division never resolves into a final arrangement. We can imagine the division between the popolo and the grandi, with the prince—who arrives to power through the aid of one or another—as a field of forces in constant flux. The interpolation we may make here is that if there is no final arrangement, and the prince must come to power with the aid of one or the other, then his power is not a possession. Nor is it a substance he wields. His strength lies rather in his relational position vis-à-vis the two humors [P9]. If power is not a substance that a prince possesses, but is only the position a prince occupies vis-à-vis the two humors, then it has a symbolic reality. Power is constituted by intersubjective recognition of the actors, and perception management becomes key to building and maintaining power. Being and perceiving, appearance and reality are all co-constitutive in Machiavelli’s world. The prince’s power depends on how the nobles calculate his capacity to reward or hurt them, and how the people calculate his capacity to come to their defense; the mercenaries, whether he can pay them, how capable a leader he is, how strong, fearless, cunning or savvy he is—whether he is a lion and a fox, or simply a man [P18]. A prince universally believed to be weak is weak, whatever material forces he nominally commands—precisely because the grandi will defect on the belief, and the defection is what makes it true. Perception is constitutive of the position. Of course armies, money, fortresses are all real and matter. Machiavelli is at pains to point this out. But these become “power” only once mediated by opinion, which relies on appearance, and this is why a prince with arms but held in contempt ultimately fails [P19].

Machiavelli is not the first to point out the symbolic reality of politics, and we find examples in the sophists and Thucydides. The Humanists too were aware of it, in their concern to align the appearance of a prince with his essence. But for them it was a defect to be remedied, whereas Machiavelli treats it instead as an inherent structural feature of political life. “Men in general judge more by their eyes than their hands: everyone can see, but few can feel” [P18]. The few that can feel beyond appearances are effectively politically impotent, and cannot contradict the majority to any great effect. The important point is that this is not some claim about a “true” and “false” world, but rather a sociological point about how politics works. Even the most material things enter politics only as they appear. The same fortress protects or fails depending on the prince’s standing with his people, which is why Machiavelli concludes that the best fortress is not to be hated [P20]. We come back to the verità effettuale: in politics, what matters is not what is imagined, but what is effectual, and appearances are among the things that produce effects.

The Remirro de Orco episode is the greatest example of this symbolic reality. Cesare Borgia installs Remirro to pacify the region of Romagna, and in doing so manages his own image. Had he simply pacified the region himself, he would have been left with a resentful populace and an arrangement that would not have been durable politically. Instead, once he executes Remirro, the instrument of cruelty, and displays his body out in the open for all to see, he leaves the popolo “satisfied and stupefied” [P7]. The spectacle itself is the political act. It relocates the cruelty from Borgia to his minister, and expiates it, because men judge by what they see. The visceral horror of the bisected body in the piazza was integral to the pacification. It resolved the humors by satisfying the people’s desire for revenge while terrifying them in the same stroke.

The second most illuminating example of the role of perception in Machiavelli concerns the founding of new orders. Given that men pay more attention to form, rather than substance, if one wishes to change institutions one must maintain the shadow of ancient modes [DI.25]. Institutions too subsist in how they are seen and if ancient titles are maintained even if functions are changed, men will be content.

If perception is constitutive of position, and power is relational, then a field made of such positions admits no final settlement. More broadly, this is a completely different view of political ontology from the classical Aristotelian-Ciceronian with great consequences for what can be done. I am using here the term “ontology” loosely, without claiming that Machiavelli is making fundamental claims about the nature of reality. This is simply the reading I provide to make sense of how the political shows itself in action. There is no final settlement in unity, in coherence, in a body which is whole and undivided. Ultimately, politics becomes the flux of alliances and claims by competing parties, and there is no essence to politics above the groupings men make. To be sure, certain arrangements are more stable than others. A prince who befriends the people is more secure than one who has the multitude as his enemy, since it is easier to protect oneself against the few than against the many; the latter situation “requires recourse to extraordinary means to protect their state” [P9/DI.16]—that is, violence, fear, and coercion—and the more discord such a prince sows, the more isolated he becomes, until he risks being toppled.

To clarify, there are two senses in which we can take the “ground”. Machiavelli’s anthropology is an explanatory constant, an interpretative lens, if you will, the “ground” which makes human behavior intelligible to us and to political actors, but it allows for no founding of order. Anthropology is not the ground on which one could fix a settlement. While men’s natures remain constant, they are expressed as part of and constitutive of a social field of fluctuating forces, and must be understood as such. I propose to call this the “agonistic field”—a social field, relational and composed of competing and allying claims to power, mediated by perception.

Now, given this specific anthropology of drives and conception of the political, we can ascertain that Machiavelli brackets teleology. Men do not aim for “the Good”, but rather towards the satiation of their desires, which, terminating in nothing, cannot serve as an end at all. This is what we observe, this is the verità effettuale. If a prince acts as men “ought” to, rather than as they “do”, he comes to his ruin. He does not live in Cicero’s moral universe. This means that success in the political realm has a different criterion from success in the “moral” realm; alternatively stated, Machiavelli is the first to posit, or to think the political as an autonomous sphere.40 There is no external standard because there is no natural end, and the criterion of minimal political success is generated immanently by the agonistic field itself: survival and maintenance of the state. By contrast, Humanist ends require stable passions, appetites that can be reined in and oriented towards higher ends. Machiavelli’s break with teleology is thus entailed by his reconceptualization of Man.

Machiavelli copied De Rerum Natura by hand, and while there is no direct evidence of influence, we may suppose that the amoral Lucretian view of the cosmos, as atoms interacting through contingency to shape the world was to some degree formative for his conception. We find, at least in terms of thought-structures, similar conceptions of a cosmos filled with chaotic parts and no resolution into a final, stable whole. The distinction lies in what follows from it. Lucretius’ world is ruled by permanent physical laws, with the atomic swerve as the minimal indeterminacy that lets anything form at all and from which free will is derived; seeing it clearly leads to withdrawal and ataraxia. Machiavelli’s men, on the other hand, can redirect Fortuna as dikes redirect a river, if they cultivate virtù.41

Nonetheless, Machiavelli is no pure immoralist. He removes the ground for the Good, not standards themselves. Politics still has an aim, a standard by which we distinguish pure capacity for maintaining power and satiating drives from higher ends. The distinction is that these ends are immanent, not transcendent. Excellence in action, glory, is the result of a positional advantage one has over others in the agonistic field, and Machiavelli’s own patriotic commitment to Italia and its people [P26] is vital or existential: the end of politics is the preservation of the body politic and its marking out a space in human history that elevates it apart from others, through the workings of great men and their magnificent deeds. Agathocles has every success, yet he is denied glory, because men cannot celebrate naked atrocity. Glory, additionally, is scarce. Two actors cannot both maximally attain glory, because it is fundamentally relational and a zero-sum game, which implies that this is not part of a perfectionist telos. A moral good is sharable, but glory inherits the relational ontology of the field. Glory’s normativity is also hypothetical rather than categorical. Chapter 25 of The Prince opens by assuming all men aim at glory and riches, and every counsel has the form “if you seek it, then”, but there is no argument anywhere that one ought to. The desire is simply supplied by the anthropology, and is not some norm above it. The Humanist telos binds, by contrast, whether or not a man happens to want it, because it is set by his nature rather than his appetite. To summarize, for Machiavelli, value is unmoored from any binding foundation, but this does not imply that it is simply arbitrary.

What consequences does this hold for the Humanist, and more broadly, Machiavellian project? The educability of men is retained, but the moral content of that formation is voided. The Humanists were fundamentally concerned with the formation of character through litterae and the imitation of antiquity toward moral goodness, because they believed, following Cicero, that goodness and advantage coincide, so that the good man and the effective ruler are one. For them, men existed in an ordered cosmos, a shared moral universe with stable values, and all that was needed was to inspire them with the spark of ancient virtue to set them on the right path. Now, we could claim, as Hankins does, that it is precisely here that Machiavelli makes the break with Humanists, by dismissing soulcraft as a fanciful dream of imagined republics, and by focusing on statecraft instead. He claims that for Machiavelli, moral reformation is pointless, because men have rigid moral dispositions that fail to adapt to changing circumstances. What matters is the erection of laws and institutions, which constrain men’s nasty and self-interested natures.42

I think this is an overstatement, consistent neither with what Machiavelli says himself nor with how he understood himself. Machiavelli took the Humanist program of soulcraft seriously, and was deeply concerned with the shaping of the human character; he used Humanist techniques and topoi to this end, but cut the moral content out of the formation. The reason he voids it is ultimately anthropological. Since men’s appetites never terminate, the political field never settles into a stable order, and there is no fixed good for formation to aim at. Nor is there a moral order in the cosmos that the soul is supposed to reflect, so the soul cannot be “disordered” in the Humanist sense. It is simply an expression of the competing passions that regulate conduct, just as the cosmos may be made up of amoral void and atoms interacting through sheer contingency.

On Hankins’ moralized account, where soulcraft is the formation of moral character toward the good, it will be granted that Machiavelli is not doing soulcraft. But if taken descriptively—soulcraft-as-formation of the actor’s dispositions—then the description reveals deeper continuity that the moralized account obscures. Furthermore, it illuminates Machiavelli’s position in the history of ideas: a “vernacular Humanist,” as some have called him43—a Humanist who has broken with the teleological and moralized universe of Cicero, with one foot in practical politics and one in Humanist antiquity.

The biggest weakness in Hankins’ assertion of “statecraft over soulcraft” is that it overlooks Machiavelli’s mode of intervention, which is not merely institutional. It overlooks the fundamental rhetorically formative nature of his writings, and takes only their substance into account, and not the effect of their form. Machiavelli is not creating laws or institutions, and he is also not simply writing a practical guidebook, a technical document with a set of rules on military and political institutional reform. There is undeniably something to the vision of politics as “technique” underlying his conception. But a reading more consistent with both Machiavelli’s self-conception and the conventions of his era sees his approach as one of an art. Like the Humanists, he is writing with the hopes of forming his readers’ practical judgment through the offer of particular examples for imitation, and his use of rhetoric. Unlike them, he is not concerned with moral behavior, but with the shaping of readers’ souls into men capable of action—men who will in turn reshape the state and its people.

What demonstrates that Machiavellian formation produces a disposition rather than a “toolkit full of modi”—some that belong to virtuous government, some that belong to tyranny, depending on the circumstances—as Hankins would have it?44 What the writing works on is the reader’s judgment. The greatest indication is Machiavelli’s own assertion in the prefatory letter to The Prince:

For just as those who paint landscapes place themselves in a low position on the plain in order to consider the nature of the mountains and the heights, and place themselves high on top of mountains in order to study the plains, in like manner, to know the nature of the people well one must be a prince, and to know the nature of princes well one must be of the people.

The letter is dedicated to the “Magnificent Lorenzo de’ Medici”, but the reader Machiavelli also has in mind is the prince to come. The evidence that Machiavelli is seeking to form judgment lies in his means: this double perspective, where the prince is both object and subject; through Machiavelli’s deployment of historical and contemporary examples alike, as well as his observations on human behavior, we get to see the people from the perspective of the prince, and the prince from the perspective of the people; there is no list of rules nor technical details to learn. Machiavelli offers up examples for our own weighing and consideration. Moving between perspectives is itself the formation of judgment, since in a relational field one’s position is constituted by how others see it.

The Humanist imitation of antiquity to educate judgment is also maintained. As Kahn puts it:

Like the humanists, he wants to educate his reader’s practical judgment, the faculty of deliberation that allows for effective action within the contingent realm of fortune; like them he recognizes that such education must therefore offer particular examples for imitation rather than the general precepts appropriate to theoretical reason.45

The prince must combine practical experience, the arts of war and everything that approaches or touches on war—like hunting—with the reading of histories and of great deeds of men. For only through personal judgment can he know what to imitate and what to discard, what brought on success and what brought on failure [P14]. He must be able to discern what is available to him in his own time: what specific constellation of socio-political and ideological factors make up his era and what is to be done. Imitating the deeds of great men, he must aim like an archer, high and beyond his target, so that “if one’s virtue does not match theirs, at least it will have the smell of it” [P6]. Machiavelli’s own text is reflexively doing this. In Chapter 26, with his exhortation to free Italy from the barbarians, he is aiming much higher than what he considers possible. For this reason readings such as Hankins’ that criticize Machiavelli’s poor predictions miss the point.46 Hankins overlooks Machiavelli’s play and irony, rhetorical exaggerations to mold the reader, and takes him at face value. It is doubtful Machiavelli truly believed Italy could be liberated, for example. But this aiming higher than one needs to go is part of Machiavelli’s endeavor for character formation.

The formative operation runs in both major books, The Prince and The Discourses, but their different styles and substances reflect different ends. The Prince is written for the new prince acting under urgency, and the writing carries that urgency—hence the importance of audacity, seizing the moment, the exhortation aiming to shoot past the target. The Discourses, on the other hand, forms citizens and re-founders through deliberation, working on a collectivity over time—and here the emphasis lies on the importance of institutions and returning to foundations.

In The Discourses proem, he himself takes on the Humanist mantle for an immanent critique. Antiquity has been “admired rather than imitated,” and by accusing his contemporaries according to their own standard, Machiavelli positions himself as the true inheritor of this tradition. The true imitator is the counselor who makes his prince “reproduce in action” the ancients’ achievement.47 His target is the decorative, ornamental use of antiquity, the adornment of galleries and gardens with ancient statues, the representation of pagan themes in poetry or painting, where antiquity is admired but never imitated in politics. His attack is thus directed at pure otium and its aesthetic use. Machiavelli therefore takes antiquity as a source of action.

To demonstrate how this formation acts in practice on an attentive reader, we can turn to Chapter 8 of The Prince. In this chapter Machiavelli sets out to discuss those who have become princes through wickedness. At the outset, he announces that these modes cannot be attributed wholly to fortuna or virtù, and that he will not enter into their merits. The examples are sufficient for anyone who finds it necessary to imitate them. In other words, it rests on the judgment of those who enter the game of politics. He mobilizes the example of Agathocles from antiquity, claiming first that he came from nothing except wickedness and virtù of body and mind, virtù that carried him through the ranks to praetor, and nothing can be attributed to fortuna or favor. This comes after the narrative of crimes and campaigns, as a considered judgment. It is a positive attribution to Agathocles’ own effort, which is why Machiavelli then rates him equal to any excellent captain. Then Machiavelli seemingly undermines that point by claiming that he gained empire, and not glory, and through wickedness and cruelty, but nothing, or very little, that can be attributed to fortuna or virtù, because killing allies and betraying friends cannot be called virtù. This echoes the opening claim but it sits oddly because it follows two positive uses of virtù of Agathocles in the same paragraph. Finally, towards the end of the chapter he goes on to say that cruelty can be well used or not, and names Agathocles as one who used it well. Machiavelli thus rehabilitates what he morally disavowed. What is going on?

This is nothing other than Machiavelli’s soulcraft in action. He is reshaping how the reader understands the meaning of virtù, working on his capacity to read the concrete case rather than its name. He is undermining the idea that virtù possesses some intrinsic moral content. The key verb in both moments is chiamare, to call: “non si può ancora chiamare virtù;” “bene usate si possono chiamare.” The question is what can be called virtù, not its essence. This is Kahn’s point. Virtù is a mode of acting and an adverb, and not a substance or a noun. Virtù is thus a flexible disposition and ability. Kahn claims that Machiavelli is trying to shock us with the rhetoric and his quick moralizing gloss to see if as a reader we are paying attention or not, if we take him at face value or not, structurally similar to how Borgia plays with the symbolic by displaying the body of Remirro, the cause of both cruelty and pacification in Romagna. The precise parallel Kahn draws is the disavowal of what one authored. Borgia authored the cruelty, then disavowed it by displaying its instrument, leaving the people “satisfied and stupefied”. Similarly, Machiavelli authors the brutal example, then disavows it with the moral gloss, leaving the credulous reader satisfied and stunned.48

Furthermore, it is clear that glory and excellence of action must be judged in relation to the economy of recognition I mentioned earlier, and the importance of opinion and appearance. While Agathocles can seize power through cruelty and maintain it, he cannot be considered as part of the “most excellent of men”. Machiavelli uses celebrato—his cruelty and inhumanity “non consentono che sia intra gli eccellentissimi uomini celebrato.” Celebration is something men do, and Agathocles’ exclusion is located in the field of recognition. Machiavelli’s apparent moral disavowal is in fact sociological—it is simply an observation that men will not celebrate atrocity—but is not grounded in a moral order.

Now one objection Hankins could possibly raise is that this close reading may be very clever, but it stays just that: a test of how clever a reader is and nothing more, and it does not have to do with character; that Machiavelli is merely giving the reader a set of masks to inhabit, and this encompasses his view of politics. However, this overlooks that the passage is not just trying to catch a sharp reader, but enacts the program Machiavelli explicitly states in Chapter 15: to form the habit of seeing the effectual truth of the thing behind the moralizing gloss. If this were merely technique, we would still be left with the question of when it should be deployed. A disposition, on the other hand, is unbidden, because it is what the actor has become rather than something he reaches for. This formation therefore produces a true disposition, and not just a repertoire of masks to wear on different occasions according to the needs of the situation. Furthermore, Machiavelli is trying to instill the willingness to act. If we take the final exhortation, once again, it is not a matter of training perception, but a matter of moving the soul through rhetoric, which works the character like a smith works metal.

The Humanist character formation aims at a stable habitus. The reason Machiavelli also cultivates disposition, and not technique, is that what is cultivated ties back into the unstable political ontology, the field of fundamental flux and clashing forces. There are no rules to be learned and to be applied, which mere technique would imply. What matters is cultivating flexibility, audacity, the tact of judgment trained on historical and contemporary examples, ready to be used as a yardstick for action, rather than any stable set of precepts. This implies fundamentally a situational capacity, to “learn how not to be good” [P15]—when judged by standards of conventional or private morality—but effective when judged by the norms that govern politics. Given the agonistic field, flexibility itself becomes a character trait.

Finally, this capacity as flexibility was already present in the Humanist thought-world through Cicero (De officiis I.107-121). Cicero posits that what is fitting varies by shared human nature, individual nature, circumstance, and chosen way of life, so the right action cannot be specifiable in advance, but is ultimately situational, dependent on the individual. He adds the constraint that the individual and circumstantial personae remain subordinate to the first, the shared rational nature (I.110), implying that situational flexibility operates within a fixed moral frame. Machiavelli thus keeps the situational flexibility, but demotes the shared rational nature. What is shared is an anthropology of drives, and reason is their outgrowth rather than their binding governor.

The tact of judgment is formed first, and appearance-management is one of the modes. To know how, when, and what mask to use, one must be able to read the situation judiciously, and this comes only from habituation and proper character formation; especially so for the new prince who must let go of the Humanist commonplaces and Christian conventions which have brought Italy to its ruin.

Why is Machiavelli’s writing so piecemeal, observational, and seemingly contradictory? I would like to propose that this is in fact an epistemological consequence of his political ontology, the groundless field, and not simply a stylistic preference or an oversight. It is consistent with Machiavelli’s aims, since he is not writing a “science of politics”. He is writing, with The Prince, a manual for action, and with his Discourses, a new way of reading Antiquity, with the help of Livy, that brings its brightest and most incisive features to light for us to use as material for shaping the new human soul and body—he is writing for a new kind of politics.

The examples deployed paint a world of conspiracies, of alliances and enemies, of breathtaking seizures of state, and rapid losses, of military defeats and triumphs. Machiavelli’s own historical situation discloses the limit case of the social relation: the ever-present possibility of violent death at the hand of another.49 As such, his experience and outlook illuminate this fundamental factor that one must grapple with when thinking through the nature of the political. His examples are of course not meant to be taken as universal maxims, but as a standard by which one measures one’s own understanding, using personal judgment to evaluate the concrete case at hand. But it is precisely because these examples deal with the limit case that they are so incisive and become “classical.”

It may be objected that the piecemeal analysis based on reasoning through examples is merely a lack of rigor on the Florentine’s part. A serious analyst would systematize the relevant factors, and Machiavelli’s refusal to do so is a limitation in his thought. But I hope that my analysis so far has clarified why this would miss the point of Machiavelli’s approach, both in his understanding of politics, and his aims given that conception.

The faculty that this agonistic field demands was already a Humanist topos. In the classical conception, as Garver puts it, prudence, or phronesis, was inseparable from a person’s moral character. Derived from Aristotle, in the traditional account prudent action is an end in itself, unlike techne, which aims at producing an object with external value. The end, excellence and flourishing, is located both in nature as man’s telos, and in the agent as formed desire; in other words, in a stable moral order. Concretely, this means that, through accumulated experience acting as a guide, action mediates between an ethics of consequence and principle, allowing for flexibility while maintaining consistency with character. The fixed end is what guarantees that means vary without inconsistency. This is what should allow us to distinguish virtuous adaptability from mere self-interested cleverness. Garver, however, points out that tracing this distinction has always been the central problem for this tradition that was never fully resolved.50

For Machiavelli, as we’ve established, there is no natural end that creates shared moral order. If there is no natural end, then there is no escape from change, to a state of rest, no possible closure of the social field, and political stability must be redefined. Stability thus becomes instead the “ability to confront the permanent possibility of instability” and this in turn implies “continual acts of innovation”. These acts of innovation rest on Machiavelli’s virtù, which as we’ve noted, he empties of moral content and turns it into a purely formal, functional category that allows an actor to impose form on matter51—matter, which is characterized by continuous change and kinetic movement. The underlying matter of politics is men, and men’s appetites never terminate, so no arrangement ever holds as a final settlement. Prudenza thus becomes recognizing the quality of disadvantages and taking the least bad as good [P21]—because no transcendent “Good” can be reached—and prudenza becomes anticipatory: Machiavelli claims that instead of enjoying the benefits of time—as received wisdom would have it—one should, as the Romans did, foresee troubles at a distance, and remedy them, especially in war [P3]. Knowledge then takes the form of provisional generalizations from historical esempli, and instead of examples of moral conduct, these are examples of action in an agonistic field.

Because nothing holds forever, the only possible foundation of stability is Man’s own strength and virtù. Machiavelli must thus establish the autonomy of practical reason, which allows Man to weigh the various factors of the agonistic field, detached from any fixed moral end. To face changing circumstances, a prince needs to be almost infinitely adaptable. As Garver puts it, if a prince were perfectly “in tune with the times” and changed his acts with every shift in fortune, he would “no longer have any character” and would, in a sense, lose his self.52 This would be the crux of Hankins’ possible objection to my thesis: from the Humanist perspective, character requires moral constancy, and flexibility would imply techne and mere cynical opportunism, a lack of character. If this were the case, this would prove a serious challenge to my account of Machiavelli’s soulcraft. The field I’ve described would indeed grant no point of stability, no place where character could be formed.

But Man is not infinitely plastic, nor does Machiavelli claim that he is or could be. Rather, he points out that no man is prudent enough to accommodate himself to every time, because nature pushes him down a particular path. Having prospered on one course, he cannot be persuaded to leave it. And a man prospers or is ruined depending on whether his nature matches his times. Julius II succeeded because he was impetuous, and the times demanded impetuosity, but if he had not perished and continued along the same path, he would have been brought to ruin, as the times would have changed and demanded caution instead [P25]. Because of this rigidity, psychological flexibility is incredibly difficult to cultivate. The mastery of the self can only come as a result of genuine character formation. A profound cynic, which is how Hankins sees Machiavelli’s prince, still does not know when to be flexible, how to appear as the situation demands without having the proper judgment for it. Besides, such a cynic often has no strength of character nor psychological flexibility to go against his own nature. He is in fact just as rigid as a strict moralist. Machiavelli’s prince is thus no simple cynic. The person, then, is not dissolved and dispositions can in fact be given shape. Machiavelli’s new prince does need specific dispositions: readiness, audacity under fear, the trained eye for the effectual truth. The capacity to remain unfixed is itself rare, precisely because most men are obstinate, so few have virtù. And while nature does not change, how it is expressed through dispositions can be changed—at least this is Machiavelli’s wager.

Beyond the contingencies that men bring about through their natures and their actions, Machiavelli points to the general nature of contingency, of chance, accident, the ironic fate that history reserves for all her playthings. He reaches for the inherited personification that names that contingency, Fortuna, the goddess that befriends young men because they are bold [P25]. But in his hands, she is no longer the handmaiden of providence, but is an independent force of instability. Here, virtù too comes into play, with its second face. It is also the capacity to respond to the nature of contingency and not just to the changing face of men. With virtù, the dikes against the unceasing destructive flow of the river of fortune can be erected, its course redirected onto ground where it can do less harm. Nonetheless, formation is imperfect, and men are obstinate. Times change quicker than men’s inclinations can, fortuna governs half of what we do and none are strong enough to master her forever [P25].

Princes are not the only ones who can be formed. People too can be shaped by laws and norms. The Discourses, where Machiavelli adopts this perspective, takes on a more deliberate, analytical tone, and this reflects also its different orientation: here it is a question of forming a prince who will in turn shape people over generations, to preserve liberty, if he can, or to know at least what kind of material he is working with. This requires no less judgment than the judgment on the agonistic field when in action.

In line with Humanist thinking, Machiavelli asserts that

where the material is not corrupt, disturbances and other disorders can do no harm, and where the material is corrupt, carefully enacted laws do no good, unless they are initiated by a man who, with enormous power, causes them to be observed in such a way that the material becomes good [DI.17].

As we remember, what mattered for the Humanists was less laws and institutions than the character of rulers and of peoples. For Machiavelli likewise, a wholly corrupted people “cannot live free even for a brief time, not even a moment” [DI.16]. Nature is inflexible in this regard unless worked by an exceptional individual, and this formation lasts rarely beyond his own lifetime.

Once a city is corrupt, only “through the exceptional ability of a single man who is alive at the time” may its liberty be recovered. But when he dies the city “returns to its former habits”; “no single man can live long enough to train well a city long accustomed to bad habits” [DI.17]. The role of an exceptional individual is to determine if and how far corruption has spread. There are no rules that can determine this in advance, but only the trained eye and keen knowledge of men’s hearts, a formed capacity for judgment. The limit to formation is thus the ephemeral life of an exceptional individual. This is why Machiavelli stresses the importance of ordini and modi, the collection of institutions and mores that continue formation of materia beyond the span of a single lifetime.

As an example of such continued formation, the ritorno ai principi works by re-presenting the founding terror through symbolic renewal. The esecuzioni memorabili bring men “bring them back to their beginnings” [DIII.1]. They operate on memory and fear, through imagination. A simple return to ordini would not work—contrary to a strictly institutional view of statecraft—since what matters are men’s characters and not institutions in the abstract. We come back to the importance of spectacle as the political act, and statecraft and soulcraft merge here: the executions are notable enough to permit a return to the founding by means of imprinting the mind with the original character of the founding, through reawakened fear that jolts the citizens out of their accumulated complacency into the fear that originally bound them together, forming their character itself.

With Machiavelli a particular strand of thought in the Humanist-formative lineage comes to an end. The form of certain answers endures, especially in the idea of non-systematic judgment, of prudential knowledge. But the idea that antiquity can serve as a model for the formation of character, especially as Machiavelli approaches it, is no longer held. This idea rests on three commitments: (1) human matter as constant enough for examples to be intelligible and applicable from one era to another, which implies that (2) judgment is transferable through text and art, which in turn means that (3) rhetoric can mold the reader into the desired dispositions. Already Machiavelli’s contemporary Guicciardini denies premises (1) and (2) and ignores (3). As he puts it in his private maxims written for his family,

what a mistake is made by those who at every moment allude to the Romans. It would be necessary to have a city conditioned as theirs was, and then govern according to their example: otherwise the comparison is as out of proportion, for someone having disproportionate qualities, as it would be to expect a donkey to run the way a horse does. (Ricordi 110)

Here we note an early historicist outlook, accompanied by a much more skeptical sociological gaze, concerned not so much with the unchanging natures of men, as with the broader constellation of factors that condition men’s acts, and by the sense that his times are not the times of the Romans.

Machiavelli is a representative of his epoch because he answers its questions with its own instruments. How does one remedy the political crisis? Through the reformation of man with the use of litterae, antiquity, imitation, the Humanist topoi of virtù and prudenza, and historical esempli. But he is also singular because he answers it having modified what made the question answerable in the specifically Humanist way. His Man is not the Man of the Humanists, his world is not their moral world, and his conception of the political is autonomous, more technical, and stripped of transcendent illusions.

A century later Hobbes will share much of Machiavelli’s anthropology and arrive at the opposite form of political knowledge. Reflecting the early modern mechanistic world picture, his civil philosophy proceeds by definition and deduction, and the commonwealth becomes an artificial body contracted together by men conceived as bodies in motion. Knowledge is now to be assented to and rationally understood, and it is stripped of character-formation. In this light, Machiavelli stands as the final Humanist looking to mold the souls of men capable of mastering the kinetic world of forces and contingency.

Subscribe now

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Stripped from the Melian Dialogue and reduced to the slogan “might is right”, Thucydides’ most famous line now serves as an all-purpose invocation for anyone wishing to sound hard-headed about power. The uses vary. Sometimes it appears as a harsh truth one must reconcile oneself with; sometimes as triumphalist celebration: the strong need no justification, their power is its own warrant. To this formula is attached another much-abused term: Realpolitik. Thucydides is held to be its father, Bismarck its purest embodiment, Kissinger its greatest deliberate practitioner. A line of amorality and pure power politics would thus lead straight from Thucydides, through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Schmitt, and finally to whoever feels the need to sound serious about power. This concept, coupled with the prescriptively understood “might is right”, has been invoked by the defenders of Greenland’s annexation. A closer look at both Thucydides and “Realpolitik,” as it was originally conceived, should dispel these illusions—and clarify what genuine analysis of the Greenland question would require.

The Melian Dialogue is placed in the middle of Thucydides’ History, right before the Sicilian expedition. Melos was a small island, a Spartan colony that had remained neutral throughout the war. Athens demanded submission and tribute, and the Melians refused, hoping Sparta or the gods would intervene, hoping that appeals to justice would sway the Athenians. The quote about the strong and the weak takes place during the negotiation that preceded the siege. The Melians refused to submit; Athens took the city, and the men were executed and the women and children enslaved, though this took place months later and almost certainly under different commanders. What did the Athenians actually mean by it?

The full passage, in Hornblower’s translation, is more nuanced than the slogan suggests:

We both know that in the discussion of human affairs, justice enters only when there is a corresponding power to enforce it; but the powerful exact what they can, and the weak have to comply.

This is often taken as a universal maxim or prescriptive doctrine, a theory of justice in which might confers right. Callicles in the Gorgias provides the clearest example of such a view: the strong possess a natural right to dominate, and conventional justice is merely the resentful invention of the weak.

But the Athenians at Melos make no such argument. Theirs is simply a statement of fact. A reading truer to Thucydides treats the line as descriptive. He provides an account of how human affairs work—and not how they ought to work. A philological analysis supports this: the μέν-δέ parallel construction places emphasis on the second clause, so that the point concerns what power does, not what justice permits. Against the traditional view represented by Herodotus—for whom justice, understood as the proper ordering of human affairs and cosmic balance, belongs to the gods—Thucydides makes a bold secular claim: justice concerns humans alone, and only when power is roughly equal does it enter the discussion at all.

The dialogue must also be read in its historical moment. The Athenians are not claiming that justice is always irrelevant to politics—after all, they acknowledge it “enters when there is a corresponding power to enforce it,” which implies it does enter under conditions of rough equality. Their claim is narrower: in this situation, where the power differential is so vast, appeals to justice are beside the point. And they were right, at least about Melos. The Melians’ hopes for Spartan intervention or divine rescue were illusions. Athens held overwhelming force. The outcome was never in doubt.

But sixteen years into the war, the Athenians were speaking from within a general moral erosion—the same decay Thucydides dramatized in his account of the plague, when norms and piety collapsed under pressure. The danger of such erosion lies in that it makes a certain kind of analysis habitual, applied even where it doesn’t straightforwardly fit.

What follows in Thucydides suggests as much. The dialogue is often read as a warning about hubris, placed as it is just before the Sicilian disaster. But the expedition failed not through overreach in the simple sense. The Melian mode of thinking, confidence in the idea that overwhelming power settles the question, operated at the level of the assembly’s decision to commit. When the assembly initially voted for a smaller force, Nicias attempted to dissuade them by demanding a far larger commitment, hoping the scale would give them pause. It had the opposite effect: the assembly voted enthusiastically for the greater expedition, as if the logic of Melos could simply be scaled up. Sicily, however, was not Melos. The power differential was not overwhelming, the strategic variables were far more complex, and success depended on precisely the kinds of judgment that the Melian calculus cannot capture: local conditions, timing, the management of alliances, and above all, leadership. Nicias delayed at Catana when speed was essential; he then failed to press Athens’ initial advantages before Syracuse could organize its defense. His request for massive reinforcements, which he hoped would cause Athens to recall the expedition, backfired once again. The assembly simply sent them, doubling the eventual losses. And when Sparta sent Gylippus with reinforcements, the window for quick victory had already closed. Most fatally, when the situation finally deteriorated beyond salvaging, Nicias delayed retreat through fear of how he would be received by the Athenian assembly, and then, after a lunar eclipse, out of superstition. There is an irony here: the assembly’s confidence produced a venture that required an Alcibiades, and then the assembly removed him. What remained was a commander defined by caution, and pious fear. The mode of analysis that underwrote the commitment proved irrelevant to the conditions of success.

The harder lesson is subtler than “pride goeth before destruction”. Sicily was not Melos. Ultimately, success depended on judgment and execution. The brutal clarity that served Athens at Melos—the insistence on stripping away pretence and seeing only power—did not transfer. What we hear in the Melian Dialogue may be less timeless philosophy than the voice of a city that had grown too accustomed to a certain mode of seeing, and could no longer tell when it rightly obtained. Whether the Athenians misapplied at Syracuse the same confidence they displayed at Melos is a harder question than what I can settle here—but Thucydides, by placing the dialogue where he does, invites the question.

Armchair analysts, “geopolitical” enthusiasts, and all varieties of self-styled “realists,” “Nietzscheans,” and “immoralists” have long liked to draw on the weighty German authority of the term Realpolitik—the feeling of hard analysis, seriousness, and the stripping away of illusions that is conferred upon whoever invokes it. The term, however, has a quite different origin, and a quite different meaning.

Realpolitik was coined by Ludwig von Rochau in his 1853 treatise Foundations of Realpolitik. Rochau began his political career as a radical student participating in the failed 1833 Frankfurter Wachensturm, an attempted storming of the main guard post of the military garrison at Frankfurt. The conspirators hoped to seize the treasury of the German Confederation and spark similar revolutions across the other German states. For Rochau, the failure was a first rude awakening to the unforgiving nature of politics and the limits of idealism. He was sentenced to life in prison, served three years before escaping, and fled to Paris, where he spent the next decade working as a journalist.

In 1848, as crowds filled the streets across Europe and protests ran their course from city to city—Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Budapest—monarchs fled or capitulated and constitutions were proclaimed. The Liberal moment seemed inevitable. For a brief spring, it seemed as if the old order had simply collapsed. But the Liberals, having won in the streets, did not know what to do next. They convened assemblies and debated, they worried about legality and procedure. Most fatally, they assumed that having right on their side was sufficient. Meanwhile, the forces of the old order regrouped. Armies remained loyal to their sovereigns. The monarchs, recovering their nerve, discovered that the Liberals commanded newspapers and lecture halls. The battalions, on the other hand, were still theirs. By 1849, the restoration was complete.

Realpolitik was born from the shattering of Liberal hopes in the 1848 revolutions. Witnessing the movements sweeping across Europe but failing to enact any lasting change, Rochau was forced to grapple with the reasons the Liberals had failed. He came to the pragmatic conclusion that they had built “castles in the air.” The Liberals had thought that because they had won in the realm of ideas, and held the most “just” positions, they would win in the sphere of politics. But they had failed to apprehend that politics have a “material” base. Realpolitik, then, as historicist pragmatic political theory, rests on four interlocking assumptions:

First, the law of the strong is the determining factor in politics. Sovereignty is not a natural right—those speculations can be left to philosophers and moralizers—but a reflection of the actual balance of forces. Echoing Thucydides, this is a descriptive claim. Only power can check power. It is a pipe dream to hope that laws or constitutions alone can control the state. The Liberals had failed to integrate the forces of order on their side.

Second, a constitution must reflect the given interplay of forces within a state and their relative strengths. These social forces comprise classes, interest groups, ideas, and opinions, to name a few. The most effective form of government is one that can harness the energies of the various social forces and achieve a balance among them. The nineteenth century administrative Rechtsstaat was the concrete historical manifestation of the enduring fact of political life, the scene in which these forces played out—one that both Liberals and statesmen had fundamentally misapprehended. The more harmonious a state internally, the greater its potential magnitude. This was directed at Germany’s rulers: take into account the rising middle class and incorporate it into the state.

Third, ideas matter in politics, but their role has been misunderstood. What matters is not the inherent truth or justice of an idea—in fact the basest and most immoral ideas may be the most persuasive—but how many people hold an idea and how strongly they hold it. Statecraft cannot neglect these commonly held opinions, but must weigh their relative strengths and be ready to compromise with even the “immoral” ideas.

Fourth, modernity has changed the nature of statecraft. The Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, has become the most important factor in determining the trajectory of a nation’s politics. The rapid spread of newspapers and literacy meant that public opinion mattered more than ever. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, this spirit was nationalism. It could provide the glue that would reconcile the competing forces within the state.

This is a far cry from amoral power politics or political pragmatism for power’s sake. Rochau was a convinced Liberal. He thought the Liberals had simply been early—material conditions had not yet caught up with them in 1848. But their time would come.

What would Rochau make of the current moment? In January 2026, the Trump administration tested the crude version of Realpolitik in real time. Trump refused to rule out military force against a NATO ally, threatened tariffs on eight European nations unless Denmark ceded Greenland, and reportedly asked the Joint Chiefs to present invasion options. The result was a transatlantic crisis. A meagre detachment of European troops was deployed to Greenland in solidarity with Denmark, and ultimately at Davos Trump retreated to a vague “framework of a future deal.” The episode is worth examining closely, because it illustrates exactly the kinds of errors Rochau diagnosed.

The case for acquisition appeals to national interest: rising global temperatures are opening the Arctic as a high-value corridor; Russia and China are making encroachments; minerals and precious metals lie beneath the ice. Leaving aside that permafrost is incredibly expensive to drill and that the strategic conversation has increasingly shifted from mineral extraction toward Arctic corridor access and missile defense positioning, we should pause to consider the question of “interest” itself.

The prevailing pro-annexation view suffers from a cramped notion of interest. It treats interest as static and material: what can we extract through the leverage we possess? But genuine Realpolitik would begin by asking what the material base of American power actually consists of. It is not military capability alone. Economic integration and trust, rather than constraints on power, are its components, social forces in Rochau’s sense, whose relative strength determines what the state can achieve. A notion of interest that sees only extraction has already misidentified the base it depends on.

Even granting the goal of greater control over Greenland, self-interest doesn’t dictate a single course. Just as the Athenians could have chosen something other than massacre and enslavement at Melos, the possibilities concerning Greenland aren’t limited to “annex” or “do nothing.” Invoking Realpolitik to justify pure assertion presents one policy as necessary when it is actually a choice—potentially a poor one even on its own terms.

A genuine analysis would require mapping out social forces, domestic and international. What is the developmental trajectory of alliance structures, of American public opinion, of great power competition? What kind of actor is America becoming through its actions?

Jingoism isn’t the only force in American politics. Every action that pushes toward radicalism also strengthens anti-radicalism, or radicalism in the other direction. Jingoism, of course, has its constituents, but so does restraint. American business interests depend on stable trade relationships and predictable legal frameworks. The Venezuela episode is instructive. American oil companies are reluctant to operate in the face of uncertainty and possible regime instability. Seizing Maduro is evidently insufficient to ensure alignment. The underlying conditions must be favorable, or capital will not flow. Domestically, each lurch towards radicalism has the potential to generate its own counter-reaction. The Democratic coalition, while having greatly fragmented over the last decade, may seize this opportunity to coalesce again with new justifications for a sharper break with the so-called “imperialism” of the United States. An administration that alienates allies abroad may find it has also mobilized opposition at home. Rochau would ask: Can jingoism really sustain itself institutionally, or does it burn through political capital faster than it accumulates? A policy that requires the permanent suppression of countervailing domestic forces is the exact opposite of “realism” or Realpolitik. It is utopian, in the precise sense Rochau criticized.

We may accept that Greenland is of vital strategic importance. The point is that there are multiple ways of gaining control. The question was always: what approach secures American interests while preserving the broader system on which American power depends? The alternative to forcible annexation was patient integration. Greenland’s circumstances made this feasible. At roughly 56,000, the population is small. Its relationship with Denmark is already strained by desires for greater autonomy. The United States could have positioned itself as a partner in Greenlandic aspirations rather than a new colonizer. These include economic investment, infrastructure development, deepened security cooperation, preferential trade arrangements. All of these create dependence and alignment without coercion. Over a generation, such a policy could have achieved effective strategic control without triggering the alliance-wide crisis that seizure would provoke. This is, of course, a slower approach, and one that does not flatter the ego because it fails to produce a pretty map with American colors over new territory. It is, however, what actual attention to the material base of power could recommend.

The obvious objection is that great power competition and the nature of domestic American politics do not permit such gradualism; that if Arctic corridors are opening now, the United States cannot afford to wait a generation. But the slower approach preserves optionality, while seizure forecloses it. It leaves open the door for future integration, or “hard annexation”, if necessity imposes it. Seizure, by contrast, commits the United States to a posture it cannot easily reverse, triggers the alliance-wide consequences described above, and does nothing to prevent Chinese or Russian Arctic operations—it may, in fact, provide their justification.

History offers examples of such a slower approach. The deep integration of Canada into an American-led security and economic order was achieved over generations, and provided a more durable alignment than any coerced arrangement could achieve. Canada has been an effectively allied state—a vassal, depending on perspective—operating within American hegemony without formal subordination, much like the broader European order. The costs of coercion, however, compound over time. Under the Trump administration we have seen a shift from this cooperative posture towards more forceful approaches. Canada, facing tariff threats and annexation rhetoric from its southern neighbor, has begun moving toward deeper integration with China—though the structural asymmetry is telling: Carney can make pretty speeches and invoke Thucydides, and middle powers can gesture toward diversification, but the gesture itself is constrained by the very dependence it seeks to escape. That Carney quickly walked back the scope of this partnership after Trump threatened 100% tariffs on Canadian goods says it all.

The partial de-escalation at Davos tilts the scales towards a slower integration with Greenland, but arriving there via a transatlantic crisis is not the same as arriving there by design. The costs of beginning from coercion rather than integration are not recovered by belatedly discovering that integration was necessary all along.

The current invocation of Realpolitik misses what actually sustains American power. Dollar hegemony rests on an alliance system in which partners choose to operate within American-led institutions because the security guarantee makes it rational . Break the guarantee, and the logic sustaining the system fractures with it. Forcibly annexing territory from an ally’s commonwealth, beyond damaging one relationship, signals to every other ally that they too might be coerced, that American protection is no longer an asset but has become a potential vulnerability. The rational response is diversification into euros, gold, into independent security arrangements, and into hedging strategies that loosen dependence on Washington. The United States, after all, is not a 19th century land empire, despite what “Dissidents” may fantasize. The cost of coercion may be the foundation of American hegemony itself.

Those who think they are being hard-headed about power are actually ignoring its material base—precisely the error Rochau diagnosed in the 1848 Liberals, only inverted. Where the Liberals mistook ideas for power, assuming that justice and reason would triumph without attending to social forces, the current self-styled realists mistake military capability for the whole of power, ignoring the institutional and economic structures, and allied good-will, that make American force projectable in the first place. Rochau would ask: What are the social forces sustaining American hegemony? What happens to them under different policy choices? The current approach sidesteps these questions and treats American power as a brute fact to be wielded. Rochau wrote against precisely this: the fantasy that power can be wielded without conditions.

There is a serious case for American retrenchment. Overextension guarantees eventual failure, and perhaps the costs of hegemony now exceed its benefits. But if retrenchment is the goal, it requires more attention to the material base of power, not less. Managed isolationism demands understanding which relationships are necessary and which are dispensable; which concessions strengthen a new equilibrium and which invite defections. The current approach does none of this.

Both Thucydides and Rochau, then, offer something more subtle than their invocations suggest. Thucydides provides a holistic understanding of human nature through war, and ultimately an anatomy of power: its strength and its limits. Rochau presents a historically minded and sociologically attuned political pragmatism in service of ideals; after all, action is future oriented, and any desired future state is, in some sense, “idealistic”. Both demand that we ask “what sustains our capacity to get what we want?” Those who invoke these thinkers as cover for crude assertion have not read them carefully. The strong do what they can—but what they can do depends on conditions they do not fully control, and which their own actions may erode.

Subscribe now

To see both the promise and the limits of this principle, we must return to Montesquieu, follow how his words were transplanted to America, and trace how their meaning shifted in the ratification debates.

De l’esprit des lois

Baron de Montesquieu was one of the most widely read Enlightenment thinkers in the late eighteenth century, and perhaps the first to treat politics in a recognizably modern “social-scientific” way. His De l’esprit des lois sought to uncover the necessary relations that shape political order—climate, customs, mores, history—rather than reduce law to abstract principle. The “spirit” of the laws is precisely this causal nexus, in which no element clearly dominates the others, and in the opening book of his work, Montesquieu tells us that he will investigate these relations and the total whole they form, rather than the positive laws as men make them. For each time and place, for each climate and region, specific laws suit the character of people.4 At the same time, he fuses description and prescription: identifying how regimes work, creating something akin to Weber’s “ideal-types”, while elevating liberty and moderation as guiding ideals. His most famous claim, drawn from his stylized reading of the English constitution, is that liberty is secured when distinct powers balance one another, preventing any single authority from monopolizing government.

This analysis was framed against the backdrop of French absolutism. Louis XIV had brought the nobility to his court, at Versailles, centering power and attention on the cult of his personne. Montesquieu saw in this weakening of traditional intermediary powers the hollowing out of the aristocracy as a structural counterweight, the ballast against both monarchical caprice and democratic leveling, and a direct path towards despotism. His defense of the nobility, then, was not simply class interest or nostalgia, but part of a constitutional sensibility. Crucially, he championed the newer judicial aristocracy (noblesse de robe) and the rising bourgeoisie over the old feudal military class (noblesse d’épée), seeking an equilibrium of modernizing forces against the despotic potential of the crown.5

On a deeper level, Montesquieu’s project was a profound rejection of the modern theory of sovereignty developed by Bodin and Hobbes.6 In their conception, the sovereign was a single, indivisible will that creates law—for Montesquieu, the path to despotism. His sensibility was rooted in an older, pre-modern ideal of the monarch as a limited judge of existing customs and laws, not their author. His entire system of intermediary powers and balanced social forces was therefore an attempt to think through a way to prevent the formation of a single, concentrated sovereign will, the primary threat to liberty.

As a product of the Enlightenment and himself one of its towering figures, this central tension propelled Montesquieu’s thought: tension between liberty and despotism. Following his proto-sociological approach, liberty wasn’t an essence tied to a single specific regime. It could exist under a republic—whether democratic, animated by virtue, or aristocratic, animated by moderation—or under a monarchy, animated by honor. What mattered was that power be balanced and that the guiding passion proper to each regime be nurtured. Despotism, by contrast, was harsh rule in the absence of law itself, that is, the absence of regular and predictable decisions—government by arbitrariness, caprice, and unchecked will—and was only sustained by the principle of fear, corrupt at its core. The two other “virtuous” regimes, if we may call them that—the regimes that make liberty possible—all contain potential corruption within themselves and could slide into despotism. In developing these three regime types, Montesquieu deliberately broke from the classical Aristotelian tradition. He replaced Aristotle’s numerical criterion (rule by one, few, or many) with a qualitative one: the manner of rule. The core distinction for him was thus not between monarchy and republic, but between moderation and despotism.7

Montesquieu’s most consequential chapter De la constitution d’Angleterre (XI, 6) deploys a stylized description of Britain’s constitution (in the sense of political order) as the highest model of liberty secured through balanced powers. He distinguishes three sorts of powers: “la puissance législative”, “la puissance exécutrice des choses qui dépendent du droit des gens, et la puissance exécutrice de celles qui dépendent du droit civil”. Liberty, he insists, is nothing mystical but simply “cette tranquillité d’esprit qui provient de l’opinion que chacun a de sa sûreté”8—a sense of security grounded in the predictability of law. Liberty has to do with civil, not political rights. As security against arbitrariness, it is both compatible with inequality and feudal privileges. That clarifies why Montesquieu could celebrate liberty in England while at the same time defend aristocratic orders in France, and this contrast also sets up why the American reception reinterprets him radically. The negative maxim followed: “Lorsque la puissance législative est réunie à la puissance exécutrice, il n’y a point de liberté… tout serait perdu, si le même homme … exerçait ces trois pouvoirs.”9 The fusion of powers would make liberty an impossibility.

But what do these powers represent? Their spirit is to be found in the social architecture of estates. As Kondylis notes in his essay on Montesquieu, “the separation of powers does not constitute a constitutional matter of concern (or: the separation of powers is not a narrow constitutional and legal matter), but primarily has to do with the equilibrium or disequilibrium of living social-political forces.”10 The executive is vested in a monarch who has only a “faculté d’empêcher”—a veto but not the right to originate laws11 (overstated but suitable for Montesquieu’s idealized account). The legislature is bicameral: the nobles with the faculty of negative (while they did also legislate, the Baron stresses their moderating role in his reading), the commons as representatives of the people. These powers are vested in concrete estates: Montesquieu emphasizes the nobles’ sociological role as a hereditary order with an interest in preserving even odious prerogatives, which paradoxically stabilized moderation.12 The judiciary, on the other hand, is conceived as a rotating tribunal, “exercée par des personnes tirées du corps du peuple”, so that one feared the magistracy, not the magistrates.13 Nobles were to be judged by nobles, and not commoners, who may resent them. Laws are to be fixed texts, judges only the voices of law.14 Around this core are procedural safeguards—legislative sessions and prorogations, annual control of finances, disbanding of armies—to prevent capture or permanent military government. This design presupposes estates as carriers of power.

Now what is revealing and often lost by secondhand accounts of Montesquieu is that in this chapter he never writes of a séparation des pouvoirs. He speaks of puissances, of their non-réunion, of the faculté d’empêcher rather than the faculté de statuer, of repos or inaction as balance, and of movement only when powers act in concert. What later became “separation of powers” in the Federalist idiom was originally a theory of distribution and counterweights, grounded in concrete bearers of power. As Kondylis stresses, the balance arises from a “reciprocal penetrating... of the various functions”15 rather than sterile insulation. The monarch participates in the legislative function via the veto, just as the legislature participates in the executive function via control of the budget. This constant interpenetration, rooted in the very structure of society, is what prevents any single force from dominating.

This was thus a sociology of institutions. King, Lords, Commons, and (temporary) judges are distinct corps, each with its own social base and interest, whose interaction prevents arbitrariness. Liberty, in this sense—security under predictable law—is achieved through the mutual checking and interpenetration of orders, each estate possessing sufficient power to resist encroachment by the others, yet none dominating outright. Despotism is the opposite: the accumulation of all functions in a single bearer, which leads to arbitrariness and rule without (true) law (here we see Montesquieu’s pre-modern inclination). Montesquieu’s project is therefore guided by a negative principle: to distribute power in such a way that no single social-political factor can oppress the others. Montesquieu’s maxim “le pouvoir arrête le pouvoir”16 encapsulates this logic: only power restrains power. Kondylis adds further: “the separation … can be carried out differently … according to the historically determined … bearers.”17 Montesquieu thus both historicizes and provides a generalizable model of liberty.

Montesquieu himself roots this balance in historical genealogy: “Ce beau système,” he writes, “a été trouvé dans les bois”18 among the ancient Germans, highlighting its concrete historical and social lineage. It was this model—half empirical, half normative—that later readers elevated into the doctrine of “separation of powers,” often detaching it from its original sociological grounding in estates and orders.

In America, Montesquieu was read immediately—and everywhere—but absent hereditary anchors to do the balancing, his principle of distribution had to be reinterpreted in institutional terms. It was in the heated exchanges over ratification that his authority was most forcefully invoked, and where the very meaning of “separation of powers” began to crystallize.

The American Revolution

The American colonies, long accustomed to a degree of autonomy under Britain’s “salutary neglect,” where each colony could experiment with its own set of laws, resisted the post–Seven Years’ War attempt to reassert metropolitan control through taxation and enforcement measures. The slogan “no taxation without representation” crystallized grievance into rebellion, giving the Revolution its first unmistakable break with Britain. Yet this created a new problem: once monarchy—by then little more than the mask of an overbearing Parliament—was cast off, how was tyranny to be prevented from re-emerging in disguise? Early confidence in popular legislatures quickly gave way to fear of “elective despotism,” as Jefferson called it.19

The tension was immediately brought to light in the earliest state constitutions. Virginia and Pennsylvania proclaimed rigid separation of powers but in practice concentrated authority in the legislatures. Governors were stripped of prerogative, and judges subordinated to assembly appointment, while the legislature became supreme, thus turning constitutional separation into mere legal formality. Jefferson would later observe that this was “precisely the definition of despotic government.”20 The Massachusetts constitution of 1780, drafted by John Adams, offered a corrective. It combined Montesquieu’s maxim with institutional checks, granting the governor a qualified veto and strengthening the judiciary. This experiment showed that parchment declarations were insufficient, and only structural mechanisms could preserve balance.21

Behind these experiments lay the imprint of English constitutionalism. Blackstone’s Commentaries, no less than Montesquieu, shaped their imaginations—carrying over the ideal of a mixed constitution in which monarchy, aristocracy, and commons balanced one another. Blackstone’s reconciliation of Montesquieu with English practice, in English terms—his insistence on legislative-executive separation and an independent judiciary—proved especially influential.22 The state constitutions allowed the colonists to experiment by adapting an old theory of mixed government to a new world without hereditary orders.

By the time of the Philadelphia Convention these lessons were clear. The challenge was how to restrain legislatures and balance power in a republic without estates. Montesquieu was constantly invoked as an immortal authority, his maxim that “power should check power” on every delegate’s lips. Yet its meaning was unsettled: was it strict division of functions, or moderated balance through mutual checks? That ambiguity would only harden into doctrine in the ratification debates, when Anti-Federalists first seized upon Montesquieu’s name to denounce the Constitution as dangerously consolidating, and the Federalists replied by redeploying him to justify checks and balances in a compound republic.

The Anti-Federalists were a coalition of critics who emerged during the ratification struggle of 1787–88. United by a deep suspicion of the proposed Constitution’s concentration of power, they feared that a remote national government would swallow the sovereignty of the states, which they saw as more accountable and more responsive to ordinary citizens, because they were much closer. They feared the Philadelphia plan created the embryo of a consolidated regime: one that might replicate the same oppression Americans had just cast off in rebelling against Britain.

Their indictment was multi-pronged. Structurally, the Constitution seemed to grant powers too broad and vaguely defined, from the “necessary and proper” clause to the capacious jurisdiction of federal courts. Politically, the small size and social composition of the national legislature threatened genuine representation: the wealthy and ambitious would dominate while distance from rural constituencies would erode accountability. The presidency, with its command of the military, veto, patronage, and indefinite re-eligibility, looked too much like elective monarchy. The judiciary, insulated and supreme, could steadily extend federal power by interpretation. Above all, the Constitution lacked a Bill of Rights—no explicit protections for speech, religion, or trial by jury to check inevitable abuses of power.23

Underlying these charges was a sociological fear drawn from Montesquieu: that a republic must be small, homogeneous, rooted in civic virtue. The Anti-Federalists insisted that a large, extended republic would fracture under clashing interests, foster oligarchy and ambition, and ultimately, require military coercion to hold together. Popular self-government could end as military despotism. In this sense, the Anti-Federalists stood as defenders of localism and pluralism against consolidation. They argued that liberty would not survive unless power remained dispersed through strong states and explicitly secured rights. Their pressure helped force the adoption of the Bill of Rights, but their deeper warning—that a vast republic risks collapsing into arbitrary rule—remains a distinctive part of America’s constitutional inheritance.

Anti-Federalist Polemics

The Federal Farmer contains the first Montesquieu echo, though unnamed: “Independent of the opinions of many great authors, that a free elective government cannot be extended over large territories, a few reflections must evince it.”24 The phrasing is tactical. By disavowing reliance on “great authors” while clearly alluding to them, the Farmer claims the authority of Montesquieu yet grounds the point in reason and observation. The substance is equally Montesquieuian: in a vast republic, heterogeneous interests fracture representation, remote legislators lack local knowledge, and laws lose voluntary support. As he warns, representation in so vast a republic “cannot be equal” because distant legislators cannot know the local circumstances of their constituents, and laws issued from the center would inevitably be “executed on the principles of fear and force.”25 Once laws cease to align with the mores of the governed, moderation gives way to coercion—to rule through fear, and ultimately to despotism.

Federal Farmer’s constructive proposal distinguishes between federal objects (war, peace, commerce) and internal police (taxation, justice, militia), which must remain with the states. Consolidation of the continent under one government, he warned, would inevitably annihilate the states or reduce them to shadows, leaving liberty without its necessary supports. This call is for the distribution of power across social bodies. The states are intermediate powers, the American equivalent of Montesquieu’s nobility or parliaments. Without them, consolidation means absorption—exactly the pathology Montesquieu identifies as the road to despotism. Even his insistence on “the jury trial of the vicinage” and on legislatures considerably numerous reflects Montesquieu’s central axiom: that liberty is civil security rooted in proximity, not an abstraction dissolved into distant national sovereignty.26

Brutus sharpens the line by quoting Montesquieu directly: “baron de Montesquieu. spirit of laws. chap. xvi. vol. I [book VIII]. ‘It is natural to a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist… In a large republic, the public good is sacrificed to a thousand views.’ ” The citation anchors his argument that the Constitution is not federal but consolidated: Supremacy and Necessary & Proper clauses make the general government “a complete one, and not a confederation.” What powers remain to the states will soon be annihilated. Brutus connects this textual exegesis to Montesquieu’s sociological maxim: heterogeneity of climate, productions, and manners makes unified representation impossible. “In so extensive a republic, the great officers of government would soon become above the control of the people.” The causal chain is Montesquieuan: large size means heterogeneity, which implies elite domination, coercion at the peripheries, and finally fear as operative principle.27

Finally, Cato turns Montesquieu onto the presidency. He cites Book II, chap. 3 directly: “It is remarked by Montesquieu, in treating of republics, that in all magistracies, the greatness of the power must be compensated by the brevity of the duration; and that a longer time than a year, would be dangerous.” Montesquieu points out that the Roman Dictators were appointed for short durations, and to specific tasks. The danger is that the President, with command of the army, appointment power, veto, pardons, combined with four-year renewable terms, will be raised “to permanent grandeur on the ruins of his country (VIII, chap. 16).” This is Montesquieu reinterpreted through a republican fear of monarchy. Cato paints the social consequence: a presidential court of sycophants and dependents, echoing Montesquieu’s portrait of monarchies corrupted by courtiers—“ambition with idleness, baseness with pride (III, chap. 5)”28 The rhetorical move is vivid: the executive is the seed of a new aristocratic faction, breeding ambition and dependence. It is a sociological reading of tenure and power: time in office reshapes social relations, creating a client network that erodes liberty.

What unites Federal Farmer, Brutus, and Cato is their use of Montesquieu as a sociologist of liberty, aligning with a close reading of the primary source. They argue from size, heterogeneity, tenure, and representation to the conditions of freedom. Their criterion of liberty is civil security—laws aligned with mores, courts near the citizen, officers answerable to the people—not abstract participation in a national “popular will.” In their rhetoric, Montesquieu’s prestige legitimates skepticism, but the core logic is empirical and social: distribution of power across intermediate bodies is the only ballast against consolidation and force. This contrasts directly with the Federalists. The Anti-Federalists’ Montesquieu is still about social conditions; Publius’ Montesquieu will become about constitutional machinery.

This reliance on pre-existing social estates is precisely where the American Federalists diverged from Montesquieu. Having just fought a revolution against what they saw as the failure of the English constitution to protect their liberties, the Founders were deeply concerned that imitation was not enough. In a new republic with no hereditary nobility to serve as a natural check on the other powers, and the states deemed as insufficient, they sought to go beyond Montesquieu and Blackstone. Their solution was one of political engineering: creating a system where internal mechanics and a formal separation of powers, rather than inherited social orders, would preserve freedom. The goal was to construct a government where ambition would counteract ambition, creating a durable republic through deliberate design rather than historical tradition.

The Federalist Response

In response to the charges brought by the Anti-Federalists, Hamilton opens Federalist 9 with a dark portrait: “those petty republics of Greece and Italy” whose annals inspire “horror and disgust.” Smallness, which Anti-Federalists had claimed as the guarantor of liberty, here becomes synonymous with civil bloodletting and instability. In their place Hamilton promises an American “edifice,” a “stupendous fabric reared on the basis of liberty,” secured by the “science of politics,” which he insists has discovered new stabilizers: “the regular distribution of power into distinct departments—the introduction of legislative checks and balances—the institution of courts… the representation of the people.” With that move, he detaches liberty from the constraint of scale and reattaches it to mechanism, to design. And to sanctify this turn, he cites Montesquieu himself: the confederate republic, by which small polities “become members of a larger one,” preserving felicity at home while gaining force abroad. Invoked against Union, Montesquieu now blesses it—only Hamilton has changed the bearer of moderation, from estates to the organs of the state.29

Hamilton’s talk of a “science of politics” was markedly an Enlightenment claim: that human affairs, like Newtonian physics, follow discoverable regularities, and that careful design could improve upon the past. Since Polybius, republics had been doomed to cyclical decay; Montesquieu had tied liberty to soil, climate, and mores; now, the Federalists could insist that liberty could be engineered, and thus progress, not fate, would govern politics—if the machine was rightly built.

The polemical masterstroke that follows comes in what we might call the consistency trap. If Montesquieu requires smallness, Hamilton presses, then Virginia and New York are already too large; the logic of the Anti-Federalists would demand their dismemberment, else despotism. By this sleight, Hamilton collapses their Montesquieu. He then appropriates another passage, the Lycia example, to show that confederacies may intrude into members’ administration without ceasing to be republican.30

Madison takes up the same strategy in Federalist 47. Montesquieu, invoked as “the oracle,” is glossed as the author of a maxim against accumulation: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”31 England, the “mirror of political liberty,” proves that mixture is orthodoxy.32 Partial interpenetration, vetoes, impeachments, shared appointments, are safeguards. Montesquieu’s equilibrium of nobles, king, and commons is translated into a doctrine of institutional functions housed in branches. Distribution among orders becomes separation among offices.

In the following papers (48–50) Madison hammers home why “parchment barriers” are insufficient. Written declarations cannot hold power in check because power is by nature encroaching, especially legislatures in republics. He points to Pennsylvania’s Council of Censors, which degenerated into partisanship, and to Virginia, where legislatures routinely usurped executive and judicial functions. Appeals “to the people” or periodic reviews would only excite passion and empower the very branch most likely to usurp. By a process of elimination, the only remedy left is internal counterweights.

It is in Federalist 51 that Madison’s argument culminates and the maxim changes register. Montesquieu had written: “power should be a check to power.” Madison reinterprets it psychologically: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition… The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place,” arming each branch with tangible weapons like the presidential veto, the congressional power of impeachment, and the Senate’s role in confirming appointments. The check is no longer between king, lords, and commons as sociological estates; it is between officeholders whose passions and interests are deliberately set against one another. The most famous line drives it home: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”33 Since they are not, government must be designed so that passion polices passion. Montesquieu’s distribution of estates thus becomes a machine of incentives, a constitutional mechanism in which jealousy and rivalry substitute for orders and honor.

The net effect is a transmutation. The Federalists preserve Montesquieu’s end—liberty through moderation—but replace his means. This is where the doctrine crystallizes. Pressed by Anti-Federalist attacks, Publius re-articulates Montesquieu into a universal principle: not estate balance but institutional friction, not mores and climate but ambition against ambition. Left in Montesquieu’s frame, America would indeed be too large for liberty; recast as judicial doctrine, however, Montesquieu becomes proof of the Constitution’s validity. By this maneuver, liberty is made portable. Against the Anti-Federalists’ tragic vision of corruption and scale, the Federalists proclaim an Enlightenment faith: that design can master fate, ambition can check ambition, and tyranny can be engineered away. That faith became the founding myth of American constitutionalism.

Liberty Without Estates

Montesquieu’s theory of liberty was rooted in the real-world tension between distinct social bodies. The Federalists, in a fateful stroke, abstracted this into a self-regulating institutional machine. This, however, created a paradox. Once the state’s machinery became the only game in town, there were no longer any truly external power bases to check it. The system is now supposed to check itself, like Baron Munchausen lifting himself up by his own feet—while power drifts toward concentration with only internal, procedural friction to slow it down.

What is the sociological outcome of this paradox? We don’t need to look to the twenty-first century. Another Frenchman, Tocqueville, already imagines based on his visit to America in the 1830s “with what new features despotism could be produced in the world.” One way of reading Tocqueville is less about America, and more about democratization as the socio-political process of modernity. What happens once old class distinctions, estates, prerogatives, have all been leveled, and man only stands shoulder to shoulder with his fellow man? I think this section is worth quoting in full:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of others [...] as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native home.

And what of the state?

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?34

The state doesn’t need to be classically despotic; this kind of despotism is unlike any Montesquieu could have imagined. It can manage the needs and care for a populace that has lost the habit of self-governance. It will only need to swallow all of their affairs.

What would be the cultural-psychological portrait of this kind of citizen? Content, safe, devoid of striving and ambition, the traits that characterized the bearers of power in Montesquieu’s world? No bleaker portrait is drawn than in the figure of Nietzsche’s last man, the citizen of the modern state, of the “coldest of all cold monsters.”35 Nietzsche’s last man is a figure of exhaustion. He no longer aims his bow of aspiration “beyond man.” He blinks at the very words love, creation, longing, unable to recognize them. In their place comes the small, smug formula: “we have invented happiness”—comfort, health, mediocrity enthroned as final ends. And socially, what remains is “no shepherd and one herd!”: sameness, safety, and the pathologizing of difference.36 Tocqueville had remarked that the two greatest passions animating the American spirit were liberty and equality; but in the end, he feared that the passion of equality would prevail over liberty. And the last man welcomes his own diminishment, confuses it for progress, and calls it happiness.

This “mild” despotism becomes possible only once a key sociological condition of liberty has vanished. Writing in Montesquieu’s tradition, the Italian elite theorist Gaetano Mosca insisted that liberty is never the gift of design but the by-product of equilibrium among real social forces. Juridical defense—the formal rule of law—is insufficient on its own. It requires a foundation in the clash of organized powers: competing elites and counter-elites, political classes whose wealth, arms, faith, or learning hold each other in tension, and for Mosca, the supreme example was ancient Rome. Following Polybius, there, he argued, the influence of the patrician landed aristocracy was balanced by the “money and mobile capital” of the knights and the “newly gotten wealth of the great plebeian families.” He saw these competing forces as so perfectly embodied in the state’s various authorities that they created a balance that was, in “juridical terms, the most perfect of all antiquity.”37 When one force—above all the state bureaucracy—achieves absolute predominance, the result is tyranny. Tocqueville’s leveled democracy is precisely this condition: organic counter-elites dissolved, the administrative class left as the sole organized power. The true ballast of liberty—the conflict and balance of forces that produce Mosca’s “heavenly interludes in history”38—has disappeared.

Liberty, as paradoxical as it may sound, lies in struggle, in the tension of the bow, in the countless competing social forces, one toppling over another, vying for dominance and prestige, blooming momentarily like flowers in full spring until they are swept away by the currents of history, without respite, without end. It thrives only through human striving for distinction—through living social-political forces.

Subscribe now

I’m still not sure what pushed me toward Uzbekistan. One reason is obvious: family history. My father served in the Soviet Air Force and spent a few years on a base near the Afghan border. He has that rational, almost mechanical mind common to men of his generation, but one incident broke through his materialism.

He dreamt he was standing in that Martian desert. The heat pressed on his skull. Across the yellow haze, Afghan soldiers raised their AK-47s. They fired. He ducked—and woke up drenched.

A few days later the scene repeated itself. He and his comrades were in the desert; Afghans appeared; he shouted for them to get down just as the shooting began. The dream had gone ahead of reality.

The other reason for my trip is less intelligible. Decisions crystallize before thoughts fully form. One day I simply realized: I was going.

I arrived in Tashkent in the middle of the night. The prayer in Arabic at takeoff had already shifted the ground under me. As I exited the plane, long lines of Uzbeks in traditional white dress stood before passport control, pale and granular as rows of sugar. After a brief exchange in Russian with the border guard, I stepped outside.

A taxi driver materialized immediately. Insistent, tireless, he followed me around. At this point, too exhausted to resist, I let him drive me, though every instinct of mine was wary. He cycled through the usual offers: city tour, Samarkand, “special price.” Later I’d learn this is simply the staple of taxi drivers here and of merchant cultures more generally.

I reached the hostel on the outskirts, and to my relief the reception was open at 4 am, though the receptionist himself was nowhere to be found. A shape was sleeping on the couch opposite mine. An alarm rang every five minutes. The shape would promptly turn it off and go back to sleep. This repeated thirty times, probably more. Eventually, I drifted off myself.

After a short but restful nap, I checked in and walked toward the center.

The district—like most of Tashkent—felt unmistakably Soviet. The earthquake of ’66 had leveled the old city, and the reconstruction gave it the familiar post-Soviet geometry. Massive blocks stood in disciplined rows along immense boulevards tracing through the city, with narrow pedestrian passages winding between them and courtyards with gazebos and playgrounds at their center.

Reaching the heart of Tashkent, I was struck by the sheer openness. The city feels like an outstretched palm. Monumental Soviet-modernist buildings flank the boulevards; the sidewalks too are wide, shaded by long rows of trees. And everything is clean—unnervingly clean. Every morning, municipal workers and merchants sweep away dust and fallen November leaves with ritual discipline. I paused to watch them.

Samarkand felt like stepping into a deeper historical stratum. The Registan’s blue-tiled facades and the dense, obsessive geometry of Timurid ornamentation pulled the eye inward. Inside the mausoleum, a rhythmic prayer in Uzbek echoed against the tiles, folding the space, and me with it. There were few tourists. I spent most of my time walking and reading. On the outskirts, ruins—half-eroded, half-erased—opened into silence.

Ruins. What do they say?
They speak the mercilessness of time.
As I step on stone and sand I almost hear the vanished bustle—
but it is just vibration under the dry crunch of my foot.

Now, only the silent come.
There flies a black feathered bird, touched by blue on the tips of its wings.
What draws it? Perhaps it hears something I don’t.

I feel no heaviness. These ruins feel nothing.
Their indifference is tender. Time left them like this.

I lift a dusty stone wedged in the ground.
It has left a small scar. Who knows how long it lay there.
I return it with care, letting its shape settle back into the earth.
The disturbance closes.

I left the ruins. From Samarkand I took the train west toward Bukhara. It cut through reddish-brown desert and low settlements until the city appeared.

Bukhara was my favorite: dense medieval streets, domed buildings the color of unbaked clay. The place, sand-toned and sun-bitten, looked like Tatooine. Cats with improbably thick fur roamed the streets; some leapt into my lap, two at a time, or perched on my shoulders to watch the passersby. The food was simple: meat, mostly. Shashlik, plov, endless green tea. Pickled salads. I ate well.

Khiva had the same desert-walled feel as Bukhara, but more carefully kept. Inside the old city, merchants tended long rows of stalls selling Uzbek goods: tyubeteykas, embroidered dresses, camel-fur socks, small trinkets laid out on cloth. Local tourists moved from stall to stall, bargaining without haste. Wedding processions drifted through the narrow streets, young men and women dancing to music from small speakers. Further in, beyond the market line, I found rows of clay houses. People still live here.

Outside of Khiva, scattered fortresses, half-collapsed, punctuate the dusty landscape. Their walls crumble into nothing upon touch. They shouldn’t still be standing.

The people are pleasant, though not expressive. It took me some time to adjust and mirror their restraint. I myself was watched like a specimen—pale and blonde against their darker features. Children would run up to me with curiosity sparking in their eyes, wondering where that stranger came from. The Steppe has flattened phenotypes over centuries; faces here feel shaped by wind and long distances. The country is young—visibly so. Students everywhere, especially in Tashkent and Samarkand. Dozens of new universities have opened in the last decade, drawing people from Pakistan, India, China, Kazakhstan.

But poverty shadows everything. Money came up in nearly every conversation: the cost of phones and cars abroad, salaries, whether life really is better “over there.” Uzbekistan feels isolated. It is oriented mostly toward Russia; the wider world recedes. Many men wait on visas for seasonal work abroad: construction in Moscow, farm labor, berry picking in the UK. The country finds respite from tension only through these migrations.

In the cities, though, a different pressure gathers. New malls, glass towers, and universities rise faster than the wages that build them. The place feels like a bow drawn back—held, waiting for direction.

Uzbekistan remains distant in ways no visitor can close. Everything lies near the surface, yet nothing yields. The wind lifts the dust. The layers settle again.

Subscribe now

“Leftism” is difficult to define (I mean here in a coherent trans-historical way that doesn’t lead one into contradictions—many positions are taken opportunistically and can switch social bearers, depending on immediate demands of a historical struggle), but it possesses a “you know it when you see it” quality.

“Rightism”, by contrast, feels practically undefinable. You know the tropes by now: conservative, traditionalist, right-winger, partisan of the True, the Good, the Noble—catchy slogans, but this is little more than dramatic rhetoric carried to lofty heights of abstraction, disconnected from social reality.

I have just finished reading Panagiotis Kondylis’ masterfully erudite Konservativismus, which I had the pleasure (and tedious labor) of machine translating last year. Kondylis reveals, with his ever incisive and penetrating intellect, that to understand these terms, we must strip away the polemics and look at the concrete historical phenomena.

Societas Civilis

The premise of Konservativismus is stark: what we call “Conservatism” today is, in terms of the history of ideas, as dead as classical Liberalism.1

Historically, Conservatism was the intellectual world-picture of the European hereditary nobility. It was the dominant ideology of a specific social formation: the societas civilis. At its core, this world was concerned with Law.

In this view, Law flows from the commands of God. It gives structure to the world and organizes it hierarchically through the Great Chain of Being. Following this, The King, although worldly representative of the divine, is not himself a legislator; he is a judge. As primus inter pares, his role is to ensure that divine justice reigns on earth and to uphold the ancient prerogatives and privileges of the nobility. Because Law is time-immemorial and divine, it cannot be modified by the will of man. There is no distinction between public and private; the ethical and the political are intertwined. Building on scholastic interpretations of Aristotle, the commonwealth is an assemblage of households, oriented towards the good (as telos of man and the political). In this world, there can never really be anything new under the sun. Time immemorial custom and tradition, accumulated wisdom, and its interpretation, is all that is necessary for the maintenance of the social order.

Modern Sovereignty and the Voluntaristic State

Ideologies wake up only when confronted with a threat. For the nobility, this threat appeared in the 16th century with the rise of the modern concept of Sovereignty, best formulated by Jean Bodin, as the highest and absolute, perpetual power in a commonwealth—essentially an authority which recognizes no higher legal authority above its own.

Modern Sovereignty was a radical rupture. It reinterpreted Law on a voluntaristic basis. The Sovereign was no longer merely upholding eternal law, but he could now legislate. He could create valid law ex nihilo.

This was the death knell for the conservative worldview. If the King could create law based on his will (or the needs of the State), he could legislate away the privileges of the nobility. The “State” began to treat everyone equally as subjects—the early seeds of equality before the law, which is fundamentally at odds with the conservative defense of privilege and hierarchy. The public sphere developed, the State as its guarantor, and morality was relegated to the private individual conscience. Religious toleration became the virtue, and secularization was now not in the too distant future.

From Estate to Interest Group

As the modern state expanded—driven by Raison d’État, geopolitical pressure, and the rise of the bourgeoisie and capitalism—the nobility was slowly crushed. The rise of industry was the final nail in the coffin for the land-based aristocracy.

Here, Kondylis makes a crucial observation about the degradation of conservative thought. As the nobility was integrated into parliamentary politics, they were forced to engage in the logic of interests. They ceased to be the guardians of a divine order and became merely one interest group among many, arguing for tax breaks and tariffs.

Aestheticism and the Caesarist Fantasy

As the nobility lost its concrete power, its articulation of its own position weakened. It turned to aestheticism, Romanticism, and mythical reinterpretations of the past. This brings us to the “Right” as we recognize it today—and specifically to figures like Charles Maurras and Action Française, who is its ideological forbearer.

Maurras represents the spiritual predecessor of the modern online Right: a belief in hierarchy and “elite” (redefined as aristocracy, but without the hereditary nobility, more discretely meritocratic in orientation), and a belief in the value of work and industrial progress. But this is a mutation from the worldviews defended by counterrevolutionaries like De Maistre or Bonald.

Kondylis dissects this shift mercilessly. For the classical conservative, after the French Revolution, a dictator (or King) could act in a commissarial sense—he could step in to defend or re-establish an existing or threatened social order. Maurras, however, envisioned a King who would create a social order from a vacuum.

“Yet his break from classical conservatism also shows in his concept of kingship. A dictatorship meant not to defend a threatened order but to create a new one could only appear to classical conservatives as a revolutionary - i.e., sovereign - dictatorship... But Maurras’ king emerges from a social vacuum and is to create the entire social order from scratch - no supporting forces are specified. The dictatorship thus floats in midair, and so does the idea of kingship itself... In its place is an instrumental and institutional justification... The personal bond and the vassal-like relationship to the king... are entirely absent from Maurras’ thought and psyche.”

This is also the diagnosis of the modern Right: The worship of dictatorship and Caesarism without understanding that Caesarism needs extra-constitutional social bearers. The modern Rightist waits for a Caesar to appear from the aether, compelled by mysterious forces and “the need for decisive action in the face of institutional gridlock”, ignoring the absence of the social forces required to sustain him.

The Incoherent “Conservative”

This leaves us with a Frankenstein’s monster. “Conservatism” as we know it is born out of the fusion of the nobility with their old enemy, Liberalism, against a new, more radical enemy: Social Democracy.

In this light, modern conservatives are simply Liberals who believe in normative progress and a future-oriented outlook (unlike classical conservatives), but who want to pump the brakes on redistribution. Distinct from this is the “Right,” which inherits the tropes of the “Conservative Revolution”—aesthetically radical, often nationalist/völkisch, but socially bourgeois. It is this radical Right that maintains a structural reliance on economic liberalism (the sanctity of private property and accumulation), even as it rhetorically attacks the “free market”, “free trade” and decries political liberalism. It fights the Liberal political and cultural regime to save the Liberal economic order.

The Legacy

This mutation solidified in the 20th century. As Kondylis explains, the “Right” emerged as a radicalized bourgeoisie, with very little relation to the nobility at this point. Faced with the threat of internationalist socialism, this new Right made a calculated trade: they sacrificed political liberalism (parliamentarianism, democracy) to save economic liberalism (private property). This was the specific historical function of the 20th-century Right: an emergency brake pulled by the property-owning classes.

This leaves the 21st-century Right in a state of total ontological drift. The “Right” today inherits the aesthetic radicalism of the 20th century (the worship of Caesars, the disdain for democracy) but lacks the concrete social bearer (the threatened industrial bourgeoisie) that gave those movements weight.

We are left with a political landscape of floating abstractions. The “Establishment Right” clings to the very economic liberalism that dissolves the traditions they claim to conserve. Meanwhile, the “Dissident Right” lives in a simulation. In reality, they are functionally liberal subjects (consumers of tech platforms, atomized individuals) larping as illiberal aristocrats. Platform identity and anonymity encourage purity spiraling, an ersatz aristocracy where distinction is performed through ritualized exclusion rather than grounded in any real social weight. They wait for a Caesar to appear from nothing, ignoring the total absence of the social forces required to sustain him. They lack the power to be anything else.

Only a nuanced understanding of these social forces allows us to see where we are headed, what is possible, and what can be harnessed. But this is tedious work. It requires penetrating the thought structures of foes and friends alike, and moving beyond the aesthetic larp of “Retvrn.” It requires the sober understanding that the societas civilis is gone, the 20th century is dead, and they aren’t coming back.

Subscribe now

The vast night stretches out, holding the city of lights in the cradle of its palm.
Through its translucent haze, rays peer between the clouds;
I trace the ribbons of light—and fail to seize them.

Dreams have their own light.
Their clarity shines through; and what distance holds us one from another,
in dreams we share what to each is due, and become one.

Breath rises over the mountain into crystalline air;
A lake faintly ripples—pools of mirrors I gaze into—
and only Nature gazes back.

I inhale, and consciousness recedes.
In the pit I sit: dust particles float around me
like thousands of cities of light—suspended, colliding,
bursting forth with tumultuous joy.
But I am silent, and wish not to speak.

It has been over a century since the publication of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922), and the slender volume retains all its allure. The book’s central thesis—“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”—has become a cliché in right-wing circles, yet the power of that sentence remains undiminished.

This post is by no means meant to be a deeply scholarly treatment. These are simply some personal thoughts and intuitions that I’ve had, some things I’ve been ruminating on, and I am using the opportunity to flesh them out with these two thinkers; Kondylis, who I admire greatly and have been digesting and preaching over the past year, and Schmitt, with whom I’m only casually familiar. I want to draw out what continues to make Schmitt’s thought so captivating, despite its contradictions, and what makes it endure. For that task, Kondylis is a necessary critic.

I. Kondylis’ Anthropology of Power

Panagiotis Kondylis is the greatest thinker of the 20th century (yes, I really think so), and someone who deserves a better treatment than I could give to in the span of this piece. But briefly:

Kondylis’ approach is simultaneously an anthropological and a social-ontological approach. From anthropology and social ontology, we arrive at the foundations and an outline of Kondylis’ theory of power. The fundamental question that ties Kondylis’ theory of power, his intellectual history approach and his geopolitical reflections together is: Who, when, in what polemical constellation, took what position against whom, for what reasons and with which arguments, and in what situation of power struggle? This question essentially defines what not only Kondylis (but also his doctoral advisor Dieter Henrich) calls the polemical constellation (see Kondylis 1981: 531)

Kondylis is a former Marxist who awoke from the dogma of dialectical materialism, but nonetheless retains its suspicion for power and ideology as the “superstructure” which masks real power relations between humans—what he calls the related world of spirit-intellect, ideas. Material and ideational reality are only epistemically distinct, not ontologically. How do concrete actors in concrete situations use ideas as weapons and what decisions do they take to create and further a certain world view (or world-picture) ? Unlike crude readings of ideology, ideas are not simply post-hoc rationalizations and covers for the “ruling class” or any sort of actor, but participate in the actor’s own orientation in the world and structure this world.

The world picture is a comprehensive framework that hierarchizes the chaotic pre-world—which segregates the relevant from the irrelevant elements through a decision (what he calls a “primordial decision”—a heuristic way to describe the initial act of orientation that structures a worldview, not an essential identity) and conveys a position, an identity to be defended and through which power is expressed and pursued for self-preservation and self-expansion. Ideas thus form identity and are constantly reinterpreted in light of shifting power needs and situations. They are always defined by the friend-foe spectrum, which in turn is defined by the needs of power. The needs of power are in turn constantly reinterpreted according to ideas and friends and foes. The friends of today can just as easily turn into the foes of tomorrow. The polemical constellation is thus absolutely relational, and reflects a world in constant flux. Analyzing these polemical constellations lets us peek underneath the hood of ideology.

As such, Kondylis is an ‘‘observer of human affairs’’ and believes that structural similarities, morphological patterns hold across space, time, and areas of human activity, be it philosophy, politics, religion, theology, history, the arts, etc. His role is to untangle the constellation of such factors and to show how they manifest themselves.

I suggest you read this overview of his methodology if you’re interested in more detail.

II. Schmitt’s Sovereign

In Political Theology, Schmitt attempts to analyze the nature of Sovereignty in its existential sense—departing from its purely legalistic conception, which had dominated political thought since at least Bodin, and to show that all modern concepts of the state are secularized theological concepts—that is, that ‘‘they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver-but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts.’’ For Schmitt, Sovereignty is a borderline concept, it cannot be grasped within the realm of juristic normality, for it cannot be subsumed or deduced from a norm. Its edges are only revealed under stress. The essence of things reveals itself only when the ordinary course is interrupted. I believe Heidegger gives the example of a hammer whose essence becomes cognized when it breaks and is no longer usable. Ready-to-hand becomes present-at-hand—an object that turns from a tool to an object of reflection, as it suddenly becomes apparent as a problematic phenomenon, grasped by our consciousness. One could say that the outlines of a thing come into focus.

Schmitt argues that the exception reveals the essence of the state’s authority and the nature of law. By examining the exception, one can better understand the relationship between norms, decisions, and sovereignty. The ordinary course of events is subsumed under a general judicial norm, requiring homogeneity—applied in a uniform manner through bureaucratic structures (rationality) in the modern state. For a legal system to make sense, a normal situation must exist. Jurisprudence is concerned with what is recognizable and ordinary, but sovereignty in its essence does not manifest itself in the ordinary. Deciding on suspending the legal order shows that “sovereignty (and thus the state itself) resides in deciding this controversy, that is, in determining definitively what constitutes public order and security, in determining when they are disturbed, and so on.” Schmitt claims, “all law is situational law,” revealing sovereignty through the decision to suspend the existing legal order when a situation demands it, not arbitrarily but based on the assessment of the situation and its threat to the state.

This decision aims to create or restore a juridical order when the existing one is under conditions that threaten anarchy—deciding both that a situation is exceptional, and what to do about it to recover order from chaos. Even in an exceptional situation, legal concepts remain relevant; the exception must be distinguished from juristic chaos and construed as a juristic problem subject to juristic considerations, though existing outside normal legal parameters, as Schmitt maintains its endeavours can only be understood within the legal order’s context. The exception defies general codification, showing the decision in absolute purity—separating from the norm, proving authority need not be based on law to produce it. Given reality’s contingency, especially in crises, this decision cannot be subsumed judicially. It carries unlimited authority—the power to suspend an entire order—not deriving from any norm but constituting one ex nihilo.

The sovereign holds the monopoly over this last decision, producing and guaranteeing the situation in its totality. Though standing outside the normally valid legal system, he belongs to it, deciding whether the constitution needs suspending entirely, raising questions of which authority determines an exception, safeguards political unity, and restores stability—as constitutions usually have emergency power clauses. The moment of decision is the purest expression of absolute sovereignty embodied in an individual—an irruption of absolute will in a singular point of space and time. Schmitt’s analogy to the miracle follows: a divine miracle introduces absolute power into law-bound causality, disrupting the ordinary course. Only God could produce a miracle; only the sovereign could produce a legal miracle. Political sovereignty, in the Hobbesian modern sense Schmitt describes, becomes a secularized miracle, by structural analogy. This is the mythico-poetical allure—the sovereign as a heroic, existential figure confronting chaos—its drama resonating with the human need for decisive leadership, unlike liberal proceduralism, which, in Schmitt’s view, reduces political questions to technical administration. This forms a broader point of Schmitt’s critique of Liberalism.

III. The Decision & Its Critics

Kondylis dissects this ‘‘militant decisionism’’ from a rigorously scholarly vantage.1 He praises Schmitt where due: Schmitt reminds us that elementary forces are always present beneath any “normality,” including “democratic normality,” and that these forces can erupt at any time—a valuable insight. The lasting value of Schmitt’s work, according to the Greek, lies in the radical way he poses the question of sovereignty, particularly in the legal-constitutional sense, raising epistemological, methodological, historical, political, and sociological questions.

But Kondylis finds Schmitt’s method wanting. Schmitt relies on analogies and metaphors that lack logical or historical necessity—the claimed structural correspondence between jurisprudence and theology is never demonstrated. He blurs the boundary between the cognitive-methodological level and the substantive-content level. Schmitt seeks to expand jurisprudence through sociological concepts without losing its autonomy, but never develops a consistent framework for doing so. The synthesis he promises remains programmatic rather than analytic: he gestures toward it rhetorically instead of grounding it in a coherent epistemology.

Where Schmitt claims to unite juristic and sociological perspectives, Kondylis sees only shifting metaphors—moves between logical, historical, and thematic planes that never yield a demonstrable connection. In the third section of Political Theology, Schmitt posits a structural correspondence between jurisprudence and theology, yet the elements he compares alternate arbitrarily. He conflates epistemological method with substantive content. Citing Leibniz on the methods of knowledge in both fields, he treats the analogy as self-evident: concepts such as the miracle and the exception are said to share a logical structure, but the basis of their “secularization” is never shown. Kondylis links this confusion to Schmitt’s reliance on thinkers like Bodin or Hobbes, who wrote before the modern differentiation of the social sciences, when law, politics, and theology could still intermingle without methodological tension. To invoke them now, Kondylis argues, is not to transcend differentiation but to regress behind it.

Kondylis thus concludes that Schmitt’s “structural analogy” is less a demonstration than a metaphor. Schmitt confuses logical form with historical derivation, method with content. His analogy oscillates between epistemological and sociological registers without clarifying how one domain secularizes the other. For Kondylis, this reveals a regression, rather than a theoretical synthesis—a pre-modern attempt to reunite differentiated spheres of thought under a single metaphysical image of unity.

This confusion also explains the weakness of Schmitt’s decisionism. By grounding the juridical in a pure act of will, Schmitt substitutes existential immediacy for theoretical explanation. The “decision” becomes an epistemic deus ex machina—a moment that resolves contradictions without accounting for them. Instead of analyzing how concrete actors and institutions actually decide within a differentiated modern order, he mythologizes decision as a metaphysical origin. What claims to be an epistemological foundation is, for Kondylis, merely a rhetorical elevation of will over method.

This rhetorical elevation then skews Schmitt’s political conclusions. His normative interpretation of “decision” leads to a false historical assessment of liberalism, judging its self-understanding normatively rather than descriptively. Schmitt focuses on what a “genuine” decision should be, not how decisions actually occur. Liberal regimes, however procedural, still decide—recent emergency powers in democratic states attest to this—but Schmitt, blinded by his polemical framing, mistakes the persistence of decision for its absence.

IV. Enduring Appeal

Yet despite Kondylis’s arguments revealing the complexity and constraints of modern governance, Schmitt’s vision is still captivating—the existential weight of decision in crises, the mythic appeal of a sovereign who embodies political will. Here is the essence of what I believe to be Schmitt’s enduring appeal: the truly sovereign in the existential sense must be capable of navigating blind. Bismarck once compared himself to a man walking in a forest who, without knowing the exact path, senses the general direction. No norms guide action here, only political instinct and judgment.

Kondylis may be right from a scholarly perspective, but this is not what compels readers. Schmitt’s rhetoric is mytho-poetical. It dramatizes decision as the final assertion of human will against chaos. He reintroduces the human, existential element—dependent on contingency and, perhaps, on phronesis in its classical sense—into the political. “Some men will be dissatisfied with the end of history and will seek to restart it.” Thymos—the need for expression and for recognition as superior—also defines the political. Liberal2 regimes, by recognizing all equally, appear to efface that dimension; or so, at least, Fukuyama suggests.

Liberal technocratic elites often behave conservatively (understandably from the point of view of their own self-preservation, strictly speaking), wary of individuals who might embody the Schmittian ethos of the sovereign—someone capable of suspending the legal order and then restoring it once the emergency has passed. Our age, however, seems barren of figures capable of acting with such authority; perhaps that is the deeper anxiety Schmitt’s thought continues to provoke. Few today could even be imagined as trustworthy bearers of such power, given how extensive the modern state has become. It is one thing to suspend it (a legal procedure any “legally” sovereign body could do), another entirely to restore or create order from chaos. In a true crisis, will there be anyone capable of stepping forward to do so?

Schmitt’s theory may not hold as a systematic jurisprudence, but as a reminder of the existential foundations of politics, it remains unmatched.

Subscribe now