 Sean Erwin 2015 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190, June 2015 ARTICLE Political Technique, the Conflict of Umori, and Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli in Sécurité, Territoire, Population Sean Erwin, Barry University ABSTRACT: This article examines Foucault's interpretation of Machiavelli in his 1978 lecture series, Sécurité, territoire, population. I argue that Foucault's interpretation in these lectures deliberately misrepresents Machiavelli. This misrepresentation allows him to develop later traditions in political thought in a way that precludes any importance Machiavelli might have had for the concerns of these later authors. Further, thorough analysis of Foucault's reading of Machiavelli uncovers a common thread between the two authors. For Machiavelli, the political is a space articulated by an immediacy of princes to peoples and generated from the fold formed by the difference between the qualities of the political humors. For Machiavelli, this difference of the humors-unstable and porous as it is- between those who desire to dominate and those who desire not to be dominated is immanent to the political. Read from this perspective Foucault's critique of the tradition in antiMachiavellian literature develops a reading of Machiavelli that, even if it misrepresents him, breaks Machiavelli free from the place his thought generally occupies in the history of raison d'État. The paper then closes developing the notion that Foucault's interpretation of Machiavelli points in the direction of a clear theme shared by the two - the theme of historically generated political technique(s). Keywords: Machiavelli, Foucault, Political Technique, Raison d'État Introduction For those familiar with Machiavelli's texts, Foucault's interpretation of Macchiavelli in his 1978 lecture series Sécurité, Territoire, Population1 is surprising. Although Machiavelli figures prominently in five of the thirteen lectures,2 Foucault treats Machiavelli as if he were the author of only one book-The Prince-and his reading of this complex text treats it as if it 1 For instance, the theme of gouvernementalité emerges from his analysis of sixteenth-century antiMachiavellian literature in the February 1st lecture of Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population (Paris: Seuil, 2004)/Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007). (hereafter cited as STP). 2 Namely, the lectures of January 18th and 25th, February 1st, and March 8th and 15th. Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 173 covered only one topic: how to guarantee the security of the Prince. Yet Foucault's interpretation of Machiavelli plays an important structural role in the development of many key themes that emerge from these lectures. Given the role Machiavelli and the traditions linked to him play, Foucault's interpretation of this thinker calls for a more complete examination than has appeared to date.3 This article examines Foucault's interpretation of Machiavelli in these lectures, develops the understanding of territoriality at the center of this interpretation, and then reveals inherent difficulties for Foucault's reading of Machiavelli by carefully comparing that reading to passages from The Prince and the Discourses on Livy where the issue of territoriality figures prominently. Finally, textual strategies that may have motivated Foucault to present Machiavelli as he does are discussed. Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli Foucault first introduces the figure of Machiavelli during this lecture cycle in connection with the theme of the town and the "problem of circulation" that it poses.4 For Foucault, the town is the site where the transition from systems of discipline with their processes of normation to apparatuses of security with their procedures of normalization occurred.5 As such, the town is at the center of the new mechanisms of security that began to emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To Foucault, the town marks an exception to the feudalism of its milieu, and it is here that the theme of territoriality emerges, a theme Foucault will 3 A number of commentators acknowledge Machiavelli's role and even question the adequacy of Foucault's interpretation of Machiavelli. However, to my knowledge, no reading yet has attempted a systematic textual analysis of Foucault's claims in STP based on close readings of Machiavelli's texts. For extended commentators' discussions of the relationship between Foucault and Machiavelli, see Jérémie Barthas, "Machiavelli in Political Thought from the Age of Revolutions to the Present", in John Najemy (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. 261; Jérémie Barthas, L'argent n'est pas le nerf de la guerre: Essai sur une prétendue erreur de Machiavel (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2011), esp. 5-37; see also Mitchell Dean, Governmentaltity: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2010, 2nd ed.), whose discussion of Foucault relative to Skinner is helpful (103–105, 116n3, and 123–24); Stuart Elden, "Rethinking gouvernementalité", Political Geography, vol. 20 (2006), 1–5; Stuart Elden, "Governmentality, calculation, territory", Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 25 (2007), 562–80; Adam Holden, and Stuart Elden, "'It Cannot be a Real Person, a Concrete Individual':Althusser and Foucault on Machiavelli's Political Technique", Borderlands, vol. 4, no. 2 (2005). Accessed April 10, 2013. Available at: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol4no2_2005/eldenhold_foucault.htm; Pasquale Pasquino, "Political Theory of War and Peace; Foucault and the History of Modern Political Theory", Economy and Society, vol. 22, no. 1 (1993), 77–88; and Michel Senellart, Les arts de gouverner: Du regimen médiéval au concept de gouvernement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 41–43; Michel Senellart, "Machiavel à l'épreuve de la gouvernmentalité", in Gérald Sfez and Michel Senellart (eds.), L'enjeu Machiavel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 211–27. 4 Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 66; Security, Territory, Population, 85. 5 Foucault develops his analysis of the town while considering the related themes of grain, street, and contagion. On this, see Alderson and his analysis of the US-Canadian border (Christopher Alderson, "Border Security/Border Sécurité", in Sam Binkey and Jorge Capetillo-Ponce (eds.), A Foucault for the 21st Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 203–20). Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 174 use to contextualize the agenda motivating Machiavelli's thought. According to Foucault, the question of the free town, with the problems it poses for territorial sovereignty, engenders the development of mechanisms for security.6 The town exceeds the sovereign–territory relation, and in this excess it displaces the territoriality element key to the sovereign exercise of power, putting its role into play.7 The issue of the sovereign, for Foucault, is that of the "safety of the territory, or the safety of the sovereign who rules over the territory."8 Foucault introduces Machiavelli in his lectures to identify this problem as Machiavelli's own: The problem posed by Machiavelli was precisely to know how in a given territory-whether it had been conquered or had been inherited-whether the power was legitimate or illegitimate-how to make it happen that the power of the sovereign is not threatened, or at any rate, how it can remove, with full certainty, the threats weighing on it. The security of the Prince [sûreté du Prince]-this was the problem of the Prince in the reality of his territorial power. This was the political problem of sovereignty.9 6 As Foucault states: "This was the town that had the possibility and to which one had recognized the right to govern itself up to a certain point and within certain well-marked limits. But the town represented always a sort of zone [plage] of autonomy in relation to the great organizations and mechanisms of territorial power characteristic of a power developed through feudalism [...] Fundamentally it was necessary to reconcile the fact of the town and the legitimacy of sovereignty" (Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 66; Security, Territory, Population, 64). 7 Commenting on this transition in Foucault, Giogio Agamben suggests another way to read the shift. Where Foucault would seem to distinguish strongly between the juridico–institutional and biopolitical models of power, Agamben wants to read these trajectories in his thought for their "hidden point of intersection": "the two analyses [juridico–institutional and biopolitical] cannot be separated and [...] the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original-if concealed-nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to life the secret tie uniting power and bare life" (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 6). 8 Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 67; Security, Territory, Population, 65. As Foucault describes the issue, "In The Prince, Machiavelli's problem is to decide how a province or a territory, acquired through inheritance or by conquest, can be held against its internal and its external rivals. Machiavelli's entire analysis is aimed at defining what reinforces the link between prince and state [...] The theoreticians of state tried to keep aloof from Machiavelli both because he had at this moment a very bad reputation and because they couldn't recognize their own problem in his problem, which was not the problem of the state but the problem of the relationships between the prince-the king-and his territory and his people" (Michel Foucault, "The Political Technology of Individuals", in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 150). 9 Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 67; Security, Territory, Population, 65. As Holden and Elden describe this shift: "What we find here is a shift then, both in the subject and object of political rule (in part because the target becomes the object) but also, crucially in their order. In the first it is the Prince and the territory he rules; in the second the population and then, only as a consequence, those that govern. In addition the archaic concept of 'surety' [sûreté] is replaced with the modern problem of security" (Holden, and Stuart Elden, "'It Cannot be a Real Person'", 15). Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 175 In the problem of circulation that emerges with the issues of the street, grain, and contagion, a shift has taken place, and Foucault clearly places Machiavelli on the side of that historical divide superceded by newly emerging strategies for posing and resolving problems of governance.10 By virtue of the importance accorded to them, issues of circulation increasingly displace an understanding of territory as extended space. As Foucault reads Machiavelli, the chief occupation of the Prince is to fix and demarcate an extended territory for the sake of guaranteeing his safety. In contrast with the forms of governance that will emerge later, the sovereign state is not concerned with the people in a direct way;11 rather, the people are affected through the relationship of the sovereign to their territory.12 However, immediately following Machiavelli and partially in reaction to him, Foucault continues by saying that as a new series of governance techniques and strategies emerge and solidify over the next two centuries, the notion of "population" displaces terri- 10 There is a strong similarity between Foucault's description of Machiavelli here-as responsible for the ultimate expression of a discourse around juridical sovereignty-and the way Foucault situates Machiavelli at the threshold of the formulation of history as a historico-political continuum in Il faut defendre la Société (Michel Foucault, Il faut defendre la Société (Paris: Seuil, 1976)/Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, translated by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), hereafter cited as DS). In these lectures, particularly in the lecture of February 25th, Foucault identifies Machiavelli (choosing him over Hobbes) as someone whose thought (and its relation to history) was a clear precursor to the history of the Franks as told by Boulainviller-who was the first to conceive a continuum between history and politics. See DS, the February 25th and March 3rd lectures. 11 For Foucault, the specific feature that separates Machiavelli's historicizing from Boulainvillier's is the way that each relates, or fails to relate, historical discourse to the groups whose relations of force and power are society's "grid of intelligibility". On Foucault's reading of Machiavelli, "History is not the domain where he analyzes power relations. For Machiavelli history is simply a source of examples, a sort of collection of jurisprudence or of tactical models for the exercise of power. For Machiavelli, history simply records relations of force and the calculations to which they gave rise" (Foucault, Il faut defendre la Société, 150-1; Society Must Be Defended, 169). In contrast, Boulainvillier intends his discourse describing the ascendancy and decline of the Frankish aristocracy to propagate a series of effects within the political domain by awakening the French aristocracy to the elements necessary for their revival. Boulainvillier apparently exceeds Machiavelli's historicizing by energetically relating his history of the groups that form the subject term of the power relation with the aim of altering that series of relations. See also Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité I (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 128/Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 97). 12 As Elden explains, the category of territoriality is at play in both the juridical state and the disciplinary state (Elden, "Governmentality, calculation, territory", 562-80). However, given Foucault's logic throughout the lecture, the notion of territoriality in play could not be the same. For Foucault, there is certainly a shift from the disciplinary territory to the state of security. But for Elden, this would actually be the second shift that involved territoriality. The first would have been the shift from the juridical state to the disciplinary state, which also corresponds to two different types of territoriality: the feudal and the frontier (see Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 111; Security, Territory, Population, 108). Here it is also important to note, as Elden does, that for Foucault it is not the case that the second shift-the one from the disciplinary state to that of security-would involve something aspatial (Elden, "Governmentality, calculation, territory", 567). Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 176 toriality as the principal focus of authors reasoning on governance.13 Thus, there is a shift from the concern with territoriality to a concern with population that occurs in parallel with a shift in concern from the surface occupied by a state to the mass of its population.14 In this shift, the notion of territoriality is demoted to become one element among several for reflecting on and affecting the population.15 Thus, in the midst of his reflections on one of these later texts,16 Foucault specifies that in considering territory, one considers a variety of features such as its barrenness or fertility, the density or sparseness of its population, and the activity or idleness of its inhabitants, but these features are no longer mere attributes of land and have come to operate instead as variables in emerging strategies and techniques for affecting a population.17 13 In the final lecture of DS (March 17, 1976), Foucault describes the penetration of disciplinary techniques in the second half of the eighteenth century as "addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes of birth, death, illness, production and so on. So after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing, but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not to man-as-body but at man-asspecies" (Foucault, Il faut defendre la Société, 216; Society Must Be Defended, 243). This new set of techniques for the application of power-which Foucault names biopolitics-does not replace the previous practices, but rather complements and infiltrates them as a supplement to the regimes of disciplinary techniques already at work. 14 "And perhaps in a completely global, coarse, and therefore inexact way, we could reconstruct the great forms, the great economies of power in the West in the following manner: first, the state of justice, born in a feudal type of territoriality and which corresponded substantially to a society of customary law and written law, with a whole interplay of commitments and litigations; secondly, the administrative state that corresponds to a society of regulations and disciplines; and, lastly, a state of government that is no longer essentially defined by its territoriality, by the surface occupied, but by a mass: the mass of the population, with its volume, its density, and, for sure, the territory it covers, but which is, in a way, only one of its components" (Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 113; Security, Territory, Population, 109–110; my emphasis). 15 For Foucault, this shift did not occur only with respect to the notion of territory. A similar shift occurred in the notion of family. With the emergence of the problematic of population, the notion of family comes into play and shifts from serving as the model of governance to being an instrument of intervention, a variable for influencing dynamics within the population. Thus, with the formulation of the problematic of population, both family and territory begin to operate as variables. 16 Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 99; Security, Territory, Population, 96. The text under discussion is Guillame de la Perriere's Le miroir politique. 17 I agree with Elden,who reads this shift in Foucault as more of a transformation of both territory and population than a shift from territory to population: "In the era of security both territory and population are understood in a transformed sense. Indeed we could make the claim that the categories of 'population' and 'territory' themselves only really emerge at this political juncture. Just as the people become understood as both discrete individuals and their aggregated whole, the land they inhabit is also something that is understood in terms of its geometric, rational properties, or 'qualities.' Territory is more than merely land, but a rendering of the emergent concept of 'space' as a political category: owned, distributed, mapped, calculated, bordered, and controlled. Foucault's notion of the politics of calculation is therefore crucial but not as something which only manifests itself in population, but, rather, in territory, too. The Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 177 In his lectures of January 25th and February 1st, Foucault extends and develops this interpretation as he describes a series of writers who attempted to formulate an art of government making use of Machiavelli as a point of repulsion (point de la repulsion)18 in the development of their theories. These lectures are significant because they act as the backdrop for the techniques, practices, and strategies of governance that Foucault will identify with his notion of gouvernementalité. However, these lectures also describe a history of reasoning about the political in which Machiavelli figures prominently but from which, at the same time, he is interestingly excluded. Thus, Machiavelli is at the center of a debate on the nature and character of the arts of governance (les arts de gouverner) that stretches from 1580 to 1660,19 but although this debate is conducted through Machiavelli, making use of his texts, it develops in a way that has no genuine connection to the program that Foucault identifies as Machiavelli's.20 Despite the fact that the discussions invoke Machiavelli, Foucault will not trace a direct line of transmission from the concerns that motivated Machiavelli to the concerns of these later authors. While Foucault does not locate an "art of government" in Machiavelli, neither does he identify Machiavelli with the emergence of the doctrine of raison d'État.21 During a second series of debates that occur through reference to Machiavelli at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the opponents of raison d'État22 identify this kind of reasoning with same kinds of mechanisms can be found in both, at root grounded in the relation between governmentality and calculation" (Elden, "Governmentality, calculation, territory", 578). 18 Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 93; Security, Territory, Population, 89). 19 For another reading of this period, see the extensive study by Senelart (Senellart, Les arts de gouverner). 20 As similarly happens, on Foucault's account, in the case of Marx (Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 249; Security, Territory, Population, 243). 21 See March 8th lecture in STP. There is a strong similarity between Foucault's insistence in STP that Machiavelli is not a proponent of raison d'état and his insistence during the 1975–1976 lectures that in the final analysis, Machiavelli fails to render the principles of managing the State as principles of historical intelligibility. Rather, he attributes this accomplishment to Boulainvillier, who bases his work on establishing a historico-political continuum between the conquering Franks, the administrative nobility of the Roman Gauls, and the Gaulish people. As Foucault states, "Boulainvillier makes what had until then been no more than State management's principle of rationality function as a principle for understanding history" (Foucault, Il faut defendre la Société, 152; Society Must Be Defended, 170), and "it is the use of the State's model of managerial rationality as a grid for the speculative understanding of history that establishes the historico-political continuum" (Ibid., 152; 171). Boulainvillier goes further than Machiavelli because his history aims to modify the relations of force, not just analyze or interpret them, and to make historical knowledge an element of the struggle it recounts and a weapon in the war it relates. In thus describing Boulainvillier's history, Foucault distinguishes it from what Machiavelli does with history, reminding us that in Machiavelli, "History simply records relations of force and the calculations to which they give rise" (Ibid., 150–51; 169). 22 Foucault defines raison d'État as a new form of governmental rationality that attempted to conceptualize the salvation of the state on its own, without reference to any outside or external principles of intelligibility (Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 257–58; Security, Territory, Population, 265–66). Given the very specific way Foucault describes the techniques of raison d'État in the similar and parallel analysis of these issues in the lecture "Omnes et singulatim" it is not surprising that he does not figure Machiavelli as an Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 178 Machiavelli himself, who here serves as a symbol for "the Prince's whims or laws."23 On the other side of this polemic, most of the proponents of raison d'État disavow Machiavelli because they view his problem as solely the calculation of the prince's interests.24 Thus, both the proponents and opponents of raison d'État reject Machiavelli, while at the same time using terms and relations that originate in and through him to conduct their arguments in this debate. Bacon and Machiavelli Foucault's final reference to Machiavelli occurs in the March 15, 1978 lecture.25 As Foucault develops his line of argument here, it is clear that due to the force of the debates that shape the reception of Machiavelli's works, even a sympathetic reader like Francis Bacon (1561– 1626) will read him through a problematic of population. In this lecture, Foucault describes how three features of pastoral government-salvation, obedience, and truth-relate to the newly emerging practices associated with raison d'État in the seventeenth century.26 Foucault links Bacon and Machiavelli by way of Bacon's reasoning on the phenomena of sedition and revolt in his essay, "Of Seditions and Troubles."27 Here again, Foucault portrays Machiavelli's concern as the problem of the Prince's relationship to the principality and the perpetual threat faced by the Prince of having that connection to the territory broken. Bacon similarly describes the possibility of sedition and riot as something that "belongs to the daily life of states, or at any rate belongs to the intrinsic virtualities of the state."28 However, Foucault shows that the focus has undergone a shift in Bacon and is no longer the fortunes of the sovereign, as it was for Machiavelli. For Bacon, the problem of sedition and unrest is intrinsic to the state itself, and its threat is an ever-present possibility even (and perhaps especially) in the midst of those periods of the greatest calm.29 In contrast, for Machiavelli, advocate, apologist, or practitioner of raison d'État. Concerning the techniques associated with raison d'État, Foucault emphasizes their specificity: "After all, in this regard at least, political practices resemble scientific ones. It's not 'reason in general' that is applied, but always a very specific type of rationality. What is striking here is that the rationality of state power was reflective and perfectly aware of its specificity. It was not tucked away in spontaneous, blind practices. And it was not some retrospective analysis that brought it to light. It was formulated especially in two sets of doctrine: raison d'État and theory of police" (Foucault, "'Omnes et singulatim' vers une critique de la raison politique" in Dits et écrits, II, 19761988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2000) 968-969; Foucault, "'Omnes et singuatim': Toward a Critique of Political Reason in Essential Works of Foucault, v. 3, Power (New York: New Press, 2000), 313–14. 23 Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 249; Security, Territory, Population, 244. 24 Ibid., 250; 245. 25 This lecture is the second in a series of three lectures that address the problems associated with the emergence of raison d'État. 26 Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 261; Security, Territory, Population, 267. 27 Ibid., 28 Ibid., 277; 271. 29 May describes this same notion as the resistance pole of the power/resistance relationship that emerges in Foucault. As May describes it, resistance for Foucault is a historical phenomenon-one that is not essentially linked to the notion of a permanent subject-and in a particular sense: "What Foucault wants to Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 179 "the people were essentially passive and naïve and had to be the instrument of the Prince or else they would be the instrument of the nobles."30 The real threat, according to Machiavelli, is posed by the nobles, due to their tendencies to scheme amongst themselves or form hostile military alliances with external powers. However, for Bacon, the threat to the stability of the state stems from the people and not from the nobles, since, on Bacon's account, it is relatively easy to secure oneself against the nobles: "The problem for government is not the Prince's rivals but the people, for, once again, the nobles are either bought or beheaded. They are close to the government whereas the people are both close and distant."31 Because the people are the primary source of an ever-present and ever-hidden possibility for sedition, knowing their belly and their mind is the principal responsibility of those who govern. While the prince in Machiavelli should take pains to appear just to the people and yet not strive to be just, for Bacon, those who govern need to be concerned with "what is really going on in the minds of the governed."32 Thus, even as Bacon acknowledges Machiavelli as his authority, the target of governance has shifted for him. Bacon is less concerned with forming means for securing the integrity of the territory than he is with articulating a strategy of intervention dependent on his conception of the people as a mass phenomenon. Although Bacon situates himself as following in Machiavelli's footsteps, his interpretation of Machiavelli has already moved beyond Machiavelli's concerns, which focused on securing the prince's relationship to the territory. In distinguishing the issues that motivated Machiavelli from the issues motivating the sixteenthand eighteenth-century movements and from later interpreters like Bacon, Foucault reaffirms his contention that the core issue for Machiavelli is that of preserving the Prince's relationship to his territory, where territory is defined as the sheer mass of surface occupied. In each case, Foucault contends that later interpreters of Machiavelli ultimately fail to engage the problem motivating the author of The Prince, which, according to Foucault, was the issue of territoriality. acknowledge with the concept of essential resistance is the permanent possibility of revolt. He wants to elicit the recognition that the contingencies of history by which we have achieved our present are precisely that- contingencies-which can be, and often are, struggled against and altered. Thus he finds resistance to be immanent to the power relationship, which makes every application of power a historical event and every constraining–constrained relationship a fragile balance" (Todd May, The Philosophy of Foucault (Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2006), 115). This understanding of history in Foucault bears an important resemblance to the event described in Machiavelli's Discorsi III.1 as the "return to beginnings" (riducere inverso principii loro), in which the apparent necessity of structures of governance is disclosed as contingent by an event in which the people's desire not to be dominated expresses itself as historical action. See Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli's Theory of Political Freedom (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), esp. Part I, Chs. 4–6, and Part III, Chs. 3–4. 30 Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 272; Security, Territory, Population, 351-352. 31 Ibid., 272, and 351-352. 32 Ibid. Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 180 Machiavelli and Territoriality The question then arises: Is the issue of territoriality as central to Machiavelli's analyses of princes' relationship to their principalities as Foucault claims? Does an examination of even his two most frequently cited texts, De Principatibus and the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio,33 support Foucault's line of interpretation? A careful examination of the issues in which the notion of territory figures prominently seems to uncover a version of Machiavelli that is at odds with the version articulated by Foucault in these lectures. For instance, the issue of territory figures prominently in Machiavelli's lengthy discussions of certain themes concerning the practical conduct of warfare. A good example is his discussion of the efficacy of fortresses.34 As fortresses provide a method for handling internal and external threats, one would expect Machiavelli's reasoning about them to indicate clearly whether or not they aid in securing the prince's territory. Machiavelli concludes that for the most part, fortresses are at best useless to the prince who employs them35 and at worst the principal cause of the reason behind the prince's loss of his state.36 Thus, when he describes the career of the Genoese fortress-the Codefà-built by Louis XII to hold Genoa securely, Machiavelli clearly states that it was indeed impregnable "by its site and by every other circumstance."37 Still, it was lost relatively quickly in 1512 when Ottaviano Fregoso 33 Niccolò Machiavelli, De Principatibus, in Niccolò Machiavelli (auth) and Mario Puppo (ed.), Opere politiche (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969), 43-181/Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by Harvey Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 2nd ed.); Niccolò Machiavelli, Discoursi, in Opere politiche (Florence: Le Monnier, 1969), 184-662/Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Hereafter cited as Principe and Discorsi respectively. 34 Principe XX and Discorsi II.24, II.25, III.27, and III.37. None of these passages affirm the effectiveness of fortresses for either princes or republics. Rather, fortresses are either unnecessary or harmful. As Machiavelli states at the close of the discussion of fortresses in Principe XX: "Therefore the best fortress there is, is not to be hated by the people, because although you may have fortresses, if the people hold you in hatred fortresses do not save you; for to people who have taken up arms foreigners will never be lacking to come to their aid" (Machiavelli, De Principatibus, 157–58; Machiavelli, The Prince, 87). See also Discorsi II.21 for a relevant discussion on the greater effectiveness of unseen rule for administering a conquered people. 35 Or of very limited and dubious utility: "If you make fortresses, they are useful in times of peace because they give you more spirit to do evil to them [the people], but they are very useless in times of war because they are assaulted by the enemy and by subjects; nor is it possible for them to put up resistance to both the one and the other" (Discorsi II.24: Machiavelli, Discoursi, 461; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 185). Fortresses would seem to offer genuine, though still limited, utility in one case: "Thus if a prince who has good armies has some fortress upon the seacoast at the frontier of his state that can stand up against the enemy for several days until he is in order, it would sometimes be a useful thing but is not necessary" (Discorsi II.24: ibid., 467; 189). 36 For Machiavelli, one of the causes that makes a prince believe he can be hated by his subjects is the possession of fortresses, since these "make you more audacious and more violent toward your subjects" (le ti fanno essere piú audace e piú violento ne' sudditi; Discorsi II.24: ibid, 461; 195). 37 Discorsi II.24: ibid, 464; 187. Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 181 laid siege to the fortress38 and then, having taken the fortress, promptly destroyed it. Machiavelli describes Fregoso's reasoning: Everyone believed and many people counseled that he should have preserved it as his refuge for any accident, but being very prudent he knew that not fortresses but the will of men [ma la volontà degli uomini] maintains princes in their states, and he ruined it. Thus founding his state not upon the fortress but upon his virtue and prudence, he has held and holds it [lo ha tenuto e tiene].39 Thus, Fregoso's policy accords with Machiavelli's evaluation of fortresses in general. At best they are of no value in securing and maintaining the integrity of the prince's territory. This quotation in fact suggests that there is another relationship at play, one more essential to princes than their relationship to the territory: the relationship of princes to the "will of men". Armi Proprie, Arms of One's Own This second theme-the relationship between princes and the "will of men"-is in fact one that Machiavelli emphasizes frequently throughout the Principe and the Discorsi when he reasons about whether it is better for princes to make use of the arms of others or arms of one's own. This theme even emerges as a frame for his discussion of the efficacy of fortresses. Thus, whether or not the prince continues to hold his territory despite having made use of fortresses depends on whether the prince has armed or disarmed his people. As Machiavelli states in Principe XX: There has never been, then, a new prince who has disarmed his subjects; on the contrary, whenever he has found them unarmed he has always armed them because, in arming them, those arms become yours [armandosi, quelle armi diventono tuo]; those become faithful whom you had under suspicion, and those who were faithful remain so; and from your subjects they are made your partisans.40 At least where the efficacy of fortresses is concerned, the relationship between the prince and his territory is dependent on whether or not the prince arms his subjects. Arming one's own subjects and having arms of one's own41 is a persistent theme of reflection in Machia- 38 Machiavelli describes Fregoso taking the fortress from the French by essentially starving them out over the course of 16 months (Discorsi II.24: ibid, 464; 187). 39 Discorsi II.24: ibid, 464; 187. 40 Principe XX: Machiavelli, De Principatibus, 153; Machiavelli, The Prince, 83; also Discorsi II.24: Machiavelli, Discoursi, 466-67; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 189. 41 To see that these two need not be the same, it is important to carefully follow Machiavelli's reasoning concerning the use of the "arms of others" (armi d'altri). For instance, on the effective management of the defects of mercenary forces, see Erwin, "A War of One's Own", British Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 18, no. 4 (2010), 558–70; also Christopher Lynch "War and Foreign Affairs in Machiavelli's Florentine Histories", The Review of Politics, vol. 74 (2012), esp. 15n32). Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 182 velli's writings.42 Many discussions of armed force in Machiavelli describe arms of one's own as the only genuine foundation for the prince's security.43 Fortresses undermine this project since they neither provide protection against the threat posed by one's own subjects nor are particularly useful against external threats. An organized invading army with effective captains will simply bypass fortresses in pursuit of strategic objectives.44 For Machiavelli, the most effective way of holding one's territory is to both arm one's own subjects and not be hated by them.45 The fundamental issue for Machiavelli surrounding the construction and employment of fortresses seems to lead us far away from Foucault's characterization of the relationship between the prince and his territory in Machiavelli. Concerning the efficacy of fortresses, the fundamental issue for Machiavelli is not how best to design or defend them, but rather the character of the relationship that holds 42 See, for instance, Principe, particularly Chs. VI, VIII, and X, but also XII, XIII, XIX, XX, and XXVI; Discorsi I.21, I.43, II.10, II.12, II.20; and Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe seguito da Dell'arte della guerra (Rome: Newton & Compton, 1998), Book I. 43 One could easily infer that having arms of one's own implies having men who are willing to lay down their lives for their country. But as Lynch states: "From this it might be inferred that the object of a prince is to get his soldiers to 'want to die for' him, and that the object for a republican captain is to get the soldiers under his command to want to die for the city or for the sake of the common good. [...] But to state an obvious point, it is killing, being able to kill, and seeming to be able to kill rather than dying that brings victory to the army and glory to the captain. The question [...] is not how to get men to want to die for their prince, city or country but how to 'keep them in the field' so that they can and will 'fight well' for their captain" (Christopher Lynch, "Interpretive Essay" in Christopher Lynch (ed. and trans.) and Niccolò Machiavelli (auth.), Art of War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 201). 44 Discorsi II.24: Machiavelli, Discoursi, 467-68; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 204. 45 However, it is not the case that both of these conditions must be met for a prince to be successful in this regard. For Machiavelli, it is entirely thinkable that a prince is free to disregard the people should he have the support of the soldiers, especially when the army constitutes a separate factor as an independent institution, dependent on neither the nobles nor the people. Thus, during his discussion of the challenges faced by the Roman emperors in Principe XIX (De contemptu et odio fugiendo), Machiavelli makes this point about the relationship that existed between the emperors and the soldiers: "For the people loved quiet, and therefore loved modest princes, and the soldiers loved princes with a military spirit who were insolent, cruel and rapacious. [...] And most of them [the emperors], especially those who came to the principate as new men, once they recognized the difficulty of these two diverse humors turned to satisfying the soldiers, caring little about injuring the people. This course was necessary; for since princes cannot fail to be hated by someone, they are at first forced not to be hated by the people generally; and when they cannot continue this, they have to contrive with all industry to avoid the hatred of those communities which are most powerful. And so those emperors who because they were new had need of extraordinary support stuck to the soldiers rather than the people" (Principe XIX: Machiavelli, De Principatibus, 144–45; Machiavelli, The Prince, 76). Machiavelli stipulates in the same chapter that both the sultan of the Ottomans, Selim I, and the sultan of the Mamelukes in Egypt made it their aim to satisfy their soldiers. In fact, the suggestion of this chapter is that any prince who "has armies joined together which are entrenched in the government and administration of provinces" (Principe XIX: Machiavelli, De Principatibus, 151; Machiavelli, The Prince, 81) might find himself similarly disposed to favor the soldiers at the people's cost. See also Discorsi III.24: Machiavelli, Discoursi, 583; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy 270. Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 183 between the prince and his people and whether and how the prince has already gone about composing forces of his own. Founding Cities This last line of argument is repeated and further developed with respect to another theme that is closely connected to issues of territory. In both the Principe and the Discorsi, Machiavelli directly reasons about territory and its qualities when he discusses the choice of a site in the founding of a city.46 Thus, in Discorsi I.1, Machiavelli clearly reasons that in the choice of the site and the ordering of the laws one can recognize the virtú of the founder. When selecting the territory for the future city, the founder is confronted with the dilemma of whether it is better to found the city on fertile or on sterile land. A sterile site would seem to be preferable because it forces men to be industrious. However, Machiavelli immediately counters that a sterile site is not the correct choice because men desire to command others and to expand their dominium. As he then concludes: Since men cannot secure themselves except with power [non potendo gli uomini assicurarsi se non con la potenzia], it is necessary to flee this sterility in a country and to settle in the most fertile places, where, since [the city] can expand because of the abundance of the site, it can both defend itself from whomever might assault it and crush anyone who might oppose its greatness.47 Machiavelli then retracts the apparent choice here by affirming that there really are no alternatives, since the virtuous founder would only select a fertile site for founding a city.48 However, choice of a fertile site would seem to destine the population to laziness, corruption, and discord.49 Therefore, the necessity of selecting a fertile site imposes yet another necessity on those who found and maintain cities. The remedy for problems caused by founding the city in a fertile location lies in the second feature that reveals the virtù of the founder: the ordering of the laws.50 As Machiavelli states, "As to the idleness that the 46 See, for instance, Principe XIV, Discorsi I.1, and Machiavelli, Il Principe seguito da Dell'arte della Guerra, VI). I am fundamentally in agreement with both Foucault and many commentators that for Machiavelli, the state is never the impersonal state but is always the state of someone or some group. As Mansfield describes this, "Stato in The Prince is used almost invariably in an exploitative sense: someone is almost always exploiting someone else by means of lo stato. It might be better to say that stato is such exploitation, and one might wish to avoid the anachronism exploitation and speak of domination (dominio) or mastery (signoria) or empire (imperio) as Machiavelli does. [...] Machiavelli's stato is someone's to acquire or to maintain. The state itself never acquires or maintains on its own account separate from the advantage of some group" (Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli's Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 290). 47 Discorsi I.1: Machiavelli, Discoursi, 195-96; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 8. 48 "And because men operate either by necessity or by choice and because one sees there to be greater virtue where choice has less authority" (Discorsi I.1: ibid., 195; 8). 49 Discorsi I.1: ibid., 195–97; 8–9. 50 Machiavelli mentions the care taken by the Egyptian king and the Ottoman sultan to develop laws and institutions precisely to counter the negative effects of a fertile territory. See Discorsi I.1: ibid., 196; 9. Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 184 site might bring, the laws should be ordered to constrain it by imposing such necessities as the site does not provide."51 Thus, the founder's attention must move quickly from the selection of a site to what would seem to be clearly extraterritorial considerations: the foundation of the city with good laws without which the choice of the site-sterile or fertile- would be for naught. And yet, as Machiavelli's argument progresses, it becomes clear that what determines the "goodness of the laws" has less to do with the prevention of vices engendered by the quality of the land than with the development of certain features that will enable the city to resist the effects of historical change.52 The foundation, modes, and orders of the city are not to be arranged with the aim of protecting a carefully chosen and defended territory from potential attack, but neither are they necessarily to be arranged with the sole aim of increasing fairness, justice, or even equality in the city.53 They are to be arranged with an aim toward the city's expansion.54 Machiavelli cites the examples of Sparta and Venice, which were both ruined by the acquisitions they had made because they were not ordered for the eventuality of their success and the expansion of their dominion over others.55 For Machiavelli, the failure of Venice lay in the fact that those who governed did not employ the people in war; and the failure of Sparta lay in the fact that the governors did not open their city to expansion with foreigners.56 Rome did both, and for this reason was able to easily hold its acquisitions when it began to expand.57 Based on the Roman policy of employ- 51 Discorsi I.1: ibid, 195; 8; see also I.3: ibid., 206; 15; I.4: ibid., 208; 16. 52 For Machiavelli, it is clear that cities-whether they are principalities or republics-can owe their laws and institutions to one founder in the way that Sparta was founded by Lycurgus. The case of Rome offers another model entirely. Rome was noteworthy not because it had a single founder, but rather because, though it began with imperfect laws, the circumstances of its subsequent history caused it to restructure itself in the way Machiavelli considers most capable of carrying out the necessity of expansion. In a strong sense, Rome's history-the interplay of events, institutions, and laws-was its foundation. See Discorsi I.2: ibid., 204–205; 14. 53 As Machiavelli states in the midst of this discussion: "But since all things of men are in motion and cannot stay steady, they must either rise or fall; and to many things that reason does not bring you, necessity brings you. So that when a republic that has been ordered so as to be capable of maintaining itself does not expand, and necessity leads it to expand, this would come to take away its foundations and make it come to ruin sooner" (Discorsi I.6: ibid., 218–19; 23; also Discorsi II.3: ibid., 385–86; 134). 54 In different places, Machiavelli understands this expansion in terms of the acquisition of both territory and people, but the emphasis is on those who are conquered. Thus, in contrast to Venice and Sparta, Roman victories brought territorial expansion only because previously conquered peoples served as external matter for swelling the ranks of Rome's citizens. This happened because Rome's laws and institutions left open pathways for the conquered to acquire citizenship. See Discorsi II.3: ibid., 384–85; 134; II.4: ibid., 387– 88; 136; II.23: ibid., 456–57; 182. 55 See Principe XII; Discorsi I.6. For a different reason why the Venetian strategy did not prevail, see Principe XX: Machiavelli, De Principatibus, 154-55; Machiavelli, The Prince, 84. 56 Discorsi I.6; II.3: Machiavelli, Discoursi, 385-86; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 134; II.4: ibid., 387–88; 136. 57 As he states, this "gave the plebs strength, increase and infinite opportunities for tumult" (Discorsi I.6: ibid., 214–15; 21). Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 185 ing Roman citizens in war and even offering conquered populations the chance to become citizens, Machiavelli's version of republican Rome displays multiple lines of reasoning that directly address the relationship of the prince to the people.58 However, in order to employ the population in this way, the laws and institutions of Rome had to be organized to allow for disturbances caused by a population both trained for war and constantly growing.59 In fact, Machiavelli attributes the goodness of Rome's laws and institutions to the fact that for a time, they opened up a space where the demands and accusations of the common people could be heard. According to Machiavelli's analysis, Rome's organization allowed it to vent the conflict all cities experience, constituted as they are, through the perpetual conflict of the two groups Machiavelli identifies as the basis of all political organizations: the common people and the great. Machiavelli locates the ultimate organizing principle of all states in this fundamental conflict of princes and peoples.60 As he states, If one considers the end of the nobles [nobili] and the not-nobles [ignobili], one will see in the former a great desire to dominate and in the latter only the desire not to be dominated [solo desiderio di non essere dominati], and thus a greater will to live freely [maggiore volontà di vivere liberi].61 While Machiavelli defines princes through their desire for rule, he consistently defines the people, both in the Principe and the Discorsi, through their desire for no-rule.62 However, by understanding princes and peoples as being different in this respect and, through that difference, perpetually in conflict,63 Machiavelli makes it the principal task of the princes of the 58 For Machiavelli, the principality and the republic are not as distinct as has been argued by some commentators. As Sullivan and Scott state, and I agree: "Not only does he insist on calling the leading men of the republic 'Princes', but he shows how the devious maneuverings of these leading men kept the mass of citizens from exercising control in the regime (Discorsi, I.47-48, III.11). Moreover he shows how a republic can overcome the problem, endemic and dangerous to republics, that of slowness to act (Discorsi, I.59, III.6) by infusing itself with the resoluteness, even the despotic character, of princely regimes (Discorsi, III.1). Machiavelli does not consider princes and republics to be completely separate or to be contradictory in nature" (Vickie Sullivan, and John Scott, "Patricide and the Plot of the Prince: Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli's Italy", American Political Science Review, vol. 88, no. 4 (1994), 897). See also Discorsi I.2 on the relationship between principality and the "natural" cycle of governments experienced by all republics. 59 As Machiavelli concludes, if the population was to be ordered in a way that allowed it to expand, it was no longer possible to govern it in the manner of a Venice or a Sparta, where the issue of territory in the case of Venice and the good ordering of laws in the case of the code handed down by Lycurgus were key for determining how both of these cities in fact came to be governed (Discorsi I.6: Machiavelli, Discoursi, 216-17; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 22–3). 60 See Discorsi I.5, I.16, I.55; Principe IX; and Niccolò Machiavelli, Istorie Fiorentine e altre opere storiche e politiche (Torino: UTET, 2007), I.12, III.1, IV.1. 61 Discorsi I.5: Machiavelli, Discoursi, 213-15; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 17–19. 62 See Vatter, Between Form and Event, 94–95. 63 As Lefort states, "The reversal of perspectives does not authorize us to judge that only the second one is legitimate. It is only necessary for us to agree that all society is divided into rulers and ruled and that the Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 186 state-whether a principality or a republic-to consistently secure the people to the ongoing projects through which the state reconstitutes and augments the effectiveness of its modes and orders.64 Insofar as the people are essentially defined by a psychologically constitutive humor [umore]-their desire not to be ruled-a significant portion of the projects, modes, and orders of the prince(s) of the state must be deployed to secure the people to its projects.65 Because the people are in a very real sense a variable in the projects of those who rule, they are in a position to threaten them simply by virtue of the possibility of denying their support.66 exterior signs of liberty cover over a de facto inequality, whose consequences lend themselves to multiple arrangements" (Claude Lefort, Le travail de l'oeuvre Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 496). 64 Althusser clearly articulates the degree to which the army as a national institution is central to this project of securing the people to the state: "We find that the forms of recruitment and organization of the army have, for their effect, rendered the end interior to the army itself [de rendre la fin intérieure a l'armée elle-même], and that the realization of the army is already in itself the realization of the end. It is not only that the mean is not external to the end, but the end is internal to the mean, since the people that the state assigns the end of uniting and expanding the state-the army of Machiavelli with its popular recruitment, its amalgam of town and country, its supremacy of infantry over calvary-this same army has already formed and united the people by the very fact of its being constituted. The army is able to be a political means only if it is already the realized form of this politics. The sole existence of Machiavelli's army is something entirely other than a means for resolving a problem: it is already the solution of this problem. Therewith, Machiavelli affirms by this remarkable proposition that the required means to resolve a problem must already be in themselves [Machiavel affirme par là cette proposition remarquable que les moyens propres à résoudre un problème doivent déjà être en soi]. On the political level, this position takes the following paradoxical form: the army, which is force in the state-and as such can be contrasted with forms of consent or distinguished from them-is not only a force. It is also at the same time an institution that acts socially and politically on the spirit of the soldiers and the people, and, in doing so, is an institution that forms consent. The military apparatus simultaneously exercises an ideological function [L'appareil militaire exerce en même temps une fonction idéologique]. Ideology thus figures in the army as the other means of power for the Prince" (Louis Althusser, Machiavel et nous (Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2009), 156). 65 The necessity for this becomes apparent if we recall here that no limiting or restraining factor can be identified within the humors [umori] themselves. Thus, Sfez locates the nature of humors in a compulsion to disequilibrium as a kind of excess: "Irrepressible, the humor is a tendency toward disequilibrium and ceaselessly puts to an incessant test the loss of all equilibrium [l'humeur déséquilibre et expose à l'épreuve incessante de la perte de tout équilibre], although to speak of the political relation in terms of humors is to speak of them in terms of the search for an equilibrium in disequilibrium [la recherche d'un équilibre dans le déséquilibre]" (Gérald Sfez, Machiavel, la politique du moindre mal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 209–10). See Discorsi I.46. 66 Philip Pettit makes a strong argument for a notion of nondomination as a third alternative to the republican notions of freedom as noninterference and freedom as self-mastery that has a strong resemblance to the notion of freedom here described by Machiavelli. In fact, Pettit cites these passages in Machiavelli for a notion of freedom as noninterference but also, more importantly, as articulating a notion of freedom as nondomination, conceived as the opposite of slavery. See Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Ch. 1, esp. Secs. III and IV. Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 187 Thus, Rome was ordered for expansion and not for civic harmony67 because its modes and institutions were organized to allow Rome's people-foreign and native, soldier and citizen-to vent their desire for no rule within the political space. Rome's success did depend on the ordering of its laws; however, the main aim was not to order this city's laws with an eye toward ruling it with greater justice, especially if such justice would involve an appeal to an objective, normative standard.68 According to Machiavelli's argument, the main objective for the organization of the laws and institutions of Rome was to increase freedom and expand the city.69 Foucault and the Conflict of Peoples and Princes Having examined these themes relating to territory and the people in Machiavelli, we should now be on firmer ground to examine once again Foucault's reading of him: Was Rome's organization simply for the sake of increasing the security of the prince vis-à-vis his territory? The lines of reasoning we have now followed would seem to indicate that this is not the case for Machiavelli. Rather, the Roman republic was organized as it was for the sake of preserving and increasing freedom, not security. This organization around freedom reflects back on the issue of territoriality in two ways. First, Machiavelli subordinates issues connected to the territory itself-i.e., the site-to the relationship between the princes of the city and its people. Thus, the choice of a sterile site would be a worthy one if "men were content to live off their own and did not wish to seek to command others."70 Because the ruling element composing states seeks to vent an ambition to command, while the people seek to enjoy security, their conflict creates an internal necessity for the city to be disposed to exceed its territorial limits. Here Machiavelli clearly subordinates issues of territoriality to the perpetual conflict of the umori constituting all states. Although Foucault bases his interpretation of Machiavelli on the relationship of the prince to his principality, he con- 67 See Lynch "War and Foreign Affairs in Machiavelli's Florentine Histories", 22–23). 68 Interestingly enough, Foucault gives a very succinct description of this conflict during the January 21st lecture: "A binary structure traverses society, and you see appear there something I will try to return to and which is very important. The great pyramidal description that the Middle Ages or the philosophical– political theories gave of the social body, the great image of the organism or the human body given by Hobbes, or even the ternary organization (in three orders) that prevailed in France (and up to a certain extent in a number of other countries in Europe) and which continued to articulate a certain number of discourses or, in any case, most institutions, a binary conception of society [une conception binaire de la société]. There are two groups, two categories of individuals, two armies present. [...] And beneath the lapses of memory, the illusions, and the lies that would have us believe that there is a ternary order, a pyramid of subordinations, beneath the lies that would have us believe that the social body is governed by either natural necessities or functional demands, we must rediscover the war that is still going on, war with all its accidents and incidents". And, as Foucault concludes, for this type of discourse the state would be nothing other than the way these two groups continue to conduct this war but, since it occurs within the modes and orders of the state, they conduct it peacefully (Foucault, Il faut defendre la Société, 44; Society Must Be Defended, 51). 69 See Discorsi I.2, I.4, I.6, I.40: esp. 313–14; 87; also II.1: esp. 372–73; 126. 70 Discorsi I.1: ibid., 195–96; 8. Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 188 ceives this relationship in terms of singularity, externality, and transcendence.71 Machiavelli's theory of the conflict of the umori, in both the Principe and the Discorsi, does describe a relationship of the prince (or princes) to the principality, but one that is better described as immanent than as transcendent, given that the very character of princes and peoples springs from this conflict.72 This aspect of Machiavelli's reasoning is clearly absent in Foucault's description of the reception of Machiavelli's works in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The second way that the organization around freedom relates to the issue of territoriality stems from the fact that for Machiavelli, it is not possible for a city to remain the same indefinitely.73 The historical expresses, fundamentally, an openness to the aleatory, unpredictable consequences and effects being drawn, on the one hand, from the perpetual internal conflict constitutive of all states and, on the other, from those 'external' events that augment and modify the relationships of the groups that make up this conflict.74 Thus, for Machiavelli, it was important that Rome be ordered for expansion-and not for stability- 71 These features would seem to characterize Foucault's reading not only when Foucault develops the arguments of writers like Innocent Gentillet and Guillaume de la Perrière in the February 1st lecture but also earlier, in the January 25th lecture, where Foucault would appear to be discussing his own reading of Machiavelli. 72 Note here Pasquino: "It could be pointed out that the civil war of the Roman republic, which Machiavelli praised in his Discourses, is not just a secret or hidden war, it is a war with neither dead or weapons; and it is for this reason, moreover, that the Florentine secretary praises it. But one could also point out that it is for this very same reason that the discourse of war that Foucault attempted to analyze during his 1976 course is situated after all, outside of political discourse, for the discourse of politics must be able to join conflict and the order, peace, and security of the members of the city" (Pasquino, "Political Theory of War and Peace", 82–83). 73 Foucault acknowledges his awareness of this aspect of Machiavelli's thought, however briefly, in the January 18th lecture: "Le responsable politique dans l'antiquité gréco-romaine, au Moyen Âge, jusqu'a Napoléon compris et peut-être meme au-delà, joue avec la mauvaise fortune et, Machiavel l'a montré, il y a toute une série de règles de jeu par rapport à la mauvaise fortune" (Foucault, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, 33; Security, Territory, Population, 31). 74 As Vatter states, "Whether the [revolutionary] changes have internal or external causes, in no case does the political and legal order control their advent: the return to beginnings is something that 'happens' to the state and the state has no control over these events" (Vatter, Between Form and Event, 255). Vatter argues that Machiavelli's state is an effect of the conflict of the umori, and, as such, there exists neither within it nor in relation to it an independent, transcendent vantage point. As Del Lucchese reads Vatter on this point: "Machiavelli situates human existence and activities in the relational and conflictual field of the relation between virtù and fortune. As Vatter correctly contends, this dynamic is inexhaustible not because of the ontological 'consistency' of virtù and its prevalence on and against fortuna, but because of their common contingent character [è inesauribile non tanto per la 'consistenza' onotologica della virtù e la sua prevalenza 'su' e 'contro' la fortuna, quanto per il loro comune carattere contingente]. Virtùand fortuna do not pre-exist their encounter [riscontro], but they exist only in and through the conflicts that determine the field of these human actions" (Filippo Del Lucchese, "La città divisa: Esperienza del conflitto e novità politica in Machiavelli", in Filippo Del Lucchese, Luca Sartorello, and Stefano Visentin (eds.), Machiavelli: Immaginazione e contingenza (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2006), 25). See also del Lucchese's treatment of this theme, in Filippo Del Lucchese, Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza (New York: Continuum, 2009), esp. in Chs. 4 and 5. Foucault Studies, No. 19, pp. 172-190. 189 because of the unforeseen historical imperatives that would emerge for which no prudent founder could provide. Territory played its part in Rome's imperial formula, but this was subordinate to the way Rome's modes and orders opened, for a time, a space of freedom through which an armed, ordered, and growing population could vent its desire not to be ruled. Conclusion But finally, given the analysis in this paper, have there emerged any compelling strategic reasons why Foucault might have interpreted Machiavelli in the way that he does?75 One effect of Foucault's approach to the traditions that received and transmitted Machiavelli is that it allows him to describe the theoretical movements associated with les arts de gouverner in the sixteenth century and raison d'État in the eighteenth century in a way that interestingly precludes any importance Machiavelli might have had for the intentions and concerns of these later authors. This allows Foucault to highlight the histories of other practices and techniques of governance-such as the pastoral techniques he introduces in the February 22nd lecture and the relationship he uncovers between pastoral government and the practices associated with raison d'État in the lectures of March 8th and 15th. These alternative histories are otherwise suppressed because of the role Machiavelli generally plays in discussions of the transition between Renaissance and early modern political thought.76 However, there also emerges a compelling common thread between the two authors. The primary focus of Machiavelli's reasoning is not the relationship of princes to their territories, but rather the relationship between princes and peoples. As Foucault's critique of Machiavelli's reception by the sixteenthand eighteenthcentury movements makes clear, it is deeply questionable whether Machiavelli even concerns himself with developing rules for achieving the security of a sovereign who is situated in some sense external to the regime and is therefore perpetually confronted with the necessity of securing his relationship to the 75 An important direction for further inquiry here, and one that exceeds this current study, would involve following up on the resemblance that Foucault's reading of the tradition associated with raison d'État- and his criticism of it-bears to Carl Schmitt's criticism of Friedrich Meinecke's reading of Machiavelli as essentially reducible to the doctrine of raison d'État. On the relationship between Foucault's reading of Machiavelli and its relationship to the works of both Schmitt and Meinecke, see Barthas, "Machiavelli in Political Thought from the Age of Revolutions to the Present", esp. 261; and Barthas, L'argent n'est pas le nerf de la guerre, esp. 5–37. 76 Michel Senellart describes the effect of Foucault's critique in just these terms: "Mais on peut encore, me semble-t-il, effectuer un pas de plus, et c'est là que l'interprétation foucauldienne de la problématique du Prince, toute sommaire et partiale que'elle soit, me paraît également très stimulante. Réduire l'oeuvre de Machiavel au Prince et ce dernier à la seule question-centrale, certes, mais liée à tout un réseau d'autres thèmes-de la domination du prince sur un territoire acquis ou conquis, n'est-ce pas ramener cette oeuvre au point le plus proche de la non-existence pure et simple? [...] Car il ne s'agit plus ici de contester l'originalité de Machiavel-point de vue qui peut s'argumenter de diverses façons-, mais de reconstituer, sans lui, la genèse de la pensée politique moderne-position, quant à elle, proprement insoutenable" (Senellart, "Machiavel à l'épreuve de la gouvernmentalité", 219–20). Erwin: Foucault's Reading of Machiavelli 190 people against an alterity arising from both foreign and domestic threats. This formulation places too great a distance between princes and those they govern. Upon close examination of Machiavelli's principal texts that are relevant to the themes discussed by Foucault, the immediacy of princes to peoples springs from the fold formed by the difference between the qualities of the umori. For Machiavelli, this difference-unstable and porous-between those who desire to dominate and those who desire not to be dominated is immanent to the political. No matter how venerable and established they are, the modes, orders, laws, and institutions of political communities do not cancel or suspend this difference as they reorder it, for a time, into peaceful, but shifting, channels of conflict.77 For Machiavelli, this fold of the umori engenders both the nature of the state and the kinds of strategies and tactics it employs to respond to fortuna. Understood from this perspective, there would seem to open a clear space where the works of Foucault and Machiavelli overlap, in the theme of historically generated political technique(s). 78 Sean Erwin Barry University Serwin@barry.edu 77 See note 68 above. 78 As Holden and Stuart make clear: "Although almost all of the readings of his work from this time are critical, and aim to dispute various aspects of that privileged text The Prince, something of Machiavelli's work continues. That something is precisely this question of political technique" (Holden, and Elden, "'It Cannot be a Real Person'", 15).