Carl Mitcham makes the case for Leo Strauss’s importance as a theorist of technology whose work complements thinkers like Bernard Stiegler and others in philosophy of technology and science and technology studies. His main argument is that a political philosophy of technology follows from the core elements of Strauss’s unique analysis of modernity. Importantly, he adapts Strauss’s “cave within a cave” image to encapsulate the interventionist origins and subsequent artificiality of modernity, and, thus, helps us to see why a “Tractatus (...) Politico-Technologicus” can usefully make common cause with contemporary philosophy of technology. (shrink)

This article is a close reading of Edward Said’s image of the intellectual and offers a critique and restatement of that image. Said characterizes the intellectual in contrast to two other images:...

In this article we investigate the value and utility of Machiavelli’s work for Community-Based Natural Resource Management. We made a selection of five topics derived from literature on NRM and CBNRM: Law and Policy, Justice, Participation, Transparency, and Leadership and management. We use Machiavelli’s work to analyze these topics and embed the results in a narrative intended to lead into the final conclusions, where the overarching theme of natural resource management for the common good is considered. Machiavelli’s focus on practical (...) realities produces new, sometimes unsettling, insights. We conclude that this focus helps to understand the development and performance of management regimes and their consequences and that institutional design should be seen as an ongoing process, which requires a constant adaptation of these institutions. (shrink)

This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions (...) of this subject have not systematically done. In part iii, focusing upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touching on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and the early Wittgenstein—we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas, nearly-contemporary with Galileo’s mathematization of physics and carried forwards by Kant’s critical philosophy and account of the substanceless subject of apperception. In different terms than Slavoj Žižek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried, at the same time as it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which thinking and being could be the same. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 9, Page 1247-1276, November 2022. Classical leadership models have insistently reinforced the notion of leader-centric rule. Business models focus on strong leadership, definitive decision-making and charismatic figures. Authoritarian leadership is the foundation upon which other models are based. However, the adoption of Charismatic Leadership and Great Man theory puts into relief the tendency within democratic rule towards fascist and populist ideology. Many leading philosophers and political scientists lend support to authoritarian rule. This tendency (...) is not always apparent in democratic theory, indeed it is counter-intuitive, but from a critical perspective, we are forced to ask whether there is not something within democracy which invites authoritarianism and harbours the seed of fascism. (shrink)

Analisaremos o comentário produzido por Leo Strauss a partir dos textos de Maquiavel no livro Thoughts on Machiavelli. Com base na crítica do método de leitura e escrita dos textos filosóficos de Strauss, podemos perceber que a operação interpretativa de Strauss consiste na construção de uma nova figuração do velho maquiavelismo que assaltou a obra de Maquiavel desde que passou a ser censurada pelos padres. A enunciação da tese de que o ensinamento de Maquiavel é diabólico consiste apenas no traço (...) mais superficial e evidente da interpretação teológica de Strauss, pois sob a sua nova figuração do “maquiavelismo” podemos ver ao fundo o seu projeto de destruição da filosofia moderna para insinuar uma certa e determinada filosofia contemporânea como se fosse o reestabelecimento da filosofia política clássica. (shrink)

Modern honor appears to be distinguished by two contradictory impulses, a neglect or even disdain of honor, and an ambition to elevate and promote it as dignity, self-esteem, and recognition. The article argues that these tensions can be traced to a foundational difference regarding the political importance of the passion of honor, evident in the seminal and contending formulations by Machiavelli and Hobbes. In recovering and articulating the bases of these competing modern conceptions of honor and tracing the influence of (...) their divergent trajectories, the article seeks to show the importance of honor for understanding contemporary politics. (shrink)

This article revisits the long-standing question of the relations between ethics and politics in Machiavelli’s work, assessing its relevance to the ‘liberalism of fear’ in particular in the work of Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and also John Dunn. The article considers ways in which Machiavelli has been a ‘negative’ resource for liberalism – for instance, as a presumed proponent of tyranny; but also ways in which even for the liberalism of fear he might be considered a ‘positive’ resource, above all (...) around the issues of political necessity and prudential judgement. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar las menciones y usos que realiza Nicolás Maquiavelo de la figura de Moisés en Il principe y en los Discorsi. Maquiavelo realiza un particular tratamiento que es necesario seguir de cerca: es a partir de su análisis que podemos encontrar insumos para interrogar cómo operan los liderazgos en la obra maquiaveliana y cómo los líderes interactúan con el pueblo a través de un círculo pasional que se genera entre ambos. A estos efectos, procederemos en (...) este artículo del siguiente modo: en primer lugar, restableceremos secuencialmente las menciones a Moisés en la obra de Maquiavelo. Solo una vez proporcionada esta reconstrucción nos dirigiremos al tratamiento de los ejes temáticos que resultan relevantes -la ausencia de la religión en Moisés, la crueldad, la tensión entre virtud y fortuna, y la relación entre líder y pueblo- con el fin de pensar la innovación teórica que estos ejemplos ilustran. (shrink)

Although Machiavelli would appear to be only a minor figure in Foucault's genealogy of modernity, this article examines his 1977–1978 lectures at the Collège de France and argues that the author of The Prince plays a pivotal role in the development of ‘governmental reason’ and its critique. These lectures indicate how The Prince serves as the negative touchstone for the emergence of an extensive and evolving discourse on government, confirming that Machiavelli was more than a passing interest for Foucault. I (...) consider two ‘Anti-Machiavellian’ episodes in Foucault's genealogy as especially significant: the sixteenth-century discourses of the state and the eighteenth-century discourses of political economy. These moments are significant both in showing how the idea of government hinges on a repudiation of the political lessons of The Prince and in establishing the link between governmentality and another term so important for Foucault's thinking in this period – biopower. Finally, I show how the art of critique – or, what Foucault describes as ‘the art of not being governed quite so much’ – finds a timely resource in the figure of Machiavelli. (shrink)

This essay interprets Machiavelli’s famous letter to Francesco Vettori in terms of a play-element that runs across his works. The letter to Vettori is a masterpiece of epistolary form, but beyond its most memorable passage, where Machiavelli recounts his evening in study, it has not received much scholarly attention. Reading the letter in its entirety is to discover Machiavelli’s account of an eclectic political education and the pleasures of playing with others. Machiavelli’s letter speaks to a basic ludicity in his (...) political thinking, in which play is not opposed to the serious, and diverse play forms can be thought together. Hans-George Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, and Roger Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games provide resources for reconstructing this play-element in Machiavelli’s thought. (shrink)

Abstract: How can the decisions of “autonomous” individuals provide a rationale for freedom and self-governance if a mechanical and causal sense of the self leads us to question the foundational nature of the individual? If most of our decisions originate in brain function below the level of consciousness, we live in a virtual world produced by mechanisms outside our control, arising from transparent self-models of which we are not aware. “Opacity,” the gift of not perceiving directly, of not automatically believing (...) what we are experiencing, is precisely what makes it possible for us to question our first-person perspectives. While we do not have direct access to the mechanisms that give rise to our sense of ourselves, our investigation can make it possible for us to analyze and understand those very mechanisms consciously. The deployment of that knowledge in the act of decision making and the infinite regress of interacting conscious individuals underlies our existential freedom. (shrink)

The starting point of this article is that there is a kind of ‘hidden dialogue’ that Claude Lefort is trying to conduct with Leo Strauss on the theologico-political problem. If Strauss claims this problem to be ‘irresolvable’, Lefort seeks to show that the ‘permanence of the theologico-political’ in modernity is only an appearance, as democracy has, in the last instance, succeeded in ‘cutting’ the knot tied between the theological and the political in pre-modern societies. Moreover, while Strauss associates recognition of (...) the irresolvable character of the theologico-political problem with moderation, Lefort takes the exact opposite view, insisting on the lack of moderation, even excess, that weighs particularly on modern politics consequent to any attempt to amalgamate the theological with the political. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What are the sources of political myths? Useful starting points for answering this question can be found in the fiction of Cervantes and the political philosophies of Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Leo Strauss. These writers, who sought to defuse clashes of custom and of religion, emphasized the need to pay attention to the consequences of false belief, without lapsing into cynicism. In this, they were the ultimate idealists, whose insights might temper the dogmas of the modern ideologue.

In this study I provide a thematic comparison of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to suggest that the representation of the ethical in Fear and Trembling is transparently Kantian. At times I draw on Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Conflict of the Faculties, and The Metaphysics of Morals to offer a comprehensive account of Kant’s ethical theory. Both philosophers hold profoundly important positions within the milieu of ethics, however (...) they have always shared a tenuous and at times negative relationship. In this study, I challenge such commentators by showing that when the figure of Abraham is taken typologically and excluded from the text, what emerges from Fear and Trembling is a Kantian based ethics. I argue that a comparative reading of Kant’s Groundwork and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling reveals that Kierkegaard’s thought gravitates towards three central principles of Kant’s categorical imperative, as well sharing some similarities with Kant’s understanding of duty. (shrink)

At Discorsi II.20, Machiavelli defines auxiliary arms as those, “whom a prince or a republic send captained and already paid for, for your aid.” My contention is that Machiavelli’s treatment of auxiliary arms is much more nuanced than it may seem at first glance. Throughout his works, Machiavelli articulates this type of force from the standpoint of the prince but also, surprisingly, from the standpoint of the people. In their princely employment, auxiliary arms act instrumentally as means for the projection (...) of power. However, analyzed from the standpoint of the people, auxiliary force exposes the projects of the state to the radically aleatory. Acknowledging the aspectival function played by the definition of auxiliaries in Machiavelli’s texts offers a new vantage point for re-reading Machiavelli on the nature of authority, power and the conflict of the umori. (shrink)

Coll clearly advocates the Aristotelian notion that "moral principles are ultimately realized only in specific acts which human beings choose to carry out." He cites Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill as examples of leaders whose moral wisdom in political reasoning led to a statecraft explicitly derived from prudence.

This work focuses on the reading and analysis of the work of Nicholas Machiavelli made by the Argentinian historian José Luis Romero in several of his historical and historiographical writings. It attends, particularly, to the assessment that Romero has made of the famous Florentine thinker as historian. From this perspective, it will be studied the impact of the Machiavellian work on the thought and intellectual work of the Argentinian academician. This work seeks to show that Machiavelli was, for the aforementioned (...) author of the 20th Century, a source of inspiration, a master in the analysis of “the real reality” and an example of commitment to public affairs. However, Machiavelli's work entailed a strong warning for him: there must be proper balance between academic rigor and political com­mitment, between the historian's own claim to truth and the citizen's ideological position. (shrink)

Bringing continental sensibilities and skill to his project, David Janssens has abandoned the line of defense heretofore used by North American intellectuals to shield Leo Strauss from criticism: Janssens wastes no time trying to prove Strauss was a liberal democrat, frankly admits his atheism, and emphasizes the continuity and European origins of his thought. Nevertheless committed to defending Strauss even at his most vulnerable points, Janssens is compelled to anchor his new defensive position on a misreading of what he calls (...) "an inconspicuous footnote" in Philosophie und Gesetz (1935). (shrink)

The paper contains interpretation and comparative analysis of Machiavelli’s and Kant’s conceptions on rationality as two prime examples of “realist” and “idealist” modes of agency. Kantian model of rationality is viewed as an augmentation of the Machiavellian one, not an opposition to it. To elaborate the point, Robert Aumann’s model of act-rationality and rulerationality is applied to the two philosophical models. Kantian practical reason is interpreted as an addition to Aumann’s instrumental rationality, providing rules for rules, or “rule-rule-rationality”.

The aim of this article is to analyze La Mandragola di Niccolò Machiavelli and in particular the character of Lucretia, the female protagonist of the play. We will try to demonstrate that Machiavelli’s Mandragola exceeds the literary record and contains its own theoretical-political potential. For this purpose, we will first restore the textual mentions of Lucretia and analyze what Machiavelli says about her. Secondly, we will briefly focus on the Roman legend of Lucretia, as it appears in Tito Livio’s account (...) in order to illuminate the uniqueness of the Machiavellian Lucretia. Finally, we will outline the conclusions. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss were contemporary with each other; they shared courses, readings and taught at the same universities. Their lives were also affected by the same historical events, both tried to understand the crisis of Modernity, and the same thinkers and philosophical ideas influenced their works. However, their conclusions differ completely and understanding both their coincidences and their differences can illuminate not only the specificities of two of the most important works of political thought of last century, but (...) also some of the political and theoretical alternatives of our time. Thus, this work aims to show some of the most significant coincidences and differences of Arendt and Strauss, particularly those related to their understandings of the crisis of their time and its consequences. (shrink)

During the Cold War and especially after the failure of Stalinism, Althusser tried to give a contribution to build up a new Marxism by the production of an original "theory of ideology". The result was the draft of a new political philosophy: the so-called "aleatory materialism" that is a philosophy of contingency (or a philosophy of the un-necessary). Using at the same time Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx, Althusser proposed an explanation of the birth of society and State with reference neither (...) to the doctrine of natural law nor to contractualism. In the althusserian theory, the ideology (persuasion without constraint) is necessary in order to interpellate the individuals into subjects. But the ideology can fail because the class struggle is aleatory in its effects. So, beyond every kind of functionalism, a revolution is always possible starting from a deviation (clinamen), that may be the prelude of a structural yielding and so an occasion to transform the old structures or to construct something totally new. (shrink)