Slade, Two Versions of Political Philosophy PDF

Francis Slade
9 Two Versions of Political Philosophy

Teleology and the Conceptual Genesis of
the Modern State
Introduction
“[T]he substitution of a natural claim or right in place of a natural law,
the substitution of will for law, as the starting point of a political phi-
losophy . . . [c]ontrasted with the ‘classical and theological tradition’ . . .
is certainly new.” To this observation Michael Oakeshott adds the fol-
lowing: “And the modern concept of sovereignty which sprang from this
new starting point involves perhaps the greatest revolution that has been
in Western European political philosophy.”1 My remarks comment on
this new starting point and the concept of sovereignty that sprang from
it. Their theme is the conceptual genesis of the state. From this perspec-
tive they could bear the title “Machiavelli’s New Form.” The connection
between sovereignty/state, and the theme of this lecture series, “Natural
Law,” is the term end/telos. Natural law presupposes the ontological pri-
ority of ends, teleology in the proper sense of the term, and it is the repu-
diation of end in the sense of telos, foundational for all modern philoso-
phy, that makes possible the conception of state/sovereign. The versions
of political philosophy to which the title refers are the version that thinks
about political life in the light of the ontological priority of ends and the
version which does not, the political philosophy of natural right, or the
1. Michael Oakeshott, “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes,” in Hobbes on Civil Association (In-
dianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1975), 156–57.
235
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236 Francis Slade
rights of man, modern political philosophy. Different as these versions

are they share a common characteristic of great importance for political
philosophy. They, each of them, possess political specificity.
The rejection of teleology is usually discussed in terms of the origins
of modern natural science. It is said that “[t]he problem of the origin of
mathematical physics is the crucial problem of modern history and mod-
ern thought,”2 that “[t]he core of modernity is mathematical physics. . . .
Therefore the origin of modernity is primarily a question of the origin of
mathematical physics.”3 Now mathematical physics dispenses with ends
and constructs form. But dispensing with ends and construction of form
also defines modern political philosophy, which does not depend upon
mathematical physics. If the core of modernity is mathematical physics,
then the core of that core is the rejection of ends and the construction of
form.4 Hence it seems better to say that the core of modernity simpliciter
is the rejection of ends and the construction of form.
Since ends prescribe what have been called “the great directive pur-
poses of our lives,”5 it should be no cause for surprise that their systemat-
ic rejection—such as we find in the programmatic announcement of the
fifteenth chapter of Machiavelli’s Prince—occurs in what Aristotle calls
the “philosophy of human things,”6 in our terms moral and political phi-
losophy, independently of what was to take place in natural philosophy.
With respect to ends the principle, or law, of inertia, is the counterpart
in natural philosophy to Machiavelli’s dismissal of best possible regimes.
Inertia, called by Descartes “law of nature,” is the antithesis of nature as
end. That nature is not an end is what is formalized in modern political
philosophy’s foundational notion, “state of nature.” And, like the condi-
tion described by inertia, the state of nature is an imagined possibility
constructed by the mind.
2. Jacob Klein, Lectures and Essays (Annapolis, Md.: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 79.
3. Richard Kennington, review of Lectures and Essays, Review of Metaphysics 41
(1987): 145.
4. “The human understanding . . . of its own nature . . . gives a substance and reality to
things which are fleeting. Matter rather than forms should be the object of our attention, its
configurations and changes of configurations and simple action and law of action or mo-
tion; for forms are figments of the human mind, unless you will call those laws of action
forms”; Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, bk. 1, Aphorisms, 51: [Idols of the Tribe].
5. Burton Rascoe, Review of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, “A Bookman’s Day-
book,” New York Tribune, 5 November 1922, section 5, p. 8.
6. “Ta anthropeia philosophia”; Nicomachean Ethics 10.9.1081b15.
Teleology & the Genesis of the Modern State 237
Form and Specificity

It is not sufficient for a philosopher to talk about political things to have
political philosophy. What is said must have the formality of political
philosophy. That formality consists in the presentation of political form.
Political philosophy properly speaking manifests political form, setting
it forth in its distinctness. Political philosophy possesses, or should pos-
sess, what I have referred to as political specificity. Lacking such specific-
ity political philosophy itself is formless. Clarity about political form is
the defining mark of political philosophy properly speaking. The impor-
tance of this consideration has been underlined by Pierre Manent:
There is no such thing as an indefinite, undefined, political form. . . . That there
are a determinate number of political forms is one of the most important “theo-
retical” propositions of political science. The human world insofar as it is politi-
cal does not present an indefinite variability; it is articulated, it is ordered. . . .
[F]rom the moment people live politically, they live in a political form, or in the
transition from one form to another.7
There are at our disposal two versions of political philosophy pos-

sessing political specificity, the politics of sovereignty or the state, and
the politics of the common good or the political community. The former
is consubstantial with modern political philosophy, the latter with what
came before the modern, call it simply premodern. Each sets forth po-
litical form with great clarity, the clarity appropriate to each form. Aris-
totle speaks about the polis/civitas/city, that is, the political community,
Hobbes about the state or sovereign and civil society.
Modern and Premodern

A comment about the choice of the term “premodern” to designate what
comes before the modern and the significance attributed to it. Premod-
ern designates conceptual distance, rather than, as modern philosophy
7. My translation of Cours familier de la philosophie politique (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 75:

“[I]l n’y a pas de forme politique indéfinie. . . . Il y a donc un nombre déterminé de formes
politiques. C’est une des propositions ‘théoriques’ les plus importantes de la science poli-
tique. Le monde humain, en tant qu’il est politique, ne présente pas une variabilité indéfinie:
il est articulé, il est ordonné. Dès lors qu’on vit politiquement, on vit dans une forme poli-
tique, ou alors dans la transition d’une forme à une autre.”
238 Francis Slade
would have us believe, historical distance, something whose being is to

be absent. For before there was modern philosophy there was philosophy.
Modern philosophy presented itself as a new beginning—“a path as yet
untrodden by anybody” as Machiavelli puts it8—and understood itself
in opposition to philosophy as it had hitherto been practiced. If there is
“new philosophy,” there must be “old philosophy.” “Philosophy becomes
ancient or old,” Thomas Prufer has written, “only when there is a sense
of newness which sets itself up in difference to what until then was sim-
ply philosophy, philosophy tout court, not ancient or old philosophy.”9
Philosophy as “ancient” and as “medieval” is the creation of “modern”
philosophy. The new philosophy understands itself in the light of the re-
jection of what it calls “old,” a rejection it constantly recalls and reenacts.
This historicization of philosophy is essential to modern philosophy. It
makes it seem as if the consideration of what came before modern phi-
losophy cannot be present now as philosophy, and therefore does not en-
dure as philosophically significant. Historicization is intended to divest
philosophy as it had been practiced of philosophical significance except
as something that has to be overcome and replaced. Modern philosophy
is tied to philosophy in the form in which it came before it in order to
show its own necessity. In this respect what are called “ancient” and “me-
dieval” philosophy function as a “state of nature” for the modern version.
But if in order to justify itself modern philosophy must always be return-
ing to the situation from which it emerges, if it recognizes the constraint
under which it is placed to argue its necessity against philosophy as it
preceded it, it thereby acknowledges the presence of premodern philoso-
phy beyond the historicization it attempts to impose upon it. It implicitly
acknowledges the permanence of premodern philosophy. Historicization
is a rhetorical posture, a tactic for winning an argument. Taken in the
most formal sense philosophy has no past. To the extent that it might be
said to have one, it is not philosophy. All philosophy insofar as it is phi-
losophy is contemporary. And so with the issue between the two versions
we are presently considering, the politics of the state and that of the com-
mon good.
8. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chi-
cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 5.
9. Thomas Prufer, “The Logic of Modernity,” in Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 66.
The Two Versions

Although polis/civitas/city and state/civil society signify very different
kinds of political entities, each signifies a determinate defined political
form. There is at the present moment no other version of political phi-
losophy that sets forth with such clarity and specificity any other account
of political form.10 The difference between the two versions is a difference
about form. For the politics of the common good, the premodern ver-
sion, form is something found, for the politics of sovereignty or the state,
the modern version, form is created.
The premodern version begins with the givenness of the political
community and of men ruling men according to the various arrange-
ments of rule called “regimes,” politeia, the well-known “constitutions”:
kingship, aristocracy, the republic, democracy, oligarchy, tyranny. In the
regimes the rulers rule by virtue of what they obviously are: wealthy, or
most numerous, or distinguished notables, for instance. The politeuma
is the politeia, Aristotle says, those who rule are the regime.11 Rule in
the political community, the city/civitas/polis, is never separated from
the human beings who exercise the rule. A regime is rule embodied in
those who rule, which means rule is never representative. As rulers they
are not separated from themselves as the human beings they are, a sepa-
ration that representation requires. What is primary for the premodern
version is the disclosure of the form of the city, the political community,
a form it reflects upon by reflecting upon the city’s own understanding of
itself. Every city wishes to understand itself as “the best city,” a claim eas-
ily disputed since every city contains within it those who consider them-
selves by virtue of the kind of men they are more suited to rule than to
be ruled.12 Premodern political philosophy turns from the consideration
of men living in cities and their claims to rule to the consideration of the
paradigmatic form of the city, the regime known as “the best city,” in the
light of which all regimes can best be understood. “It is in things whose
condition is according to nature,” Aristotle says, “that one ought partic-
10. As an instance of political formlessness attempting to supplant a well-defined politi-

cal form, take the proposed (and rejected) European Union Constitution of October 2004.
“To call this a constitution is to misuse the word”; Jeremy Rabkin, “Continental Drift,” Cla-
remont Review of Books 5, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 47.
11. Politics 3.6.1278b11.
12. Cf. Aristotle’s Politics 3.
240 Francis Slade
ularly to investigate what is by nature not in things that are defective.”13

The “best regime,” to which Thomas More gave the name “Utopia,” is
the end/telos for the sake of which cities exist. The form of the best city,
Socrates says, is “laid up in the heavens,”14 meaning the end/telos consti-
tutive of the city possesses ontological priority, or, as Aristotle says, “the
city, or civitas, or polis exists by nature.”
“But for an utmost end, in which the ancient philosophers have placed
felicity, and have disputed much concerning the way thereto, there is no
such thing in this world, nor way to it, more than to Utopia.”15 So Thom-
as Hobbes. This denial of end/telos, a denial first clearly pronounced in
Prince 15, is where the modern version begins. The denial of the reality
of ends makes it possible to postulate a condition called “the state of na-
ture.” Modern political philosophy turns from the consideration of men
living in cities to the condition of men living in the “state of nature,” a
formless condition in which human beings are “clanless, lawless, hearth-
less,”16 where no one rules anyone, a condition which is never given and
13. Aristotle Politics 1.5.1254a36–39. Aristotle adds the following: “Thus the human being
to be studied is one whose state is best both in body and soul—in him this is clear.” Clear be-
cause the end realized as form is present in its complete actuality. See Politics 3.13.1284b26–
34: “In the case of the best regime there is considerable question as to what ought to be done
if there happens to be someone who is outstanding . . . on the basis of virtue. . . . what seems
the natural course is for everyone to obey such a person gladly, so that persons of this sort
will be permanent kings in their cities.” Politics 4.2.1289a39–b1: “Kingship must necessarily
have the name alone without being such, or rest on the great superiority of the person ruling
as king.” By nature means by actualization of the end. The hereditary king, the king simply
by birth, is not the “natural king.” In the dedication of the Discourses on Livy (4), Machiavel-
li says: “writers praise Hiero the Syracusan when he was a private individual more than Per-
seus the Macedonian when he was king, for Hiero lacked nothing other than the principal-
ity to be a prince while the other had no part of a king other than the kingdom.” This recalls
Aristotle’s sentence at 1289a39. Machiavelli’s Hiero is not a “natural prince” in any sense, not
by birth—for Machiavelli the principe naturale (7)—nor by actualization of the end/telos—
for Aristotle the natural prince—but by what Machiavelli calls virtù. Machiavelli concludes
Prince 6, “New Principalities That Are Acquired through One’s Own Arms and Virtue,” by
speaking of Hiero of Syracuse, a “lesser example” added to the “high examples” of Moses,
Theseus, Romulus, and Cyrus, “and I want it to suffice for all other similar cases,” saying “he
lacked nothing of being a king except a kingdom” (Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince, trans.
Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], pp. 22, 25). Aristotle’s
real prince, not one in name only, is a prince by nature. Machiavelli’s Hiero is a real prince,
but not a natural one. Aristotle’s natural prince is for Machiavelli an “imagined prince.”
14. Republic 9.592b3.
15. The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1928), 26.
16. Aristotle Politics 1.2.1253a5, quoting Homer, Iliad 9, 63.
is accessible only in thought.17 The classic form of the modern version is

the unique political form created by modern political philosophy, sover-
eignty, or the state, something also not given, also something accessible
only in thought. The conception of this unique political form, supplant-
ing that of a best possible regime, becomes possible only by the denial
of end/telos. For the modern version what is first is something postulat-
ed, the absence of form and therefore its generation. Form follows gen-
eration. “I took my beginning from the very matter of civil government
[civitatis],” Hobbes says, “and thence proceeded to its generation and
form.”18
The state of nature, a condition of indetermination and formlessness,
is a condition of pure potentia, one in which thought encounters itself as
loosened from experience, unbound from the actual.19 Thought defines
itself as access to indefinite possibilities, thus to what it may be able to
cause to be. In Hobbes’s words, “imagining anything whatsoever, we seek
all possible effects, that can by it be produced, that is to say, we imag-
ine what we can do with it, when we have it. Of which I have not seen
any sign, but in man only.”20 Understanding itself as freedom from the
actual, that is, as not determined by ends, thought comes into view as
power, the power to create forms, forms that have no actuality except
as thoughts, and in that sense ideal forms. Such considerations supply
a context for understanding what Machiavelli means when he speaks of
himself as having “decided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone.”21
The modern version of political philosophy abandons the perspective
of actual political life, the contention about who should rule in the city,
which is implicitly the question of the best city (Prince 15). It steps back
from that, it steps back toward possibility, toward what takes its origin
from within our minds, that is, toward potentia/power, toward what I
17. Hobbes makes an effort to argue the contrary in Leviathan, ch. 13.
18. De Cive The English Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1983), 32.
19. In contrast: “Potentiality is nothing but a capacity to act or be acted upon; it essen-
tially involves a relation to actuality and can only be defined in such terms”; Thomas Aqui-
nas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, I2.6.304 (South Bend, Ind.: Dumb Ox Books,
1994), 97. “Power is said in reference to possible things”; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theolo-
giae I q.25 a.3.
20. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 21.
21. Discourses on Livy, 5.
242 Francis Slade
can bring about, that is, toward effectivity. This is the movement from
end to ideal, or projected possibility, for the ideal is a projection of a form
whose origin is within our own power to effect. The state is such an ide-
al. Detached from ends, ideal forms, forms that take their origin from
thought, lack the end’s “gravitational pull.” Ideal forms “push,” they do
not “pull.” Ideal forms, because they exist only as posited by thought,
manifest thought’s power to realize itself. From contemplation philoso-
phy turns to action.
The State: The Political Subject

Modern political philosophy created a unique new political form, the
state, one unassimilable to any of the well-known regimes because the
state is intended to replace them all. It is a form that supplanted, one
might say dissolved, all previous political forms in the West and which
has been exported throughout the world. As Hegel puts it, “The state is
universal in form, a form whose essential principle is thought.”22 Mod-
ern political philosophy achieved this by constructing an understanding
of government as such, something entirely different from the regimes,
or forms of political rule, which had been the concern of premodern po-
litical philosophy, things like kingship, aristocracies, republics, tyran-
nies, oligarchies, and democracies. This point is made with great force by
Hobbes when he says in Leviathan: “Because the name of Tyranny, signi-
fieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of Sovereignty . . . toleration
of a professed hatred of Tyranny, is a toleration of hatred to common-
wealth in general.”23 Modern political philosophy reduces all regimes to
government, for government is what every regime is.24 Being treated as
22. Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 172. See also
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 299–300. Hegel’s German reads: “das Prinzip seiner
Form als Allgemeines wesentlich der Gedanke ist.”
23. Leviathan, Review and Conclusion, 486. De Cive The Latin Version, ed. Howard
Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 83–84: Omni tamen civitati, potestatem sum-
mam & æqualem tribuendum esse passim & expresse dico. “I say everywhere explicitly that
every commonwealth must be allowed supreme and equal power”: On the Citizen, ed. and
trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 14.
24. “There is no specifically ‘democratic,’ or republican, or monarchical apparatus of
governing”; Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 196.
government transforms all regimes into something different, “states.” I

am here calling government what Jean Bodin and Hobbes called sover-
eignty. But that is what sovereignty means, government as such. “I speak
not of men, but in the abstract of the seat of power,” Hobbes says in the
dedication of Leviathan.25 If the regime is to be understood as the em-
bodiment of rule, sovereignty is its disembodiment. It is this understand-
ing of political rule that makes the new political form, the state, possible.
The state as a political form is not visible, as the regimes are, in the
obvious, the almost inevitable, the almost natural, articulations of a
large society. The state does not “appear.” We can see the city and the
parties in the city that believe they have the right to rule the city and who
put forward their claims: the notables or distinguished men, the aristoi;
the “few” who are the wealthy; the “many” lacking both distinction and
wealth; the “leader” who loves “the people” and who claims to be their
voice. As the city comes into view so do the regimes; the regimes are
inherent in those who make up the city. In Federalist 10 James Madi-
son says, “[T]he latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man;
and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity,
according to the different circumstances of civil society.” What we see,
then, are the regimes, or, what Madison calls them, “the factions.” The
state is not visible to the eyes. It does not exist outside of thought, and
therefore it does not exist until it is thought.26 But being thought, and be-
ing a thought, it possesses brilliant clarity, an idea that can be “conceived
very clearly and distinctly.”27 The state is something effected by thought,
“a creation out of nothing by human wit,” Hobbes says.28 In these few
words Hobbes has managed to set forth everything important in modern
“The three authorities in a state, which arise from the concept of a commonwealth as such
(res publica latius dicta), are only the three relations of the united will of the people, which
is derived apriori from reason. They are the pure Idea of a head of state which has objective
practical reality. But the head of state (the sovereign) is only a thought-entity [nur ein Ge-
dankending] (to represent the entire people) as long as there is no physical person to repre-
sent the supreme authority in the state . . .”; Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary
Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 146.
25. Leviathan, 3.
26. Rousseau speaks of “la personne morale qui constitue l’État comme un être de rai-
son parce que ce n’est pas un homme”; Du contract social, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3 (Paris:
Éditions Gallimard, 1964), 363.
27. Descartes, Discours de la méthode (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 92.
28. The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, 84.
244 Francis Slade
philosophy, a measure, it seems to me, of his stature as a thinker. Machi-

avelli was the first to understand political rule in this manner as some-
thing effected by thought. He deserves to be recognized not only as the
first modern political philosopher, the founder of the modern version,
the politics of the state, or sovereignty, which he often is, but he should
also be reckoned the first modern philosopher, the founder of philosoph-
ical idealism, which he is not, the honor, of course, going to Descartes. In
speaking of “the prince” Machiavelli is speaking of a new entity, govern-
ment, government as such. Machiavelli employs the old, traditional, term
“prince” to designate something quite new, the political entity effected
by thought, which later writers will call “sovereignty.” Machiavelli’s term
“prince” designates the political subject—an indispensable coinage I bor-
row from Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel, Claude Lefort’s book on Ma-
chiavelli29—just as cogito designates the epistemological subject. Machia-
velli’s prince is the prince who effects himself as ruler, meaning that his
being as ruler is not determined by an end that is ontologically prior. The
political subject, the prince, or state, does not come forth as the actual-
ization of an end. In this consists the newness of what Machiavelli calls
prince. Government and the state emerge when rule is detached from
any context defined by an end, from any teleological understanding of
rule. The emergence of this new form, the state, whose essential principle
is thought, can be directly—and perhaps most easily—encountered in
chapter 9 of The Prince entitled “De principatu civili,” “The Civil Princi-
pality.” The politics of the state is the politics of what I will call decontex-
tualized rule, rule detached from men and from the societies over which
it is exercised. Government conceived in terms of this abstractive imagi-
nation, the sovereign of modern political philosophy, puts us in mind of
the epistemological subject of modern philosophy, the cogito. Both are
inventions of thought, ideal constructions effected by thought. Neither
the state nor the epistemological subject is something thought finds in
the sense that it comes upon them as things somehow “overlooked”; both
are things effected by thought—thus their “newness”—and have no real-
ity apart from that effectuation. We can express this in the language of
Hegel, a language devised after all just to express such notions, by say-
ing state and cogito determine themselves to be in their existence (Da-
29. Claude Lefort, Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 445.
sein)—that is, as standing over against themselves—what their concept

is, in other words because the pure concept has the intuition of itself as
its reality.30 This is the sense of Rousseau’s statement about the sovereign
in The Social Contract: “The sovereign by the sole fact that it is, is always
everything that it ought to be.”31 The “ought to be” does not stand over
against the “is.” The actuality of the sovereign, unlike that of the king,
is complete as soon as it exists. Whereas a king is measured and limited
by the form he aspires to embody in his kingdom, realizing that form in
varying degrees, there being good, bad, and mediocre kings and king-
doms, the sovereign is never less than a sovereign. The sovereign has no
need to look into a mirror for princes such as Thomas Aquinas’s De regno
to find out what he and his kingdom should be and is. Unlike the king
the sovereign is not engaged in the activity of embodying a form.
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant explicitly draws the parallel be-
tween cogito and state, or sovereign.
The critique of pure reason can be regarded as the true tribunal for all disputes
of pure reason; for it . . . is directed to the determining and estimating of the
rights of reason in general, in accordance with the principles of their first insti-
tution.
In the absence of this critique reason is, as it were, in the state of nature, and
can establish and secure its assertions and claims only through war. The cri-
tique, on the other hand, arriving at all its decisions in the light of fundamental
principles of its own institution, the authority of which no one can question, se-
cures to us the peace of a legal order, in which our disputes have to be conduct-
ed solely by the recognized methods of legal action. . . . The endless disputes of
a merely dogmatic reason thus finally constrain us to seek relief in some cri-
tique of reason itself, and in a legislation based upon such criticism. As Hobbes
maintains, the state of nature is a state of injustice and violence, and we have no
option save to abandon it and submit ourselves to the constraint of law.32
30. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science, trans. J. Michael Stewart and
Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 55. This
is a translation of Hegel’s Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, Heidelberg
1817/1818.
31. “Le Souverain, par cela seul qu’il est, est toujours tout ce qu’il doit être”; Du contract
social, in Oeuvres complètes, 3.363.
32. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymond Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner
Verlag, 1952), 687–88, in KrV. English translations are from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1950), 601–2.
246 Francis Slade
A “critique of reason itself and . . . a legislation based upon such crit-

icism” is the rule of the epistemological subject, sovereign reason. The
philosopher, Kant says, “is not an artificer in the field of reason, but him-
self the lawgiver of human reason.”33 Thinking means ruling. The phi-
losopher effects himself as the rule of reason,34 the imperium rationis of
Enlightenment. What this means is, as Robert Pippin expresses it, that
“thought’s self-legislation cannot be anchored in a ‘beyond’ . . . or ‘pure
form.’ ”35 In short what is ruled out is any teleological understanding of
thought. The cogito, like the sovereign, is “always everything that it ought
to be.”
The epistemological subject is reason as ruler and, just as is the case
with the political subject, the sovereign, the prince, this subject can only
be generated by means of the repudiation of objective teleology.36 The
parallelism of epistemological subject and political subject is striking.
Right from the beginning modern philosophy consisted of two compo-
nents, the epistemological and the political. “Epistemology” is mind ef-
fecting itself as knower, mind establishing its right to know. The par-
allelism manifests their underlying unity. Both epistemological subject,
the cogito, and political subject, the state, show that thought is freedom,
something essentially self-determining, for thought effects them beyond
anything that is given, both are the creations of thought. Man is revealed
to be self-determining subjectivity originating the forms that it realizes
33. Kritik, 753; Critique, 658.

34. Kritik, 549–60; Critique, 486; Kritik, 753–54; Critique 657–58. “[An] ideal of reason,
which must serve . . . as a rule and archetype, alike in our actions and in our critical judg-
ments”; Kritik, 550; Critique, 487.
35. Robert B. Pippin, Idealism as Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 171.
36. What I mean by “objective teleology” is the ontological as opposed to the psycholog-
ical priority of ends. Psychological priority means that ends are purposes. Hobbes’s Thomas
White’s De Mundo Examined, trans. Harold Whitmore Jones (London: Bradford Universi-
ty Press in association with Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1976), 463, makes the psychological
priority of ends evident: “First, it is clear that anyone’s happiness consists in what he finds
good: no-one finds something good for which he has not appetite. So he who has nothing to
seek after enjoys no happiness; and, because everything we seek must be sought with an eye
to the future, we must class happiness as ‘the desire for good that is to come.’ ” Note here the
rejection of happiness = fulfillment, completion, perfection. Happiness is not an end in the
ontological sense, it is a purpose in the psychological sense. The italicized words make clear
that for Hobbes it is appetite, desire, that creates the good. It is not the good that creates ap-
petite and desire. This is why Hobbes can reduce final cause to efficient cause. It is appetite,
desire (i.e., a force that pushes men), that moves men to seek what they seek.
in itself, which is to say man is potentia/power. There is nothing he is; he

is formless prior to his own determination.37 That act does not precede
potency is what is meant by natural right. Man’s freedom is the prior-
ity of potency to act. Heidegger speaks of “the basic concept of potency
(Aristotle’s δύναμις as “philosophy’s ultimate concept, its concept of ori-
gin”).38 This has to mean that philosophy comes into being not as the
fulfillment of man’s perfectedness as a human being, but as the supreme
expression of human freedom and power. The rejection of teleology bore
the most profound implications for philosophy. Philosophy had been
understood to be the fulfillment of “all men by nature desire to know”
and the eros for the good of which Socrates speaks in the Symposium.
It is wisdom as the good which creates in man that love for it which is
called philosophy. The perfection and fulfillment of man is in the activ-
ity of understanding of being, the life of theoria, the contemplation of the
intelligible realities. Modern philosophy rejects that. Philosophy is the
creation of man, an expression of human freedom. Descartes gives
us an account of how the mind actualizes itself apart from nature as
philosophy, therefore independent of nature. This is the cogito, the “I
think.” Philosophy becomes the self-generation of the mind as some-
thing that is not given by nature. And this is exactly what the state as
sovereignty is, the generation by thinking out of itself of something not
given by nature.
Common Good and State

The term “common good” comes to us from the premodern version of
political philosophy. It designates the ontologically prior end which is the
origin of the political community, the reason why it can be said to “ex-
ist by nature.” The state, in contrast, is understood to be the creation of
man’s power, his freedom, or right. In his autobiography, No One Could
Have Known, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper records a conversa-
tion that occurred in 1943 between himself and Carl Schmitt, the politi-
cal theorist and legal scholar, a prominent figure in the intellectual life of
37. These points are made with force in Rousseau’s Second Discourse.
38. In his course for the winter semester 1919–1920 at the University of Marburg; see T.
Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1995), 131.
248 Francis Slade
Weimar Germany who was to continue to be an influential one in politi-

cal philosophy into the later twentieth century.
The opposition between the notions common good and state, and so
between the two versions of political philosophy, appears in sharp relief
in the exchange between the Thomist Pieper and Schmitt, who explicitly
identified himself with those of whom he speaks as “the founders of my
discipline, Bodin and Hobbes.”39 When Schmitt says, “my discipline,”
he means political philosophy founding the political form we call “the
state.” Referring to Schmitt’s book, The Concept of the Political—a book
that has been called “one of the very rare classic works of political theory
in this century”40—Pieper says, “I asked him [Carl Schmitt] why, in his
book on the concept of the political he had not written a syllable about
the bonum commune, since the whole meaning of politics surely lay in
the realization of the common good. He retorted sharply: ‘Anyone who
speaks of the bonum commune is intent on deception.’ ”41
A sentence from one of Schmitt’s most famous books, the opusculum
Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Doctrine of Sovereignty, makes
the meaning of his reply to Pieper’s question clear. “Everyone agrees,”
Schmitt writes, “that whenever antagonisms appear within a state, every
party wants the general good—therein resides after all the bellum om-
nium contra omnes.”42 What the fundamental issue for modern politi-
cal philosophy is, and how it is opposed to premodern political philoso-
phy, could not be made clearer than Schmitt’s response to Pieper makes
it when taken together with the words that immediately follow the sen-
tence just quoted from Political Theology: “But sovereignty (and thus the
state itself),” Schmitt says, “resides in deciding this controversy.” “This
controversy” about the common good is what Schmitt terms the bellum
omnium contra omnes. But the bellum omnium contra omnes is the state
of nature.43 Thus the concept of the state of nature is seen to be a formal-
39. Schmitt at Nuremburg, Appendix III, TELOS, no. 72 (Summer 1987): 128.
40. Pierre Manent, “Notre Destin Libéral,” in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss
et la notion de politique (Paris: Commentaire/Julliard, 1990), 9.
41. Josef Pieper, No One Could Have Known: An Autobiography: The Early Years, trans.
Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 175.
42. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George
Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 9.
43. Hobbes, Leviathan, in Opera Latina, ed. William Molesworth, vol. 3 (London: 1845;
reprint, Aalen: Scientia, 1961), 99–100.
ization of the controversy about the common good, which naturally aris-
es in the city as the question, who ought to rule in the city. Modern po-
litical philosophy translates the political community as it is understood
in the premodern version into what it calls “the state of nature,” “the war
of all against all.”44 But that question “Who ought to rule in the city?”
leads to the question—it is the Socratic discernment—“What is the end
for man?” the question from which Aristotle begins political philosophy
in the Nicomachean Ethics.
In his reply to Josef Pieper, taken together with the two statements
that follow upon one another in Political Theology, Schmitt repeats the
founding conceptual moment from which modern political philosophy
emerges. It emerges by turning away from the foundational question for
premodern political philosophy, by turning the question about ends into
what Hobbes calls the bellum omnium contra omnes. The state cannot be
thought in terms of ends.45 “The state is in the decisive case the ultimate
authority.” Take note: the determination of the decisive case does not arise
from consideration of the bonum commune, the common good, the end.
The state, or sovereign, is undetermined by anything except its own will
and to anything except by its own will. This indetermination, the absence
of any determination outside its own act, is the state’s power or right. In-
deed this indetermination is why it is called “power,” that is, potentia.
Sovereignty, or rule as it is understood in modern political philoso-
phy, is independent of claims made concerning what the end is. The po-
litical form, the state, becomes possible only with the rejection of political
community defined by end-telos-good, that is, actuality, determination,
limit. What defines the political form of sovereignty is this power to ef-
fect. It is what Machiavelli calls la verità effetuale.46 The political entity
is precisely the effect of rule as sovereignty. Sovereignty is rule defined in-
dependently of the society over which it is exercised. What is ruled over
44. That the premodern form of political existence, the city/civitas/polis, is in effect a
state of nature is evidenced in Federalist 9 (Hamilton): “It is impossible to read the history
of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust
at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of
revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes
of tyranny and anarchy.”
45. This, surely, is the ground for what is called “separation of Church and State” as a
structural requirement of political existence in modern western societies.
46. Niccolò Macchiavelli, Il Principe, in Il Principe e Discorsi, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan:
Editore Feltrinelli, 1960), 64–66.
250 Francis Slade
by rule exercised as sovereignty cannot properly be spoken of as a “com-

munity.” Hobbes, as usual, expresses clearly the opposition of sovereignty
and communities constituted by a common good: “The . . . error is this
[that] the members of every commonwealth, as of a natural body, depend
upon one another. It is true they cohere together, but they depend only
on the sovereign.”47 It is because they depend on the sovereign that they
are able to cohere together in society. As Rousseau’s variant of the ver-
sion makes clear, end as constituting the political community is replaced
by the general will. The general will is not something determined by an
end-telos at all. It is undefined by anything outside itself for it “is always
what it ought to be.” The political entity, sovereignty, the state, is not con-
stituted by “the common good,” for then it would be a community and it
would owe its existence to, as well as be measured and limited by, an end.
It would not be something effected by thought, but uncovered and found
by thought. Sovereignty, rule divorced from end, defines itself as power,
and first of all, as power of self-generation, causa sui. Schmitt, Hobbes,
Bodin, Rousseau—it is Machiavelli who stands behind them all.
Machiavelli’s Civil Principality

Aristotle calls the city koinē politikē, “political community.” Modern so-
cieties are not political communities. They are states and civil societies.
State and civil society does not add up to political community. What is
civil society? It is the web of associations formed by the interaction of in-
dividuals as they seek the fulfillment of the purposes peculiar to them as
individuals pursuing their private happiness. Why is civil society called
“civil society”? Calling it “civil society” indicates two things. It is not a
natural form of society, for no societies, the modern version holds, are
natural, not even the family; and it is society that comes into existence
as the consequence of the creation of government. Civil society is pos-
sible only subsequent to the existence of the political entity, the state or
sovereign.48 Although the sovereign does not make civil society, the sov-
ereign’s rule makes it possible. But while civil society always presupposes
47. Leviathan, 397, 230. See also footnote 21 above.

48. Civil society “presupposes the state, which it must have before it as a self-sufficient
entity in order to subsist itself. Besides, the creation of civil society belongs to the modern
world”; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §182, Addition H.
government, in contrast to the regime, which is the focus of attention for

the premodern version of political philosophy with its aim of discern-
ing “the best possible regime,” civil society is society from which what
is political has been removed. Society becomes “civil” only insofar as it
is nonpolitical, only insofar as it ceases to be political. It is precisely be-
cause it is depoliticized that it can be society. Depolititicized society and
decontextualized rule are the great innovations effected by modern po-
litical philosophy. It is what originally was meant by liberalism. The West
in its difference from the rest with respect to government and society tes-
tifies to the very large dimensions of the modern version’s achievement.
There may be a certain reluctance to admit it, but Niccolò Machiavelli
must be reckoned among our political founding fathers.
The essence of the regime as the term is understood in premodern
political philosophy is that it is rule by human beings over human be-
ings. It is just Machiavelli’s point to deny this proposition and to as-
sert that rule in itself is not something that belongs to human beings in
the givenness of their natural humanity, something that will be highly
amplified in the notion of states of nature. What makes the ruler is not
“those infinite good parts”49 that are thought to make some worthy to
be princes. Such is the “imagined prince.”50 The “real prince” is an in-
vention outside and beyond men’s natural givenness as human beings.
Machiavelli indicates this in different ways. One of them is the many ex-
amples of, and references to, the inhumanness of some rulers, as, for in-
stance, Agathocles, the tyrant of Syracuse, in Prince 8, who, if we con-
sider his virtù, “one does not see why he has to be judged inferior to any
most excellent captain,” but whose “savage cruelty and inhumanity, to-
gether with his infinite crimes, do not allow him to be celebrated among
the most excellent men.”51 Hannibal’s “admirable actions . . . could not
have arisen from anything other than his inhuman cruelty . . . togeth-
er with his infinite virtues.”52 And “whoever examines minutely the ac-
tions” of the Roman emperor Septemius Severus “will find him a very
fierce lion and a very astute fox.”53 They “show . . . how well he knew how

50. The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), 61. On the difference between imagined and real princes, see Prince 15–19.
51. Ibid., 35. 52. Ibid., 67.
53. Ibid., 79.
252 Francis Slade
to use the persons of the fox and the lion whose natures . . . are necessary
for a prince to imitate.”54 With such examples the distance between rule
and human beings, between the real prince and the imagined prince,
is indicated by qualities that are manifestations of the nonhuman. This
conception of the nonhuman, nonnatural character of rule is conveyed
in Machiavelli’s treatment of those rulers whom the calls “the greatest
examples,” Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. Of them he says, “to
such high examples I want to add a lesser one . . . and I want it to suffice
for all other similar cases. . . Hiero of Syracuse.”55 In this manner Machi-
avelli equates what he has presented as “the most excellent” instances of
rule with a more ordinary one, making the point that rule in itself is in-
different to the human qualities for which men are praised and blamed.
These human qualities are not what constitutes rule. Rule is a construc-
tion beyond the humanly given. What men invent to carry them beyond
their natural givenness is reason in its distinctly modern sense, mind as
the effector of its own reality as reason, the power to originate what has
never been given. In this sense reason is not a natural endowment, nor
is then rule as reason’s construct. With respect to rule one might say all
men are created equal, but not by nature and not by God, but by their
own invention. They invent their equality by inventing a superior that
does not naturally exist.
The separation of rule from human beings, so prominent in Machia-
velli’s The Prince, begins modern political philosophy, for without the
separation of rule from human beings in their natural givenness, sov-
ereignty, the state, could not be thought. Sovereignty is that separation,
and the separation cancels regimes as the outstanding fact about cities.
Rule by human beings, the regime, is embodied form. The separation of
rule from human beings is the separation of form from embodiment.
The separation of form from embodiment in society, the decontextual-
ization of rule, is the dissolution of political society, the condition for un-
derstanding rule or government as something separate from society. It is
the condition for moving from “political society” to “civil society.”56 We
54. Ibid., 78.

55. Ibid., 22, 25.
56. It is just the point of these remarks that “civil society” and “political society” are two
very different things, but it is not uncommon to find them used as if they were interchange-
able.
think of this separation as representation, “the great principle which we

owe to modern Europe,” Madison calls it in The Federalist.57 It is Thomas
Jefferson’s opinion that “the new principle of representation has rendered
useless everything written before on the structure of government and in
a great measure relieves our regret if the political writings of Aristotle or
of any other ancient have been lost or are unfaithfully rendered or ex-
plained to us.”58
The political subject, the sovereign, the state, an artificial person, is
something that comes to be in thinking. The sovereign is a thought, for
only in thought can something like a sovereign make an appearance and
be seen. This thought, the thought that is the state, possesses great clarity.
There is nothing obscure or indefinite about it as there can be in the case
of the regimes of premodern political philosophy, which, since premod-
ern political philosophy does not separate ruling from human beings,
tend to blur around the edges and shade into one another exemplifying
the realism of premodern political philosophy as over against the ideal-
ism of modern political philosophy59 for which state, civil society, and
the individuals who inhabit them are creatures that exist primarily in
thought. The moderns say that the ancients, the premoderns, could not
separate rule from the rulers because they could not think the thought,
which separates them. They could not think the separation which we call
“representation.” Montesquieu notes that this is the reason “the ancients
. . . could not achieve a correct idea of monarchy,” which he distinguishes
as “the monarchies we know.”60 He finds evidence for this incapacity in
Aristotle’s “confused,” as he calls it, treatment of monarchy. Aristotle, he
says, distinguished among monarchies “by accidental things like the vir-
tues or vices of the prince.” In other words, Aristotle finds the difference
between king and tyrant in their difference as human beings ruling for
or against the end that belongs to the city as a whole, the common good.
“Kingship,” Aristotle asserts, “must necessarily . . . rest upon the great
57. The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961),
100.
58. Letter to Isaac H. Tiffany, August 26, 1816, in Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
ed. Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. (Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM Publishing Corp., 1979), 86.
59. This is precisely Machiavelli’s criticism of the six regimes of premodern political
philosophy; see Discourses on Livy, 1.2.2, 11. See Aristotle Politics 4.13.1297b30–31.
60. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn
Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 168, 166.
254 Francis Slade
superiority of the person ruling as king.”61 Montequieu’s implies that Ar-

istotle does not think the separation between rule and human beings.62
Not knowing “the monarchies we know,” he did not know that the insti-
tution of monarchy does not depend on the virtues and vices of the natu-
ral person of the ruler.63
In Prince 9, the chapter entitled “De principatu civili,” “Of the Civ-
il Principality,” Machiavelli generates the distinction between state and
civil society. The term itself, civil principality, is Machiavelli’s inven-
tion.64 A new name is required for a new thing. This new thing, civ-
il principality, which is in effect state and civil society, is generated in
thought, thought thinking through Aristotle’s political science of re-
gimes, and in so doing thinking into existence a new form, one intended
to supersede the Aristotelian account of the city and its regimes. Ma-
chiavelli’s account in Prince 9 closely follows Aristotle’s Politics 5.10–11
(1310a39–1315b10), in which Aristotle addresses “monarchy and the things
naturally apt to cause its destruction and its preservation,”65 but whereas
Aristotle’s treatment of monarchy distinguishes between kingship and
tyranny, Machiavelli’s does not. What Machiavelli calls “principality,”
embracing both, is indifferent to the distinction. Machiavelli weaves to-
gether threads taken out of Aristotle’s account into a new text (textura).
The old text is unraveled and a new text is rewoven from the threads of
the old.66 Prince 9 thus makes visible the way Machiavelli takes apart the
premodern city as it is understood in The Politics, replacing it with what
will come to be known as the “state.” Civil principality replaces all re-
gimes of whatever kind, and cannot itself be understood as a regime, the
subject matter of Aristotelian politics.
In contrast to Aristotelian rulers moved by ends, Machiavellian princ-
es are differentiated in terms of how they produce their effects as distin-
guished from any differences about ends. That is, Machiavellian princ-
es are not defined by what they rule, rather they define what they rule,
61. Politics 4.2.1289a41–b1.
62. The Spirit of the Laws, 167–68. See also Pierre Manent, Les libéraux (Paris: Galli-
mard, 2001), 219.
63. The moderns rest their case against the premoderns on the primacy of history.
64. Machiavelli says, “il quale si può chiamare principato civile,” “this may be called a
civil principality”; Il Principe, 45.
65. Politics 5.10.1310a39–40.
66. Machiavelli says “e andrò tessendo li orditi soprascritti”; Il Principe II, “De princi-
patibus hereditariis,” 16.
their success measured by the extent to which they are independent of

and create what they rule, “shape it into the form they think fit.”67 Rule
undefined by end is potentia, power, something protean, capable of as-
suming many forms. “The civil prince,” Machiavelli says, by “una astuzia
fortunata,” a fortunate astuteness, “establishes himself with the support
either of the people or the great [the nobles], for in every city these two
diverse humors are found. The people desire neither to be commanded
nor oppressed by the great and the great desire to command and oppress
the people. From these two diverse appetites one of three effects [effetti]
occurs in cities: principality or liberty or license,”68 rule by the one, or
the few, or the many. But whereas premodern political philosophy dis-
tinguishes between just and unjust forms of each, the six regimes, Ma-
chiavelli does not. These are not diverse understandings of what is just, of
regimes, of ends, but effects, either effects of “diverse humors” or of astu-
zia. The rule of the great (the few) and the rule of the people (the many)
are the effects of diverse appetites, of the desire to command and of the
desire not to be oppressed. “In every city these two diverse humors are
found.”69 Implicit in cities, they are what the city is, something in itself
indeterminate. Principality, however, does not arise from appetite; it is
not the effect of a “humor.” It is the effect of astuzia fortunata in devis-
ing its opportunity out of what is presented by appetite. Rule of the great
and rule of the people are the city as it is naturally given, the consequenc-
es of diverse wills rooted in natural appetites. Principality, the invention
of astuzia, is beyond the city as it is naturally given. It is rule that has
been disengaged from a naturally given context. Astuzia, “knowing how
to get around men’s brains,”70 or “outsmarting,” is what enables us to be-
come fortunata and overcome nature. Civil principality is nature out-
smarted.71
67. Prince, 23. Modern political science emphasizes the means by which political orders
are effected, not the ends which constitute them. How political orders are effected takes the
place of that for the sake of which they exist. For modern political science how political or-
ders are effected is the measure of legitimacy.
68. Ibid., 39; Disourses on Livy, 1.2.2, 11: “[S]ome who have written on republics say that
in them is one of three states—called by them principality, aristocrats, and popular.”
69. Ibid., 39.
70. Ibid., 60. In Italian “e che hanno saputo con l’astuzia aggirare e’ cervelli delli uomi-
ni”; Il Principe e Discorsi, ed. Bertelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960), 72.
71. Ibid., 39: “. . . civil principality . . . neither all virtue nor all fortune is necessary to at-
tain it, but rather a fortunate astuteness.”
256 Francis Slade
Demagogues are always dividing the city into two, Aristotle says,
“and waging war against the well-off.”72 This is what Machiavelli, play-
ing the demagogue, does here in Prince 9. He attacks those who pursue
political life as the good, as the end or telos that constitutes completion,
happiness in human life. Seeking the end they seek to rule. Machiavelli
presents the desire for political distinction and greatness as the desire
to oppress the people: “One cannot satisfy the great with decency and
without injury to others, but one can satisfy the people; for the end of
the people is more decent than that of the great, since the great want to
oppress and the people want not to be oppressed.”73 Demagogues win
the people’s confidence, Aristotle notes, “by slandering the notables.”74
Treating the regimes as effects either of humors or of astuzia, and not as
ends, allows Machiavelli to ignore the distinction between just and un-
just regimes and, consequently, the political arguments for rule, the re-
gime arguments, particularly those for the three just regimes. To ignore
that distinction is to abandon the peculiarly human perspective on rule.
But Machiavelli is considering things from a position outside that per-
spective. Playing the demagogue, Machiavelli favors the people, but fa-
voring the people does not mean favoring the political arguments of the
people, the arguments with which the people make their claim to rule
over the city. Machiavelli does not give the people an argument that sup-
ports their claim that they should rule, for that would be the claim that
it is just for the people to rule. Such a claim asserts a natural right to rule
and Machiavelli denies a natural right to rule to both the people and the
great. For a natural right to rule would derive from the end sought in ex-
ercising rule and ends are imaginary. Of the people’s desire to rule Ma-
chiavelli says not that it is just, but that it is “more decent” than that of
the great.
Instead of offering an argument on behalf of the people justifying
their claim to rule, Machiavelli provides an explanation of why they seek
to rule, just as he offers an explanation of why the great seek to rule: “The
people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by the great and
the great desire to command and oppress the people.” Of course this is
not what either the people or the great say in laying claim to rule, it is
72. Politics 5.9.1310a4–5. 73. Prince 9, p. 39.

74. Politics 5.10.1310b15.
what Machiavelli says explaining why they seek to rule. The people are
moved, according to Machiavelli, to seek rule by fear, fear of oppression,
not because they desire rule for its own sake, not as an end. Unlike the
great, they do not want to rule for the sake of rule as something good in
itself. Their desire for rule is out of necessity: “The people ask nothing
but not to be oppressed.” The people’s fear of oppression explains why
they seek to rule, it is not an argument that they should rule. Aristotle
observes that if no one acted arrogantly toward them, nor sought to ag-
grandize themselves at their expense, the people would be content in a
regime in which they had no share in the offices of rule.75 In his treat-
ment of the people Machiavelli imitates Aristotle’s observation. His ex-
planation of the people’s desire to rule implies that the people do not
want to rule. From the recognition that, although the people do not wish
to be oppressed, they do not want to rule, is born the opportunity for the
rule of the civil prince. The civil prince, who with “a kingly hand that
with absolute and excessive power puts a check on the excessive ambition
and corruption of the powerful,”76 relieves the people of their necessity,
of their need to rule. Astuzia recognizes that what the people fear and
desire—their humor—are the means to the establishment of civil princi-
pality. Without the “humors” of the people, and of the great, there would
be no opportunity for principality, but without astuzia there would be no
recognition of it as opportunity, therefore no seizure, no exploitation, of
it as the means to establish civil principality. The civil prince effects what
the people want, for what the people want is not to rule, but to be free
from oppression. Having taken the part of the people against the great,
as ruler the civil prince takes the place of the people. Through his instru-
mentality the people achieve what they desire, not to be oppressed. In
this sense Machiavelli’s civil prince represents the people.
Machiavelli’s treatment of the people can be formulated as a dictum:
“The people do not want to rule.” The sense of this dictum is that rule is
not to be pursued in terms of ends, that the issue of who ought to rule in
the city is not resolvable in such terms, and that to attempt to do so is to
have recourse to “imagined principalities and republics.” Which is what
the great do, who pursue rule as the end of human life, and it is why one
75. Politics 4.13.1297b5–7.

258 Francis Slade
“who comes to the principality with the aid of the great maintains him-
self with more difficulty than one who becomes prince with the aid of the
people.”77 Because the great believe that ruling is happiness, “one cannot
satisfy the great.”78 As matter they are not disposed to the introduction
of a new form. Machiavelli favors the people because the people, who
don’t want to be oppressed by the great and who don’t want to rule, are
receptive to the introduction of the new form, civil principality, which
Machiavelli favors.79 “For a prince it is always necessary to have the peo-
ple friendly.”80 What Machiavelli calls the greater “decency” of the peo-
ple consists just in this, they do not understand ruling as human fulfill-
ment. “One can satisfy the people.”81
With dispositions toward rule of the great and resistance to that rule,
what the city is in itself is in Machiavelli’s presentation indeterminate.
The great and the people do not share anything common. A state of war
obtains between them with rule over the city at stake. Aristotle says that
“there is a single end for the city as a whole.”82 Machiavelli’s account of
the city is intended as the repudiation of that proposition. The city as it
naturally exists—the great and the people—has no end; there is no com-
mon good. The bonum commune is, in Carl Schmitt’s words, “a decep-
tion.” It is the rule of Machiavelli’s prince that effects political identity.
Rather than rule originating in the end of the whole which is ruled, rule
is that which effects the being of what is ruled. The civil prince shapes
what is in itself indeterminate (“the matter”) into “the form he thinks
fit”83 and that form requires favoring the people more than the great.
Though he arrives at the principality with the aid of the people, the civ-
il prince “finds himself alone there.”84 Machiavelli’s civil prince can be
identified with no one inside the city, for this civil prince, unlike the
great and the people, does not occur naturally within the city. In this the
civil prince is differentiated from the tyrant. The civil prince originates
not in the city but in thought.
77. Prince, 39.
78. Ibid. The civil prince “can never feel safe with them.” In the Discourses on Livy (55)
Machiavelli recommends “the elimination of the gentlemen.”
79. “Et, esaminando le azioni e vita loro, non si vede che quelli avessino altro dalla for-
tuna che la occasione, le quale dette loro material a potere introdurvi drento quella forma
parse loro . . .”; Il Principe, 31.
80. Prince, 41. 81. Prince, 39.
82. Politics 8.1.1337a. 83. Prince, 23.
84. Prince, 39.
Separating rule from both the great and the people the civil prince ef-
fects what Machiavelli asserts the people actually want: to be left alone,
not to be compelled to be concerned with ruling, free to pursue their
various versions of happiness. Again Machiavelli imitates Aristotle. In
Politics 5.8.1308b34–38 Aristotle says: “The many do not chafe as much
at being kept away from ruling—they are even glad if someone leaves
them leisure for their private affairs—as they do when they suppose that
their rulers are stealing common [funds]; then it pains them both not to
share in the prerogatives and not to share in the profits.” Of Machiavel-
li’s “people” it could be said that they “set themselves no other end than
one which is domestic and private.”85 The program of modern political
philosophy is summed up in the dictum “the people do not wish to rule,
they wish only not to be oppressed.” The people want the private, not the
public, life; they want commerce, they want liberty, and what have been
called “penumbral rights of privacy and repose.”86 Montaigne, one of the
first distinctly modern minds, states their case when he says, “You can
attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just
as well as to one of richer stuff. Every man bears the whole form of the
human condition.”87 Hegel was to identify this as the distinctly modern
principle: “the right to the satisfaction of the particularity of the subject.”
Rule or government separated from the political context defined by end
or telos, that is, decontextualized, comes to the rescue of “the people.”
The rule of the civil prince opens the space for private life, the space of
“civil society.” “The people loved quiet and therefore loved modest princ-
es.”88 Rule has been removed from both the great and the people and
belongs to the prince alone, but it belongs to the prince not as an end
sought by a human being—a monarchical regime—but as the political
subject effecting the political entity, the state. The people’s fear provides
the occasion for the exercise of Machiavelliian astuzia in the introduc-
tion of a form of rule in which government is separated from politics.
In Prince 9 Machiavelli cites one example of a civil prince, Nabis,
85. Montaigne, Essais, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1953), 1.1. I have
applied to Machiavelli’s “people” what Montaigne says of himself: “[J]e ne m’y suis proposé
aucune fin, que domestique et privée.”
86. Justice Douglas’s majority opinion in Griswold v Connecticut (1956).
87. Michel de Montaigne, On Repentance, in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech
(London: Penguin Press, 1991), 908.
88. Prince, 76.
260 Francis Slade
prince of the Spartans. Nabis was a tyrant. Tyranny is not rule of the city
as a whole for the common good, and the tyrant understands himself to
be a ruler independently of any end shared with those whom he rules.
Among the regimes it is tyranny that most closely approaches what I
have called “decontextualized rule.” Thus Aristotle characterizes it as
“the farthest removed from being a regime.”89 And since regime means
political society, it is the farthest removed from being political society,
farthest removed from nature as end. Tyranny lends itself to Machiavel-
lian transformation into civil principality, a ruler not embodied in the
society which he rules and individuals pursuing private aims and pur-
poses, that is, state and civil society. Principality means rule by one. If we
are speaking of human beings as rulers, the term elides the difference be-
tween king and tyrant. Machiavelli’s indifferent use of principality is an
assertion that as rule there is no difference between them. Principality,
rule of one, signifies the political entity as a single will, a will that origi-
nates in and is effected by thought (astuzia). “A wise prince must think
of a way by which his citizens always and in every quality of time, have
need of the state and of himself.”90 Machiavelli’s account of civil prin-
cipality has for its context Aristotle’s account of tyranny in the Politics,
but his prince is not simply Aristotle’s tyrant. Aristotle’s tyrant is, as all
Aristotlean rulers are, a human being; Machiavelli’s prince or tyrant is
a theoretically elaborated political subject or sovereign, “which is in fact
thinking itself,”91 something quite different from and more radically de-
contextualized than tyranny, for it is rule undefined by the human be-
ings who exercise it. This is the reduction of the most personal of regimes
to “that impersonal entity, government,”92 the political subject. Machia-
velli can effect this transformation, tyrant into prince or sovereign, be-
cause he does not understand the exercise of rule as constitutive of hu-
man fulfillment and perfection, as an end that completes a human being.
Prince 9, in contrast to Aristotle,93 shows that the city does not ex-
ist for the sake of its own life as city. It shows that the city has no end. To
89. Politics 4.2.1289b2.

90. Ibid., 42. Note Hobbes’s amplification of this point in Leviathan, 230–31.
91. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 257. Hegel’s German reads: “zwar das
Denken selbst ist.”
92. The phrase is Margaret Thatcher’s in a speech delivered at Hofstra University, April
2000.
93. Politics 3.9.1279b24–1281a10.
recognize that the city has no end transforms it into the state. What takes
the place of the common good, what creates the commonness, and thus
the public character, is not the end or telos, but the power that makes the
common unity of them all and of the individuals a public which is not
the same as all the individuals nor the same as civil society. The common
will does not make the common good, the common will makes the po-
litical entity, the existence of which can be called the collective, or gener-
al, interest. Will replaces end or telos. The polis/civitas/city is understood
to have its origin in nature, that is, in end or telos, the state in will, that
is, in freedom, freedom understood as absence of determination by end
or telos.
Machiavelli’s new form defines the modern version. Noel Malcolm
in his book Aspects of Hobbes says, “readers will search Hobbes’ works
in vain for anything like a depiction of the Machiavellian prince.”94 My
thesis is this: Machiavelli’s prince is understood as political subject or
sovereign. My claim is that in Prince 9 a political form is set forth that
will be elaborated in the subsequent significant variants of modern po-
litical philosophy from Bodin to Hegel. That Hobbes follows and imi-
tates Machiavelli’s presentation can be gathered from passages such as
that found in De Cive, 1, 4, a passage matched by an even more celebrated
one in Leviathan 13:
All men in the state of nature have a desire and will to hurt, but not proceed-
ing from the same cause, neither equally to be condemned. For one man, ac-
cording to that natural equality which is among us, permits as much to oth-
ers as he assumes to himself; which is the argument of a temperate man, and
one that rightly values his power. Another, supposing himself to be above oth-
ers, will have a license to do what he lists, and challenges respect and honor, as
due to him before others; which is an argument of a fiery spirit [ingenii ferocis].
This man’s will to hurt ariseth from vain glory, and the false esteem he hath of
his own strength; the other’s from the necessity of defending himself, his liberty,
and his goods, against this man’s violence.95
94. “Hobbes Theory of International Relation,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Claren-

don Press, 2002), 440.
95. De Cive The English Version, 46. See also Leviathan, ch. 13, as well as Elements of
Law, pt. 1, ch. 14, sect. 3. Since neither of the English translations of the De Cive are Hobbes’s
own English, I give here the Latin text which is his own. “Volunta laedendi omnibus qui-
dem inest in statu naturae, sed non ab eadem causa, neque aeque culpanda. Alius enim
262 Francis Slade
Hobbes’s account of the “state of nature” argues the same points

about the people and the great as those presented in Prince 9. Looked at
in the light of Prince 9 it is clear that what is called “state of nature” re-
capitulates the contentions that define the condition which Machiavelli
holds to be that of the city as such. For premodern political philosophy
these contentions concern what is just with respect to who ought to rule.
They are understood to constitute the political condition and are thought
to point to the best regime, the measure of all regimes. For modern polit-
ical philosophy they point toward the political subject, the prince/state/
sovereign, and escape from the political condition. What Machiavelli
calls principato civile, which I have called his new form, Hobbes will call
“Leviathan, King of the Proud.”96 Astuteness combining shrewdness and
perspicacity to the point of being artful or crafty and able to take ad-
vantage of what opportunity offers is exactly what we think of as “Ma-
chiavellian.” The effecting of this new political form in thought and as
thought shows us an instance of una astuzia fortunata, that of Machia-
velli himself.
Summary
In Discourses on Livy 1.55.3 Machiavelli gives the same advice to the
founders of republics as that which Periander, the tyrant of Corinth, is
said to have given to Thrasyboulus, tyrant of Miletus, concerning the
preservation of a tyranny. That advice as related by Aristotle in Politics
5.10 (1311a20–22)97 consisted of “the lopping off of the preeminent ears
[of corn], the assumption being that it is necessary always to eliminate
secundum aequalitatem naturalem permittit caeteris eadem omnia, quae sibi (quod modesti
hominis est, & vires suas recte aestimantis.) Alius superiorem se aliis existimans omnia lic-
ere sibi soli vult, & praecaeteris honorem sibi arrogat (Quod ingenii ferocis est.) huic igitur
voluntas laedendi est ab inani gloria & falsa virium aestimatione; Illi ex necessitate res suas
& libertatem contra hunc defendendi;” De Cive The Latin Version, caput 1, p. 93. In Behe-
moth or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London, 1889), 93, Hobbes says “the
Lords . . . following the principles of warlike and savage natures envied his [the Earl of Straf-
ford’s] greatness.” Warlike and savage nature suggests, given the context, an alternate ren-
dering for ferocis ingenii. It has the advantage of being Hobbes’s characterization of the no-
bility in his own vigorous English. The words quoted from Tönnies’s edition of Behemoth do
not appear in English Works, vol. 6, of the Molesworth edition. In the preface to his edition,
p. ix, Tönnies explains why.
96. Leviathan, 221.
97. See also Politics 3.13.1284a25–30.
the prominent among the citizens.” In Discourses 1.55.3, Machiavelli says:

“he who wishes to found a republic where there are very many gentle-
men cannot do it unless he first eliminates all of them.” If the necessary
measure for founding a republic is the same as the measure necessary
to preserve a tyranny, the conclusion may be drawn that so far as rule
is concerned there is no difference between republics and tyrannies.
Qua government they are the same. Government as such is indifferent
to form. That government qua government is the same whatever its form
is sovereignty. Form does not define what government is, but only the
mode of its exercise. The term “sovereignty” translates the Machiavel-
lian decontextualization of rule. If rule is decontextualized, then there
are no natural rulers. Rule is something constructed beyond nature. The
Machiavellian decontextualization of rule points to the state of nature.
Decontextualization of rule is exactly what state of nature means. There
are no states of nature without the decontextualization of rule. Rule
must have been removed as a natural relation between human beings
for states of nature to appear. It is only when rule has been understood
apart from the contexts in which it is naturally exercised that states of
nature show themselves, that is, can be conceived. The understanding of
rule independent of the contexts of rule precedes the state of nature. The
understanding of rule independent of the context of rule is sovereignty.
Independence of the context of rule means no end specifying rule. Sover-
eignty is rule understood nonteleologically, rule undefined by ends. Rule
so understood is inaugurated by Machiavelli. He is the founder of the
modern version.

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What is the connection between sovereignty/state and natural law discussed in the text?

What is the connection between sovereignty/state and natural law discussed in the text?

What does the author mean by the 'conceptual genesis of the state'?

What does the author mean by the 'conceptual genesis of the state'?

Francis Slade

9 Two Versions of Political Philosophy

rights of man, modern political philosophy. Different as these versions

Form and Specificity

There are at our disposal two versions of political philosophy pos-

Modern and Premodern

7. My translation of Cours familier de la philosophie politique (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 75:

would have us believe, historical distance, something whose being is to

The Two Versions

10. As an instance of political formlessness attempting to supplant a well-defined politi-

ularly to investigate what is by nature not in things that are defective.”13

is accessible only in thought.17 The classic form of the modern version is

The State: The Political Subject

government transforms all regimes into something different, “states.” I

philosophy, a measure, it seems to me, of his stature as a thinker. Machi-

sein)—that is, as standing over against themselves—what their concept

A “critique of reason itself and . . . a legislation based upon such crit-

33. Kritik, 753; Critique, 658.

in itself, which is to say man is potentia/power. There is nothing he is; he

Common Good and State

Weimar Germany who was to continue to be an influential one in politi-

by rule exercised as sovereignty cannot properly be spoken of as a “com-

Machiavelli’s Civil Principality

47. Leviathan, 397, 230. See also footnote 21 above.

government, in contrast to the regime, which is the focus of attention for

49. Discourses on Livy, 3.

54. Ibid., 78.

think of this separation as representation, “the great principle which we

superiority of the person ruling as king.”61 Montequieu’s implies that Ar-

their success measured by the extent to which they are independent of

72. Politics 5.9.1310a4–5. 73. Prince 9, p. 39.

75. Politics 4.13.1297b5–7.

89. Politics 4.2.1289b2.

94. “Hobbes Theory of International Relation,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Claren-

Hobbes’s account of the “state of nature” argues the same points

the prominent among the citizens.” In Discourses 1.55.3, Machiavelli says:

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