Political Realism and the Cultural Imaginary

Graham Hammill (bio)
University at Buffalo, SUNY
ghammill@buffalo.edu

Review of Filippo del Lucchese, Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation. New York: Continuum, 2009.

 

Filippo del Lucchese’s Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza is a welcome addition to the growing collection of scholarly works that firmly place Spinoza in a tradition of radical political thought. This movement began in France in the late 1960s with the publication of Gilles Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza and Alexandre Matheron’s Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Individual and Community in Spinoza), and with Louis Althusser’s many courses on Spinoza during those years. This reading of Spinoza was introduced to the Anglo-American academy through the translation of these works and others, including Etienne Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics, Antonio Negri’s Savage Anomaly, and the seminal essays in The New Spinoza. One of del Lucchese’s main contributions is to link Spinoza to Machiavelli. Taking up the line of thinking developed by intellectual giants like Althusser, Deleuze, Negri, and Balibar, del Lucchese persuasively shows that much of what is radical in Spinoza comes from his ongoing engagement with Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s break with humanism and Thomism—his penetrating effort to recast virtue as a combination of force and display—formed the kernel that developed into Spinoza’s profoundly democratic political philosophy. In making this argument, del Lucchese also contributes to contemporary critical discussions concerning justice and violence, multiplicity, power and resistance, and the questions that these issues raise for democratic theory. Exposing and elaborating the lines of affiliation between Machiavelli and Spinoza, del Lucchese offers a version of democracy that stands as an alternative to the liberal model based on security, contract theory, and the transfer of rights to state authority. His book is an excellent contribution to the study of democratic theory and the history of radical political thought.

 

Del Lucchese’s central premise is that Machiavelli and Spinoza both take dissensus as a political norm. This presupposition distinguishes these two thinkers from the political thought that preceded them as well as contemporary visions of politics that take unity and agreement as desirable ends. What Spinoza learns from Machiavelli, del Lucchese argues, is the idea that power and crisis are not at odds—that crisis is not an exception to the state or to political community but is one of the means by which power is expressed. As he writes, “A crisis that faces people and states, princes and peoples, does not represent an exception to the rule.” Instead, “crisis and power . . . intertwine, overlap, and meld together within the limits of a recursive relationship in which one necessarily refers to the other” (2). Del Lucchese then shows how this insight leads Machiavelli and Spinoza after him to develop political and metaphysical systems in which crisis is not mediated by sovereignty but is productively internal to the systems themselves.

 

Del Lucchese tends to proceed through finely argued analyses of Machiavelli and Spinoza, but it is also quite clear that he intends his analysis to serve as an antidote to the double romance of the Schmittian decision and bare life, which Giorgio Agamben posits as the “hidden matrix” of Western sovereignty (45). Schmitt conceives of crisis as a break from political norms, and for that reason he argues that it demands an excess of sovereign power. Crisis must be mediated by the personal authority of the sovereign, who alone has the right to return the state to normal operating procedures through his capacity to decide the exception. Agamben’s analysis of bare life begins with a critique of Schmitt but then goes on to develop a complementary account of sovereignty and crisis through the lens of biopower. The excess of sovereignty identified by Schmitt results in an inextricable bond between the sovereign unfettered by law, on the one hand, and bare life stripped of legal protection and vulnerable to the cruelest and most sadistic operations of power, on the other hand. Responding to Agamben’s argument, del Lucchese writes that

“bare life,” in this sense, is more of a theoretical figure than a real thing. It is a radically negative concept intended to express the lowest possible degree of humanity, reduced to an inert object. Now, the philosophy of Machiavelli and Spinoza denies that bare life can exist at all, negating its “ontological reality,” if you will. The philosophy of resistance and the absolute affirmation of life that emerges from the pages of these thinkers prevents us from thinking about the “bareness” of life; and life is never submitted to the violent actions of power as a purely passive object.

(45)

This is not to say that Spinoza and Machiavelli shy away from scenes of raw political violence. This is especially clear in Machiavelli, whose focus on cruelty and terror is well known. Spinoza is less obviously concerned with political violence per se, but del Lucchese makes a compelling case that Machiavellian concepts of violence influence Spinoza’s accounts in the Ethics of finitude, affect, and modes. When del Lucchese argues that that the philosophies of Machiavelli and Spinoza deny bare life, his main point is to insist that resistance, successful or not, can never fully or finally be expunged from political life once crisis is understood to be an expression of power, part of the norms of political operations. In no way does del Lucchese deny the sense of oppression that bare life as a concept aims to capture; rather, he argues that the figure obscures both the conflicts brought about by resistance and the resourcefulness of political agents that for Machiavelli and Spinoza form “the ontologically constitutive dimension of politics” (47).

 

One of this book’s real strengths is the way that it draws out congruencies between Machiavelli and Spinoza, but this strength also comes at a cost. Some readers might object that the congruencies del Lucchese uncovers obscure a more complex sense of reception history. The version of Machiavelli that del Lucchese presents is clearly Spinoza’s Machiavelli. By the seventeenth century, Machiavelli’s works had become a weapon used across a range of political thought—including Reason of State, Huguenot resistance theory, French libertinism, and English revolutionary writing—in the effort to conceptualize state power, citizenship, and the rights of the oppressed. I think that del Lucchese’s theoretical rigor and penetrating analyses more than make up for this potential shortcoming. Scholars committed to a richer sense of intellectual history will learn much from this book.

 

Del Lucchese’s argument proceeds in three stages. His first move is to show how Machiavelli and Spinoza develop a realistic approach to politics that displaces classical and theological notions of the common good. Rooted in a natural, ontological order—the natural order of master and slave or of husband and wife—the common good is better understood as a rhetorical ploy used by tyrants and others to justify systems of oppression. As Machiavelli and Spinoza show, once we understand political agents to be motivated by desire, passion, and interest, rather than reason, “there no longer exists a stable, sure perspective from which the common good can be defined. What exists in its place is a plurality, a clash of interests and demands” that only look like “private ambition” from an older, classical point of view (29).

 

In a second move, Del Lucchese deepens the sense of community implied by this realistic perspective, by discussing the central role of conflict in Machiavelli and Spinoza’s sense of ontology, institutions, and political concepts. Del Lucchese shows how, on one level, conflict has to do with Machiavelli and Spinoza’s sense of political ontology—that is, the sense each has of individuals as internally conflicted, active agents operating in a world of ongoing contestation. On another level, conflict is built into instructional life. In The Discourses, for example, Machiavelli elevates Rome over other ancient city-states because it was able to build conflict between the patricians and the plebeians into its system of government, which for Machiavelli was the strength of the Roman republic. On yet another level, conflict becomes the ground from which received political and juridical concepts can be rethought. In a set of brilliant analyses, del Lucchese shows how Spinoza took up Machiavelli’s analysis of institutional life in order to reconceive terms that seem to be on the side of peace, security, and discipline. Conflict, he persuasively argues, is at the core of Spinoza’s understanding of obedience, natural right, and participation in civic life. In a particularly illuminating set of pages, del Lucchese claims that conflict is also at the core of Spinoza’s understanding of law, which from one perspective is a “sign . . . an effect, taken separately from its cause” (104), but from another perspective is a “battlefield” in which questions of rights and power get played out (105).

 

Finally, in a third move del Lucchese shows how realism and conflict culminate in a political philosophy of multiplicity. At stake is Spinoza’s thinking about the multitude for democratic theory. Following Negri’s Savage Anomaly, del Lucchese argues that Spinoza takes up the figure of the multitude in response to contemporary contract theorists, Hobbes in particular. Expanding Negri’s arguments, del Lucchese links Spinoza’s engagement with the multitude to Machiavelli’s analysis of the people—as opposed to the wealthy—as a strong foundation for political rule. Following Machiavelli, Spinoza asks how multiplicity can be “affirmed” via the state “in the absoluteness of a democracy” (132). But del Lucchese’s analysis runs deeper than this, arguing that Spinoza’s analysis of multiplicity proceeds along two related lines. Multiplicity shows the need for democratic government, and it also shows the need for a critique of the autonomous individual. Del Lucchese tracks this double questioning—the multiplicity of the common and the multiplicity of the individual—first by producing an ingenious reading of diversity and animality in The Prince and then by showing how Spinoza develops the theme of diversity in the Ethics. In del Lucchese’s intricate and provocative argument, Spinoza suggests a form of political wisdom that emerges out of the multitude in the Ethics, in the well-known and difficult to understand third form of knowledge that goes beyond common notions and is associated with the intellectual love of God.

 

One of the most surprising aspects of del Lucchese’s argument is that he takes political realism at face value. Realism is, among other things, a genre that encodes rather than simply accesses the real. Machiavelli certainly thought of himself as having a realist approach to politics—what del Lucchese calls “a concrete approach to political themes from a realistic point of view” (8)—and opposed his own emphasis on practical reason to “those who have imagined republics and principalities which have never been known to exist in reality” (Machiavelli 84). Machiavelli’s political realism was part of a broader movement in early modern Europe that included, among other things, the revival of Augustinianism, the recovery of classical writers like Lucretius, and the emergence of an increasingly strong merchant class. One strand of this movement resulted in what C. B. MacPherson has called possessive individualism and aided the explosion of capitalism in the eighteenth century. Machiavelli and Spinoza’s realism may well challenge this trend, but it would be worth understanding realism as itself a conflicted term that responded to and participated in key historical shifts.

 

For del Lucchese, Machiavelli’s realism has to do with his conception of history as a plane of action on which virtù shapes events. Almost the inverse of Luther, for whom history reveals the inability of the human will to achieve salvation, in del Lucchese’s account Machiavelli conceives of history as the occasion for the will to assert its own shaping authority. (Here, he comes closest to J. G. A. Pocock’s reading of Machiavelli in his magisterial Machiavellian Moment.) Del Lucchese goes on to argue that Spinoza inherits and expands this understanding of history to encompass the whole of reality. But realism also involves Machiavelli and Spinoza in the politics of imagination. If, for example, the common good is not deducible from the natural order of things, for Spinoza this means that the common has to be constructed through the resources of the cultural imaginary.

 

The politics of the cultural imaginary is one radical component of Machiavelli and Spinoza’s thought that del Lucchese does not take up. But this dimension of politics is central as each theorizes political community. One of the main lessons of the Theologico-Political Treatise is that culture is a powerful mediator of collective life, one that rivals charismatic authority. At the beginning of the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza calls out tyrants for using “the specious title of religion” to “keep men in a state of deception,” so that they will “fight for their servitude as if for salvation” (389-90). Part of Spinoza’s response is to turn scripture into a cultural text—a product of human invention—so that it can no longer be used to justify authoritarian government. At the same time, Spinoza also recuperates scripture as a cultural text through which the common continues to be forged. This is for Spinoza the theologico-political dilemma: because religion can be instrumentalized in the service of oppression, it must be translated into a cultural apparatus that enables democracy. Spinoza would have learned this lesson from Machiavelli who, in The Discourses, supplements his critique of the Church with an argument in favor of Roman religion, which reinforced the norms and values of an expansionist republic. Both Machiavelli and Spinoza’s worry is that the cultural imaginary exerts such a powerful influence that it can lead the people or the multitude to act against their own desires and best interests. And this leads to the insight that the cultural imaginary has to be revised and reshaped again and again toward republican and democratic ends. This line of thinking has been pursued most powerfully by feminist scholarship on Spinoza—in particular work by Moira Gatens, Genevieve Lloyd, and Susan James. In his account of political realism, del Lucchese is paradoxically much more idealistic and utopian about the possibilities of the multitude being actualized without cultural mediation.

 

It is very much to his credit that del Lucchese’s argument raises vexing problems like these. His rich and substantial account of conflict and multiplicity in the political philosophies of Machiavelli and Spinoza demonstrates the continued importance of these provocative and illuminating writers. In the opening pages of Conflict, Power, and Multitude, del Lucchese explains that his purpose is “to reveal the diversity and complexity of [early modernity] by emphasizing the existence of various, alternative modernities and the various conceptions of politics, law, and the state that were being formulated from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century” (2). The alternative modernity that he reveals will be of great interest to anyone concerned with theorizing democracy today.