Abstract

This paper consists of three parts. In the first part (A), I briefly examine the main features of Strauss’s interpretation of Machiavelli’s political thought which rests on destructive analysis of moral virtue and consequent reduction of politics to a technique of conquering fortune. In the second and central part (B), Strauss’s reading is complemented by another classical interpretation, that of Claude Lefort. In contrast to Strauss, Lefort reads Machiavelli as a theoretician of the political conceived as a specific modern way of instituting the social through irresolvable division. Lefort launches Machiavelli into motion by throwing him in the insurmountable void opened up by the division of desires, setting off a constitutive play of politics and the political. The great Florentine is thereby exalted as the inventor of nothing less than the new political ontology. However, class struggle seems to be completely trapped in the forks of the ontological dimension, and Machiavelli’s theory of political freedom is reduced to its legal dimension. That is why I intend to provide an outline of a possible critique of such a reading, inquiring, in the conclusive part (C), into a (hidden) ethical dimension of the political implied in the desire of the people for freedom, which leads us to the assumption of possible diachronic success of collective political subjectivization of citizens.