Machiavelli, Strauss, and the Beginning of the Human World

Abstract

Leo Strauss’s political philosophy is an attempt to alleviate the anxiety about the end of the world, which arose during World War I and increased with World War II. The core of his political philosophy is the critic of Machiavelli which he proposes in his 1958 book Thoughts on Machiavelli. He maintains that Machiavelli shared with Classical and Judeo-Christian culture the idea that at the beginning of the human world there was terror and that the permanence of that world is assured by beliefs founded on terror. He maintains also that Classical and Judeo-Christian culture was aware of the illusiveness of those beliefs, but kept silent about it, and that the novelty of Machiavelli’s thought consists exclusively in his betrayal of its silence: according to Strauss, Machiavelli’s revelation of that illusiveness initiated modernity and lead to nihilism, relativism and to the end of the human world. Strauss maintains finally that Machiavelli’s thought, as he has interpreted it, is very near to Freud’s thought. Comparing the critic of Strauss with Machiavelli’s texts, this paper shows that, according the latter, at the beginning of human world there is not terror, but a feeling which Machiavelli calls ‘sbigottimento’ a word which in this paper is translated with ‘astonishment’. The paper shows also that Machiavelli considers this feeling as the condition of a dialectics of recognition different from the Hegel’s – which is at the root of Lacan’s thought. The author suggests that remembering the presence of Machiavelli’s way in western culture to conceive the beginning of the human world can be the precondition for conceiving society, psychotherapy and the continuity of the human world in a way that differs not only from Strauss’s, but also from Freud’s and Lacan’s.

Keywords:

• Beyond the life/death drives Keyword: Beyond the life/death drives
• Freud Keyword: Freud
• Love and Death Keyword: Love and Death
• War and Transience Keyword: War and Transience
• ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ Keyword: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’
• ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ Keyword: ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’

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Rights: Incopyright