The Prince as Manifesto and the National-Popular Will: Machiavelli between Gramsci and Althusser

Abstract

This article examines some of the theoretical and political problems developed by Althusser from the perspective of the materialism of encounter expounded in his writings of the 1970s. During those years, while reflecting on the profound crisis of Marxism, Althusser set himself the task of elaborating a new practice of philosophy and politics. The high point of this elaboration stems from his reading of Machiavelli, whom he conceives as an unavoidable antecedent of Marx. The materialism of encounter, in the tradition of Machiavelli and Marx, is a philosophy of militant political practice. The similarity to Gramsci’s approach is by no means accidental, since the author of the Prison Notebooks occupies a central place in Althusser’s quest to recreate materialism. The thesis of the practical-political character of philosophy, whose style is not the systematic treatise but the manifesto, as well as the idea that politics is not the expression of a historical class-subject but the construction of a collective will capable of founding a new state–two central theses of Althusser’s Machiavelli–compel us to rethink the relationship with Gramsci’s problem of the national-popular.