Machiavellian National-Popular Will and the Right | Jorge Alemán | en ULTRADERECHAS (Far-Right Politics)

NED 2025

The Florentine writer—despite the many and varied ways he has been acknowledged —occupies a founding, singular place in the field of political theory. Readers across the spectrum, from left to right, recognize in The Prince and the Discorsi the first thinker to set out—with incomparable intensity—what we can now treat conceptually as the earliest theory in which “the political” presents itself in the mode of radical autonomy. In Machiavelli, although the political sphere is traversed by the economic, the religious, and the history of ideas, it must always be thought in its own specificity.

That is the emphasis underlined by the three great readings of Machiavelli: Gramsci, Althusser, and Lefort. For all their differences, they reach the same insight: the Prince is the metaphor that embodies the complex, mutually constitutive relationship, between virtue and contingency.

At the same time, virtue and contingency must be combined with the art of governing and with the appropriate duration of that governance, grounded in the authority it requires. Such authority, which expects nothing from love, because of love’s volatile and fleeting nature, must indeed evoke respect—eliciting a certain fear—yet it must never make itself hated.

Finally, and to sum up, the link between the Prince and the people is forged in order to build a national and popular will, driven by the desire to achieve the unity of the nation and to culminate in the founding of the republic.

From this perspective, one might understand that Machiavelli himself was not “Machiavellian”. The adjective “Machiavellian” is the great ideological distortion that masks true Machiavellian thought. The “Machiavellian” idea shows no emancipatory feature; it is a representation of power in which the jouissance of the subjected contribute to their own subjection to a power that lacks virtue and does not know what to do with contingency, because it has never understood the random oscillations of popular will.

The political representatives of the Right are “Machiavellian”: they devote themselves to Power solely with the perverse aim of reproducing it for the “great ones,” as our Florentine writer would say. But national-popular movements and the Left—whether they admit it or not—will remain true to their cause only if they are Machiavellian.