Machiavelli and the Concept of Political Sublimation

Abstract

Niccolò Machiavelli has long been considered a republican thinker concerned with the actualization of a historically contextual common good, but recent interpretations of his political thought have attempted to locate in his work a specifically democratic content, a concern with the concrete participatory empowerment of all citizens. This paper will attempt to situate this concern in a specific philosophical anthropology, suggesting that Machiavelli develops a hierarchy of regime types that are differentiated by their ability to give a popular expression to what he characterizes as a vital, dynamic, and creative human desire. Machiavelli provides us with a means to think about a specifically political externalization of desire, the possibility of a political form of the psycho-social process of sublimation. What is more, Machiavelli’s recognition of the universality of the capacity for creative expression will serve as the ground for an ethical commitment to the generalization of the faculty of political creation via a project of radically democratic institutionalization.