Ontologies of Power in the Sovereign Politics of Pindar and Machiavelli

Abstract

Ontologies of power allow us to speak of power’s place in the construction of the order, coherence, and intelligibility of a larger world. How one understands that world depends in good part on how one presents power as a meaningful construct. This essay explores the ontological contradictions of sovereignty, manifest in the propensity of the sovereign agent to preserve and jeopardize the welfare of those he brings under his aegis in order to persist, in two influential paradigms of power: Pindar’s nomos basileus preserved in fr. 169α, and Niccolò Machiavelli’s archetypal sovereign in his treatise Il principe. Both compositions record the human cognition on the nature of governance from the vantage point of the aspiring ruler. In fr. 169α, Pindar recounts the violent labors of Heracles as a means to civic advancement and personal atonement. In Nemean 3, Pythian 4 and 6 he offers correctives to Heracles’s forceful interventions through the figure of Cheiron. In his treatise Il principe, Machiavelli traces the equivocal path of the ascending prince in sixteenth-century Florence by attending to his metaphysical telos, political dominance. In charting the antinomies of sovereignty in the proposed texts, the author relates the political aberration at the heart of its being to its Renaissance and post-Renaissance applications in state administration and civic control. The politics of sovereign legitimation has carried on successfully from antiquity to modernity, and continues to play an active role in various arenas of international politics and human rights: from the conditions and forms under which military action, humanitarian intervention, and mass incarceration become acceptable in the United States and abroad, to medical judgment on euthanasia, biotechnology, and abortion, the civic and biological processes of life remain under the firm control of the state.