Abstract

This study examines the manner in which Machiavelli undertakes to elaborate and to justify the notorious "realism" of his political science, which consists in a deliberate and rigorous critique of justice or moral goodness. Despite its overt appeal to the common good and republican devotion, the Discourses on Livy, I argue, supplies a pathway to the foundation of this realism: the work is addressed to "the young" who combine rare intelligence with moral and civic concern, and it is guided by Machiavelli's concern to persuade such readers of the reasonableness of his amoral account of human affairs and the order of the world. Through his discourses on Livy's Romans Machiavelli undertakes to enlighten the young about the meaning of genuine virtu and the distance that allegedly separates it from the justice they currently embrace. ;An examination of Machiavelli's discussions of acquisitive necessity, domestic rule and foreign affairs in Books I and II reveals that the core of this enlightenment is a confrontation with what he understands to be the essentially pious foundation of the moral life: Machiavellian realism is a secular, and secularizing, enterprise. Machiavelli teaches those exceptional youth who are suited to become "princes" that the prosperous management of human affairs requires that the rulers of peoples abandon pious scruple and instead determine appropriate courses of action in accordance with necessities knowable through prudence or natural reason alone. However, by ascending in places to theoretical discussions about the "things of the world" , Machiavelli indicates his awareness that the adequacy of his political critique of piety ultimately depends upon his ability to demonstrate to the full satisfaction of reason the existence and sovereignty of Nature, understood as an order of impersonal necessity. Machiavelli's moral-political realism is thus shown to entail and to point towards a theoretical realism that confronts the claim that the world is ordered providentially under a just and omnipotent sovereign