Machiavelli and Us

Machiavelli and Us, by Louis Althusser. Edited by Francois Matheron, trans. by Gregory Elliot. London and NewYork: Verso, 1999. $30.00. Pp. xxii, 136.

This book grew out of Althusser's lectures on Machiavelli at the Ecole normal superieur in 1972, and includes in an appendix "Machiavelli's Solitude," an address delivered in 1977 to the Association Francaise de Science Politique. Althusser's reading of Gramsci in the summer of 1961 led him to study Machiavelli. Althusser taught his first course on Machiavelli in 1962, but these notes were misplaced. He taught the course several times in the 1970s, and it is the notes dating from 1972 that laid the foundation for the essays in this text. Althusser revised and added to these essays several times up to 1986, with the intention of publishing them. They were first published in French after Althusser's death in 1995.

Althusser offers a view of Machiavelli as a partisan theorist passionately committed to the goal of Italian unity and independence. Althusser therefore rejects the traditional interpretation of the Galilean Machiavelli who advanced a positivistic and purely technical notion of politics which anyone could make use of. Machiavelli and Us also develops certain aspects of Althusser's thought, particularly the theory of overdetermination, and the concept of ideological state apparatuses. The interpretation of Althusser as a structuralist will have to be modified in light of this book's emphasis on authority, ideological politics, and individual action as they relate to a specific historical context.

In his autobiography, and also in an essay on Spinoza, Althusser writes about a number of theoretical detours that he made along the road to Marxism. According to these reflections, Althusser was fascinated with Machiavelli even more than with Marx. It is evident from this book that Althusser's work on Machiavelli is pivotal in his shift to an aleatory theory...