The illusion of realism: fundamental errors in Machiavelli's work

Abstract

This article undertakes a critical and in-depth analysis of the fundamental errors in Machiavelli’s political philosophy, drawing upon Carvalho’s work Machiavelli or the Demonic Confusion (2011). According to the author, Machiavellianism cannot be understood as a realistic or pragmatic political science; rather, it should be regarded as a contradictory, and at times parodic, construction in which moral and religious elements are distorted and reconfigured within an instrumental logic of power. By introducing a conception of “virtue” detached from morality and by postulating a form of power that stands in open hostility to transcendence, Machiavelli performs a radical inversion of the classical and Christian foundations of politics. His thought thus inaugurates a profound rupture with the philosophical tradition inherited from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, in which politics was conceived as an extension of ethics and as a pursuit of the common good. The historical and doctrinal consequences of this enterprise reveal themselves as destructive and corrosive in nature, incompatible with philosophical rationality, human dignity, and any teleological orientation of political action.