Hey guys. I've been lurking here for a bit and was wondering what your opinions were of Machiavelli?

Hey guys. I've been lurking here for a bit and was wondering what your opinions were of Machiavelli?

Is he worth studying today or would I be better off with Debord and Baudrillard?

I'd recommend reading him, for sure. Althusser believes that Machiavelli is one of the first proto-materialist political philosophers out there.

wtf is that shit. its like timecube but better

just listen to some tupac

Is this image that one guy who tried to synthesise dialectics with linear algebra (and failed spectacularly, making it clear they barely understood linear algebra)

I think anyone who wants to study politics should start with Machiavelli, his way of analyzing history, power, and the state were foundational to every next attempt.


I haven't read Althusser's analysis but it would make sense from what I've read of Machiavelli.

fraud who convinced wealthy patrons he had something of value, rambled out a list of 'natural order' type ideas and generic concepts familiar to and concerning italian power. ex: fear of using mercenaries rather than native soldiers used by the wealthy in his era, which are widely used today and no-one seems to care.

I think Gramsci said that too. Modern princ draws inspiration from Machiavelli.

His military advice may be slightly outdated, but using mercenaries still isn't a good idea if you are dealing with wealthy opponents, of if there is a lack of an established order.

I've actually read the original, then Gramsci's commentary, then Althusser's. Gramsci's book was a waste of time, tbh.

I know it's a simplification, but when I think about machiavelli he is like the first guy in the west who wrote a "walkthrough" for the manteinance of political power (the prince). The book is not about the divine right of kings and all that shit, it's about what to do in practice to mantain power: for example he doesn't condemn tactics based on fear, he just says that they create a fragile balance that makes them impratical. For that stuff I think the prince is absolutely worth studying, for the other shit maybe his fiction can be fun but his actual ideas of an ideal and just society are just literally autistic oligarchy based on roman shit old laws

Gramsci didn't write a book.

And it is not commentery; It is an essay about orginazing a political party, it draws inspiration from Machiavelli.

It still was a waste of time.

I'm trying to make some sense out of this image. Seems like all this user did was define algebraic terms and operators for "history" (sub tau = epoch in the timeline), "categories", "conversion of categories" and "revolution" as some weird variant of addition, that adds a new category, and thus new conversions of commodities into it's corresponding subset of history. Also, socialism simply adds a "social property" category and mantains money as the universal commodity, which is kind of weird since one of the goals of communism is the abolition of money.

I think whoever made it was never told that math is not just applied logic.

Debord himself said that it was time that "the basic theoreticians to retrieve and develop are no longer Hegel, Marx and Lautreamont, but Thucydides, Machiavelli and Clausewitz."

bump

It was originally a webpage I screencapped from dialectics.org or something of the sort that had a bunch of pages like this. Probably can find an explanation there.

links for the lulz?

His military advice may have been intentionally bad, since he would have very much liked to see the people he wrote The Prince for get killed.

true

"his actual ideas of an ideal and just society are just literally autistic oligarchy based on roman shit old laws"

He was a republican [small r], which at the time was as radical left as there was in the political spectrum. He was tortured and exiled for his support of the Republic. He just happened to think, not unreasonably, that if societies weren't strict enough in terms of governance or religion, then they would become too unstable and ultimately picked apart by stronger and more tyrannical states. Therefore, the most humane alternative was a Republic based on civic virtue, rather than the Divine Right of Kings bullshit or the predatory oligarchies of contemporary Italy. He was one of "us" in spirit, I truly believe, despite some of his antiquated ideas.

Dialectics.org

If they'd had read his book, he have been assassinated.

Such mentalities are permeated, in some cases consciously, but, more often, unconsciously, by the all-pervasive praxis of
reducing, and of collapsing, the vast, burgeoning, multi-qualitative richness of humanly-lived reality to a single dimension
of monetary quantity; of exchange-valuation; of ‘value-upon-sale’, i.e., of ‘alienation-value’; in short, of capital-value(s).

You like not just meaningless word salad but meaningless chopped word salad then?

Later on in life Marx renounced dialectics and became a follower of L. Ron Hubbard and his idea of dianectics. This is often ignored by Marx scholars but it must be considered when studying Marxism as a whole. It must also be stressed that Marx too renounced materialism in his later life and subscribed to Hubbardian scientology, supposedly claiming that it is the "one true religion", in which he told non-scientologists to "fuck off.

He later admitted being off by just one letter.

I mean… Republic's weren't exactly uncommon in Italy in those days. It was less his support of republicanism in general and more his support of republicanism, in this particular city, that was formerly a republic, that the people exiling him were quite keen on ruling.

Also it legitimately seems to have been satire?

It still holds up if you replace 'mercenaries' for 'Salafi militias'