For a hundred years after 1848, defeats for the Left typically came in two, tightly intermeshed, forms. Crushing blows—1849, 1871, 1919, 1926, 1939—alternating with unexpected bouts of prosperity, could contain, for a time, the aspirations of those demanding more than the owners of society and their allies were prepared to concede. In the West, the great rebellions of the late sixties broke with this pattern. The unprecedented affluence of the first postwar decades had shaped a generational milieu resistant to an older, middle-class work and leisure ethic, and receptive to insurgencies of the downtrodden. The subsequent sharp upswing in working-class militancy in the core, and setbacks for American imperialism on the periphery, briefly made it seem to some as if distant pre-revolutionary situations were looming in the homelands of capitalism.

In attenuated local forms, various legacies of these overlapping moments have survived the sweeping rounds of capitalist restructuring that followed the world economic downturn of the mid-seventies. Despite this impressive feat of adaptation, such pockets of opposition have had difficulty coming to terms with the formidable staying power of a conservative/neoliberal ascendancy that is now in its third decade. In a parallel perhaps to the legendary failure of the interwar Left to comprehend the advances of fascism, opponents of this passive revolution have been unable to account for its great successes, as so far it seems to possess the historically unique ability to invent the standards by which it is judged. What accounts for the ease of its victories, often scored with sparing doses of coercion—‘democratically’—and yet in a context of declining fortunes for large majorities? The enervation of collective resistance under these conditions seems to signal the advent of an order of things in which praxis itself has become an enigma.

Times of open conflict between proponents of different social orders are, of course, historically exceptional. The keenest observers of 19th-century politics—Tocqueville, Heine, Donoso, Marx, Burkhardt, Nietzsche among them—underscored the novelty of a society in the throes of a chronic, publicly staged legitimation crisis. In 1929, Carl Schmitt captured the culmination of this historical experience in an epigram: ‘We, in central Europe, live sous l’oeil des Russes.’footnote¹ While organized counter-offensives played a significant role in the eventual neutralization of this threat to the West, during the last decades of the 20th century these specifically political thrusts were overtaken and subsumed by a broader structural transformation that has bypassed classical forms of both hegemony and resistance.

It is difficult to gauge the possibilities of effective intellectual intervention in such an opaque historical situation. The crux of the exchange between Stefan Collini and Francis Mulhern in these pages has been whether critical discourse needs to be anchored in deep political commitments in order to orient its targets, scope and polemical intensities. The burden of Mulhern’s case is that it is only in a political mode that society can be put into question, through sovereign affirmations and negations of its fundamental premises. One does not have to endorse Collini’s notion of politics as a potentially open and endless conversation to recognize that both views seem to presume the existence of a largely superseded public sphere, where society once revealed its sensitivity to the pin-pricks and salvos of critique. It could be that this contemporary closure of the political is merely a conjunctural, and thus reversible, effect of a quarter-century of sweeping victories for capital. Alternatively, we may be in the midst of a deeper transformation that has scrambled the very phenomenon of agency, relegating classical partisanships to the status of more or less eccentric, ideological preferences. Perhaps in a more ominous sense than he intended, this development confirms Collini’s position.

In the waiting chamber of the present, to what texts should we turn in determining a critical stance adequate to our situation? Thought experiments with previously inconceivable constitutions were the hallmark of classical political philosophy; it may be useful to revisit this genre, whose peaks had cast a shadow over every institution of human society in the long intervals before their actual negation seemed possible. From the Republic to Emile, this art of estrangement had the effect of making the most drastic transformations conceivable, if only in theory. Generally, however, even the most antinomian forms of this tradition have had little determinate relationship to political practice. The writings of Machiavelli form an exceptional case within this history, for instead of a critical, essentially idealistic, discourse on the absence of legitimacy, they offer a novel method for exploring the sheer potentiality of praxis: thinking through the inception, full scope and limits of the constituent power to construct new orders.

In a posthumously published manuscript, Louis Althusser sought to convey the philosophical significance of Machiavelli’s fragmentary thoughts on the traumatic origins of new states.footnote² The point was not to offer a new interpretation of Machiavelli but rather, he reasoned, to recognize the impossibility of a definitive solution, as the creative statute of a new mode of political thought. The ellipses and antinomies of these texts were the nodal points of a buoyant ontology, enabling readers to imagine and to think the onset of action through a new literary form: the parable of innovation. I would like to propose that a more concrete thesis can be developed from this speculative point of departure, one that consists of two parts: Machiavelli’s innovation was, firstly, to raise the distinctively modern problem of the actuality of the most radical projects of transformation; and secondly, to provide an attentive reader with a method of reflecting upon and generating effective practical stances with regard to continuing, renewing or abandoning such projects. This thesis can be tested by examining the decisive episodes in the centuries-long reception of Machiavelli’s thought, and posing for our own times the question that earlier commentators considered to be the defining problem of the modern historical situation: what in the human condition can be changed through political praxis?

An initial problem is whether classical political theory or philosophy can retain any relevance today, within the labyrinth of mediatic society. The charge that such works belong to an antiquarian genre cannot be dismissed out of hand. One influential reason offered for studying these canonical texts is that they provide an opportunity to reflect on alternative political orders, based upon different conceptions of human nature. If this were true, books of this kind should perhaps then be regarded as memorabilia for our post-political situation. While not many intellectuals like to assent to the finality of this verdict, most public discourse more or less enthusiastically accepts the absence of any alternatives to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, with the main outstanding problem being the parameters of cultural tolerance. There are, of course, some volatile elements in this formula: a broad upswing of religious fundamentalism in the us; anti-immigrant backlashes in Europe. Elsewhere, numerous combinations of religion and ethnicity offer challenges but present no compelling alternatives to the governing norm.