Rearticulating recoveries of importance: A reading of Walker’s Strauss’ Machiavelli

Abstract

This article argues that a productive way of studying the legacy of Machiavelli in contemporary international politics is to study works that have sought to assess this legacy already. In effect, we should acknowledge that Machiavelli's legacy is generally mediated by influential previous readings. I make this argument on textual mediation by engaging the assessment of Machiavelli's legacy in Walker's Inside/Outside and After the Globe, Before the World. More precisely, the article documents and analyzes the intertwinement of Walker's reading of Machiavelli with (and mostly against) that of Leo Strauss. Both Walker and Strauss are concerned with the relationship between Machiavelli's claims and the notion of a tradition, be it of political philosophy or of international relations. While Walker claims that Machiavelli should be recovered from Straussian accounts of modernity as a radically new order, Strauss claimed that Machiavelli himself should be recovered from his heirs in order to recover from the crisis that he initiated. Crucially, Machiavelli's own reading of Roman history can be read as a creative recovery, both in the archeological and in the therapeutic sense of the word.As the captains of our times have abandoned all the other orders and do not observe any part of ancient discipline, so they have abandoned this part, which is of no little importance. For whoever orders himself so that he can recover three times in battles has to have fortune his enemy three times to be able to lose, and has to have against him a virtue capable of conquering him three times. But whoever does not stand except against the first push, as do all the Christian armies today, can lose easily, for any disorder, any middling virtue, can take victory away from them. What makes our armies lack the ability to recover three times is having lost the mode of receiving one line into another. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, II-16