Canvas Foreword
The following content is a discursive “canvassing” exercise intended to: process ideas and prime them for more formal publication; foreground thought processes in the spirit of auto-discourse (see A Primer on Auto-Discourse); garner feedback from peers; establish conceptual provenance for ideonomic archiving purposes.
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Building upon Notes on an Ethical Hermeneutics of Machiavelli and being halfway through Raab’s The English Face of Machiavelli, it may help in my sensemaking efforts to re-articulate my driving curiosities into more incisive lines of inquiry. Specifically, I am interested in developing an operationally viable conceptual framework for navigating the de facto political dimensions of a given milieu, in a manner which can be transparently embodied and endure some degree of scrutiny. In other words, I am interested in probing the extents to which an open-source moral-tactical calculus, consisting of conditional logic and contingencies conforming to certain “graduated constraints” of a given set of moral axioms, can be effectively employed.
As to the nature of this moral-tactical calculus, I aim for it to be substantively informed by the discourse of Machiavelli, and perhaps to advance beyond him, according to some presently undetermined logic of progression past the world-historical phase of western political discourse of which Machiavelli remains a prominent mouthpiece, namely the era of secular realpolitik. Part of my motivation to attempt to reconcile the moral with the tactical in a sufficiently coherent conceptual framework, is a refusal to accept the essentialism of the antagonism between a healthy ethic and a realistic political acumen.
A number of uncertainties arise with regard to this discursive enterprise. Firstly, my lack of familiarity with the existing sphere of discourse around Machiavelli and the wider evolution of political science, gives me pause in respect to the novelty of the ideas at hand; that is, perhaps someone has already done this. Another measure of uncertainty regards the nature, or even the necessity, of any useful paradigmatic shift “beyond” Machiavellianism; that is, what logic this progression would follow, and whether any such progression would prove to be of more than an academic value.
For example, a “post-Machiavellian” political praxis may consist in taking a secular realpolitik for granted, and from there attempting to re-inject some degree or morality or ethic, secular or otherwise, into a conduct which is tactically viable in light of said realpolitik. Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, such a progression may consist of a transition from a Westphalian nation-state paradigm to the paradigm of privatized corporate realpolitik in the context of the Rechtsstaat. That is, just as Machiavelli heralded and to an extent influenced the transition from an Augustinian theologico-political paradigm of divinely sanctioned temporal de jure power, to a secular paradigm of institutional nation-state de facto power, perhaps the subsequent transition will involve the developments of privatization, economic liberalism, and the information revolution.
In what manner, if any, these developments may coalesce into an essentially novel paradigm, is unclear to me, and thuswise my curiosity beckons deeper probing. Indeed, if there is any political dimension which Machiavelli neglected, it does seem to be that of political economy. In this capacity, the trajectory of my approach, still early in its development, is largely delineated in my Prospectus of the Reconciliation of Individual Liberty and Collective Welfare. In short, my present aim is ambiguously fixed on a protocolized and non-statist approach to promoting welfare, without compromising the fundamental tenets of liberalism.
Putting aside, for a moment, whatever developmentally historiographic character this prospective conceptual framework may take on, the manner in which such a framework may be transparently employed as a moral-tactical calculus, within the socio-professional firmament of the corporatized paradigm of the Rechtsstaat, demands its own measure of definition. While the transparency, as a condition, may be excised from these considerations by any who don’t find it valuable, personally I rather like the idea of optimizing for transparency, even if it entails certain tactical limitations. Indeed, it is not the categorical avoidance of such limitations that is of fundamental interest, but rather a comprehensive awareness of them.
In other words, I am not advocating for principled people to abandon their principles in view of the tactical limitations they entail, but rather for such people to simply exercise a more nuanced awareness of such limitations, and to adjust their calculations accordingly. This is all intended in the interest of epistemically empowering principled people to more tactfully navigate political reality.
