MACHIAVELLI AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

Abstract

The article takes into account the different readings of the work of Machiavelli that attempt to explain the duality of the author (at once a Republican and an adviser for Lorenzo de Medici) and to bring to the foreground of the analysis a defense of freedom and the articulation of it with the dynamics of the moods of the city, in order to put into relief the decisive contribution of C. Lefort for the discussion of the democratic character of the teachings of the Florentine thinker. Then, it finds in La Boétie‟s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude and in Montaigne‟s Essays, that is, in the French reception of the political philosophy of Machiavelli in the sixteenth century, new evidence of an articulation between desire and freedom. Such evidence is not only consonant to the interpretation provided by C. Lefort, but also promotes important developments concerning reflections on the institutionalization of the desire of the people and its power to safeguard the freedom of the republic from the ambitions of the great.