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* University of Milan-Bicocca; Collège International de Philosophie, Paris
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLI | Number 1 | 2020 | 87–113 | doi: 10.3986/fv.41.1.03
Vittorio Morfino*
Althusser, Machiavelli, and the PCF
Introduction
Althusser’s interest in Machiavelli traverses the most productive theoretical pe-
riod of his thought, despite the fact that in the work published during his life-
time, Machiavelli’s name only rarely appears.
1
 However, this rarity is offset by 
the large quantity of texts dedicated to Machiavelli contained in the archives at 
IMEC, which are now at least in part published:
1)  the manuscript of a course held in 1962
2
2)  the manuscript of a course held in 1971–72, of which there is a second ver -
sion with numerous modifications presumably made in 1975–76, with the title 
Machiavelli et nous [Machiavelli and Us] (a version that Althusser continued to 
correct until the 1980s)
3
3)  an article with the title “La solitude de Machiavel” [“Machiavelli’s Solitude”] 
from 1977
4
4)  a note on Machiavelli and Gramsci from 1977
5
5)  a text with the title Que faire? [What is to be done?] with a long digression on 
Machiavelli, from 1978
6
1
 Cf. Louis Althusser, Montesquieu. La politique et l’histoire, PUF, Paris 1959, p. 12  ; Pour 
Marx, Maspero, Paris 1965, p. 93 and especially Louis Althusser,  “Soutenance d’ Amiens”, 
in Y. Sintomer (Ed.), La solitude de Machiavel, PUF, Paris 1998, p. 205.
2
 Louis Althusser, Machiavel (1962), in Politique et Histoire de Machiavel à Marx, Seuil, Paris 
2006, pp. 207–254.
3
 Louis Althusser, Machiavel et nous, in F. Matheron (Ed.), Écrits philosophiques et poli-
tiques, t. II, Stock/Imec, Paris 1995, pp. 42–168.
4
 Louis Althusser, “La solitude de Machiavel”, in La solitude de Machiavel, pp. 311–324.
5
 Manuscript in the Althusser Archive at IMEC with the label ALT2. A57-01.09. (now pub -
lished: Que faire?, ed. G.M. Goshgarian, PUF, Paris 2018.
6
 Manuscript in the Althusser Archive at IMEC with the label ALT2. A26-05.06 / 07.

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vittorio morfino
6)  the part dedicated to Machiavelli in The Underground Current of the Materia-
lism of the Encounter, from 1982
7
7)  two excerpts from the autobiography, given the title The Only Materialist 
Tradition by the editors, from 1985
8
8)  a manuscript text from 1986 entitled Machiavelli philosophe
9
 
This series of texts merits consideration. I will not closely track variations in the 
details of Althusser’s interpretation throughout each text here. Instead, I will 
try to isolate the most significant moments and highlight the continuities and 
discontinuities. In order to synthesize, I think we can observe four phases of 
Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli across this series, within which we can trace 
some discontinuities:
1) The 1962 course
2) Machiavelli and Us from 1972–76
3) Althusser’s new confrontation with Gramsci in 1977–78
4)  The writings of the 1980s
However, before considering these phases it is necessary to establish a prem-
ise that allows us to frame Althusser’s overall relationship with Machiavelli. 
Althusser declares at the beginning of Machiavelli and Us that he will read 
Machiavelli directly, without interpretative filters, as if he were his contem-
porary. However, this is actually a misleading suggestion. Althusser reads 
Machiavelli as a Marxist and a communist: in this sense the question he poses 
to Machiavelli concerns an essential question, that of the party. But to under-
stand the theoretical framework of the question it is necessary to keep in mind a 
fundamental mediation of Althusser’s reading of Gramsci, namely Gramsci’s in-
terpretation of Machiavelli, which Filippo Del Lucchese has the merit of already 
emphasizing for us.
10
 
7
 Louis Althusser, Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre, in F. Matheron 
(Ed.), Écrits philosophiques et politiques, t. I, Stock/Imec, Paris 1994, pp. 539–579.
8
 Louis Althusser, “L’unique tradition matérialiste”, Lignes 18 (1993), pp. 71–119.
9
 Manuscript in the Althusser Archive at IMEC with the label ALT2. A29-06-07.
10
 Filippo Del Lucchese, «Sul vuoto di un incontro: Althusser lettore di Machiavelli», in 
AA. VV ., Rileggere il Capitale. La lezione di Louis Althusser, parte seconda, Mimesis, Milano 
2009, pp. 31–49.

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althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
Without fear of exaggerating it can be said that Althusser’s encounter with 
Machiavelli takes place entirely through Gramsci,
11
 and if something new hap-
pens in his reading of Machiavelli, this novum must be thought in light of his 
work on Gramsci.
12
 In one of the two autobiographical writings dedicated to 
Machiavelli in 1985, Althusser recognized this debt: Machiavelli’s thought must 
be read as the project of the “historical realization of Italian national unity.”
13
 He 
then adds: “Gramsci has seen this extremely well, although he has blundered 
with everything else.”
14
 Here Althusser recognizes an important debt, but liqui-
dates the rest, which in my view leads critics astray. Actually, Althusser’s debt 
to Gramsci is much larger, although it is certainly animated by this key point. 
The 1970s course, as well as the 1962 course, has as its fundamental interpreta -
tive framework the question of the unitary national state. This framework allows 
Althusser, on the basis of Gramsci, to reject the horns of the dilemma between 
monarchy and republicanism for a much deeper and more complex democratic 
reading: the absolute monarchy that is allied to the people against the feudal 
elements of society. And yet Althusser fully accepts the definition of The Prince 
as a manifesto and a utopia in Gramsci’s sense, i.e., not as a yearning for an 
ideal state, but as a project of political intervention. Moreover, the entire read-
ing that Althusser proposes of the principalities, armies, and the political prac-
tice of the prince is nothing but the full development of what Gramsci had only 
sketched out concerning the analytic chapters and rhetorical conclusion of The 
Prince: the entire analysis is carried out from the perspective of the construction 
of the strategy of the new prince in the Italian conjuncture. Althusser also ac-
cepts Gramsci’s key reflection on the army and on the primacy of politics over 
the military element, on the anticipation of Jacobinism in the creation of the 
mixture between city and country, just as he also extends the logic of Gramsci’s 
argument regarding the political value of the infantry over the cavalry. He also 
accepts the definition of the political practice of the prince, the definition of 
11
 Cf. Emmanuel Terray, “An Encounter: Althusser and Machiavelli”, trans. A. Callari and D. 
Ruccio, in Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory, Wesleyan University 
Press, Hanover, NH 1997, p. 258.
12
 Cf. Adam Holden and Stuart Elden, “It cannot be a Real Person, a Concrete Individual”: 
Althusser and Foucault on Machiavelli’s Political Technique”, Borderlands 4 (2005), p. 2, 
who refer to Althusser’s “neo-Gramscian” reading.
13
 Louis Althusser, “L’unique tradition matérialiste”, Lignes 18 (1993), p. 101.
14
 Ibid.

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religion as an all-pervasive ideological element of the time, as well as the two 
levels of force and consent on which the prince must act, and also the theory of 
violence directed against the feudal world.
But that’s not all. If Gramsci’s suggestion of the deep unity of The Art of War and 
The Prince is indeed taken up by Althusser, he also reads the unity of The Prince 
and the Discourses with the help of hints from Gramsci. Whereas Gramsci speaks 
of the two works as the moment of dictatorship (the individual) and hegemony 
(the universal), Althusser speaks of the absolute beginning and the “settlement 
of the laws and emergence from solitude,” to which correspond the metaphors of 
foundation and taking root. In the 1977 text “Machiavelli’s Solitude,” Althusser 
will use the Gramscian term dictatorship, making the debt explicit even from a 
terminological point of view.
15
 There is thus no contradiction between a monar-
chic and republican Machiavelli, but rather unity: in the Discourses Machiavelli 
searches for the example of a state that lasts, a state founded by kings, but ca-
pable of becoming popular. 
Is Althusser’s reading thus a simple repetition of Gramsci? Such a claim would 
probably be unjust because Gramsci’s reading, while being extremely powerful, 
is actually only hinted at: it would be more accurate to claim that Althusser 
grasps the profound internal logic of Gramsci’s interpretation, developing it as 
far as possible. In a certain sense, it could be said that Althusser, in his course 
from the 1970s, wrote the book on Machiavelli that Gramsci could not have writ -
ten, drawing out all of the analytic and synthetic consequences that, certainly 
in retrospect, appear to us as ineluctable, which does not mean that they were 
such prior to being drawn out.
Having said that, some elements of the originality of Althusser’s reading should 
also be outlined. First of all, we should emphasize the element of the encounter 
between virtù and fortuna, of the occasion, the conjuncture, the element that in 
the 1962 course will come to be identified as an “insoluble contradiction”
16
 of 
Machiavelli’s thought. During the 1970s course and with even greater emphasis 
in the writings on aleatory materialism, precisely the impossibility of assigning 
15
 “[...] the first moment of the State [...] is [...] the monarchic, or dictatorial moment.” Althus-
ser, “La solitude de Machiavel”, p. 316.
16
 Althusser, Machiavel (1962), p. 233.

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althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
a name and space to this beginning will constitute one of the points of force of 
Machiavelli’s political thought and what Althusser calls his philosophy. From 
the viewpoint of political theory, this point marks Machiavelli’s alterity to sub-
sequent political philosophy, to the theory of the accomplished fact, to the state, 
whereas Machiavelli thinks the fact in its unfolding, and is capable of think-
ing the violence of the birth of the state and the radically aleatory character 
of its boundaries, what Althusser calls “primitive political accumulation”
17
 in 
“Machiavelli’s Solitude.” Now, this element of the aleatory has some conse-
quences on the level of the conception of the Modern Prince, the party, which 
was clearly the question behind both Gramsci and Althusser’s readings. If for 
Gramsci the Modern Prince is a historical given,
18
 which is necessary in order to 
think strategy, for Althusser it is subjected to the same contingency that charac-
terizes the birth of the state and cannot renounce the figure of the “fox,” which 
introduces the element of fear and cunning. In this context Machiavelli and the 
place from which The Prince is formulated returns, which has epistemological 
consequences: Gramsci claims that The Prince is “a self-reflection of the peo-
ple,”
19
 that “Machiavelli himself becomes the people, is confused with the peo-
ple, but not with a people “generically” understood, but with the people that 
Machiavelli has convinced with his earlier treatment, of which he becomes and 
feels the consciousness and expression, feels himself.”
20
 What Gramsci thinks 
through the categories of “myth” and “concrete fantasy,”
21
 the fusion of ideology 
and science on the one hand and the prince and people on the other, Althusser 
thinks through the category of the gap: the gap between science and ideology 
and between prince and people.
22
 The gap means that the theory must be in-
scribed in both the political and ideological conjuncture, but cannot become 
popular consciousness transparent to itself, and the prince must implement 
a popular politics, but cannot identify himself with the people, being a sim-
ple expression of them, but rather that the people will be produced as such by 
the political practice of the prince (“in the army common to them, the men of 
17
 Althusser, “La solitude de Machiavel”, p. 320. Cf. Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, 
trans. G. Elliott, Verso, London 1999, p. 125.
18
 “This organism is already given from historical development and it is the political party.” 
Q13, 1, 1558.
19
 Q 13, §1, 1556.
20
 Ibid.
21
 Q 13, §1, 1555–1556.
22
 Cf. Terray, “An Encounter: Althusser and Machiavelli”, pp. 257–277.

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the towns and countryside begin to become – learn to become – one and the 
same people.)”
23
 It is here, in the definition of these “gaps,” that Althusser finds 
his Machiavelli, the Machiavelli of the materialism of the encounter and of the 
“fox,” which he will insist on in his writings in the 1980s.
24
 
But this extraordinary reading, I want to emphasize one last time with force, is 
not found simply because of work on Machiavelli’s text. Althusser’s Machiavelli 
is the Gramsci’s Machiavelli, and if one wants to put the correct light on 
what Althusser says, one must start from the work internal to this reading. In 
Quaderno 13, taking distance from the Sorelian myth, Gramsci writes:
The modern prince, the myth-prince cannot be a real person, a concrete indi-
vidual, he can only be an organism; a complex element of society in which the 
concretization of a collective will recognized and partially affirmed in action has 
already begun. This organism is already given by historical development and is 
the political party, the first cell in which are summarized germs of collective will 
that tend to become universal and total
25
.
I will propose a reading of Althusser’s writings on Machiavelli from the specific 
perspective of the way in which, through them, he re-elaborates the relationship 
with the party on a theoretical level. And not an abstract sense of the party, but 
precisely his own relationship with the PCF, which Althusser was a member of 
throughout the post-war period after joining in 1948. 
The 1962 Course
Althusser’s 1962 lecture course is dedicated to a close analysis of The Prince and 
limited to this work. As I noted, the basic framework, although only referred to 
en passant, is Gramsci’s interpretation: the new prince must constitute the na-
tional state by giving a new form to an already existing matter. Now, according 
to Althusser, Machiavelli’s anti-utopianism consists in “the insertion of the polit-
23
 Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, p. 87.
24
 I refer here to my essay, “La storia come ‘revoca permanente del fatto compiuto’”, in R. Ca-
porali (ed.), La varia natura, le molte cagioni. Studi su Machiavelli, Il ponte vecchio, Cesena 
2007, pp. 125–140.
25
 Q13, 1558.

93
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
ical plan in the matter itself, in the existing political structures themselves.”
26
 The 
problem is that the status quo requires the constitution of the new state, but at 
the same time “renders impossible or almost impossible to assign a point of ap-
plication, its beginning.”
27
 This is because the initial matter is in such disorder 
that it is impossible to fix the birthplace of the form in advance. In this sense, 
Althusser emphasizes the originality of Machiavelli’s concept of matter, which 
has nothing to do with Aristotelian or Hegelian matter: “matter is pure void of 
form, pure formless expectation of the form.”
28
This radical exteriority of form to matter justifies the analysis of the first eleven 
chapters. These are nothing more than the analysis of existing negative forms, 
the recognition of the “radical contingency of the application of the New Form.”
29
 
Althusser first analyzes the treatment of hereditary principalities, and then fo-
cuses on chapters III and IV where the question of mixed principalities is at 
stake. Here there is “crucial question for Machiavelli,” that of the “enlargement 
of the State by annexations.”
30
 The annexation does not present problems in the 
case of states with the same customs and language. If instead language, customs 
and governments are different, “fortune and ability are necessary.”
31
 Beyond 
Machiavelli’s suggestions, what is the question at stake here? For Althusser, the 
constitution of the national state is at stake: for Machiavelli, Italy does not have 
the same customs and the same language everywhere. Naples, for example, is 
“almost foreign to the rest of Italy,” being “old state marked by the Norman con-
quest, which established a very powerful feudal order, feudalism in the French 
way.”
32
. Thus we do not have to deal with an “unreal or foreign imaginary varia-
tion to the horizon of real problems [...] but [rather with] one of the specific prob-
lems of this constitution.”
33
 Althusser reads chapters V–XI similarly, but we can 
leave the detailed analyses aside to arrive at Althusser’s conclusion. Is Italian 
matter really empty and is its enumeration neutral? In reality the enumeration 
of matter provides a series of suggestions:
26
 Althusser, Machiavel (1962), p. 207. All emphasis is Althusser’s unless otherwise noted.
27
 Ibid., p. 208.
28
 Ibid.
29
 Ibid.
30
 Ibid., p. 209.
31
 Ibid., p. 210.
32
 Ibid., p. 211.
33
 Ibid.

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vittorio morfino
1)  From some states there is nothing to expect: the hereditary principalities, 
the ecclesiastical ones and those established by sheer wickedness “which 
are outside [...] the political as such, because historical monsters.”
34
2)  New principalities, made up of men who owe their political promotion to 
luck, virtue or a social force, are quite interesting: these show that “the 
agreement [l’accord] between the Prince and the people constitutes the true 
‘foundation’ of his power and his durability.”
35
3)  Finally, the absence of the republics, because Machiavelli does not believe 
possible the creation of the national state starting from the republics for the 
reason that they “exist in Italy only in a corrupted form.”
36
The enumeration thus provides a series of indications, an enumeration domi-
nated by the chapter on mixed principalities which “draws the near future of 
the new state: the conquest and annexation of other provinces, to constitute the 
national state.”
37
The analysis of chapters XII–XIV on the army presents us with a similar enu-
meration, whose purpose is precisely to provide indications. The prince must 
have his own army and a new military organization. Althusser summarizes: 
“the good army: national troops”
38
 and adds immediately:
Machiavelli’s project. To create urban and peasant militias: to enlist peasants 
in the militias as well as the citizens of the cities. That is to say, to make of the 
army something that resembles to the future project of Jacobins: the amalgam, 
the crucible [creuset] of national unity (see Gramsci).
39
And again:
34
 Ibid., p. 215.
35
 Ibid.
36
 Ibid.
37
 Ibid., p. 216.
38
 Ibid., p. 217.
39
 Ibid., p. 218.

95
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
Primacy of the infantry. A kind of military democracy. [...] All technical problems 
are for him subordinated to the force constituted by the union [réunion] of the 
citizens in the national army: example the artillery.
40
What is the general meaning of these analyzes?
1)  Military force is a necessary tool for the project of the national state. 
2)  But this force must be itself national and popular. Machiavelli in the tradition 
that leads to Clausewitz and Lenin is the first “theorist aware of the political 
nature of war and the need to give to the forms and means of violence a polit-
ical content.”
41
Althusser goes on to analyze chapters XV–XXIII on the methods of government 
that contain:
1)  A theory of violence
2)  A theory of appearance
3)  A theory of relations with the people
According to Althusser, the theory of violence states one “internal law to vio-
lence that commands or prohibits it use.”
42
 The use of violence is justified only 
in the case of a just end: “the foundation or the preservation of a state.”
43
 The 
end, that is, justifies the means only if it is a good end: «in the general element of 
violence, which is the reality of Italian matter, we can only come out of violence 
by means of violence, provided that it is constructive, restorative and positive, 
resolutive.”
44
In commenting on the figure of the centaur, Althusser emphasizes how politics 
is “haunted by the law and yet most often rejected towards force.”
45
 But force 
alone is not enough; the lion alone is vain, and this is the meaning of the fox: “to 
40
 Ibid.
41
 Ibid., p. 219.
42
 Ibid., p. 222.
43
 Ibid.
44
 Ibid., p. 223
45
 Ibid., p. 224.

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vittorio morfino
be fox: to know how to dominate the use of the force with intelligence, to adapt 
it to its goal.”
46
As for the theory of appearance, Althusser emphasizes that the fox also has an-
other meaning: the fact that the action of the prince takes place in the context 
of the opinion of men, an opinion dominated by moral and religious qualities. 
Acting politically means acting on two levels: “the real means and ends, but 
also the imaginary and ethico-religious ideological element in which the people 
move.”
47
According to Althusser there is a strong proximity between Machiavelli and 
Spinoza on this point, although in Machiavelli it functions in a practical state, 
in the identification of an organic link between “ideology and the essence of 
politics” and at the same time in the recognition of the unreformability of this 
“spontaneous ideological consciousness.”
48
As for the theory of the prince-people relation, Althusser’s analysis is only 
sketched:
Fear without hate or contempt [...] good use of imagination and passions.
49
Finally, Althusser arrives at the analysis of chapters XXIV–XXVI in order to ask 
if a theory of action has been sketched there. In the theory of virtù and fortuna, 
Althusser identifies a failure in Machiavelli’s thought: the impossibility of think-
ing the beginning of a national state, the beginning of an absolute monarchy:
All of his theory is summed up in the thought of this event, and all of his theory, 
all of his own concepts (fortuna/virtù, return to principles, enumeration of possi-
bilities, etc.) are only the impotent thought of this event. That is why his theory, at 
the level of its concepts, is contradictory at this point, and finally comes undone 
at the very moment where it is made. That is why it exhausts itself in the definition 
of the New Prince and the New Principality, that is to say, in the obsession of the 
46
 Ibid.
47
 Ibid.
48
 Ibid., p. 226.
49
 Ibid.

97
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
absolutely New, without being able to think the event form of this Novelty. That is 
why it exhausts itself conceptually in the “tourniquet” of concepts through which 
it tries to grasp the conditions of this pure event: virtù and fortuna.
50
Certainly, Machiavelli captures this irreducible fact of modern history and is 
the only witness who has tried to think of this as a problem. This explains the 
enigmatic nature of Machiavelli’s concepts: they are foreign to modern con-
ceptuality, to natural law theories, precisely because the problem with which 
Machiavelli tries to think “has been recovered by all the later theories of the 
accomplished fact, that is to say of the solution.”
51
The failure that Althusser identifies in Machiavelli at the height of the 1962 
course concerns the concept of virtù necessary to the foundation of a national 
state: it, which must be at the origin of every necessity, is subdued “in the man 
who must be the bearer, to a radical contingency”
52
: 
The radical voluntarism of virtù is itself subject to the irrational necessity of for-
tuna.
53
Now, if we transpose the question of the virtù of the founding Prince to the ques-
tion of the virtù of the Gramsci’s Modern Prince, what seems to be unacceptable 
in Machiavelli for Althusser is subjecting the virtù of the party to radical contin-
gency, to the irrational necessity of fortuna. This in 1962.
Machiavelli and Us
We come now to the course that will be published posthumously with the title of 
Machiavelli and Us. Althusser’s reading in this text is not limited to The Prince, 
but rather is an interpretation of the unity of The Prince and the Discourses. 
And in this course, his reading of Gramsci becomes the explicit starting point 
and occupies the entire first chapter. Here we find Althusser’s reflections on the 
“gripping, but elusive [saissant mais insaisissable]”
54
 character of Machiavelli, 
50
 Ibid., pp. 246–247.
51
 Ibid., p. 247.
52
 Ibid., p. 229.
53
 Ibid., p. 230.
54
 Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, p. 6.

98
vittorio morfino
which pertains to the political and philosophical fields at the same time. On the 
philosophical level, it is given by the fact that Machiavelli is a theorist of the be-
ginning, “of the beginning that is rooted in the essence of a thing, since it is the 
beginning of this thing. It affects all its determinations, and does not fade with 
the moment, but endures with the thing itself.”
55
 
However, Althusser adds, before the thing begins, there was something else, 
but “nothing of it.”
56
 The beginning is symbolized by the formula of the effec-
tual truth [verità effettuale] that pushes the earlier discourses into the sphere 
of the imaginary. In this sense, Machiavelli’s silence on the political theories 
of Aristotle, Cicero, and Christianity has, according to Althusser, the meaning 
of a declared rupture: “It was enough for Machiavelli to speak differently to de-
nounce the imaginary character of the reigning ideology in political matters.”
57
But it is in the political field that this character provides the greatest surprise. In 
order to illustrate it with all its force, Althusser returns to Gramsci. Machiavelli 
is not simply the thinker who introduced the question of the state, as Hegel 
thought:
The State that Machiavelli expects from The Prince [...] is not the state in general 
(corresponding ‘to its concept’) but a historically determinate type of State, re-
quired by the conditions and demands of nascent capitalism: a national State.
58
Thus, Machiavelli is the thinker who poses the political problem of the constitu-
tion of the national state. This is neither constituted spontaneously nor by de-
cree, but is rather the stakes of a class struggle, whose outcomes are determined 
by a series of pre-existing economic, geographical, historical, linguistic, and 
cultural factors, but also by international relations of force. 
Gramsci claims that The Prince is a revolutionary-utopian text because we are 
dealing with “a theoretical text [...] affected in its modality and dispositive by 
political practice.”
59
 In this sense, Althusser can say that Machiavelli is the first 
55
 Ibid.
56
 Ibid. 
57
 Ibid., p. 8.
58
 Ibid., p. 10. English translation modified.
59
 Ibid., p. 17.

99
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
theorist of the conjuncture, insofar as he does not generally think about the 
question of national unity, but starts from the existing determinations and cir-
cumstances, not in order to simply enumerate them, but rather to transform 
them within the project of national unity and these circumstances. As Gramsci 
claimed, the effectual reality is not a static reality, but the effect of relations of 
force that change the meaning of a project. The problem then becomes which 
political practice is adequate to group together the positive forces of the Italian 
conjuncture. 
According to Althusser, this produces a “vacillation” of the status of the theo-
retical propositions which is undermined by political practice. The theoretical 
space in fact has no subject, while the space of political practice has no meaning 
except for its subject: the new prince. The theoretical analysis of the conjuncture 
thus has meaning if it allows an identification of an “empty space” in which the 
action of the ‘subject’ [sujet] (a term that, due to its ambiguity, Althusser propos-
es to replace with agent, and which Gramsci had designated with the term ‘will’) 
to be inserted. Althusser adds:
I say empty, to mark the vacillation of theory at this point: because it is necessary 
for this place to be filled – in other words, for the individual or party to have 
the capacity to become sufficiently strong to count among the forces, and strong 
enough again to rally the allied forces, to become the principal force and over-
come the others.
60
However, there is not only one empty space, but two, as Gramsci’s definition of 
The Prince as a manifesto indicates: the second empty space is the one through 
which the text stages this political practice. The text, in order to be politically 
effective, must be inscribed “somewhere in the space of this political practice.”
61
 
The manifesto must declare itself to be a partisan and gain partisans. In other 
words, Machiavelli treats his text as a means, transferring political practice into 
the element of ideology. In order to do this, he constructs a topological space 
and fixes the viewpoint of his text: the people. In this sense, we can claim that 
Machiavelli is neither a theorist of tyranny, nor of the state in general, but rather 
of the popular state. However, if the viewpoint is that of the people, the text is 
60
 Ibid., p. 20.
61
 Ibid., p. 22.

100
vittorio morfino
addressed to the prince. This implies the rejection of the democratic reading 
that identifies the viewpoint of the text with the addressee: the reflection of the 
people on itself, to which Gramsci refers, does not transform the consciousness 
of the people into a political force, but prepares for the advent of the prince. 
Turning to an analysis of the Discourses on Livy in chapter two, Althusser takes 
some distance from a republican reading of this work. Machiavelli’s main in-
terest in the Discourses is Rome, but not insofar as it is a model of a republic: 
“Rome is the objective experience of the foundation of a state that endured.”
62
 
What interests him about Rome is its foundation, a republic founded by a king:
Machiavelli’s utopianism does not consist in resorting to Rome as the prop for a 
moral ideology that is required in the present. It consists in recourse to Rome as 
guarantee or rehearsal for a necessary task, whose concrete conditions of possi-
bility are, however, impossible to define.
63
 
It is thus not an ideological or political utopia, but a theoretical one, insofar as 
it attempts to think the conditions of possibility of an “impossible task,”
64
 “to 
think the unthinkable,”
65
 and in this effort, Machiavelli found himself “engaged 
in forms of thought almost without precedent [engagé dans des formes de pensée 
à peu près sans précedent].”
66
 
In the third chapter, “The Theory of the ‘New Prince’,” Althusser shows the pro-
found unity of The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, a unity that resides in the 
project of the constitution of a national state: Rome outlines à la cantonade the 
theory of foundation and duration of a new state. In particular, the example 
of the history of Rome is instructive as regards the relation between laws and 
conflict:
There is no doubt that in his theory of the class struggle as the origin of the laws 
that limit it, Machiavelli adopts the viewpoint of the people.
67
62
 Ibid., p. 48.
63
 Ibid., p. 51.
64
 Ibid., p. 52.
65
 Ibid.
66
 Ibid.
67
 Ibid., p. 59.

101
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
From this, Althusser draws the following thesis: in the conflict between the 
people and nobles, the king takes the side of the people “by decreeing laws.”
68
 
This does not mean, however, that it is necessary to be alone in order to found. 
Gramsci had spoken of the unity of The Prince and the Discourses by thinking 
them under the categories of dictatorship and hegemony. Althusser thinks them 
through the categories of absolute beginning and duration, that is, the moment 
of the “settlement of laws” and the “emergence from solitude,” to which the 
metaphors of foundation and taking root correspond: “so long as their distinc-
tiveness is borne in mind, these two moments can help us to think the difference 
between The Prince and the Discourses – in other words, their non-difference, 
their profound unity.”
69
 Machiavelli is thus neither a monarchist nor a republi-
can. Rather, there is nothing but one position: the definition of the theoretical 
space of the object of The Prince.
Turning to The Prince, Althusser more or less repeats the analysis of his 1962 
course,
70
 this time citing Gramsci explicitly:
Machiavelli can set up his political problem only on condition of making a 
clean sweep of existing feudal forms as incompatible with the objective of 
Italian unity.
71
In other words, the enumeration of the principalities Machiavelli proposes in 
the first eleven chapters of The Prince is not neutral, but rather excludes several 
types of principalities as not being functional for the project: tyrannies, hered-
itary principalities, ecclesiastical principalities. Republics are not included in 
Machiavelli’s list because they are urban forms of feudalism. All of these are 
excluded as the base of the project, but not “from the political field in which this 
unity must be accomplished” given that
the body of the nation is not fixed in advance [...] it is in part aleatory, the stake 
of a struggle whose borders are not assigned [arrêtées], and [...] because it is ulti-
68
 Ibid.
69
 Ibid., p. 65.
70
 Cf. chapter 1 (“Le point de départ: la revue des principautés”) in Althusser, Machiavel 
(1962), pp. 207–216.
71
 Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, p. 70.

102
vittorio morfino
mately necessary to envisage the annexation of territories with different languag-
es and customs in order to embody the nation.
72
The new principality is identified as the basis of the project and is bound to 
a double adventure: that of a man “passing from private citizen to ruler” and 
that of a region “passing from ‘geographical expression’ to national state.”
73
 A 
double adventure linked to the encounter or non-encounter of virtù and fortuna. 
This is the crucial point of the theory, in which, according to Althusser, poli-
tics presents itself in the form of a determinate absence, because Machiavelli 
“leaves the names of the protagonists in this encounter completely blank [laisse 
complètement en blanc]; he provides them with no identity.”
74
Therefore, the geographical space and individual are by definition unknown, 
and national unity cannot be accomplished by starting from the existing princi-
palities. To Althusser, however, this seems to be a positive silence: the encounter 
will take place, but outside of the existing principalities and States. The exam-
ple of Cesare Borgia shows precisely that this “starting from nothing” is attaina-
ble. There is in it a “discrepancy [décalage] between the definite and indefinite, 
the necessary and the unforeseeable. This discrepancy, thought and unresolved 
by thought, is the presence of history and political practice in theory itself.”
75
We can now examine chapter four, “The Political Practice of the New Prince,” 
which is what Machiavelli deals with in chapters XI–XXIII. In this chapter, 
Althusser partially reprises and partially develops the 1962 course.
76
 According 
to Althusser, at this height Machiavelli leaves aside the problem of pure begin-
ning as “unassignable” and presupposes that things have already begun: the 
process of becoming prince and becoming state has already begun. Althusser’s 
argument is focused on two elements: the army and ideology. As for the army, 
Althusser claims that Machiavelli’s theses are impressive in their consistency, 
incisiveness, and political acuteness. Like Gramsci, he maintains that these the-
72
 Ibid., p. 72–73.
73
 Ibid., p. 73.
74
 Ibid., p. 76.
75
 Ibid., p. 80.
76
 Cf. chapter 2 (“L’armée et la Politique”) in Althusser, Machiavel (1962), pp. 217–220.

103
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
ses anticipate the Jacobins, as well as Clausewitz and Mao.
77
 Machiavelli main-
tains first that the army is the state apparatus par excellence, that is, he affirms 
the primacy of force over ideology and laws. Second, the army must be thought 
sub specie politica, i.e., Machiavelli maintains the primacy of politics over mil-
itary technique. Third, the aforementioned primacy of force must be thought 
under the aegis of the primacy of politics which is “the prince’s popular and 
national politics.”
78
 And finally, the prince must rely on his own army.
Here Gramsci is again the fundamental point of reference for Althusser’s inter-
pretation. Althusser broadly repeats his analysis from the 1962 course of the 
chapters on different types of troops as well as Gramsci’s conclusions on the 
popular army, founded 1) on recruitment from the popular strata of town and 
country (“the blending of town and country”
79
) and 2) on reorganization based 
on the primacy of the infantry over the cavalry. These are profoundly revolu-
tionary ideas: on the one hand, the armed campaign has a political significance 
against the feudal lords, and on the other, the primacy of infantry over caval-
ry reverses the social hierarchies of the time. Althusser refers extensively to 
Gramsci in order to conclude that “the men of the towns and countryside begin 
to become – learn to become – one and the same people.”
80
 Thus, the army is 
necessary for the construction of the national state, but not as a simple means 
for an exterior end. Recruitment makes the goal internal to the medium: “The 
army,” Althusser writes, “can serve as a means to a political end only if it is 
already the realized form of the relevant end.”
81
 In other words, the army is not 
only a force available to the prince to reach national unity; it also creates con-
sensus by acting on the minds of the soldiers: “the military apparatus simulta-
neously exercises an ideological function.”
82
Turning to the analysis of the side of consensus understood in a Gramscian 
sense, that is, as ideology, Althusser divides the field of Machiavelli’s treatment 
into religion and the image of the prince. The former, as Gramsci emphasized, 
77
 Here it is interesting to compare the 1962 course, where instead of the name Mao, we find 
the name Lenin (p. 219).
78
 Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, p. 84.
79
 Ibid., p. 87.
80
 Ibid.
81
 Ibid., p. 89.
82
 Ibid.

104
vittorio morfino
is a dominant ideology of the masses (“without the support of ideology, no pop-
ular consent to the state”
83
), which the latter, as a very particular ideological 
form, i.e., the representation of the prince, stands upon. On this point Althusser 
distances himself from Gramsci by emphasizing, in the figure of the centaur, the 
splitting of the beast into force and cunning. The latter
possesses no objective existence: it does not exist. If cunning is a way of govern-
ing, given that it has no existence, it can be employed only when it is based on 
laws or force [en prenant appui sur les lois ou sur la force]. Cunning, then, is not a 
third form of government [une troisième forme de gouvernement]; it is government 
to the second degree, a manner of governing the other two forms of government 
[elle est un gouvernement au second degré, une manière de gouverner les deux au-
tres formes de gouvernement]: force and laws.
84
However, this ideological politics must be subjected to the primacy of politics: 
that is, the prince must compose and control his image politically not by con-
forming himself to the spontaneous ideology in a demagogic way, but by in-
serting himself into spontaneous ideology with his own political project. In this 
sense, the thematization of fear without hate has a clear class meaning accord-
ing to Althusser, because hate is the hatred of the people against the nobles:
The theory of ‘fear without hatred’ is the theory of the political precondition for 
‘popular goodwill’ towards the Prince. It is also, factually, an acknowledgement 
of the popular state’s double function: the unity of coercion and popular consent 
that so struck Gramsci in Machiavelli.
85
Machiavelli is therefore not a utopian thinker. Rather, in the way in which he 
thinks the conditions of existence and class of absolute monarchy, he thinks the 
conjunctural case and goes directly to the truth of the thing with concepts that 
make him “the greatest materialist philosopher in history.”
86
83
 Ibid., p. 91.
84
 Ibid., p. 95.
85
 Ibid., p. 101.
86
 Ibid., p. 103.

105
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
We thus arrive at a crucial point. What in the 1962 course was considered a veri -
table setback of Machiavellian thought, a concept of fortuna that dominates that 
of virtù, becomes in the analysis of Machiavelli and Us his true point of force: the 
encounter of virtù and fortuna cannot be theoretically anticipated, or rather, to 
use the words of Althusser itself, politics presents itself in theory in the form of 
a determinate absence: “he leaves the names of the protagonists in this encoun-
ter completely blank; he provides them with no identity.”
87
 This absence is for 
Althusser the force of Machiavellian theory.
Now, Machiavelli and Us, unlike the course of 1962, is not a draft, but a text 
ready for printing. Althusser leaves it in his drawer, showing it only to some of 
his collaborators. Why? My hypothesis is that this reading of Machiavelli, of the 
new prince whose name cannot be anticipated by the theory, would feed back 
into the question of the Modern Prince, whose identity could not be established 
by decree or by genealogical rights, but could only be given in the encounter of 
virtù and fortuna. Starting from nothing means that there is no Subject, the PCF 
(legitimized by the PCUS), prior to the relationship with the masses, but that is 
precisely in the encounter (or non-encounter) between party and masses that 
opens the space of the novum.
"La solitude de Machiavel” and Que faire?
“Machiavelli’s Solitude” is a text written in May 1977 for a conference held on 
June 11
th
 of the same year at the Fondation National de Sciences Politiques in 
Paris. Here Althusser repeats the interpretative lines in the earlier treatments, 
on which therefore we will not insist. It is enough to emphasize the parallel that 
Althusser proposes between the primitive accumulation reconstructed by Marx 
against the ideologies of capital and the primitive political accumulation men-
tioned by Machiavelli against the “Edifying discourse held by philosophers of 
natural law on the history of the state”:
Instead of saying that the state is born from right and nature, he tells us how a 
state should born if it wants to last, and be strong enough to become the state of 
a nation. He does not speak the language of the law, he speaks the language of 
the armed force indispensable to constitute any state, he speaks the language of 
87
 Ibid., p. 137.

106
vittorio morfino
the cruelty necessary to the beginnings of the state, he speaks the language of a 
politics without religion which must at all costs use religion, of a politics which 
must be moral but if necessary not be moral, of a politics that must reject hatred 
but inspire fear, he speaks the language of the struggle between classes and as 
for right, laws and morals, he puts them in their place, subordinate. When we 
read him, as well informed as we are of the violence of history, something in him 
catches us: a man who, long before all the ideologues have recovered the reality 
with their stories, is able not to live, not to endure, but to think the violence of the 
birth of the state.
88
Machiavelli’s thought illuminates in a crude way the birth of bourgeois socie-
ties, but even more it sheds light on the “aleatory character of the formation of 
national states”: 
Because for us they are written on the map, as forever fixed in a destiny that 
would always have preceded them. For him, on the contrary, they are largely ran-
dom, the borders are not fixed, it takes conquests but how far? At the limits of 
languages, beyond? At the limits of the force? We forgot all that. When we read 
it, we are seized by it as by our forgetfulness. By this strange familiarity, as Freud 
says, of a repressed.
89
The parallel that Althusser establishes between the primitive accumulation de-
scribed in chapter 24 of Capital and the primitive political accumulation, the 
insistence on the element of force and cruelty necessary for the birth of the 
state, have a precise political meaning: they clearly take a position against the 
PCF’s abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. If the Althusser of 
Machiavelli and Us desacralizes the party through the theory of the encounter 
of virtù and fortuna, the Althusser of the 1977 conference takes a position within 
the party, against the Eurocommunist transformation that was taking place. It 
is not a case that, differently from the previous texts, he speaks of the Prince as 
“moment of the dictatorship.” In this sense, to reinforce my hypothesis, there is 
also a passage from the 1978 text Que faire? in which Althusser takes Gramsci 
back up at an overall level, because he seems to consider him the inspiring phi-
88
 Althusser, “La solitude de Machiavel”, p. 320.
89
 Ibid.

107
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
losopher, via Poulantzas and Buci-Glucksmann, of Eurocommunism. Althusser 
introduces Machiavelli into the text starting from Gramsci’s admiration for him: 
What did Machiavelli do? He was the first to speak of the class struggle and of 
the domination of classes by active bourgeois over the idle and usurious nobili-
ty. He has shown that the class domination of the productive bourgeoisie can be 
assured only by a definite political force, that of the absolute monarchy of ‘one’, 
which relies not on the nobility but on the bourgeoisie to found a national state, 
and to govern the people by virtue and cunning, and by this capacity to subor-
dinate (moral) virtue to cunning and sham (and to the worst means of lust and 
cruelty), which leads to him the unique, untranslatable name of ‘virtù’.
90
Everything is already in Gramsci, the beast-force and the human-consensus. But 
in Machiavelli there is more than in Gramsci why “la bête chez lui se dédouble”
91
 
and virtù is the ability of the fox to use force or consent, according to the oc-
casion (the conjuncture). Machiavelli goes further than Gramsci, showing that 
ideology is constitutive of all state power. 
Whether in the form of religion, necessary to create the best consensus, that in 
any case that is best suited to hold a united army, but also a people, because 
it produces the best and safest, because the most constant of the forms of con-
sensus of the masses of the people, in the form of the military amalgam, which 
mobilizes all the men of the people in the army, and giving to the infantry (of the 
simple men, of the peasants) the step on the cavalry (the traditional body of the 
nobles, owning horses), is not only a military principle, but a means of producing 
ideological transformation effects among citizen-soldiers, a real political school 
that teaches them in practice the unity of the discipline granted, and treating the 
nobles on horseback as they deserve: as auxiliaries and not the leaders of the real 
soldiers, the producing citizens.
92
And he adds: 
90
 Althusser, "Que faire?" (ALT2. A 26-05-06),
91
 Ibid..
92
 Ibid., p. 72.

108
vittorio morfino
We see how much Gramsci, who exalted Machiavelli, is poor compared to his mas-
ter. For Gramsci never supported, like Machiavelli, the primacy of the moment of 
force (the army) over hegemony in the state. Highly present in Machiavelli, force 
appears in Gramsci only to prepare his pure and simple disappearance in the 
concept of state as hegemony. And when he invoked it, Gramsci never considered 
force except as brutal and bare force (the Machiavellian figure of the lion, which is 
only muscles and has nothing in the skull). Gramsci never suspected that the force 
could be productive, fruitful, and fit to enter a strategy where it can produce effects 
of hegemony (the political education of the citizens by the amalgam of the army). 
Finally, Gramsci never suspected that the beast may be anything other than force 
(the lion) but the trick (the fox), that singular beast infinitely more intelligent than 
man (which represents the recognition of moral virtues and the good), since all his 
reason consists in the power to feign. And Gramsci never understood that pretence 
was consubstantial with the state, or rather with the Prince’s political strategy, 
and that it had above all the effect of producing this representation, this image of 
the Prince for the use of the people, without which there is no state power, since 
to exist this power must be recognized by the people who can recognize the state 
power only by recognizing themselves in him: precisely in the ideological image of 
the Prince as head of state rendered indisputable by it. In this way, Machiavelli re-
sponded to Gramsci’s total silence on the question: but what can make the hegem-
onic apparatus work? He responded to Gramsci’s total silence about the ideology 
considered in his major function, his political function.
93
On this point Althusser does not introduce new elements compared to the 1962 
course and Machiavelli and Us. What is new is the anti-Gramscian accent of a 
reading that in reality owes a great deal to Gramsci, an emphasis which however 
can be explained in the context of a controversy with Gramsci as inspiration for 
Eurocommunism. 
From The Underground Current to Machiavel philosophe 
Now we arrive at the group of writings from the 1980s dedicated to Machiavelli. 
In the Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter, written in 
1982, Althusser seems to provide the ‘philosophy’ of Machiavelli promised in 
Machiavelli and Us. As is well-known, the fundamental concepts of this period 
93
 Ibid., p. 73.

109
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
are those of encounter and void and from this perspective (an Epicurean one), 
Althusser reads Machiavelli.
Encounter between a man and a region, encounter between fortune and virtue, 
from which, from a nameless man in a corner of Italy without a name, the great 
project of national unity can arise. Nothing new compared to Machiavelli and Us. 
The political void: it is in the political void that the encounter must produce 
itself by starting from what must take hold for national unity. But this political 
void is above all a philosophical void:
There is no Cause that precedes its effects, no Principle of morality or theology (as 
in all the Aristotelian political tradition: the good and the bad regimes, the deca-
dence of the good ones in the bad ones), one does not reason there in the Necessity 
of the accomplished fact, but in the contingency of the fact to be accomplished
94
.
Machiavelli’s philosophy is a philosophy of the void:
[A philosophy that] begins by evacuating any philosophical problem, therefore 
by refusing to give itself any ‘object’ whatsoever [...] to begin from nothing, and 
from this infinitesimal and aleatory variation of the nothing that is the deviation 
of the fall.
95
And again:
Machiavelli who emptied all the philosophical concepts of Plato and Aristotle to 
think of the possibility of making of Italy a national state.
96
It is a materialism of the encounter thought through politics, a materialism of 
the encounter that does not presuppose anything pre-established: it is a phi-
losophy in which the alternative between the encounter and the non-encounter 
reigns. But more, this philosophy goes so far as to affirm the provisional nature 
of each encounter:
94
 Althusser, Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre, p. 546. 
95
 Ibid., p. 567.
96
 Ibid.

110
vittorio morfino
[N]othing ever guarantees that the reality of the accomplished fact is the guaran-
tee of its durability.
97
Machiavelli’s philosophy, which Althusser reads through the Epicurean con-
cepts of atoms, void and clinamen, is a philosophy du fait à accomplir:
History is only the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another in-
decipherable fact to be accomplished without knowing in advance or ever, where 
or how the event of its revocation will occur.
98
Now, through this materialism of the encounter, the real reason for the profound 
fascination exercised by Machiavelli, Althusser redefines the question of the par-
ty. In 1982 Althusser draws all the implications already implicit in Machiavelli 
and Us: there is neither a legitimated political subject nor a place designated ex 
ante, this is the reason for the insistence on the aleatory, on the fact that both 
the name of the federator and the region are left “blank” by Machiavelli. In oth-
er words, regeneration is not to be expected from the PCF: the model is Cesare 
Borgia, “a man of nothing, starting from nothing, and starting from an unassign-
able place [un homme de rien, parti de rien, et partant d’un lieu inassignable].”
99
Althusser returns to Machiavelli in two short texts of 1985 which were initial -
ly conceived as chapters of the autobiography and then deleted and published 
posthumously with the title of The Only Materialist Tradition. There is also a 
strong insistence on the categories of void, encounter, and taking hold in these 
texts. Again, the encounter between virtù and fortuna, the good occasion (it 
seems to me that there is an insistence on the concept of occasion that is not 
present in the previous writings), with an even stronger insistence on the ab-
sence of the presuppositions of political action:
The most astonishing thing about Machiavelli, in his theory of the New Prince 
having to found a new Principality, is that this new man is a man of nothing, 
without a past, without title or office, an anonymous man, alone and naked. [...] 
Not only is he like a naked man, but he finds himself intervening in a place that is 
97
 Ibid., p. 547.
98
 Ibid.
99
 Ibid., p. 545.

111
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
itself anonymous and stripped of any significant social and political determina-
tion, which could hinder its action.
100
In this sense, it is extremely interesting that Althusser identifies the Machiavellian 
concept of fortuna, which in the course of 1962 constituted the failure of Machi-
avelli’s thought, as the very heart of his philosophy:
[T]he unusual greatness of Machiavelli’s thought (that it is largely implicit does 
not matter) to have at the very least conceived the essence of “fortune”, as im-
plausible as it may seem, as the nothingness and the void, that is to say the noth-
ing of cause, of essence and origin.
101
What relationship does this change of position have with the question of the 
party? Althusser explicitly declares that the Gramscian theory of the communist 
party as the new Prince was meaningful if linked with the Third International, 
“world party with a single center of decision and direction, its office to organize 
national parties and subject them to the same strategy and political tactics.”
102
 
With the dissolution of the Third International, however, the communist move-
ment “no longer has a center of strategy and common tactics.”
103
 Althusser’s 
surprising conclusion is then that “Machiavelli does not serve us for anything.”
104
 
Surprising precisely because his philosophy of the encounter designates a po-
litical action that does not presuppose a center that directs ex ante, but the 
ability to federate the forces in the field without the presupposition of either a 
transcendent subject or a material structure of the world that contain the path 
for the emergence of a subject.
Finally, in a draft from 1986, Machiavel philosophe, in which he cursorily repeats 
a whole series of elements of his previous interpretation, Althusser summarizes 
Machiavelli’s philosophy through four theses:
Thesis 1: die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist (“the world is all that is the case” 
Wittgenstein).
100
 Althusser, “L’unique tradition matéreialiste”, pp. 91–92.
101
 Ibid., p. 104.
102
 Ibid., p. 111.
103
 Ibid.
104
 Ibid., p. 118.

112
vittorio morfino
Corollary 1: Everything is encounter in the world.
Thesis 2: Primacy of movement over form or structure. Primacy of movement over 
matter/primacy of energy over mass / primacy of energy principle over inertia 
principle
Thesis 3: there can be sketched, missed, fugitive encounters, +++ or more or less 
durable. In this ++++ the encounters give rise to stable or hereditary (in biology) 
structure
Thesis 4: there are no laws of these structures, except that they present structural 
invariants
105
.
And then in the pages 4-5 he adds:
Note that Thesis 3 has political implications. Primacy of mass movement over any 
political organization. [Notez que la thèse 3 a des implications politique. Primat 
du mouvement de masse sur toute organisation politique.]106
Some interpretative elements remain, but the real novelty consists in the thesis 
that affirms the primacy of the movement of the masses over the prince, a sort 
of spontaneity that makes the void not in the absence of presuppositions of po-
litical action, but alluding to a sort of power that tends towards actuation, the 
void becomes the correlative concept not of the encounter, but of the world, of a 
fullness that must be grasped. This text should be read together with Althusser’s 
June Theses
107
 and is full with a strong eschatological charge.
Conclusion
It would be completely misleading to try to read every page Althusser dedicated 
to Machiavelli as a conscious taking of position within the party. It seems to me 
rather that there is an attempt to rethink through Machiavelli on the one hand the 
question of the party in relation to the Marxist theory of history and on the other 
to re-define his own position as a Marxist intellectual within the French com-
munist party. In this sense I think it is relevant that in 1962 Althusser considered 
the Machiavellian theory of fortuna to be aporetic, while in 1972–76 it was pre -
cisely this element that became the heart of his interpretation of Machiavellian 
105
 ALT2.A29-06.07, p. 3
106
 Ibid., pp. 4–5.
107
 ALT2.A29-06.02.

113
althusser, machiavelli, and the pcf
political theory, and in 1982 the fundamental concept that renders Machiavelli a 
pillar of the subterranean current of the materialism of encounter. How can this 
element not be read as a reworking of both the party-history relationship and 
the party-intellectual relationship? And moreover, how can we not read in this 
sense also the affirmation of the 1986 text on the primacy of the masses over all 
political organization? Of course, we must avoid the risk to consider this posi-
tion as the necessary outcome of his path.
Translated by Dave Mesing
References
Althusser, Louis, “Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre”, in Écrits phi-
losophiques et politiques, ed. François Matheron. Stock/Imec, Paris 1994
—  “L’unique tradition matérialiste”, Lignes 18 (1993)
—  “Machiavel (1962)”, in Politique et Histoire de Machiavel à Marx. Cours à l’Ecole 
Normale Supérieure de 1955 à 1972, ed. François Matheron, Seuil, Paris 2006
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