Machiavelli in the Making

Machiavelli in the Making is both a novel interpretation of the Florentines work and a critical document for understanding influential French scholar and public intellectual Claude Leforts later writings on democracy and totalitarianism. Lefort extricates Machiavellis thought from the dominant interpretations of him as the founder of objective political science, which, having liberated itself from the religious and moralizing tendencies of medieval political reflection, attempts to arrive at a realistic discourse on the operations of raw power. Lefort ultimately finds that Machiavellis discourse opens the place of the political which had previously been occupied by theology and morality.