CODA
THIS BOOK began as a study of the “other” tradition of Renaissance rhetoric—not the tradition of dialogue, debate, and consensus but of conflict, disunion, and dissent. Familiar with the argument that Machiavelli courted and then mocked the assumptions of humanist political discourse, I assumed Machiavelli was disturbing to Renaissance readers in part because of his attack on the humanist rhetoric of consensus. And I assumed that Renaissance readers of Machiavelli would accordingly identify him both with the subversive or critical potential of rhetoric and with political dissent. I was not sure whether I agreed with Pocock that “the truly subversive Machiavelli was not a counselor of tyrants, but a good citizen and patriot,” that is, a republican (MM, 218); but I believed I knew Machiavelli was subversive. In the course of writing this book I had to learn the lesson of my first book all over again—the lesson of argument on both sides of a question.1 While many readers did of course see Machiavelli precisely in terms of republican disunion or dissent, many more saw him as providing a rhetoric of de facto political power—a rhetoric of theatrical violence, sembling and dissembling, whether in the service of the commonwealth (to use a Renaissance term that is not equivalent to our republic) or in the interests of the self-aggrandizing tyrant. Although for some readers Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics was truly innovative, for others, beginning with Guicciardini, Machiavelli was not the radical critic of humanism he represented himself as being but something more like an armchair theorist, excessively enamored of ancient examples. For still other, more charitable readers, Machiavelli was simply a good observer of “wise impieties,” not a shockingly original political thinker. In short, Machiavelli was himself read in utramque partem.
I believe this complicated reception of Machiavelli is responding to the complexity of Machiavelli’s own political vision, not least of all his vexed relation to the humanist tradition. And I believe it is not only refreshing but right to be reminded of the armchair Machiavelli—the Machiavelli who, after all, wrote a commentary on Livy and who thought that modern commerce was detrimental to civic virtue. But I also think that Renaissance readers of Machiavelli knew what the reception of Machiavelli in succeeding centuries has borne out: Machiavelli was quite simply a great writer, and his eloquence was not ancillary but central to his understanding of politics.
Although I have analyzed the variety of responses to Machiavelli’s rhetorical politics in this book, it is important in concluding to say the obvious: that Machiavelli was, among other things, a republican thinker—a thinker who believed that republicanism was the best argument not only for preserving the state but also for generating virtù among its citizens. And although I have stressed, throughout this book, Machiavelli’s acute sense of the possible failure of this argument (a failure he experienced with the return of the Medici to Florence), in concluding I would like to focus on the success of Machiavellian rhetoric as a critique of ideology.
As we have seen, although Machiavelli’s critics perceived amoral argument on both sides of a question as immoral, some of his admirers and defenders perceived in Machiavelli’s rhetoric not only a method that was exemplary in its flexible response to contingency, but also a dialectical mode of analysis that was at once descriptive and subversive. For these admirers, Machiavelli offered a rhetoric not only for constituting but also for challenging the status quo: rhetorical politics served as a critique of ideology.2 In this coda, I wish to explore in more general terms the intersection of rhetoric and ideology, not in order to rehearse the argument of this book but rather to indicate some of the modern critical issues that have informed my analysis. My brief remarks should also suggest how research in the history of rhetoric and of reading may contribute to contemporary debates in literary theory.3
The terms of abuse applied to rhetoric in the Renaissance—in particular, the association of rhetoric with “force and fraud”—suggest that it was viewed the way critics now view ideology. Paul Ricoeur has defined ideology in part as “the distortion . . . [of] the symbolic structure of social life” in the service of class interests. Ideology involves both “the impact of violence in discourse, [and] a dissimulation whose key eludes consciousness.”4 So rhetoric was accused of being an instrument of deception, an expression of particular interests, or a potentially coercive system of symbolic interaction. Yet, as we have seen, Renaissance writers were concerned not only with the potential abuse of rhetoric or with the ideological functions of the humanist tradition itself; they were also aware of the power of rhetoric to subvert established authority. Elaborating this analogy between rhetoric and ideology will help us further to see—as Machiavelli and his admirers did—how Renaissance rhetoric provided the tools not only of ideological manipulation but also of the critique of ideology; it will also allow us to revise the place of the humanist tradition in modern critical debate.
Ricoeur’s argument that ideology and critique are two sides of the same coin provides a useful analogy to the ideological and critical functions of Renaissance rhetoric. According to Ricoeur, the pejorative theory of ideology as distortion of “the symbolic system of social life” (8) presupposes a “neutral” definition of ideology as the cultural symbolic system or a rhetoric that is constitutive of human understanding.5 For distortion could not occur if we were not already operating within a symbolic system: as Ricoeur remarks,
If social reality did not already have a social dimension, and therefore, if ideology, in a less polemical and less negatively evaluative sense, were not constitutive of social existence but merely distorting and dissimulating, then the process of distortion could not start. Only because the structure of human life is already symbolic can it be distorted.6
Yet this notion of ideology poses a further problem, that of the connection between ideology as symbolic system and ideology as distortion (12). The answer according to Ricoeur is to be found in a third function of ideology as the legitimation of authority:
Ideology enters here because no system of leadership, even the most brutal, rules only by force, by domination. Every system of leadership summons not only our physical submission but also our consent and cooperation. . . . Ideology’s role as a legitimating force persists because, as Weber has shown, no absolutely rational system of legitimacy exists. (13)
The function of ideology is to bridge the gap between the claims to legitimacy and the beliefs held by members of society. And, in doing so, ideology “moves beyond mere integration to distortion and pathology. . . . Ideology tries to secure integration between legitimacy claim and belief, but it does so by justifying the existing system of authority as it is” (14).
Yet, for Ricoeur, the gap between authority and domination, which requires the supplement of ideology, has a critical function as well: “Is it not because a credibility gap exists in all systems of legitimation, all authority, that a place for utopia exists too?” (15). It is here that the critical potential of the concept of ideology becomes apparent. For the power of ideology to distort and the power of the imagination to construct critical utopias are two sides of our irreducibly imaginative and, in a neutral sense, ideological relation to the world (see 145).
Just as ideology in its pejorative meaning is the modern equivalent of Renaissance attacks on rhetoric, so ideology in a neutral sense has its equivalent in Renaissance rhetorical practice. Like the distortions of ideology, the force and fraud of rhetoric—its deviation from the norms of communication and representation—can only be charted against an already irreducibly rhetorical relation to the world. The pejorative sense of rhetoric presupposes a “neutral” sense of rhetoric as a system of symbolic action that is not parasitic on but constitutive of human experience. The rhetorician’s abuse of power presupposes a notion of language that does not simply represent but rather constructs the world as we know it. (Representation in this analysis is an effect of a preexistent symbolic system or rhetoric.) In providing us with the means of force and fraud, and of legitimation of the status quo, such rhetoric simultaneously gives us the power to dissent.
This view of rhetoric as an instrument not only of ideological manipulation but also of critical dissent allows us to revise the place of the humanist rhetorical tradition in contemporary debate concerning the critique of ideology. The debate between Gadamer and Habermas concerning the relationship of hermeneutics to critique is particularly pertinent since both authors identify hermeneutics with the humanist tradition from the Renaissance to the present, while the critique of ideology becomes the preserve of the critical social sciences. Yet, as Ricoeur has argued and as I suggest below, this opposition between hermeneutics and critique depends on a monolithic view of the humanist tradition, one that is belied by the humanists’ ambivalence about rhetoric, an ambivalence that was facilitated by their rhetorical training in utramque partem.
Gadamer insists on the priority of hermeneutics to any critique of ideology, arguing that our relation to the past is fundamentally mediated not only by our “prejudices” but by a preexistent tradition: we are always already within a symbolic system. In this sense the “dialogue” with the past always takes place within a preestablished consensus. For Gadamer this hermeneutical situation does not preclude a critical attitude toward the past: the authority of tradition presupposes recognition, not blind obedience. Yet, as Paul Ricoeur has noted, the language in which Gadamer describes this relation to the past is more subservient than critical: “That which has been sanctioned by tradition and custom has an authority that is nameless, and our finite historical being is determined by the fact that always the authority of what has been transmitted . . . has power (Gewalt) over our attitudes and behaviour.”7 In terms of one recent typology of humanist imitators, Gadamer’s attitude toward tradition is more reverential than ambivalent or dialectical.8
Habermas, in contrast, is suspicious of the coercive force (Gewalt) of tradition. Like those Renaissance humanists who reject the authority of the past as ideologically coercive, Habermas argues that Gadamer’s textual and hermeneutical orientation precludes genuine criticism of the status quo. For although hermeneutical criticism or philology allows for the correction of accidental textual errors, it is incapable, according to Habermas, of dealing with “systematic distortion,” that is, with ideology. Instead of conversing with the past, the critic of ideology must propose a “regulative ideal” of nonideological symbolic interaction (“communicative action”) against which ideological distortion can be measured. Yet, in doing so, Habermas goes to the opposite extreme from Gadamer: if Gadamer runs the risk of conflating tradition with the coercive power of rhetoric or the constraints of imitation, Habermas’s ideal of “unconstrained communication” runs the danger of isolating reason from rhetoric and imitation altogether.
Like Ricoeur, I think the opposition between hermeneutics and the critique of ideology is too stark. First, hermeneutics has a critical dimension, as my brief discussion of Renaissance theories of rhetoric and imitation in the early chapters of this book has suggested. It involves a recognition of historical distance and of anachronism. Furthermore, Renaissance philologists were sometimes capable of recognizing systematic, ideologically motivated textual distortions—as Valla did in his analysis of the Donation of Constantine. Second, the critique of ideology necessarily involves interpretation and relation to an authoritative past: as Ricoeur remarks, “critique is also a tradition,” as is the case with Exodus (“Hermeneutics,” 99). Familiarity with the past is necessary in order to reimagine the future: “He who is unable to reinterpret his past may also be incapable of projecting his interest in emancipation” (97). Thus whereas Gadamer gives priority to interpretation and Habermas stresses the necessity of critique, I want to insist with Ricoeur on the intersection of these two. Both in the Renaissance and in current critical debate this intersection deserves the name “rhetoric.” Rhetoric is an instrument not only of force and fraud but also of the critical distance and reflection that is necessary for the critique of ideology. As Machiavelli and his best Renaissance readers recognized, the possibility of the former is the precondition of the latter.