Machiavelli, Epicureanism and the Ethics of Democracy

Recent scholarship on the political thought of Niccolo Machi-avelli has demonstrated the extent to which the latter's republicanism is of a populist type, and a potentially important resource for contempo-rary democratic theory. Although work has been produced on the consti-tutional form of the Machiavellian republic, less effort has been made to articulate the theoretical assumptions upon which the advocacy of such a republic is ethically grounded. Here, I attempt to locate the democratic ethical imperative in the affirmation of a fundamental human difference. Influenced by the Epicurean tradition, Machiavelli's natural philosophy considers material entities as absolute singularities lacking internal tele-ological direction, their movement the productive result of contingent encounters. One cannot assume a natural or pre-social identity of desire between persons. Democracy is the ethically preferred regime because it is the one that is capable of facilitating the expression of this human uniqueness.