O tyranii i cnocie politycznej. Uwagi na marginesie książki Romualda Piekarskiego "Koncepcja cnót politycznych Machiavellego na tle elementów klasycznej etyki cnót"

Abstract

The article presents the most recent Polish analyses concerning the thought of Niccolò Machiavelli on the background of trends in the contemporary international literature on this thinker, focusing on Romuald Piekarski’s book Koncepcja cnót politycznych Machiavellego na tle elementów klasycznej etyki cnót (Machiavelli’s Concept of Political Virtues against the Background of the Classical Virtue Ethics, Gdańsk 2007). The author points out that Piekarski’s work uses the methodology appropriate to the philosophy of politics, while the important monograph by Igor Kąkolewski, based on modern methodology of the study of political discourse, seeks to reconstruct an image of tyranny in the political culture of the Renaissance, and the book by Piotr Kimla devoted to political realism utilizes fairly typical methodological assumptions for the studies of political and legal thought. While in Piotr Kimla’s opinion Machiavelli is a “philosopher of security” seeking to stabilize the state with a strong power, Piekarski regards Machiavelli as a philosopher whose postulates assume the superiority of foreign policy over domestic one, and thus lead the unsettling of the political institutions. In turn, Kąkolewski argues that Machiavelli’s works are the key to understanding the sixteenth-century discourse on tyranny, which began the process – culminating in the nineteenth century – of axiological neutralization of such terms as “dictatorship” or “despotism”. Romuald Piekarski’s analyses, though carried out from a completely different point of view, correspond with those theses. According to Piekarski (who refers to famous Leo Strauss’ thoughts), Machiavelli was a thinker who broke with the classical, i.e. antique and Christian, concept of virtue in politics, and the contemporary research on politics which assumes refraining from value judgment and axiological pluralism is a specific legacy of Machiavelli’s approach. Following the considerations of Piekarski and Kąkolewski, the author of the article states that distant heritage of that approach is a kind of inability of contemporary reflection on the politics to explicitly, i.e., in an unambiguous manner, asses such political phenomena as tyranny.