Abstract: In this paper I seek to address what I take to be a tension in much contemporary scholarship on Machiavelli’s thinking on human nature. While it is common for readers to identify Machiavelli’s rejection of any sort of foundational determining law that would organize the structure of the world, it is just as common for readers to abstract human nature from this world, positing a fixed and static structure of the human essence. I will attempt to demonstrate, however, that both of these two moments of nature are for Machiavelli consistently integrated into an overall ontology of being that rejects all forms of essentialist thinking, including all positive models of human nature. Firstly, I reveal Machiavelli’s rejection of any notion of a fixed human essence through an exploration of his account of the openness of human being to change and alteration via subjugation to processes of socialization, as well as his account of the multiplicity of forms of human doing and being. I then contrast this rejection with Machiavelli's affirmation of a negative essence that reveals nothing about the human being other than the capacity to perpetually remake itself and the conditions of its existence. Lastly, I gesture towards some political implications of Machiavelli's reorientation or the concept of essence through an examination of the self-overcoming structure of the Machiavellian republic.

Abstract: Human nature has become a decidedly unfashionable concept in political theory generally, and perhaps more specifically for utopian theory. Indeed, human nature appears both too simplistic and too essentialist to be able to make a major contribution to contemporary thought. Likewise, the understanding of a progressive leap into a harmonious or reconciled society has been drawn into question by critics as hopelessly "utopian" in the pejorative sense. Drawing on the work of Paolo Virno, this paper aims to complicate and challenge this line of thinking in offering a political theory of utopia rooted in the modalities of human nature. Virno's attempt to resuscitate the political import of human nature does so in direct antagonism to classical conceptions of the inherent goodness or evil of the human subject, instead representing it as open/malleable and therefore ambivalent. This is precisely why humans are "dangerous animals": devoid of a determined environment, they are capable of both dystopian aggression and utopian compassion. Consequently, the core utopian project in Virno's work lies not in the affirmation of a human essence or the creation of a harmony, but in the negation of the "not human" that informs the experiences of dystopia. This requires a re-thinking of human potentiality in its capacity to produce new forms of "we-centric" subjectivity that can account for the ambivalent character of human nature.

Abstract: While much work has been done tracing the origins of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s natural man of the Second Discourse in travel literatures and natural histories, I argue in this paper that there has not been significant enough attention paid to the overall overlaps – and accompanying disagreements - in discussions of the potential perfectibility of mankind as it relates to the French Revolutionary programs. More specifically, this paper will address the relationship between Georges-Louis LeClerc de Buffon’s homo duplex (of the Histoire Naturelle), Rousseau’s conception of perfectibility, Charles Bonnet’s scientific accounting for the regenerative potentials of animal species (including man’s), and the educational proposals put forward by revolutionary actors and politicians such as Condorcet, Lepeletier and the Abbé Grégoire. Over the course of the century, I argue, ideas of man’s perfectibility – founded in natural history, and refracted through Rousseau - lost the often ambiguous endorsements of their authors and became, as time progressed, more solidified assertions about the possibility of man’s historical progression and perfection in politics. While Rousseau is often blamed for the atrocities of the Terror (due to Robespierre’s endorsement), I will suggest that the conception of man as a regenerative or perfectible species takes, perhaps, some cues from Rousseau, but belongs more properly to the political appropriation of a scientific surety that cannot in any way be attributable to the story of the Second Discourse, and only in part to the scientists who preceded or followed it.

Abstract: The Laws of Plato inaugurate a turn to law according to what is right "by nature". The Athenian Stranger’s rhetoric with respect to sexual desire and behaviour, about what does and does not accord with nature, is based in the Laws on examples of behaviours of other species of animals, on the one hand, and in the widely observed incest prohibition, on the other. As tendentious as the examples given concerning animal behaviour themselves are (which the Stranger is aware of – he clearly backtracks after suggesting that all animals by nature are monogamous, heterosexual, and have sexual intercourse [only?] for purposes of reproduction), the Stranger does not offer even a tendentious example in “the nature of beasts” for observance of an incest prohibition. Since by his own definition animals (or most animals, or perhaps only many animals) select their partners according – aside from “natural” monogamous, heterosexual, and reproductive desires – only to what they find pleasing, it would indeed be difficult to derive a “natural” incest prohibition for human beings from “the nature of beasts”. Yet the Stranger's rhetoric nevertheless confounds the two. Close consideration shows that what appears to be the single root of natural right is in fact two quite distinct roots, and those roots not only do not logically agree, but conflict with each other fundamentally. Yet their fusion in the Stranger’s rhetoric reveals his psychological acuity with respect to laws, combining natural moderation with seemingly natural self-restraint to form a single justification of law.