ABSTRACT
MORALITY AND MACHIAVELLI In Chapter 1 I mentioned the importance of paying attention to political imagery. After the opening chapters about resacralization, politics and the market economy, I now want to move on to a psychological analysis of the imagery in the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. The idea is to explore what an engagement with politics does to psychology and at what psychology can bring to political theorizing. Machiavelli is important for us precisely because he does not look like a modern resacralizer. There is no deep ecology in Machiavelli’s Prince, no upbeat spiritual optimism, not a lot of femininity or feminine consciousness. He’s a meat-eater, isn’t he? He can be dishonest, unreliable, impure, worldly-and, perhaps because of these things, he is very effective in the worlds of psychology and politics alike. What we find in Machiavelli is the kind of bleak realism and sense of civic duty that sees things through. If only resacralization could tap into Machiavellian energies….
