Tragic men vs virtuoso politics: the hidden dialogue between Hans J. Morgenthau And Niccolò Machiavelli

Hans J. Morgenthau thinks we are condemned to inhabit a world beset by failure, destruction, and crisis because of our tragic political existence, where all political questions are moral questions, yet any moral choice we make is inevitably flawed. This article shows Morgenthau’s despairing, deterministic, Gnosticist view of tragedy as based on a partial lesson he learned from Niccolò Machiavelli. By fostering a Gadamerian hidden dialogue between Morgenthau and Machiavelli on tragedy, this article investigates the indebtedness of Morgenthau’s tragic view of politics to Machiavelli and his misunderstanding of Machiavelli’s response to tragedy via virtù.

This article finds that Morgenthau derives his tragic view of politics from Machiavelli’s ‘tragic sensibility’. However, Morgenthau fails to fully understand Machiavelli's virtuoso response to tragedy, which hinders him from recognising the potential for human freedom in an imperfect world. Morgenthau follows Machiavelli to view our divergent moral values as fundamentally wrong and irreconcilable. For him, the best we can do amidst tragedy is to choose the lesser evil with Machiavelli’s virtù defined as prudence, which means the ability to make flexible judgments according to circumstances. However, Morgenthau neglects that Machiavelli’s virtù denotes not only prudence but also innovation. Virtù as innovation enables us to transcend tragedy creatively. It enables agents to re-interpret and remould tragic circumstances to conditions favourable for happy endings. By uncovering Machiavelli’s virtù as innovation through the lens of Morgenthau’s IR realism, this research hopes its findings can help us seize the occasione for new political actions to repair our fragile, broken world characterised by tragedies.