“Moderate Machiavellianism”: Aron, Machiavelli, and the Modern Machiavellians

Raymond Aron did not write very much on Machiavelli. Moreover, he did not especially appreciate what he had written on that subject, as he confessed, 40 years later: “when the war came, I was working on…a study on Machiavelli, from which only about thirty pages survived. They are not worth much. The knowledge I had of Machiavelli was insufficient.”1 However, beyond a first text strictly focused on Machiavelli’s thought, the study that Aron mentions included three other essays, adding up to more than one hundred pages, focusing, on the whole, on what the author calls “modern Machiavellianism.” It would have been part of a book, as Aron says, that he intended to finish. Unfortunately, in 1940, when Germany occupied France and he went into exile in London, he gave up that project and published those pages, which eventually came to light only posthumously.2