Is Gerald Graff Machiavellian?

Style, Fall, 1999 by Don Bialostosky

At first hearing, this question may sound like an accusation. The stock figure of the Machiavel, like the commonplace connotation of "rhetoric," calls to mind a calculating schemer who will use any means to attain an end, a manipulator of appearances who will wear sheep's clothing to satisfy wolfish appetites for power. My question might appear to ask whether Graff is something other than he seems, whether he is after more than he says, whether he is strategically deceiving us for the sake of undeclared and self-aggrandizing ends. Has he, for example, managed to get himself attacked as a "leftist" in order to gain credibility among left-leaning critics who still remember his earlier attacks? Is he still pursuing that earlier antitheoretical agenda under the guise of a friend of theory?

This line of criticism might be suggested by my question, and I would even admit to exploiting its sensationalism to draw attention to my argument, but it does not represent either the Machiavelli or the Graff I want to discuss. The question arose for me in the margins of Victoria Kahn's essay on "Habermas, Machiavelli, and the Humanist Critique of Ideology" in the special issue of PMLA devoted to "The Politics of Critical Language," and it has led me to further inquiry into Kahn's interpretation of Machiavelli, into Machiavelli himself, and into Graff's proposals for the reorganization of literary studies, the humanities, and the university on what he calls a conflict model. [1] The phrase in Kahn's essay that provoked my question was "Machiavelli's interest in the productive uses of conflict" (472), for the phrase could describe Graff's widely publicized interest as easily as Machiavelli's. Graff, after all, has identified himself as firmly with the slogan "teach the conflicts" as Matthew Arnold identified himself with the slogan "the best that has been known and said" and for the same reason, too--to make his position, as Arnold would have said, "prevail" in what Arnold called "culture" and Graff, in his more conflictual idiom, calls "the culture wars." This link between Graff and Machiavelli might well have led nowhere, but Kahn's own articulation of contemporary critical theory with Renaissance exemplars seemed to legitimate the posing of such a question, not for the benefit of Machiavelli scholars (of which I am not one); but for the edification of contemporary professors of English (of which I am), and moreover other features of her account of Machiavelli's interest in productive conflict seemed to firm up the analogy with Graff's proposal but also to offer a position from which it might be elaborated and criticized.

Kahn learns much from Machiavelli and other Renaissance writers about the problems of using historically distant words and deeds as examples to imitate or standards by which to criticize contemporary affairs. It is difficult, she shows, to maintain the difference between past and present that makes the past exemplary, while at the same time demonstrating the resemblance between them that gives the past force and relevance in the present situation. She points to Machiavelli's reduction of his historical sources from continuous narrative to fragmentary exemplary anecdotes and aphorisms as a strategy by which he makes Roman history available for his Florentine readers' interpretation and critical application to their own circumstances. My own argument will proceed in similar fragmentary fashion, further reducing Kahn's Machiavelli's version of Livy's Roman Republic for Renaissance Florentines for the citizens of the late twentieth-century American Republic of Letters.

That last phrase, "Republic of Letters," helps to link what may seem to be the farfetched terms of my comparison through their common interest in the conditions under which and the strategies by means of which the best possible polity might be sustained in their respective worlds. The phrase feels a bit orotund and out of date, but it links political ideals with literary interests in a way that I think names the good to which both Kahn's and Graff's work is devoted, though neither of them uses the phrase. Kahn, who sees herself among those contemporary "literary critics and historians" (464) who view the task of defining "the historical specificity of the Renaissance [ldots] as inseparable from the ability to criticize our own social and political institutions" (469), introduces Machiavelli as "one of the first critics of Renaissance humanism to propose a new politics of Renaissance studies" (470), a politics that would appear to bear upon "social and political institutions" including but by no means limited to those of academic literary criticism and history. Graff starts with the academic institution of modern literary study and its own ironic and pathological history, [2] as he tells it, a story of "repressed conflicts always return[ing] to haunt the subject in the form of neurotic repetition" (207), but Graffs political interests are no more confined than Kahn's to the politics of critical schools or departments or universities. For him literary departments are interesting to insiders and potentially interesting to the outsiders he repeatedly gestures toward because they "embody the conflicts of the culture" and "encompass questions about the nature of cultural and political choices in a democratic society which have been debated since the beginning of the American republic, and which in turn came out of struggles over the politics of culture that originated in the Enlightenment" (201-02). Both Graff and Kahn view literary institutions in political terms and both see those institutions as providing a politic al education consequential for the larger polity.