A Critical Examination of Virtu and Fortuna: Towards the Understanding of the Politics-Morality Paradox in Machiavelli’s Philosophy

Abstract

Machiavelli’s political theory is riddled with controversy and understood differently by scholars. His ideas on virtu and fortuna in politics are central to the controversy surrounding Machiavelli’s political tenets. A comparative analysis of Machiavelli’s virtu and fortuna clearly reveals the tension and/or paradox between the two concepts. This also leads to another serious paradox discoverable in Machiavelli’s political doctrine: the politics-morality paradox – that political morality, history has shown, often precedes moral politics. Despite Machiavelli’s position that morality is not subservient to any universal code, which stems from the fact that politics is always in a state of flux, this research equally deduced (from Machiavelli’s doctrine) the subtle relationship between politics and morality as construed by scholars like Hillay Zmora: the puzzle that political morality often lays the foundation for moral politics. Consequently, in the task of laying a solid political foundation on which moral existence can repose, it is even immoral to be moral.