Barbara Cruikshank

University of Massachusetts

cruiksha@polsci.umass.edu

Niccolo Machiavelli

This (draft) essay schematizes the resonance between Niccolo Machiavelli and contemporary poststructuralism in order to articulate (and even to sloganize) a politics of the possible. By politics of the possible I mean a tactical politics of experimentation, variety and becoming instead of the more familiar strategic politics of social movements, difference and identity. We might also call it a cultural or a queer politics because it shares with them a concern for how power and knowledge shape habits, traditions and epistemes with which we make sense and order out of the world. It is not "political" per se because it is a politics that does not necessarily center on the organization of power, or governmental order. Rather, it takes into account the ways in which we are governed and how power sediments our ways of being human, of thinking, feeling, knowing, loving, being, and so on. By disassociating government, politics, and the state, the politics of the possible never expects that politics can be rationally changed or infused with enough consciousness to come under the purview of our ability to control it. Politics has no formal structure, no one text, myth, ideology or discourse governs it. It doesn’t exist in our heads so much as in the ways we do things, our grammars, games, and governing strategies. It is a politics that pursues the possibility that there are different ways to be human. Such possibilities are not worth pursuing for the sake of novelty per se but for the revelation (and possibly revolution) that human variety might itself ground a conception of politics that does not foreclose in advance upon what counts as political.

As Foucault said about inventiveness and experimentation, a politics of the possible is grounded upon the contingency of things: "But the idea of a program of proposals is dangerous. As soon as a program is presented, it becomes a law, and there’s a prohibition against inventing. There ought to be an inventiveness special to a situation like ours and to these feelings, this need that Americans call "coming out," that is, showing oneself. The program must be wide open. We have to dig deep to show how things have been historically contingent, for such and such a reason intelligible but not necessary" (139) I aim to elaborate and even popularize the claim that the order of things is not a necessary one. Perhaps most problematically, a theory of the politics of the possible may provide poststructuralism with a public voice, a voice in which its own claims could be defended against the charge that it is nihilistic and apolitical.

The provocation for this essay is the attempt by feminist theorists in particular to "theorize the political." In the volume of that title, edited by Judith Butler and Joan Scott, Butler argues that the foundations of normative thought and action are contingent and that if we understand that we might then go on accept the fact that any normative foundation for claims to power and knowledge is always contestable. The relation she establishes between contingency and contestability is a kind of assurance that no matter how obvious a normative principle might seem (e.g., to dominate other people is bad; women as a group have some things in common), it is contestable. "To establish a normative foundation for settling the question of what ought properly to be included in the description of women would be only and always to produce a new site of political contest…This is not to say that there is no foundation, but rather, that wherever there is one, there will also be a foundering, a contestation. That such foundations exist only to be put into question is, as it were, the permanent risk of the process of democratization" (16). This essay builds on that insight even as it quibbles with the sentence omitted in the above quotation: "That foundation would settle nothing, but would of its own necessity founder on its own authoritarian ruse." Are all normative foundations authoritarian? One might think after reading the essays in this volume that all normative claims are authoritarian, that they are established by a kind of violent exclusion that threatens the possibility that things could be otherwise.

I suggest that were we to distinguish strategic from tactical theory and politics, we might understand that claims about foundations, such as the one given by Butler above, are themselves grounded upon normative foundations. In this case, it is the claim that all normative foundations are contestable. Butler is not outsmarting herself here or ignorant of the exclusions upon which her own claims rest. I believe her claim that foundations are contingent is normative and even universal, but its force does not rely upon exclusion or some authoritarian ruse. Rather, it takes advantage of the fact that in the current order of things it is possible to intelligibly make normative claims that might otherwise sound absurd, such as the claim that contingency is a permanent condition of claims-making.

Certainly by way of contrast to the variety of feminism that seeks a normative subject (woman) in advance of any political engagement, contingency appears as a reminder that politics is an activity that will inevitable transform the subject of feminism. But more important here is that while Butler might or might not convince her reader that the foundations of feminist theory and practice are contingent, she does not defend her own claims to know it. She does not claim that the fact of contingency is uncontestable; she would willingly submit that all normative claims, even her own, are contestable. At the very least, she would say that claims are not necessarily but "contingently contested."

In turn, I argue that what Butler’s claims about contingency forecloses is the possibility that there are various modes of claims-making and theorizing that might not succeed in exclusion or foreclosure. In fact, they might not need to. If, as I will argue, Butler’s own claims about contingency are normative, they are not necessarily authoritarian (as she suggests normative claims are). To make sense of that, it is necessary to understand that there is more than one kind of normative claim.

There are many possible sources for a politics of the possible, particularly feminism and pragmatism. I choose to pursue Machiavellian sources because his work is tactical rather than normative and strategic. Michel de Certeau lays out the difference between a tactic and a strategy in The Practice of Everyday Life, which I apply to political theory. A strategic calculus is "possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment.’ A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clienteles,’ ‘targets,’ or ‘objects’ of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model"(xix). Plato’s republic, his "bulwark against change," is exemplary of the strategic model in political theory. Plato circumscribed his city in almost every way imaginable against the elements of change. Another example: Butler shows that critics collect a disparate set of theorists under the category of "postmodernists" in order to establish them as holders of a common position. The proper noun affords critics a strategic position vis-à-vis an assortment of incongruent ideas.

A strategy, says de Certeau, is "a victory of space over time," which masks the enclosure of space upon which strategic calculations are made. That is, strategies work by masking the enclosure of space that establishes an objective relation to something outside. It is on this score that Plato is interpreted as a totalitarian, a tragedian, or a distopian writer. Of course, it is the pretense of the dialectic in the text that masks the intellectual cum political authority of philosopher-kings over their city and the exigencies of time.

Tactics, on the other hand, do not depend upon control over time and place; they do not require a "borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other" (xix). Rather, because it has no place, it must put time to use by "manipulating events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities’"(xix). A tactic cannot control its own circumstances so it must develop something akin to the art of what Machiavelli called prudence. "Nor should any state ever believe that it can always choose safe courses of action; on the contrary, it should think that they will all be doubtful; for we find this to be in the order of things: that we never try to avoid one disadvantage without running into another; but prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the nature of disadvantages and how to choose the least bad as good." As opposed to strategy, a tactic comes into play when the landscape of action is unknown in advance or when the only thing that is predictable is that the landscape will change, hold surprises and opportunities as well as dangers. Prudence, or the knowledge of how to act tactically, comes from surveying the past and the present landscape; how such and so came to power and was deposed, for example. Tactical knowledge answers the question of how things came to be as they were and not otherwise. To deploy a tactic is to forgo the garrison of identity and difference; it is to weigh one’s relation to the other in the balance of power.

A tactic cannot hide behind the conditional mask of its own exercise. Foucault’s attempt to produce a tactical theory by disappearing, by renouncing the position of the author, can be read as an attempt to forgo the closure of space and strategic theory. A tactical theory is likely to appear to simply lack the normative components of theory, that is, to pose as theory. Foucault is well known for his delight at writing in such a way that his political affiliations were completely open to speculation. One cannot fix Foucault’s work within a discipline, a movement, or easily align with it. Saying that one is Foucaultian is not the same as to declare oneself a Marxist or a feminist because there is no subject to align with; no Woman, no proletariat, no other or subjugated class is fixed in relation to power. It is also not to declare oneself a party of one as a libertarian might. Despite his attempt to disappear, the authority of Foucault the author is left open to question by his own hand, which makes his work available to those pursuing tactics as opposed to strategies. Geneologies are, in my understanding, tactical political theories.

Tactical political theory, Machiavellian and poststructuralist alike, embraces a vision of politics that is uncontrollable and unpredictable. Whereas Machiavellian prudence demanded a knowledge of historical examples and landscapes, Foucault’s demands the history of the present and subjectivity, the hallmarks of his genealogies. The boundaries of the political are not fixed and remain open to contestation; one expects them to change without warning. I will argue here that the normative claims of tactical theory are unrecognizable as such so long as the unspoken commitment to a vision of politics as proper (in de Certeau’s sense) predominates in political theory. While pointing out the resonance between Machiavelli and poststructuralism, I will explain why both are so hard to defend against the charge of immorality.

With no comprehensible divide between the political and the personal or the cultural or the social, everything is political. Rather than robbing the political of its meaning (the so called "normative view"), once we see that tactical theory is normative, we see that while politics might be is everywhere, it is not everything. For example, pleasure

In part because of the stance poststructuralists take against normative claims, they are accused of being merely critical, nihilistic, apolitical, amoral, unconcerned with justice and so on. Recent events in the theater of American intellectual life, the Sokal affair, Martha Nussbaum’s review of Judith Butler’s work in The New Republic, and various assaults appearing in Lingua Franca, or Habermas calling Foucault a young conservative, among other events, make it necessary to defend poststructuralism in a public voice. For example, according to Nussbaum, Bulter is a leader of "many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, [who] have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action." In addition to extreme Francophilia, Bulter is accused of "moral passivity," duplicitous "obscurity," of "telling a lie that flatters evil," and, inevitably, she is condemned for the "absence of a normative dimension" in her writing. In the end, Nussbaum caricatures Butler’s theory of performativity as juvenile criticism, self-gratifying and indulgent, but nevertheless dangerously enervating for young activists and scholars.

These charges, so often repeated, recall similar charges made against Niccolo Machiavelli (amorality, telling a lie that flatters evil, duplicity, the absence of a normative dimension). The difficulty of answering these charges, I think, is due to the fact that the normative aspects of tactical political theory are not recognized as such by either the accused or the accusers. I offer an explanation of that difficulty be way of comparing Machiavellian and poststructural theory. The infamy of Machiavelli resonates with that of poststructuralism in ways too numerous to recount here. I am interested in just four aspects that reflect the tactical stance of the authors:

1) Machiavelli’s works have never been settled in time: is he a medieval or a modern? Their place in the canon is assured, but unsettled as to whether we read him as a saint with republican aspirations or a sinner willing to do anything to get his old job back. Is he on the side of power no matter who holds it or what they do with it, or is he a red-blooded republican and patriot? His accounts of sovereign and the state power are held to inaugurate the modern state and, on the other hand, harken back to medieval political order. Similarly, the question whether Foucault is a modern or a postmodern is an open one. For example, Baudrillard and Haraway claim that Foucault is simply reiterating the modernist politics of discipline and fails to make the leap into the postmodern. Are we moderns completely dominated, or are we ‘freer than we think’? Both authors (alongside Butler and others) are accused of being amoral, if not immoral, non-normative, and seductively improper theorists, that is, not settled within the proper order of things.

2) Both refuse to ground their theories of power in anything transcendental. Power is not a problem to be solved or legitimated. Rather, power is a permanent condition of possibility for human being. Subjects are neither good nor bad and always fickle. Only insofar as they are free are they subjects of power and vice versa. Freedom is not the antithesis of power, but its condition.

One way to articulate a politics of the possible is to give an account of theories that support the idea of agonistic freedom, such as Arendt, Wittgenstein, Connolly, and Foucault, among others. In their works, ideally the agon is capable of contestation within rule-governed activities. However, as James Tully points out, Foucault is unique among these authors because he is not concerned so much with the freedom to speak and act within the game, but the freedom to speak and act differentlyby changing the rules of the game. There is no strategic closure afforded by agreement over the rules around various activities or subjects that shapes the agon’s action. Like Bonnie Honig’s retrieval of agonistic virtu, I attempt to appropriate Machiavellian categories to discuss politics. However, whereas Honig redeems an attenuated version of Machiavelli’s love of liberty by linking it to democraic participation in politics (one’s liberty is a value insofar as one uses it to participate agonistically in democratic politics), I read Machiavelli as embracing liberty as an end in itself (one’s liberty is a value regardless of the use one puts it to or the place on acts).

3) Both grant a central role to contingency in the unfolding of history. Machiavelli counsels that we seduce contingency, in the persona of Fortune. (Think here of how a tactic must manipulate and use time to create its opportunities to act.) He can man-handle or sweet-talk her, but he cannot overcome or control her. In fact, I would go so far as to say that contingency is a foundation of tactical political theory. Contingency is a priori. This is not to say that contingency signals the hidden enclosure of a strategic theory. Rather, it is to say that contingency constitutes a normative claim of a different sort, one that does not give tactical theory a proper place. It is difficult to recognize this normative aspect of tactical theory so long as we equate normative with strategic theory. It is made even more difficult by the fact that both Machiavelli and poststructuralists take aim at normative strategic theory. Machiavelli transformed the mirror-of-princes genre that taught princes how to be good (Christian). Similarly, Foucault and others take aim at the Enlightenment expectation that our theories ought to make us better, freer, truer to ourselves. Nevertheless, I contend (and not in spite of themselves) that the claim that contingency governs human affairs is a normative claim.

4) Finally, Machiavelli holds a central place in Foucault’s theory of governmentality. It was against The Prince that the anti-Machiavellians articulated reason of state and the arts of government (17^th-18^th centuries). The problem was to articulate "a kind of rationality which was intrinsic to the art of government, without subordinating it to the problematic of the prince, and his relationship to the principality of which he is lord and master." Over and against the rationality of The Prince, the anti-Machiavellians distinguished a rationality that was intrinsic to the nature of the state rather than, like the prince, transcendent over the state. That is, they eventually replaced the problem of sovereignty with an art of government that took the population as its object. Foucault treats the literature on the art of government as stalled until the emergence of population overcame the problem of sovereignty. Up to that point, the arts of government were conceived in terms of family and economy, not government.

The object of government needed to change from maintaining the prince’s power over territory and his subjects, as Foucault explains, to the government of things. "One governs things. But what does this mean? I don’t think it is a question of opposing things to men, but rather of showing that government does not bear on the territory but rather on the complex unit constituted by men and things. Consequently the things which the government is to be concerned about are men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific qualities…men in their relation to that other kind of things which are customs, habits, ways of doing and thinking, etc.; lastly men in their relation to that other kind of things again which are accidents and misfortunes…" If we follow Foucault, we might understand much of modern political thought to be grounded in opposition to Machiavelli’s obsession with transcendental power. However, Foucault fails to note that Machiavelli did not theorize the sovereignty of the prince, but the appearance of sovereignty. For example, in those moments when the prince was powerless to defend his people he must appear, still, to be sovereign in order to maintain his power. Power was as much about posturing as having strong and loyal armies or the fear of the people.

The anti-Machiavellian writers weren’t out scouting for a rationality of government that would replace the sovereign prince and inaugurate the modern liberal state. Rather, they were looking for an answer to the problem of the contingency of power, the difficulty of distinguishing appearance from reality, and the instability of the prince’s power which Machiavelli so clearly elaborated. If their problem was to find a rationality intrinsic to the nature of the state, it was to overcome the instability of the principality as, indeed, Foucault notes. Nevertheless, it is easy to overlook the fact that the contingency of the prince’s power was their problematic and not sovereignty per se.

One might elaborate on Foucault’s account of the emergence of governmentality to say that modern political thought aimed to discover a rationality intrinsic to the nature of the state in order to conceal the strategic enclosure (or naturalization of the state and society as a whole) that made the arts of government possible. Their possibility was not born out of pure ideas but out of an anti-tactical maneuver in political thought. The pride of place that Machiavelli accorded to Fortuna and prudence (to the condition of contingency and the tactical arts) was lost and with it the ability to recognize contingency as a normative claim. Poststructuralism, particularly that inspired by Michel Foucault’s geneologies, seeks to demonstrate the contingency and non-necessity of uniquely modern forms of power, inequality, arts of government, and ways of knowing. Contingency is, once again, a kind of normative claim. Contingency is the norm. Rather than respond to contingency as Plato did, by seeking and valuing the permanent, poststructuralism values contingency for the promise it whispers: things can and will be different; we must make them so. Our ways of seeing, acting, speaking, knowing, being, loving, and governing are not natural or intrinsic to human being.

One reason why poststructuralists and their critics seem to talk past one another is that poststructuralists do not claim their own normative positions. As improper as those positions appear to be, they would be made much more intelligible and possibly even more persuasive were the varieties of strategic and tactical theories clarified. For example, if we do not suppose a priori that the order of things is not necessarily so, there is very little incentive to pursue genealogical inquiries. More importantly, that supposition is a political impetus: if the order of things is not natural, God-given, or necessary, then that order might be political, that is, changeable. Thus, the foundational character of contingency carries a political and intellectual promise that things can be ordered otherwise. The role of theory, then, is not to perfect our knowledge of that foundation, but to submit to it, seduce it, or to take advantage of it. To admit in advance that one’s theory is just one more theory is not to abnegate the responsibility of the theorist, but to acknowledge the foundational character of contingency for the act of theorizing.

In addition to contingency, there are more foundational claims that can be attributed to Machiavelli and poststructuralism. The second is that we are more various than diverse or different because even those of us who share our differences are not without variation. Whereas difference marks off one from another, variety is a condition of changability (variation or contingency). Difference is negotiable whereas time is not; time or contingency is, again, the norm. Machiavelli cautions that whatever convictions someone expresses today, one should expect them to change tomorrow. People are more various than diverse because marking diversity is one way to make people predictable and people are not always predictable. Today "diversity" and "difference" are the watchwords of a movement aligned with progressive politics. Think, for example, of the bumper sticker that utters the imperative, "Value Diversity." A slogan or bumper sticker is a measure of how broadly the order of things is changed. Even if one does not value diversity and the imperative fails, one might still know that by "diversity" the slogan is aligned with progressive politics. Slogans are small lessons in how intelligible a new order is become. If poststructuralism is unintelligible as a discourse that orders the world it is in part because of the failure to sloganize. I like to try to put the normative claims of poststructuralism in the syntax of slogans even though they might be generally unintelligible because it exemplifies both how close and yet how difficult it is to put the claims of poststructuralism in a public voice.

Take my own slogan, "we are more various than diverse." It presupposes the knowledge that some people think identity politics is failing to deliver upon the promise of diversity who are also not opposed to recognizing diversity. It substitutes variety in order to suggest a politics that is dialectically related to progressive politics but is not the same. My slogan is normative insofar as it stakes a claim (unintelligible, perhaps, outside of college towns) to measure the world in terms of variety rather than diversity. Taxonomically, variety lends itself to lists but not necessarily to hierarchy, categorization, or judgement vis-à-vis difference.

Third, I suppose that the solutions to political problems are to be found in more politics, not in truth or reality. (The slogan might read, "The Truth Cannot Save Us From Politics." [ok, so you try it]) Truth and reality are impotent especially in the present moment when there is no common epistemological frame in which to assert one’s claims to know. Against the enlightenment expectation that our theories ought to help us to live better, I suppose that theory helps us to comprehend the non-necessity of the order of things. Quite beyond recognizing the social construction of x, y or z, a politics of the possible can change what it is possible to be, feel, say, do, see or know. Clearly I am equating geneology with theory. If normative political theory is rule-governed (disciplinary), then it is possible to change the rules that demand a foreclosure around the political. "Politics" is put to use in a way that is non-spacial by claims, for example, to cultural politics, literary politics, sexual politics, and so on. These are tactical in the sense that they need not forclose upon the political and in fact rely upon a non-spatial and non-constitutional norm that politics is everywhere. Just because politics is everywhere does not mean, as is so often held, that it thereby loses its meaning altogether. Rather, the meaning of the political that is lost is the strategic one wherein politics is an activity whose meaning is derived from what it is not (e.g. the private, economic, cultural). One can no longer meaningfully isolate politics from other activities such as shopping or having sex. The political is no longer the privileged space of politics because, in part, tactical politics have put the time of the political to use rather than taken it as a terrain of action.

And it is important to see that I am pursuing a politics of the possible rather than following Foucault and Connolly to the ethical practices of the self as the ground of possibility. Consider, for example, the notorious claim made by Ti-Grace Atkinson and other feminists in the 1970s that the vaginal orgasm is a myth. Whether it is true or not is beside the point. Quite literally, some women stopped having vaginal orgasms and started having clitoral ones, sometimes even when their physical practices stayed the same. Besides a telling account of how material political discourses can be, the so-called myth of the vaginal orgasm was contested because the possibilities of female sexual response are not in any way fixed. The fact is that female orgasm continues to occupy feminist discourse because the possibilities for sexual pleasure are various. Listing those pleasures, to say nothing of sloganizing them, is quite different from using them as markers of difference between men and women, on the one hand, or among and between women on the other. There is no recourse to the truth of the matter because variety, rather than difference, characterizes sexual pleasure (despite the fact that for some it is the joy of repetition). The solution to the political problem of female orgasm will never finally be disclosed by the body. Rather, the solution to the problem is more politics. As we fight now over whether female ejaculation is "really" ejaculation or over whether breast-feeding can produce orgasms, we are enacting the politics of the possible. Also, for example, in the politics of identity, recognition does not bring a close to politics. That is why I substitute becoming for identity.

To struggle and experiment with our own bodies is not strictly an ethical practice of the self. Experimenting sexually is not strictly personal, aesthetic, scientific, or decidedly political. It is sometimes none and at other times all those things. To situate the politics of the possible in the field of ethics, as do Foucault and Connolly, is to perform a strategic move that demands we shift rather than abandon our position. It is a remarkably fruitful and decidedly political. Nevertheless, it is a move that limits rather than enlarges the politics of the possible.

"That revolution will come precisely because of the infiltration of clear and articulate language into the marginal areas of human sexual exploration…Now that a significant range of people have begun to get a clearer idea of what has been possible among the varieties of human pleasure in the recent past, heterosexuals and homosexuals, females and males will insist on exploring them even further…"

Samuel Delany, The Motion of Light in Water

Joan Scott and others have read Delany to suggest that a genuine sexual revolution will come not from making marginal identities and pleasures tantalizingly visible or legitimate, but by revealing their historical construction and the possibility that pleasure might be felt, embodied, communicated, politicized, or experienced differently. Delany trusts, I suppose, that once new pleasures appear on the horizon of "clear and articulate language" people will pursue them rather than shy away or condemn the novelties that put their comfort zones and their own pleasures to the test. He does not claim that those pleasures will be uncontested, but the fact that it is possible to articulate new varieties of pleasure means that still others are possible. Variety, so to speak, speaks for itself. Tactical political theory can participate in creating opportunities for variety and contingency to speak.

I want to caution against equating my call for a tactical politics and theory with related calls for local, self-reflective, or particularist ones. As I noted before, the best of what poststructural feminism has to offer, I think, can be found in the essays in Feminists Theorize the Political, which are exemplary. However, they tend to pursue new, if contingent, grounds for strategic theory. That is to ground our theory in what is, where we are located now, rather than in what might be. Consider the following from Jane Flax: "To take responsibility is to firmly situate ourselves within contingent and imperfect contexts, to acknowledge differential priviledges of race , gender, geographic location, and sexual identities, and to resist the delusory and dangerous recurrent hope of redemption to a world not of our own making" (460). Tactical theory and politics necessarily reject such responsibility. A history of the present (a tactical theory) need not be responsible to the present.

It is not that tactics are safe and strategies are dangerous. Rather, such responsibility entails evaluating what we think, do and say by the measure of the present, of what is rather than what might be. Flax want s us to ground our theory in what is rather than what might be. She forecloses upon variety in the name of difference. She continues: "We need to learn to make claims on our own and others’ behalf and to listen to those which differ from ours, knowing that ultimately there is nothing that justifies them beyond each person’s own desire and need and the discursive practices in which these are developed, embedded, and legitimated." She gives up on the possibility that theory can be anything but radically incomplete. Yet it is only so if we accept that all theory is strategic. Instead of throwing in the towel and accepting that theory is a necessarily incomplete project, I propose that we understand theory tactically, as unlocated in space and time but making use of both when the opportunity strikes. Like our politics, our theory is caught up in the swirl of time. The difference is a minor but a crucial one.

If poststructuralism is to become a legitimate mode of theorizing it must be spoken in a public voice. This essay is an experiment, if you will, in whether or not the politics of the possible can ground a conception of politics that does not foreclose upon what counts as political. I believe that it can so long as the normative claims of tactical theory are rendered intelligible. With argument as well as slogans, I have presented a case that is written with other poststructuralists in mind. However, it is my sincere hope that poststructuralism fares better than Machiavelli and that tactical political theory becomes a recognizable and legitimate mode of claims-making. Perhaps, remaining true to the principles of tactical theory, it will simply remain an open contest much like the interpretation of Machiavelli. However, remaining true is not one of the norms of tactical theory.