In Chapter 1, it was seen that the increasing interest in Machiavelli in Argentine political thought between 1880 and 1910 was the result of a shift in the appreciation or interpretation of his work. No longer considered an obsolete or old-fashioned author, an apologist of evil (who proposed an immoral politics and tyranny), he started to be read as an intellectual, a pioneer of the modern State, and (for good or for bad) a harbinger of the main political tendencies of the time, such as nationalism and imperialism. Machiavelli, no more the master of evil or advocate for arbitrariness, was invoked when giving name to phenomena and circumstances that challenged or contradicted the realities and promises of liberalism. The State that he had imagined, and which figures like Otto von Bismarck brought into reality, in the nineteenth century was, rather than a rule of law, an aggressive and militarist State-Power.

These considerations around the political meaning of his work were linked to the particular conception of politics attributed to his thinking. Here there was also a concurrence in interpretative nuances: Machiavelli had made “effectual truth” his object of study. This postulate contained two aspects: effectual truth implied a conception of politics as something in itself, something autonomous (that is, separated from morality or religion), and, at the same time, a study of politics without appealing to speculative abstractions and normative horizons. For this reason, Machiavelli was seen as an ineluctable author for “political realism.” The author of The Prince had proposed both an ontology (a way of understanding and defining what politics is) and an epistemology (a way of knowing or a field of knowledge).

However, connecting his name with militarist nationalism, imperialist expansion, or war was just one among many possible ways of understanding the political effects of his ontological and epistemological concepts. For this reason, the objective of this chapter is to identify the different interpretations circulating in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century relating to the type of political knowledge proposed by Machiavelli, as well as to analyze which phenomena were distinctive of politics when studied from the “realistic” perspective he postulated.