Introduction

1. This book completes the inquiry I began with Instituting Thought and continued with Institution. The first explored contemporary philosophical debate for a conceptual alternative to the impolitical ontologies of Heidegger and Deleuze; the second reconstructed the historical challenges and paradigmatic resources essential for a new way of thinking about institutions. Compared to both, what you are about to read has an even more ambitious goal: to retrace the classical and modern philosophies that resonate most closely with institutional semantics, but also to look at the history of philosophy from a perspective that is itself instituent. This involves reversing the traditional approach: instead of beginning with a given set of authors and arriving at a particular conclusion, I attempt to open a new theoretical angle from which to critically examine the philosophical tradition. What I have sought to do, in short, is to cast an instituent perspective onto modern thought, and reinterpret it from this viewpoint. This reversal in perspective has allowed me to approach Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hegel from a fresh standpoint, despite their established positions in the canon, and to recognize them as precursors of the theory of institutions that developed in the twentieth century. The result is a kind of genealogy that flows down to us from the pages of their works, in the languages of philosophy, law, anthropology and political science.

The term just used - 'genealogy' - should not be taken broadly but in a precise sense that uses the tools of historiography or philology to catch hold of an elusive origin. The modern and contemporary authors who appear in this book are examined starting from a lemma that precedes them in time, not as a known fact but as a presupposition whose significance is difficult to fully fathom. I am referring to the Latin expression of uncertain provenance, vitam instituere, which also lends its name to the book. In the first chapter, I retrace its shifting fortunes, from the twilight of antiquity to the dawn of the modern era - developments that continue to challenge us today. The striking thing about this expression is its enigmatic or at the very least problematic character. When reduced to its essential terms, it calls up the two sides of life, at once instituent and instituted. Yet, when looked at from the other side of the mirror, it also evokes the potentially vital dimension of institutions. It is precisely this intersection between law and life that appears so opaque, like a tangle wound too tightly to be unravelled - hence the genealogical mode with which I approach it: indirectly, that is, rather than frontally. Vitam instituere is the distant matrix from which we originate and, at the same time, the still hazy goal towards which we move.

2. The fertile period of Roman law, represented by some of the prominent figures of the imperial age - from Ulpian to Marcianus - appears incapable of incorporating the semantic power of this expression, even though it arose from its own language. Roman law, imprisoned in a dense web of formalism, never caught up with the most radical meaning of vitam instituere. The idea of a life led according to the laws it gives itself first flickered in Greece, amid the shortlived experiment of Athenian democracy, and not in Rome, despite the Romans' deeper appreciation for the potential creativity of the law. The threshold of awareness that even the most gifted legal minds of Roman jurisprudence were unable to cross was that dividing nature and history in a form ungraspable by the ancient mentality. Although the Roman idea of nature held a potentially emancipatory value for all humanity, at least in the eyes of later eminent jurists, it was incapable of recognizing its own historicity and, therefore, of affecting the real dynamics of its time. As Hegel noted astutely, this prevented Roman law from breaking free of the limits that encircled it, and thus from developing the more disruptive sense of institutio vitae. Even though everything in Rome - from nature to the city, knowledge to power - was instituted or susceptible to legal institution, institutions could not relate to life except by submitting life to their exclusionary dispositifs. Consequently, in the power wielded by a Roman father over his children, the right of death (ius necis) remained inextricable from the right of life (ius vitae), as its grim shadow. A lethal element intensified the bond between sovereignty and biopolitics, an entanglement that only modernity would strive - not always successfully - to break apart.

In Rome, it would seem that the relationship between life and institutions was contemplated purely from its negative side - or at least from a point of view that clouded over its universal value. What most propels Roman law towards modern institutionalist theory is that its instituent practice involved both persons and things. And yet this power to institute, firmly established in the realm of private relations, was never extended to society as a whole, which was regulated instead by inviolable thresholds of domination and submission. The modern idea of legal subjectivity is lacking, since it is inconceivable in a context like Rome's where the focus is entirely on objective relations. This absence of subjectivity, even more than a dehistoricized conception of nature - though the two are linked - makes what has been called Roman 'natural law' (borrowing from modern terminology) impracticable.

Even in the Christian world, when nature upended its subordinate role to the law and elevated itself above it, institutions failed to re-establish an intrinsic connection with a human life created by God, now the sole legitimate source for both. It was this phase in particular - long dominated by Augustinian political theology - to which the vertical, authoritarian idea of institutio dates back, revolving around whoever bore its title. Throughout the ancient era, both Roman and Christian times, up to the early Renaissance, law and nature, institution and life, could only meet in mutual subordination, in service to their transcendental destination. While in Rome the law assumed nature as an object for its own instituent workings, in the Christian world, nature, originated by God once and for all, prescribed its everlasting norms to a legal system designed to transmit them, unchanged, into human life.

3. Modern reflection on institutions begins with Machiavelli, a man so deeply entrenched in them that he felt lost when ousted from the Florentine government. Considering what we have just discussed, the significant influence of the Roman experience on his cultural background does not seem irrelevant. But it was the step he took from law to politics that proved decisive. The connection between institutions and life, barred from Roman law, was afforded to Machiavelli from his new focus of study: no longer the frosty legal relations between private parties, but the communal fabric of a political affair woven into the effectual lives of people. 'Free life', 'civil' and 'political' were the new terms Machiavelli used to tackle the still unresolved question of institutio vitae. However, for this paradigm shift to become possible, he had to overcome the two conceptual obstacles that had stood in the way of Roman jurists: the vertical break between nature and history, and the ban on political subjectivity.

As for the first point, it must be said that, while Machiavelli historicizes human nature, plunging it into the dynamics of contingency and change, he does not lose sight of the tensions created by this intersection. On the contrary, he emphasizes them in a dramatic conception of human destiny, undermined not only by the battle for power but also by nature's implacable work, wielded through ageing, disease and death. In Machiavelli's worldview, imbued with vital desire, death is just as prevalent as life. In contrast to freedom (along with the lust for power, the most potent driver of political action), nature stands on the side of necessity, as something that, sooner or later, must be reckoned with. As Italian institutionalists would argue five centuries later, necessity is one of the ineradicable sources of the law. But, at the same time, necessity may generate freedom by motivating political subjects to overcome objective obstacles with a surplus of creative energy - provided, however, that the institutions around the subjects remain solid and are adaptive to circumstances. This explains the importance that institutions assume in Machiavelli's thought - directed, of course, towards the instituent.

This word should be understood in its full meaning. Machiavelli pioneered instituent thought because he worked his entire life for Florentine institutions, to whose reform he dedicated his final writings. But also, because, starting with The Prince, and from a different perspective in the Discourses on Livy, he upholds the primacy of the instituent over the instituted. Institutions are preserved only if, and as long as, they do not lose their relationship with their source - namely, the constituent power. This immediately brings into play the other critical element of Machiavelli's theory of institutions: its relationship with political conflict. Flying in the face of all previous and later political philosophy, Machiavelli breaks with the traditional dichotomy between order and conflict, making one the...