IN HIS recent appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Argentine President Javier Milei surprised his audience by declaring that Niccolò Machiavelli is dead. The announcement was greeted with the usual mixture of applause and confusion that Milei’s interventions provoke. Yet behind the unexpected statement lies a claim worth taking seriously, not because it is correct, but because it reveals a confusion about political thought, historical sequence, and the nature of the state itself.
At the beginning of his somewhat uneven speech, he declared: ‘I am here before you to state categorically that Machiavelli is dead. For years, our thinking has been distorted by being presented with a false dilemma when designing public policies, whereby one had to choose political efficiency over respect for the ethical and moral values of the West.’
Nearly 4,000 words later, towards the end of his exposition, he reiterated: ‘Therefore, I reaffirm what I stated at the beginning of this conference. Machiavelli is dead, and thus it is time to bury him. Moreover, given the deep link between morality and free markets, the latter make us better people. Thanks to dynamically efficient markets, we can simultaneously achieve economic progress, defend private property, maintain peace, attain social harmony, and strengthen those social virtues that are indispensable to a prosperous society.’
Contrary to Milei’s claims, Machiavelli does not posit a dilemma between efficiency and morality. Milei presupposes that Machiavelli taught rulers to choose efficiency instead of ethics. But he never frames the struggle for power as a choice between two commensurable goods. He does not say: be immoral in order to be effective. What he says is far more unsettling: political action belongs to a different logical register altogether.
In The Prince, morality is not rejected; it is bracketed. As a consummate empiricist, he observes that outcomes are judged by consequences, not intentions, and that rulers who cling to private moral virtues in public life often fail – and bring ruin with themselves and those they govern. That is not a dilemma. It is an ontological separation.
Machiavelli argues against moral naïveté. Classical and Christian moral philosophy assumed that good intentions tend, over time, to yield good outcomes. He denies this causal link. He considers a ruler virtuous not simply if he is efficient, but if he possesses the capacity to act effectively in the service of political order. That nuance is precisely what disappears when he is reduced to a slogan — or ceremonially declared dead.
Machiavelli defines virtù as the capacity to acquire, exercise, and preserve power effectively under conditions of uncertainty. In that sense a ruler is ‘virtuous’ insofar as he is effective. But effectiveness alone is not the whole story.
Virtù includes: decisiveness, adaptability, strategic intelligence, courage, cruelty when necessary and restraint when possible, the ability to read circumstances and the capacity to shape fortune rather than submit to it. A ruler who is merely efficient but politically blind, hated, or unable to secure obedience would not count as virtuous in Machiavelli’s terms. He judges rulers by the ultimate criterion: the founding, preservation and strengthening of a political order.
Milei smuggles in a post-Kantian moral framework. The dilemma he describes – efficiency versus ethics – is a modern construction, born of Kantian moral absolutism and later liberal moralism. It assumes that ethics are universal, intention-based and inviolable, that statemanship should obey the same norms as private conduct, and that any deviation is corruption. Machiavelli predates all this. He inhabits a world closer to Greek tragedy than to Enlightenment moral theory. Ethics, in the modern sense, simply does not organise the field.
To sustain confrontation, Milei needs dilemmas, and the dilemmas need villains. Thus, Machiavelli becomes shorthand for cynical statism, utilitarian sacrifice, populist expediency, and moral relativism. But this is a caricature. He is neither a utilitarian nor a statist in the modern sense, but a realist about conflict. Declaring him dead allows Milei to claim that markets reconcile ethics and efficiency automatically – a harmony the Renaissance Florentine would have found implausible. What is rejected under his name is not Machiavelli himself, but an effigy erected to serve one of Milei’s preferred rhetorical targets.
Taken at face value, Milei’s pronouncement seems to echo a much older and far more ambitious claim: Karl Marx’s prediction that the state would ultimately ‘wither away’. Nearly two centuries after The Communist Manifesto, Milei appears – perhaps unwittingly – to be announcing a libertarian version of the same eschatology. The difference, of course, is that Marx imagined the disappearance of the state as the culmination of communism, while Milei presents it as the natural outcome of unfettered markets. In both cases, the state is treated as a transient historical aberration, destined for extinction once the correct economic logic prevails.
The irony begins with Machiavelli himself. To declare him ‘dead’ on the grounds that the state is supposedly dissolving is to misunderstand his work. Machiavelli never theorised the modern state for the simple reason that it did not yet exist. He wrote about principalities and republics, about cities and factions, about mercenary armies and foreign invasions, about power exercised personally and precariously. His universe was one of fragmentation, instability and constant threat. Sovereignty, as later conceived by Hobbes, is largely absent from his work.
If anything, Machiavelli is the thinker of weak, not strong, social orders. He assumes no monopoly of violence, no stable institutional continuity, no abstract legal personality called ‘the state’. For him, government affairs is an art practised under conditions of radical uncertainty, where survival depends on judgment, timing and a clear-eyed understanding of human behaviour.
This is where the parallel with Marx becomes illuminating. When Marx spoke of the withering away of the state, he did not mean that power would evaporate. He meant that once class antagonisms were abolished, the coercive apparatus that enforces them would become superfluous. The state, in Marx’s view, is not eternal; it is a historical instrument of class domination. Its disappearance presupposes a radical transformation of social relations, not merely a change in policy preferences.
Milei’s vision dispenses with this complexity. The state, in his rhetoric, appears as a moral pathology: an intrusive, parasitic entity that distorts voluntary exchange and suffocates individual freedom. Markets, by contrast, are endowed with near-metaphysical virtues. Once liberated, they are expected to generate order spontaneously, rendering authority obsolete or at least marginal. Somewhat surprisingly, Milei and Marx converge on a shared Platonic idealism.
Yet history offers little comfort to such expectations. When institutions erode, power does not vanish; it changes hands and forms. The vacuum is filled not by abstract markets, but by actors willing and able to impose order – often brutally.
Here lies the central paradox of Milei’s declaration. A world in which the state truly withers away would not be a post-Machiavellian world. It would be a pre-Hobbesian one. And Machiavelli, far from being obsolete in such a scenario, would become indispensable. His insights were forged in an Italy without a unified state, where power struggles were conducted amid shifting alliances, mercenary violence, and foreign intervention. That is precisely the kind of landscape that emerges when centralised authority collapses or abdicates.
Moreover, Milei’s own political practice quietly contradicts his rhetoric. The radical deregulation he champions, the confrontation with entrenched interests, and the imposition of fiscal shock therapy, all require a firm grip on state power. They presuppose control over legislation, enforcement, and, ultimately, coercion. One cannot dismantle the state without first wielding it decisively.
What remains notoriously absent from his account is not a critique of the state’s pathologies, but any conception of a sound, minimal public sector capable of exercising authority without degenerating into the very Leviathan that Milei professes to abolish.
Machiavelli, after all, never advised rulers to love the state for its own sake. He advised them to understand power as it is, not as they wish it to be. He separated political judgment from moral consolation and insisted on facing the tragic dimensions of collective life. Declaring him ‘dead’ is often a way of refusing that discomfort – of pretending that governance can be dissolved into economics, ethics or good intentions.
If Machiavelli is dead, it is not because his insights no longer apply. It is because declaring him so offers the illusion of moral and intellectual escape. Unfortunately, reality has a way of resurrecting its most inconvenient thinkers precisely at the moments when we insist we no longer need them.
Far from being dead, Machiavelli is more alive than ever. For him, Aristotelian politics – politics as the pursuit of the common good – is absent, completely out of the picture. Even the word politics is conspicuously missing from his works. Today, so-called political actors are nothing but contenders striving to gain and preserve power. What we witness every day is agonocracy, which means ‘rule by contest’: a system whose signature trait is perpetual competition, ferocious rivalry and leadership constantly contested, rather than oriented toward consensus or shared ends.
