H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: ACITO

 G.: Let us begin with the date, because dates in such cases are not ornaments but conditions. Acito’s Macchiavelli contro l’Anti-Roma appears in 1934, and that fact should prevent all later innocence. S.: Because by 1934 one can no longer pretend not to know the atmosphere. G.: Quite. One may still debate what exactly was known, by whom, and in what detail, but one cannot treat the text as politically uninflected. S.: Then the question is whether one may still read it philosophically. G.: One must, if one is to read it at all. The alternative is to turn it into a police exhibit and close the book. S.: But there is danger in that too. If one reads it philosophically, one may sound indulgent. G.: Only if one confuses understanding with absolution. That confusion is the first vice of bad intellectual history. S.: So with Acito one has to walk a line. G.: A narrow and unpleasant one. But historians of philosophy are paid, insofar as they are paid at all, to walk unpleasant lines. S.: I am not paid at all. G.: Then you may do it for the love of exactness. S.: Or for the irritation of being forced to. G.: Also respectable. Now, in 1934 Acito writes on Machiavelli against Anti-Rome. The very title is already a political act. S.: Because “Anti-Rome” is not simply a historical category but a polemical one. G.: Exactly. Rome there functions less as antiquarian object than as legitimating image. S.: So Rome becomes a rhetorical resource for the modern state. G.: Yes, and specifically for a unitary, authoritarian conception of the state. That is the first point Grice finds philosophically interesting, though morally unattractive. S.: Because you care about how political language manages uptake. G.: Precisely. Acito interests me not because I admire the doctrine, but because he shows, almost too clearly, how institutions speak through abstractions. S.: Such as Stato, unità, corporazione, popolo. G.: Exactly. Those large nouns by which people are gathered, classified, and quieted. S.: Quieted? G.: Very often. Collective nouns are excellent for reducing objections to murmurs. S.: Then the corporation, in Acito’s sense, is not just an economic body. G.: No. It is a communicative device disguised as a constitutional one. S.: That sounds severe. G.: It is meant to. The corporation proposes to mediate between state and citizen, but it may equally serve to pre-format what counts as a citizen’s voice. S.: So when Acito calls it dialogue, you hear ventriloquism lurking. G.: Very possibly. Or at least managed dialogue, which is not quite the same as the thing itself. S.: Yet Acito, in the material you have, says that the corporate structure is a space where implicatures between individual and power manifest themselves. G.: Yes, and that is what makes him philosophically useful. He cannot avoid admitting that power rarely speaks in explicit commands alone. S.: It speaks by arrangement. G.: Exactly. By structure, role, expectation, permitted vocabulary, institutional placement, and the implied limits of dissent. S.: Then the corporative order itself becomes a kind of speech-act. G.: Better: a speech-situation. A whole apparatus within which some utterances become natural and others nearly unsayable. S.: That sounds rather like a bad tutorial. G.: Worse than a bad tutorial. In a bad tutorial one may at least fail in private. S.: While in the corporate state one fails publicly and perhaps legally. G.: Quite. Which is why one must not prettify the “dialogue” too quickly. S.: Still, Acito seems to believe there is room for negotiation. G.: Yes, and that belief is itself worth examining. Does he mean genuine negotiation, or only the controlled absorption of pressures into a prior unity? S.: You suspect the latter. G.: I suspect that in authoritarian contexts “negotiation” often means “the centre listening selectively.” S.: Then where does your conversational framework enter? G.: Here. In ordinary conversation, what is implicated depends upon common presumptions of cooperation, relevance, sincerity, and the like. In political institutions, one may ask what the institution itself makes reasonable to infer. S.: For example? G.: If the state insists that all classes are represented organically within corporations, the citizen may be expected to infer that no extra-political voice is legitimate. S.: So the very rhetoric of inclusion can imply exclusion. G.: Exactly. That is the sort of thing Acito helps one see. S.: Then his value for pragmatics lies not in any moral soundness, but in the clarity with which he inhabits a managed language of unity. G.: Very well put. He becomes a witness to institutional implication under ideological pressure. S.: A witness, not a guide. G.: Better not call him a guide, unless one wishes to walk into a wall. S.: Then what of the 1934 title specifically? Why Machiavelli against Anti-Rome? G.: Because Machiavelli offers him a usable ancestor. A thinker of statecraft, severity, force, founding, and political realism can be drafted into a Romanising modern agenda. S.: Even if Machiavelli himself would not have enjoyed the enlistment. G.: Almost certainly not. Dead political writers are forever being made to serve causes they would have mocked. S.: Then Acito’s Machiavelli is already an interpretation under command. G.: Precisely. One must ask not only what Machiavelli said, but what Acito needs Machiavelli to be saying in 1934. S.: And the answer is: something about unity, authority, anti-natural-law statism, and Rome as political grammar. G.: Yes. The anti-Roma in the title marks an enemy space against which Roman statehood is reaffirmed. S.: Then “Rome” is functioning less as city than as legitimating symbol. G.: Very much so. Rome is not topography there. It is political metaphysics in civic costume. S.: That sounds almost too grand for a polemical tract. G.: Polemical tracts are often where political metaphysics does its cheapest work. S.: Fair. But if Acito believes corporations can mediate between state and citizen, must we dismiss the belief entirely? G.: Not entirely. That would be too easy. Corporate forms can indeed mediate interests. Guilds, chambers, syndicates, professions, and councils all do so in some degree. S.: Then the question is what changes under fascism. G.: Exactly. Under fascism the mediation is subordinated to prior unity. The form remains mediating in appearance, but the permitted outcome is heavily pre-scripted. S.: So the corporation ceases to be a site of plural bargaining and becomes an organ of total integration. G.: That is the danger, yes. And the language of dialogue then becomes ideological lubrication. S.: Lubrication is a scholar’s word? G.: It is a commoner’s word, which is why I borrow it. S.: Generous of you. G.: I have my moments. Now, Acito’s philosophical interest lies in the way he makes the state think of itself as speaking through bodies intermediate between individual and sovereign whole. S.: Which means the individual no longer speaks directly. G.: Or rather, he speaks only through already curated channels. S.: That must alter what counts as sincerity too. G.: Deeply. Once institutional position determines the admissible form of speech, sincerity itself becomes role-bound. S.: Then one may be sincere within the corporation and still be politically unfree. G.: Certainly. Sincerity is not liberty. S.: Nor is participation. G.: Exactly. Authoritarian systems often survive by staging participation while constraining consequence. S.: So Acito’s “margins of freedom and negotiation” may be real in local cases, but unreal in constitutional depth. G.: Splendid. That is the right distinction. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become pleased with yourself. S.: I shall become only moderately municipal. G.: Better. Now, what does Speranza do well here? S.: He does not hide the fascist commitment. G.: Precisely. He refuses the two common evasions: sanitising the politics, or refusing philosophical attention on that account. S.: Which means he neither excuses nor theatrically condemns. G.: Yes. He keeps the historian’s harder posture: describe the ideological grain accurately, then ask what can be learned about forms of meaning, institutional speech, and collective uptake. S.: So Acito becomes useful not as a moral exemplar, but as an analyst’s difficult case. G.: Exactly. Some of the best cases in pragmatics are morally ugly. S.: That sounds uncomfortable. G.: Philosophy ought occasionally to. S.: Then the corporation, from your point of view, would be a place where people learn what they may mean only by first learning what they may say. G.: Very good. Institutional meaning begins in prior restriction. S.: And implication then does political work. G.: Enormous political work. If the state says “we are all represented,” what is implicated is often “there is nowhere else to speak.” S.: And if it says “dialogue,” it may implicate “obedient participation.” G.: Precisely. The vocabulary of inclusion may carry the structure of exclusion. S.: Which is why studying such language matters. G.: Exactly. Pragmatics is not only for tea-table politeness. It also belongs in the analysis of regimes. S.: Then Acito is one of those uncomfortable figures who improve theory by worsening the air. G.: Excellent. Keep that too. S.: You are generous today. G.: Only because you have earned it twice. Do not ask for a third. S.: I should like to ask about “Omnis potestas a Deo,” since it appears among his themes. G.: A good point. That formula introduces another layer of legitimating implication. If power is from God, resistance becomes not merely political dissent but metaphysical impropriety. S.: So theology is conscripted into institutional pragmatics. G.: Exactly. The source of authority is elevated beyond argument, which changes the inferential field of every civic utterance. S.: Then one does not merely obey the state; one risks impiety by questioning its principle. G.: That is the old advantage of sacred backing. S.: Which Rome, in its own imperial ways, already understood. G.: Very much so. Acito’s Roman language is never merely classical. It is a machine for making continuity feel inevitable. S.: There is your machine again. G.: Yes, but do not drag Ryle into this one. S.: I should not dare. Then does Acito teach us that collective speech is always suspect? G.: Not always. But collective speech is always worth analysing for who may speak, under what description, and at what cost. S.: So the corporate state is just the extreme case. G.: A particularly clarifying one. Extremes often reveal the ordinary mechanisms in magnified form. S.: Such as role, uptake, permitted idiom, staged consent. G.: Yes. All the furniture of ordinary political communication, only more rigidly arranged. S.: Then a commoner’s summary might be: Acito shows how power talks as if it were listening. G.: That is very good indeed. S.: I may keep that? G.: You may, though you will make it sound better than I would. S.: That is one of the few liberties left to the commoner. G.: Enjoy it while you can. Now, the 1934 publication matters because it fixes the text before certain later catastrophes while already inside the catastrophe’s grammar. S.: So one cannot read it as innocent prelude. G.: No. It belongs to the formed ideological present of fascism, not to a merely preparatory mist. S.: And yet one should not pretend that because it is compromised it is intellectually empty. G.: Precisely. Compromised texts are often intellectually vivid. Their vividness is part of their danger. S.: Then the historian’s burden is to keep both facts in view at once. G.: Yes: the text thinks, and the text serves. S.: That is rather grim. G.: Political philosophy often is, once one leaves undergraduate anthologies. S.: Then perhaps Acito’s true lesson for pragmatics is this: imposed unity has its own rhetoric of conversation. G.: Excellent. And one must learn to hear the coercive implicatures inside the grammar of participation. S.: So when the regime says “we speak together,” the analyst asks who defined the “we.” G.: Precisely. That is the first decent question. S.: And the second? G.: What penalties attach to speaking otherwise. S.: That is a commoner’s question if ever there was one. G.: Which is why it is often the better one. S.: Then the final word on Acito? G.: Not absolution, not erasure. Rather: a philosophically usable witness to the rhetoric of corporative unity under fascism, fixed for us in 1934 and still instructive because his language shows how institutions imply more than they declare. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Milanese, with a Roman aftertaste.