Machiavelli's "Ferocious Freedom": Dangerous Nature, Subjectivity, and the Necessity of Violence

What must one undertake to transform one's subjectivity in order to acquire and maintain one's free status in a world where one's freedom is inherently fragile and susceptible to constant dangers? This thesis aims to explore Niccolò Machiavelli's ethos of protecting individual and collective freedom (exemplified by a democratic way of life) by highlighting the existential and institutional significance of the necessity of violence and the necessary dangers imposed by others' "ambitions." Based primarily on Machiavelli's works The Prince and Discourses on Livy, my reading suggests that for Machiavelli, maintaining freedom (i.e., autonomy or not being dominated or oppressed by others) is inextricable from the constant production or emergence of what I refer to as a "ferocious subjectivity." This consists of (1) the necessary willingness to look at the world as conflictual or hostile in itself, which forces one to have an existential understanding of the inherent fragility of one's freedom, and (2) the necessary capacity to engage in violence that this new horizon of nature or life necessitates and which is justified because it enables a free being to courageously respond to this ontologically dangerous world.