This article presents a reflection on the use of ambiguous argumentation in dealing with the theme of conflict in two classical authors: Machiavelli and Aristotle. The idea here is that both authors were forced to discuss the theme of social conflict in an ambivalent way, following a common directive of their time, criticizing conflict as the loss of order yet, at the same time, seeing conflict as a force that is capable of giving rise to a superior form of political order. In fact, in Aristotle, conflict may both breed class stability and the constitution of a virtuous form of democracy (the polity) and lead to the decadence of a constitutional order. In Machiavelli, conflict is at the root of the freedom that sustains the republic, with Rome as a model, as well as at the source of the spiraling disgregation of the republic, with Florence as its illustration. A suggestion for this debate is that such ambiguity, in this particular case, resides in the need to accomodate a metaphysical characteristic of these authors' analytical frame, that is, the circular nature of historical time, in tension with the empirical analytical requirements that the theories of the Greek and the Italian author were expected to meet. A comparison of Machiavelli and Aristotle is based on the fact that_ notwithstanding enormous differences in their work - both dealt with a common issue, that is, the notion of the circularity of history as a problem to be resolved, toward more realistic interpretations of class conflict.
Machiavelli; Aristotle; Argumentation; Conflict