From 1880, the reading of Machiavelli among the intellectuals of Argentine liberalism changed tone and emphasis, compared with the reading in vogue until the mid-nineteenth century among figures such as Sarmiento or Alberdi. He was no longer an author associated with arbitrariness, tyranny, and personal power, or with a way of exercising power that supposed the denial or absence of any regulatory context. Instead, according to authors such as Garcia Merou or Rizzi, Machiavelli was responsible for creating concepts and instruments in tension with freedom, but not illegal or founded on institutional rupture, as well as strictly defined procedures for government that enabled liberties to be suspended only in exceptional circumstances. Machiavelli was a danger to freedom, but no longer a writer synonymous with an arbitrary personal power, strictly speaking, or even with a substantial denial of freedom. Moreover, because of the objective attributed to his ideas, which was national unification through consolidation of the State (understood as a solution to anarchy rather than a passage to oppression or despotism), his arguments could be linked to individual freedom and security. It is worth recalling García Márou's words about the State being the “first need of the man.”

Certainly, suspicions and misgivings about Machiavelli had not evaporated as concerns preoccupying those linked with the liberal tradition, and not only in Argentina. His relationship with an aggressive form of State, the State-Power, in tension with the rule of law, militarist nationalism, and imperialism — a reading that, as seen in Chapter 1, had become popular in the Western world by the turn of the twentieth century and was, in fact, defined by contemporaries as the reason for a renewed interest in his work and postulates — indicates that the conception of his thinking as a danger for freedom remained valid and persistent.

This idea gathered traction with the outbreak of the First World War and in the post-war scenario, a time when contributions connecting Machiavelli with arbitrariness, violence, and, more specifically, the enemies of liberal democracy, multiplied. It has been seen that this earned the praise of Leopoldo Lugones, even as it was the subject of vigorous debate by university intellectuals of the 1920s, from Enrique Martínez Paz to Carlos Sánchez Viamonte. Similar events may be observed among the intellectuals and leading figures of Argentine liberalism of that time.