Machiavelli. Republics and principalities, ancients and moderns

Abstract

At some point, Machiavelli thought of his time as a decaying world (un mondo guasto). On the one hand, Florence and Italy suffered the devastation of the European wars and became aware of their own political and military weakness. On the other hand, virtue and freedom, in Machiavellian terms, seemed to have been vanished from the world. The question then was how to revive the ancient virtue in a world in which the great territorial monarchies, Christian culture and the bourgeois values of society were becoming hegemonic and apparently irreversible phenomena.