Machiavelli, tragic thinker

Abstract

The article argues that Machiavelli was a tragic thinker. After a brief introduction to the key aspects of a tragic view of the world, I offer, in the first section, evidence that the author of The Prince could have reached this view from the sources available to his intellectual circle. Among these sources, I focus on Lucretius' book De Rerum Natura, and its reception in Renaissance Florence. In the second section, I show the tragic view of the cosmos in Machiavelli's texts, with an emphasis on his theory of the encounter (riscontro). In the third section, I argue that faced with this tragic cosmos, Machiavelli defends a tragic affirmation that wagers on virtù, knowing that success depends on a happy encounter with Fortune, which may or may not happen.