Contents

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Introduction

1 ‘A question that will never close’

2 The Prince as a Battlefield

3 The Text, the Practice and the Truth

4 Language, Text and Context of ‘The Prince’

5 Machiavelli and Philosophy

6 Politics, Religion, and Prophecy

7 Radical Democracy beyond Republicanism

8 Machiavelli and Marxism

9 Note on the citation of Machiavelli’s works

part 1

Language, Text and Context of The Prince

∵

Chapter 1

Il genere e il tempo delle parole: dire la guerra nei testi machiavelliani

Jean-Louis Fournel

1 Preambolo: la lingua dello stato di guerra

2 La lingua di Machiavelli come lingua di guerra

3 Il lessico della guerra nel testo machiavelliano: distinzioni e composizioni

4 Lingua generica: il caso-Principe

5 Il tempo delle parole: il confronto con il latino

Chapter 2

‘Uno piccolo dono’: A Software Tool for Comparing the First Edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince to Its Sixteenth Century French Translations

Jean-Claude Zancarini

1 Travelling Texts

2 Coherence of the Act of Translation

3 An Approach to the Texts: Political Philology

4 Stato and Its Translations: Polysemy, ‘Interference’, and ‘Tension in Meaning’

5 Reflections on the Act of Translation

6 Some Differences and Their Consequences: The Example of Il Principe XXI, 24

Chapter 3

Of ‘Extravagant’ Writing: The Prince, Chapter IX

Romain Descendre

1 Civil Prince and Roman Law

2 ‘Avere il populo amico’

3 ‘Dall’ordine civile allo assoluto’

4 Broken Lines

Chapter 4

‘Italia’ come spazio politico in Machiavelli

Giorgio Inglese

Chapter 5

Machiavelli the Tactician: Math, Graphs, and Knots in The Art of War

Gabriele Pedullà

part 2

Machiavelli and Philosophy

∵

Chapter 6

Lucretian Naturalism and the Evolution of Machiavelli’s Ethics

Alison Brown

Introduction

1 Hard Primitivism and the Growth of Expedient Justice and Religion

2 Men and Animals

Conclusion

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Secondary Sources

Chapter 7

Corpora Caeca: Discontinuous Sovereignty in The Prince

Jacques Lezra

Chapter 8

The Five Theses of Machiavelli’s ‘Philosophy’

Vittorio Morfino

1 The Thesis of Invariance

2 Thesis of Universal Variability

2.1 Epistemological Consequences of the Formulation of the First Two Theses

3 The Primacy of the Encounter over the Form

4 Thesis of the Primacy of the Interweaving of Times over Linear Time

5 Thesis of the Disarticulation of Truth and Memory

Conclusion

Chapter 9

Tempo e politica: Una lettura materialista di Machiavelli

Sebastián Torres

1 Tempo, contingenza, conflitto

2 Il tempo controverso

3 Il tessuto dei desideri

4 Memoria involontaria

5 Il tempo della res (publica)

6 Considerazioni finali

Chapter 10

Imitation and Animality: On the Relationship between Nature and History in Chapter XVIII of The Prince

Tania Rispoli

∵

part 3

Politics, Religion, and Prophecy

∵

Chapter 11

Prophetic Efficacy: The Relationship between Force and Belief

Thomas Berns

Chapter 12

Prophecy, Education, and Necessity: Girolamo Savonarola between Politics and Religion

Fabio Frosini

1 Fanaticism, Religion, and Politics

2 A Speculative Re-translation

3 Discussing the Reasons

4 Necessity, Virtue and Desire

5 Interpreting Religion, and Education

6 ... One Should Speak with Reverence of Such a Man...

7 Savonarola’s Prophetism

Chapter 13

‘Uno Mero Esecutore’: Moses, Fortuna, and Occasione in the The Prince

Warren Montag

Chapter 14

Machiavelli and the Republican Conception of Providence

Miguel Vatter

1 The ‘Providential Logic’ in Chapter 26 of The Prince

2 Military Order and Divine Providence: From Moses to Cicero and Augustine and Back

3 The Messianic Moment in Machiavelli’s Republicanism

part 4

Radical Democracy beyond Republicanism

∵

Chapter 15

Machiavelli, Public Debt, and the Origins of Political Economy: An Introduction

Jérémie Barthas

Chapter 16

Plebeian Politics: Machiavelli and the Ciompi Uprising

Yves Winter

1 Who were the Ciompi?

2 The Three Acts of the Ciompi Uprising

3 Machiavelli’s Two Voices

4 A Plebeian Call to Arms

5 How to Read an Invented Speech

6 Interpreting the Anonymous Voice

Conclusion

Appendix: Full Text of the Speech

Chapter 17

Machiavelli’s Greek Tyrant as Republican Reformer

John P. McCormick

1 Humanism and Tyranny

2 The Civil Tyranny

3 Corrupt Republics and Tyrannical Reformers

Conclusion

Chapter 18

Essere Principe, Essere Populare: The Principle of Antagonism in Machiavelli’s Epistemology

Etienne Balibar

1 Knowledge, Conflict, Truth

2 The Prince and the People: Knowing Each Other’s Nature

3 Embodying Political Antagonism into Knowledge

4 Partiality, Truth and the Displacement of the Prince

5 Back to the Present: Machiavelli’s Challenge to Universalism

Chapter 19

The Different Faces of the People: On Machiavelli’s Political Topography

Stefano Visentin

1 The Apparition of the People

2 The People as Plebs

3 The People as Multitude

4 The Tie between the People and Its Prince

5 The People Internally Divided

6 The Place of the People, the Place of Machiavelli

part 5

Machiavelli and Marxism

∵

Chapter 20

Machiavelli was Not a Republicanist – or Monarchist: On Louis Althusser’s ‘Aleatory’ Interpretation of The Prince

Mikko Lahtinen

1 The State and the Law

2 Philosopher of the Effective Truth

3 Aleatory Dynamics

4 ‘Verità effettuale della cosa’ – The Effective Truth

Conclusion: Materialist Political Theory

Chapter 21

Lectures machiavéliennes d’Althusser

Mohamed Moulfi

1 Résurgence de Machiavel

2 Pour une théorie politique

3 Machiavel comme philosophe

Chapter 22

Machiavelli after Althusser

Banu Bargu

1 Primitive Political Accumulation

2 Machiavelli, the Materialist

3 An Aleatory Materialist Dialectic?

Chapter 23

Gramsci’s Machiavellian Metaphor: Restaging The Prince

Peter Thomas

Index