Composing Modernity in Machiavelli's Prince

Machiavelli's status as the progenitor of modern political thought has long been uncontested and is reaffirmed frequently.1 Likewise, The Prince remains his most representative text, the sure embodiment of his innovative intelligence. The specific character of his innovation, however, has been the subject of an astonishingly diverse and dense history of interpretation that belies the apparent simplicity of his text.2 This essay offers another attempt to identify Machiavelli's genius. I argue that by setting The Prince in opposition to the rhetorical sensibility of his genre Machiavelli invented the peculiar assumption informing modern political consciousness that power is autonomous, material force. Thus, Machiavelli marks the transition from politics understood as a text to the modern understanding of a political text as something awaiting realization in the material world. It is somewhat odd that Machiavelli has been less prominent in analyses of modernity per se. In Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, for example, he is mentioned only once as a minor illustration of how other historians have overextended the secularization

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Modernity · Philosophy · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

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  Open Access•Philippe Oliveira De Almeida, Ana Guerra Ribeiro De Oliveira•Revista Direito e Práxis•2016

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• Fortuna and the Landscape of Action in Machiavelli's Prince

  Charles D Tarlton•New Literary History•1999

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• Machiavelli’s Lessons for Public Administration

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• A Machiavellian perspective on the rhetorical criticism of political discourse

  William E Wiethoff•Quarterly Journal of Speech•1991

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