The goals of the present study are to relate the transactional and transformational aspects of modern leadership theory to the history of Medici rule and influence in Renaissance Florentine politics, and, at the same time, to test leadership models against the humanist debates on the accession of the Medici to power. I will focus on the Discorso sopra il fermare lo stato di Firenze nella devozione de’ Medici [Discourse on holding the State of Florence in devotion to the Medici], written (...) in 1516 by Lodovico Alamanni (1488–1526), a prominent Florentine statesman. Alamanni’s Discorso relates to the first restoration of the Medici government and engages with a number of issues that animate Machiavelli’s political theory as well as other memoranda for the Medici contemporaneous with The Prince. I argue that the two categories of leadership—the transactional and the transformational—first proposed by James MacGregor Burns, provide a new way of specifying Alamanni’s intentions and, by comparison, those of contemporary authors, including Machiavelli. I will also demonstrate that Alamanni’s work exemplifies more vividly than other political writings of the Medici period an approach to leadership that is predicated upon the combination of the transactional and transformational paradigms. (shrink)

This article examines Niccolò Machiavelli’s account of virtues in his famous work The Prince. The Italian philosopher uses three different stages or steps of argumentation. All these steps are analyzed in this paper. It is argued that in each step, Machiavelli makes partial conclusions which are neglected in the next step. In the last step, Machiavelli concludes that not only some virtues lead to failure, but all virtues are harmful to a successful leader. Instead of an honest and just way (...) of acting, Machiavelli proposes the slyness of a fox – the most effective and successful way of acting. Cicero’s De Officiis effectively helps to understand the radicality of Machiavelli’s account of virtues. Cicero’s work enables one to explain all the central metaphors and analogies used in Machiavelli’s The Prince. Comparing Cicero’s and Machiavelli’s radically different accounts of the same virtues and vices shows that Machiavelli changed the traditional understanding of virtues, thus refuting traditional moral and political philosophy. -------------------------- Received: 05/01/2023. Reviewed: 20/02/2023. Accepted: 30/03/2023. (shrink)

This paper assesses the complex debt of Machiavelli’s moral and political thought to Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, especially in its Scholastic variant. My claim is that Machiavelli’s attitude vis-à-vis Aristotle is twofold because it reflects two different aspects of Aristotle’s moral and political theory that are closely intertwined and that were selectively developed by subsequent Aristotelian Scholastic commentators: a teleological and a realist aspect. On one hand, Machiavelli provides a model that dramatically breaks with Aristotle on, for example, the (...) question of the origin of human society and the moral prudence of rulers. On the other hand, Machiavelli’s engagement with Aristotle amounts to something more complex than a simple rejection. The Florentine appears to read Aristotle rather selectively, and emphasizes the realist dimension of certain Aristotelian ideas that suit his own original overturning of classical moral and political ideas. I use two paradigmatic themes in which the Aristotelian teleological-realist divide is most evident, i.e. the account of the origin of human society and the case of prudence, in order to prove the dual relationship of Machiavelli’s thought with Aristotelianism. (shrink)

Though Machiavelli is famous for advising the mere ‘appearance’ of certain Christian and classical virtues (P XVIII), Machiavellian virtù inherits the legacy (though neither the content nor the telos) of the Christian virtue of humility, a virtue that is not present in pagan Roman accounts of heroism. I am not contending that Machiavelli is a Christian nor that he is continuing a Christian principle. Rather, I am asserting in this article that Machiavelli secularises the distinctly Christian virtue of humility, particularly (...) in its affinity with the virtue of compassion, and that this is particularly true in his Discourses on Livy. To demonstrate how this is so, I compare Machiavelli's treatment of the Roman hero Brutus in the Discourses on Livy to the retelling of the life of Rome's liberator in Augustine's City of God. (shrink)

This article draws a connection between socio-economic inequality and political corruption based on a reading of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. Prevailing interpretations of the Histories attr...

Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics: It is the magistracy, the “ordinary mode,” to which they turn to deal with “extraordinary accidents,” political and military emergencies. Machiavelli's gaze is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: Although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that (...) were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli's discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will briefly tackle the more general question of the relationship between politics and law in his work as a whole. (shrink)

Drawing on contemporary pragmatic philosophy and grounded in a reading of techniques associated with digital media as sophist practices of influence and manipulation, this paper proposes an ‘experimental’ reading of key aspects of the topological qualities of the infrastructure of the knowledge economy, with its obsessive attempts at measuring, recording and monitoring, or ‘qualculation’. Taking seriously, albeit with humour, early criticisms of actor-network for its ostensibly Machiavellian proclivities, it offers a series of playful stratagems for the exploration and analysis of (...) power as an emergent property of socio-technical relations. Topology, in this account, becomes relevant to cultural analysis because of the way that it allows us to think together processes constructive of the intensive continua of ‘desiring production’ with the sociotechnical operations of digital media infrastructures. Different elements operative within digital media are read stratagematically – as figures of a praxis, that reveals different facets of the operations of power, while also allowing for counter-tactics to be deployed. Rather than proposing a theoretical account or an empirical analysis, the paper develops what Stengers calls ‘operative constructs’, which become ingredients for further active exploration of and thinking about the topological qualities of mediatic infrastructure. The paper addresses four different and overlapping areas of digital media from a point of view that considers the plural, compositional quality of media/power relations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and passages out of their historical contexts. Yet the methodological literature stresses the latter and says little about the former. This paper thus theorises the idea of textual context, distinguishes three types of textual context, and asks how we uncover the right textual contexts. I distinguish four kinds of textual-context (...) error, and offer practical tips for avoiding these errors. However, the beating heart of this paper is the history–philosophy debate: in contrast to the prevailing assumption that historical and philosophical analysis are fundamentally different, I show that a commitment to textual context, which should be entirely uncontroversial, also commits one to think philosophically. (shrink)

The paper contains interpretation and comparative analysis of Machiavelli’s and Kant’s conceptions on rationality as two prime examples of “realist” and “idealist” modes of agency. Kantian model of rationality is viewed as an augmentation of the Machiavellian one, not an opposition to it. To elaborate the point, Robert Aumann’s model of act-rationality and rulerationality is applied to the two philosophical models. Kantian practical reason is interpreted as an addition to Aumann’s instrumental rationality, providing rules for rules, or “rule-rule-rationality”.

T his article intends to analyse the Machiavellian treatment of the Romans' religion. This is, we will argue, a fundamental issue to understand the way the relation between religion, foundation and politics is thought in Machiavelli’s work. In the first part, we will analyse the chapters of the Discourses on Livy dedicated to the roman’s religion, and contrast the statement of this section with statements on the religious phenomenon from other parts of Machiavelli’s work, paying special attention to the understanding (...) of the relation between the phenomenon of belief and popular obedience Machiavelli expresses. In the second part, we will face the question of the way in which it is possible to interpret Machiavellian writing, with special emphasis in the problem of how to make sense of the recurrent contradictions the text presents. In the third section, and as a conclusion, we present some reflections on Machiavelli’s understanding of the relation between politics and religion, and the possibilities of a secular thought in the modern context. (shrink)