Machiavelli’s political theory centers on securing permanent consent through the art of governing.

Evidence

It is not true, as Azzalini seems to believe, that in Machiavelli no account is taken of “constitutional law”, since general principles of constitutional law can be found scattered throughout Machiavelli’s work. Indeed he quite clearly asserts the necessity for the State to be ruled by law, by fixed principles, which virtuous citizens can follow in the certainty of not being destroyed by the blows of blind fate. But what Machiavelli does do is to bring everything back to politics— i.e. to the art of governing men, of securing their permanent consent, and hence of founding “great States”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 932

Categorization

• XREF: This framing of politics as the art of securing permanent consent prefigures Gramsci’s own hegemony concept, which later Islamophobia readings will invoke.