Machiavelli’s political theory expresses Italy’s specific structural contradictions of his era

Evidence

Machiavelli should be considered more as a necessary expression of his time, and as closely tied to the conditions and exigencies of his time, which were the result: 1. of the internal struggles of the Florentine republic, and of the particular structure of the State, which was unable to free itself from the residues of commune and municipality—i.e. from a form of feudalism which had become a hindrance; 2. of the struggles between the Italian states for a balance of power throughout Italy—which was obstructed by the existence of the Papacy and the other feudal and municipalistic residues of forms of state based on city rather than on territory; 3. of the struggles of the Italian states, more or less united, for a European balance of power—or, put in another way, of the contradictions between the requirements of an internal balance of power in Italy and the exigencies of the European states struggling for hegemony. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 638

Categorization

• XREF: This contextualist reading of political theory prefigures the way Orientalism readings insist European thought is situated in particular imperial conditions, not timeless science. — connects to: Reading Machiavelli as timeless political science distorts his situated meaning — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 637; Machiavelli blamed transitory conditions, not human nature, for Italy’s failure — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 730