Machiavelli’s politics demanded drawing rulers closer to the people

Evidence

Why did Gramsci attach such importance to Machiavelli? Because “Machiavelli was the representative in Italy of the recognition that the Renaissance could not be a real one without the foundation of a national State”; “Machiavelli’s political thought was a reaction to the Renaissance [in the narrow sense]; it was an invocation of the political and national necessity of drawing closer to the people as the absolute monarchies of France and Spain had done …” Machiavelli did not merely abstractly desire the national unification of Italy; he had a programme, and it was one which revealed his “precocious Jacobinism”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 593

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli as proto-Jacobin anticipates the ‘national-popular’ concept that later postcolonial theory repurposes.

Related

• Machiavelli’s science of state mirrors the era’s drive toward absolute monarchies (similarity 0.84)
• Gramsci reads Machiavelli as legitimizing political leaders who defy reigning ideology (similarity 0.83)
• Machiavelli wrote as an agitator urging action, not as a systematic theorist (similarity 0.81)
• Machiavelli’s work is political action, not utopian blueprint or abstract science. (similarity 0.80)
• Machiavelli must be read as historically situated, not as a timeless political scientist (similarity 0.79)
• Machiavelli’s political priorities distort his military theory (similarity 0.79)
• Machiavelli’s logical argument functions as the people’s own inner reasoning (similarity 0.78)
• The Jacobins represented future needs of groups not yet fully part of the nation (similarity 0.78)
• Italian unification posed a national question only in partial aspects, not fully (similarity 0.78)