Machiavelli’s science of state mirrors the era’s drive toward absolute monarchies

Evidence

Machiavelli is influenced by the examples of France and Spain, which have achieved as states a strong territorial unity; he makes an “elliptic comparison” (to use Croce’s expression) and deduces the rules for a strong State in general and a strong Italian State in particular. Machiavelli is a man wholly of his period; his political science represents the philosophy of the time, which tended to the organisation of absolute national monarchies—the political form which permitted and facilitated a further development of bourgeois productive forces. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 639

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds directly into the reading purpose: the state-form as the political shell for bourgeois productive forces is a building block for later claims about modern bureaucracies enabling mass exclusion.