Machiavelli’s thought answers three nested layers of Italian political crisis
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
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The method of reading a thinker’s categories as responses to concrete structural pressures prefigures how the reader will need to situate Orientalist and Islamophobic discourse in its own historical settlements.