Machiavelli distinguished political action from political science

Evidence

Machiavelli was in fact very far from thinking that the French understood nothing of the State; on the contrary he admired the manner in which the monarchy (Louis XI) had welded France into a unitary State, and he used the actions of the French State as a term of comparison for Italy. This conversation of his with the Cardinal of Rouen is “political action” and not “political science”; for, according to him, if it was damaging to French “foreign policy” that the Pope should grow stronger, it was even more damaging to the domestic affairs of Italy. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 929

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the distinction between ‘political action’ (engaged, context-bound intervention) and ‘political science’ (systematic deduction) — a key conceptual distinction in Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli that the toolkit can carry forward.