Machiavelli gendered fortune female and urged men to subdue her violence by engineering
Evidence
For Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) society appeared as a wilderness, and fortune, like nature, was unpredictable, violent, and must be subdued. … Fortune is the ruler of half our actions… . I would compare her to an impetuous river that when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings, removes earth from this side and places it on the other; everyone flees before it and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it; and yet though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet, men can make provision against it by dikes and banks, so that when it rises it will either go down a canal or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. So it is with fortune which shows her power where no measures have been taken to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dikes or barriers have been made to hold her. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 549
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: The female fortune needing hydraulic containment echoes the nature-as-feminine-territory metaphors threaded through the tree-infrastructure article’s living-bridge engineering.
- XREF: connects to: Machiavelli reframed fortune as circumstance and virtu as human capacity — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1469
Broader Connections
- Machiavelli reframed fortune as circumstance and virtu as human capacity
#expands(0.78) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1469