Machiavelli premised Italy’s Renaissance on founding a national state.

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

• XREF: Links to the imagined-community-of-the-nation strand of the toolkit — the nation as a political project requiring the state to be realized, echoing Anderson’s later formulation.