Machiavelli reduces everything to politics, the art of securing permanent consent

Evidence

It is not true, as Azzalini seems to believe, that in Machiavelli no account is taken of “constitutional law”, since general principles of constitutional law can be found scattered throughout Machiavelli’s work. Indeed he quite clearly asserts the necessity for the State to be ruled by law, by fixed principles, which virtuous citizens can follow in the certainty of not being destroyed by the blows of blind fate. But what Machiavelli does do is to bring everything back to politics— i.e. to the art of governing men, of securing their permanent consent, and hence of founding “great States”. (It must be remembered that, in Machiavelli’s opinion, neither the Commune, nor the Republic, nor the communal Signoria 315 was a State, since they lacked not only a sizeable territory but also a population capable of supporting the military force required for an autonomous international policy. In his opinion, there was still a situation of non-State in Italy, with the Papacy, and this would last until religion too became a “policy” of the State, and ceased to be the Pope’s policy for preventing the formation of strong States in Italy—a policy which involved intervention in the internal affairs of peoples not under his temporal domination, in the pursuit of interests which were not those of the States in question, and which hence were troublesome and disruptive.) … One could find in Machiavelli the confirmation of what I have noted elsewhere: that the Italian mediaeval bourgeoisie could not pass from the corporate to the political phase, because it was unable to free itself completely from the mediaeval cosmopolitan conception represented by the Pope, the clergy and also by the lay intellectuals (humanists)—in other words, it was unable to create an autonomous State, but remained within the mediaeval framework, feudal and cosmopolitan . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 932

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli defines politics as the art of securing permanent consent and founding ‘great States’ — a precursor to his hegemony concept.
• XREF: The corporate-to-political phase distinction will recur throughout Gramsci’s analysis of the Southern Question and civil society — relevant to how he later theorizes subaltern classes.