Machiavelli reframed fortune as circumstance and virtu as human capacity

Evidence

“Fortune” is the natural force of circumstances (i.e. the causal nexus) the chance concurrence of events, what providence is in the works of Vico; it can also be that transcendent power (i.e. God) mythologised in old mediaeval doctrine, but for Machiavelli this is then nothing other than individual “virtu ” 522 itself and its power is rooted in man’s will. Machiavelli’s “virtu ”, as Russo puts it, is no longer the virtus of the scholastics, which has an ethical character and takes its power from heaven, nor that of Livy, which generally means military valour, but it is the virtu of Renaissance man, which is capacity, ability, industriousness, individual strength, sensibility, intuition of opportunity and a measure of one’s own possibilities. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1469

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Machiavellian pair fortune/virtu against scholastic virtue and transcendent providence.
• XREF: The fortune-virtu polarity is the ancestor of Gramsci’s own sense that political outcomes mix structural conditions with organized human will — recalls determinism vs. agency debates in sociology of knowledge. — connects to: Machiavelli gendered fortune female and urged men to subdue her violence by engineering — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 549; Machiavelli counseled princes to adopt beastly cunning to survive politics. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 552