Machiavelli wrote as an agitator urging action, not as a systematic theorist

Evidence

Machiavelli’s ideas were not, in his own day, purely “bookish”, the monopoly of isolated thinkers, a secret memorandum circulating among the initiated. Machiavelli’s style is not that of a systematic compiler of treatises, such as abounded during the Middle Ages and Humanism, quite the contrary; it is the style of a man of action, of a man urging action, the style of a party manifesto. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 619

Machiavelli’s ideas were not, in his own day, purely “bookish”, the monopoly of isolated thinkers, a secret memorandum circulating among the initiated. Machiavelli’s style is not that of a systematic compiler of treatises, such as abounded during the Middle Ages and Humanism, quite the contrary; it is the style of a man of action, of a man urging action, the style of a party manifesto. … It is commonly asserted that Machiavelli’s standards of political behaviour are practised, but not admitted. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 619

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts bookish treatise-writing with the genre of the party manifesto — key to how Gramsci repositions political writing.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s later concept of the organic intellectual and political writing as praxis, and to the orientation-premise (Orientalism’s discursive construction of its object) the reader is building toward.
• ADDENDUM: This distinction between public fealty to ideals and private practice of realist means resonates with themes in ‘On Sacrifice’ about the gap between professed morality and actual political practice.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 619