The scope of political analysis determines whether change seems possible

Evidence

Guicciardini represents a step backwards in political science with respect to Machiavelli. This is all that Guicciardini’s greater “pessimism” means. Guicciardini regressed to a purely Italian political thought, whereas Machiavelli had attained a European thought. It is impossible to understand Machiavelli without taking into account the fact that he subsumed Italian experience into European (in his day synonymous with international) experience: his “will” would have been Utopian, were it not for the European experience. The same conception of “human nature” thus becomes different in the two cases. Machiavelli’s “human nature” embraces “European man”, who in France and Spain has effectively transcended the phase of the break-up of feudalism by means of the system of absolute monarchy: hence the creation of a unitary absolute monarchy in Italy is prevented not by “human nature” but by transitory conditions which the will can overcome. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 730

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci’s distinction between ‘politics’ (transformative, European-wide) and ‘diplomacy’ (conservative, state-bound) is a key conceptual tool.
• XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s concern with hegemonic struggle vs. passive positional maneuvering, and to Gramsci’s later distinction between war of movement and war of position. — connects to: Atlas used concrete success stories to enlarge the perceived scope of politically possible policy — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 585; Contentious politics analysis must steer between abstraction and particularity — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 288