Para além do regime misto : conflito e potência militar nos Discorsi de Maquiavel

Abstract

Recent Machiavellian scholarship has taken as a central object of its inquiry how Machiavelli’s praise of political conflicts, his thesis that all cities are divided between the humors of domination (of the grandi) and non-domination (of the popolo) and the institutional aspects of the regime (its modi e ordini). This dissertation intends to collaborate to present discussion by investigation the status of the mixed government model in Machiavelli’s political philosophy and, by extension, his critique of classical constitutional theory and its reception by humanist republicanism. We defend that there is an explicative and conceptual break by Machiavelli with this tradition, implicit in his comprehension of the schism between the people and the great as constitutive of the city. Our research centers on the opening chapters of the “Discourses on Livy’s first decade” and conjoins them with the study of other passages on the Florentine’s main political and historical works. We circumscribe our analysis to Machiavelli’s investigation on the causes of the Roman Republics greatness, power and liberty and in how it differs from other political models. In this debate, Machiavelli presents the limitations of an explanation by reference to the institutional order and shifts his analysis to the register of humoral division and is effectual conflictive configuration. According to our interpretation, this movement entails a profound disagreement with the tradition of political philosophy on the nature of political phenomena, the fundamental structure of the city and the relationship between contingency, history and theory. In other words, we argue that Machiavelli’s position is predicated on a revolutionary conception about the meaning of the political.