O povo nas obras de Maquiavel

Abstract

The central theme of this thesis is the people in Machiavelli's works. Taking the works The Prince and The Discourses on Lívy as a major reference, in complementarity with several other Machiavellian texts, our main objective with it is to seek to understand how our author conceives the people in what refers to a principality and also to a republic. The thesis that guides this work is that Machiavelli understands the people in his most significant philosophical works in two main ways, both as a generality that refers to the universal of a political body, and as a specific part of the city. The generic people, which refers to the universality of a city, is treated in most cases in a sense relatively similar to the mentions that we find over the centuries both in the works of philosophers and historians of Greco-Roman antiquity, as well as in various texts of the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance. The people, understood as a part, is the concept that presents crucial novelties for Machiavellian theory in relation to the history of political philosophy, given that, as a result of his desire, we find in him not only a greater aptitude to be the guardian of the freedom of a city , but mainly a capacity to extend to the universal the effects derived from actions arising from its characteristic humor. Thus, when he chooses to identify a popular part of the city in the face of the universality of a people, what Machiavelli does is reveal to us the desire not to be dominated or oppressed as the heart of political life in cities, and, therefore, the people are part of fundamental element of the political relations that proliferate among the people in general, both in terms of the aggregation and the disintegration of a political body