Niccolo Machiavelli is an idea, an enduring author-function.  In no other time is this idea more relevant than in ours. But in order to reassess this function, we have to historically place Machiavelli in his context. We are forever perplexed by the twin threads of profound admiration and lasting unease in the reception of his methods and writings. Was Machiavelli the first detached empiricist in matters political and artistic? Or did he simply refine and reinvent several genres of expression, including modern treatises and letters? Was he a precise realist, a neutral strategist—no more, no less? Or is it his patriotism that actually shines forth as he repeatedly emphasizes solidarity, cohesion and order in public discourse? Was Machiavelli also not the partisan advocate of the argumentative modern citizen, the one who cries out against manumission and political bondage? Or should we refrain from taking his radical solutions at face value since his texts and tales are actually satirical and cautionary? What about the moral force of Machiavelli’s pronouncements? Are his methods of amalgamating the past with the contemporary so unique that they come across as visionary and fantastical?

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The idea of Machiavelli forces us to wrestle with the difficult questions of moral strength, magnanimity, suasion, vigor, vitality, public spirit, civic sense, dedication, glory, expansion and patria. Most of all, it is evident that he places a powerful wager on verita effettuale, the truth that is tested by success and experience. In the words of Isaiah Berlin, effectiveness and order must always precede ozio: quietism and indolence, for Machiavelli. The seminar will give us an opportunity to reconsider the central questions of Machiavelli scholarship: issues of statecraft and order, liberty and citizenship, modes of strategization, lessons of diplomacy and leadership, the classical heritage, quest for empire, modes of history writing, the issues of morality, ethics and law, and questions regarding force, suasion, ambition, corruption and vigilance in public discourse.

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A central aim of the seminar will be to place the literary within the spectrum of cultural discourse available to Machiavelli and also locate his singular ways of approaching literature within the evolving modes of disciplinary shifts and forms of writing in the early modern period. We shall pay particular attention to: Machiavelli, the man of letters. He both includes the literary techniques of humanist rhetoric and also disparages and distances himself from the purely theoretical and abstract in humanist rhetoric as ineffective and airy. Was literature and art idle pastimes for him, merely a way to engage with the Orti Oricellari circle of Republicans or did he seriously take the various tools of literature, like myth, figure and narrative strategies and use those to a fine effect in formulating the political treatises, reflections, letters and poetry?  How far does his particular fusion of the Tuscan vernacular and the Roman traditions reorient the prevailing tendencies of Florentine literary humanism?

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In this context we shall take an in-depth view of Machiavelli’s engagement with the non-rational. This is indeed necessary in order to understand how a powerful realist and proto-scientific way of advancing the tenets of early modernity simultaneously tries to grapple with the forces of the non-rational and cosmic, by bringing these within the ambit of the social and the political. It is evident, for instance, that Machiavelli’s God is a providential force, a master deity, a God who loves the fatherland, rule of law and freedom for the citizen. Religion for Machiavelli, as Maurizio Viroli has explained, is at one level, intrumentum regni, the medium through which an intelligent legislator can carry out extraordinary achievements. At a second level, religion is a constructive moral force, outside of mere utility. So, he is neither an atheist nor a straightforward pagan. Another productive way of departure is to place the Machiavellian cosmos against that backdrop of the astrological debate and early modern naturalism. What do celestial signs, for instance, mean in matters political? What role does fortuna play in the political destinies of countries? How are the metaphors of body and humour deployed in evolving a whole organic cosmos? How do natural motions affect the fate of whole principalities? A yet third coordinate in matters non-rational is to take stock of Machiavelli’s pronouncements on eros and affect, especially since he is also the formulator of the art of war. Whether it is better to be loved or feared is a constant theme in his writings; his poetry and epistles consistently address the question of love and affection, friendship and desire. How does he place his idea of love vis a vis the prevailing Ovidian and neo-Platonic forms? Was he himself a youthful archer or did he consider love as Cupid’s punishment, ultimately a powerful but random force? What is the nature of masculine friendship within such a scheme of things?  Undoubtedly, there is an implicit critique of Christian love in his writings.

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The seminar also wishes to engage with the afterlife of Machiavelli, or what is known as Machiavellianism.  After the initial outcry and discontent with the murderous Machiavel, we notice how Justus Lupsius reinstates him as a patriot and pragmatic, a label that would be extended later by Hegel and Macaulay, in their own ways. For Ernest Cassirer and Eric Voeglin, he is a technician who successfully applied inductive methods in political thinking.  Fichte and Herder thought that Machiavelli is an extraordinary mirror of his age and provides us with deep insights about real historical forces.  Marx and Engels refer to Machiavelli as one of the giants of the Enlightenment. Antonio Gramsci, Claude Lefort and Louis Althusser have advanced and refined this view in powerful ways. Benedetto Croce has carefully considered the emancipation of politics from ethical concerns in Machiavelli, especially when placed against the backdrop of Christian and Aristotelian frameworks. In the last century there has been a spate of readings: from the civic republican to the feminist, from the autobiographical to the deep empirical, that we also hope to traverse and trouble through the course of the seminar.

But it is this century that seems to be truly revisiting Machiavelli in the very ethos and ways of its interaction. The author-function of Machiavelli is all around us. We seem to be returning to the permanent interrogation mark that he has placed in the path of posterity: the de facto recognition that equally sacred ends and entire systems of value, may contradict each other without the possibility of rational arbitration. To be buffeted is a creaturely predicament and an agonizing experience. And yet it would be foolhardy to seek any easy escape hatch from such a predicament. Unfairness and vagaries of fortune must be rather tackled in a forthright and strategic manner.