Machiavelli e il materialismo delle passioni

This special issue reconsiders the centrality of the passions in Machiavelli’s political thought, not as residual disturbances to be disciplined by reason, but as constitutive energies that shape, sustain, and unsettle political order. Against modern rationalist paradigms that sought to neutralize affect, the essays collectively develop a “materialism of the passions,” showing how ambivalent drives—desire, fear, laughter, resentment—generate both cohesion and crisis within republican life. Machiavelli’s analysis, indebted to a Lucretian naturalism, maps the deep tensions that animate the multitude and recasts conflict as a productive condition of freedom rather than a pathology to be cured. The volume opens with Sonja Lavaert’s account of Lucretian traces and a non-transcendent reading of the multitude; continues with Alberto Fabris’s theorization of collective desire as a negative, world-opening force; and turns to Thomas Berns on laughter and parody in Discorsi I, 4 as a rhetorical device that disarms fear of tumult. Gregorio Baldin reframes Machiavellian realism and virtù through the management of passions in the Istorie fiorentine. Broadening the horizon, Giorgio Bottini studies the Machiavellian construction of the Swiss as a political myth in European culture, while Saverio Ansaldi tracks Machiavelli’s afterlife in Carl Schmitt’s concepts of commissarial and sovereign dictatorship (Discorsi I, 34–37). Together, these essays portray Machiavelli as a theorist of complexity for whom political vitality emerges from the incessant oscillation between order and conflict.