Machiavelli e il materialismo delle passioni. Introduzione

This special issue reframes Machiavelli through a “materialism of the passions”: affects are not residues to be disciplined but constitutive energies that organize, unsettle, and regenerate political life. Drawing on a Lucretian naturalism, the essays map how desire, fear, laughter, and resentment operate beneath formal order, making conflict not a pathology to cure but a generative condition of freedom. The opening studies trace a non-transcendent account of the multitude and theorize collective desire as a negative, world-opening force, exemplified by Rome’s refusal to colonize Antium and Pacuvio Calavo’s ruse at Capua. Subsequent contributions examine laughter and parody in Discorsi I, 4 as rhetorical devices that disarm the fear of tumult; recast Machiavellian realism and virtù via the governance of passions in the Istorie fiorentine; and situate Machiavelli within broader cultural-political imaginaries—from the myth of the Swiss in European nation-building to Schmitt’s concepts of commissarial and sovereign dictatorship (Discorsi I, 34–37). Taken together, the volume presents Machiavelli as a theorist of complexity for whom political vitality emerges from the incessant oscillation between order and conflict, and for whom the passions are the deep motor of both cohesion and crisis.