Between ancients and moderns: notes on history in Machiavelli

Abstract

In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli discusses the histories of Rome in the search for the meaning of action, the knowledge of politics intertwined with the practice of the ancients. In the preamble to the first book and in the preamble to the second, the Florentine makes some considerations about the stories and how the moderns understand them, which for him as a problem. Indeed, for Machiavelli, the knowledge of the past is not immediate, either through the reading of stories that seeks only to delight, and not to know them, or through the situated narrative of the writers, who partially portray ancient things, or even through the nostalgia that the elderly have from their youth, which they consider superior to old age, when they no longer have so much strength. Thus, the relationship between past and present becomes problematic, as ancient times appear to moderns as a glorious past, but unattainable, irremediably lost and, therefore, out of step with the corrupted present. Our proposal, then, is to resume the preamble to the first book and the preamble to the second book of the Discorsi to investigate the relationship between present and past, and how Machiavelli elaborates this tension through a notion of history that makes possible a knowledge of the common politics to ancient and modern, therefore, a notion of history that reveals the thread of common sense that crosses them in the historical movement.