Maquiavel na Sala dos Espelhos: entre a arte dello stato e a defesa do republicanismo

Abstract

This thesis has as working hypothesis the idea that Machiavelli is fundamentally an author of political creation and maintenance of power, independently of the form of the government. In this sense, the approach of the republican vision, focused on the political institutions and on the civic freedom and virtue, conditioned the Machiavelli thought in the republican form. For those purposes this thesis has been separated in two parts: the first one presents the neo republican reading of the Machiavelli oeuvre, beginning with the thesis of the civic humanism heritage of Hans Baron, passing through the Cambridge School interpretation with John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, and ending with the more recent readings of Philip Pettit and John McCormick. The second part begins with the analysis of the cyclical vision of history and between the analogies of present time and the past, we observe the teachings of the art of the war, whose model is the vigor of the ancients. Afterwards, the discussion is centered in the relation between the individual and the political action, and between the relation between the ruler and those being ruled as a way of analyzing the political action itself and the concepts of virtù and fortune. In this moment of the research, we observe that the notions of necessità and occasione, are fundamental to understand and interpret the machiavellian vision of politics. And finally, we make a reflection about human nature in Machiavelli, and it function in the theory of political action, defending the idea that the ontonegativity is an assumption to guide the political action. The thesis ended with a rescue of the history of the reception of the Machiavelli thought, especially in the Late Renaissance and in Illuminism, we observe that not always the Discorsi was read as a treatise of classical republicanism, as a rule, it was read as an oeuvre that has teachings about the art of the war and a treatise about pagan cultures.