John P. McCormick
Machiavellian democracy
Viella, 386 pages, 35 euros
In common sense Machiavelli is above all the author of Principe, the book that, according to a simplified view, would allow tyrants to manipulate crowds. In reality, his complex thought is difficult to place, to the point that his legacy is claimed by very different scholars: Marxists who find in him the exaltation of the fertility of conflict and the theorization of a revolutionary state; elitists who make him the father of the theory for which few people govern; republicanists who connect it to the exaltation of the law that was born with Cicero and culminated in the European revolutions.
Distancing himself from all these readings, McCormick (who teaches political science in Chicago) makes Machiavelli the first theorist to write that the greatest risk to politics is not the people, but the elites who use it for their own interests, and that among the main purposes of the government is to put a stop to the excessive power of the rich. Nine years after its publication in English, this text comes out in a beautiful Italian translation (by Anna Carocci). An introduction precedes it in which the author takes stock of the criticisms and distances raised and claims the opportunity to use the Machiavellian reflection on the history of the ancient Roman republic and on the medieval municipality of Florence to understand how to save the current democracies. by those who, bending them to their own ends, empty them from the inside.
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