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Politics in Apocalyptic Times: Machiavelli’s Savonarolan Moment

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 78; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/685750

1468-2508

Alison McQueen,

Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

This article accounts for the surprising final chapter of Niccolò Machiavelli's Prince by situating it in the context of the apocalyptic fervor that gripped Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. In Florence, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was at the center of this enthusiastic movement. The final chapter of The Prince, the article suggests, is an apocalyptic exhortation that reiterates Savonarola's message in secular terms. Machiavelli gravitates toward this apocalyptic solution because he has failed to render the apparent contingency of the political world intelligible by containing it with analytical categories, ordering it with general rules, or analogizing it with metaphors for fortune. Offering evidence of the failure of The Prince to deliver on these epistemological aspirations, the article argues that the work's concluding chapter amounts to a final attempt to render the variability and contingency of the city's political situation intelligible by fashioning it into an apocalyptic story with which Florentines would have been intimately familiar.