L'oeuvre machiavélienne, espace de tension entre le réalisme et l'imagination

Publié par Thierry Ménissier sur 7 Avril 2019, 12:03pm

Catégories : #Lectures

Lorenzo Bartolini, Statua di NiccolòLa statue de Machiavel par Lorenzo Bartolini, façade du Musée des Offices à Florence

"Machiavelli’s political writtings wind between stabbing perceptions of mundane reality and perceptions of overneat patterns, between the need of understand real situations and the need to get behind them to their universality of formulaic modes. The Prince is a strangely disturbing alloy of realism and idealism, of romance of hard-boiled cynicism, of made hopes that are turned into pobabilities and probabilities that lapse into caricature, as in Machiavelli’s pessimistic assumptions about the nature of man. The tension in his political writtings lies in the anxious play between realism and modes of idealization or exaggeration. His tense prose style goes to pin down tough realities as well as fantasies. The velleities of a romantic wield the pen of a realist."

Lauro Martines,

Power and Imagination. City-States in Renaissance Italy

Alfred A. Knopf ed., New-York, 1979