Revisiting Maquiavel under the optics of ambivalence

Abstract

The text investigates certain aspects of the thought and trajectory of the Florentine thinker Niccolo Machiavelli, especially in the work The Prince, from the sociological reading of ambivalence in the work Modernity and Ambivalence  by  the  sociologist  Zigmunt  Bauman.  The  interest  of  the relation is indicating how is possible to detect an ambivalent character in Machiavelli, considering the ambiguities of his political and intellectual stance through facts of his life and excerpts from the discourse contained in the work dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici. For this, passages of the life and work of Machiavelli are explained, seeking to incur the minimum of anachronisms and other vices of textual and contextual criticism, and, moreover, fulfilling the objective of indicating some preliminary critical approximations that allude to the ambivalence existing in the formulations of one of the fathers of modern political thought. It was possible to see that ambivalence is already present in the roots of modern political thought, since Machiavelli, who, however, prefers to play with its contingency instead of trying to suppress it definitively.