Abstract
Renaissance thought undermined the spatial hierarchies of the medieval political imaginary. The promotion of the ideal of sovereign man challenged the belief that man was a prisoner in space, trapped in a mundane world, which existed only as a dull reflection of the divine world of the heavens. Further, Machiavelli’s realism removed republic and princedom from the political theology of Christianity, in which territoriality was conceived of as an attribute of Christendom rather than as an exclusively political space, the locus of Aristotle’s zöon politikon. However, no sooner had the state been de-territorialized, extricated from the vertical spatial order of the medieval cosmos, than State-thought sought to re-territorialize it, to striate its space with the markers and symbols of sovereign territory. Concentrating on Machiavelli, this chapter explores how Renaissance political discourse territorialized lo stato by fixing sovereignty, violence, and identity onto state space.
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Notes
Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli: Anticristo (Rome: Gherardo Casini, 1954), p. 3.
Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth Century Florence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 177.
J. H. Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli and Seyssel (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 175.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. L. Arthur Burd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), I, pp. 173–74. All subsequent citations are from this text and are my translations, unless stated otherwise.
Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 158–59.
Adolf Berger, Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1953), p. 441.
F. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 26.
Jens Bartleson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 88–136.
See Walter Ullman, “The Development of the Medieval Idea of Sovereignty,” English Historical Review, 64, 1949, pp. 1–33.
Walter Ullman, “Personality and Territoriality in the ‘Defensor Pacis’: The Problem of Political Humanism,” in Ullman, Law and Jurisdiction in the Middle Ages (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986), pp. 397–410. For Ullman the development of the principle of territorial sovereignty could be seen in the changing intitulations of kings from Rex Francorum to Rex Franciae and from Rex Anglorum to Rex Angliae.
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchill, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 87–104, at p. 104. Foucault argues that the sixteenth-century territorial administrative state, analogous to the territorial a priori, of International Relations was supplanted in the classical age by the “governmental state,” no longer defined by its surface area or territory but by a population which it controls through economic savoir.
Sheldon S. Wolin, “Machiavelli and the Economy of Violence,” in Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), pp. 195–238, at p. 221.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Levio, ed. Gennaro Sasso and Giorgio Inglese (Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1984), III:iii, p. 467. My translation. Machiavelli’s reference is to Brutus who, according to Livy, not only ordered the death but attended the execution of his sons, the rebellious Tarquins.
Elena Fasano Guarani, “Machiavelli and the Crisis of the Italian Republics,” in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 17–40.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , tr. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), pp.136–138.
Pierangelo Schiera, “Legitimacy, Discipline and Institutions: Three Necessary Conditions for the Birth of the Modern State,” The Journal of Modern History, 67: Supplement (December 1995), pp. S11–33, at pp. S30 and S32
William E. Connolly, “Tocqueville, Territory and Violence,” Theory, Culture and Society, 11:1, 1994, pp. 19–40, at p. 22.
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 163.
Federico Chabod, L’idea di nazione (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1962), p. 7. My translation.
Vincent Ilardi, “‘Italianita’ among Some Italian Intellectuals in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought and Religion, 12, 1956, pp. 339–67, at p. 362.
On Flavio Biondo see The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 11 (Online 2003), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02575a.htm.
Denys Hay, “Italy and Barbarian Europe,” in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacobs (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), pp. 48–68.
Marcel Gagneux, “Italianité, Patrie Florentine et service de L’Église dans l’oeuvre et dans la vie de François Guichardin,” in Quêtes d’une identité collective chez les Italiens de la Renaissance (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1990), pp. 67–119, at p. 80.
Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1971), IV:vi, pp. 376 and 377.
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© 2010 Jeremy Larkins
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Larkins, J. (2010). Machiavelli, Territoriality, and Lo Stato . In: From Hierarchy to Anarchy. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101555_7
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