ARTICOLI / 2 / Antonio De Simone /
Reflecting on the relationship between conflict and power from Machiavelli means understanding why the conflict cannot prescind from an order, and that the unity of politics is in some sense immanent to the conflict. There is no human community that historically can neutralise the ambivalence of the conflict. From the point of view of political philosophy, the “revolutionary gesture” of Machiavelli consists in the fact that he does not deplore the division, tumults, conflicts, does not see in them a split destined to be overcome, but also conceives of them as the principle and the engine of freedom. The tumultuous conflict is the condition of possibility of freedom, because the negativity of the people, of many, is the only one to be able to curb the desire for domination of the greats. Thinker of the human condition and politics, Machiavelli, in his persistence, today, is still a “classic” that disturbs, with the “oblique glance” of his political anthropology, our contemporaneity.
