Lawyers usually consider that space is divided into two spheres: the private sphere and the public sphere. But it’s actually a tripartition. Private sphere is about protection of privacy and public sphere about neutrality and “laïcité”. But between the two of them, there is the public space, that of squares, streets, stadiums, theatres, etc. This space must be mainly ruled by “civility”, a social counterweight raised in the XVIth century against the modern state, and not by state rules. The decline of civility benefits the state, which takes advantage of it to cut down liberties, with the consent of the citizens.

The Epicurean worldview asserts a purposeless nature: one in which natural objects have no forms, no excellence towards which they strive. In Machiavelli’s hands, this physics constitutes ‘fortuna’: an opportunity to impose artificial forms on the human race. The result is brutality across the board. Existing interpretations of Machiavelli, such as those initiated by Quentin Skinner and Leo Strauss, flatter Machiavelli’s boldness by acquiescing in it. A new interpretation is necessary.

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 neutralize 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.

The article deals with the position of Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez concerning the political power as superiorem non recognoscens. The author’s aims are to prove that that principle belongs in fact to their political philosophy, and to understand the sense and foundations of their political independence’s notion.

Did Descartes ever develop a political thought of his own? This question, still open in the field of cartesian studies, is maybe doomed to remain without a definitive answer, mainly because of the lack of a specific work dedicated by him to politics. Nevertheless, we have a long letter to Princess Elisabeth in which the french philosopher, starting from his reading of Machiavelli's masterpiece, Il Principe, discusses political matters, and especially the political instruments that a good prince should use in order to guarantee stability to his reign. The present essay deals with it, exploring the possibility that Descartes might have been trying to outline in that text the main features of a political anthropology, founding it on the universal anthropology of passions that he was developing in those years.

Sovereignty, originally conceived of in all its majesty as an abstraction, is being demythologized. This process of demystification – or de-deification, whereby power is no longer conceived of simply within its legal entity, but in the context of its political plurality – is making way for a more functional and material notion of sovereignty: both within the domestic context, through the development of decentralization, federalism and participatory mechanisms as symptoms of the multiplication of decision-making centres; and within the supranational context, through the emergence of ideas of shared sovereignty, governance and cosmopolitanism. This new approach reveals a less vertical concept of sovereign power and a more concrete view of its stakeholders – the people – raising the issue of the maintenance the privileged link between sovereignty and the nation state.

The aim of this work is to enquire the theoretical instances and the conceptual frameworks around which Foucault defines the function of the Intellectual and its peculiar oscillation between specialization and universalism. So I examine the archaeological prospect of investigation on knowledge structures, the genealogical prospect of study of power relations and the relationship between regimes of truth and power relations on the background of an 'ontology of contingency'.

The late thought of Jacques Derrida identifies a number of doubles: law and justice, absolute and conditional hospitality, democracy and democracy-to-come. Justice, for example, is the larger principle to which the law aspires, but justice will always remain in excess of law. Justice both makes law possible by providing it with its meaning, but it also makes law impossible by setting up an aspiration that the law can never meet. On the one hand, the law comes into being only in response to justice, but the only existence justice has is by way of law. Normally, justice is seen as the larger, unconditional phenomenon that the law constricts violently by narrowing and reducing it. This paper argues that violence does not only reside on the side of constriction in Derrida, but that unconditionality is itself always a principle of violence. Indeed constriction and unconditionality work togther insperably even as they challenge and defy one another. By connecting these themes with Bataille's theory of sovereignty, this paper explores the horizons of violence in Derrida's political thinking.

Caterina Sforza’s fame as ruler of the small territories of Imola and Forlì in the late fifteenth-century has persisted over the centuries. Yet her fame has shifted and changed with the Niccolò Machiavelli’s comments on her life greatly affected her reputation. Her powerful Medici descendants further tempered her legend without diminishing her fame. The various levels of archival traces for Sforza’s life and legend present a remarkable example of how accretions of information and interpretation become history.

Hobbes named his work Leviathan for a Biblical monster, yet he mentioned it only three times in the book itself. Curiously, in those three passages Hobbes speaks of Leviathan in wildly divergent ways: as a machine, man, sovereign, state, and god. In this article, the author argues that we can make sense of this radical ambiguity from a perspective found in the late Antique work Peri hermeneias. Specifically, ambiguity is taken to be conducive to fear, and Hobbes thus employs it as an instrument for the purpose of political obedience.

In his Tractatus de legibus Suárez describes the promulgatio as a switch which allows the law “circulate” its effect. Differently form the thomistic theory, wherein individuals per se are immediately and “neatly” subjected to the law, conceived as a direct emanation of the eternal law of God, according to Suàres promulgatio is an element of deordinatio. The difficulty does not concern the collocation of the authority, but that of its subject, the latter having to be able to receive it responsibly and with right and proper means. But what would happen if...

Can we compare Robespierre’s and Machiavelli’s thinking ? Robespierre himself spoke in various occasions of Machiavelli as a model for tyranny, despotism, evil in ethics and politics - just the contrary for the conduct he praised during the French Revolution. Nevertheless, some aspects of the Robespierrist discourse (especially during the spring of 1794) can evoke Machiavelli : the “return to basic principles” is a necessity for the collective salvation, the worship of “l’Etre Suprême” is essential in the life of a Republic ( a”vertuous republic” according to Maximilien Robespierre). Concerning this point, civic religion, Robespierre knew very well the page by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the quotation made by him of Machiavelli’s Discorsi. So, it can be fruitful to give an interpretation of the famous cult celebrating the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, in the French context as much as in the Machiavellian perspective.

Famously, Foucault claimed that Bentham's Panopticon is the model of modern disciplinary society. Foucault put Bentham's project of a new penitentiary at the centre stage of his exposition of the birth of biopolitics. This article focuses on Foucault's conception of power as a ubiquitous relation , where governors and subjects are fading, and resistance is the counterpart of power. It is claimed that going beyond the Panopticon, a similar conception of power could be found in Bentham's writings on law and constitutional theory. Accordingly, Foucault's conception of power can be found in, and reconciled with, a different framework, at the service of a liberal-democratic conception of State and society.

The contemporary society is very different from the previous ones, but sign these differences a discontinuity between the contemporary one and the previous societies, or are the changes, although deep, contained into the same line of development? And so, mark the contemporary Western democracies a discontinuity with the totalitarianism of the last century, or are them different in the proceedings but not in purposes? In other words, live we really in a post-ideological era or not? And whether not, which is the form of the current ideology and its framework? Trying to answer to these issues, that are essentially a question of “power”, is useful delineate a possible theory of the social transition and analyze if changes are essential or just formal – a sort of upgrade of the domination of man by man and by nature. Developing this reasoning will be taken in consideration, integrating each other, the political theory and the moral philosophy of Th.-W. Adorno, M. Foucault, J. Habermas, M. Horkheimer, H. Marcuse, A. Negri, P.P. Pasolini, in order to disclose a critical way for observing reality and its main phenomena.

Since the development of mass society and despite of its quantitative enlargement public opinion has been losing its vital critical function which is deemed to constitute the very basis of political legitimacy. This paper aims at analysing the relevance of the political theorisations of Gramsci and Ortega y Gasset – radically different in their fundamental assumptions but attentive to the same problems – concerning the role of intellectual activity as a necessary means for shaping an informed public opinion which could guarantee the effective practice of a responsible democracy. Thus, it will be proved that solely through a reconsideration of the role of education within society it could be assigned a specific leading role to intellectuals in politics.

In this paper I will analyze contemporary image technologies starting from the phenomenological theory of image. Husserl’s conceptual system does not fit with contemporary images, because of their peculiar technical nature. The phenomenological theory of image is based on an essential assumption: perception is an intuitive act, therefore in perceptual experience there is no mediation; on the contrary image consciousness (that is the experience of perceiving something through an image) always implies a mediation. This essential phenomenological distinction is precisely what contemporary images deny. Moreover technical features of contemporary images produce not only theoretical but also political concerns. Images have power; but the power of contemporary image technologies is deeply ambiguous.

At the core of this interview is the last publication of Roberto Esposito, titled “Due. La macchina della teologia politica e il posto del pensiero”. Starting from the book, the discussion focuses on the topics of economic and political theology; the relationship between this book ant Esposito's previous work; the inclusion of "Due" in the Italian philosophical discussion as well as in the international debate on the problems arising from debt theme.

In contrast with the Aristotelian tradition, Machiavelli holds that the purpose of «customs» and «institutions» is not to make it possible for the internal end of human beings, that is life according to reason and virtue, to be fulfilled. It is instead possible, through crafty strategies aiming at taking advantage of the inevitably selfish mainsprings of individuals, to «correct» the results of the «insatiable human appetites». Politics then becomes the art of «correcting» men in order to adapt them to an ideal entailing an apparent violence to their identity.

Since the XIXth century Industrial Revolution, modern technology has become a power which not only transforms our world but produces it. In other words, technology is now a political power. It is becoming a factor of strangeness whereas human beings are more and more strangers in this world, more and more "obsolescent" (Günther Anders). In this paper, we will try to define the main characteristics of this technological strangeness process which erases the imprint of the humankind on the world.

The concept of popular sovereignty establishes the ground for the study of Costitutional Right: concerning the in-force power, has it to be undertood starting from an inner perspective or from an outer one? By discerning the writing of a law-text from its reading, this article moves from the ermeneutical understanding of the constitution that will affect the typing of the sovereign identity. The text aims to locate the core moment of the transition from an idea of early sovereign to the realization of an original one.

The paper deals with the analysis of the theme of power in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. In The Kingdom and the Glory Agamben interprets Glory as the fundamental apparatus of power languages, an empty center around which the western governamental machine works. The Glory is the transcendental of power, the device by which auctoritas and potestas are articulated. Therefore, Glory is the foundation of modern consensual democracies. In this sense mass-media are modern devices of power glorification. To deconstruct western governamental machine is necessary to show the role of Glory as a practice of legitimateness of power.

This short essay will briefly review the reflections of Nicos Poulantzas in his book State, Power, Socialism (1978), focusing on the issue of intellectual work, understood as a practice of knowledge (science, organizational skills, technical “know-how”), that inseparably accompanies the exercise of the power. This issue involves directly into question both the studies of Antonio Gramsci, on the figure of the intellectual, and the contributions on the analytics of the power, provided by Michel Foucault in the late 70s, to which Poulantzas himself refers. At the end of this writing we will try to draw conclusions to determine the role of the intellectual in the contemporary society, starting from the analysis of the examined thinkers, according to their theoretical coordinates.

The paper addresses the transcendence of political organizations adopting an anthropological perspectives. In contexts in which power is grounded in society the latter tends to be formed by the synergy of multiple and hybrid identities. When power becomes concentrated in institutional government, and thus becomes transcendental, identity is progressively codified and standardized. I argue that representative democracy has failed to resolve the transcendental dimension of government, as evidence from contemporary Italy shows. Emerging social movements, on the contrary, tend to root power in a polyphonic and heterogeneous social body.

The general aim of this text is to propose an engineering to deconstruct/build power devices. This engineering is based on a model that distinguishes and makes explicit three levels in the power devices. The first level is that of standards governing concrete economic life. The second level is that of principles guiding standards and establishing their conceptual and methodological framework. The third level refers to worldviews underlying the principles and standards: the doxai. The political object "enterprise" is taken as illustration. This object is first deconstructed, and then reconstructed according to an alternative doxa. The text emphasizes the importance of institutions that design and produce dominant doxai and instruments through which they materialize.

This short article by Jean Paul Malrieu is the core of an interview starting from his book La science gouvernée. Essai sur le triangle science/technique/pouvoir. Professor Malrieu, physicist and quantum chemist of great importance, insists on the nerve centres of the twine in institutionalized power and democratic regimes, that non only coexist but also reveal their collusion in a paradoxical system. This twine produces an ambiguous dialogue between science (that inquires into the “why”) and technique (whic search for the answer about the “how”), in a dangerous perspective of continuity between homo faber and human improvement.