Machiavelli secondo Carlo Ginzburg

This essay discusses the recent collection of essays on Machiavelli by Ginzburg (Nondimanco, Adelphi, 2018) and shows its many shortcomings. It is unlikely that casuistry counted much for Machiavelli (whose thoughts on necessity and derogation are indebted instead to Roman law); Machiavelli did not limit himself to subverting Aristotelianism from within but attacked the Aristotelian tradition head on; The Prince’s caesura in the history of political philosophy has nothing to do with a shift in politics from praxis (ethically connoted) to poiesis (ethically neutral), which would have for Ginzburg caused the separation of politics from ethics; Blaise Pascal’s anti-Machiavellianism cannot be traced back to his polemic against casuistry and the Jesuits, and so on. At the origin of these profound misunderstandings is the decontextualizing use of erudite elements and a minimizing of the role Machiavelli’s involvement in Florentine struggles played in the birth of his revolutionary political theory. Moving beyond the failure of Nondimanco’s investigation, however, above all this essay intends to discuss the problems of «cultural» micro-history and to offer a new explanation for the methodological differences that arose early on between Ginzburg himself and «social» micro-historians like Edoardo Grendi and Giovanni Levi.