Jordanna's Philosophers

"troubles very often come because we have asked for them; but that the most prudent and innocent of conduct is not necessarily enough to keep them away; also that when they come, through our fault or otherwise, trust in God goes far to take away their sting, and makes them a useful preparation for a better life"

Alessandro Manzoni

All around I now hear festive cries, / They are adorning the church and they sing, / And there rise from those murderous hearts / Hymns and thanks that offend God in Heaven. / From beyond the tall crown of the Alps / Most intensely the stranger is looking / See the strongest now biting the dust / Counts the dead with most cruel content. Make haste. O be ready in the ranks, / Interrupt merry games and triumphs / And return to your banners of war; / For the stranger is coming, he is here, / Is victorious! Weak and scant are your troops? / That is why he is coming to challenge, / And he is waiting for you on those fields / Where the brothers have murdered their brothers

Alessandro Manzoni

All these fighters belong to one land / They all speak the same language, and "brothers" / Is the name that the foreigner gives them; / The same traits appear on all faces, / The same land has nurtured them all, / This land that their blood now submerge / And that nature from others divided / By the girth of the seas and the Alps. Who was first among them to unsheathe / The sacrilegious sword to kill brothers? / For what blameworthy war such a terror? / No one knows. Without ire they came here / to give death or receive it: they sold / Their young vigor to a captain who is paid, / And for him the now fight without question

Alessandro Manzoni

Amid all those enthusiasts, there were some cooler heads, who were very pleased to see the muddy water stirred up, and did their best to stir it up still further. They put forward arguments and stories of a kind that the cunning can always invent and the hot-headed will always believe. They had no intention of letting the troubled waters settle again without doing a little fishing in them. Thousands of men went to bed with a vague feeling that something must be done, and that something would be done. Before dawn, there were again a number of groups of people to be seen in the streets. Boys, women and men, the old, the workers, the destitute, all assembled together at random. In one place there would be a whispering of many voices; in another there would be a single speaker with an applauding audience.

Alessandro Manzoni

Among the spectators was one - a debauched looking old man - who was a spectacle in himself. With his deep-set, bloodshot eyes stretched as wide open as they would go, with the wrinkles of his face distorted into a smirk of fiendish pleasure, with hands held high above his unreverend white locks, he was brandishing a hammer, a rope and four large nails. When the commissioner had been killed, he said, these things would be used to hang his body up on the front door of his own house.

Alessandro Manzoni

And like savage beasts made prey to their fear, / Their reddish manes bristling for terror and fright, / They are running for shelter, to find their old lairs. / Their usual proud visage the women cast down, / No longer dismissive, nor haughty, but pale/ They pensively gaze at their pensive sons.

Alessandro Manzoni

Could you doubt it? Now that he is delivered / From Frankish threat, he will promptly move / Against the holy prince. Thus we will lead / Lombardy to the Tiber, unanimous / And eager, against a helpless people. / And Lombardy will lightly move to fight / For such an easy booty! Is this war / Is this a foe? We will heap ruins over / Existing ruins. This is our art, / You know, an ancient one: to set fire / To hunt and palaces alike. / We will first kill the lords of the land, then all those / Who randomly shall fall under our axes. / The rest will be enslaved and distributed / And the most feared, that is, the most disloyal / Lombard will have the booty's best share. - Alas / That my destiny should come to this / To be the leader of a band of thieves! / I thought Heaven would destine me to deed / On this land other than to despoil it / Without peril or honor. - O dearest friend, / You who have been with me since the first year / Of my life, my companion in arms, games, And dangers alike, my chosen brother - / With you only I can let my thoughts fly / Over my lips. My heart aches. O Anfrid. It does command me lofty and noble deeds / But fortune condemns me to unjust ones; / Thus I walk my way / Dragged along a route / I did not choose, an obscure path to nowhere.. / And my heart becomes dry like to a seed / Cast onto a barren ground and blown away / By the wind

Alessandro Manzoni

Do not let revenge's evil cry rise/ in your pure soul; / do not let rancor spoil / These last moments together, they are sacred. The wrong is great, yet forgive and you shall see / A high joy arising amidst the evils. / O, what is death? The cruelest enemy / Can only sped the course that leads to it. / Nay, men did not invent death; it would be / Full of rage, unbearable. From Heaven / Death comes to us, and Heaven sends with it / Such solace that men cannot give or take.

Alessandro Manzoni

In popular uprisings there are always a certain number of men, inspired by hotblooded passions, fanatical convictions, evil designs, or a devilish love of disorder for its own sake, who do everything they can to make things take the worst possible turn. They put forward or support the most merciless projects, and fan the flames every time they begin to subside. Nothing ever goes too far for them; they would like to see rioting continue without bounds and without an end. But to counterbalance them, there are always a certain number of other men, equally ardent and determined, who are doing all they can in the opposite direction, inspired by friendship or fellow-feeling for the people threatened by the mob, or by a reverent and spontaneous horror of bloodshed and evil deeds. God bless them for it! In each of the two groups we have just mentioned, the conformity of the individual members' wishes provides an instant coordination of their actions, even if there has been no previous agreement about what should be done.

Alessandro Manzoni

Life is arcane, and only upon dying / One comprehends. Of your kingdom you were / Despoiled: do not lament the loss, say. / When do this same hour you will come near, / The happy memories that will visit/ Your mind will only be the years in which / You will not have been king, in which you no tears / Shall have been ascribed to you in Heaven, / Nor shall your name have ascend there / Accompanied by the victims' curses. / Have joy of not being king; have joy of not / Being able to act. There is no room for guiltless action, 'tis only given / To either inflict wrongs or suffer them. / A fierce and dire force governs the world; / Men call it law! / With blood-stained hands our / Forefathers cast the seeds of injustice; / Our fathers manured it with blood / And the land does not yield other harvest. / It is not sweet to rule over the unjust, / And you know it from facts, it's right that thus / It should all end. This happy man for whom / My death strenghtens the throne he sits upon, / For whom everything smiles and shines, is but / A mortal man

Alessandro Manzoni

Like to a sun ray that pierces thick clouds / The fathers' grand virtue still shines on those brows, / Beneath the pale cheeks, in those fearful eyes / The offenses they suffered and their tattered pride / For their ancient glory appear in those eyes, / And patience and pride collide on those brows.

Alessandro Manzoni

No less foolish the stranger! Was a people/ ver saved by its murders, its insults?/ To the vanquished no troubles befall,/ While the joy of impious turns sour. / Oftetimes God's vengeance is silent, / Does not strike man as proudly he treads on / His ephemeral way, but she marks him: / When he gives his last breath, then she appears. We are all made in the image of One, / We are all children of a sole Redemption, / And no matter in what epoch, in what region, / We all pass through this ether of life, / We are brothers, we are tied by one pact. / Cursed be those who infringe such a pact, / Those who rise by trampling the weak, / Those who sadden an immortal spirit.

Alessandro Manzoni

On the right, sudden sound of shrill trumpets / From the left quickly a flourish replies. / From both sides the earth rumbles with footsteps / Of the infantry and cavalry charging. / Here merges in the view one ensign; / There another advances unfolded; / Yond appears a whole cohort arrayed, / And another against it attacks.

Alessandro Manzoni

The bulk of the mob - what we may term its raw material - is made up of a fortuitous conglomeration of human beings, who range from one end of the scale to the other without any clear-cut divisions. A little hot-headed; a little cunning; a little too fond of their own special brand of justice, and inclined to hanker after flagrant examples of it; quick to ferocious violence and quick to feelings of pity; quick to both loathing and to adoration, whenever a convincing occasion for either sentiment offers itself; greedy at all times to hear and to believe something outrageous; always looking for a reason to shout, to applaud someone or to howl for his blood. 'Long live Peter!' and 'Death to Paul!' are the phrases that come most readily to their lips.

Alessandro Manzoni

The carriage had already made its way a certain distance into the crowd, and had halted there - one of the frequent stops that are inevitable in such a journey. Old Ferrer looked out of the windows, first on one side, and then on the other, with a humble, smiling, affectionate expression, which he had previously always saved for the moments when he found himself in the presence of His Majesty King Philip IV; but he was compelled to put it on for this occasion as well. He spoke to the crowd too; but the clamour and the buzzing of many voices, the cheering addressed to Ferrer himself, were such that very few people could hear anything at all of what he said, and even they could not hear much.

Alessandro Manzoni

The crowd left behind began to break up, dispersing in different directions, along various roads. Some went home to get on with their own affairs; others moved off to find an open space and fill their lungs with fresh air, after so many hours in a crowded throng; others again went off in search of friends with whom to discuss the great events of the day. There was a similar exodus at the other end of the street, and the mob thinned out enough for the detachment of Spanish soldiers to be able to move forward without resistance and station themselves before the commissioner's house [...] The reader can imagine the bedlam that passed for discussion in those groups. Some gave exaggerated descriptions of what they had seen; others of what they themselves had done. Some expressed their pleasure that the thing had ended so well, praising Ferrer, and prophesying serious trouble for the commissioner; others sniggered and said: 'Don't worry; he'll be all right. Dog doesn't eat dog.' [...] Meanwhile the sun had gone down, and a greyness spread over everything. Tired after a long day and bored with gossiping in the dark, many people went off home. Renzo had helped to make way for the carriage, as long as his help had been needed; and he had passed between the two rows of soldiers in its wake, as if in a triumph. He was glad to see it trot away in safety, unimpeded.

Alessandro Manzoni

The destruction of sifting machines and breadbins, the wrecking of bakeries and the mobbing of bakers are not really the best methods of ensuring long life to a plenteous supply of bread. But that is one of those philosophical subtleties which a crowd can never grasp. Even without being a philosopher, however, a man will sometimes grasp it straightaway, while the whole matter is still new to him and he can see it with fresh eyes

Alessandro Manzoni

The evening before Renzo reached Milan, the city's streets and squares had been swarming with men. Possessed by a common anger and dominated by a common thought, all of them, whether they knew each other or not, began to form into groups. They joined forces without any prearrangement, almost without being aware that they were doing so, like drops of water coming together as they run down the same slope. Every speech that was made increased the conviction and the passion both of the listeners and the speaker.

Alessandro Manzoni

The howling outside grew louder and louder. In the courtyard it seemed to be coming down from the sky, like the sound of thunder; and every room and hollow space in the building resounded with it. Amid the vast, confused clamour could be heard the loud, rapid impact of heavy stones against the door.

Alessandro Manzoni

The terrain in the middle is swallowed, / And already the swords strike on swords / On both sides chests are wounded and bleed / And the battle's vehemence redoubles. / Who are they? To this beautiful country / Who is the stranger that came to bring war; / Who is the native the swore to defend / His own land from the assault or to die?

Alessandro Manzoni

The warriors pursuing them are greedy for blood, / They run everywhere, unceasingly searching, / Like greyhounds unlashed to seek out their prey. / A newfound contentment pervades the bystanders, / Swift hope makes them see the outcome already: / They dream of deliverance from their heavy sefdom. Yet listen! Those brave ones who won the day's battle / and kept your cruel tyrants from easy withdrawal, / Came here from afar, through craggy and rough paths. / They abandoned the joy of festive communal, / Abruptly awoke from lulling repose, / And ran to the summons of bellicose trumpets.

Alessandro Manzoni

There are certain official measures which the multitude always regards (or always has regarded up to the present day), as fair, simple and ideally calculated to bring out the grain that has been secreted - or walled up, or buried, to use the language then in fashion - and to bring back times of plenty. The magistrates were implored to take those measures at once; and they did take certain steps. They fixed maximum prices for a number of foodstuffs, they decreed penalties for anyone who refused to sell at those prices, and passed one or two other regulations of that kind. But all the official measures in the world, however vigorous they may be, cannot lessen a man's need for food, nor produce crops out of season. The measures actually taken on this occasion were certainly not calculated to attract imports from other areas where there might conceivably be a surplus. And so the trouble continued and grew worse.

Alessandro Manzoni

They eagerly gather, then tremble and part, / And through twisted paths, with wandering steps / With fear and desire, advance and recede. / They watch their cruel masters for once fleeing cruelty: / The enemy swords are prompting their flight, / In disarrayed crowds, disheartend, confused.

Alessandro Manzoni

This was the second year of bad harvests. The year before, stocks of food left over from earlier harvests had filled the gaps to a certain extent. The population had got through to the autumn of 1628 - the year of which we are now speaking - without being either overfed or starved, but it was left with absolutely nothing in hand. Then the longed-for harvest turned out to be even more wretched than the one before; partly because the weather was worse, not only in the territory of Milan but for a considerable distance around it, but also through the fault of mankind.

Alessandro Manzoni

Though we like to show our poor young hero from the mountains in the most favourable light, historical accuracy compels us to admit that his first reaction was one of pleasure. He had so little reason to be pleased with the ordinary course of events, that he found himself inclined to approve of anything that would change it. And besides he was in no way a man who rose above the general intellectual level of his age, and therefore he too held the common opinion - which might almost be called a common passion - according to which the shortage of bread was the fault of the hoarders of grain and the bakers. He was ready to see justice in any method of making them loose their hold on the food which they (according to that opinion) were cruelly denying to the needs of a famished nation.

Alessandro Manzoni

Thus how can you hope that, as their sole reward, / These brave ones intended to bring you deliverance, / To bring to an end the pains of some strangers? / Return to your ruins replenished with pride, / To the unmanly work of the hot, noisy forges, / To those furrows sprinkled with the sweat of slaves. The brave ones will merge with the people they vaniquished; / The masters of old will remain the new ones; / Thy will steer together the plough that you pull. / They jointly will own all the cattle and the men. / They are taking possession of blood-drenched pastures, / Belonging to a people who have lost their name.

Alessandro Manzoni

Within mossy mansions, among city ruins, / Within silent forests, on hot, noisy forges, / Among furrowed pastures by servants' sweat sprinkled, / A people's sparse remnants are suddenly astir. / They are raising their heads, they are pricking their ears to the growing tumult, to novel clangor.

Alessandro Manzoni

"Pure" spontaneity does not exist in history. It would be the same thing as "pure" mechanicity. In the "most spontaneous" movement it is simply the case that the elements of "conscious leadership" cannot be checked, have left no reliable document. It may be said that spontaneity is therefore characteristic of the "history of subaltern classes", and indeed of their most marginal and peripheral elements; these have not achieved any consciousness of the class "for itself", and consequently it never occurs to them that their history might have some possible importance, that there might be some value in leaving documentary evidence of it. Hence in such movements there exist multiple elements of "conscious leadership", but no one of them is predominant or transcends the level of a given social stratum's "popular science" - its "common sense" or traditional conception of the world.

Antonio Gramsci

"State spirit" presuppose "continuity", either with the past, or with the tradition, or with the future; that is, it presupposes that every act is a moment in a complex process, which has already begun and which will continue. The responsibility for this process, of being actors in this process, of being in solidarity with forces which are materially "unknown" but which nevertheless feel themselves to be active and operational - and of which account is taken as if they were phisically "material" and present - is precisely in certain cases called "State spirit".

Antonio Gramsci

A human mass does not "distinguish" itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself; and there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is without organisers and leaders, in other words, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people "specialised" in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas. But the process of creating intellectuals is long, difficult, full of contradictions, advances and retreats, dispersals and regroupings, in which the loyalty of the masses is often sorely tried.

Antonio Gramsci

An historical act can only be performed by the 'collective man', and this presupposes the attainment of a 'socio-cultural' unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed wills, with heterogeneous aims, are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world, operating in transitory bursts (general and particular, operating in temporary bursts (in emotional way) or permanently (when the intellectual base is so well rooted, assimilated and experienced, that it becomes passion).

Antonio Gramsci

At a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. In other words, the traditional parties in that particular organisational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent and lead them, are no longer recognized by their classes (or fraction of a class) as its expression. When such a crisis occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous, because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces, represented by charismatic "men of destiny".

Antonio Gramsci

Every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes. The school as a positive educative function, and the courts as a repressive and negative educative function, are the most important State activities in this sense: but,in reality, a multitude of other so-called private initiatives and activities tend to the same end—initiatives and activities which form the apparatus of the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes.

Antonio Gramsci

Every man, in as much as he is active, i.e. living, contributes to modifying the social environment in which he develops (to modifying certain of its characteristics or to preserving others); in other words, he tends to establish "norms", rules of living and of behaviour.

Antonio Gramsci

Faced with bourgeois thought in its feeble old age, perhaps only now can the working-class point of view enjoy the fertile season of its own vibrant youth. To do this, it must violently break with its own immediate past. It must reject the traditional figure that has been officially attributed to it and surprise the class enemy with its sense of initiative, making a sudden, unpredicted, uncontrollable theoretical advance.

Antonio Gramsci

Historical relationship between the modern French state created by the Revolution and the other modern states of continental Europe. The comparison is vitally important - provided that it is not made on the basis of abstract sociological schemas. It should be based on the study of four elements: 1. revolutionary explosion in France with radical and violent transformation of social and political relations; 2. European opposition to the French Revolution and to any extension of it along class lines; 3. war between France, under the Republic and Napoleon, and the rest of Europe - initially, in order to avoid being stifled at birth, and subsequently with the aim of establishing a permanent French hegemony tending towards the creation of a universal empire; 4. national revolts against French hegemony, and birth of the modern European states by successive small waves of reform rather than by revolutionary explosions like the original French one. The "successive waves" were made up of a combination of social struggles, interventions from above of the enlightened monarchy type and national wars - with the two latter phenomena predominating. The period of the "Restoration" is the richest in developments of this kind; "Restoration" becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French machinery of terror. The old feudal classes are demoted from their dominant position to a "governing" one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate them as an organic whole; instead of a class they become a "caste" with specific cultural and psychological characteristic, but no longer with predominant economic functions.

Antonio Gramsci

If political science means science of the State, and the State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justify and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules, then it is obvious that all the essential questions of sociology.

Antonio Gramsci

If the state represents the coercive and punitive force of juridical regulation of a country, the parties - representing the spontaneous adhesion of an élite to such a regulation [...] - must show in their internal life that they have assimilated as principles of moral conduct those rules which in the State are legal obligations. In the party necessity has become freedom [...]. From this point of view the parties can be considered as schools of State life.

Antonio Gramsci

In Europe from 1789 to 1879 there was a (political) war of movement in the French Revolution and a long war of position from 1815 to 1870. In the present epoch, the war of movement took place politically from March 1917 to March 1921; this was followed by a war of position whose representative - both practical (for Italy) and Ideological (for Europe) is fascism.

Antonio Gramsci

In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.

Antonio Gramsci

It is obvious that, in order to counterpoise itself effectively to the Moderates, the Action Party ought to have allied itself with the rural masses, especially those in the South, and ought to have been "Jacobin" not only in external form, in temperament, but most particularly in socio-economic content. The binding together of the various rural classes, which was accomplished in a reactionary bloc by means of the various legitimist-clerical intellectual strata, could be dissolved, so as to arrive at a new liberal-national formation, only if support was won from two directions: from the peasant masses, by accepting their elementary demands and making them integral part of the new programme of government; and from the intellectuals of the middle and lower strata, by concentrating them and stressing the themes most capable of interesting them.

Antonio Gramsci

It should be remarked that the general notion of State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion). In a doctrine of the State which conceives the latter as tendentially capable of withering away and of being subsumed into regulated society, the argument is a fundamental one. It is possible to imagine the coercive element of the State withering away by degrees, as ever-more conspicuous elements of regulated society (or ethical State or civil society) make their appearance.

Antonio Gramsci

The thesis of the "passive revolution" as an interpretation of the Risorgimento period, and of every epoch characterised by complex historical upheavals. Utility and danger of this thesis. Danger of historical defeatism, i.e. indifferentism, since the whole way of posing the question may induce a belief in some kind of fatalism etc. Yet the conception remains a dialectical one - in other words, presupposes, indeed postulates as necessary, a vigorous antithesis, which can present intransigently all its potentialities for development. Hence theory of the "passive revolution" not as a programme, as it was for the Italia liberals of the risorgimento, in the absence of other active element to a dominant extent.

Antonio Gramsci

Machiavelli himself remarks that what he is writing about is in fact practised, and has always been practised, by the greatest men throughout history. So it does not seem that he was writing for those who are already in the know; nor is his style that of disinterested scientific activity; nor is it possible to think that he arrived at his theses in the field of political science by way of philosophical speculation— which would have been something of a miracle in that field at the time, when even today he meets with such hostility and opposition. One may therefore suppose that Machiavelli had in mind "those who are not in the know", and that it was they whom he intended to educate politically. [...] Who therefore is "not in the know"? The revolutionary class of the time, the Italian "people" or "nation", the citizen democracy which gave birth to men like Savonarola and Pier Soderini, rather than to a Castruccio or a Valentino. It seems clear that Machiavelli wished to persuade these forces of the necessity of having a leader who knew what he wanted and how to obtain it, and of accepting him with enthusiasm even if his actions might conflict or appear to conflict with the generalised ideology of the time—religion.

Antonio Gramsci

Political concept of the so-called "Permanent Revolution", which emerged before 1848 as a scientifically evolved expression of the Jacobin experience from 1789 to Thermidor. The formula belongs to an historical period in which the great mass political parties and the great economic trade unions did not yet exist, and society was still, so to speak, in a state of fluidity from many points of view: greater backwardness of the countryside, and almost complete monopoly of political and State power by a few cities or even by a single one (Paris in the case of France); a relatively rudimentary State apparatus, and greater autonomy of civil society from State activity; a specific system of military forces and of national armed services; greater autonomy of the national economies from the economic relations of the world market, etc. In the period after 1870, with the colonial expansion of Europe, all these elements change: the internal and international organisational relations of the State become more complex and massive, and the Forty-Eightist formula of the "Permanent Revolution" is expanded and transcended in political science by the formula of "civil hegemony".The same thing happens in the art of politics as happens in military art: war of movement increasingly becomes war of position, and it can be said that a State will win a war in so far as it prepares for it minutely and technically in peacetime. The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as State organisations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the "trenches" and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely "partial" the element of movement which before used to be "the whole" of war, etc

Antonio Gramsci

The Moderates represented a relatively homogeneous social group, and hence their leadership underwent relatively limited oscillations [...]; whereas the socalled Action Party did not base itself specifically on any historical class, and the oscillations which its leading organs underwent were resolved, in the last analysis, according to the interests of the Moderates. In other words, the Action Party was led historically by the Moderates.

Antonio Gramsci

The Moderates were intellectuals already naturally "condensed" by the organic nature of their relation to the social groups whose expressions they were. (As far as a whole series of them were concerned, there was realized the identity of the representative and the representative; in other words, the Moderates were a real, organic vanguard of the upper classes, to which economically they belonged. They were intellectuals and political organisers, and at the same time company bosses, rich farmers or estate managers, commercial and industrial entrepreneurs, etc.) Given this organic condensation or concentration, the Moderates exercised a powerful attraction "spontaneously", on the whole mass of intellectuals of every degree who existed in the peninsula.

Antonio Gramsci

The basic thing about The Prince is that it is not a systematic treatment, but a "live" work, in which political ideology and political science are fused in the dramatic form of a "myth". Before Machiavelli, political science had taken the form either of the Utopia or of the scholarly treatise. Machiavelli, combining the two, gave imaginative and artistic form to his conception by embodying the doctrinal, rational element in the person of a condottiere, who represents plastically and "anthropomorphically" the symbol of the ''collective will''. In order to represent the process whereby a given collective will, directed towards a given political objective, is formed, Machiavelli did not have recourse to long-winded arguments, or pedantic classifications of principles and criteria for a method of action. Instead he represented this process in terms of the qualities, characteristics, duties and requirements of a concrete individual. Such a procedure stimulates the artistic imagination of those who have to be convinced, and gives political passions a more concrete form. Machiavelli's Prince could be studied as an historical exemplification of the Sorelian myth - i.e. of a political ideology expressed neither in the form of a cold utopia nor as learned theorising, but rather by a creation of concrete phantasy which acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will. The utopian character of The Prince lies in the fact that the Prince had no real historical existence; he did not present himself immediately and objectively to the Italian people, but was a pure theoretical abstraction - a symbol of the leader and ideal condottiere.

Antonio Gramsci

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

Antonio Gramsci

The crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm. The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres, changes men and programs and, with greater speed than is achieved by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promise; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be very numerous or highly trained. The passage of the troops of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class, is an organic and normal phenomenon [...] When the crisis does not find this organic solution, but that of the charismatic leader, it means that a static equilibrium exists (whose factors may be disparate, but in which the decisive one is the immaturity of the progressive forces); it means that no group, neither the conservatives nor the progressives, has the strength for victory, and that even the conservative group needs a master.

Antonio Gramsci

The first element is that there really do exist rulers and ruled, leaders and led. The entire science and art of politics are based on this primordial, and [...] irreducible fact. [...] Given this fact, it will have to be considered how one can lead most effectively (given certain ends); hence how the leaders may best be prepared (and it is more precisely in this that the first stage of the art and science of politics consists); and how, on the other hand, one can know the lines of least resistance, or the most rational lines along which to proceed if one wishes to secure the obedience of the led or ruled. In the formation of leaders, on premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer necessary? In other words, is the initial premise the perpetual division of the human race, or the belief that this division is only an historical fact, corresponding to certain conditions?

Antonio Gramsci

The historical unity of the ruling classes is realised in the State, and their history is essentially the history of States and groups of States. But it would be wrong to think that this unity is simply juridical and political (though such forms of unity do have their importance too, and not in a purely formal sense); the fundamental historical unity, concretely, results from the organic relations between State or political society and "civil society"

Antonio Gramsci

The history of subaltern social groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic. There undoubtedly does exist a tendency to (at least provisional stages of) unification in the historical activity of these groups, but this tendency is continually interrupted by the activity of the ruling groups; it therefore can only be demonstrated when an historical cycle is completed and this cycle culminates in a success. Subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up: only "permanent" victory breaks their subordination and, that not immediately.

Antonio Gramsci

The merit of an educated class, because it is its historical function, is to lead the popular masses and develop their progressive elements. If the educated class has not been capable of fulfilling its function, one should speak not of merit but of demerit - in other words, of immaturity and intrinsic weakness. Similarly, it is necessary to be clear about the term, and the concept, of demagogy. Those men in effect were not capable of leading the people, were not capable of arousing their enthusiasm and their passion [...]. Did they at least attain the end which they set themselves? They said that they were aiming at the creation of a modern State in Italy, and they in fact produced a bastard. They aimed at stimulating the formation of an extensive and energetic ruling class, and they did not succeed: at integrating people into the framework of the new State, and they did not succeed. The paltry political life from 1870 to 1900, the fundamental and endemic rebelliousness of the Italian popular classes, the narrow and stunted existence of a sceptical and cowardly ruling stratum, these are all consequences of that failure.

Antonio Gramsci

The methodological criterion on which our own study must be based is the following: that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as "domination" and as "intellectual and moral leadership". A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to "liquidate", or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise "leadership" before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to "lead" as well.

Antonio Gramsci

The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party - the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total.

Antonio Gramsci

The popular element "feels" but does not always know or understand; the intellectual element "knows" but does not always understand and in particular does not always feel. The two extremes are therefore pedantry and philistinism on the one hand and blind passion and sectarianism on the other. [...] One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. In the absence of such a nexus the relations between the intellectual and the people-nation are, or are reduced to, relationships of a purely bureaucratic and formal order; the intellectuals become a caste, or a priesthood.

Antonio Gramsci

The rise of sociology is related to the decline of the concept of political science and the art of politics which took place in the nineteenth century (to be more accurate, in the second half of that century, with the success of evolutionary and positivist theories). Everything that is of real importance in sociology is nothing other than political science. "Politics" became synonymous with parliamentary politics or politics of personal cliques.

Antonio Gramsci

The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. In war it would sometimes happen that a fierce artillery attack seemed to have destroyed the enemy's entire defensive system, whereas in fact it had only destroyed the outer perimeter; and at the moment of their advance and attack the assailants would find themselves confronted by a line of defence which was still effective. The same thing happens in politics, during the great economic crises. A crisis cannot give the attacking forces the ability to organise with lightning speed in time and in space; still less can it endow them with fighting spirit. Similarly, the defenders are not demoralised, nor do they abandon their positions, even among the ruins, nor do they lose faith in their own strength or their own future. Of course, things do not remain exactly as they were; but it is certain that one will not find the element of speed, of accelerated time, of the definitive forward march expected by the strategists of political Cadornism.

Antonio Gramsci

Throughout the book, Machiavelli discusses what the Prince must be like if he is to lead a people to found a new State; the argument is developed with rigorous logic, and with scientific detachment. In the conclusion, Machiavelli merges with the people, becomes the people; not, however, some "generic" people, but the people whom he, Machiavelli, has convinced by the preceding argument—the people whose consciousness and whose expression he becomes and feels himself to be, with whom he feels identified. The entire "logical" argument now appears as nothing other than auto- reflection on the part of the people—an inner reasoning worked out in the popular consciousness, whose conclusion is a cry of passionate urgency. The passion, from discussion of itself, becomes once again "emotion", fever, fanatical desire for action. This is why the epilogue of The Prince is not something extrinsic, tacked on, rhetorical, but has to be understood as a necessary element of the work—indeed as the element which gives the entire work its true colour, and makes it a kind of "political manifesto".

Antonio Gramsci

First of all, there must necessarily be a union or pairing of those who cannot exist without one another. Male and female must unite for the reproduction of the species [...]. Next, there must necessarily be a union of the naturally ruling element with the element which is naturally ruled, for the preservation of both. The element which is able, by virtue of its intelligence, to exercise forethought, is naturally a ruling and master element; the element which is able, by virtue of its bodily power, to do the physical work, is a ruled element, which is naturally in a state of slavery; and master and slave have accordingly a common interest».

Aristotle

«A city, by its nature, is some sort of plurality. [...] Not only the city is composed of a number of people: it is also composed of different kinds of people, for a city cannot be composed of those who are like one another».

Aristotle

«But language serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse, and it is the peculiarity of man, in comparison with other animals, that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust, and other similar qualities; and it is association in these things which makes a family and a city».

Aristotle

«It is evident that the city belongs to the class of things that exist by nature»

Aristotle

«Man is a political animal, in a higher degree than bees or other gregarious animals. Nature, according to our theory, makes nothing in vain; and man alone of the animals is furnished with the faculty of language».

Aristotle

«The reason why there are many different constitutions is to be found in the fact that every city has many different parts. In the first place, every city is obviously composed of households. Secondly, in this number there are bound to be some rich, some poor, and some in the middle, with the rich possessing and the poor being without the equipment of the heavy-armed soldier. Thirdly, the common people [or demos] are engaged partly in agriculture, partly in trade, and partly in menial jobs. Fourthly, there are also difference among the notables - differences based on their wealth and the amount of their property [...]. Besides differences of wealth, there is also difference of birth, and difference of merit; and there are differences based on other factors of the same order. [...]. Sometimes all these parts share in the control of the constitution; sometimes only a few of them share; sometimes a number of them share. It thus follows clearly that there must be a number of constitutions which differ from one another in kind. This is because the parts differ in kind from one another».

Aristotle

«There is a democracy when the free-born and poor control the government, being at the same time a majority; and there is an oligarchy when the rich and better-born control the government, being at the same time a minority».

Aristotle

A close-knit society necessarily sets up a conflict between the interests of individuals. For the satisfaction of the desires of one group it makes injury to others necessary. Against the superiority, the advantages, the happiness of one group, it sets the inferiority, the disadvantages, the unhappiness of others. It arouses the desire for goods which cannot be achieved without injuring others, for goods consisting of injury to others, which correspond by their nature to the same number of injuries o other individuals, and of the same level, no, in the main, greater than are those goods.

Giacomo Leopardi

By this I mean a life and interest which truly exists in the people and therefore can only be found in democratic states, or states of popular or semipopular monarchies (as in ancient and medieval times), or in states in national combat against foreigners who are hated by the people [...], or finally in states where tyrannies are fought from within [...]. But in the state to which European nations have been reduced since the end of the 18th century—a state of calm absolute monarchy—the peoples (apart from the Greeks) have been unable to have such traditions and poems, nor can they have them. These nations have no heroes. [...] As the peoples have become strangers to public affairs, so they have become come strangers to their own history. If, that is, you can call their own what is a history of princes, not of peoples.

Giacomo Leopardi

Civilization which by its nature makes man wholly spirit in a manner of speaking (pp. 3910ff.), and consequently gives infinite increase to life properly so called, and self-love, also by its nature greatly increases the unhappiness of man and society. And similarly how by transferring action, and activity, energy, etc., in a thousand ways from matter to spirit, and, by placing a thousand obstacles in the way of present and effective corporeal action (governments, customs, the lack of needs, the diminishing of strength, the taste for study, etc. etc.), and by diminishing the degree and the force and the frequency of sensations, passions, actions, and material pleasures, and the capacity for them, etc., civilization horrendously concentrates self-love, turns it all back on itself and into itself, increasing it beyond all belief in consequence, and taking away or impoverishing what might distract or occupy it, etc. etc. The savage by the nature both of his body and of his customs and society, since he is less alive in spirit, that is properly less alive, is less unhappy than the civilized man, beyond all comparison. So the peasant, the ignorant, the man who does not reflect, the hard, the stupid man, is either by nature or habit inactive in mind, in imagination, in heart, etc. etc., in comparison with the man, etc. Civilization increases excessively in man the totality of life (meaning internal life) by diminishing in proportion his existence (meaning external life). Nature is not life, but existence, and tends to the latter, not the former. Because it is matter, not spirit, or matter in nature prevails and must prevail over spirit.

Giacomo Leopardi

Egoism, that is to say, self-love, is inseparable from man, but by egoism is meant more particularly an ill-directed, ill-employed self-love, designed to further one's own real advantages and not those which derive from heroism, from sacrifices, from virtues, from honor, from friendship, etc. When, therefore, this egoism reaches its peak, [...] the nature of social dealings [...] changes almost entirely. Because, with each thinking only of himself [...] all respect is set aside, and one seizes the prey from the mouth and talons of another; the individuals in what is termed society are in a state of more or less open war with one another. [...] Every so-called society that is dominated by individual egoism is barbarous, and barbarous with the utmost barbarism.

Giacomo Leopardi

Even if philosophy paved the way for the French Revolution, it did not bring it about, because philosophy, especially modern philosophy, is incapable by itself of achieving anything. And even if philosophy itself had the power to start a revolution, it could not sustain it. It is really moving to see how the French republican legislators thought that they could keep up the revolution, decide its length, and influence its progress, nature, and scope by reducing everything to pure reason, and expected for the first time ab orbe condito [since the earth was formed] to geometricize every aspect of life. Something not only deplorable had it succeeded, and therefore foolish to desire, but something that could not succeed even in this mathematical age.

Giacomo Leopardi

Everything in man is therefore habituation. This o b s e r v a t i o n c a n b e extended to cover all the passions, and all the outward and inward parts of man and of his life.

Giacomo Leopardi

For what concerns morality, the state of the opinion and of the nation is reduced to this precise misery which is the bon ton, not only the strongest, but also the only foundation that is left for good costumes, which are generally exercised only by the educated classes. [...] where the bon ton of society is lacking or nobody cares about it, morality lacks any foundation and society is deprived of any bond except force.

Giacomo Leopardi

Habit is a second nature, especially habit that is so rooted, so longlasting, and begun at such a tender age, like the habit (composed of an infinite number of diverse habits) that makes us anything but men who are natural, or who conform to man's primitive nature, and to the general nature of earthly beings.

Giacomo Leopardi

I applaud the fact that Italians are being turned away from blind love and imitation of foreign things, and even more that they are being reminded and invited to use and esteem their own things. I applaud the fact that an effort is being made to reawaken that national spirit in them without which there has never been greatness in this world, and not merely national greatness but individual greatness also. Yet I cannot endorse the idea that our present achievements and, as far as study is concerned, our present literature, the majority of our writers, etc. etc., are celebrated and exalted every day as though they were superior to all the great foreigners, when they are inferior to the least of them [...]. If we are to wake up one day, and recover the spirit of the nation, our first step must be not pride or regard for our present achievements but shame. And shame must spur us on to change direction altogether, and make everything new. Otherwise we will never achieve anything. The commemoration of our past glories is an incitement to virtue, but lying and feigning present glories is proof of cowardice, and an argument for staying satisfied with this most craven condition.

Giacomo Leopardi

In France the parity [of language between writers and nation] is great indeed, and not only this parity of language but also the actual popularity and national feeling of writers and literature. In Italy [...] the written language of writers, though it differs much less from the spoken language than was the case with Latin, does nonetheless differ, or so I believe, more than it does in any other educated country, or certainly any European one. And this may perhaps account in part for the absolute lack of popularity of our literature, and for the fact that the best books are in the hands of a single class, and are addressed to it alone [...]. It also stems, however, from the absolute lack of culture and literature and the utter neglect of study even for amusement that prevails among the other classes in Italy, a neglect that comes in the final analysis from the absence in Italy of all life, all sense of nation, all activity, and also from the total lack of liberty and hence originality of writers, etc. etc. These causes are likewise mutually reinforcing [...] and all of them through their reciprocal effects help to keep all sense of homeland, all life, and all activity far from Italy

Giacomo Leopardi

Man is naturally, originally and essentially free, independent, and equal to others, and these qualities belong inseparably to the idea of the nature and constitutive essence of man [...] Society is by the same token originally and essentially dependent and unequal, and without these qualities it is not perfect; indeed, it is not a true society. Hence man in society must necessarily divest himself of, and lose, some qualities that are essential, natural, inborn, constitutive, and inseparable from what he himself is. He may well lose such qualities in practice, but not in principle, for how can one even contemplate a being divested of one of the qualities that is intrinsic to it.

Giacomo Leopardi

Man's inclination toward pleasure is infinite in a material sense, and does not allow us to conclude anything more about the grandeur or infinity of the human soul than about that of animals, who must naturally feel the same desire, of a similar intensity, this being an immediate and necessary consequence of self-love, as I shall explain below. So we can deduce nothing on this account from man's inclination toward the infinite or from the sense of the nothingness of things (which is not a natural sentiment in human beings, and which, therefore, is not found in animals or in primitive societies but arises from accidental circumstances, not willed by nature). And since the desire for pleasure is a consequence of our existence itself, infinite solely in this sense and therefore, just like thinking, our inseparable companion throughout life, it is no more a proof of the spirituality of the human soul than the ability to think. Rather, it is noticeable how this desire, which seems at first glance to be the most spiritual part of our soul, is an immediate and necessary consequence (in our present circumstances) of the most material thing there is in living beings, namely self-love and self-preservation, something that we share with animals and that, as far as we are aware, is common to all living creatures.

Giacomo Leopardi

Our civilization, which we describe as a perfection essentially due to man, is manifestly accidental, both in the manner in which it has been brought about, and in its intrinsic qualities. As regards the manner, I have already elaborated upon that elsewhere As regards its qualities, since man is variously conformable, and has the capacity to modify himself in a million different guises once he has moved away from his original state, it is only through circumstance that he is as he is today, and in a different circumstance he could well be utterly different. This kind of supposed perfection we have attained or approached is one of ten thousand completely different conditions in which we might have found ourselves and which we would also have called perfections. Consider the histories, and the sources of our present state, and note what an infinite combination of completely different causes and circumstances has led to us becoming what we are. The lack of such causes or combinations, etc., in other parts of the globe means that men are either without civilization, and not very far removed from their original state, or they are civilized (that is, perfect) in a very different fashion, like the Chinese. It is therefore evident that our civilization, which we believe belongs to us by its essential nature, was not the work of nature, not a necessary and primordially anticipated consequence of the measures taken by it with regard to the human species (and that is how it ought to be, if it were perfection), but the work of chance.

Giacomo Leopardi

Self-love can assume very different guises, so that, as the sole motor of animal actions, though now it is egoism, once upon a time it was heroism, and all the virtues, no less than all the vices, stem from it.

Giacomo Leopardi

The age of Louis XIV and the whole of the last century were truly the era of barbarous corruption of the most civilized parts of Europe [...]. But the present time, which regards itself as the pinnacle of civilization, differs not a little from the one mentioned and may be considered to be the era of rebirth from barbarism. A rebirth begun in Europe through the French Revolution, a rebirth that was weak and very imperfect because it derived not from nature but from reason, indeed from philosophy, which is a very weak, false, sorry, unenduring principle of civilization. And yet it is a kind of rebirth; and note that—despite the insufficiency of means on the one hand and, on the other, the manner in which those means clash with nature—nonetheless the French Revolution (as has often been observed) and the present time have brought men closer to nature, the sole source of civilization, have set in motion great and powerful passions, have restored to formerly dead nations, I do not go so far as to say life but a certain palpitation, a certain distant impression of vitality

Giacomo Leopardi

The civilization of nations consists in tempering nature with reason, where nature has the greater part [...] the safeguards of a nation's freedom are neither philosophy nor reason, which are now expected to regenerate public affairs, but virtue, illusions, and enthusiasm, in other words nature, from which we are very far removed. A nation of philosophers would be the most small-minded and cowardly in the world. Thus, our regeneration will depend on what might be called an ultraphilosophy, which, through a complete and intimate knowledge of things, brings us close again to nature. And this should be the outcome of the extraordinary enlightenment of this century.

Giacomo Leopardi

The political and military insignificance of the Italians and Spanish has led to them being without modern language and literature from the 17th century onward, and is why they have none today. This insignificance is the reason why Italy and Spain have lost their existence as nations from that point onward. Therefore it is the reason why Italy and Spain have not had, from that point onward, either modern literature, or philosophy, etc. They do not have their proper modern language because they are without their proper modern literature and philosophy, but why do they lack these? Because they are no longer nations. And they are not nations, because without politics and military force, they no longer have any influence on the fate of others nor on their own, they do not govern nor do they govern themselves, and their existence or their way of behavior is a matter of indifference to the rest of Europe. As far as not having influence over others nor having any part in the common affairs of Europe is concerned, it is clear. As far as not having any influence over themselves nor governing themselves is concerned [...] both part in it, affairs are in the hands of very few who are completely separate from the rest of their countrymen, everything happens without ever coming to the notice of the nation, so that politics is completely unknown and alien to the nation itself, its business is the same as anybody else's as far as it is concerned. And in addition to that the liberty of each, particularly the private citizen, that is of the majority and of the true body of the nation, is so circumscribed that each individual is in a very poor position to determine his fate, and to govern himself, but as far as possible is governed by others.

Giacomo Leopardi

The self-love of man, and that of any individual of any species, is a preferential love. That is to say, because an individual naturally loves himself as much as he can, he therefore prefers himself to others, therefore strives to outdo them as much as he is able, and therefore, in effect, the individual hates other individuals, and hatred of others is a necessary and immediate consequence of love of oneself, and, because self-love is innate, it follows that hatred of others is innate in every living being. From which a first corollary follows, to the effect that no living being is exactly predestined for society, whose purpose can only be the common good of the individuals who make it up: this is contrary to the exclusive, preferential love that each person inseparably and essentially has for himself, and the hatred of others that follows from it and that essentially destroys society.

Giacomo Leopardi

The sense of the nothingness of all things, the inadequacy of each and every pleasure to fill our spirit, and our tendency toward an infinite that we do not understand comes perhaps from a very simple cause, one that is more material than spiritual The human soul (and likewise all living beings) always essentially desires, and focuses solely (though in many different forms), on pleasure, or happiness, which, if you think about it carefully, is the same thing. This desire and this tendency has no limits, because it is inborn or born along with existence itself, and so cannot reach its end in this or that pleasure, which cannot be infinite but will end only when life ends. And it has no limits (1) either in duration (2) or in extent. Hence there can be no pleasure to equal (1) either its duration, because no pleasure is eternal, (2) or its extent, because no pleasure is beyond measure, but the nature of things requires that everything exist within limits and that everything have boundaries, and be circumscribed. The desire for pleasure has no limits of duration, because, as I have said, it ends only with existence, and so human beingswould not exist if they did not feel this desire. It has no limits of extent because it belongs to the substance of ourselves, not as the desire for one or more pleasures but as the desire for pleasure. Now, such a nature carries infinity materially within it, for every single pleasure is circumscribed, but not pleasure itself, whose extent is indeterminate, and the soul, which loves pleasure substantially, embraces the whole imaginable extent of this feeling, without being able even to conceive of its extent, because it is not possible to form a clear idea of something desired without limit

Giacomo Leopardi

There is no social tone in this nation: everyone has their own. Indeed, there is no tone of society that can be said to be Italian. Every Italian has their own manner of social interaction, whether natural or learned from foreigners, or otherwise acquired. Whereas in a sociable nation, and so too by extension in a large city, the person who does not conform to the common manner of conversing, and who does not have the tone of others, is not merely not esteemed but is not even tolerated, for this common manner exists, and the tone of society is determined, more or less strictly

Giacomo Leopardi

Therefore all pleasures must be mingled with displeasure, as experience shows, because in the process of obtaining them the soul is desperately searching for something it cannot find, that is, an infinity of pleasure, or the satisfaction of an unlimited desire.

Giacomo Leopardi

Those foreigners who most honor Italy with their respect, that is, those who regard it as a classical land, do not consider the Italy of today, in other words we, modern, living Italians, other than as custodians of a museum, of a cabinet of curiosities, or such like; and they have the sort of respect for us which is generally given to that kind of people; the sort of respect that we in Rome have toward the usufructuaries, so to speak, of the various antiquities, places, ruins, museums, etc.

Giacomo Leopardi

Today civilization provides us with remedies to its own damages concerning customs; so nothing is more useful for them than promoting and spreading civilization as much as possible, on the one hand as a remedy against itself, and on the other against what remains of the extreme corruption and of the barbarity [...]. Speaking generally and without dissimulation, morality is actually destroyed, and it is unlikely that it can rise again [...]; customs can somehow be preserved and only civilization can be a suitable means for this effect, when it his highly developed.

Giacomo Leopardi

Without activity, without industry, without spirit of literature, arts, etc., without spirit or style of society, the life of the Spanish and the Italians is reduced to a routine of inaction, of indolence, of old and fixed ways, of spectacles and feasts regulated by the Calendar, of habits, etc. But never any innovation among them either in the public or the private sphere, of any sort which shows life in any way at all. All that they can do is receive in charity some slight innovation either of things, or of customs, or of thoughts, and a kind of breath of false and alien life, from foreigners.

Giacomo Leopardi

[The French revolution] drove civilization backward (in fact, the wonderful monarchist philosophers complain about this), returned France to the state of nation and homeland (which it had lost under the kings), curbed, if momentarily, its most dissolute habits, opened the way to merit, developed the desire, the honor, the strength of virtue and natural feelings, kindled hatreds and every sort of keen passion, and, in short, if it did not bring back the middling civilization of the ancients, certainly did almost that (as far as the times permitted), and those actions called barbarous, which were then so abundant in France, should not be attributed to anything else. Rising out of corruption, the revolution staunched it for a moment, as the barbarism arising from excessive civilization still, by twisting pathways, leads men back closer to nature.

Giacomo Leopardi

civilization which by its nature makes man wholly spirit in a manner of speaking (pp. 3910ff.), and consequently gives infinite increase to life properly so called, and self-love, also by its nature greatly increases the unhappiness of man and society. And similarly how by transferring action, and activity, energy, etc., in a thousand ways from matter to spirit, and, by placing a thousand obstacles in the way of present and effective corporeal action (governments, customs, the lack of needs, the diminishing of strength, the taste for study, etc. etc.), and by diminishing the degree and the force and the frequency of sensations, passions, actions, and material pleasures, and the capacity for them, etc., civilization horrendously concentrates self-love, turns it all back on itself and into itself, increasing it beyond all belief in consequence, and taking away or impoverishing what might distract or occupy it, etc. etc. The savage by the nature both of his body and of his customs and society, since he is less alive in spirit, that is properly less alive, is less unhappy than the civilized man, beyond all comparison. So the peasant, the ignorant, the man who does not reflect, the hard, the stupid man, is either by nature or habit inactive in mind, in imagination, in heart, etc. etc., in comparison with the man, etc.1 Civilization increases excessively in man the totality of life (meaning internal life) by diminishing in proportion his existence (meaning external life). Nature is not life, but existence, and tends to the latter, not the former. Because it is matter, not spirit, or matter in nature prevails and must prevail over spirit

Giacomo Leopardi

the truly primitive and natural state, can never be recovered by man once he has become corrupt (by nothing other than society), and the civilized state (that too very social, indeed supremely social) is very different from it. Certainly it is preferable to the corrupt savage state: this preference is very reasonable, and follows from and is in accordance with our and any sound discourse. But it is not preferable to the true primitive state.

Giacomo Leopardi

«Man is by nature free, and equal to any other member of his species. But that is not how things are in the state of society. The justificaton, principle and purpose of every society is simply the common good of those who compose it and who join together in a more or less extensive body. Without this purpose, society lacks its justification. And since society, where it has no such purpose and subsists without achieving it, is not merely irrational but pointless, indeed, even harmful to man, so then, if that same purpose is not achieved, one should dissolve society, for in itself and independently of the said purpose, it brings man more harm than benefit»

Giacomo Leopardi

«The more we contemplate, and scrutinize the nature, qualities, and effects of any imaginable government, and the wiser, deeper, more thoughtful, more observant, more educated, and more experienced man has become, the more readily he concludes and decides with absolute certainty that [...] there is no government possible that is not highly imperfect, that does not essentially contain the seeds of evil and of the greater or lesser unhappiness of peoples and of individuals».

Giacomo Leopardi

But starting with the French Revolution, when it becomes the sole depositary of sovereignty, the people is transformed into an embarrassing presence, and misery and exclusion appear for the first rime as an altogether intolerable scandal. In the modern era, misery and exclusion are not only economic or social concepts but eminently political categories (all the economism and "socialism" that seem to dominate modern politics actually have a political - and even a biopolitical - significance). In this sense, our age is nothing but the implacable and methodical attempt to overcome the division dividing the people, to eliminate radically the people that is excluded. This attempt brings together, according to different modalities and horizons, Right and Left, capitalist countries and socialist countries, which are united in the project - which is in the last analysis futile but which has been partially realized in all industrialized countries-of producing a single and undivided people.

Giorgio Agamben

Every interpretation of the political meaning of the term "people" must begin with the singular fact that in modern European languages, "people" also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. One term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics. [...] Such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it must reflect an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept "people" in Western politics. It is as if what we call "people" were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve - court of miracles or camp -of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated. In this sense, a single and compact referent for the term "people" simply does nor exist anywhere.

Giorgio Agamben

I believe that one of the few things that can be declared with certainty is that [...] all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the people of the Earth) have gone bankrupt. We live after the failure of peoples, just as Apollinaire would say of himself: "I lived in the time when the kings would die". Every people has had its particular way of going bankrupt, and certainly it does make a difference that for the Germans it meant Hitler and Auschwitz, for the Spanish it meant a civil war, for the French it meant Vichy, for other people, instead, it meant the quit and atrocious 1950s, and for the Serbs it meant the rapes of Omarska; in the end, what is crucial for us is only the new task that such a failure has bequeathed us. Perhaps it is not even accurate to define it a task, because there is no longer a people to undertake it.

Giorgio Agamben

It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were doublesided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order, thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. [...] Only because biological life and its needs had become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentiethcentury parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century's totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life.

Giorgio Agamben

It is as if every valorization and every "politicization" of life (which, after all, is implicit in the sovereignty of the individual over his own existence) necessarily implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only "sacred life," and can as such be eliminated without punishment. Every society sets this limit; every society - even the most modern - decides who its "sacred men" will be. It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exceptio of natural life in the juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history of the West and has now - in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty - moved inside every human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being.

Giorgio Agamben

Paraphrasing the Freudian postulate on the relation between ego and id, one could say that modern biopolitics is supported by the principle according to which "Where there is bare life, there will have to be a People" - on condition that one immediately add that the principle also holds in its inverse formulation: "Where there is a People, there will be bare life." The fracture that was believed to have been overcome by eliminating the people (the Jews who are its symbol) thus reproduces itself anew, transforming the entire German people into a sacred life consecrated to death, and a biological body that must be infinitely purified (through the elimination of the mentally ill and the bearers of hereditary diseases). And in a different yet analogous way, today's democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development nor only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life. Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth.

Giorgio Agamben

Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized. In the "politicization" of bare life - the metaphysical task par excellence - the humanity of living man is decided. In assuming this task, modernity does nothing other than declare its own faithfulness to the essential structure of the metaphysical tradition. The fundamental categorial pair of Western politics is not that of friend/ enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

Giorgio Agamben

The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoe in the polis - which is, in itself, absolutely ancient - nor simply the fact that life as such becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life - which is originally situated at the margins of the political order - gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested. When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it.

Giorgio Agamben

The constitution of the human species in a political body passes through a fundamental division and that in the concept "people" we can easily recognize the categorial pairs that we have seen to define the original political structure: bare life (people) and political existence (People), exclusion and inclusion, zoe and bios. The "people" thus always already carries the fundamental biopolitical fracture within itself. it is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a part and what cannot belong to the set in which it is always already included. Hence the contradictions and aporias to which it gives rise every rime that it is evoked and put into play on the political scene. It is what always already is and yet must, nevertheless, be realized; it is the pure source of every identity bur must, however, continually be redefined and purified through exclusion, language, blood, and land.

Giorgio Agamben

The extermination of the Jews in Nazi Germany acquires a radically new significance in this light. As the people that refuses to be integrated into the national political body (it is assumed that every assimilation is actually only simulated), the Jews are the representatives par excellence and almost the living symbol of the people and of the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way. And we must see the extreme phase of the internal struggle that divides People and people in the lucid fury with which the German Volk - representative par excellence of the People as a whole political body - sought to eliminate the Jews forever. With the Final Solution (which did, not by chance, involve Gypsies and others who could not be integrated), Nazism darkly and futilely sought to liberate the political scene of the West from this intolerable shadow in order to produce the German Volk as the people that finally overcame the original biopolitical fracture.

Giorgio Agamben

The growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact of politics in our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. To an order without localization (the state of exception, in which law is suspended) there now corresponds a localization without order (the camp as permanent space of exception). The political system no longer orders forms of life and juridical rules in a determinate space, but instead contains at its very center a dislocating localization that exceeds it and into which every form of life and every rule can be virtually taken. The camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d'attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities.

Giorgio Agamben

The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power. What this work has had to record among its likely conclusions is precisely that the two analyses cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original - if concealed - nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond (derived from a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic which one encounters in the most diverse spheres) between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii.

Giorgio Agamben

A people who are secure from foreign or civil wars, who have no fear of being assailed in their homes by violence or deceit, and who can have cheaply all the food they need, cannot but be contented and will not trouble themselves with other matters. The children of Israel in Egypt, although they lived in strict servitude and were sorely tried by the ministers of Pharaoh, so that they scarcely had time to draw breath, had food in plenty and therefore did not think of attempting to regain their liberty. Yet when they were in the desert they complained at the least shortage of water or of other things, and murmured against the men who had brought them out of Egypt. Men who aspired to rule Rome all sought to accomplish this by winning the favour of the populace with distributions of grain, grants of land, by agrarian laws, and generally by providing food [...]. Harsh living conditions and scarcity of bread exasperates the common people more than anything else. An abundance of bread, however, is of no avail if the violence of enemies or the wickedness of one's fellows prevent its enjoyment: and it must therefore be accompanied by peace and justice. And then, because the common people are by nature unstable and long for novelty they will seek it out for themselves, changing even their government and their rulers if their prince does not provide some kind of diversion for them. Knowing this, the wisest rulers have introduced various popular entertainments which exercise the powers of the mind and body and which are the more effective the better they succeed in doing this.

Giovanni Botero

As Horace says, the populace is bellua multorum capitum [many headed beast],* and when it is troublesome it must be taken now by one of these heads and now by another; it requires most careful management, and the hand, the rod, the curb and the halter may all be needed in turn. The great need j here is for a fertile imagination, capable of thinking up expedients to inspire in the populace feelings in turn of pleasure, fear, suspicion and hope, so that they can be held in check and then reduced to obedience: those men are best fitted for this work who possess the affection of the rebels as well as the gifts of sagacity and eloquence.

Giovanni Botero

Clearly it is a greater task to preserve a state, because human affairs wax and wane as if by a law of nature, like the moon to which they are subject. Thus to keep them stable when they have become great and to maintain them so that they do not decline and fall is an almost superhuman undertaking. Circumstances, the weakness of the enemy and the deeds of other play a considerable part in conquest, but only most excellent qualities can hold what has been conquered. Might conquers, but wisdom preserves: many are mighty, but few are wise. [...] But how does it happen, we may ask, that those who conquer are more honoured than those who preserve? It is because the results of conquest are more obvious and more popular, they cause more stir and noise, they make an outward show and have the virtue of novelty, which man so desires and enjoys.

Giovanni Botero

We now come to the true strength of a ruler, which consists in his people: for upon them depend all his other resources. The ruler who plenty of men will have plenty o f everything which the ingenuity and industry of man can provide, as we shall discover as we proceed. We shall accordingly use the terms 'people' and 'strength' indiscriminately. There are now two aspects of strength to be considered under the name of people: their number and their valour.

Giovanni Botero

I have been greatly astonished to find Reason of State a constant subject of discussion and to hear the opinions of Niccolò Machiavelli and Cornelius Tacitus frequently quoted, the former for his precepts relating to the rule and government of peoples, the latter for his lively description of the arts employed by the Emperor Tiberius in acquiring and retaining the imperial title in Rome [...]. I was amazed that so impious an author and so wicked a tyrant should be held in such esteem that they are thought to provide ideal examples of the methods by which states should be governed and administered; and I was moved to indignation rather than amazement to find that this barbarous mode of government had won such acceptance. [...] The very beasts possess a natural instinct which turns them towards useful things and away from harmful ones: shall then the light of reason and dictates of conscience, bestowed upon man to enable him to distinguish good and evil, be obscured in affairs of state, mute in matters of importance?

Giovanni Botero

In every state there are three sorts of people, the wealthy, the poor, and the middle class which lies between these extremes. The middle sort is usually the quietest and the easiest to govern, the two extremes are the hardest to govern, because the rich are drawn towards wrong-doing by the power that goes with wealth, while the poor are equally drawn to it by necessity. [...] Moreover those who have great riches and are distinguished by their noble birth and influential position are too proud and highly bred to suffer subordination, while the needy are as ready to obey an evil command as an honest one. The former are given to violence and unruliness and will attack their neighbour openly, while the latter turn to underhand forms of villainy. The rich are reluctant to submit to rule because they are fortunate [...]. The needy cannot live within the law because necessity, which oppresses them, knows no law. The middle rank are sufficiently wealthy to have no lack of what is required by their station, and yet their affluence is not such as to tempt them into ambitious schemes. They are usually friends of peace, contented with their station and neither exalted by ambition nor prostrated by despair.

Giovanni Botero

State is a stable rule over a people and Reason of State is the knowledge of the means by which such a dominion may be founded, preserved and extended. Yet, although in the widest sense the term includes all these, it is concerned most nearly with preservation, and more nearly with extension than with foundation; for Reason of State assumes a ruler and a State (the one as artificer, the other as his material) whereas they are not assumed—indeed they are preceded— by foundation entirely and in part by extension. But the art of foundation and of extension is the same because the beginnings and the continuations are of the same nature. And although all that is done to these purposes is said to be done for Reasons of State, yet this is said rather o f such actions as cannot be considered in the light o f ordinary reason.

Giovanni Botero

The foundation upon which every State is built is the obedience of subjects to their prince, and this in turn is founded upon his outstanding excellence; for, as the elements and the bodies formed from them obey unresistingly the movements of the heavenly spheres because of their exalted nature and in the heavens themselves the lesser bodies are ruled by the motion of the greater, so a people submits willingly to a ruler adorned by splendid talents.

Giovanni Botero

The king should secure himself against such men, either by driving them out of his state or by giving them an interest in its internal peace. They may be driven out by sending them to the colonies, [...] or they may be dispatched to the wars [...]; or, finally, they may be simply ordered out [...].Their interest in the state can be secured by compelling them to undertake some work, such as agriculture or any trade which will give them a sufficient income to live on. [...] The lazy and the workless are not tolerated, and even the blind and crippled do such work as they are capable of; only the completely disabled are admitted to hospitals.

Giovanni Botero

The preservation of a State depends upon the peace and the tranquility of its subjects. This peace may be divided into two kinds and so may its converse, war: war may be waged by a foreign power or by the subjects themselves; and within this latter kind of war another division may be made between civil war, in which the subjects fight each other, and rebellion or revolt, in which they fight their ruler. All these disagreeable possibilities may be avoided by the exercise of the arts which win for a ruler the love and admiration of his people; for just as the works of nature are preserved by the forces which have given them birth, the means which brought a State into being are those which should preserve it. There is no doubt that in the earliest times men were moved to create kings and to place themselves under the rule and leadership of others by the affection they felt for them and high regard (which we call admiration [reputazione]) for their valour, and we may deduce that these are the feelings which keep subjects obedient and peaceful

Giovanni Botero

The ruler who has many subjects will also have plenty of money, for the more people he has the greater sums he will receive as tribute and so his treasury will be the richer. Italy and France have no mines of gold or silver, yet they possess more of both these metals than any other country in Europe, for no other reason than the high density of their population and their trade and commerce which draw in money from the furthest comers of the earth. Where there are many people, the land must be well cultivated [...] and the land provides the foodstuffs necessary for life, and the raw materials for industry.

Giovanni Botero

The works of nature fail through two kinds of cause, intrinsic and extrinsic. We call intrinsic causes excess and corruption of essential qualities, extrinsic causes fire, the sword, and other forms of violence. In the same way State come to ruin through internal or external causes: the incapacity of the ruler is an internal cause, either by his extreme youth or ineptitude or his stupidity, or loss of his reputation, which may come about in many ways. [...] Other internal causes of the ruin of states are envy, rivalry, discord, ambition among the great, fickleness, inconstancy, and passion in the people, and the inclination of both to favour a different rule.

Giovanni Botero

Those who have nothing to gain from public peace, that is to say those who live in great poverty and wretchedness, are also a danger to it; for having nothing to lose, they are easily stirred by new events and willingly embrace any means that presents itself of bettering themselves by the downfall of others.

Giovanni Botero

[not to] go directly in the face of the multitude, for you will not defeat it easily, and such a victory can only be won at the cost of a great loss in popularity. Learn like a skilful sailor to advance against a head-wind by tacking, and make a show of willing what you cannot prevent and granting what you cannot withhold.

Giovanni Botero

A prince should have two fears: one within, on account of his subjects; the other outside, on account of external powers. From the latter one is defended with good arms and good friends; and if one has good arms, one will always have good friends. And things inside will always remain steady, if things outside are steady, unless indeed they are disturbed by a conspiracy. [...] And one of the most powerful remedies that a prince has against conspiracies is not to be hated by the people generally. For whoever conspires always believes he will satisfy the people with the death of the prince, but when he believes he will offend them, he does not get up the spirit to adopt such a course, because the difficulties on the side of the conspirators are infinite.

Machiavelli

A prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things for which men are held good, since he is often under a necessity, to maintain his state, of acting against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion.

Machiavelli

A republic in which there are so many examples of virtù [cannot] reasonably be called disorderly, since good examples derive from good upbringing, good upbringing from good laws, and good laws from the very conflicts that many people condemn indiscriminately. [...] Some might say: these ways were extraordinary and almost brutal, for we see the people united making an outcry against the Senate, the Senate against the People, men rushing riotously through the streets, shops barred, all the Plebs feeing Rome [...]. I would reply that every city must have its own ways in which people can give vent to their ambitions, especially cities that want avail themselves of their people in significant matters. [...]. The desires of a free people are rarely detrimental to freedom because they arise from either being oppressed or fear of being oppressed. And as Cicero says, the people, though they may be ignorant, are open to truth.

Machiavelli

All human affairs are in flux and cannot remain stable, they must rise or fall and necessity leads you to do many things that reason does not

Machiavelli

Anyone who considers present and ancient matters readily understands that the same desires and feelings exist in all cities and all peoples and they always have. So it is easy for anyone who carefully examines past matters to foresee those in the future of any republic and to apply to them the remedies that were used by the ancients or, if they are not to be found, to devise new ones because the events are similar. But because these considerations are neglected or not understood [...] the same problems always ensue in every age.

Machiavelli

As is ponted out by all who discuss civil society and every history is filled with examples, anyone who sets up a republic and establishes its laws must presuppose that all men are evil and always prone to exercise the malice in their minds whenever opportunity gives them free rein. And when some malice remains temporarily hidden, it results from some hidden cause that is unknown because there has been no contrary experience; but time, which is said to be father of all truth, eventually brings about its revelation. [...] Men never do good except out of necessity; but where choice abounds and they can act as they please, suddenly everything is full of turmoil and disorder. That is why it is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious and laws make them good.

Machiavelli

As to wisdom and stability, I say that the people are wiser, more stable and of better judgement than a prince. And not without reason is the voice of the people likened to that of God, because we see that popular opinion has marvelous effects in its predictions to such an extent that it seems as if it foresees their bad or good fortune through some secret virtù. As to judging matters, when they hear two orators of equal virtù tending in different directions, they are very rarely seen not to take the better opinion and not to grasp the truth of what they hear. And if, as was said above, they err in matters that involve courage or that seem useful, a prince too also often errs in matters involving his own passions, which are more intense than those of the people. They can also be seen to make far better choices in their selection of public officials than a prince; the people will never be persuaded that it is good to elect a scoundrel with corrupt habits to high office, whereas a prince can easily and in a thousand ways be persuaded.

Machiavelli

Because of the invidious nature of men, it has always been no less dangerous to find new methods and institutions than it has been to seek unknown sea and lands, since men are more prone to blame than to praise t h e a c t i o n s o f t h e o t h e r s . Nevertheless, impelled by the natural desire that has always be within me to act unhesitatingly on matters that I believe bring about the common good for everyone, I have decided to set out upon a path as yet untrodden by anyone else

Machiavelli

But let us go to Rome. Despite not having a Lycurgus at its founding to organize it so it could endure for a long time in freedom, nevertheless, so many events occurred because of the dissension between the Plebs and the Senate that what a lawgiver had not done came about by chance. [...] Fortune was so favorable to Rome that, even though power was transferred from the King and the Aristocrats to the People - through the same steps and for the same reasons I discussed earlier - nevertheless royal power was never entirely done away with to empower the Aristocracy or the Aristocracy's power completely reduced to empower the People. But continuing its mixed form of government, Rome created a perfect republic. It attained this perfection on account of the dissension between the Plebs and the Senate.

Machiavelli

Countless examples that we read about in the annals of ancient history show us how difficult it is for people accustomed to living under a prince to preserve their freedom if they acquire it through some event or other, as Rome did after the expulsion of the Tarquins. And such difficulty is understandable: these people are like nothing but a dumb animal that, though by nature wild and free, has always been raised in captivity and bondage. If by chance it is then set free in the countryside, it falls prey to the first man who seeks to chain it up again, since it is unaccustomed to foraging and does not know the places where it may take refuge. The same happens to people accustomed to living under the control of others: not knowing how to discuss state defense or offensive measure and not understanding princes or being understood by them, they soon return under a yoke that is usually heavier than the one they had recently thrown off their necks. They find themselves in this kind of difficulty even if the body politics is free from corruption. For a people completely permeated by corruption cannot live free at all, let alone for a short time.

Machiavelli

Discourses, I, 4 I do not want to neglect discussing the conflicts that existed in Rome from the death of the Tarquins until the creation of the Tribunes, and then several matters contrary to the opinion of many who say that Rome was a contentious republic, so full of disorder that had good fortune and military virtù not compensated for its defects it would have been inferior to all other republics. [...] I say that those who condemn the conflicts between the Nobles and the Plebs appear to me to be blaming the very things that were the primary reason for Rome's remaining free and to be paying more attention to the shouts and cries that these conflicts aroused than to the good results they had. They do not consider that in every republic there are two opposing humors - the people and the upper classes - and that all laws made to promote freedom derive from the conflict between them.

Machiavelli

Each prince should desire to be held merciful and not cruel; nonetheless he should take care not to use this mercy badly. Cesar Borgia was held to be cruel; nonetheless his cruelty restored the Romagna, united it, and reduced it to peace and to faith. If one considers this well, one will see that he was much more merciful than the Florentine people, who so as to escape a name of cruelty, allowed Pistoia to be destoryed. A prince, therefore, so as to keep his subjects united and faithful, should not care about the infamy of cruelty, because with very few examples he will be more merciful than those who for the sake of too much mercy allowed disorders to continue.

Machiavelli

Hatred is acquired through good deeds as well as bad ones; and so, as I said above a prince who wants to maintain his state is often forced not to be good. For when that community of which you judge you have need to maintain yourself is corrupt, whether they are the people or the soldiers or the great, you must follow their humor to satisfy them, and then good deeds are your enemy.

Machiavelli

He who comes to the principality with the aid of the great maintains himself with more difficulty than one who becomes prince with the aid of the people, because the former finds himself prince with many around him who appear to be his equals, and because of this he can neither command them nor manage them to suit himself. But he who arrives in the principality with popular support finds him has either no one or very few who are not ready to obey. Besides this, one cannot satisfy the great with decency and without injury to others, but one can satisfy the people; for the end of the people is more decent than that of the great, since the great want to oppress and the people want not to be oppressed. Furthermore, a prince can never secure himself against a hostile people, as they are too many; against the great, he can secure himself, as they are few.

Machiavelli

Human desires are insatiable, because nature has given us the ability and the will to desire everything and fortune has given us the ability to achieve but little; the result is unremitting discontent in the minds of men and disgust with the things they have. Hence men blame the present, praise the past, and desire the future, even though they are not motivated to do so by any reasonable cause.

Machiavelli

The struggle of the working class constrained the capitalist into changing the form of its domination. Which means that the pressure of labour-power is capable of constraining capital in modifying its very own internal composition and that it intervenes inside of capital as essential component of capitalist development, that is it pushes forward, from within, capitalist production, until it makes it trespass completely all its external relations of social life.

Mario Tronti

I do not believe it can be doubted that these floods, plagues and famines occur because every history is full of them, because this effect can be seen from the oblivion into which things fall, and because it seems reasonable it should be so. When a lot of superfluous matter has accumulated in nature as in simple bodies, it often moves by itself and produces a purge that makes for that that body's health. So [...] the world must necessarily purge itself by one of the three means. Thus men, having become fewer and beaten down, may live more comfortably and improve.

Machiavelli

I liken [fortune] to one of these violent rivers which, when they become enraged, flood the plains, ruin the trees and the buildings, lift earth from this part, drop in another; each person flees before them, everyone yields to their impetus without being able to hinder them in any regard. And although they are like this, it is not as if men, when times are quiet, could not provide for them with dikes and ams so that when they rise later, either they go by a canal or their impetus is neither so wanton nor so damaging. It happens similarly with fortune, which demonstrates her power where virtue has not been put in order to resist her and therefore turns her impetus where she knows that dams and dikes have not been made to contain her. And if you consider Italy, which is the seat of these variations and that which has given them motion, you will see a country without dams and without any dike. If it had been diked by suitable virtue, like Germany, Spain and France, either this flood would not have brought the great variations that it has, or it would not have come here.

Machiavelli

I say that one sees a given prince be happy today and come to ruin tomorrow without having seen him change his nature or any quality [...] I believe [...] that he is happy who adapts his mode of proceeding to the qualities of the times; and similarly, he is unhappy whose procedure is in disaccord with the times. For one sees that in the things that lead men to the end that each has before him, that is, glories and riches, they proceed variously: one with caution the other with impetuosity; one by violence, the other with art; one with patience, the other with its contrary, and with these different modes each can attain it. One also sees two cautious persons, one attaining his plan, the other not; and similarly, two persons are equally happy with two different methods, one being cautious, the other impetuous. This arises from nothing other than from the quality of the times that they conform to or not in their procedure. From this follows what I said, that two persons working differently come out with the same effect; and of two persons working identically, one is led to his end, the other not.

Machiavelli

I think the philosophers who have claimed that the world is eternal could be answered that if it really were so old it would be reasonable for there to be a record of more than five thousand years, even if we did not see how the records of the past are obliterated for various reasons, some of which come from men, some from heaven. Those that come from men are the changing of religion and languages. For whenever a new sect, that is, a new religion, emerges, its firs concern is to wipe out the old one in order to establish its reputation [...]. As for the causes that come from heaven, they are those that stamp out the human race and reduce the population of part of the world to very few. This results from either plague, or famine or flood..

Machiavelli

If one keeps his state founded on mercenary arms, one will never be firm or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, unfaithful; bold among friends, among enemies cowardly; no fear of God, no faith with men; ruin is postponed only as long as attack is postponed; and in peace you are despoiled by the enemy. The cause of this is that they have no love nor cause to keep them in the field other than a small stipend, which is not sufficient to make them want to die for you. They do indeed want to be your soldiers while you are not making war, but when war comes, they either flee or leave. [...] The present ruin of Italy is caused by nothing other than its having relied for a period of many years on mercenary arms.

Machiavelli

If princes are superior to the people in establishing laws, forming civil societies, establishing new statutes and institutions, the people are so superior in preserving what has been established that they unquestionably add to the glory of those who establish them.

Machiavelli

If we consider the aims of the Nobles and common people, we shall see in the former a great desire to dominate and in the latter merely the desire not to be dominated, and consequently a greater will for freedom, since they can have less hope of usurping it than do the Nobles. This if the people are charged with safeguarding a freedom, it makes sense that they will take better care of it; because they cannot seize it for themselves, they will not allow others to do so.

Machiavelli

If you want to make a large, armed population in order to establish a great empire, you make it so you are unable to control it as you please at a later date; if you keep it either small or unarmed in order to control it, you are unable to hold on to any territory you acquire or the population becomes so weak that you fall prey to anyone who attacks you.

Machiavelli

In short, to conclude this matter, I say that governments by princes have endured for a long time and governments by republic have endured for a long time; both of them needed to be regulated by laws: for a prince who can do as he pleases is mad; a people that can do as it pleases is unwise. So if we discuss a prince obligated to the laws and a people enchained by them, more virtù will be seen in the people than in the prince; if we discuss both of them unregulated, we shall se fewer errors in the people than in the prince, and they are less serious and will have better remedies. For licentious and rioting people can be addressed by a good man and can be easily brought back to the right way; a bad prince can be addressed by no one and the only remedy for him is the knife. [...] The cruelties of the masses are against anyone they fear may size the common wealth; those of a prince are against anyone he fears may seize his own wealth. But sentiment against the people arises because anyone can speak ill of the people without fear and openly even when they are in power; a prince is always spoken of with a thousand fears and precautions.

Machiavelli

It is customary most of the time for those who desire to acquire favor with a Prince to come to meet him with things that they care most for among their own or with things that they see please him most. Thus, one sees them many times being presented with horses, arms, cloth of gold, precious stones and similar ornaments worthy of their greatness. [...] I have found nothing in my belongings that I care so much for and esteem so greatly as the knowledge of the actions of great men, learned by me from long experience with modern things and a continuous reading of ancient ones. Having thought out and examined these things with great diligence for a long time, and now reduced them to one small volume, I send it to your Magnificence. [...] No greater gift could be made by me than to give you the capacity to be able to understand in a very short time all that I have learned and understood in so many years and with so many hardships and dangers for myself.

Machiavelli

It is necessary for a prince to have good foundations for himself, otherwise he must of necessity be ruined. The principal foundations that all states have, new ones as well as old or mixed, are good laws and good arms.

Machiavelli

It is not unknown to me that many have held and hold the opinion that worldly things are so governed by fortune and by God, that men cannot correct them with their prudence, indeed that they have no remedy at all; and on account of this they might judge that one need not sweat much over things but let oneself be governed by chance. This opinion has been believed more in our times because of the great variability of things which have been seen and are seen every day, beyond every human conjecture. When I have thought about this sometimes, I have been in some part inclined to their opinion. Nonetheless, so that our free will not be eliminated, I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half of our actions, but also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern

Machiavelli

Just as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains and high places and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains, similarly, to know well the nature of peoples one needs to be prince, and to know well the nature of princes one needs to be of the people.

Machiavelli

Men can comply with Fortune, but they cannot oppose her; they can weave her warps but cannot break them. Of course, they must never give up: since they do not know her purpose and she travels by oblique and unknown paths, they always should have hope and, while hoping, not give up in the face of any Fortune and any travail they find themselves in.

Machiavelli

My judgment is that the world has aways been the same way and that there has been as much good in it it as evil, but this good and this evil has varied from region to region.

Machiavelli

Once the duke had taken over Romagna, he found it had been commanded by impotent lords who had been readier to despoil their subjects than to correct them, and had given their subjects matter for disunion, not for union. Since that province was quite full or robberies, quarrels, and every other kind of insolence, he judged it necessary to give it good government, if he wanted to reduce it to peace and obedience to a kingly arm. So he put there Messer Remirro de Orco, a cruel and ready man, to whom he gave the fullest power. In a short time Remirro reduced it to peace and unity, with the very greatest reputation for himself. Then the duke judged that such excessive authority was not necessary, because he feared that it might become hateful; and he set up a civil court in the middle of the province with a most excellent president, where each city had its advocate. And because he knew that past rigors had generated some hatred for Remirro,he wished to show that if any cruelty had been committed, this had not come from him but from the harsh nature of his minister. And having seized this opportunity, he had him placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, with a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of this spectacle left the people at once satisfied and stupefied.

Machiavelli

One who becomes prince through the support of the people should keep them friendly to him, which should be easy for him because they ask of him only that they not be oppressed. But one who becomes prince against the people with the support of the great must before everything else seek to gain the people to himself, which should be easy for him when he takes up their protection. And since men who receive good from someone from whom they believed they would receive evil are more obliged to their benefactor, the people immediately wish him well more than if he had been brought to the principality with their support. The prince can gain the people to himself in many modes, for which one cannot give certain rules because the modes vary according to circumstances, and so they will be left out. I will conclude only that for a prince it is necessary to have the people friendly; otherwise he has no remedy in adversity

Machiavelli

Our Livy, like all other historians, affirms that nothing is more vain and inconstant than the masses [multitudes]. [...] I say [...] that all men individually, and especially princes, can be accused of this flaw of which writers accuse the masses, because anyone who is not regulated by laws would make the same mistake as the unbrilled masses. This can be easily realized because there are and have been many princes, but few good and wise ones. I am speaking of princes who were able to break the reins that can control them [...]. The comparison should be between kings controlled by laws and similarly controlled masses. One will see the same goodness in both of them. One will also see, as was the case with the Roman people, that the masses neither "tyrannize arrogantly" nor "bow humbly". For as long as the republic endured uncorrupted, the people never served humbly and never tyrannized arrogantly; rather with their institutions and officials they held their own rank honorably. When it was necessary to rise up against a powerful man, they did so [...]; and when it was necessary to obey Dictators and Consul for the public safety, they did so. [...] Hence the nature of the masses is no more to be blamed than that of the princes, for they all err equally when they all can err without interference.

Machiavelli

Principality is caused either by the people or by the great, according to which of these sides has the opportunity for it. For when the great see they cannot resist the people, they begin to give reputation to one of themselves, and they make him prince so that they can vent their appetite under his shadow. So too, the people, when they see they cannot resist the great, give reputation to one, and make him prince so as to be defended with his authority.

Machiavelli

Since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation. For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good. Hence it is necessary to a prince,if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good,and to use this and not use it according to necessity.

Machiavelli

Such corruption and a lack of aptitude for living in freedom arise from inequality existing in the city, and in order to restore equality in it one must use very extraordinary means, which, as I shall point out in greater detail elsewhere, few people know how or wish to use.

Machiavelli

The cause of mankind's ill or good fortune lies in matching one's course of action with the times. For we can see that some men proceed impetuously in their actions, some with restraint and caution; because the proper limits are exceeded in both of these ways if one cannot observe the right way, one errs in both of them. But, as I have said, a man who matches the times with his course of action and always proceeds as nature obliges you manages to err less and to have a prosperous fortune.

Machiavelli

The prince [...] should think how to avoid those things that make him hateful and contemptible. When he avoids them, he will have done his part and will find no danger in his other infamies. What makes him hated above all, as I said is to be rapacious and a usurper of the property and the women of his subjects. From these he must abstain, and whenever one does not take away either property or honor from the generality of men they live content and one has only to combat the ambition of the few which may be checked in many modes and with ease.

Machiavelli

There are two reasons why we are unable to change: one, we cannot oppose what nature predisposes to us; the other, when someone has prospered greatly from one way of doing things, it is not possible to persuade him that he can do well by acting differently; that is why one man's fortune changes, because it changes the times and he does not change his ways.

Machiavelli

There has never been, then, a new prince who has disarmed his subjects; on the contrary, whenever he has found them unarmed, he has always armed them. For when they are armed, those arms become yours; those whom you suspected become faithful, and those who were faithful remain so; and from subjects they are made into your partisans. And because all subjects cannot be armed, if those whom you arm are benefited, one can act with more security toward the others. The difference of treatment that they recognize regarding themselves makes them obligated to you; the others excuse you, judging it necessary that those who have more danger and more obligation deserve more. But, when you disarm them, you begin to offend them; you show that you distrust them either for cowardice or for lack of faith, both of which opinions generate hatred.

Machiavelli

Therefore I state that all three abovementioned forms of government are pernicious because the duration of the three good ones is brief and the three bad ones are evil. So, because those who organized laws wisely have realized this defect, they have avoided each form per se and opted for a form that partakes of all three. They have felt this to be more solid and more stable, because each form keeps watch over the other in a city that has a Princely, an Aristocratic and a Democratic government.

Machiavelli

Therefore, my conclusion goes against the common opinion, which says that the people (when they are in power) are fickle, changeable and ungrateful; I hold that these sins are not otherwise in them than they are in individual princes. Anyone who accuses both the people and princes might be telling the truth, but if he leaves out the princes he is wrong. For the people, if they command and are well organized, will be just as stable, wise and grateful as a prince or better than a prince, even one who is considered wise. On the other hand, a prince uncontrolled by laws will be more ungrateful, fickle and unwise than the people. The difference in their action arises not from a different nature (since it is the same in all men, and if there is greater good is in the people) but from their having more or less respect for the laws under which they each live

Machiavelli

Therefore, to discuss what the institutions of the city of Rome were and what circumstances let it to perfection, I state that some people who have written about republics say there are three sorts of states among them, which they call Princedoms, Aristocracies and Democracies, and that those who organize a city must turn to one of them accordingly as it suits their purposes. Still other - and in the opinion of many, wiser - peope believe that there are six types of governments: of which three are very bad and three others are good in themselves but so easily corrupted that they too, become harmful. The three good ones are those mentioned above. The bad ones are the three others, which devolve from the first three; each one so closely resembles its neighbor that it is an easy leap from one type to the other: the princedom easily becomes a tyranny, an aristocracy easily becomes an oligarchy, a democracy turns without difficulty into anarchy. Consequently, if the organizer of a republic establishes one of these three forms of government in a city, he sets it up for only a brief period because no remedy can prevent it from slipping into its opposite form because of the similarity that there is in this instance between virtue and vice.

Machiavelli

This is the cycle through which all republics have been and are governed. But they rarely revert to the same forms of government, because hardly any republic can endure long enough to pass through these transformations often and remain standing. What does occur is that, while the republic is in turmoil - always lacking good advice and military strength - a better organized neighboring state will subjugate it. But if that were not so, a republic would likely experience an infinite number of cycles through these various forms of government.

Machiavelli

Those republics, in which uncorrupted political life has been maintained, do not allow any of their citizens to exist or to live in the style of gentlemen. On the contrary, they maintain complete equality among themselves, and they are very hostile to the lord and gentlemen that do exist in the land; and if by chance any fall into their hands they put them to death, as the origin of corruption and the cause of all civil strife. And to clarify what the name gentlemen means, I shall say that we call gentlemen those who live richly in idleness and on the income from their estates without having any care for either agriculture or other work essential for living. Such men are destructive to any republic and any land; but still more destructive are those who, in addition, to the wealth mentioned above, have strongholds under their command and subjects. The kingdom of Naples, the lands of Rome, Romagna and Lombardy are full of these two kinds of men. From this arises the fact that no republic and no political life has ever arisen in those regions because those classes of men are completely hostile to any kind of civil society.

Machiavelli

Those who, through bad choice or natural inclination, are not in harmony with their times usually live unhappily and their actions turn out badly but is the contrary for those who are in harmony with their times.

Machiavelli

When the Tarquins were gone and fear of them no longer checked the Nobility, a new institution had to be thought up that would duplicate the effect the Tarquins had while they were living. So after a good deal of rioting, disorder and danger between the Plebs and the Nobility, the Romans turned to creating Tribunes for the protection of the Plebs, and they were invested with such preminence and prestige that ever after they acted as intermediaries between the Plebs and the Senate, preventing the Nobles' insolence.

Machiavelli

Whenever men cease fighting out of necessity they fight out for ambition: it is so powerful in men's hearts that it never leaves them, no matter what position they have attained. The reason is that nature has created men such that they can desire all things but cannot obtain all things, so since desire is always greater than the power to acquire, the result is discontent and dissatisfaction with what we have. Hence the origin of the swings in their fortune: because men in part desire to have more and in part fear the loss of what they have acquired they become embroiled in hatred and war, which destroy one country and raise another to new heights. I have written this discourse because it was not enough for the Roman Plebs to protect themselves against the Patricians by creating the Tribunes, a desired forced on them by necessity; once they attained their goal, they immediately began fighting out of ambition, and trying to share public offices and property with the Patricians since these are what men most prize. This produced the diseasee that led to the struggle over the Agrarian Law, which ended up by causing the republic's downfall

Machiavelli

Wherever the body is not corrupted, riots and other civil strife do no harm; wherever it is corrupted, well-ordered laws are of no avail unless they are promoted by someone who uses extreme force to get them observed until the body becomes good. [...]

Machiavelli

Without its own arms no principality is secure; indeed it is wholly obliged to fortune since it does not have virtue to defend itself in adversity. And it has always been the opinion and judgment of wise men "that nothing is so in firm and unstable as fame for power not sustained by ones' own force." And ones' own arms are those which are composed of either subjects or citizens or your creatures: all others are either mercenary or auxiliary.

Machiavelli

[The prince] should not care about incurring the fame of those vices without which it is difficult to save one's state; for if one considers everything well, one will find something appears to be virtue, which if pursued would be one's ruin, and something else appears to be a vice, which if pursued result's in one's security and well-being

Machiavelli

if one governs himself with caution and patience, and the times and affairs turn in such a way that his government is good, he comes out happy; but if the times and affairs change, he is ruined because he does not change his mode of proceeding. Nor may a man be found so prudent as to know how to accommodate himself to this, whether because he cannot deviate from what nature inclines him to or also because, when one has always flourished by walking on one path, he cannot be persuaded to depart from it. And so, the cautious man, when it is time to come to impetuosity, does not know how to do it, hence comes to ruin: for if he would change his nature with the times and with affairs, his fortune would not change.

Machiavelli

it happens that a republic has a longer life and has good fortune longer than a principality, because, thanks to the diversity of the citizens there are in it, it can adapt better to diversity of circumstances that a prince can. For, as has been stated, a man who is accostumed to proceeding in one way never changes; and when times unsuited to those ways of his change, he must necessary fail.

Machiavelli

A new form of antagonism must install itself in working class science, bending this science towards new ends, and then transcending it in the totally political act of practice. The form we refer to is the form of the struggle of refusal, the form of organisation of the working class "No": the refusal to collaborate actively in capitalist development, the refusal to put forward positively programme of demands. [...] The refusal is thus a form of struggle which grows simultaneously with the working class - the working class which is, at one and the same time, both political refusal of capital and production of capital as an economic power. This explains why the political struggle by workers and the terrain of capitalist production always form a whole. The first demands made by proletarians in their own right, the moment that they cannot be absorbed by the capitalist, function objectively as forms of refusal which put the system in jeopardy. Whenever the positive demands of workers go beyond the margins that the capitalists is able to grant, once again they repeat this function the objective, negative function of pure and simple political blockage in the mechanism of the economic laws. Every conjunctural transition, every advance in the structure, in the economic mechanism, must therefore be studied in terms of its specific moments: but only in order to arrive at the point where the workers can demand that which capital, at that particular moment in time, cannot give. in such circumstances, the demand as a refusal sets off a chain of crises in capitalist production [...]. The platforms of demands which workers have for decades, presented to the capitalists have had - and could only have had one result: the improvement of exploitation. Better conditions of life for the workers were not separable from greater economic development of capitalism. As far as the official working class movement is concerned, both the trade union strand, and later the reformist strand, have functioned within the spiral of this process, in their attempts at economic organisation of the workers.

Mario Tronti

And, just as the working class politically frees itself from the people when it no longer takes the stance of a subaltern class, so too does working-class science break with the heritage of bourgeois culture at the moment that it no longer takes the viewpoint of society as a whole, but of that part which wishes to overthrow it. Culture, in fact, like the concept of Right, of which Marx speaks, is always bourgeois. In other words, it is always a relation between intellectuals and society, between intellectuals and the people, between intellectuals and class; it is thus always a mediation of conflicts and their resolution through something else. If culture is the reconstruction of the totality of man, the search for his humanity in the world, a vocation to keep united that which is divided - then it is by nature reactionary and should be treated as such. The concept of working-class culture as revolutionary culture is as contradictory as the concept of bourgeois revolution. And this idea also contains that wretched counterrevolutionary thesis whereby the working class supposedly has to relive the whole experience of the history of the bourgeoisie. The myth that the bourgeoisie had a 'progressive' culture, which the working-class movement is now supposed to pick up from the dust where capital dropped it along with the usual old banners, has taken Marxist theoretical research into the realm of fantasy. But it has also imposed as a 'realistic' everyday practice the preservation of a tradition that is to be accepted and safeguarded as the heritage of the whole of humanity advancing along its path. Unblocking this kind of situation, as in other cases, will take the violent force of a destructive blow. Here, the critique of ideology must consciously assume the working-class perspective as a critique of culture and work towards a dissolution of all that already exists, refusing to continue to build on the old foundations.

Mario Tronti

At the highest level of capitalist development, this social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production, the whole society lives in function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive dominion over the whole society. It is on this basis that the political state machine tends ever more to identify with the figure of the collective capitalist; it increasingly becomes the property of the capitalist mode of production and, therefore, a function of the capitalist. The process of the unitary composition of capitalist society, imposed by the specific development of its production, no longer tolerates the existence of a political terrain even formally independent of the web of social relations.

Mario Tronti

Everyone knows that capitalism stands historically, from the very beginning, as a system of contradictions: its internal development is the development of its contradictions.

Mario Tronti

Marx today cannot eternally continue to settle scores with his old philosophical conscience. Rather, he must become embroiled in an active clash with the most modern reality of contemporary capitalism precisely in order to understand and destroy it. For this is the moment of verification, this is the working-class demand imposing itself.

Mario Tronti

No worker today is prepared to recognise the existence of work outside capital. Work equals exploitation: this is the logical prerequisite and historical result of capitalist civilisation. From here, there is no point of return. The worker has no interest in the 'dignity of work'; she can leave the 'pride of the producer' entirely for the boss. [...]. Today, the working class need only look at itself to understand capital. It need only combat itself in order to destroy capital. It has to recognise itself as a political power and negate itself as a productive force. For proof of this, we need only look at the moment of struggle itself: during the strike, the 'producer' is immediately identified as the class enemy. Labour standing counterposed to the working class, as an enemy - such is the point of departure not only for antagonism, but also for its organisation. If the alienation of the worker has any meaning, its essence is highly revolutionary. The organisation of alienation: this is the obligatory path that the party must impose on working-class spontaneity. The goal is, again, refusal, but at a higher level - it becomes active and collective, a political refusal on a mass scale, organised and planned. Hence, the immediate task of working-class organisation is now to overcome passivity

Mario Tronti

On one side stands the working class, on the other capitalist society: that is how the class struggle is plotted out today. It is not true that this shifts the relationship of forces in capital's favour. No, the opposite is true. For this is the only way in which the working class can acquire strength for itself and indeed recognise its strength, as the only living, active, productive element of society, as the hinge of social relations, as the fundamental articulation of economic development and thus a class that potentially already holds in its fists political domination over the present.

Mario Tronti

The bourgeois call to social reason stands against the sectoral demands of the workers. The bourgeois want the same relation that exists at a certain level between social capital and the single capitalists to exist between capital and labour: as the functionaries put it, a consistently 'dialectical' relationship. However, when the total labour agrees to participate reasonably in the general development, it ends up functioning as just another part of total social capital. The only thing to be attained along this path is the most balanced and rational development of all capital. It is at this point that the working class must instead consciously organise itself as an irrational element within the specific rationality of capitalist production. The growing rationalisation of modern capital must find an insurmountable limit in the growing irrationality of the organised workers - that is, in the working-class refusal of political integration within the system's economic development

Mario Tronti

The general social interest is left entirely in the hands of capital. Nothing is left to the workers other than their partial class interest. So, on one hand, we have capital's social self-government, and on the other, the class self-management of the organised workers.

Mario Tronti

The truth is that the working class's massive refusal to consider itself an active participant in capitalist society already represents a decision to opt out, a stance against the social interest [...]. We need continually to point against the class enemy the only subversive weapon capable of reducing him to a subaltern force: namely, the threat of denying him the mediation of the working class in the social relation of capitalist production. The working class must no longer shoulder the requirements of capital, even in the form of its own demands; it must force the class of capitalists to present its own objective needs and then subjectively refuse them; compel the bosses to ask, so that the workers can answer with an active, organised 'no'. [...]. the type of productive activity was left intact. It has always exclusively been a question of the distribution of productive activity, redistributing labour to new groups of people. Only the communist revolution, as Marx said, or, as we can today begin to say, simply the revolution, the only plausible present-day minimum programme for the working class, challenges for the first time the whole of productive activity that has hitherto existed. This challenge will abolish work. And in so doing it will abolish class domination.

Mario Tronti

The worker cannot be labour other than in relation to the capitalist that stands against her. The capitalist cannot be capital other than in relation to the worker that stands against him. It is often asked what a social class really is. The answer is: these two classes. The fact that one is dominant does not imply that the other becomes subaltern. Rather, it implies a struggle, on equal terms, to break that domination and to reverse it into new forms, into a domination over those who have thus far dominated. [...] Working-class struggles against the iron laws of capitalist exploitation cannot be reduced to the eternal revolt of the oppressed against their oppressors. [...] We have already envisaged the political history of capital as a succession of attempts by capital to free itself from the class relation as a normal moment of 'separation'. Now we can envisage it at a higher level as the history of the capitalist class's successive attempts to emancipate itself from the working class, through the medium of the various forms of capital's political domination over the working class.

Mario Tronti

This is the basis on which specifically working-class power is immediately absorbed into the generic concept of popular sovereignty: the political mediation here serves to allow the explosive content of the working class's productive force to function peacefully within the fine forms of the modern capitalist relations of production. So, at this level, when the working class refuses politically to become the people, it in fact opens up the most direct path to the socialist revolution.

Mario Tronti

We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital's own reproduction must be tuned.

Mario Tronti

Workers no longer have to counterpose the ideal of a true society to the false society of capital: they no longer have to release and dilute themselves within the general social relation. They can now re-find and re-discover their own class as an anti-social revolutionary force. Today, without possibility of mediation, the whole society of capital stands in front of the working-class. The relation is finally reversed: the only thing that the general interest cannot mediate within itself is the irreducible partiality of the workers' interest.

Mario Tronti

For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.

Michel Foucault

Nazism was doubtless the most cunning and the most naive (and the former because of the latter) combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of a disciplinary power. A eugenic ordering of society, with all that implied in the way of extension and intensification of micropowers, in the guise of an unrestricted state control (etatisation), was accompanied by the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood; the latter implied both the systematic genocide of others and the risk of exposing oneself to a total sacrifice.

Michel Foucault

There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death [...] now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. Michel Foucault, The will to knowledge. History of Sexuality 1, Pantheon books p.

Michel Foucault

Good luck on your exam! You got this!

Sarena :)

«A multitude of men, are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular»

Thomas Hobbes

«I know that Aristotle in the first book of his Politics, for a foundation of his doctrine, maketh men by nature, some more worthy to command, meaning the wiser sort, such as he thought himself to be for his philosophy; others to serve, meaning those that had strong bodies, but were not philosophers as he; as master and servant were not introduced by consent of men, but by difference of wit: which is not only against reason, but also against experience. For there are very few so foolish that had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others: nor when the wise, in their own conceit, contend by force with them who distrust their own wisdom, do they always, or often, or almost at any time, get the victory. If nature therefore have made men equal, that equality is to be acknowledged: or if nature have made men unequal, yet because men that think themselves equal will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted»

Thomas Hobbes

«The People is not in being before the constitution of government, as not being any Person, but a multitude of single Persons»

Thomas Hobbes