Machiavellis Kriegskunst: Die Lehren des Libro dell’arte della guerra

Abstract

Abstract For the most part, Machiavelli’s Libro dell’arte della guerra has been studied as a military treatise, which had produced different interpretations and applications. Whereas military historians assumed that Machiavelli somewhat underestimated the role of the so-called gunpowder revolution, recent scholarship stresses the political dimensions of the text and its reception in different contexts. This article focuses on the poetics of the dialogue, which cannot be reduced to propositional contents. Instead of teaching specific strategies and tactics of warfare, the Libro engages its readers in a military dialogue in a more radical sense. It enacts the very dynamics of war and battle by staging the complex and often contradictory conditions and foundations of speech and (military and political) theory on the one hand and its potential interactions with conflicting historical realities on the other. By combining different generic traditions of the literary dialogue from Plato to Cicero and Petrarch it performs a Machiavellian arte della guerra as the very form of military and militant intervention which concerns not only the practice of warfare, but human activity as such.