THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS BY NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

Abstract

The authors present the concept of modern political science proposed by Nicolo Machiavelli. In the authors' opinion, it was around the kingdom and the king, the sovereign state and one ruler that a new political doctrine was born, which took from tradition what could serve it, but was also built on new values, or at least on a new hierarchy of values. Niccolo Machiavelli was the thinker who best combined new, or rather renewed, political values into a coherent modern doctrine of the state and power, which would secularize it and liberate it from the tutelage of religion and morality. The authors point out that the personal experience of life on the divided Athenian Peninsula was crucial for the political thought of the famous thinker from Florence. The authors share the view of Albert Asor Rosa, who tries to find the reasons for this almost paradoxical concentration on the Italian experience of the founder of modern political science, a realistic, calculating, amoral and secularized study of the engines of action of leaders and crowds.This is why the central categories of Machiavelli's political thought are "state interest", "national identity", "raison d'état". The experience of the lack of statehood, on the one hand, and the democratic traditions of the Florentine Republic on the other, created a special amalgam of ideas and views on which a modern understanding of the science of politics was created, which is invariably associated with the name of Machiavelli.