2 février 2018
https://www.openedition.org/12554 , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Michel Senellart, « Simuler et dissimuler : l’art machiavélien d’être secret à la Renaissance », Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, ID : 10670/1.735f5t
Machiavelli introduces a new form of manifestation of power, no longer centred on the exemplary figure of the virtuous prince but on the art of feigning and hiding. This technique of princely and political crafstmanship is not kept within the retired space of secrecy (in the sense of the magico-religious arcanum) but it opens out on the indeterminacy of the strategic game. The Machiavellian secret belongs neither to the sphere of having or being, but to that of action. If one is to make out the originality of this idea, it is to be situated in the context of the ethico-political tradition of the Middle Ages, revived in the Renaissance, namely that of the Mirrors of princes, and to be dissociated from the narrowing concept of machiavellism. It is Machiavelli’s triple transformation of the relationships between virtù and fortuna which lends its meaning to an analysis of the secret as an art of “changing nature with the help of time”.