«Force the Signory», «Force the People». Patterns of political action in Niccolò Machiavelli's «Florentine Histories»

Machiavelli's Florentine Histories show characteristic transformations concerning his historical and political theory. The origin of the alternatives that this essay tries to account is grounded in a new political practice potentially able to force orders and institutions. As a consequence, Machiavelli outlines an innovative, and peculiarly modern, view of history as a sequence of moments of structuration and destructuration, and not only linear correspondence between action and times