MACHIAVELLI THE REVOLUTIONARY: A MODERN REINTERPRETATION

Susan A. Ashley

Four hundred years and the space between the far ends of the political spectrum separate the advocate of princely power from the most prominent Italian Communist, . Other than their reputations as in uential Italian political thinkers, little connects Machiavelli, the Renaissance Humanist, to Gramsci, a Marxist-Leninist proponent of proletarian revolution. And yet, Machiavelli gures pro- minently in Gramsci’s work. Gramsci provided a clear, confident reading of The Prince and its relationship to Machiavelli’s other writings, and he drew on Machiavelli’s ideas both to shape and to explain his own distinctive views of power and of revolution. This founder of the Italian Communist Party and Italian delegate to the Comintern used Machiavelli to reinvent Marx. In doing so, Gramsci also turned Machiavelli into a Marxist, his particular type of Marxist. Despite the evident differences between in the Renaissance and in the twentieth century, Machiavelli and Gramsci shared some common ground. They lived in chaotic times, and both enjoyed political in u- ence, then experienced exclusion when power changed hands. In 1494, the citizens of Florence drove Piero de Medici out for collaborating too closely with the French who had invaded Italy. Machiavelli stepped in and played a prominent role in the new government. He served on a committee which advised the newly-established Grand Council on war and foreign affairs, and he participated in a commission charged with studying the creation of a civilian militia. Four years later, the Florentines established another government under the leadership of Pier Soderini. Machiavelli served as secretary of this new Republic and remained in that of ce until the Spanish and papal troops reimposed the Medici family in 1512. Machiavelli indicated a willingness to work with the new rulers, but his alliance with Soderini made him suspect, and in 1513 they had him imprisoned and tortured, then exiled him to his country estate in San Casciano where he wrote his major works: The Discourses on Livy, The Prince, and the History of Florence. In 1527, the Florentines revolted again and established yet another Republic. These 304 susan a. ashley rulers also rebuffed Machiavelli’s overtures. He died in June, just before the troops of Emperor Charles VII swept through Italy and sacked . In 1530, Charles, now allied with the Medici Pope Clement VII, ousted the Florentine government and returned the Medicis once again to power. Born in 1891 in Sardinia, Gramsci left the island twenty years later to study linguistics at the University of Turin. He became active in the (PSI) and began to write for Il Grido del Popolo, a Socialist weekly, and for the Turin edition of Avanti!, the principal Socialist newspaper. By early 1916, he declared himself a professional revolutionary.1 In 1919, just after the conclusion of the First World War, he joined other socialist militants to found a cultural newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo, assuming the editorship in 1921. That year, at its congress in Livorno, the PSI split, and Gramsci joined others to found the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In 1922, he left for Moscow, as the Italian party’s representative to the Comintern, just as King Victor Emanuel III appointed the Fascist leader, , as prime minister. Soon after, Mussolini’s government moved against Communist leaders and issued a warrant for Gramsci’s arrest. At that point, Gramsci left Moscow for Vienna, and from there, he successfully ran for election to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in the spring of 1924. Protected by parliamentary immunity, Gramsci returned to Rome, just before the murder of an outspoken Socialist critic of Fascist electoral skulldug- gery, Giacomo Matteotti, provoked immense public outrage against Mussolini. Several months later ( January 1926), Mussolini took full dictatorial powers, and in November he had Gramsci arrested. After a trial involving Gramsci and other Communist leaders in 1928 (May 28–June 4), the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State sentenced Gramsci to a twenty-year prison term. Harsh conditions undermined his already fragile health, and the authorities transferred him to a hospital and then released him on bail in October 1934. But Gramsci’s health worsened, and they moved him to a clinic in Rome in August 1935. Two years later (April 1937), the government freed Gramsci, but just days later, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. From 1929 until broken by illness, Gramsci worked on a series of notebooks—thirty-three in all—which, with the letters he managed to

1 Dante Germino, Antonio Gramsci: Architect of a New Politics (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), xvi.