The 20th-century reception of *The Prince* finds a particularly significant expression in the work of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), a German jurist and political theorist whose reflections on sovereignty, decision-making, and the state of exception profoundly shaped the political debate of the 20th century. Trained as a jurist in Wilhelmine Germany and having become a professor of constitutional law during the Weimar Republic, Schmitt developed his thought within a historical context marked by Germany’s defeat in World War I, institutional instability, and the crisis of the liberal-parliamentary state. His temporary and controversial involvement with National Socialism in the early 1930s—which later became the subject of self-criticism and prolonged academic marginalization in the postwar period—constitutes an essential biographical backdrop for understanding the radical nature of his political theory, without, however, exhausting its theoretical significance. In this context, Schmitt’s thought, while not explicitly centered on Machiavelli, finds in the treatise a fundamental theoretical antecedent, especially regarding political realism and the primacy of decision. Politics is conceived as a sphere that cannot be reduced to abstract moral or legal norms, and sovereignty as the capacity to intervene in moments of emergency, when order falters.
Sovereignty and the Foundation of Order
One of the fundamental conceptual cores of Schmitt’s thought is the definition of sovereignty formulated in Political Theology (1922):
“the sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception.”[1]
This conception of sovereignty, founded on the ultimate decision and not on the norm, presents clear points of contact with the modern reception of The Prince. Machiavelli is implicitly recognized as one of the first theorists of politics understood as a field of concrete action, in which the ruler must know how to suspend the ordinary to safeguard the political order. In Schmitt’s reading, Machiavelli’s treatise is not so much a manual of governing techniques as a text that recognizes the structural necessity of the exception in political life. The figure of the prince embodies the one who, in the face of crisis, takes upon himself the responsibility of decision-making, without being able to take refuge in pre-existing moral or legal justifications. The Florentine secretary thus becomes, in the twentieth-century reception, a precursor of decisionism.
A further point of convergence between Schmitt and Machiavelli concerns the critique of normative conceptions of politics; Schmitt openly polemicizes against legal liberalism, accusing it of reducing politics to a system of procedural rules incapable of addressing real conflicts. This critique finds an ideal antecedent in the posthumous reception of the treatise as a text that unmasks the illusion of a politics founded exclusively on abstract moral principles. As Vincenzo de Santis, an Italian scholar of political philosophy and legal theory, observes, Schmitt’s reading of Machiavelli aligns with the interpretive tradition that views the Florentine secretary as the first author to recognize that politics can be neither neutralized nor moralized without losing its effectiveness. [2]
Machiavellian realism is thus taken as the theoretical foundation of a conflictual conception of politics, in which order does not arise from legal form but from the capacity to decide and impose a criterion of distinction. Schmitt, in fact, defines the political through the friend-enemy distinction, understood as a criterion autonomous from other spheres of human experience. Although he does not explicitly formulate this distinction, Machiavelli appears, in twentieth-century reception, to be fully aware of the conflictual dimension of politics: the prince must preserve the unity of the state against internal and external threats, identifying the dangers that call the political order into question. In this sense, The Prince is reinterpreted as a text that anticipates the conception of politics as a field of extreme decisions, in which the very existence of the political community is at stake. One of the most significant aspects of the Schmittian reception of Machiavelli’s treatise concerns precisely the theme of the foundation of political order. Schmitt insists that every legal order presupposes an original decision that cannot be justified by prior norms. This insight finds clear resonance in the modern reading of The Prince as a text on the foundation and preservation of the state. Machiavelli’s prince often acts in a situation of a normative vacuum, in which order must be created ex novo. Founding violence, the necessity of acting against common morality, and the centrality of force are thus reinterpreted, in the twentieth century, as structural elements of political sovereignty. Schmitt thereby contributes to consolidating a reading of The Prince as a theoretical text on the birth of authority, rather than as a mere treatise on political technique.
Political Theology and Decision: Duso’s Interpretation
A decisive contribution to understanding this reception is offered by the essay by the Italian philosopher Giuseppe Duso, Carl Schmitt: Political Theology and the Logic of Modern Political Concepts (1996)[3], which allows us to situate Schmitt’s interpretation of Machiavelli within a broader conceptual history of political modernity. Schmitt does not use Machiavelli merely as a reference author, but rather as an implicit theoretical pivot in the construction of the fundamental concepts of modern politics—sovereignty, decision, state, and order. From a biographical and intellectual perspective, Schmitt interprets modernity as an era marked by the secularization of theological categories, transferred into the language of politics: The Prince is understood as one of the first texts to make conceivable a politics autonomous from morality and traditional theology, while retaining a decision-making structure of a theological nature.
According to Duso, the heart of Schmitt’s reflection lies not so much in the justification of authority as in the conceptual structure that makes political order possible. The famous thesis that “all the meaningful concepts of modern state doctrine are secularized theological concepts”[4] thus becomes a fundamental interpretive key for the posthumous reception of Machiavelli as well. The Prince appears as a text that anticipates the decision-making logic of modernity, though without formulating it in legal terms: the prince acts as the one who, in the absence of a given order, produces order through action, assuming a function that in medieval theology belonged to God. For Schmitt, sovereignty is not a stable quality but rather an active function that emerges in crisis, and this element allows us to read Machiavelli as a structural precursor of modern decisionism. The Prince thus contributes to the genesis of the modern concept of the state even before its systematic theorization. I