From “Effective Truth” to Political Modernity
Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought emerged at a time of profound crisis in the Italian and European political order, marked by the territorial fragmentation of the peninsula, the interference of major foreign monarchies, and the instability of institutional systems.
In this context, the direct experience Machiavelli gained within the Florentine Republic forms the concrete foundation of his theoretical framework, which develops from what he himself defines as “experience of modern affairs.” Machiavellian thought arises from direct observation of the conflicts and power dynamics of his time and establishes an autonomous political reflection, detached from traditional ethical-religious models and oriented toward understanding the actual mechanisms of political action.
It is within this context that The Prince takes shape, composed in 1513 during the period of exclusion from public life following the Medici restoration. The fundamental novelty of the treatise lies in the principle of the “actual truth of the matter”: the Florentine secretary analyzes politics as it actually manifests itself, taking as his guiding criterion not what ought to be, but what actually is.
Among the central categories of Machiavellian thought, the concepts of virtue and fortune stand out. Virtue refers to the operational capacities (decision-making, adaptability, and boldness) that enable the prince to confront political instability, while fortune represents the unpredictability of historical events.
Similarly, Machiavellian analysis centers on the question of the preservation of the state, identified as the primary goal of political action: the prince must be able to employ, depending on the circumstances, both force and cunning, coercion and consent.
It is precisely these elements—the autonomy of politics, methodological realism, and the centrality of necessity—that have determined the work’s controversial reception. While in the sixteenth century The Prince was interpreted as a dangerous and subversive text, accused of legitimizing deceit and violence, in the twentieth century it was progressively reinterpreted in light of the transformations of modern politics.
It is within this context that Antonio Gramsci’s reading takes place; he interprets the treatise no longer as a manual for individual domination, but rather as a work aimed at conceiving the construction of a collective political will.
Gramsci and the Modern Prince
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian communist leader and political theorist, reinterprets The Prince from a historical and political perspective, adapting it to the conditions of the contemporary world. During his imprisonment under the fascist regime, in the Prison Notebooks he interprets Machiavelli in light of the crisis of the liberal state and modern regimes: he is not an author to be interpreted, but rather an interlocutor who leads the reader to question contemporary political practice. Gramsci’s reception of Machiavelli fits into a broader framework of twentieth-century interpretations of the thinker. While at the beginning of the century the secretary was transformed into a theorist of modern nationalism and an instrument for legitimizing fascism, after World War I, however, a noteworthy revival came from European Marxists, including Gramsci, who saw in the treatise a symbol of collective will and revolutionary action.
Gramsci interprets Machiavelli’s treatise as a theory of the construction of collective political power, and in his reading, the Machiavellian prince becomes a symbolic figure:
“The modern prince, the mythical prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual; he can only be an organism—a complex element of society in which the crystallization of a collective will, already recognized and partially affirmed in action, has begun”
he writes in Notes on Machiavelli, Politics, and the Modern State, in the 13th Prison Notebook.
From this perspective, The Prince is understood as a founding political myth, and the posthumous success of the treatise lies in its ability to provide a realistic theory of leadership, based on the combination of force and consent—a theme that would be central to the political debate of the twentieth century. Gramsci credits Machiavelli with understanding that every effective political project must grapple with the reality of passions, conflicts, and power relations, thus anticipating a modern conception of politics as a struggle for hegemony.
Another central element of Gramsci’s interpretation concerns the concept of hegemony. The treatise is interpreted as a text that demonstrates how effective political power must combine force and consent, coercion and persuasion. Gramsci identifies in Machiavelli’s treatise an early awareness of the fact that no political order can be sustained exclusively through violence. Even the strongest prince is doomed to failure if he fails to secure a minimum of support from the governed. This reading allows Gramsci to free Machiavelli from both the anti-Machiavellian tradition and interpretations that portray him as a theorist of political cynicism.
Hegemony, Virtue, and Political Practice
In Gramsci’s reception, Machiavelli’s concepts of virtue and fortune take on a profoundly new meaning. Virtue is not understood as an individual moral quality, but as the organizational and strategic capacity of the collective political subject and coincides with the ability to correctly read the balance of power and to intervene in history effectively. Fortune, on the other hand, represents for Gramsci the set of objective, economic, and social conditions that escape the immediate control of political actors. The Prince is thus read as a text that teaches how to transform contingency into political opportunity, anticipating a conception of praxis as a dynamic interaction between structure and action.
A particularly original aspect of Gramsci’s reading is the definition of The Prince as a political myth. Myth is not a lie, but an action-oriented narrative that renders a political project intelligible and desirable. From this perspective, the work is not merely an analytical text but a tool aimed at building a collective national will, an objective that Gramsci recognizes as central to Machiavelli’s historical context and still relevant in modern politics. In this reading, Gramsci reinterprets the Florentine secretary as an author who does not separate realism and normativity but recomposes them within historical praxis.
Gramsci’s interpretation marks a decisive turning point in the history of the treatise’s reception. For the first time, the treatise is explicitly taken up as a theoretical text of mass politics, capable of engaging with the problems of the twentieth century: the building of consensus, the role of parties, the function of intellectuals, and the stability of modern states.
A decisive element of Gramsci’s reading, often less emphasized, concerns the valorization of The Prince as the founding act of modern political science, understood as a concrete analysis of power relations. Gramsci insists on the anti-utopian character of Machiavelli’s work, reading the treatise as a radical stance against any abstract conception of politics. The theorist writes in Quaderno no. 13:
“The fundamental character of The Prince is that it is not a systematic treatise but a living book, in which political ideology and political science merge in the dramatic form of myth.”
This observation is crucial for the twentieth-century reception of Machiavelli’s treatise: the text is not interpreted as a technical manual, nor as an inverted moral philosophy, but as a work in which knowledge and action coincide. The value of the treatise lies precisely in its refusal to separate theory from practice, an element that Gramsci recognizes as fully modern.
The Prince as Myth and Political Pedagogy
A further original element of Gramsci’s reception is the interpretation of The Prince as a pedagogical work, intended to form a new political consciousness. Gramsci observes that Machiavelli does not merely describe power, but educates the reader to understand its mechanisms, shattering moral and consolatory illusions. Gramsci writes:
“Machiavelli wants to educate the people […] he wants to create a national-popular collective will. […] Any formation of a national-popular collective will is impossible unless the great masses of peasant farmers simultaneously burst into political life. This is what Machiavelli meant by the reform of the militia.”
This statement is central to understanding why Gramsci considers The Prince a politically active text even centuries later. Its posthumous reception also lies in the text’s ability to teach political thinking, unmasking the hypocrisies of power and demonstrating the necessity of decision-making. Gramsci devotes particular attention to the question of force, which in the anti-Machiavellian tradition had been one of the main charges against the treatise: Machiavelli does not glorify violence in itself, but analyzes its historical function. Implicitly commenting on passages from The Prince such as the one in which Machiavelli states that:
“since a prince must therefore know how to use the beast well, he must choose the bull and the lion among them.”
Politics, for Machiavelli as for Gramsci, cannot be separated from conflict, but what matters is the ability to transform force into stable consent. Indeed, in Quaderno No. 13, we read:
“The modern prince must and cannot but be the herald and organizer of an intellectual and moral reform […]”.
It is clear how Machiavelli is regarded as a forerunner of a complex conception of power, far removed from both cynicism and moralism.
Gramsci interprets the famous Chapter XXVI as the work’s culminating moment, in which Machiavelli abandons all ambiguity and addresses directly the need for a political regeneration of Italy. This appeal is not rhetorical, but deeply political: Machiavelli identifies Italian fragmentation as the central problem of his time and attempts to point out a way to overcome it.
With Gramsci, the posthumous reception of the treatise reaches a decisive turning point: the text is recognized as an indispensable theoretical tool for understanding modern politics. The Prince becomes a text that does not merely belong to the past but continues to produce theoretical and political effects, confirming itself as one of the fundamental classics of Western political thought.
Between Realism and Hegemony: Machiavelli’s Legacy
In light of the analysis conducted, the twentieth-century rehabilitation of The Prince finds in Gramsci’s reading one of its highest and most theoretically fruitful moments. Through the notion of the “modern prince,” Gramsci carries out a theoretical operation of great significance, transforming an originally individual figure into a collective subject, capable of embodying and organizing a widespread political will. In this way, Machiavellian thought is freed from both moralistic reductionism and a purely decisionist reading, to be reinterpreted as a theory of the construction of hegemony.
What emerges with particular clarity is the centrality of the link between force and consent. While this relationship was already present in Machiavelli—though still tied to the figure of the prince—in Gramsci it becomes the structural principle of every stable political order. Politics is not founded exclusively on coercion, but requires a complex balance between cultural leadership and the capacity for command, between the education of the masses and the organization of power.
From this perspective, The Prince reveals itself as an eminently pedagogical work, aimed not only at describing the techniques of power, but at forming a political consciousness capable of acting in history. Gramsci’s rehabilitation of Machiavelli thus consists in recognizing him not as a theorist of arbitrary violence, but as a thinker of political construction under conditions of conflict. The relevance of Gramsci’s reading lies in his ability to grasp the profoundly modern dimension of Machiavellian thought: the awareness that every political order is the result of a historical process, which implies organization, direction, and the ability to interpret existing power relations.
The twentieth-century rehabilitation, far from being a mere historiographical revision, thus emerges as a decisive moment in the understanding of politics as an autonomous and inherently conflictual sphere, in which the Machiavellian legacy—filtered through Gramscian reflection—continues to offer interpretive tools of extraordinary effectiveness.