Boone Ayala’s Reviews > The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition > Status Update

The core of the book is an examination of florentine political theory as it developed in the period between 1494 and the final restoration of Medicean political control in 1527. Pocock argues that events in this period - the outbreak of the Italian wars, the breaking and then reconstruction of Medici power - fueled investigation into how to preserve and restore the republic in an unstable world.

The “Moment” of the title refers to the moment in which a republic confronts its own mortality, but also the one in which it constructs itself in order to forestall that mortality. Because republics did not mirror the heavenly monarchy, they did not reflect the eternal. Republican constitutions, in seeking to construct enduring polities, sought to cheat death.

Florence’s almost unique status as a republic in a world of monarchies served to inspire a sense of its particularity and exceptionality. Unlike monarchies, Florence could not claim to be an earthly mirror of the heavenly kingdom; it looked to history for its kin, the republics of yore which had fallen, in the process cementing an understanding of the republic’s transitory nature.

Climbing Everest here. Pocock is concerned with the collision between classical and medieval notions of universalism and an emerging renaissance and early modern idea of historicism - how did the eternal come to be supplanted by the temporally bounded? He sees republican political theory as critical to this intellectual shift. Ch 1 provided one tool for medieval temporal thought: the idea of custom in law