Fundação, conservação e corrução: o ciclo da vida política em Maquiavel.

Abstract

The man is a selfish being who wishes everything, which is why he can only see other men as rivals to the full satisfaction of their desires. The idea of political community, therefore, no longer appears as a necessary event because of the human natural condition. Nevertheless, the historical world shows that collective life erupted and effectively perpetuated in time. What was, then, the force that forced men against their nature, to collective life? How and why the collective life should be preserved? Why, like everything in life, corrupts itself and declines? These are the questions that guide this Dissertation and that, once answered, will show what we think is the life cycle of political life for Machiavelli: the foundation, conservation and corruption. The foundation of political life, most important human action, is the one that combines the wealth and ingenuity terms, therefore, to Machiavelli, the confrontation between wealth and virtù is a tug-of-war that conditions the success or failure of political action. Fortune is random, meaning the creative opportunity for the virtù of a man. And virtù means the ability to obtain good political results. Thus, the foundation of political life will be based on the extraordinary virtù of a man. However, founding the political life is not enough. It is necessary to keep it alive. The virtuous man who is required to found political life and give you the first ordinations is not the ideal man to accomplish the task of structuring and preserving the community. The conservation is a task for all citizens and must occur based on the ordinances and laws, which have the constrictive force of necessity. Laws and ordinances are the product of mood conflicts between the great and the people, each seeking to fulfill their wishes: the great want to dominate the people and the people intents to resist to the desire of the great remaining them free. Therefore, the laws that are produced due to the tension of moods should turn to the conservation of political life and freedom of citizens. Even if this task is well executed, for Machiavelli all things in the world have their end, in other words, the end of the collective life is an inexorable fact. And what causes the end of political life is corruption, degenerative process of the body politic, laws and institutions that fail to observe the common good and start to ensure only the private interest. The question, then, starts to be the discovery whether there are and what are the possibilities of salvation of collective life, preventing men return to the barbarism of pre-political life. The possibilities presented by Machiavelli to prevent the extinction of collective life turn to, again, the extraordinary virtù of the man, who, with his strength - kingly power - will make citizens, laws and institutions to be virtuous again, taking precedence in the public interest, with what the political will continue to exist.