„Ein Arzneibuch für alle Rezepte“ (Paolo Mattia Doria)

Abstract

Summary „A pharmacopoeia for any prescription“ (Paolo Mattia Doria).Machiavelliana after 1700 Recent research has gained many new insights into Machiavelli’s influence on Early Modern European political history. This article focuses on a so far little researched, but decisive stage in the history of Machiavelli’s influence, namely Paolo Mattia Doria’s treatise „La Vita Civile“ (1709/10; further editions in the 18th century), which was written in Naples, a centre of the Early European Enlightenment. In a peculiar mixture of anti-machiavellism that is inspired by Platonic thought and allegiance to Machiavellian ideas, Doria follows the structure and texture of Machiavelli’s „Il Principe“. The political treatise is still coloured by humanist ideas and includes a speculum principis („L’Educazione del Principe“). Despite the similarities, Doria criticizes Machiavelli’s amoral analysis of power politics and postulates, with reference to Machiavelli’s „Discorsi“, an ideal republic or a principality of virtue with a virtuous ruler (principe virtuoso) at the top. In the course of his analysis, Doria re-moralizes Machiavelli’s morally neutral, praxeological concept of virtù. The treatise reflects the fork in the history of Machiavelli’s influence both on a general level and in its details: the ambivalence of „Il Principe“ as political advice for the successful and unscrupulous prince on the one hand but, on the other hand, as an exposure of unscrupulous power politics, written modo obliquo by the passionate Republican whom Rousseau, for example, wanted to see in Machiavelli.