CRISI DELLA PRUDENZA POLITICA E FORMAZIONE DELL’UOMO DI STATO NELLA CULTURA POLITICA ITALIANA DELLA PRIMA ETÀ MODERNA

Surveying the political and civic literature published in Italy during the early modern period, one observes an increasing preoccupation with the means and strategies required to consolidate the emerging structures of statehood, and consequently with the theoretical foundations that were to inform such an endeavour. Almost in parallel, there developed a sustained reflection on the institutio—the formation and education—of those figures deemed suitable for the new functions demanded by the construction of the state. Thus, the definition of a formative path for those destined to serve within the state apparatuses progressively assumed a more practical orientation, directly concerning the very functioning of institutions. When one considers the broader cultural processes accompanying these transformations, the evidence clearly points to the exhaustion of interpretative paradigms of political life grounded in the inexhaustible yet increasingly inadequate repository of doctrines inherited from Classical Antiquity. The projects of education and formation of the man of government examined in this essay thus respond to a wider process of cultural renewal, one that sought to move beyond the increasingly narrow and lifeless themes of political prudence, whether articulated in Aristotelian, Tacitean, or Stoic terms.