The Arendt and Machiavelli State: two visions

Abstract

The ideas about the power and the state are as old as human itself. Survive many questions and criteria from Socratic Greece and the Middle Ages, because the pressing problems of that era also remain valid. No wonder why in the geographical and chronological distance two recognized voices like those of Machiavelli and Hannah Arendt meet in divergence. For the Florentine, the governor is primarily an individual capable of achieving the purpose of acquiring power and keeps it, without moral hurdles, proper of the personal conception of life; for the German philosopher, in an Aristotelian evocation, the word defines politics. According to Arendt, logos, assumed as discourse, is the genuine political action, as Machiavelli sees the result - conquest and preservation of power rather than the means, which are the mechanisms that he prescribes in his gigantic opuscle: The Prince. Different-even contradictory-and distant, their views about State call us to reflect on a dimension of power- so human, and sometimes dehumanizing.