Machiavelli, Lucretius, and Latent Temporalities

• In Event: Rethinking Machiavelli through His Philosophical Sources

Abstract

Sometime prior to 1498 Machiavelli transcribed by hand his own copy of the 1495 Venetian edition of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Recently, scholars like Rahe (2008) and Brown (2010) have explored possible ways Machiavelli may have been influenced by Lucretius concerning the nature of the origin of human society and the character of religion as superstition based on fear of punishment. This paper takes a different approach and examines the relationship between the two from the standpoint of their reasoning on the nature of time. Both Machiavelli and Lucretius resist notions of time as linear and teleological. They do this by conceiving any particular event, or l’occasione, as a conjunction of multiple, causal rhythms ranging from the biological to the political. This leads both authors to affirm a notion of human action as neither entirely determined nor contingent but, rather, the composite effect of irreducibly many, latent temporalities.

Author

• Sean David Erwin, Barry University