ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs Machiavelli’s interpretation of conspiracies from the point of view of political theory and sociology. Machiavelli (as Leo Strauss had already realized) is the first political thinker in history who had interpreted the conspiracy in a global and unitary way, beyond the individual conspiracies which—starting from Classical Antiquity—had been studied by historians and chroniclers. In Machiavelli’s opinion, the conspiracy was a political category, and he offered a phenomenological interpretation that honors, even five centuries later, a surprising modernity.
