ABSTRACT
The name of Machiavelli has become almost the symbol of pure politics and it certainly marks a sharp crisis in the development of the science. It is known that Machiavelli discovered the necessity and autonomy of politics, of politics which is beyond or, rather, below moral good and evil, which has its own laws against which it is useless to rebel, politics that cannot be exorcized and driven from world with holy water. For Vico, politics, force, the creative energy of States, becomes a phase of the human spirit and of the life of society, an eternal phase, the phase of certainty, which is followed eternally, through dialectic development, by the phase of truth, of reason fully explained, of justice and of morality, or ethics. The foremost Machiavellian satirist of the eighteenth century was the abbot Galiani, a politician of the old Italian school who chanced to fall among the naturalists, the economists, the encyclopædists and the abstractionists of Paris.
