Abstract

Machiavelli subjects the notion of the common good of the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition to a significant work of re-semantization. While in this tradition, from Aquinas to Girolami, up to Savonarola, the common good had a solid metaphysical and theological foundation, in Machiavelli’s works these metaphysical and theological foundations are lost. His challenge is to think of a possible common good starting from the conviction that every politicalcommunity is structurally divided into different humors, which convey different desires and different ways of relating to the experience of freedom. The common good is constituted by the orders and laws that make life and liberty possiblein the republic: orders and laws are not fixed once and for all, but are in a process of constant revision and re-elaboration. Machiavelli thus transmits to the thinkers of the modern republican tradition, from Giannotti to Harrington to Rousseau, a notion of the common good rich in fruitful implications and potential developments