1 MACHIAVELLI’S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Christopher Holman Published in 2016 in The European Legacy 21(8), pp. 769-790 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10848770.2016.1180866?journalCode=cele20 Introduction It has become increasingly common for readers of Niccolò Machiavelli to stress the extent to which the latter was significantly influenced by the Epicurean philosophical tradition, whose rediscovery in the Florentine context took on an especially acute form. 1 Machiavelli was most certainly very familiar with Epicureanism, having transcribed Lucretius’ De rerum natura and having been familiar with Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, as revealed for example in his redeployment of various of the statements found in this text in “The Life of Castruccio Castracani”. 2 Indeed, Paul Rahe notes that “by 1517 or so, if not well before, Machiavelli had made Lucretius’ repudiation of religion and his rejection of natural teleology his own.” 3 This rejection of natural teleology, of the foundational grounding of the movement of the world in some form of transcendent law or logic of development, is revealed in the numerous passages within Machiavelli’s writings suggesting the fundamentally inconstant, irregular, and variable form of being of the world. 4 Machiavelli can be seen to locate the chaotic structure of reality in a quasi-dialectical understanding of temporal objects. 5 This is certainly not a positive dialectical understanding that, in teleological fashion, assimilates historical events into a logical or causal time-continuum culminating in the actualization of a synthetic end, but rather a negative dialectical understanding that emphasizes the internal non-identity of objects. Objects are subject to a play of different forces, whose interaction and interpenetration generate a multitude of unique potentialities. Hence Machiavelli’s characterization of the process of