Ricardo Polidoro Mendes

Conflict is a central concept in Machiavelli's philosophy, since in several of his writings the Florentine states that every social body is split by two disunity moods: that of the people, of not being dominated, and that of the great, of dominating. This conflict, however, does not signal the impossibility of social life, but is what the structure, because each city institutes laws and ordinances for itself according to this dynamic between these political agents, so that ordinance is not simply an institutional arrangement that eliminates the moods, but a structure that allows the release of the moods and, thus, the movements of the social body and the action of agents. This operation of the two desires, however, is not symmetrical, since the people only want not to be dominated, while the great ones want to dominate, oppress, which gives rise to different effects, because, if they are superimposed on the popular ones, they submit the social body with the aim of appropriating it only for its own interest and throwing servitude on it. Thus, only when the people express their desire, when they act and oppose the big ones and have authority in the republic, can freedom be effective, as it refuses the domination of the big ones and expands the public space beyond their personal interests. This work, therefore, aims to investigate the action of the people and to what extent it promotes freedom. We defend that the operation of this political agent is not restricted to ordinary modes, because only through extraordinary action, when the people demand the reorganization of the social body and impose a limit on the action of the great, true freedom can be achieved.