Abstract
In “Machiavelli’s Populist Republicanism and the Perversion of Democracy”, Jan Bíba offers another perspective on Machiavelli’s populist republicanism reffering to the work of Margaret Canovan in an attempt at conceiving of Machiavelli’s populism as a political style. Bíba’s argumentation is based on the claim that this form of populism is not encumbered by the unconscious notion of the people’s perversion found in the main schools of contemporary democratic theory that calls into doubt the people’s intelligence and capacity for participating in democracy.
Bíba’s Machiavelli is a kind of organic intellectual who helps to articulate the people’s political program, based on non-domination. In the voices of the excluded and rejected,this populist Machiavelli uncovers a specific, fully-fledged political logic.
In the second part of his essay, Bíba supports his interpretation using Machiavelli’s interpretation of the revolution of Florence’s urban poor, the “Revolt of the Ciompi.”