Antonio Negri
Abstract: This text by Antonio Negri, published in Rivista di storia della filosofia, vol. 22, no. 2 (April–June 1967), analyzes the formation of the modern state, beginning with the case of France between 1610 and 1650. Reviving Federico Chabod’s notion of the “state as machine,” Negri interprets absolutism as the outcome of the crisis of Renaissance humanism and the political defeat of the bourgeoisie, which, though socially hegemonic, was separated from the state. Through the examination of libertinism, Jansenism, and Cartesian philosophy, the article identifies the main ideological configurations that define the relationship between civil society and the absolute state. Finally, Negri proposes a new periodization, reading the humanist age as a long process of formation of the modern bourgeois order, completed only with the full capitalist triumph of the nineteenth century.
Keywords: State Machinery; Civil Society; Legitimacy Crisis; Bourgeois Revolution; Historiographical Critique.