Machiavelli’s antipathy toward institutionalized Christianity has been very well documented, but less attention has been afforded to whether there might be some version of Christianity of which he would have approved. In the present paper, we investigate Machiavelli’s misgivings about Christianity by inquiring into the role that he assigned to prayer, through which Christian “ideology” was operationalized. To our knowledge, nowhere in the large body of Machiavelli literature has anyone investigated systematically one such device for transmitting doctrinal principles into everyday (...) practices. We contend that Machiavelli’s formulation of prayer is consistently transactional and in line with pagan worship, especially as it was practised by Roman religion. We conclude that Machiavelli was not un-Christian, but that his formulation of prayer reveals one element of his criticism of the earthly church that he believed was complicit in twisting Christianity’s potential for promoting commitment to love of country and civic liberty. (shrink)

In this paper, we observe an undergoing transformation in the qualification of the processes of emergence that we call ‘innovation’. First conceived in the industrial mode defined by Schumpeter within the consumer economy context, innovation has now acquired a more general meaning and has been transformed in the understanding of collective action. Against the backdrop of transformations in the industrial reality, the crisis of desire in consumer societies, and the impoverishment of the imaginary, ‘social innovation’ appears to be a new (...) form of imaginary institution of society in the definition that Cornelius Castoriadis gave to this expression. The semantic enrichment of the notion of innovation allows us to glimpse a new framework for the ethics of innovation, which needs to be interpreted from the perspective of the age of transitions. (shrink)