Biography

Eugenia Mattei is a specialist in Niccolò Machiavelli and his relationship with modernity. Her research focuses on Machiavelli’s political thought and its contemporary projections, particularly in relation to populism. She holds a PhD from the University of Buenos Aires. She is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), based at the Institute for Research Gino Germani (IIGG), and Associate Professor at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been a visiting scholar at KU Leuven, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo, and Universidad de Sevilla. Her work has been published in academic journals in Spain, France, Argentina, Italy, Colombia, and Chile. Her recent book is Machiavelli, pueblo y populismo. Historia, teoría política y debates interpretativos, co-edited with Leandro Losada and published by IIGG–CLACSO.
 

Project Summary

Between the Italian Renaissance and the early modern expansion, the emergence of the Americas profoundly reshaped the conceptual language of European political thought. This project examines how the encounter with the New World intersected with and transformed key categories of power, freedom, and legitimacy through the lens of Niccolò Machiavelli. Although Machiavelli never explicitly referred to America, his work develops within an intellectual horizon marked by discovery, exploration, and the crisis of Christendom. From this perspective, America is not treated as a peripheral object but as a conceptual space in which political categories are redefined. The project traces this transformation across three dimensions: the indirect presence of the New World in Machiavelli’s writings; the reconfiguration of authority, religion, and domination in early modern interpretations of the Americas; and the reaction of anti-Machiavellian thought in early modern Spain. On this basis, the project reconstructs a shared conceptual field linking Renaissance political thought and the colonial experience, showing how the transatlantic circulation of ideas was constitutive—rather than merely reflective—of the formation of modern political categories.