O CONCEITO DE RAZÃO DE ESTADO NO LIMIAR DO RENASCIMENTO TARDIO

The purpose of this article is to present the concept of reason of State in Italian Renaissance humanist literature, with the purpose of understanding the process through which the contributions of classical theorists of reason of State, more precisely the Italians Nicolau Machiavelli and Giovanni Botero and the Frenchman Gabriel Naudé, operate a rupture in the scope of politics and ethics in the analysis of political phenomena based on immediate experience, understanding it as a study of conflicts between States for power. Based on the lessons of history and the context in which they lived, the aforementioned Italian thinkers, from a realist perspective, observed what really existed in the society of that historical period and saw that men do not have a tendency towards peace, but towards conflict, as they enter into disagreements with each other so that they can prosper towards power. It is this driving force of the political process, the impulse of the greatest disputes between men at the beginning of Modernity, therefore, that led these thinkers to think about how political power is achieved and maintained.