Maquiavel: o Príncipe que não houve

Abstract

Conceived as a lecture for a Criminal Policy course in progress, this text investigates the dispersion of punitive power in the cities of the northern Italian peninsula, a dispersion that delayed the formation of an Italian national state. Unlike the concentration of punitive power taking place in other countries, the peculiar economic and political process of those cities - whose governing models are briefly examined - prevented absolutist centralization. The central object of the analysis is Machiavelli's negative preventive-general criminal policy, which is based on historical bibliographical sources.