Prophets, resurgences, and the truth: in discussion with Maurizio Viroli’s Prophetic Times

Abstract

Maurizio Viroli’s Prophetic Times: Visions of Emancipation in the History of Italy (2023) is the latest in a long list of outstanding works on Italian intellectual history that the scholar has published in the course of his career. Many of these works address one of the key issues posed by Machiavelli, an author to whom Viroli has dedicated the greater part of his intellectual endeavours: Italy “seems born to resuscitate dead things”