Breaking the Circle

This chapter examines how early modern political thought broke free from classical cyclical conceptions of time to embrace historical contingency and openness to the future—a transformation essential to later democratic imagination. Beginning with Renaissance astrology's dual temporality, the analysis traces how Machiavelli and his predecessors challenged the medieval politics of eternity grounded in divine providence. Ancient Greek philosophy viewed political change skeptically, privileging eternal truth over democratic opinion, while Roman thought began to emphasize human agency and founding moments. Christianity introduced linear eschatology but maintained interpretive control over history. The republican revival in Renaissance Italy, particularly in Florence, reimagined politics as a secular, historically contingent domain shaped by human action rather than divine design. Machiavelli's reconceptualization of fortuna as radical unpredictability, combined with his insistence on collective political judgment, established history as a space of strategic possibility. This “breaking of the circle”—the shift from cyclical necessity to contingent futurity—created the temporal conditions for conceiving democracy as self-governance oriented toward an open future shaped by human action.