This chapter focuses on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Machiavelli’s political thought and argues that during the nineteenth-century Italian political language underwent a radical transformation: while the term Risorgimento had generally indicated a specific period of modern history (approximately from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), by the end of the century that term began to be identified with the Italian struggles for national emancipation. At the same time the word Renaissance began to be used to indicate the period of early modern history between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, also identified with the birth of ‘Modernity’. The transformation of the language represents a change of ideas, of the way the intellectual and political leaders of the Risorgimento interpreted the failed religious and moral reformation in early modern Italy and how Machiavelli represents the ‘Italian Luther’.

Chapter three concerns the role and influence of politics and other intangible elements in modern warfare. This is taken from a historical perspective with the philosophy of great military strategy thinkers such as Sun Tzu, Niccolo Macchiavelli and Carl von Clausewitz, and the influence of their ideas on the contemporary information war battlefield that runs parallel to physical wars.