Francesco Guicciardini’s essay “Del suicidio per ragione di libertà o di servitù” for the Florentine republican tradition

The study considers the work “Del suicidio per ragione di libertà o di servitù” by Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine historian, thinker and diplomat. It contains reasoning with justification of the moral and ethical choice of accepting or refusing to accept the restructuring of state political system according to the tyranny or people's power by people who represented in this system a “line” polar to the formed one. Despite the fact that Guicciardini analyses this ethical problem using examples from ancient history, his maxims are also related to the problems of his contemporary Florence of the Italian Wars, which lost its political sovereignty under the attack of the Habsburg Empire and committed a kind of suicidal act against itself as a great republic as a result of a series of internal political perturbations. The author concludes that the character of the considered work of Guicciardini as a “requiem” on the history of republicanism in Florence of thinker's era, clad in metaphors on the theme of ancient history. The author of the study has prepared a translation of Guicciardini's work “Del suicidio per ragione di libertà o di servitù” into Russian, which is placed in the appendix.