This article identifies a striking affinity between Machiavelli and the natural philosophy of Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–1382). I situate both thinkers within a common ‘dirt-affirming’ philosophical tradition that challenges a robust doxa privileging harmony, coherence and stability. The central claim is that Oresme’s reflections on incommensurability, variability, and novelty provide a conceptual setting for Machiavelli’s political cosmos – one structured not by perfect order but by disruption and irregularity. I trace further convergences: both imagine a body politic inhabited by fluctuant humors; both take seriously the influence of celestial motion on human behavior while rejecting astral determinism; and – perhaps most radically – both sustain unpredictability and dissonance not as monstruous marks of irrationality but as necessary conditions of free will. Although direct influence cannot be demonstrated, Machiavelli likely encountered Oresme’s name and ideas, for example through Pico della Mirandola or other Italian scholars familiar with Oresme’s mathematical and astronomic studies. By tracing these resonances, the article complicates the prevailing view of Machiavelli as a distinctly modern thinker and argues that medieval natural philosophy provided conceptual resources for his vindication of antagonism and political liberty.

Animosity towards novelty is not only sustained by theology (where Creation is a divine prerogative), the arts (which privilege imitation) and politics (which favor custom). More fundamentally, I claim that it is a problem rooted in natural philosophy. If the study of Nature reveals its regularity, then phenomena of deviation, variation, or inconstancy must, by definition, be anomalous. The very notions of regularity, order, and harmony scarcely tolerate the idea of the new. How could Nature permit deviation or change without violating its own nature? This question lies at the heart of Nicole Oresme’s reflections on motion. Among the issues Oresme poses is whether kinetic movement is regular, commensurable, or whether incommensurability is (at all) conceivable in Nature. I argue that Oresme’s validation of incommensurability in natural philosophy paves the way for a positive revaluation of novelty, which he explicitly praises not only in the realm of aesthetic pleasure (in particular polyphonic music) but also in politics (where changes are welcome under certain conditions). At the core of this debate lies the understanding of movement and its mutations through notions such as novelty but also velocity, speed, rhythm, renovation – while each of these terms carries aesthetic and political significations.

A growing interest in Claude Lefort is bringing to light his radical insights on modern democracy, totalitarianism, and human rights. While the notion perhaps most closely associated with Lefort is that of ‘the empty place of power,’ this article offers a reading of Lefort from a unique angle: his concept of the myth of the One. I demonstrate that to Lefort, the phantasmagorical appeal of the One – the desire for harmony, unity and stability – is the force that continually endangers the democratic project, while the distinctive and unavoidable characteristic of democratic society is its ‘inability’ to name itself as One – a coherent and established social self. Thus, the main challenge of society is its symbolic self-institution. The discussion illuminates Lefort’s singular stance in the study of totalitarianism (Arendt), his rejection of the imaginary (next to Castoriadis), his debt to the structuralism scheme (Lévi-Strauss), as well as his conversation with anarchist voices (La Boétie, Clastres) and with psychoanalysis (Lacan). Ultimately, what Lefort coins ‘symbolic division’ condenses the pledge of democracy to embrace a neurotic self, a bodiless body, a nameless identity in an empty space of power. As such, Lefort’s anti-myth of the One promises to be a vexing objective.

The ambition of the present volume is to explore the (dis)ordering impact of emotions and gender ideologies, or how emotions and gender transform the strengthening or weakening of social structures. This book should definitely be seen as the twin volume of Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100-1800 also edited by Susan Broomhall (2015). In her introductory paper Broomhall asserts that "states of emotions" have structuring purposes as well as the power to affect secure social balances: "We thus explore how gender and emotions operated to effect real or perceived forms of order and disorder" (1). While states of disarray are in some of the cases studies a consequence of concrete historical events involving much instability, such as revolts, crusades, or wars, in other cases they are themselves emotions, such as anxiety caused by personal changes (such as travel, for instance). In other words, disorder can itself be a matter of feelings of alarm. Such a wide-ranging notion of "(dis)order" can be perplexing.

Contrary to most readers who have emphasized the notions of passage or liminality, I demonstrate in this study that Van Gennep’s Rites de passage is articulated around the four notions of sequences, margins, passages, and schema. Subsequently, the main claim of this article is to propose the idea of social kinesis—or social rhythm—as the crux of Van Gennep’s theory. Such a fresh reappraisal of Van Gennep is also an opportunity to show how Pierre Bourdieu sought for social laws and regularities in a rather deterministic fashion, and completely overlooked Van Gennep’s idea of motion. More importantly, this article is an invitation to reconsider Van Gennep’s epistemological approach as a bridge between the social and the life sciences. Indeed, Van Gennep’s so-called méthode des séquences emerges from a dialogue between the social sciences and biology on the one hand, and with cosmology on the other. Indeed, I illuminate how Van Gennep investigated the enigmas of social life and dynamics within the framework of his understanding of metabolism and regenerative processes.