The Ideology of the Regional State
Keyword(s):
This chapter analyses the way in which the Visconti justified their seigneury and their expansionist policies on an ethical and political level. They attempted to set themselves up as paladins in the war against tyranny—now seen not in its traditional sense as one of the degenerate forms of government, but as a division of the political body, a prime cause of war and an obstacle to peace. Through this intrepid conceptual twist, pro-Visconti circles were thus notably successful in deflecting any delegitimizing accusation away from their masters, while at the same time elaborating an ethico-political justification for their expansionism: a first glimpse, here, of the ideological foundations of the regional state.