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Abstract
Since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, some philosophical questions connected with modernity have taken centre stage again: these relate to power, sovereignty, freedom and moral responsibility; and above all to the importance of the use of time in public life and health issues, something that is closely connected to political organisation. This article goes back to the birth of modernity to see how problems related to these subjects were dealt with by one of its most important thinkers: Machiavelli. The aim is to go beyond the traditional two-dimensional reading that defines him as a 'Machiavellian' friend of tyrants and at the same time overcome the contemporary interpretation that he was a champion of republican freedom. Instead, the article detects the temporality of political life, which constantly changes the setting in which we move – meaning we are unable to always trust the same solutions. Machiavelli allows us to understand this time of contingency and opportunity, which we must learn to use in order to take ownership of the sovereign space in which what was not can be.

In the contemporary debate no topic is more prominent than that of responsibility. If only because global changes, technologic al development, wars, pandemics or ecological catastrophe show us the consequences of humanity acting irresponsibly. In deed, it is the same limitless power that huma nity has evoked that drives it to raise questions about that power. Responsibility relates to humanity's ability to respond to its actions. But to whom, to what, does one respond? Contemporary politics does not seem to be able to offer a convincing vision: on the one hand we are witnessing an individualization of responsibility, a blaming of the individual, citizen or political actor. On the other hand, there is a growing irresponsibility resulting from a freedom that wants to be ever more absolute. Is it possible, then, to imagine a responsibility focused on the collective, that maintains a rela tionship with history, that shifts the attention from the individual to rulers and organizational processes? Antonio Gramsci, in an era in many ways similar to ours seems to have been able to conceive of a concept of responsibility that proves itself very relevant to our current condition. In this essay I read Gramsci's reflection s from the novel perspective of responsibility and bring his conclusions up to date