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The article by Marcianne Blévis depicts jealousy as an affect that is part of the adventure of the common person, expressing the vulnerability of the individual and his or her feeling of exclusion. With Machiavelli, we are dealing with a completely different world of political issues. Polemical emulation may stimulate men and women to action, but it also exposes them to the conflict of ambitions. In the Machiavellian paradigm, motivation, a passion that is endowed with a dimension of challenge, represents a more aggressive stimulus to action than the classic paradigm, that of the conquest of a blindly hostile Nature, which becomes an impersonal and indifferent power.