I finally got around to uploading my Bachelor’s thesis: Machiavellin Fortuna, kummallinen sattuma. As you may be able to guess from the title, it’s in Finnish.
A quick summary in English: Machiavelli inherited the concept of fortuna from the Romans. Fortuna is a powerful and unpredictable goddess who is largely responsible for our… well, fortunes. However, Machiavelli seems not to believe in such goddesses, and his project is to minimize the accidental element in political life, and perhaps life in general. His use of the goddess is primarily rhetorical. However, as rhetoric, it is not always effective, if we consider that Machiavelli contradicts himself from time to time on the question of how powerful fortuna actually is. I speculate that this is because Machiavelli himself is not completely sure of what he’s doing. From the theoretical (or scientific) perspective, fortuna does not exist. But perhaps since Machiavelli is not purely a theorist, but also a teacher of morals, he also uses rhetorical concepts because of their psychological effect.