On Machiavelli
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ~George Santayana~ The Question of Machiavelli There is something surprising about the sheer number of interpretations of Machiavelli’s political opinions. There exist, even now, over a score of leading theories of how to interpret The Prince and The Discourses—apart from a cloud of subsidiary views and glosses. The bibliography of this is vast and growing faster than ever. While there may exist no more than the normal extent of disagreement about the meaning of particular terms or theses contained in these works, there is a startling degree of divergence about the central view, the basic political attitude of Machiavelli. This phenomenon is easier to understand in the case of other thinkers whose opinions have continued to puzzle or agitate mankind—Plato, for example, or Rousseau or Hegel or Marx. But then it might be said that Plato wrote in a world and in a language that we cannot be sure we...