Machiavelli in the New World

In: Worldview, Band 26, Heft 8, S. 4-6

Abstract

The fundamental problems of politics, in the modern world as in the ancient one, have been and inevitably will be moral. To the ancients the maxim that no state could long flourish without virtue was clear. Equally clear was the conclusion that no state had ever conducted itself virtuously over a long span of years. We are all familiar with the philosophical and the practical debate over this problem, one that has perplexed statesmen and philosophers from the beginnings of history. We need only think of the New Testament account of Herod's massacre of the Innocents—an issue that conjured up, or seemed to conjure up, Reasons of State.