History of mordern political thought - Essay Example

..But mostly he wrote about politics. He was mad about politics. He says in one of his letters that he had to talk about it; he could talk of nothing else.The Prince is scarcely more than a pamphlet, a very minor fraction of its author's work, but it overshadows all the rest.Everyone recognizes "Machiavellian" as an adjective for political conduct that combines diabolical cunning with a ruthless disregard for moral standards.The Prince contradicts everything else Machiavelli ever wrote and everything we know about his life.. The notion that The Prince is what it pretends to be, a scientific manual for tyrants, has to contend not only against Machiavelli's life but against his writings.

The standard explanation has been that in the corrupt conditions of sixteenth-century Italy only a prince could create a strong state capable of expansion. The trouble with this is that it was chiefly because they widened their boundaries that Machiavelli preferred republics. In the Discorsi he wrote, "We know by experience that states have never signally increased either in territory or in riches except under a free government. The cause is not far to seek, since it is the well-being not of the individuals but of the community which makes the state great, and without question this universal well-being is nowhere secured save in a republic.. Popular rule is always better than the rule of princes." (1958) Machiavelli was a nationalist, a political scientist, a scholar and a staunch republican.

About the most pro-monarchic view that could possibly be ascribed to him is that a Prince might be the best way to unify Italy. Machiavelli began by writing satire of the corrupt leaders of Italy such as the Medicis, making bare their horrible and destructive ambitions, but he also created modern political science simultaneously. This paper will analyze precisely how The Prince is in fact brilliant political science. Modern political science takes something for granted that classical analyses of politics and law would have found preposterous: Analyses of what governments actually do and how to efficently carry out objectives are just as valuable as analyses of what governments should do.

The Prince describes how princes actually behave and how they should behave if they want to be effective, not if they want to be moral. The Prince opens up in a rather startling way for a philosophy book about politics and law: It describes what principalities there are (Chapter I). He goes on to distinguish separate types of rule for hereditary and mixed principalities (Chapter II and III). The Prince is proceeding with simple, clear analyses, breakdowns and categories. Filling The Prince is distinct analysis of history of the Greeks and Romans, what a modern political scientist would call a case study, providing support for his claims.

Take his analysis of Nabis in Chapter IX. “Nabis, Prince of the Spartans, sustained the attack of all Greece, and of a victorious Roman army, and against them he defended his country and his government; and for the overcoming of this peril it was only necessary for him to make himself secure against a few, but this would not have been sufficient if the people had been hostile.[G]ranted a prince who has established himself as above, who can command, and is a man of courage, undismayed in adversity, who does not fail in other qualifications, and who, by his resolution and energy, keeps the whole people encouraged — such a one will never find himself deceived in them, and it will be shown that