![]() At an extreme - that moment when the polis broke down entirely under the strain of fortune - virtù could take the form of audacity exercised by Machiavelli's infamous Prince. Because fortune was so powerful (and God suddenly so absent), Machiavelli's conception of virtù called for a new degree of assertiveness on the part of citizens. The key thinker in this Italian milieu was Niccolò Machiavelli, who went further than anyone else in secularizing politics by recognizing the destructive power of fortune in human history. ![]() As a result of this awakening, the humanists theorized that individuals must take up active civic life - must exercise civic virtue - in order to take charge of the course of history and prevent the decay of their state. ![]() This thread, which we may call "civic republicanism," emerged in Italy as the Renaissance humanists (a) revived knowledge of classical civilization and (b) realized that societies are located in time and thus are subject to change. The Machiavellian Moment argues that a distinct thread of political thought ran from medieval Florence through Stuart and Hanoverian England to nineteenth-century America. Here is my first, informal attempt to do that for J.G.A. ![]() Were I placed in charge of the administration of purgatory, I would institute a rule for the purification of scholars: they must revise their entire published oeuvre and resubmit it as a brochure.Īfter all, that's pretty much what they make us students do. ![]()
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