Machiavelli in hell by Sebastian De Grazia

Author:Sebastian De Grazia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527., Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527 -- Ethics., Florence (Italy) -- Politics and government -- 1421-1737.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1989-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Moses, perhaps his £freatest hero, is the model of the babe in the bulrushes.

CHAPTER lO

death of Lorenzo de’ Medici the elder, the Duomo was struck in its highest point by a celestial arrow . . ” Neither do they form theological or supernatural assertions, such as that God does not want to take free choice away from us or that Fortuna is the arbiter of half our actions. They are more like natural laws in the Thomistic view: universally valid, discoverable by reason, implicating the nature and acts of men. But Nic-colo’s propositions do not prescribe that men should or must act in proper ways; and they apply more to institutions or collective acts of men than to the conduct of single persons. If not as laws of nature, they may be classified as laws of history. Though he uses neither natural nor historical to refer to them, their context embraces discourse on the nature of history and historical events, which Niccolo commonly Latinizes as worldly things or the human things of the world.

Our author’s interest in making universal historical propositions dates back, we know, at least to his days as Secretary. It brings him to the resounding opening of The Prince: ‘All states, all dominions that have had and have imperium over men’ . . . The propositions of the present group appear mainly in the Discourses and to a lesser extent in the Florentine Histories. Thev are related to his assertion of the recur-rence of events in history. We first hear that “the world was always in a way inhabited by men who have always had the same passions” in a short, sharp paper written in 1503, “On the Method of Dealing with the Rebellious Peoples [against Florence] in the Val di Chiana.” Elaboration appears in the Discourses. Anyone who considers present and ancient events recognizes that in all cities and peoples there are “those same desires and those same humors . . . that were there alwavs” and that give rise to “the similarity of events” throughout historv. The Discourses later refines this similarity to almost a matching of events: “all the things in the world in every time have their own counterpart wjth ancient times. Which occurs because those [things of the world] are carried out by men who have and always had the same passions, [and so] it must happen of necessity that [those things] come out with the same effect.”

In Clizia^ the playwright as he mounts the stage to deliver the prologue pokes ftin at the historian. The case you are about to hear, he explains to the cultivated audience, originally happened in Athens, “but what do you say if the same case, a few years or so ago, happened again in Florence?” Fie asks the question in order to illustrate his point: “If in the world the same men returned as the same cases do return, a hundred years would never go by before they would find us again together doing the same things as now.

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