World History

"There is of course no point whatever in trying to formulate independent 'laws' for the behavior of two interdependent quantities.

Machiavelli was reviled throughout Europe during the 16th century and on into the next two centuries.

For while the humanists would hear of no institutional check on state rule, one critical stumbling block still remained: Christian virtue. What was needed, then, to complete the development of absolutist theory, was a theoretician to fearlessly break the ethical chains that still bound the ruler to the claims of moral principle. That man was the Florentine bureaucrat Niccolò Machiavelli.

By the 12th century, the Italian city-states had evolved a new form of government, new at least since ancient Greece.

Prosperity meant the standing temptation of wealth to loot, and so the German emperors, beginning with Frederick Barbarossa in 1154, began a two-centuries-long series of attempts to conquer the northern Italian cities.

Every state needs justification. And the justifiers are always welcomed and cheered by the state. So we should not be shocked that a false science — a science that props up the state — is embraced by the state and associated sycophants.

"Governmentalizing, and thereby controlling through an appropriate bureaucratic apparatus, the providing of medical, accident, and old age care and of death (burial) benefits seemed an obvious way to put the reins on laissez-faire capitalism as well as on labor."

Socrates' conversation illustrates the logic of the politics of plunder and injustice in the polis. Socrates is able to do this because of his audience's lack of a definition of justice.

"The kind of power traditionally exercised by kings and princes, represented chiefly by the tax collector and the military, was in fact a very weak kind of power compared with what a philosophy of government resting on the general will could bring about."

It is remarkable that the Constitution was little trusted or admired by the wisest and most illustrious of its founders, and that its severest and