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Protagoras and Thrasymachus Niccolo Machiavelli Thomas Hobbes Friedrich from MHC 101 at University of South Florida. Free Essay: Comparing Machiavelli's The Prince and Plato's The Republic Many people in history have written about ideal rulers and states and how to maintain.
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After reading the Discourses on Livy, it seems that Machiavelli tends to really criticise the characteristics and tendencies of humanity - How he feels that he is providing the guidance that is needed. Just prior to reading the Discourses, I read The Republic again for the first time in a while, and I couldn't help but think - what would Socrates think about Machiavelli's approach on humanity. I feel that he would find Machiavelli harsh in his approach? Considering the amount of violence and and cruelty that is being promoted in Machiavelli's works. (Both the Prince and Discourses involved) (sorry if my english isn't that great)
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We may let Machiavelli speak for himself, but how shall we understand what he says?While Neville’s fictitious defense of Machiavelli does not authentically respond to this question, Neville does suggest a reasonable posture to take.When he closed the essay by invoking Aristotle and Plato, tacitly showing how the abandonment of Aristotle’s moral distinctions leads ineluctably back to the challenge to Plato to defend justice, he invited the speculation that his own most comprehensive work, Plato Redivivus, perhaps recognized in Machiavelli its inspiration.The re-born Plato was not Neville but Machiavelli, and the defense of “liberal democracy” which Neville outlined has to be understood as founded on the moral distinctions introduced by the “born again Plato.”The question:Is the “born again Plato” a dialectically superior Thrasymachus or is there an alternative to the defense of justice which Plato placed in the mouth of Socrates?Correlatively, is liberal democracy founded in indifference to justice (i.e., overthrowing the claims of every other regime), or is liberal democracy founded in superior claims to justice?
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In acknowledging this much Vissing requires further to acknowledge that the ability to think in this Platonic fashion is not general but rather limited to a few.Thus, the “people” play a passive role, as “clients” of the knowing prince who manages their illusions. [13] Furthermore, not every would be prince can manage the illusions, since in addition to being able to “sniff out the reality,” it is necessary to be able to “smell” it and have an opportunity to “touch” it. [14] We have, then, a special class of prince, the philosopher-prince, who conforms to the Machiavellian standard.
Here is where Machiavelli’s insertion of the vérità effetuale in our story, for it replaces, not the “noble lie,” but the “lie in the soul.”Here the philosopher-prince encounters a constraint of nature, which makes it impossible for him to speak to the many save by means of their illusions.Thus, he does not so much lie as approach the truth by means of the vérità effetuale.That is the best he can do. Vissing here turned to the political outcome, rather than the natural constraint, and missed the most telling point of Machiavelli’s usage. When Machiavelli substituted for the Platonic distinction between truth and appearance (or nature and convention), the concept of vérità effetuale, he applied reason across the board to every political undertaking, including appearances or the manipulation of opinion.True, he made political efficacy depend on success in sustaining the passivity of the prince’s clientele, [20] but he did so from necessity.That is why one cannot stop at saying a prince can be loved by his people. [21] What being loved by the people means is to be thought just. For the best men, who rule as princes, to be thought just, and to know themselves to be regarded so, is to live with a “lie in the soul.”
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The foregoing argument makes clear the extent to which we dissent from Adams’s moral archeology.Nevertheless, he hints at some kind of relation between Machiavelli’s moral skepticism and the revolution which eventuated in the United States.We must ask further, therefore, whether the United States is Machiavellian, despite Washington’s attempt to place the nation beyond such a choice.