Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

82 results

Page 1 of 5

  • 2 - Machiavelli’s World

  • from Part I - Machiavelli’s Enterprise and “the World”
  • Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Machiavelli's Effectual Truth
    Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023, pp 33-70

  • Summary

    Machiavelli creates the modern world of necessities that can be understood and controlled. He invented a world in the modern sense of a whole by itself, not explained by ideas or essences, and not followed by the next world.

Machiavelli's Effectual Truth
  • Creating the Modern World
  • Harvey C. Mansfield
  • Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • Machiavelli is said to be a Renaissance thinker, yet in a notable phrase he invented, 'the effectual truth,' he attacked the high-sounding humanism typical of the Renaissance, while mounting a conspiracy against the classical and Christian values of his time. In Machiavelli's Effectual Truth this overlooked phrase is studied and explained for the first time. The upshot of 'effectual truth' for any individual is to not depend on anyone or anything outside yourself to keep you free and secure. Mansfield argues that this phrase reveals Machiavelli's approach to modern science, with its focus on the efficient cause and concern for fact. He inquires into the effect Machiavelli expected from his own writings, who believed his philosophy would have an effect that future philosophers could not ignore. His plan, according to Mansfield, was to bring about a desired effect and thus to create his own future and ours.

  • 16 - The Republican Form of Government in The Federalist

  • Edited by Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University, California, Colleen A. Sheehan, Villanova University, Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to <I>The Federalist</I>
    Published online:
    28 February 2020
    Print publication:
    12 March 2020, pp 557-586

  • Summary

    The wisdom of The Federalist brings the politics of liberalism to a height it had not reached before and was not to keep. To sustain this lofty claim, I shall first briefly compare its political science – the form of its wisdom – both backward to its sources in liberalism and republicanism and forward to its unwitting heir, the political science of today. The Federalist made liberalism popular and republicanism viable, on the one hand refashioning Locke and Montesquieu to accommodate the American “republican genius” (Fed. 66, 448; also Fed. 37, 234; Fed. 70, 471) and on the other, giving lessons in prudence to naïve republicans in thrall to utopian theory and unable to learn from sad experience. Looking forward, we shall see that our political science repeats the formula we have from Publius (apparent author of The Federalist), as it criticizes formal theory and then proceeds to recreate a formal theory of its own. But our political science does this unconsciously and incompletely, so that it loses the capacity to give advice. To recover the wisdom of The Federalist – still available to us – I shall examine its reform of the republican form and try to show how we can recover its sage and subtle advice. To follow Publius will require a study of the use and abuse of forms in politics.

Page 1 of 5