The
Prince
“When
one considers how much corruption there was in those kings, if two or
three successive reigns had continued the same way, and that corruption
which was in them had spread to members of the body politic, it would
no longer have been possible to reform [Rome].”
That was Niccolo Machiavelli, commenting in his Discourses on Livy
published in 1517, almost 500 years ago, on what might have happened if
the ancient Roman monarchy had not been overthrown by Brutus and a
republic established. Although better known for his masterpiece of
political violence, The Prince, here in Discourses Machiavelli’s clear
preference for republican government and liberty can be found.
But, writes Machiavelli, freedom has a prerequisite, and that is virtue
— a love of liberty. Lacking this virtue, then, a people become
ambivalent to politics and those who wield power. Politics becomes the
province of the powerful that participate, and lacking power, is
something to otherwise be avoided out of fear. There are those who have
access, and then there is everyone else.
If such a form of government persists for long, the freedom of the
republic as a whole is ultimately lost, and the people themselves are
corrupted. Not in the sense that they are accepting bribes — although
public forms of subsistence duly enacted can be common in these cases
to sweeten the deal of wearing a yoke — but in that inherent inability
and unwillingness of the people and their representatives to affect the
outcome of public ...
[Full]
THE
KING
"Plato
has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to
the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people
watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a
fire behind them, and begin to ascribe names to these shadows.
According to Plato's Socrates, the shadows are as close as the
prisoners get to viewing reality."
When
one of the chained is released into the real world, he is
astounded.
When he goes back to the cave to tell his brethren that everything
they've learned from the shadows is false, they would kill him if they
could for questioning what they learned in Professor José Ángel
Gutiérrez's classroom.
