Word: machiavelli
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...While Putin may be "Tsar of the New Russia," as you called him, he is most definitely its new prince as described by Machiavelli back in the 16th century. Putin has followed Machiavelli's playbook for managing and retaining power with a deftness and an intelligence rarely seen in modern statesmen. You have it right; his Russia will be a major element of the 21st century. Nels Pearson, Redondo Beach, Calif...
...proliferation—or translated into therapies, like those our researchers have designed to treat macular degeneration or to combat anthrax. The expansion of knowledge means change. But change is often uncomfortable, for it always encompasses loss as well as gain, disorientation as well as discovery. It has, as Machiavelli once wrote, no constituency. Yet in facing the future, universities must embrace the unsettling change that is fundamental to every advance in understanding...
Italy's ongoing wars provide King's book with its narrative structure, but Machiavelli's personal struggles give it drive. After 15 years of service - representing Florence abroad, raising and training its first citizen militia, and collaborating with Leonardo da Vinci on engineering projects - Machiavelli watched his beloved city-state fall to the Spanish in 1512. Under the subsequently installed Medici family, he was imprisoned, tortured by having his shoulders dislocated, and banned from his former offices. He retreated to the countryside with his wife, then pregnant with their seventh child. King doesn't miss the irony: "He understood better...
They were the darkest years of Machiavelli's life, and King poignantly captures his anguish as he became a broken man, haunted by a sense of defeat and inadequacy. "Physically I feel well, but ill in every other respect," he wrote to a friend in 1513. Subsequent missives grew increasingly plaintive as he worried about "rotting away ... unable to find any man who recalls my service or believes I might be good for anything." The man who had once graced the courts of Louis XII and Ferdinand II now trapped birds for dinner and passed his afternoons in a tavern...
Political philosophers will find little new in King's sound, if predictable, analysis of Machiavelli's later writings, which show an evolution in his thinking. In Discourses, Machiavelli demonstrated a more idealistic outlook, embracing personal liberty, republicanism and good government. King's real achievement comes in his careful appraisal of Machiavelli's lesser-known works - the poems and bawdy plays that provided an outlet for his lascivious imagination and wit. In the play Clizia he mocked the folly of an older man pursuing a younger woman. In the novella The Fable of Belfagor, he speared matrimony by having the protagonist...