![]() Oddly, it seems in some ways, religion does not seem to be a major theme of The Prince. To affect the maxims, to affect the standards that govern our lives, it is necessary to go to the source of those standards and those maxims and that can only be found in religion. You have to go to the source of morality. In order, he argues, to effect a transformation of European morality, it is, in other words, to teach the prince, as he says in chapter 15, how not to be good, you have to go to the source of the morality. ![]() I want to talk about what in the political and philosophical literature about this is called the problem of “dirty hands.” And if you want to join the political game, you must be prepared to get your hands dirty, and what Machiavelli means by that, how he comes to this problem. Virtue is associated with the quest for worldly glory, with ambition, with the desire to achieve success, and that’s what I want to talk about at greater length today. ![]() He tells us, in chapter 25 of The Prince, the ethic of the prince must be one of audacity and even more audacity and that famous and very volatile image he uses, fortune is a woman and you must know how- the prince must know how to conquer the woman, must be used through policies of force, brutality, audacity. ![]() Virtue is, for him, or to use his term again, virtù is related with manliness, with force, with power. Machiavelli seeks to replace, to transpose an older vocabulary associated both with Plato and certainly, perhaps more importantly, with biblical sources, wants to transform altogether the language of virtue, to give it a new kind of meaning, to change it from either Platonic or Christian otherworldliness to a greater sense of worldly power. ![]() Professor Steven Smith: Last time, I ended by talking about Machiavelli as both a revolutionary in many ways and a reformer of the moral vocabulary about virtue and vice, good and evil. Introduction to Political Philosophy PLSC 114 - Lecture 11 - New Modes and Orders: Machiavelli, The Prince (chaps. ![]()
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