Have we got Machiavelli all wrong? | Books | The Guardian - 0 views
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The quickest way, it says, is to have fortune on your side from the outset, with plenty of inherited money and a leg up through family connections.
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Make the people your best friend. Promise to protect their interests against predatory elites and foreigners.
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he recommended them – that he himself is the original Machiavellian, the first honest teacher of dishonest politics.
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But what if we’re overlooking Machiavelli’s less obvious messages, his deeper insights into politics?
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Yes, he made sinister excuses for violence and hypocrisy. But his reasons were patriotic, well-meaning, human.
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But he also says – in a passage most scholars pass over – that “victories are never secure without some respect, especially for justice”. For every cynical Machiavellian precept, I found two or three others that clashed with it.
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If we look again at how he lived his life and how that life shaped his thoughts, it looks as if we’ve got Machiavelli all wrong.
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Overinterpretation is very tricky because we never know certain of what other people are trying to say. Especially when we are studying the words of people in the history. People are never consistent with themselves, and I think that's why life is so interesting. People love the coming of age stories because you never know where the character will go. The same with people in the history. They are not black or white. They are a mix. But our confirmation bias always make us unconsciously select the words from them that support our opinion. Although we always say we can learn from the history, what we actually are doing is just agreeing on stuff that we have already agreed with. This is not real learning. --Sissi (3/4/2017)