Every Good Morning

  Machiavelli’s view of humanity brings to mind this description of The Inferno : “… Virgil’s warning to Dante when traveling in Hell: if he is to see rightly, pity is forbidden. The eye that wishes to see human nature complete must be unclouded by tears, unclouded even by allegiance.” * In this context of pitilessness, we see that Machiavelli has little faith in human nature: “We can say this of most […]

One can draw out Machiavelli’s assumptions about human beings based on his analysis of power and his real-world examples. We possess a desire for freedom that is intrinsic and therefore a capacity for rebellion that is equally intrinsic. We are naturally corrupt. No one and nothing can perfect us. In theological terms, we are all sinners. Some may sin more, some may sin less, but no one is without sin. […]

The Prince is a treatise on political power – how to claim it, how to keep it, how to defeat one’s enemies. It is also a book written to please a prince. Its tone is one of servility, for it was written to an actual Prince to curry favor and to secure some scrap of power and a living for Machiavelli. It is a book about how a sovereign can […]

I became aware of Dr. King in the late summer of 1963 as a ten-year-old in perpetual motion moving past our black and white TV and seeing pictures of a black man speaking in drawn out syllables and a crowd that seemed to fill up Washington D.C. I remember his voice then. No one I knew spoke like that. The priests mumbled, the nuns’ sentences came in the form of […]