Sublime

The link between intentional deception and cognitive limitations was made five centuries ago by Machiavelli. “Men are so simple and so ready to follow the needs of the moment,” he wrote, “that the deceiver will always find someone to deceive.”

THE Renaissance, though it produced no important theoretical philosopher, produced one man of supreme eminence in political philosophy, Niccolò Machiavelli.

paralyzing its influence if it opposes his designs. He requires the assistance of the legislative assemblies to make the law, but those assemblies stand in need of his aid to execute it: these two authorities cannot subsist without each other, and the mechanism of government is stopped as soon as they are at variance.

As the great Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”

Hans Morgenthau, the political theorist, has said that men don’t willingly accept the truth about human nature and especially about political nature. The aim of politics, Morgenthau says, is not to make people better or to alleviate their misery: it is to increase the power of one man or group of men against the power of another man or group of men

Leonardo may have gone to work with Borgia at the behest of Machiavelli and Florence’s leaders as a gesture of goodwill, similar to the way he had been dispatched twenty years earlier to Milan as a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza. Or he may have been sent as a way for Florence to have an agent embedded with Borgia’s forces. Maybe it was both.

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Many men dreamed at last of establishing above the cities a sort of sovereign power, which should look to the maintenance of order, and compel those turbulent little societies to live in peace. It was thus that Phocion, a good citizen, advised his compatriots m accept the authority of Philip, and promised them, at this price, concord and security.