Well, I didn't know about Louise Cowan, who's discussed in the piece linked to at the end. Grateful to learn about her work, even though in this particular case, it looks like one of her more politics-attuned and thus Machiavelli-wary students, Mac Owens, was more in the right.
I'm also grateful for your phrases "despicable play" and "brilliant sophists," which cut against the "but-he's-a-Strauss-pronounced-capital-P-Philosopher" fascination with Nick which gets too humored by too many of the Strauss-influenced. "Sick fantasy" may be unjust to him, however...
This is a tricky problem -- as your examples suggest, from the 16th c. to our times, this is the age of Machiavelli. He won, the Church lost, is losing still today. There's something there that those of us who take morality seriously & endeavor to live moral lives need to face. It seems to me that calling his comedy despicable is a failure to face that problem. I would admit that there's a lot of danger in the taste to which it appeals, which is sometimes called "giving the devil his due;" part of that is, one mustn't allow the charms of Machiavelli's wit to encourage one to enjoy the life of crime, either because it flouts the moral authority of priests or because one enjoys the spectacle of getting away with it. But being outsmarted or outfought is no laurel to rest on, either -- & refashioning an alliance between intelligent people & decent people who aren't particularly intelligent requires somehow facing up to Machiavelli's challenge. The strategy that would occur, I think, naturally to the ordinary decent man: Call the clever evil & call ordinary people stupid, as they fail to understand the natural element of natural law or fail to heed the lawful element of it, strikes me as a failed strategy. What now?
Well, I didn't know about Louise Cowan, who's discussed in the piece linked to at the end. Grateful to learn about her work, even though in this particular case, it looks like one of her more politics-attuned and thus Machiavelli-wary students, Mac Owens, was more in the right.
I'm also grateful for your phrases "despicable play" and "brilliant sophists," which cut against the "but-he's-a-Strauss-pronounced-capital-P-Philosopher" fascination with Nick which gets too humored by too many of the Strauss-influenced. "Sick fantasy" may be unjust to him, however...
This is a tricky problem -- as your examples suggest, from the 16th c. to our times, this is the age of Machiavelli. He won, the Church lost, is losing still today. There's something there that those of us who take morality seriously & endeavor to live moral lives need to face. It seems to me that calling his comedy despicable is a failure to face that problem. I would admit that there's a lot of danger in the taste to which it appeals, which is sometimes called "giving the devil his due;" part of that is, one mustn't allow the charms of Machiavelli's wit to encourage one to enjoy the life of crime, either because it flouts the moral authority of priests or because one enjoys the spectacle of getting away with it. But being outsmarted or outfought is no laurel to rest on, either -- & refashioning an alliance between intelligent people & decent people who aren't particularly intelligent requires somehow facing up to Machiavelli's challenge. The strategy that would occur, I think, naturally to the ordinary decent man: Call the clever evil & call ordinary people stupid, as they fail to understand the natural element of natural law or fail to heed the lawful element of it, strikes me as a failed strategy. What now?