Mansfield on Machiavelli on Science
What do our scientists believe they're doing when they're doing science?
So a reader reacted to the latest Machiavelli post with skepticism that Machiavelli had anything to do with the origins of modern natural science. I think everyone in the world would agree with my reader—except Harvey Mansfield, the most famous Machiavelli scholar in the world. You can find a lecture he gave below, or if you prefer to read his thought in an essay, here it is.
The argument, only in its beginning here, is as follows. It has long been said that Machiavelli is a scientist, that he looks at politics without moral prejudices or preferences, objectively. Just the facts. On this basis, he gives rules of action, based on universal principles. His science would be a political or social science, but one recognizable to people whose idea of science is distinctly modern. Machiavelli’s science came before the modern natural science of Newton, or Descartes, or Galileo, or Bacon. The scientist Bacon, who was also a lawyer, politician, & writer, in fact quotes Machiavelli as someone who has something to teach. The science of Machiavelli set the basis for the natural science which later philosophers like Bacon or Descartes created, when politics, philosophy, & science were still united. This was accomplished by a rethinking of what it means to know the world, what it means to know the facts. Reasoning, the use of the mind, the power & activity that issues in science had to produce & to suffer a revolution before it was possible to end up with the scientific method of machines & experiments.
Here, Mansfield explains the transformation of rationality, or the origins of modernity from the works of Machiavelli—how talk about politics turns into talk of how human beings act & think, & the causes of action, thus gradually establishing how to think about knowledge & power.