From: Randall Parker 

BTW, if you go to the link then at the bottom click on the link to his book
The Coming Anarchy on Amazon. Then read the full length editorial and
customer reviews.

In article ,
rgparker{at}west.net says...
> This is a very thought-provoking article and I recommend that you all
> read it.
>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/issues/2000/06/kaplan.htm
>    Excerpt:
>
> By substituting pagan for Christian virtue, Machiavelli explained
> better than any political scientist today how Rabin and Hussein
> could become what they were. There is nothing amoral about
> Machiavelli's pagan virtue either. The late Oxford philosopher
> Isaiah Berlin observed that Machiavelli's values may not be
> Christian but they are moral. Berlin implied that they are the
> Periclean and Aristotelian values of the ancient polis -- values
> that secure a stable political community. (If you want to act
> strictly according to Christian ethics, Berlin suggested in
> explaining Machiavelli, that's fine -- so long as you don't
> assume political responsibility for the lives of too many others.)
>
> ...
>
>
> Machiavelli's emphasis on political necessity rather than moral
> perfection framed his philosophical attack on the Church. By in
> effect leaving the Church, he left the medieval world and
> kindled the political Renaissance, renewing links with
> Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, Seneca, Sallust, and other
> classical thinkers
>

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