The concept of reason of state implicit in Machiavelli's represented an essential element in the emerging thought of the fresh era. It operated to sever political entities from the religious domination, characteristic of governance during the center(a) Ages and thus played a pivotal role in the evolution of independent state systems. Machiavelli presented this break with past political paradigms as a matter of necessity, divorced from normative considerations. Machiavelli seek to define the principles of political leadership appropriate to this
Pocock sees The Prince as a study in innovations that import in a degree of newness of rule for a leader, which leaves both the leader and the state more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of event. The problems raised by fortune also create problems in honor, with virtue as the force used by good men to subvert form on the chaos created by fortune. Civic humanism, an antediluvian concept undergoing metamorphosis in Machiavelli's era, equated the good man with the citizen. By this viewpoint, virtue could exist barely when citizens grouped together to hire a common political goal, rendering the Aristotelian politeia equivalent with virtue. The outcome of this logic is that the good man could be pious only within the framework of citizenship.
The collapse of the citizenship framework as the result of innovation, gradual decay of citizenship, or other foreign forces results in a corruption of the virtue of the state. This affects all citizens in the state, whether prince or beggar. During this time of collapse, the ability of the state to sustain itself against fortune becomes identical with virtue. The virtue of the citizenry then is equated with maintaining the stability of the state, and the virtue of the state becomes the maintenance of the citizenry. Both politically and morally, this evolved and non-standard virtue is the only defense against the ascendancy of fortune.
In opposition to Pocock is Harvey Mansfield who finds that Machiavelli represents aspects of the birth of modernity, which requires the tuition of a new form of reason, based on different postulates than those offered by the classical or medieval eras. The growth of humanism was characteristic of the early modern era, which places people rather than deities at the center of attention. Machiavelli appears to have declared that he was in choose of concepts such as humanism, secularization and progress, which were shocking for his era hardly familiar in the present day. In large measur
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