ote: Premises]

The great era of the state naturally shone in political thought.
Though there was some scientific investigation of social and economic
laws, thought was chiefly conditioned by the new problems to be faced.
From the long medieval dream of a universal empire {589} and a
universal church, men awoke to find themselves in the presence of new
entities, created, to be sure, by their own spirits, but all
unwittingly. One of these was the national state, whose essence was
power and the law of whose life was expansion to the point of meeting
equal or superior force. No other factor in history, not even
religion, has produced so many wars as has the clash of national
egotisms sanctified by the name of patriotism. Within the state the
shift of sovereignty from the privileged orders to the bourgeoisie
necessitated the formulation of a new theory. It was the triumph, with
the rich, of the monarchy and of the parliaments, that pointed the road
of some publicists to a doctrine of the divine right of kings, and
others to a distinctly republican conclusions. There were even a few
egalitarians who claimed for all classes a democratic regime. And,
thirdly, the Reformation gave a new turn to the old problem of the
relationship of church and state. It was on premises gathered from
these three phenomena that the publicists of that age built a dazzling
structure of political thought.

[Sidenote: Machiavelli, 1469-1527]

It was chiefly the first of these problems that absorbed the attention
of Nicholas Machiavelli, the most brilliant, the most studied and the
most abused of political theorists. As between monarchy and a republic
he preferred, on the whole, the former, as likely to be the stronger,
but he clearly saw that where economic equality prevailed political
equality was natural and inevitable. The masses, he thought, desired
only security of person and property, and would adhere to either form
of government that offered them the best chance of these. For republic
and monarchy alike Machiavelli was ready to offer maxims of statecraft,
those for the former embodied in his _Discourses on Livy_, those for
the latter in his _Prince_. In erecting a new science of statecraft,
by which a people might {590} arrive at supreme dominion, Machiavelli's
great merit is that he looked afresh at the facts and discarded the
old, worn formulas of the schoolmen; his great defect is that he set
before his mind as a premise an ab