Word: machiavellis
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...though, Bok might be obliged to arrest and press charges against student trespassers. The fact that he didn't attests to his personal morality. It also testifies to his pragmatism; he had learned the lessons of 1969 well. To Bok, the university's virtue is inevitably bound up with Machiavelli's concept of virtu: the employment of prudence in the service of all specific ends. His ethics and ethos are relativist...
...Machiavelli defined his ideal prince as a head of state with a "flexible disposition, varying as fortune and circumstances dictate." Melvin Laird, the consummate congressional pol who served Richard Nixon as Secretary of Defense, lived by the rule that a wise man never says no to the inevitable and rarely encounters a situation that cannot be turned in some way to his advantage. In 1970, for example, a helicopter-borne rescue team penetrated North Viet Nam's air defenses but found that its quarry-U.S. P.O.W.s held at the Son Tay prison camp-had been moved to parts...
Armed with his Montaigne and Johnson and Machiavelli, Wills criticizes, on both moral and pragmatic grounds, what he sees as the Kennedy's crude and immature conception of power. If only he did not seem to enjoy disemboweling John Kennedy so much. Wills eloquent eulogy to Martin Luther King (and King's rival conception of power) would seem more in character; so would his ongoing vindication of Ted Kennedy. The Teddy question accounts for some of the book's weakest moments, with Wills at times making himself the judge in a brother-to-brother competition for the Character Award...
...somehow large quantities of "Baudelaire and Rilke, even Montesquieu and Vico; also Machiavelli; also Plato" still get slathered over everything. The novel does not asphyxiate beneath this icing. But it is certainly not Bellow's best staff...
Thus transformed. Molloy takes his liver for success through the employment process, and a short resume workshop of which Machiavelli himself might prove jealous. Dishonesty is the best policy. "If you have an extended unexplainable gap in your resume, you are frankly going to have to fudge. There are several ways you can go about this. You can take the job you had prior to your gap in time and extend it to cover...