Word: machiavellis
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...adds up to an eminently successful career: his aim in life is to make people mad enough to fight for their own interests. "The only place you really have consensus is where you have totalitarianism," he says, as he organizes conflict as the only route to true progress. Like Machiavelli, whom he has studied and admires, Alinsky teaches how power may be used. Unlike Machiavelli, his pupil is not the prince but the people...
Russell was a troublemaker, the classic incarnation of Effete Intellectual, Snobdom. He was the mouthpiece of a moral conscience that ignored national and diplomatic boundaries, no blessing to the men of power throughout the world. No man more clearly understood Machiavelli's aphorism that "the manner in which man lives is so different from the manner in which he ought to live," and no man then proceeded to such un-Machiavellian conclusions...
...Cuban missile showdown. Despite the old American distrust of all power, he believes that our current social ills are eliciting new assertions of power, and that its nature should therefore be better understood. His own attack on it is as systematic and undaunted as any book since Machiavelli's The Prince...
Berle feels that the recurrent threat of chaos is most pressing in foreign affairs. Pure nationalism, as bequeathed to the modern world by Machiavelli, he sees as the dominant focus of international power still. But its influence is complicated by such things as Communist messianism (waning), and such illusions of order as can be generated by the United Nations. Berle believes power's next institutional forum, internationally, is not likely to be a single world empire but a concert of empires. All of which at least will have a good chance of avoiding nuclear war (the "least immediate...
Berle has no faith in automatic human evolution for the better. His chief bias is an old New Deal planner's intolerance of chaos-which may not prove as intolerable as he thinks. His analysis of power is a great deal more congenial to the American mind than Machiavelli's, which separated power from ethics. In outlining a basis for the post-modern world. Berle makes clear that power succeeds only with the help of philosophers, whose task is to cause man to agree on ideas of good and evil...