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2:32 PM, DEC 9, 2013 BY MICHAEL ANTON

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Anniversaries come thick and fast. But 500-year marks are still rare, reminders of a simpler
time, a different world. We look back to Columbus and forward to the Reformation without
understanding the epochal revolution in between that made our time, our world.
On December 10, 1513, Niccol Machiavelli wrote a lettercalled the most celebrated in all
Italian literatureto his friend Francesco Vettori announcing that he has just completed a little
work, On Principalities. It later acquired the title The Prince, under which it became the most
famous, and infamous, book on politics ever written.
Everyone knows that the book teaches how to win without scruple, how to get away with
murder, howand whyto squelch any feelings of remorse. Readers of Leo Strausss
magisterial 1959 interpretation of Machiavellis work also know that The Prince, and its longer
companion The Discourses on Livy, is about much more.
Strauss showed that Machiavelli is the cause of our time, our world, our context. He attempted
a break with all prior thought and he succeeded, through these two books that recruited an army
of writer-captains who, in wave after wave of intellectual change, remade the West. Everything
characteristically modernfrom civil rights to iPhonesis the direct or indirect result of
Machiavellis revolution in thought.
Its easier for modern ears to accept that a political philosopher decisively altered political
practice than it is even to consider the notion that one mana writer no lessis responsible for
the incredible bounty and intricacy of the modern world. iPhones? Really?
Yes. Technology derives from engineering, which is applied natural science, which achieved its
current rigor thanks to a foundation built by Descartes and Bacon, who in turn learned the core
argument from Machiavelli. Its an unlikely claim on behalf of a writer whose most substantial
book seems to call for a revival of ancient Roman republican politics and who seems to have
nothing at all to say about science.
Except, in fact, he does. Harvey Mansfield, arguably Strausss greatest student and inarguably
the greatest living interpreter of Machiavelli, showed where and how at a conference Saturday
at Columbia University (and in this longer treatment published earlier this year). At the heart of
Machiavellis project is an epistemological revolution to liberate philosophy from the classical
prudence that prevented it from taking a direct role in guiding human affairs.
The phrase effectual truth appears in Machiavellis writings only onceto concentrate its
power, Mansfield saysand nowhere else in prior or contemporaneous Italian or Renaissance
literature. It seems to be merely one of Machiavellis excuses for his immoral teaching: a prince
must have recourse to the effectual truth of how men do live, as distinct from how they ought to
live, so that he may learn how not to be good, lest he come to ruin among so many who are not
good.
Difficulties in the text reveal a deeper meaning. Those who wish to make a profession of good
in all regards are above all the ancient writers who imagined republics and principalities that
have never been seen or known to exist in truth. The effectual truth is not merely the truth that
has an effect. It is the visible truth, the truth of sense perception, of concrete realitythe truth
that displays itself. Here is the creation of the concept of fact, which is meaningless unless
understood in opposition to what purports or aspires to be but is not fact: that which is merely
supposed or hoped for or believed. Here also is the beginning of the break with ancient
metaphysics and teleology that has, after centuries of working through the implications, left the
West morally bereft. If what cannot be felt or seen cannot be real, how can it guide our

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05.11.2015