CLEP Western Civ I

Answer: A - Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) did not advocate that a leader should focus on his ideal government or state; he was emphatic that a leader should focus on being realistic, not idealistic, to make the best of the situation in which he finds himself. The Prince was one of the first major works of political philosophy since antiquity to deal with the subject of democratic or republican politics, and it was radically different from all previous writing on that topic. Prior to Machiavelli, political philosophers only considered republicanism in terms of how it should ideally be practiced, without allowing for the possibility that a ruler could be in a situation in which this ideal choices would cost him his position. Machiavelli believed that keeping one’s political position should be a leader’s primary goal. Some of his assertions were ruthless, especially his insistence that a leader should be willing to use brute force or deceit to accomplish his goals or to remove a political rival. The work was shocking to Renaissance culture. It was banned outright by the Catholic Church, and many of Machiavelli’s fellow humanists viewed it negatively as well. Present-day scholars debate whether or not the author was deliberately using comical irony. Machiavelli is considered one of the greatest modern political philosophers and a founder of political ethics as a field of study. He did astutely recognize that republican politics and power rarely, if ever, yield ideal circumstances and that, in this type of system, a politician must be prepared to compromise his own ideals for the sake of achieving and maintaining power. On that point, the whole history of democracy has proven Machiavelli to be correct.