man and beast

If you thought Darwin was a dangerous thinker, the New Yorker reminds us that Machiavelli was equally controversial and just as misunderstood,

The Prince offered the first major secular shock to the Christianized state in which we still live. Long before Darwin, Machiavelli showed us a credible world without Heaven or Hell, a world of “is” rather than “should be,” in which men were coolly viewed as related to beasts and earthly government was the only hope of bettering our natural plight.