PERHAPS 21st WESTERN (I.E., AMERICAN) POLITICAL CULTURE IS IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS OWN MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, with a new afterword (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 1975, 2003) ("'The Machiavellian moment' is a phrase to be interpreted in two ways. [] In the second place, 'the Machiavellian moment' denotes the problem itself. It is a name for the moment in conceptual time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability. In the language which had been developed for the purpose, thus was spoken of as the confrontation of 'virtue' with 'fortune' and 'corruption'; and the study of Florentine thought is the study of how Machiavelli and his contemporaries pursed the intimations of these words, in the context of those ways of thinking about time . . . " Id. at vii-viii. "It is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and them regenerate it." Id. at 545.).