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1. Realism is a protean concept. Put bluntly, it is a view of the world as predominantly an arena of conflict of all kinds, in which power is the only guarantee of security and therefore the ultimate end as well as the essential means. Necessarily, this attitude is disenchanted, pessimistic about man's rational capacity, considerably more sceptic about the force of morality than about the morality of force.1 Expressions of these elements abound in Machiavelli, formulated frequently with epigrammatic - and occasionally programmatic - 2 brilliance: not for nothing is he considered as one of the founding fathers of the Realist tradition. Machiavelli, true to type, did not attempt to construct a systematic theoretical basis for his political realism and its vaunted superiority over other paths to knowledge about the world of man. It is nonetheless possible to infer from his writings that he rested his political realism on four foundations: personal political experience, history, human nature and rejection of metaphysical principles.
Extensive personal experience and deep knowledge of history are explicitly mentioned by Machiavelli as the bases of his claim to impart practical political knowledge. In The Prince he wrote that ?I have not found among my belongings anything that I might value more or prize so much as the knowledge of the deeds of great men that I have learned from a long experience in modern affairs and a continuous study of antiquity?.3 A stronger claim still for the value of history is made in the Discourses: Machiavelli laments the moderns' lack of ?true knowledge? of ancient histories, and their failure to draw on that invaluable stock of political and military wisdom.4 The professed aim of the Discourses is to correct this error by providing a commentary on Livius that will be based on knowledge of both ?ancient and modern affairs?.5
Inevitably, the emphasis on personal and historical experience replaces metaphysical principles as ways of knowing the world. Reality for Machiavelli has no transcendental purpose. The denial of divine agency is manifested with particular force in Machiavelli's discussion of Italy's military weakness in the face of foreign armies. The French invasion of 1494 and the havoc it wreaked on Italy were not divine punishments, as was claimed by Girolamo Savonarola; they were the...