Status Updates From The Rise and Fall of Ration...

World history, we have seen, is not the mere application of Hegel's thought but the working out of his metaphysics, and the most essential aspect of his metaphysics, as well as the most complete and brilliant flowering of the modern philosophy of rational control we study in this book. Here is Machiavelli and his successors brought to a rational end rich in insight and colored with beautifil descriptive reasoning.

For Hegel has no less scorn for the humdrum as for the recondite. He does not categorize nations by the kind of tool they used, as if some future archaeological expert would announce that the United States was a power lawn-mower culture.

With these strictures in mind to calculate Kant's debts, one may still consider the true language of modern political philosophy to be Machiavelli's Italian.

“…[C]lassical political science depended on the primacy of domestic policy over foreign policy and of public justice over private interests.” p.30