Benji’s Reviews > The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy > Status Update

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.