PUTIN my selection for him 5. The State and the Prince: Language and Concepts Machiavelli has also been credited (most recently by Skinner 1978) with formulating for the first time the “modern concept of the state,” understood in the broadly Weberian sense of an impersonal form of rule possessing a monopoly of coercive authority within a set territorial boundary. Certainly, the term lo stato appears widely in Machiavellis writings, especially in The Prince, in connection with the acquisition and application of power in a coercive sense, which renders its meaning distinct from the Latin term status (condition or station) from which it is derived. Moreover, scholars cite Machiavellis influence in shaping the early modern debates surrounding “reason of state”—the doctrine that the good of the state itself takes precedence over all other considerations, whether morality or the good of citizens—as evidence that he was received by his near-contemporaries as a theorist of the state (Meineke 1957; Viroli 1992). Machiavellis name and doctrines were widely invoked to justify the priority of the interests of the state in the age of absolutism.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 22:50:03 +0000
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