Harvey Mansfield: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we turned Machiavelli into a series of empirically testable propositions, what percentage of them do you think would be true? A small percentage, because he exaggerates. He exaggerates. At the same time, you could say he’s the author of making empirical propositions. This is something of what I said earlier, the effectual truth. He tries to predict what can happen. He has in view a path toward greater liberty and greater virtue that we now call modernity. The understanding of knowledge as prediction really begins, I would say, with him. That what we call empirical, which is understanding based on fact, is really a new way of knowing things in such a way that we can protect ourselves and predict what may happen or occur to us. For Machiavelli, religion is most important as a form of providence or prediction. Most people don’t want to so much know God as they want to know what’s going to happen to them. They want to know what God is going to bring to us or what Machiavelli says—he substitutes this—what fortune is going to bring to us. You can deify fortune if you like, call it Lady Fortune, as he does in The Prince. Fortune is making something happen by reducing the possibilities of chance or of a bad outcome. That depends on what we would call an empirical or a factual account. If you understand how people act in a way different from what they say or what they wish, then you can reduce the effect or the power of fortune or chance, and make, as a fact, what you hope for in defiance of fortune. Reducing the realm of fortune or of chance comes about through what we might call empirical analysis. I’m trying to say that exaggeration is the requirement of empirical analysis, not the enemy of it. Are there still great books being written today?…

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