Harvey Mansfield: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, given that Machiavelli had no real sense of modern science and its fruits, what ends up being missing from his political thought? Well, he didn’t have no idea of modern science. In fact, I would say that his notion of effectual truth is the beginning of modern science. The effectual truth, he says, is what comes out of the truth, or what is the effect if you say to somebody, “I love you. ” The effectual truth of that is I want something from you. The effectual truth is the upshot, sometimes not necessarily the intent of the statement. You must judge then from cause to effect. The word effectual was brand new, actually invented by Machiavelli. It comes from the Latin facere, which has to do with fact. Today, we use the word fact all the time, as if it were something that always existed. It was Machiavelli and some later thinkers who developed that notion of fact. The fact of a thing is what it is without any wish or intent attached to it. That means you can go from cause to effect. That, I think, is the fundamental notion behind modern science. Modern science isn’t based on wish or speech as with Plato and Aristotle. It’s based on fact. Galileo didn’t go around asking people, “Does the earth move or not?” He looked for the fact. It was not a matter of public opinion or philosopher’s opinion, but for the effectual truth. Say, when it comes to technology, Machiavelli understood gunpowder, but the idea that our lives could be so safe—nuclear weapons, modern effective birth control, modern media—don’t all those things mean that modernity is, in fact, quite irreversible?…

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