ABSTRACT
The unfulfilled promise of the Enlightenment was that moral reason would increasingly govern the progress of society. The evidence of history, it appears, illustrates the thinking of Machiavelli in The Prince rather than that of Condorcet. In politics the question is what it has always been: How does one gain and retain power? Those in power have the advantages of the law and of those who enforce it; those out of power have the passion of grievance born from the sense of being the victims of injustice, as well as the capacity for mass insurgency. Conventional wisdom has it that social and political change does not proceed through reasoning but through conflict, often with bloodletting as the result. The role of reason, as Machiavelli viewed it in The Prince, is to understand the workings of power. As an analytical instrument, reason is amoral. Or its morality is the establishment and preservation of order, not justice. Conventional wisdom is that moral reason, promoted by the Enlightenment, has achieved little in the political realm. It may have value as an exercise in personal virtue or as an academic project, but it is not what makes the political world go round.
