ABSTRACT
The structure of political thought in the Greek-medieval tradition was built on the subordination of practical science to theoretic science and, within the sphere of practical science, on the subordination of art to prudence. When Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern politics, "writes that the prince must learn how not to be good, he is perfectly aware that not to be good is to be bad". The element of force is the essential element in law, which is to say that it is the determining element in man qua man and not merely in man qua animal. In the basic principle of the sixteenth-century Reformers find the fundamental ground of alliance between the Reformation and the new humanism of the Renaissance. At first sight it may appear just as arbitrary to connect such different movements as to connect such different works as those of Galileo and Machiavelli.
