ABSTRACT
Political science in the medieval sense meant the description of obligations, it gave no further practical advice for it did not claim any special practical wisdom. The fact that this political literature was so little sociological, so blandly mindless of economics, administration, even the military arts, obviously reflects to some extent the simple conditions of medieval life and medieval society. One can appreciate the revolution in political theory that Niccolo Machiavelli accomplished. The homiletic tradition then continued after Machiavelli. Indeed, one finds innumerable specimens of the genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But one also finds that, under the influence of Machiavellianism, this genre is either being converted into or tinged with something new in political philosophy. A great part of the intellectual history of the modern era can be told in terms of the efforts of a civilization still Christian, to come to terms with Machiavelli in politics, de Sade in sex, Nietzsche in philosophy.
