ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how Niccolo Machiavelli expressed reservations concerning good and evil as commonly understood and replaced them with a 'success or ruin' theory of value. It explains how this theory of value is beholden to historical knowledge as a repository of data on how to bring about success or eschew ruin. Machiavelli believed that knowing about history was so important in politics that he advised princes to divide their time equally between learning about it and hunting. There is a kind of essence of 'prince-ness' that seems supported by Machiavelli's puzzling statement about Hiero and Perseus in the dedicatory letter of the Discourses. Some scholars, at any rate, have identified in Machiavelli's writings a potential alternate route to the realization of a ruler's dominance in a most surprising place: Christian cosmology. Machiavelli finds in God's grace an authorization to act as necessary for the sake of realizing the divine plan.
