ABSTRACT
What relevance has this to a modern political world to whose pragmatism and business orientation erudition and ‘blood-curdling’ displays of erudition may even be counter-productive (Brown 1995:ix)? In tacit reply to this (rhetorical) question, Margaret Thatcher proposed the diverting of educational funds towards the sciences as a means to promote national prosperity based on technocratic elites. Powell, far more traditional in his cultural perspectives, stood opposed to her line, supporting learning for its own sake (Heffer 1998:887). Meanwhile the usefulness of the classical curriculum was a live issue in the Renaissance too, for when Machiavelli (1961: ch. xiv) in effect restricts the Prince’s education to war, its organization and discipline, he is running, quite wittingly, against that school of contemporary opinion for which good education produced good moral grounding and therefore successful princely rule. However it is Machiavelli’s task to describe a model prince, not to embody one: like Powell, he never rose above the middle ranks of political administration. Hence the learning he applied to his writing, described as a ‘continuous reading of ancient matters’—cose antique (ibid.: Dedication), was
part of the equipment which he offered his potential employers, plus an element in his own mode of self-expression, but it was never a prerequisite he imposed on the political leader.
