Fichte

Now at last in Germany Machiavelli found men who understood him, or at least began to comprehend things from the starting-point of his historical and individual presuppositions. In 1795, before Hegel already, Herder had, in his Letters for the furtherance of humanity (5th collection, Nos. 58 and 59), shown his great sense of what was historically individual even with regard to Machiavelli and thus paved the way for a juster assessment of this much-misunderstood man, by drawing attention to the power of the opinions then dominant concerning the relationship between politics and morals, whose most important and clever representative Machiavelli in fact was. He also heavily emphasized Machiavelli’s goal of the national liberation of Italy, and thus paved the way in general for the later interpretation of Ranke. But the historical justification of Machiavelli’s personality which he undertook did not reach as far as justifying his doctrine. He praised Machiavelli, but execrated Machiavellism with which his ideal of humanity would have nothing to do. Oh, if only (he cried) this policy of raison d’état, of which Machiavelli was the master, ‘could be forever buried for the human race!’ By praising Machiavelli and his follower Naudé (whom he also re-discovered), he only wanted to show that, by ‘gazing calmly into a dark abyss of history’, he could discover something of value and be forced to recognize it even there, and that this was particularly possible if one was living in a better period. After such an enormous passage of time (he believed), even a Machiavelli would be bound to think differently today. ‘Oh, if only we had a picture drawn by Machiavelli, of a ruler of our own times!’ ¹ Thus we see that even Herder had not yet attained the new, specifically German attitude to the problem of Machiavellism, which we first found in the case of Hegel.