ABSTRACT
The more intimate relation of present and past which it reveals involves new problems and indicates new standpoints, brings history into closer contact in particular with the sciences of conduct—ethics and politics. In ethics, the stress is laid on the law of ought, in politics on the conditions of existence, on the actual forms realized in communities and the methods by which they are maintained. Machiavelli wished to show the means by which a united state could be maintained, and his observation told him that it was not by following the recognized principles of ethics, but rather by violating these. A discrepancy between the end to which a state commits itself and that which some individuals in the state may conceive to be the true end involves no breach between ethics and politics. At the same time, a discussion of this difficulty will perhaps throw light on the wider topic.
