Reviews for Man and society

The average rating for Man and society based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-27 00:00:00 Eric Olague Skipped the last part. Machiavelli deserves the Italian word Machiavello made out of him, which, according to the Italian themselves, means someone subtle, intricate, hard to keep up with his pace in thinking, and as you can see from the descriptions, zero moral judgement. Meinecke himself never quite managed to blow me away during the book. Although one could argue that there are pages here and there in the book that wows people — not due to Meinecke's analysis, but the great minds and their deeds he's describing. What I found relatively precious is that Meinecke did take the contemporary political situation of the political philosophers, historians and politicians in mind (hence realizing that sometimes he's looking at rationalization instead of reasoning). The scope of the book is quite impressive, though, and one could see how an Idea is created out of a highly anti-Eidos person's writing, and lured its way into various disciplines: political philosophy, history writing, international relation, ethics etc. As a means Raison d'Etat overthrew a bunch of ends (salvation, feudal social structure and so on), and in process became an end itself thus fostering its own means; and then the rinse repeat cycle continues, the new means usurped and assumed the position of the end — and that's how we get all state leaders talking about economics non-stop. Sometimes greatness could be understood only through comparison. It is kind of sad that at the beginning there's a figure of political-philosopher-plus-historian-plus-military-leader-plus-comedy-writer four in one, and then the ones followed him could only hope to best him in at most one dimension he demonstrated. I still want to marry Machiavelli.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-02 00:00:00 H Noordijk In the history of Western Europe since the Renaissance there has been a constant conflict between personal standards of morality and the action of statesmen to preserve or enlarge the state they govern. The author, a German historian working shortly after The Great War, looked at the history of theorizing about this conundrum from the time of Machiavelli up to his own. His motivation seems to have been that he saw states growing continually more powerful throughout the period, and continually more destructive wars leading to the catastrophe for Germany of the Great War and he feared if the process continued Europe would become a shambles. Could a brake be applied and if so how? He looked for a solution in philosophy and ethics and I don't think he found one. However it is a fascinating, exhaustive history of a philosophical conundrum and an excellent history of the growth of State power and nationalism from the city states of Italy to the Great Powers that fought from 1914 - 1918.