I
However paradoxical it may seem, I’d venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture, as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all. The discovery of and training in the meaning of the simplest acts of existence, seeing, listening, speaking, reading, the acts which relate men, to their works, and to those works thrown in their faces, their absence of works.
Louis Althusser, Reading Capital
II
Although the envious nature of men has always made it no less dangerous to find new modes and orders than to seek unknown waters and lands, because men are more ready to blame than to praise the actions of others, nonetheless, driven by that natural desire that has always been in me to work, without any respect, for those things I believe will bring common benefit to everyone, I have decided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone, and if it brings me trouble and difficulty, it could also bring me reward through those who consider humanely the end of these labors of mine. If poor talent, little experience of present things, and weak knowledge of ancient things make this attempt of mind defective and not of much utility, it will at least show the path to someone who with more virtue more discourse and judgment will be able to fulfill this intention of mine, which is it will not bring me praise, ought not to incur blame.
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy First Book, Preface
III
Since men when they get old lack force and grow in judgment and prudence, it is necessary that those things that appear to them endurable and good during youth turn out unendurable and bad when they get old; and whereas for this they should accuse their judgment, they accuse the times. Besides this, human appetites are insatiable, for since from nature they have the ability and the wish to desire all things and from fortune the ability to achieve few of them, there continually results from this a discontent in human minds and a disgust with the things they possess. This makes them blame the present times, praise the past and desire the future, even if they’re not moved to do this by any reasonable cause.
Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Second Book, Preface
IV
Machiavelli assumed that every religion or “sect” has a lifespan of between 1,666 and 3,000 years. He was then uncertain as to whether the end of Christianity would come about a century after his death, or whether Christianity might still last for another millennium and a half. Machiavelli thought and wrote in this perspective: that he himself might be preparing a radical change of modes and orders, a change which would be consummated in a not too distant future, but that it is equally possible that his enterprise would fail completely. He certainly reckoned with the possibility that the destruction of the Christian church was imminent. As for the way in which Christianity might be superseded by a new social order, he saw this alternative. One possibility was the eruption of barbarian hordes from the east, from what is now Russia. It was this region which he regarded as the pool from which the human race rejuvenates itself periodically. The alternative was a radical change within the civilized world. It was of course only the latter kind of change for which he was anxious and which he did everything in his power to prepare. He conceived of this preparation as of war, a spiritual war.
Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?
V
Virtuous people who lived in corrupt polities were like chimeras, having the head of one species and the legs of another, he said; the same was true of vicious people living in virtuous polities. The former ought to emigrate if a virtuous city can be created. But virtuous people could live in corrupt regimes without losing their virtue, even if they were forced to act corruptly: they had to practice a combination of external conformity and internal resistance. Conversely, even perfect cities had “weeds” and pseudo philosophers among their inhabitants. In other words, the more al-Fārābī thought about it, the more difficult he found it to endow truth and falsehood with separate political embodiments. In real life, there will always be a mixture of both, wherever one was, the virtuous city was not so much a polity as a brotherhood.
Patricia Crone, God’s Rule – Government and Islam: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought
VII
In connection with the plan of a campaign we shall hereafter examine more closely into the meaning of disarming a nation. But here we must at once draw a distinction between these three things, which as three general objects, comprise everything else within them. They are the military power, the country and the will of the enemy.
1. The military power must be destroyed, that is reduced to such a state as to not be able to prosecute the war.
2. The country must be conquered, for out of the country, a new military force may be formed.
3. But even when both these things are done, still the war, that is the hostile feeling and action of hostile agencies, cannot be considered as at an end as long as the will of the enemy is not subdued also.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
VIII
The religion of magic is still found today among the wholly crude and barbarous peoples, such as the Eskimos. Thus Captain Ross—and others such as Parry—discovered Eskimos, who knew no other world than their icy rocks. When interviewed these people said they have no representation of God or of immortality and the like. They do hold the Sun and Moon in awe. But they have only magicians or conjurors who claim the authority to produce rain and gales or to cause a whale to approach them. They say that they have learned their art from ancient magicians (“angekoks”). These magicians put themselves into a wild state; their gestures make no sense. One could hear them invoke the ocean, but their words were not directed to a higher essence. They only have to do with natural objects. They have no representation of a universal essence. For example, someone asked one of them where the Eskimos believe they go after death. He replied, they were buried. In ages past an old man had indeed said they might go into the moon. But no rational Eskimo believes that any longer.
G.W.F Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion