KoMoL Book 1, Chapters 12 and 13
The next several chapters continue to examine the question of what religion does in a polity. Many of these chapters break cleanly into an examination of how Rome treated religion, followed by Machiavelli’s examination of the Christianity/Catholicism of his day, dominated by Rome.
KoMoL Book 1, Chapters 9 through 11
Machiavelli gives his chapter 9 the subtitle “That to give new Institutions to a Commonwealth, or to reconstruct old Institutions on an entirely new basis, must be the work of one Man.
KoMoL Book 1, Chapters 7 and 8
In Chapter 7, Machiavelli discusses the utility of the ability to do what both translations call “accuse”; I think in modern terms that might be better rendered as “bring a lawsuit”.
KoMoL Book 1, Chapters 3 through 6
These chapters consist on several ruminations of the power the people of Rome had, especially against their nobility, and the utility of that to the Republic.
KoMoL Book 1, Chapter 2
This is an example of a place where I’m going to riff off of Machiavelli, and it’s (mostly) not a criticism of his work. In this chapter, Machiavelli mentions that “many” have created a division of types of government into three types: Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy.
KomoL Book 1, Chapter 1
Immediately my theme on the differences between Machiavelli’s world and ours takes center stage. There are two major themes in this chapter, a discussion of how a city is founded and how that affects the likelihood of greatness, and what amounts to the virtues of having easy local supply lines in to a city or difficult ones.
KoMoL Book 1, Prelude
The Prelude opens with an observation that many of the institutions we have are the manifestation of accreted wisdom from the past, but few people are willing to examine and learn from that past.
Krymneth on Machiavelli on Livy
I made a resolution to raise the Castalia Library books higher on my book pile, and after a second swing through Awake in the Night Land, I picked as my second book to be Discourses on Livy by Machiavelli.
How To Tell Who Can Be Objectively Right About Life
God says that he is Good, that he created Good things in creation, that he intended Good things for Man, and that falling for the temptation of Satan was a bad thing for Man.
A Tidbit on "Free Will" and Theodicy
A note on a common aspect of theodicy (the problem of evil) and/or free will: It is commonly supposed that free will is in conflict with God knowing the outcome of our free choices, and that free will1 must somehow entail God not knowing and not being able to know what we will choose.