Machiavelli’s Cardinal Achievement: A Selection from Isaiah Berlin’s Against the Current (2001)

“Machiavelli's cardinal achievement is . . . his uncovering of an insoluble dilemma, the planting of a permanent question mark in the path of posterity. It stems from his de facto recognition that ends equally ultimate, equally sacred, may contradict each other, that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration, and that not merely in exceptional circumstances, as a result of abnormality or accident or error . . . but . . . as part of the normal human situation. . . . If what Machiavelli believed is true, this undermines one major assumption of western thought: namely that somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next, in the church or the laboratory, in the speculations of the metaphysician or the findings of the social scientist, or in the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man, there is to be found the final solution of the question of how men should live.”—Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (2001)