ABSTRACT
According to the Bible, the serpent tempted Eve, suggesting that by eating the forbidden fruit she and Adam would become “like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Knowledge of good and evil is God’s prerogative, in the sense that God determines what is good and evil; human beings have moral discernment, which enables them to identify what is good but by eating the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve want to go further, to decide for themselves what is good or evil. They reject their condition of “creatures” and want to become “makers,” creators of values. Machiavelli did not have any such ambition, despite a long interpretative tradition that sees him as a “teacher of evil” and a subverter of traditional (Christian) morality. 1 In fact, Machiavelli was not the bearer of a new morality for humankind, the herald of a “transvaluation of all values,” nor was he the thinker who separated morality from politics, justifying politically what is morally condemnable. These statements are grounded on the observation that the words “good” and “evil” retain their usual meaning in his works nor is there any dispensation from ordinary morality for statesmen. Machiavelli’s original contribution rather consists in the discovery that politics has a distinct dimension of duty that, in exceptional cases, forces the statesman to commit actions that collide with moral and religious imperatives. Machiavelli discloses to his readers that, contrary to the popular, naive opinion that statesmen can do what they wish, politics is in fact the realm of necessity because statesmen are often forced to choose between evil alternatives and opt for the lesser evil. This fact reveals the dramatic side of the political realm, which should be known, and eventually accepted, by Machiavelli’s reader, the prospective statesman.
