Kategorie: Machiavelli

Peter Sloterdijk, in his new book The Prince and His Heirs, has taken up a theme that sits at the center of any serious theory of the political: power — its embodiment, its self-assertion, and its tendency to immunize itself against limitation. The book is about "great men in the age of ordinary people," about men "willing to go mad for the sake of power." Sloterdijk rereads Machiavelli in order to understand the modern type of the prince: Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi — and, by implication, Orbán — the new men of power in a world where charisma, amoralism, and media stagecraft are reshaping the old liberal procedures. Sloterdijk builds his reading on Machiavelli's foundational insight: a prince who means to hold his ground must learn "not to be good." The new autocrats, he argues, have learned t…