Machiavelli's Unchristian Charity

The central theoretical chapters of the Prince (chapters 15 ff.) yield forgotten justifications of the road the West has traveled. Machiavelli relieves us of our qualms; in chapter 16, over dangling the carrot; in chapter 17, over brandishing the stick. He thereby lays the moral foundations for societies based, as all modem societies have been, on collective aggrandizement recognizing no limits in principle, and on justice understood as the enforcement of “equal (but otherwise boundless) opportunity.”