[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Virtue as seen through the eyes of Machiavelli and Montaigne
This paper is on "Virtue as seen through the eyes of Machiavelli and Montaigne". The paper compares Machiavelli's "The Prince" Montaigne's "The Essays" and analyzes their thoughts and beliefs on virtue.
The word Virtue means moral fineness. Machiavelli was by explanation peripheral, extrinsic, and weak into the very core of politics and hence the central focus of political thought. However Machiavelli, who is most famous as the author of a book entitled The Prince, in fact resisted the temptation to face up to the changeable nature of politics with a wholly executive-oriented response, instead advocating the mixed regime precisely because he thought it could best withstand the accident that inevitably arise from time to time. All through his career Machiavelli sought to set up a state competent of resisting foreign attack.
His writings are concerned with the main beliefs on which such a state is founded, and with the means by which they can be implemented and maintained. In his most eminent effort, The Prince (1532; trans.1640), he describes the process by which a prince can get hold of and keep up biased supremacy. This study, which has often been regarded as a defense of the despotism and tyranny of such rulers as Cesar Borgia, is based on Machiavelli's belief that a ruler is not bound by traditional ethical norms. In his view, a prince should be concerned only with power and be bound only by rules that would lead to success in political actions. Machiavelli believed that these rules could be discovered by deduction from the political practices of the time, as well as from those of earlier periods.
On the other hand, the Essays by Montaigne made known the idyllic, derived from Plutarch's appearance of temperament and plainly uttered estimation, of "high traditional virtue and the courageously honest man" that became the humanist ideal of the Renaissance period. One of Montaigne's much loved images is of life as a humorous symptom a circus entertainment or a travesty, at which the chief gratification is looking on..............
