Through this work hardly appears in the most recent bibliographies, I believe that the following work by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke is still a very important study of a concept that has dominated political thinking for many years—The Idea of State Reason (German original 1957, common English version titled Machiavellianism). The concept, usually quoted in its French translation as raison d’etat, does indeed derive from the work of the Italian author Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), whose handbook for rulers, The Prince, has been plausibly interpreted as the first textbook of modern political science—self-consciously written not as a treatise in political …read more
Source: The American Interest
