rtain people that were pre-ordained by God. Kings were born kings and serfs were born serfs. They taught that there was a natural order to society. This was no prevalent with Machiavelli or Hobbes. Machiavelli says “All men particularly, and especially princes, can be accused of that defect of which the [ancient] writers accuse the multitude…..The variation in their proceeding arises not from a diverse nature because it is in one mode in all, and if there is advantage of the good, it is in the people—but from having more or less respect for the laws within which both live”. He also doesn’t really believe that God completely governs the world. Half of our actions are determined by God, the other half are determined by uncontrollable shifts in fortune. In Hobbes we see that anyone can be the ruler. It doesn’t have to be a King passing on the throne to his son. All the ruler has to do is convince the people to sign away their rights so he can act for them. Machiavelli borrowed several terms from the Aristotelian tradition such as the nature-accident distinction and the importance of habituation to citizenship, yet the content he gave to these ideas is very anti-Aristotelian. “ He understood our essential nature not as a potential for virtue that is actualized by reason, but as a capacity for ambitious license that is necessarily developed by the mind and that can be best attenuated by opposing habits of cooperation (Fischer)”. Also Machiavelli broke with the long-held Aristotelian assumption that “the city is by nature prior to the household and to each of us; for the whole must of necessity be prior to the part (Aristotle)”. He conceived the city to be a human artifice constructed from natural individuals. It was Machiavelli, who long before Hobbes, introduced the methodological individualism to the modern study of political life. Hobbes approached classical phil...
