Just finished Spinoza's A Theologico-Political Treatise and Machiavelli's The Prince back to back. Though both are writing about the politics of their time as they understand them and as they affect each one's lives, they couldn't be more different. Spinoza focuses on the virtue of the state; Machiavelli on a state without virtue--unless you see power as a virtue. Neither makes much sense in today's political climate. My initial reaction to Spinoza was that he was engaged in a very elaborate CYA. This work came before Ethics, which caused such a stir then, as well as for those of us who read it now. (Though it stirs us for different reasons, I suspect.) Two takeaways: Spinoza's insistence that the Bible should be taken as authoritative on moral issues only, and his emphasis on loyalty and obedience to temporal authority. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Machiavelli is so completely unconcerned with moral or ethical issues that I suspect anyone but a sociopath will have trouble reading him without some degree of unease.
Note: I have been surprised by how many of the older works (Seneca, for example) I've listened to and read have been pertinent to what MacIntyre refers to as Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity. I have been sufficiently entranced with Spinoza's Ethics that I've listened to it twice and read it twice--and it's on my list for this summer. However, the two works above have nothing to say to me or to modernity. They are entirely mired in their own age.
Note Two: It wouldn't surprise me to find out that Trump might think of himself as Machiavellian, though I doubt he ever read it.
