Ego vs. Decency

A recent interaction I had with a Left Wing Big Shot led me to re-read my chapter on Machiavelli in my book Genio: The Story of Italian Genius. One thing that emerges from Machiavelli studies (literally an industry: between 2009 and 2017 there were no less than eight biographies of the man in the English language alone) is that there are several ways of interpreting his life and work. The most common, i.e., popular view is that he was amoral, a manipulator, whose most famous work,