This is not a blog post, it is just a piece of fun, a quote which is too long for Twitter. It is by Lord Macaulay, giving it both barrels, from near the start of his essay 'Machiavelli', written in March, 1827.
"It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy, to read without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which the most hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of some palliating sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the slightest circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms of all political science."
'Obloquy', 'hardened ruffian', above all 'palliating sophism' ! Outstanding stuff. Macaulay goes on to explain that in his view, this commonly held opinion of Machiavelli is far too simplistic. I could quote from this essay more or less forever. I recommend the whole piece very much indeed.
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