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Articles

The Machiavelli Inquiry

Casimir Kukielka asks: What might some of history’s most famous practitioners of power politics have thought about the war in Iraq?

In Issue 50 of Philosophy Now, an article by Ian Dungate called ‘The Aquinas Inquiry’, imagined the reactions of certain medieval philosophers to the invasion of Iraq. The panel, led by St Thomas Aquinas, used six criteria to determine whether the invasion could be morally justified; unfortunately for Blair and Bush, they ruled that it could not. While the conclusions of the Aquinas Inquiry may be comforting to some people, others who do not follow the idealistic tenets of medieval Christianity may feel that what Aquinas and company had to say was irrelevant. After all, a lot has changed in the last 700 years, and that includes perceptions of morality.

May I offer an alternative to the Aquinas panel – the Machiavelli panel, consisting of Niccolò Machiavelli, Cardinal Richelieu, Klemens von Metternich, and Otto von Bismarck.

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