POLS 2900 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Puritans, English Civil War, Parliamentary Sovereignty
7 Apr 2014
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Today was a religious holiday for some students in the class and so i am posting a summary of my lecture. I left off last time speaking about machiavelli"s unorthodox approval of the tumult characteristic of. Machiavelli admits that the people (the plebeians) can be mistaken about some perceived threat to their liberty, but in that event freedom itself provides a remedy. Some sensible man has to get up and harangue them, showing them how they are wrong. This makes them reasonable in the ordinary sense of that word. The people and the preservation of republican liberty. As i remarked in discussing the prince, machiavelli"s political sociology posits that every city will consist of rich and poor and thus every city will experience class conflict. In the discourses he tells us not to worry overly much about this conflict, because it actually tends to preserve liberty rather than put liberty at risk.
