In such a world, heroic considerations of honor and glory, vows to gods or desire for vengeance, were at best weaknesses to be manipulated. In the numerous manuals on statecraft produced at the time, everything was cast as a matter of recognizing interest and advantage, calculating how to balance that which will profit the ruler against that which will profit the people, determining when the ruler’s interests are the same as the people’s and when they contradict.58 Technical terms drawn from politics, economics, and military strategy (“return on investment,” “strategic advantage”) blended and
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Interesting note! However there seems to be a contradiction here with a previous chapter. Weren't "considerations of honor and glory" deeply connected to periods of war, slavery, and coinage (the "military-coinage-slavery complex")? Then why is it that the opposite of these considerations were also connected to the same of such periods? Why is it then that when the military-coinage-slavery complex took hold in some societies mentioned in previous passages (i.e., Ancient Greece, medieval Ireland, etc.) that these societies never adopted the "profit motive" as a guiding ideology and stood by "considerations of honor and glory"?
