On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

Both this saint and this sinner, then, see proportionality as a pathway. For Augustine, it shows rulers, however deeply into iniquity they may have descended, the way back from the City of Man to the City of God. Machiavelli doesn’t imagine communities “that have never been seen or known to exist,”52 but he does seek virtù, by which he means doing what’s required when facing necessity but not in all respects at its mercy. It’s here that he’s most original—and most brave. As Machiavelli’s finest translator has put it: “[J]ustice is no more reasonable than what a person’s prudence tells him he must acquire for himself, or must submit to, because men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”53 The cagey Florentine might have appreciated, for its literary qualities, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. But he’d have thought it careless in the extreme for Sydney Carton, that novel’s hero, to submit so gallantly at the end, to the sound of knitting, to his own disassembly.54