driven by passion. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli suggested that we presuppose that “all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.” The best way to ensure the freedom of human beings, then, would be to check passion with passion: “The desires of free peoples are rarely harmful to liberty, because they arise either from oppression or from the suspicion that they will be oppressed . . . the people, although ignorant, can grasp the truth, and they readily yield when they are told the truth by a trustworthy man.”17 Machiavelli thus
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