Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

The date of The Prince, 1513, to 1725, the date of Scienza Nuova, overlapped heavily with the scientific revolution and it is certainly no coincidence that all of these political philosophers attempted to construct their theories based on at least the principles of the new sciences, and to construct systems which could be generalised from state to state. It may be, however, that it was too early to apply the new sciences to the affairs of men. The most enduring legacy has in fact been the distinction between those who, like Machiavelli and Hobbes, were pessimistic about human nature (occasioning authoritarian or conservative philosophies), and those like Locke and Spinoza, who were more optimistic (the liberal philosophies). Broadly speaking, this is still the main political division by which most of us live, though we now call them, respectively, right and left.

The beginnings of right vs left