Compare And Contrast Machiavelli And Shmitt

Let me start with the first anthropological extreme according to which man is necessarily a sinful being and cannot be by nature good. This extreme can be found in the works of Machiavelli and Schmitt.
Machiavelli's The Prince is known as a significant elaboration of rather cynical political strategies and tactics that the rulers should adopt. But Machiavelli's focus on the figure of prince is grounded in a certain anthropology. Basically, it is this negative anthropology that Schmitt mentioned a few centuries later. According to Machiavelli, 'one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, pretenders, fickles and dissemblers, evaders of danger, eager for gain' (Machiavelli 1985, 66). This is a quite extreme viewpoint, but it seems to follow from both the doctrine of the Original Sin and historical circumstances. It is not at all surprising that Machiavelli had small respect for humans in general.
In Machiavelli's view men are mostly driven by their own selfish interests, and this fact annihilates any need to develop a full-fledged ethical conception. Of course, not all men are necessarily terrible and cruel creatures. As he says, 'the nature of people is variable' and that the one is 'a breaker
Machiavellian prince has to be guided solely by dry political logic (and the political is an independent and self-sufficient realm). This logic has to be displayed in his international affairs, too. As Machiavelli asserts, 'whoever is in a province that is disparate, as was said, should also make himself head and defender of the neighboring lesser powers, and contrive to weaken the powerful in that province and to take care that through some accident a foreigner as powerful as he does not enter there' (Machiavelli 1985, 11). Such moves on the international arena would make one, and his or her state, greater and more