Review of Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)

Abstract

Wight praised Meinecke’s Die Idee der Staatsräson, translated as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History, as ‘by any odds the most important and enduring book on international relations published in the 1920s, and perhaps between the wars’. It is, Wight wrote, ‘an essay in the historiography of human thought, a study of how Machiavelli’s principles infiltrated into European statecraft, how thinkers and politicians who most strenuously repudiated him found it necessary to borrow from him, and how the idea of raison d’état developed to guide the greatest statesmen from Richelieu to Bismarck, until it was swamped by the ignorant popular passions of 1918’. Meinecke was preoccupied, Wight observed, with (in Meinecke’s words) ‘that tragic duality which came into historical life through the medium of Machiavellism—that indivisible and fateful combination of poison and curative power which it contained’. Moreover, Wight added, the tension between ‘necessity’ and ‘moral traditions’ has been recognized by some statesmen ‘as the central experience of international politics’. Wight noted that ‘Meinecke, despite his honourable retirement under the Nazis, was infected with the German heresy of idealizing State power and fatalistically abdicating personal responsibility. … Yet it was easier for a Burckhardt or an Acton, in the security of nineteenth-century Switzerland or Britain, to condemn power as evil without qualification.’