Machiavelli on the problem of our impure beginnings | Aeon Essays

Florentine Street Scene with Twelve Figures (Sheltering the Traveller) (1540-60), anonymous artist. Courtesy the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam by David Polansky + BIO Florentine Street Scene with Twelve Figures (Sheltering the Traveller) (1540-60), anonymous artist. Courtesy the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam is a research fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. His writing has appeared in Quillette, New Criterion and The Review of Politics, among others. He lives in Toronto, Canada. Edited bySam Haselby Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: ‘Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.’ With apologies to Nietzsche, the ‘questions of origins and beginnings’ are in fact more controversial and hotly debated. The ongoing Israel-Gaza war has reopened old debates over the circumstances of Israel’s founding and the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis. Meanwhile, in a speech he gave on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin insisted t

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