And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.

I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations.

I'm very pleased to have with me again, Harvey Mansfield,

Professor of Philosophy at Political Philosophy at Harvard University, and I guess

Political Science Government Department, but I think Political Philosophy subsection of government

and a leading interpreter, a, student of Macievelli.

And you're going to explain Macievelli and modernity today.

All right, I'll start.

Macievelli and modernity for dummies.

Do you want to...

Was Machia the founder of Modernity?

Yeah, that's my question.

I learned that from you and I repeated it in my few years.

I dutifully repeated it in my few years of teaching, but can't say I really understood it so let's

attack the meaning of those words so first Machia really doesn't speak of himself as a

founder and he doesn't seem to use that word very much I think think if you wanted to know what he thought of himself was,

he was a prince, a strange kind of prince, a thinker or a writer who's a prince,

but that doesn't announce.

And then modernity.

So for him, he lived in modernity already.

Modernity was especially Christian modernity. So it was the

ancients who have been corrupted into decadent Christianity, Christianity which is both weak and cruel.

...