Friday, July 6, 2007

Summary and Response to “The Circle of Governments”

The article “The Circle of Governments” by Niccolo Machiavelli is about his opinion on the forms of governments. He starts off by stating the three forms of government: the monarchical, the aristocratic, and the democratic. Then he states that these governments can be degraded into other types of government . For example: monarchy degrades to tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, and democratic lapses into licentiousness. He continues by stating a how a monarchy was first formed and how it quickly became a tyranny by making the throne hereditary. The children of the original king would not follow the same values as the father and believed in living in luxury rather than focusing on politics. Machiavelli goes on to describe the newly form of government of an aristocracy with a small number of nobles in charge with everything. These noblemen did not take interest with what the people wanted and instead took interest in what they wanted. He states that this government was quickly overthrown as well and replaced with the popular government. Machiavelli reveals that this government did not last long due to the officials seeking personal passions and committing acts of injustice daily and this were overthrown and the government went back to monarchy. Machiavelli states that the circle of governments of is the basic formula of the monarchical, the aristocratic, and the democratic, is one that all republics are destined to run through but rarely go back to the first form. He concludes the article by stating that no type of government is perfect because the good ones are short lived and the bad ones are band due to inherent viciousness.
History is really interesting. Politics is not so interesting in my opinion. First off, it was hard to get into because of the huge vocabulary he used. It also seemed to me that he kept rambling and going on about nonsense for a while. As soon as he starts off the cycle of explaining the governments is when I was able to comprehend what he was saying. It was downhill after he was done with the cycle because he used the same stuff he used in the introduction. And I felt like I was re-reading it. I liked the statement about how all governments have defects because I believe our government has major flaws with it right now. Overall I didn’t enjoy this essay.

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