The Question of Machiavelli

A 1971 essay by Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli (reprinted in Against the Current as "The originality of Machiavelli"):

The idea of the world and of human society as a single intelligible structure is at the root of all the many various versions of Natural Law [...] It is this rock, upon which Western beliefs and lives had been founded, that Machiavelli seems, in effect, to have split open.

Nothing less...