Machiavelli as Sin-Eater

When the Egyptians were voting on a new government, The Wall Street Journal got international criticism for suggesting that Chile's President Pinochet had a valuable government model. "Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turned out to be in [Pinochet’s] mold,” read the WSJ article, published last Thursday. “He took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy.”

This question of the source of government power is an old one. This very idea was the subject of Machiavelli's writing where he theorized that nations were better started by dictitorial power and better maintained by republics.

Morality might be dangerous to a society, many thought.
Petrarch thought the Christianization of Rome's leadership was the beginning of Rome's decline.  "..the name of Christ began to be celebrated in Rome and to be adored by the Roman emperors as the beginning of a`dark' age of decay and obscuration, and the preceding period . . . as an age of glory and light."

Sophists of the type of Thrasymachus and Callicles believed that morality was tantamount to the interests of the strong man who has the power to call that right which serves him and that wrong which pertains to weakness.

Unlike these men, Machiavelli did not pervert the accepted notions of right and wrong but simply taught that the prince, in order to secure political success, must commit wrongs which, even though Machiavelli deems them necessary in politics, still remain wrongs. What he taught was therefore not a novel concept of right and wrong but rather a novel duty which bids the prince to accept evil as his norm. To teach evil as a norm, however, does not come natural to man. 

Sort of like what we have without the philosophy.