Now, what is the illusion proper to Machiavellianism? It is the illusion of immediate success. The duration of the life of a man, or rather the duration of the activity of the prince, of the political man, circumscribes the maximum length of time required by what I call immediate success, for immediate success is a success our eyes may see....Yet immediate success is success for a man, it is not success for a state or a nation; it may be...a disaster according to the duration proper to state-vicissitudes and nation-vicissitudes. It is with regard to immediate success that evil and injustice enjoy a seemingly infinite power, a power which can be met and overcome only by a heroic tension of the antagonistic powers. But the more dreadful in intensity such a power of evil appears, the weaker in historical duration are the internal improvements, and the vigor of life, which have been gained by a state using this power.
[Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason, Scribner's (New York: 1952) p.149.]
One of the things that is very noticeable whenever I teach the Gorgias is that my students have difficulty sorting these two perspectives out: they, like most people in our society, have an equivocal notion of success which occasionally ties them in knots. They accept the Sophistic conception of success -- getting whatever you'd like to have -- but also a Socratic conception that places success in the doing of justice, and the two mix as well as oil and water. It is always very difficult to get them to set aside the former for the moment in order to see that from the latter perspective the former is illusory; and the most common move, a perfectly understandable move, is to try to have both, to have their cake and eat it too. But all this ever leads to is switching back and forth in an ad hoc fashion. As I always point out to them when they try to describe a good politician, from a Socratic perspective they are simply saying that they want a Callicles-style man of nature who agrees with them. They never quite like that. But they never quite manage to find their third alternative, either. They can see that from one perspective the success of the unjust is the success of a cancer cell; but holding onto the perspective of the common good of civilization, even if only to trace out the consequences, they find difficult. And I think they are fairly representative of our society at large. We like to think ourselves practical, and what is more practical in appearance than immediate success? And, after all, if you judge cells in the body on their ability 'to get things done', on one way you can take that phrase, the cells that really get things done are the cancerous ones. And so the hunt is on for a controlled cancer that has only beneficial effects....
