About 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli compiled a little treatise on the business of acquiring and governing principalities. In Chapter IV, he specifically warned of the difficulties—impossibilities, really—of holding onto a state in which barons, influential and with loyal constituencies, compete for power with a relatively weak central government. Machiavelli advised one can easily enter such a state “by gaining over some baron of the kingdom, for one always finds malcontents and such as desire a change. Such men, for the reasons given, can open the way into the state and render the victory easy; but if you wish to hold it afterwards, you meet with infinite difficulties, both from those who have assisted you and those you have crushed…because the lords that remain make themselves the heads of fresh movements against you, …and that state is lost whenever time brings the opportunity.” He concluded it was “impossible to hold with such tranquility states constituted [thusly],” and that the capacity to hold on to a state was “not occasioned by the little or abundance of ability in the conqueror, but by the want of uniformity in the subject state.”
We are burdened today by choices borne of the hubris of men who believed they could accelerate (within the span of an administration, no less) the very tides of history, circumventing centuries of social and political evolution.
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