In The Prince, Machiavelli asks how a Prince may deal with a world changing constantly. One strategy is innovation. Innovation is a resource for dealing with change and with diseases in the world, or corruption, in the sense of degeneration. Until Machiavelli, innovation had both a negative and a positive connotation, the latter among Latin writers at least. To Christian writers and poets, innovo is spiritual renewing (Godin and Lucier, 2014). To Machiavelli, innovation is positive too, as this paper documents. Innovation is a fact of politics, and merits a place in a Prince’s arsenal. However, the representation of innovation changes after the Reformation. The concept of innovation shifts to the pejorative. Religious (heretics) and political (revolutionaries) deviants are labeled innovators, in a negative sense. Excerpted from - The Politics of Innovation: Machiavelli and Political Innovation, or, How to Stabilize a Changing World by Benoît Godin, Working Paper No. 17 under Project on the Intellectual History of Innovation. csiic.ca/PDF/WorkingPaper17.pdf
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 12:13:15 +0000
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