Jacob Conrad
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Machiavelli's adventurer-prince is one of the first of the "masterless men" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were the heroes and villians of the age, cut loose from organic, hierarchical, and particularistic ties--ambitious, calculating, irreverent--insensitive to the ancient mysteries but not yet integrated into a modern social system. Some of these men eventually found a new master in Calvin's God, and then they set to work creating a new society in which he could be glorified and they could be active. Calvin pursued power in Geneva with all the artfulness of a Machiavellian adventurer; the same might be said of his followers in England. ... It is hard even to conceive of a politics of such destructive sweep in the Middle Ages.... In his own fashion, however, Cromwell was such a man; John Milton, who served him, was surely another. Not only the church, but the state, the household, the school, even the theater and the sports arena--religion, culture, family, and politics--all these the great Puritan poet would have made anew.