SİYASAL DÜŞÜNCE

Machiavelli had two different but interrelated objectives. His personal objective was to return to his active duty in the state. His second objective arose from rejection of the past. According to Machiavelli, the Italian city states, including Florence, often had instability for that reason and they obviously tended to decline. As a result, they were dominated by external powers such as Spain, France or the Papacy. Machiavelli’s second objective was of political: to ensure stability and to free entire Italy from any kind of secular or religious external control.The answer is C.

According to Machiavelli, the main means of The Prince is violence. A prince who wants to hold power should not have any other purpose or thought than war. Machiavelli distinguishes between the violence that is applied rightly and cruelties that are applied wrongly when a prince is coming to the power. However, this definition is not based entirely on a moral basis, and for him, it is an appropriate behavior for a prince to resort to violence intensely at a time in order to secure himself against threats. The answer id D.

On the other hand, the bourgeoisie and the emerging urban middle class would be one of the main supporting forces behind the Renaissance and the Reformation. Those who politicized the reformation movement on another level would be the peasants. It was evident that as the Renaissance was spreading all over Europe, its content inevitably began to change. Increasing numbers of translations were made from Greek and Latin languages. There was an increasing desire not only to read the ancient masterpieces but also to challenge their findings. The best examples of this situation are the scientific developments of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo (Harman, 2009: 180). The answeris B.

Martin Luther lit the fuse of the Reformation movement. On October 31, 1517, he posted The Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the church of Wittenberg Palace. These theses had social and political demands as much as theological ones. These demands had three main consequences.
1. Catholic world was divided
2. The churches were brought under the control of the states.
3. The bourgeoisie used these demands as a weapon against its opponents such as aristocracy and the Roman Catholic Church. (Ağaoğulları et al., 2016).

Calvin claims that social order organized in accord with the true religion is composed of three elements:

1. The Governors, the source of duty is God.
2. Laws, as the products of natural justice imprinted in all minds by God.
3. The Governed, who are responsible to obey the governors as much as the laws of God (Ağaoğulları, et. al., 2016). The answer is D.

The three principles of sovereignty for Bodin are:
1. Sovereignty is continuous because beyond the changing governments, the society remains the same. The continuity of sovereignty results from the idea of continuity of political society.
2. The continuous power makes law for the subjects, changes the law, makes the new one. The sovereign governor is not subject to the law.
3. Sovereignty, above all, is the power to make laws for everyone generally, and specifically and to change laws (Göze, 2017: 141).

Bodin’s preference for the best form of government is monarchy. Bodin bases his preference for monarchy on three basic reasons.
1. By stating that all-natural laws lead us to monarchy, he claims that monarchy is the most appropriate form of state to nature.
2. He expresses that the talented people in the country could come into prominence only in the monarchy.
3. He asserts that the fact that sovereignty that is absolute, indivisible and continuous, can only take place in the form of monarchy (Ağaoğulları et al., 2016).

What Utopia is mainly concerned with is the happiness of people. According to More, happiness is not a singular thing. Happiness has a collective characteristic. The way to reach happiness is through implementing the equality principle. According to More, equality cannot be ensured in a state where property is monopolized and absolute. Thus, eliminating the ownership of property is the only way to distribute the wealth of the country equally and fairly and to make people happy (Ağaoğulları et al., 2016).

According to Locke, property is a natural right. His initial idea is that everything in the world is the common property of everyone. His basic premise on property is that it is in every individual’s self: In its strict sense, property is the labor an individual produce by its own force and skills.

Individuals in the natural state make a social contract to protect their properties as Locke call their lives, freedoms and possessions, and prefer a society with a political power for their security. According to Locke, the reasons of transition from natural state to political society are as follows:
1. The lack of a situated and commonly recognized law of common consent to refer in case of conflicts.
2. The lack of a common authority which can make decisions based on such a law.
3. The lack of an authority (jurisdiction) to exercise a punishment as a result of a rightful decision (Ağaoğulları, 2016: 493-494).

By 1500 the population in most areas of Europe was increasing after two centuries of decline or stagnation. The bonds of commerce within Europe tightened, and the “wheels of commerce” (in the phrase of the 20th century French historian Fernand Braudel) spun ever faster. The great geographic discoveries then in process were integrating Europe into a world economic system. New commodities, many of them imported from recently discovered lands, enriched material life. Not only trade but also the production of goods increased as a result of new ways of organizing production. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers accumulated and manipulated capital in unprecedented volume. Most historians locate in the 16th century the beginning, or at least the maturing, of Western capitalism.

Absolute monarchy already became a widespread form of government in the Western Europe in the early years of the 16th century. The absolute monarchy was a combination of blood and iron depending clearly on force to a great extend.

The group that Machiavelli mainly addresses in The Prince is the one who seizes and maintains power by force of arms and their skills. Machiavelli says very little in his work titled The Prince about for which reason or for which purpose princes wish to come to power, but the work is full of advice about the means that can be used in policy.

The development of cities in the 16th century turned these places into centers where new relations, new classes, new demands, new expectations, new political struggles, and new nerves of energy were connected and redistributed. Especially the bourgeoisie using the money from the trade made the cities the main places of conflict between old and new social classes. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie and the emerging urban middle class would be one of the main supporting forces behind the Renaissance and the Reformation.

There are three principles of sovereignty for Bodin as given below.

1. Sovereignty is continuous because beyond the changing governments, the society remains the same. The continuity of sovereignty results from the idea of continuity of political society.

2. The continuous power makes law for the subjects, changes the law, makes the new one. The sovereign governor is not subject to the law.

3. Sovereignty, above all, is the power to make laws for everyone generally, and specifically and to change laws.

Thomas More is mostly known as the author of the book titled Utopia (1516). He is also known to have been a lawyer, a politician, a diplomat, one of the leading figures of the Northern European Renaissance and later one of the advocates of the established belief in his age.

Hobbes lists the chain of causes that creates the state of war as follows:

1. People are equal in the state of nature: The main reason causing war in the state of nature is the fact that people are equal in terms of their physical and mental abilities.

2. Inequality causes insecurity: Natural equality brings forth equality of the hope of achieving goals. Because every human being has equal chances with respect to achieving their goals, they have equal hopes. If they both want the same thing, the problem
arises there.

3. The result of insecurity is war: Individuals want to rule others and to dominate them to get rid of the state of insecurity. The state of equality requires to constantly cope with dangers to survive and to dominate others.

Locke departs from the characteristics of human being and of the natural life to construct his political thought. In this thought, human individual is not created to live alone: s/he has to live in a society. The first society is constituted of the relationship between women and men. The society of parents and children follows the former, and the society of masters and slaves comes. These societies, however, differ from political societies in their aims and the responsibilities of their members. Human being, as a social being, is naturally equal and free. Locke claims that reason in the natural state teach all individuals that they are equal and free, and that they must not harm each other’s freedom, life, welfare and property. Individuals are also a part of God’s creation, and God directs them to good. Human beings, differently from any other animals, have reason and conscience. Human nature, therefore, is a virtuous combination of many elements, potentially: Moral, reasonable, egoist, and social elements.

According to Hume, reason is (and has to be) the slave of passions. Moreover, he claims that a particular passion cannot be considered as rational or irrational. They might be based on correct or incorrect beliefs, or they may confirm or contradict with other passions. Hume’s philosophical investigations define moral beliefs as individual experiences and emotions that emerge from the sympathies of the related parties.

Like Nicola Machiavelli, Spinoza sought to understand relations of political power practically, scientifically, and dispassionately. Like Hobbes, he held that citizens are well-advised to give up their right and power to the state in return for the protection that it can provide to them in their pursuit of selfpreservation. Unlike Hobbes, however, Spinoza emphasized the breadth of the practical limitations on the individual’s concession of power to the state; and also, unlike Hobbes, he located a human being’s highest advantage not in mere continued life and the pursuit of pleasure, but in the achievement of adequate knowledge and its resulting peace of mind.