"Poised between a last, desperate attempt to outline a strategy for the construction of a unified state and the dramatic awareness of the political impotence to which the Italians are reduced, Machiavelli is a great, solitary witness to the political decline of a highly intellectual civilisation. He has something of Dante in him, a passionate politician and disdainful exile, and of Luther. He is the last great voice of our realistic tradition and the first modern reformer of Italian consciousness. (chap. 4, p. 36)"