CONCEPT OF MAN IN POLITICAL THEORY 29 shows the unmistakable characteristics of a historically ascendant paradigm. He is so convinced of the correctness of his doctrine that he does not bother to conceal its unpleasant aspects. His concept of the prince shows the vigour, the fearlessness, the cynicism and the stunning novelty of all revolutionary concepts. The image of an abstract man starts breaking apart; the generic conception splits into two images opposite to each other. The tone of The Prince is contemptuous about the common man. "All men are ungrateful, hypocritical, fickle, selfish, cowardly59^—a description that anticipates Hobbes. However, as a dialectic composition, the tone of The Prince shifts in its last chapter to something quite close to populism.29 Gramsci observed that The Prince was a live work in the form of a dramatic myth. The con" dottiere "represents plastically and anthropomorphically the symbol of the collective will." It performs a typically mythological function of the sort Sorel has mentioned— "a creation of concrete fantasy which acts on the dispersed and scattered people to arouse and organise its collective will. Throughout the book Machiavelli discusses what the Prince must be like if he is to lead a people to found a new state.... In the conclusion Machiavelli merges with the people, not however some "generic9 people, but people whom he, Machiavelli, has convinced by the previous argument —the people whose consciousness and whose expression he becomes and feels himself to be, with whom he feels identified.9'30 Machiavelli thus manifests a double attitude toman, and shows the tension inside the renaissance concept. But above all, he transforms the status of politics as a praxis. From an illegitimate, apologetic, underground existence, it emerges now as an essential collective activity. In effect, Machiavelli argued, it is impossible not to act politically, though this is on occasions useful as a pretence. (To be concluded) [An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, in October 1976 as part of a seminar on Concept of Man: Perspectives from the Social Sciences] 1 For a modern version of the same reasoning, sec Herbert Marcuse, legations, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968, Chapter 2. 2 For Hobbes's intellectual biography, see Samuel Mintz, Hunting of the Leviathan, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970. 8 Apparently, it was not a great success at the exiled court of England. The queen, in fact, agreed to put the prince under Hobbes's care under the explicit condition that he would not teach him political philosophy. 4 Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 1.