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Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor1 3 1“political art consists…in so directing the passions and even the malignanthumors that they cannot be satisfied without their satisfaction contributingto the common good.” 43 What applies to the leaders also applies to thepeople. “The large majority of men” are selfish and “cannot possibly resist…temptations.” Both “the nature of man” and “man’s situation,” for examplepopulation growth in conditions of resource scarcity, “account for the necessityof sin,” for the necessity of killing others in order to survive. 44 Therefore,the prince should not seek to convince people to be good, but should forcethem to be good through “institutions which make actions detrimental tothe common good utterly unprofitable,” while encouraging “actions” that“are conducive to the common good.” 45 And good institutions “arise frommost shocking things.” The best example is Rome, the most glorious of allcities, which has been founded through Romulus’s murder of his brother.Ultimately, this means that “morality is possible only after its condition hasbeen created, and this condition cannot be created morally; morality restson…immorality.” 46Given his position concerning the relation between individual moralityand social institutions, Machiavelli would be viewed by Dostoyevsky as anancestor of the “environmental doctrine” 47 which, in Dostoyevsky’s view, characterizedmodern Western socialism. According to this doctrine, immoralactions and crimes are the necessary consequences of miserable social conditions.Consequently, humans cannot be blamed for their behavior, whichcannot be modified through inner change, but only through a social revolutionthat would lead to the rational reorganization of society. Thus, there is no moralsolution to evil, but only a scientific solution, the implementation of whichrequires violent or, more precisely, immoral action. 48 To the environmentalist43Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 281.44Ibid., 191–92.45Ibid., 281.46Ibid., 255.47Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), 1:13.48Motivated by the goal to help mankind with the money stolen from a useless, or rather “activelyharmful” pawnbroker woman, Raskolnikov’s murder provides the perfect example of Machiavellianpractice as far as the relation between means and ends is concerned (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime andPunishment, trans. Jessie Coulson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 62–63). The murder, asstated by Raskolnikov, was a miniature social revolution, which the murderer intended to replicate“on a larger scale” in the future (ibid., 399). But while Raskolnikov ends up repenting, his politicalphilosophy finds its continuation in Demons, through Pyotr Verkhovensky, who argues that oneshould not hesitate to cut “one hundred million heads” for the sake of the triumph of the Revolution,because otherwise “despotism…, in a hundred years or so,” may very well “consume not a hundredbut five hundred million heads,” also definitively compromising “mankind’s” chances of “building its