PURPOSE

The purpose of The Machiavel Review is to present excerpts from some of the least known but most provocative thinkers and artists working in today's culture. We care little for who is "popular" or accepted by either the mainstream media or the academic establishment. We present the work of philosophers, novelists, scholars and innovators who challenge both the establishment and the so-called "counter-establishment," both the conformists and the self-appointed "individualists," both those in power and those in opposition. We believe that progress in science and culture comes not merely from challenging the status quo, but from challenging the challengers as well. For us, independence means being independent from everyone, including those whom everybody regards as independent. The Machiavel Review offers only high quality work which is too independent, too provocative, too politically incorrect, too far off the beaten path for the even so-called "independent" publishers. The writers at this site do not truckle to anyone. There is not a calloused knee or supple spine or brown nose among the whole lot of us. We have no interest in credentials and other such fripperies. We only want writers who have something substantive to offer, who tell us something that is not merely new and original, but true and profound as well. Although our aim is not to shock people or be offensive, we will not shrink from taking on even the holiest of hollies. This is not to say that we regard ourselves as rebels or blasphemers. We certainly do not consider independence as being equivalent to antinomianism. Immorality, bohemian mores, blasphemy and sexual deviance are merely some of the more obnoxious forms of counter-conformism. We reject all forms of pseudo-independence. Independence does not mean alligning oneself against that which is true, honest, just, pure, and lovely; not, not in the least - what it really means is the willingness to defend these virtues against the vulgarity and unbridled conceit of phillistines everywhere.

 

GREAT INDEPENDENT THINKERS & ARTISTS THROUGHOUT HISTORY:

Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, Michel Montaigne, Benedict de Spinoza, Sir Isaac Newton, Pierre Bayle, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Johann von Goethe, Alexander Hamilton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Arthur Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Carlyle, Jacob Burkhardt, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles S. Pierce, W.G. Sumner, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber, Robert Michels, Georges Sorel, Geatano Mosca, George Santayana, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Wyndham Lewis, Joseph Schumpeter, Frank H. Knight, Micheal Polanyi, Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper, David Stove.