Yet, alongside republicanism emerged a darker doctrine: that the expansion and preservation of the state constituted the highest good. In both The Prince and Discourses on Livy, Rothbard notes, Machiavelli “preached the maintenance and expansion of state power as the highest good,” subordinating all considerations of morality to that end. This was the germ of the reason of state: the idea that rulers could and should depart from ordinary ethics for the sake of political necessity. If the monarch’s private interest was the public interest, then any measure taken to preserve his power was justified as serving the common good. The reason of state was not the triumph of rational governance, but of naked power cloaked in divine and patriotic rhetoric.