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One of the root causes underlying the optimist view is a social outlook animated by a philosophy of history. In the case of the pessimists, their view is shaped by an anthropology grounded in historical and social reflection - one that reveals strife, war, and folly as omnipresent features of human affairs. This, in turn, leads to a focus on political order rather than on society as such. Let us take Machiavelli and Marx as examples. Machiavelli is a pessimist precisely because he begins with men, whereas Marx is an optimist because he begins with the evolution of social formations. Machiavelli sees the struggle among men as irreducible, for it permeates history regardless of the social formation, religion, regime, or ideology that happens to govern a particular age - and, all of these are integral to the rationalisation of the power struggle. Marx, too, regards struggle as constitutive of history. Yet for Marx, struggle is continually sublated into new social orders, in which there is a progressive democratisation of the relations of production. It is precisely this historical development that allows him to envisage an end to struggle. Marx’s philosophy of history therefore presupposes a long-term historical process, whereas Machiavelli’s political theory identifies the recurrence of cyclical movements throughout history. For Marx, the march of history carries along the men who make it, often independently of their intentions or consciousness. For Machiavelli, by contrast, each man and each group bears a responsibility before history, yet neither can ever fully realise that responsibility in an ideal or ethical manner. The same applies to political regimes. For Machiavelli, the republic remains the political ideal because it balances and moderates competing powers, even though it too remains vulnerable to implosion - because man remains man. As long as there are friends and enemies, competing interests, wishes, and desires among men and within society, there will always be points of tension. Marx believes that these tensions can ultimately be suspended through the total victory of the proletariat. Machiavelli, by contrast, recognises that the proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, consists of men - and that both are subject to the same fundamental human condition. "Also in the future, the application of 'Machiavellianism' as a political and ideological weapon will depend on the characteristics and the outcome of social and ethnic conflicts. Theoretically, one can show three options: First, 'Machiavellianism' will disappear with the abolition of the separation of politics and morality in a humane society; second, it will persist into eternity because the separation of politics and morality is immanent, and it will not only persist practically, but it will also agonizingly split the consciousness of humans; third, the separation of politics and morality is not abolished in practice, but it prevails to such an extent that the moral side dwindles and falls into oblivion – in a historical phase in which barbarism, however technologically transfigured, becomes a matter-of-course and carefree lifestyle for brainwashed people who treat and solve every problem only technically; then the performance principle will take the place of morality, of the humanistic ideal. But that these three options were formulated here does not mean that we have all three before us and can choose by weighing each one from the outside; we are already in the middle of the path to one of these three options, whereby the impetus on this path is determined by great and famous events as well as by our daily doing and whereby the heterogeneity of goals is always virulent. This historical impetus, which arises and which changes gradually in the chaos of individual events, forces us, if not to pessimism, then certainly to skepticism." - Panajotis Kondylis, Machiavelli