Thus his fundamental theory excluded any conception of a satisfactory social order gradually emerging by the impersonal work of successive generations, adapting their institutions to their own changing needs and aspirations.

It is characteristic, and another point of resemblance with ancient thinkers that he sought the ideal state in the past--republican Rome.
These doctrines, the sameness of human nature and the omnipotent lawgiver, left no room for anything resembling a theory of Progress.
If not held afterwards in the uncompromising form in which Machiavelli presented them, yet it has well been pointed out that they lay at the root of some of the most famous speculations of the eighteenth century.
[Footnote: Villari, loc.

cit.] Machiavelli's sameness of human nature meant that man would always have the same passions and desires, weaknesses and vices.

This assumption was compatible with the widely prevailing view that man had degenerated in the course of the last fifteen hundred years.

From the exaltation of Greek and Roman antiquity to a position of unattainable superiority, especially in the field of knowledge, the degeneration of humanity was an easy and natural inference.