The fashionable Italian clothing designer, Brunello Cucinelli, has a full page ad in the current New Yorker. Its sole written message is this: “The State is the actuality of the ethical idea.” Is this man suggesting that the pinnacle of morality is to be found in the principled standards set by Hitler, Stalin, or even Attila the Hun? Do the ethics of the current American state — whose leaders announce their rightful authority to torture, imprison, and murder whom they please, and who are eager to unilaterally declare war upon any nations that satisfy their whims — further inform his judgment? Is unrestrained violence, killing, theft, deceit, and other  acts of dehumanization, that define the state. the ethical model to which he repairs? Do his words only reflect the conditioning he acquired in his youthful Italian schooling? Perhaps his learning was spiced by the writings of earlier Italian advocates of statism such as Machiavelli, or that more recent philosopher-king, Benito Mussolini, who advised: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state!”

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