 Elisabeth’s interest in properly evaluating actions and their outcomes is clearly related to her position as an exiled Princess, one with hopes that her family will regain some of their political power. She is particularly concerned with the problems that rulers face making decisions that stand to impact a large group of people with incomplete information. To this end, she asks Descartes to present the central maxims “concerning civil life” (AT 4:406, 25 April 1646), and for his thoughts on Machiavelli’s The Prince. Descartes politely refuses the former, but offers his thoughts on the latter in his letter of September 1646. Elisabeth offers her own reading in her letter of 10 October 1646. In her view Machiavelli’s focus on a state that is the most difficult to govern does provide useful guidance for achieving stability, but affords little for how to proceed in governing a stable state. Paganani (2021) situates this exchange within the broader 17th century context, both the political realities and the political philosophy, and in particular, Hobbes. He argues that Elisabeth took Machiavelli’s realism as a starting point, to begin to work through her own solution to how to resolve the conflicts arising from competing evaluations of self-interested agents, each moved by their own desires and passions, and ensure mutual security, peace, and insofar as possible individual well-being. Elisabeth rejects Descartes’appeal to divine guarantee, and, perhaps rooted in her own actual practice and public role, favours a pragmatic and operational approach to navigating charged political realities. He argues that she puts forward a distinctive position on the politics of moral action, and in particular on the problem of how natural law applies in a wicked world.