Many thanks to Professor Mansfield for replying to my review of his Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth. He is correct to consider my criticisms “friendly.”Footnote ¹ I have enjoyed reading him for many years, and his promotion of Machiavelli studies over several decades remains admirable. Yet sometimes friends disappoint and, when their mistakes matter, the office of friendship requires drawing attention to them. In response to my review, Mansfield reiterates his belief that “an immense conspiracy conceived by Machiavelli … created the modern world.”Footnote ² There is ironic charm to the statement, which Mansfield offers up in the manner of a literary conceit, but it makes an historical claim said to be founded on texts. By reaffirming his anti-historicist stance, Mansfield deprecates precisely the kind of research and evidence, historical and philological, that might confirm said conspiracy or, e converso, debunk it. And so the scholar who disregards what is known about a sixteenth-century text like the Florentine Histories, yet publishes it in translation, spends hours counting out the multiples of thirteen in chapters that before the nineteenth century were non-existent.

Most people will agree that the world has changed dramatically since the sixteenth century. Many will agree also that in these changes, including change in political thought, there has been an insistent movement toward what is commonly called “modernity.” That Machiavelli’s texts played a uniquely active part in this process is not a novel idea. My own way of stating this is to say that Machiavelli helped forcefully to usher in a new empiricism by casting off Scholastic approaches both to natural philosophy and human affairs. He found “truth” in the observed effects that result from what the Scholastics had called “efficient causes.” At the same time, he abandoned Aristotle’s “final” and “formal” causes as mere imaginings. This is made clear in the statement of method that appears in chapter 15 of The Prince. There Machiavelli proclaims he will “go after” (or “follow”) the “effectual truth” of the matter (i.e., rulership) “rather than the imagination of it.” Mansfield and I agree that this is the most important single sentence in Machiavelli’s oeuvre, but we interpret it differently because we translate it differently.

The formula andare dreto a is an Italian idiom meaning “to go after,” “to follow,” or “to pursue.” Yet Mansfield prefers to have an ostentatiously aggressive Machiavelli “go directly to the effectual truth.”Footnote ³ He ignores the empiricist premise and still radical but more precise contrast with Scholasticism embedded in Machiavelli’s sentence. Machiavelli’s early readers must have agreed with my reading, for French translations (beginning in 1546) render the idiom as “ensuivre” or “suivre”; the first Latin version (1560) has “veritatem sequi”; and the first English edition (1640) offers “to follow.” And although Mansfield repeats the assertion that “effettuale is an Italian word used first by Machiavelli,”Footnote ⁴ it had already appeared in a fourteenth-century commentary on Dante that used the term “effectuale cagione” as a synonym for Aristotle’s “efficient cause.”Footnote ⁵ As Mansfield notes, Machiavelli’s writing was indeed shocking and often exaggerated. But the Florentine knew also how to present a revolutionary argument of philosophical importance in a way that his contemporaries would grasp. A long series of later readers, many of them illustrious, understood so too. And that is why—not because of an “immense conspiracy” intended to resolve a selfish “succession problem”Footnote ⁶—Machiavelli is still with us, for good and for ill.