Whether Machiavelli is the ultimate theorist of elites and the “iron laws” of oligarchic politics (Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, Max Weber), or the precursor of modern, democratic, and revolutionary thinking (Claude Lefort, Louis Althusser) remains one of those open questions about his thought that, in all likelihood, will never be settled. Two other persistent puzzles concern Machiavelli’s real intentions in writing a book of advice for his heretofore political enemies and torturers (Leo Strauss), and his advice to imitate (“return” to) the ancient Romans in all things political (Gennaro Sasso). In this concise and agile book, Ronald Schmidt reshuffles these interpretative cards once again and deals us a suggestive, new hand. Schmidt sides with radical democratic theorists like Wendy Brown, Étienne Balibar, and John McCormick who also seek in Machiavelli ways to counteract the deleterious effects of neoliberalism on the “democratic imagination” (pp. 14, 23). But Schmidt’s new twist is to seek to rekindle the democratic imaginary by delving into what Machiavelli has to say (directly and indirectly) about topics usually favored by proponents of the elitist conception of politics: conspiracy (Chap. 2), prophecy (Chap. 3), and, last but not least, torture and exile (Chap. 4).

There is a welcome air of pessimism about this book’s discussion of democratic possibilities, one permeated by the awareness of how low the North American republic has sunk, of how vast the corruption has grown, and of how difficult it will be to recover some semblance of a democratic polity from here onwards. The setting for Schmidt’s Machiavellian lesson is our current predicament, in which victorious economic neoliberalism has tipped over into “illiberal” democracies and alt-right populisms. While the obscene concentration of wealth in economic elites and plutocratic families is identified as the principal source of corruption of democracies (p. 18), Schmidt also seconds Brown’s warning that neoliberalism’s unfettered pursuit of economic privatization not only threatens democratic institutions but also extinguishes democratic ways of thinking (p. 21).

To get back in touch with these ways requires adopting Machiavelli’s “self-consciously anachronistic method,” which is “obsessed with exemplary models” and “leaps over eras” in order to “create communities” of thought (p. 7). Schmidt’s claim, as I understand it, is that Machiavelli’s anachrony is a consequence of the “uncanny” that defines his understanding of politics. For Machiavelli’s excursions into the past intend to bring out something that was once familiar to all peoples (in different eras), something that was an open secret of republics, and that just as predictably is always repressed (in any given present), yet always somehow manages to make its unpredictable return, with disruptive, even utopian consequences (p. 11). This “uncanny” is nothing other than the politics that is always somehow at hand and yet never quite enacted, in order to put an end to the permanent scandal that no matter how economically developed our world gets (no matter how “productive” our global economy is), we always find ourselves in a primal scene in which the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the 1% is master over the lives of the 99%.

In Chapter 2, Schmidt suggests that if we are to enact the uncanny of this kind of politics we need to breathe in (co-inspire) the open secret that has been known by all elites since time immemorial: that everyone and anyone can conspire to bring down a tyrant. Yet in his famous discussion of conspiracies, Machiavelli also advises in no uncertain terms that not everyone should bring themselves to act in this way, and that it is better for most people to follow “the golden saying” of Tacitus: “They should wish for good princes but should endure those of any sort” (Discourses III, 6). In a subtle interpretation of Machiavelli’s typically contorted use of exempla and of ancient gnomic sayings, Schmidt argues that in reality, Machiavelli seeks to draw the reader’s attention from Tacitus’s saying to those Roman republican heroes (like Agricola and Junius Brutus) who stood up against unbridled emperors and kings by seeming to stand down before them, even to the point of feigning their loss of sanity (p. 35). As I take it, Schmidt’s point is that democratic politics is not about generalizing conspiracy to everyone, as much as getting many people to encourage, inspire, and breath new air into those few, more heroic, individuals who are crazy enough “to think the impossible, the chance to create, in our time, the citizenry that we can conjure into existence” (p. 49).

Democratic life has always been saturated with religion. In Chapter 3, Schmidt addresses the penchant for the jeremiad in American politics and the continuing appeal of Puritan apocalyptic and eschatological fantasies in contemporary Christian fundamentalism. He proposes to recover Machiavelli’s lesson about the “armed prophet” represented by Moses. It is unclear, at first sight, how the democratic imagination could be rekindled by the idea of a prophet who has to resort to violence in order to keep his followers obedient and on message. Yet for Schmidt, the lesson Machiavelli seeks to draw is that as a prophet, Moses in reality was only armed with his words, for he is “a persuader, someone who can make others believe as he does, and can then force them to hold to their convictions” (p. 63). Moses is such a good persuader that he can even talk God Himself out of (some of) His vindictive aims (p. 69). Machiavelli’s Moses is the opposite of the theocratic prophet discussed by Michael Walzer, who tells people to “do” little or nothing because their God is all-powerful. This Moses, instead, persuades God to “do” nothing, or very little, in order that His People may assume their political responsibility for their freedom (p. 75).

The third and longest chapter of the book is a discussion of torture and exile, which Schmidt considers to exemplify the highest order of the democratic uncanny. Indeed, it is uncanny that Machiavelli, having been tortured and then exiled by the Medici, would nonetheless pine to enter into their service by writing a manual for princes that seems to advocate the use of torture and exile, no less. Schmidt seems to be saying that Machiavelli engages with torture and exile as extreme political practices in order to reveal what makes them so appealing, not only for tyrants but also for republics. After all, Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump have both legitimated the use of torture in fighting the so-called War on Terror by claiming that it “works” to keep Americans safe. Apparently, a majority of Americans may agree, just like an inordinate number of Americans seem to want to “build the wall” to keep refugees and migrants out of their country.

Schmidt follows Elaine Scarry’s classic interpretation in order to remind us how torture does its “work,” namely, by transmitting the incommunicably private pain of the tortured in the form of “the regime’s message” of power (p. 86). Machiavelli’s praise for Borgia’s “well-used cruelty” and for Ferdinand of Spain’s original act of ethnic cleansing and expulsion of whole populations into exile, another form of torture (p. 95), seems to contain “a cohesive argument for a politically engaged, ‘blood and soil’ nationalism” (p. 100). Maybe Hannah Pitkin was right to be concerned that in Machiavelli’s thought, elements of democratic politics coexist with elements of a proto-fascist politics (p. 103). Schmidt stays with this thought because it reveals that the deepest uncanny of democratic politics may be that “republics, too, who claim power from our democratic foundations, can ventriloquize the ‘support’ of their victims. . . . Machiavelli understands why the Medici chose to torture him to ventriloquize the pain of his torture and his exile; but he also insists in calling out that policy as a performance by a regime that is still vulnerable to the political acts of a free people” (p. 114).

The best parts of Reading Politics with Machiavelli, in my opinion, occur when the author tries to identify these “political acts of a free people” even in the midst of today’s profound corruption and decay of political life. Schmidt’s call for a democratic form of conspiring at the start of the book receives a more concrete physiognomy toward the end, when the last words of a tortured Eric Garner at the hands of the New York Police Department become the protest chant “I can’t breathe” of Black Lives Matter and are, in turn, picked up by Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s objection to the U.S. Supreme Court majority decision on Utah v. Strieff that legitimates “unlawful police stops”: “[N]o one can breathe in this atmosphere” (cited on p. 123). Schmidt’s hope is that, like Machiavelli, we “will not remain privatized” and will “direct our eye toward stories that resist the ideologies of the opponents of republican politics” (p. 135).