These two books present formidable revisions by heavily credentialed, intelligent young scholars. In Machiavelli and the Modern State, Alissa Ardito seeks to establish the consistency and essential synergy of The Prince and Machiavelli’s less famous and less frequently read republican tract, The Discourses on Livy. She also defends the proposition that Machiavelli, not David Hume or James Madison, was the first theorist of an extended republic. Ardito pursues these two basic lines of argument by first placing The Prince and The Discourses in the context of the seismic transformations in the political landscape of Europe that took place during the sixteenth century. In this tumultuous century, according to Ardito, the traditional small urban polis that had been the dominant form of political organization in the ancient world proved increasingly vulnerable to military attacks from regional territorial monarchies. Wedded to the walled polis, the sixteenth-century republic was quaint, dangerous, and on the verge of extinction. Machiavelli, however, was unwilling to relinquish the noble traditions of political participation, freedom of speech, and equality under the law that the Florentine republic had preserved.

Creating a republic that could survive among territorial states, Ardito argues, led Machiavelli into a breathtakingly creative act of conceptual innovation involving three problems of state building: how to expand a republic in space, how to preserve it in times of war and peace, and how to translate participatory politics into a geographically large republic. Machiavelli’s concrete plan, according to Ardito, was to convince a Medici ruler, any Medici ruler, to expel foreign powers from Florence using a citizen army, to acquire additional territory, and to establish a composite principality in Tuscany. Born from a citizen rebellion, this composite principality would rest on an alliance between a popular prince and his people, not a tyrannical one and local elites. Once established in central Italy, it thus might evolve nonviolently into the world’s first extended republic.

Most broadly, understanding Machiavelli’s project in this way establishes his two most famous works as “interlocking parts of a project to found a Tuscan state based on Medici territories in central Italy. The Prince presents a blueprint for the acquisition of a Tuscan territorial state while the Discourses attempts to graft participatory public freedom onto an extended territory” (p. 8). More elaborately stated, The Prince was a “revolutionary manifesto,” with the famous “liberation exhortation” of the last chapter understood as a call for a prince to liberate Italy and acquire new territory (pp. 10, 17 ). The Discourses, in turn, was Machiavelli’s engagement with the three problems of state building posed by the establishment of a republic in a broad territory. Overall, a study of Machiavelli’s project reveals his “Madisonian impulse” to conceptualize and give birth to an extended republic and the “unwitting companionship” of Machiavelli and the American Founders (p. 10).

If Ardito seeks a major revision of Machiavelli’s place within the history of political thought, Eric Nelson sets the even more daunting goal of overturning prevailing Whig interpretations of the ideology of the American Revolution. Nelson’s iconoclastic thesis is that the American Revolution was “a rebellion in favor of royal power” predicated on a constellation of ideas that he calls “Patriot Royalism” (p. 2). Patriot Royalism refers both to the elaborate case that American colonists-cum-revolutionaries made that their affairs were outside of the dominion of parliamentary sovereignty and to their defense of a specific (Stuart) understanding of monarchical prerogative powers that they envisioned the king wielding in their defense. Together, the colonists’ denial of parliamentary sovereignty and their call for expanding the king’s prerogative pointed to a broader “federal” vision of the imperial constitution, in which each part of the empire was governed by its own provincial assemblies and the king used his prerogative to act as the superintending authority over all. The Royalist Revolution, then, is the bumpy story of the colonists’ embrace of royalist principles in the early 1770s, their abrupt “republican turn” in 1776, and the subsequent rebirth of the Stuart understanding of prerogative power in second-generation state constitutions of the mid-1780s and the federal Constitution of 1787.

In particular, in Nelson’s telling of the imperial debate, the American revolutionaries self-consciously abandoned Whiggism—including both the traditional Whig narrative of British history and the cause of Parliament against the king—in the early 1770s. This remarkable moment came as the seemingly inexorable logic to the conclusion of the serpentine and protracted debates over regulation and taxation that quickened after 1763 with the increasingly aggressive regulatory and taxation policies imposed by Parliament on the colonies. After initially conceding that Parliament might legitimately impose “external” taxes on them, colonists recanted that claim with the passage of the Townsend Duties and set forth a distinction between legitimate taxes designed to regulate commerce and illegitimate ones meant to raise revenue. When that distinction also proved untenable, patriots turned to what scholars have come to call “dominion theory” and rejected the legitimacy of parliamentary authority in the colonies altogether.

“Dominion theory” derived an understanding of the character and extent of the crown’s authority in the colonies from an account of the king’s special history and relationship to them. Espoused by several of the most important patriot apologists in British North America, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and James Wilson, dominion theory held that the colonies had been created under the prerogative powers of the king, not the laws of Parliament. The king had negotiated and signed the charters and contracts with companies and proprietors that formed the colonies. The colonists thus viewed him as their patron and protector against Parliament. Conversely, according to the colonists, America lay “outside of the realm” of Great Britain and thus outside of the sovereignty of Parliament: “The king’s prerogative crossed the ocean, but Parliament’s authority ended at Britain’s shore” (pp. 30–31).

Most importantly for Nelson’s argument, the constellation of claims associated with dominion theory had first been set forth by James I and Charles I, who had claimed that administration of the American colonies was the prerogative of the crown during their battles with Parliament in the 1620s. As proponents of monarchical absolutism, the Stuart kings were reviled in the official Whig narrative of British history. According to Nelson, however, this hardly kept the colonists not only from employing Stuart claims that the king was their rightful representative but also from enthusiastically adopting Stuart understandings of the reach of prerogative power. Furthermore, although appeals to what Nelson variously calls “Patriot Royalism,” “Stuart Prerogativism,” and the “Royalist constitutional position” temporarily halted in 1776 with the ascendancy of republicanism in Tom Paine’s America, they reemerged as Americans adopted second-generation state constitutions in the 1780s and the new federal Constitution in 1787. At that moment, the same men—Adams, Wilson, Hamilton, and Iredell—who had celebrated the Stuart kings and their case for a sweeping prerogative during the imperial crisis came back, according to Nelson, to argue for an energetic executive with extensive prerogative power at the Constitutional Convention. The reappearance of Patriot Royalism thereby acts as the foundation for Nelson’s stunning claim that the Stuart conception of monarchical power should be thought of as the ideological origin of the American presidency.

As models of comprehensive research, expert craftsmanship, and persuasive argumentation, both of these works deserve the most serious consideration by scholars. The Royalist Revolution has drawn the lion’s share of immediate attention with its attempt at radical revisionism. Machiavelli and the Modern State, however, contains a sounder thesis and is likely to prove the more lasting contribution. Although somewhat speculative, Ardito’s reading of The Prince as an exhortation to the Medici to acquire a large territorial state in Tuscany is based on original archival research and insights into Machiavelli’s political writings gleaned from the application of a growing literature on early modern state building. Ardito’s broader case for the consistency of The Prince and The Discourses as a one—two punch for acquiring a composite principality and examining how it might be transformed into a republic is likewise historically plausible and supported with abundant textual evidence. In presenting this interpretation, Ardito joins Catherine Zuckert (Machiavelli’s Politics, 2017) in arguing for the coherence of Machiavelli’s political writings and interpreting Machiavelli’s prince as a popular leader of the people, rather than a tyrant serving his own interests.

Ardito also presents a provocative and smart discussion of the similarities between Machiavelli’s and Madison’s intellectual efforts to conceptualize an extended republic. Fortunately, her claim here is not about the genealogy of Madison’s ideas. It is, rather, that Machiavelli and Madison were equally bold in searching for new modes and orders to retool the republic for operation in a large geographical area. Unlike most commentators, Ardito emphasizes the importance of external defense in the desire of Madison and his Founding colleagues to create an extended republic. This discussion, however, ignores substantial differences between Madison’s and Machiavelli’s efforts. Most importantly, Machiavelli sought to preserve republican traditions of popular governance, including freedom of speech and citizen participation, by transferring them into an extended republic. In contrast, Madison thought of extent of territory as a means of dissipating majority factionalism and taming popular turbulence. Machiavelli’s republic was on the verge of extinction, Madison’s on the verge of overheating.

For his part, Eric Nelson has put himself out on a limb—where recognition is easily secured but a fast fall also hard to avoid. To glimpse the magnitude of the revision he proposes, one need only note that each of the three most prominent interpretations of the ideological origins of the American Revolution held by modern historians—the liberal or Lockean, “Country Party” or classical republican, and British constitutionalist—rest on the centrality of Whig principles to American revolutionaries. Has Nelson toppled the Whig consensus? Can “Patriot Royalism” serve as the next framework of analysis for the American Revolution, the next “republican synthesis”? Probably not. At minimum, Nelson’s innovative reading of the imperial debates has reminded scholars of the American Founding of the importance of “dominion theory” to the colonists, and made those less familiar with the imperial debates aware of the unusually large number of anomalous appeals made by American revolutionaries to the king right up until the eve of independence. As Nelson himself and numerous critics of his interpretation observe, the question of the significance of Patriot Royalism pivots on how many colonial rebels held this set of beliefs and how sincerely they meant their appeals to the Stuarts to be taken. Nelson insists, as a methodological premise, on taking the several claims he groups under the label “Patriot Royalism” as literal expressions of the colonists’ deeply held beliefs. Nevertheless, this seems to contradict the on-again, off-again commitment to “Patriot Royalism” among the colonies he maps. It thus rules out, a priori, the at least equally plausible conclusion that the colonists adopted dominion theory and the prerogative when it aided their cause and dropped it in favor of republican common sense when it became apparent that independence was inevitable because an island could not hope to govern a continent.

If Nelson’s study is unlikely to be viewed as a historiographical Yorktown complete with the singing of “The World Turned Upside Down,” however, it should spark extensive inquiry into the murky origins of the American presidency. Nelson ignores existing research into Jefferson’s understanding of executive prerogative by Jeremy Bailey and Madison’s by Benjamin Kleinerman. He also seems to treat prerogative power as a monolithic inheritance drawn from the Stuarts, rather than a deeply contested concept about a constellation of powers that a king or executive might be granted or denied, in part or whole. Nevertheless, the final chapter of The Royalist Revolution supplies sufficient evidence for the existence of a Stuart conception of the presidency to open the door for a much-needed future comprehensive study of the various ways that the American Founders conceived of their new republican executive. The importance of this book thus lies in the reactions it provokes as well as the thesis it forcefully and unapologetically pursues.