This collection of original essays by a distinguished team of political theorists and historians may well be, as John McCormick proclaims on the book's dust jacket, “the best and most accessible source for the ‘Straussian’ perspective on Machiavelli's influence over modern political thought.” But unfortunately, no explicit effort is made in Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy (hereafter MLRL) to review the fundamental principles of Leo Strauss's hermeneutical strategy or even his basic “thoughts on Machiavelli.” Indeed, Strauss's name is only mentioned once (p. lvi) in passing in the text, and his perspective, while it fundamentally guides the plot of the book, is so muted, so submerged, so “esoteric” that one needs to be something of a Straussian to detect it.

For this reason, I would strongly encourage even scholars who have read some Strauss to reread his discussion of Machiavelli in What Is Political Philosophy? (1959) and in the “Introduction” to his Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958) before plunging into this volume. In about 15 pages in these two pieces, Strauss outlines, as I see it, the three major themes or paradigmatic arguments that the contributors to MLRL seek to defend, develop, and extend, while refuting the “highly misleading” (p. xxi) rival interpretations of Machiavelli and his legacy advanced by John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and the other proponents of the Cambridge School's more historically oriented or “historicist” approach to the study of political thought and discourse.

To help make the Straussian perspective in MLRL more transparent, I wish to describe these three themes briefly and indicate where each is worked out in the book. First, in contrast to John Pocock's claim that there is “an essential continuity in republican thought, stretching from Aristotle to Machiavelli” (p. xx), MLRL contends, closely following Strauss, that Machiavelli founded modern political philosophy when he initiated a “sharp break” with and “repudiation of the classical tradition” (pp. xxxiv–xxxv), that he was a “teacher of evil” (pp. 95, xlii–xliii), that he advocated a “rapacious” Roman republicanism (pp. xxii, lix) and believed he had discovered how to recreate an imperialistic republic that could master the world the way Rome did (p. lxii). This paradigmatic argument runs throughout, but it is primarily explicated in the book's “Introduction” (Paul A. Rahe) and “Prologue” (Markus Fischer).

Second, in contrast to the Cambridge School's contention that there is an essential continuity between Machiavelli's republicanism and that which evolved in England and France between 1650 and 1748, MLRL maintains with Strauss that Machiavelli's aggressive, militaristic, morally unrestrained republicanism (p. xxii) was toned down, “mitigated” (pp. xxiii, xxvi), and eventually transformed into a more successful liberal republican ideology, as it was adapted to bourgeois rights and values by Hobbes, Locke, Sidney, and a host of other thinkers (pp. xxiii–xxvii). This theme is developed and elaborated in chapters that explore the acceptance, rejection, and modification of Machiavelli's ideas by Marchamont Nedham and Harrington (Rahe), Locke (Margaret Michelle Barnes Smith), Sidney and “Cato” (Vickie B. Sullivan), Hume (John W. Danford), and Montesquieu (Paul Carrese).

Third, in contrast to Pocock's famous claim that the founding of the United States represents a “Machiavellian moment,” MLRL argues, as Strauss does, that while the American founders embraced “on occasion the devices of Machiavellian statecraft,” their “prime concern” with “justice” meant that their “use of Machiavelli was circumscribed and constrained,” that “they adopted his means only when they deemed it unavoidable” (pp. xxvii–xxviii). This theme is explored in essays on Franklin (Steven Forde), Washington (Matthew Spalding), Adams (C. Bradley Thompson), Jefferson (Rahe), Madison (Gary Rosen), and Hamilton (Karl-Friedrich Walling).

Given the recent advocacy by so many prominent Straussians of such Machiavellian policies as expansionary internationalism, full-spectrum dominance, and preventative war, I cannot resist noting here that MLRL ends with this remarkable observation by Walling (p. 278): “When it comes to waging war and remaining free at the same time, the American republican empire has been both more successful and more deserving of success than any other nation in history. The chief credit for this remarkable accomplishment belongs to Alexander Hamilton.”

Although I am not a Straussian and, in fact, approach the study of political theory from an evolutionary, naturalistic, and leftist perspective, I found all of the essays in MLRL to be meticulously researched, worth reading, and in some cases particularly informative and provocative. But let me conclude by pointing out some significant weaknesses or limitations in this generally impressive volume. First, the term liberal republican is never formally defined, and nowhere is any attempt made to specify operationally the cluster of beliefs a thinker must embrace to be classified as a liberal republican. Even more crucially, the title of this book clearly implies that Machiavelli's writings contain a legacy of liberal republicanism that was bequeathed to posterity as an intellectual inheritance. But everything in this book indicates that this suggestion is highly misleading. Machiavelli endorsed the “freedom of the ancients” (p. xlvi), but, as Barnes Smith observes (p. 49), he had no conception of modern, liberal freedom, of individual rights to life, liberty, and property. And while there are some bourgeois elements in Machiavelli's view of human nature, society, and the good life (pp. 19–20), Sullivan (p. 86) suggests that it was probably Algernon Sidney who first systematically “reconciled” Machiavellian republicanism and modern liberalism and created an actual legacy of liberal republicanism. Finally, I might note that MLRL, like the Straussian paradigm in general, does not provide a comprehensive, compelling theory of the process of belief selection that produces the evolution, the change and continuity, in a tradition of thinking over time. We are told that the American founders essentially repudiated Machiavelli's realpolitik. But why? The answer cannot simply be that they all just decided to reject his evil teachings in favor of freedom and justice. This overly rationalistic response simply ignores how culture and political context shape the acceptance and rejection, the modification and adaptation, of beliefs by whole groups of thinkers, such as the American founders.

Despite these reservations, I would strongly recommend this volume to all scholars who are interested in Machiavelli's influence on the evolution of that peculiar species of liberal republicanism that continues to survive and thrive in the United States. This is not just a book by Straussians for Straussians, but reading some Strauss certainly makes it better and more accessible.