A perennial question for scholars of political thought is: How original was Niccolò Machiavelli? Gabriele Pedullà’s Machiavelli in Tumult presents a novel understanding of the Florentine's originality, premised on his qualified embrace of political discord.

Pedullà takes as his starting point Machiavelli's remarkable claim near the outset of the Discourses that “Rome attained … perfection through the disunion of the plebs and the senate” (D 1.2). This fundamental disunion was the precondition for all manner of political disputes, ranging from quotidian strife to unique institutions such as the plebs’ use of secessio (abandonment of the city and abdication of political duties) and detractio militiae (refusal to participate in war), both deployed throughout Livy's first ten books. More controversially, the plebs also relied on the power to accuse, considered a most dangerous political mechanism by ancient commentators, and reviled by latter-day observers for its use even against virtuous citizens such as Scipio Africanus. Yet these and similar modes, exercised through the leadership of the tribunes, allowed the plebs to successfully vent their anger at Rome's elites in a way ultimately conducive to both the order and the vitality of the city.

As Pedullà makes clear, Rome's tumultuous politics were widely recognized—and maligned—by ancient, Christian, and humanist commentators. Machiavelli's novelty lay in treating this phenomenon as cause for praise. His embrace of tumults is an essential element of his thought, separating him from both ancients such as Cicero and contemporaries such as Guicciardini. Indeed, for Machiavelli, this failure of analysis among his contemporaries was linked to a more consequential failure to effectively imitate the Romans rather than merely admire them.

Machiavelli defends his interpretation by noting that Rome's tumults “rarely involved exile and even more rarely bloodshed” (D 1.4). Pedullà justifies this claim by arguing that, per Machiavelli, Roman politics experienced a sharp break following the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE; it was only in the last century of the republic that violent conflict became a routine factor in political competition. In accounting for this fact, Pedullà seizes on an argument advanced by scholars such as Ioannis Evrigenis and Neal Wood, and derived from Sallust, that Rome's metus hostilis (fear of enemies) produced a certain degree of unity and harmony within the city. And fear more broadly is at the core of Machiavelli's understanding of the role of tumults. Pedullà thus rightly highlights Machiavelli's understanding that cities must take their bearings from foreign rather than domestic policy. In this Machiavelli broke with the humanists, as well as the classical tradition, in preferring a large, dynamic imperial republic over a small political community composed of the best citizens. For Machiavelli, expansion and immigration were both the cause of Rome's greatness and the source of its internal conflict.

The conclusive political problem can be expressed as follows. As Machiavelli himself puts it in Discourses 1.4: “good examples derive from good education, good education from good laws, and good laws from those tumults that many people condemn thoughtlessly.” The tumults in turn are meliorated by the fear of external enemies. Rome's mastery of the region in the second century BCE deprived it of those enemies that had kept its tumults in check up to that point, yet for a variety of reasons, Rome could not (and should not) have abandoned its mode of conquest that did so.

Throughout his work, Pedullà is careful to distinguish his argument from those of other contemporary readers of Machiavelli. Cambridge School scholars fail to recognize that Machiavelli's mixed government does not result in a constitutional equilibrium but in something far more, well, tumultuous. It is closer to the balance-of-power politics of international relations than to the stable checks and balances of Enlightenment government.

At the same time, Pedullà’s account of Machiavelli's “populism” does not veer into an uncritical embrace of the people, as it does for John McCormick; the people are merely the lesser of evils, when it comes to internal threats to the city. Pedullà usefully delineates how Machiavelli's qualified endorsement of the people is compatible with his generally skeptical understanding of human beings: the people are trustworthy in inverse proportion to their power.

Pedullà brings a remarkable facility with Machiavelli's historical context, as well as the classical tradition, to bear on his thesis. And he deploys this context not as a mere display of his erudition, but with a view to clarifying Machiavelli's originality. The reader will note the gracefulness of Pedullà’s prose—never a given when it comes to academic writing—and this dimension of his work is not just a matter of style but belongs to an almost Straussian attention to Machiavelli's own prose, including his use of imagery, metonymy, and repetition (praise is similarly due to Patricia Gaborik and Richard Nybakken for their fluid translation). Pedullà is particularly sensitive to the ways that Machiavelli's project reshapes conventional political categories, sometimes by introducing a wholly new terminology, sometimes by transforming existing terms and concepts.

One area in which Pedullà proves himself more conventional is his relative disregard of the third book of the Discourses. This proves significant precisely because of that book's broad focus on private modes of maintaining the republic, in contrast to the decidedly public character of tumults. And it proves doubly significant because Pedullà himself, in considering the crisis generated by the Gracchan land laws, highlights the infamous discussion in D 3.1 where Machiavelli notes that for a republic to endure, “it has to be taken back frequently toward its origins.” Pedullà acknowledges that such instances require something more drastic than the tumults that are a component of ordinary politics. Specifically, they require the violent and conspiratorial intervention of a princely reformer.

It is surprising that Pedullà does not develop this point, given the importance he assigns both to the general division between the two periods of the republic's history and to the specific events surrounding the Gracchi. And it suggests that tumults are but one exhibit within a more comprehensive bestiary of Machiavellian political conflict.

More important still is Pedullà’s repeated use of Cleomenes—whom Machiavelli clearly depicts as a tyrant, alongside similar figures such as Agathocles, Hiero, and, most tellingly, Caesar—as the successful reformer par excellence. (That Pedullà otherwise downplays the significance of his choice of Cleomenes may be linked to the relative paucity of references one finds to The Prince in this work.) Thus, Pedullà attempts to integrate this extraordinary mode of judiciously applied violence into his interpretation of the Discourses, but this attempt reads like an ad hoc addition to his scheme of tumults.

But these are not so much caveats as arguments—of the kind that should be provoked by a book like this. One anticipates future responses in the years to come, as scholars absorb and respond to this deeply learned work. Such is the praise it merits.