This book is admirable for its large ambitions. Diego A. von Vacano seeks to imitate Machiavelli's own imitation of great men, designed to launch the imitator above and beyond the object of his imitation. His proximate goal is indeed identical to the one he attributes to both Machiavelli and Nietzsche: “to break the Manichean mold of morality in their respective cultures” (p. 7; cf. pp. 182–83). To do so in his own culture, he aims “to construct an aesthetic political theory that can have … applicability” beyond the thinkers (again, Machiavelli and Nietzsche) from whom it is purportedly derived (p. 5).

Von Vacano denies that his ambitions are outsized. Rather, they “are in a sense quite humble” in that his construction limits itself to viewing politics aesthetically, from an “analytic and observational” point of view. Such a perspective does not “privilege any particular moral perspective.” It “distances itself from views that are rooted in fundamentalism, fanaticism, and moralism in politics” and “allows us to refrain from … universalist ethical language.” Why his ambitions are humble only “in a sense” can be gleaned from his characterization of the sort of language his theory would liberate us from: that which “has led to cultural clashes over the proper way to live” (p. 183).

The book's ultimate goal and full ambitions begin to come into view when one considers the applications of von Vacano's aesthetic political theory. The Art of Power begins and all but ends with reflections on the aesthetic parallelism of 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, offering an idiosyncratic version of the now-hackneyed moral of these stories as spectacle. The author's moral is that if his “aesthetic political theory” could replace “logical rationalism” as “the basis of political theorizing in the West,” then “perhaps” it could become an “alternative modern Western construct that … avoids the West's ‘empire of reason’ that has come to be resented in many parts of the world.” By devising “a form of modernity … that is less moralizing, less sure of itself and hence less threatening to other cultural traditions,” Von Vacano seems to believe that he can mitigate the ever more “common and severe” “reactions to modern Western understandings of notions such as rationality, freedom, equality, and commerce” (p. 9).

Absurd implications follow. If, as his employment of 9/11 suggests, we are to infer that terrorism is the most severe reaction to modern Western understandings, one such implication is that terrorism against the modern West might become less common and less severe if we could just get our political theory right. Another is that, to get it right, we need to replace that threatening imperialist John Locke with a tolerant pluralism stemming from Machiavelli and Nietzsche. And if taking the author to task for this second absurdity is not altogether fair, being more fair drives one all the more deeply into the first absurdity. For it is not so much John Locke's liberalism that needs supplanting as it is John Rawls's (pp. 8, 160, 177–82). If political theorists could just dethrone Rawls's quasi-deontology and replace it with aesthetic political theory, then we could all sleep soundly at night.

Difficulties with these goals and implications aside, just what is aesthetic political theory? And how does it derive from Machiavelli and Nietzsche? Since “this book is about Machiavellian aesthetic politics” (p. 6; cf. p. 112), priority must be given to Machiavelli. This emphasis is reflected in the organization and content of the book: Part I interprets works by Machiavelli, Part II is on Nietzsche's Machiavellianism and a Machiavellian Zarathustra, and Part III constructs a theory of aesthetic politics with frequent particular reference to Machiavelli.

Von Vacano focuses his interpretation of Machiavelli on The Ass and The Prince. In both he seeks Machiavelli's “philosophy of life” or “worldview,” which he characterizes as existential and suffused with “the tragic sense of life.” These somewhat anachronistic labels are meant to convey that pain, struggle, and failure predominate in human life and to suggest that it is nonetheless more heroic to persevere against all odds. When these two sets of conclusions are combined, a tragic view does indeed emerge. As a rendering of The Ass, the former set of conclusions is partly persuasive: The denouement of this apparently unfinished work consists of a speech by a pig, once a man, unfavorably comparing human life to the lives of beasts. As a rendering of The Prince, the latter conclusion regarding perseverance is convincing insofar as Cesare Borgia, von Vacano's chief focus, can be identified as Machiavelli's mythopoetic hero.

Von Vacano tries to close the open question of whether and how these two sets of conclusions should be combined by drawing both fully formed from each work. But to do so, it must be assumed that Machiavelli is as tormented with “deep despair and agony” (p. 37) as, say, Albert Camus might be by the teaching of The Ass (see p. 41 nn. 53 and 61), and that Machiavelli presents Cesare Borgia's strivings as the embodiment of the noble attempt to etch out meaning from a meaningless world (pp. 45, 51, 65), rather than as an avoidable failure in need of study.

It is from his treatment of Machiavelli's Borgia that von Vacano's Machiavelli, as well as his own aesthetic political theory, emerges most clearly. Machiavelli's “Borgia Myth” is meant to inspire action “against the precepts of common morality in order to bring about something of greater purpose to oneself and to one's community. By creating a myth, Machiavelli is acting as an artist, not a realist. The fact that Borgia ultimately failed is not an objection…. The myth making is creative, and it requires an artistic mind as well as the desire to re-found Western values on a different set of principles: to move away from ethics as the grounds of politics and towards aesthetic, creative, sensory, and perspectival bases” (p. 65). In this endeavor, von Vacano asserts that Nietzsche follows Machiavelli, and von Vacano follows both.

According to the author, we in the post-9/11 West face two problems: that of the clash of “value systems” that is ultimately inscrutable and that of “strong military action” whose “inevitable tragedy … lies in the fact that beyond ratiocination and serious debate (which may stamp an approval on a military retaliation) [innocent] human beings … are likely to be killed or maimed.” And since exclusive “focus on the ethical side” will not yield “better understanding,” we would be “better served by observation of its characteristics as a performance or act” (p. 192). In this guise, aesthetic political theory appears as the default for those overwhelmed by the burden of thinking through the signal conflict of our day and unwilling to enter into “serious debate” for fear that “ratiocination” will issue in the result they would rather not accept.

These criticisms notwithstanding, von Vacano has boldly brought to our attention a serious subject and has earnestly raised the question of whether and how Machiavelli and Nietzsche can help us to grapple with it. For that we owe him thanks.