In this book, Timothy Fuller offers a rich account of the central questions of Machiavelli scholarship by way of a series of diverse—and sometimes divergent—essays. Containing many of high quality, this volume will be valuable to Machiavelli scholars and those seeking a convenient distillation of political scientists’ diverse appropriations of Machiavelli.

Harvey Mansfield’s and Maurizio Viroli’s essays establish the broad debate about how to read Machiavelli. Mansfield’s sweeping ambition is to offer a “compressed view of Machiavelli’s enterprise,” which entailed a “twofold transformation of politics and philosophy” that would bring each way of life together in princes who are “knowers of ‘the world’” (pp. 32, 11, 13). The world in question is material, human, and “tumultuous” (p. 24): it requires action, rather than contemplation or prayer, as recommended by classical philosophy or Christianity (pp. 13–14; cf. 20–24). Ultimately, Mansfield argues, Machiavelli’s worldly wisdom subordinates imagination (cf. pp. 27–28) to necessity as discerned by reason, resulting in a political philosophy that in its sensitivity to necessity and earthy devotion to the effectual truth is identical with a war against Christianity (pp. 28–31), but conduces also, possibly, to the moral, intellectual, and political impoverishment of humanity.

If Mansfield reminds us that Machiavelli was alert to ugly necessities, Viroli is attuned to the “dramatic beauty” (p. 53) of Machiavelli’s works. In a recapitulation of the argument of Redeeming the Prince (2014), Viroli argues that “Machiavelli wrote The Prince to design and invoke a redeemer of Italy capable of creating, with God’s help, new and good political orders” (p. 34). Chapter 26 of The Prince is the clearest evidence of this plan to create “the myth of the redeemer” (p. 34). For the most part, Viroli’s argument concerning The Prince is modestly argued and persuasive (see especially pp. 41–47), yet his effort to render Machiavelli’s philosophical and literary worlds a synthetic whole sometimes shortchanges the complexity of the former. For example, Machiavelli’s privately expressed hope that a Medici might serve as Italy’s defender (p. 37) is in some tension with his thoroughgoing critique of the Medici in both The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, and the fervent patriotism that Viroli identifies in Machiavelli obscures the biting criticism of the world to which Mansfield draws our attention.

David Wootton, David C. Hendrickson, and Thomas E. Cronin each address how subsequent readers have received Machiavelli’s thought. By a study of Machiavelli’s political vocabulary, Wootton seeks to disentangle Machiavelli’s thought from “Machiavellism” in order to identify the origin of “key concepts with which political thinking was conducted in the seventeenth century” (p. 87). Wooton finds that Machiavelli uses “the state” in multiple contexts, avoids the term “interest,” and eschews entirely the term “politics” (pp. 88–94) in order to engage in a comprehensive study of political life that remained alive to normative questions, without remaining in thrall to the dictates of classical political philosophy. Subsequent theorists—especially “reason of state” theorists (pp. 96–97)—narrowed political possibilities by restricting the moral vocabulary of politics, thus dissolving the tension between normative and calculative concerns that renders Machiavelli’s work so profound.

Conversely, Hendrickson writes that Machiavelli’s popular contribution to modern politics was to remind them that “political calculation” lies beneath professions of “conventional morality,” a teaching that Machiavelli recovered from the ancients, but which horrified the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment (pp. 107, 111). Hendrickson follows Machiavelli’s critique of the growth of the Roman republic in Book II of the Discourses on Livy, highlighting how republican empire was “ruinous for free peoples” in Italy, while simultaneously maximizing Roman aggrandizement (p. 114). Hendrickson concludes that Machiavelli ought to have preferred “the confederal solution,” but because he remained “wedded to ideals of glory and conquest” (p. 120), he praised empire. Hendrickson counsels U.S. foreign policymakers to avoid Machiavelli’s error. Yet by providing the map to the “old Roman road” (p. 122), does not Machiavelli thus arm the world against future Romes?

Cronin examines The Prince to learn what it teaches about “leadership, power, and governance”; he finds that it offers “an enlightened and pragmatic way of thinking about the preservation of an energetic, successful state” (p. 128), and identifies the success of Florence as Machiavelli’s ultimate aim. Cronin charts how modern leaders have assimilated Machiavelli’s advice—and how U.S. presidents, who seek to balance the “larger purposes of the state” with the achievement of “lasting glory” (pp. 136, 137), have wrestled with the thorny questions entertained by Machiavelli’s book (pp. 137–41). For Cronin, Machiavelli provides a realistic guide for leadership, but nonetheless underestimated “the role that pride and hubris often play in bad governance” (p. 145); he comments thus, although he concedes earlier (in a more careful presentation of Machiavelli’s political vision) that Machiavelli “preferred a republican form of government” (p. 133), and that principalities are best understood as a means to found republics. Cronin closes his essay by ruminating on what he tales to be the productive tensions (or “paradoxes”) of Machiavelli’s work (pp. 148–155).

Catherine Heidt Zuckert, Arlene Saxonhouse, and Clifford Orwin each offer particular elaborations of Mansfield’s themes. Zuckert argues that Machiavelli’s novelty consists in his “democratic bias”—or rejection of the pre-Machiavellian consensus among classical and Christian thinkers that held that “the few truly morally good and rational human beings” ought to rule (p. 57). Although her account of Machiavelli’s treatment of virtue and vice (pp. 58–64) is not new, Zuckert astutely observes that Machiavelli urges the ruler to “combine the art of war with the modern art of dissimulation, which [Machiavelli] associates particularly with Christianity” in order both “to satisfy his desire to command and oppress” and subjects’ desires for personal security, rather than the requirements of an “illusory . . . common or higher good” (pp. 64, 65). This union of interests between great personages and the people is, according to Zuckert, identical with the formation of the modern democratic nation-state, in its multifarious forms.

Saxonhouse juxtaposes Machiavelli’s infamous treatments of women—including his presentation of Fortuna in Chapter 25 of The Prince—to his private writings in order to argue that Machiavelli conveys a teaching on “sexual ambiguity” that reveals a “radical and dangerous” legacy that shatters the “chain of being” (pp. 71, 72). Saxonhouse combines appraisals of Machiavelli’s colorful love life and the women of his major writings—including Caterina Sforza and Dido—to argue that “Machiavelli’s women with virtù escape gendered expectations and transcend gendered boundaries” (p. 79). While neither woman was an unqualified success, successful princes will learn this gender “fluidity” (p. 80)—a quality that Machiavelli’s virtuous women embody, and thus will learn to be both men and women, an argument Saxonhouse identifies as “emblematic” (p. 83) of his generalized rebellion against the hierarchical structures of the late classical and Christian worlds.

Orwin closes the volume by directing sustained attention to Machiavelli’s lengthy and detailed treatment of Cesare Borgia’s failed career in The Prince, which, according to Orwin, “most evokes [Machiavelli’s] own situation. His is the failure that casts the most doubt on the possibility of Machiavelli’s success” (p. 158). Orwin’s withering and penetrating treatment of Cesare is a significant contribution to the scholarship: After the death of his father, Cesare might hope, at best, to be an “abject flunky” to either a Spanish or French pope (p. 164). Orwin concludes that Cesare, “by deploying an unchristian bag of tricks however unwittingly on behalf of the Christian pontificate . . . had given it a new lease on life” (p. 166). Cesare’s new modes benefit the “ancient order” by which his soul remained captured and to which his fortune remained subject. Machiavelli underscores his dim view of Cesare by juxtaposing his dubious success with the unequivocal virtue of pagans, the “limited” success of Francesco Sforza, and the limitless possibility of his own writing, which promises him a legacy that will outstrip that of pagans and Christians (pp. 168–170).