Harvey Mansfield opts often for a style that is coy: he delights in revealing ambiguities only to become ambiguous himself. But this book is different. The central argument is clear and the conclusion may sound chilling while the word coup is being bandied about frequently in the United States. To state matters simply, Mansfield argues that Machiavelli’s concept of “effectual truth”—announced in chapter 15 of The Prince—is entirely novel. Although he used it only once in his writings, the term captured the essence of a project that Machiavelli hoped would be realized by enlightened readers in later generations. Studying the natural world by accepting truths based only on observable “facts” (pp. 61–65) would lead to the modern scientific method. Statecraft based only on observed outcomes would lead eventually to egalitarian democracy, where numerical superiority becomes the determining standard.

Yet precisely because democracy is a regime of Machiavellian “necessity” (pp. 36–48), Mansfield argues, it drifts naturally into a form of soft despotism. Interests prevail over passions, courage is wanting in a crisis, and each looks out for his own. To correct democracy’s weaknesses, Mansfield points approvingly to Tocqueville as advocating reform via “a coup de main within the established government, rather than a regular war against democracy that he is sure to lose” (p. 258). Tocqueville, in this reading, becomes a Machiavellian in order to correct the deficiencies resulting from the politics that Machiavelli founded.

In the first two chapters Mansfield discusses the radical implications of Machiavelli’s proposal to replace high-minded concepts of truth with truth known from results: the “effectual truth.” Machiavelli’s statement is indeed supremely important: truth becomes measured by man, rather than man measured against truth. The great literary critic Francesco De Sanctis once summed up Machiavelli’s contribution in these famous lines:

Mansfield’s claim that Machiavelli’s effectual truth was ignored by previous scholarship hardly holds water. Yet it is true that recent Machiavelli scholarship has been more concerned to read the man as a “realist,” a “republican,” or a democratic “populist” than consider his approach to truth and how it is established.

Unfortunately, Mansfield persists in errors from earlier work that are sometimes significant, including the translation of the very sentence that gives the book its title and is printed as an epigraph (p. vi). The mistake first surfaced in Mansfield’s 1985 edition of The Prince, whence it has been repeated many times over by himself and by others. Machiavelli wrote: “mi è parso più conveniente andare dreto alla verità effettuale della cosa che alla immaginazione di essa” (Prince, 15.3). A proper translation ought to read: “it appeared to me appropriate to go after the effectual truth of the matter rather than the imagination of it.” But Mansfield mistook dreto (from dietro, meaning “behind,” “after”) as diretto (“directly”), with the result that his Machiavelli goes “directly to the effectual truth.” Yet the idiom andare dietro means “to go after” or “to pursue.” The difference between going “directly” and going “after” may appear slight, but where Mansfield imagines Machiavelli knowing and seizing the truth, Machiavelli instead claims to pursue the truth empirically by studying effects or outcomes. In the more moderate claim lies Machiavelli’s originality: his reasoning progresses inductively, thus differing from predecessors who argued from authority.

Mansfield further asserts that Machiavelli invented the Italian word effettuale (p. 4). But the word was not new and its meaning had contemporary significance, referring to the “efficient cause” of Aristotle and the Scholastics.Footnote ² The Aristotelian terminology is significant because it draws attention to what Machiavelli was explicitly rejecting. “Efficient causes” were only one of four in Aristotle’s schema of the “Four Causes,” which, in addition to efficient causes, included formal, material, and final causes. By establishing truth as dependent on efficient causation alone, Machiavelli took an important (and limiting) philosophical step.Footnote ³ In so doing, the Florentine drew no doubt from Lucretius, who had denied formal and final causation, and he anticipated later developments in the thought of Suarez, Bacon, and Descartes.

Obeisant to an anti-historicist bias bequeathed him by his teacher, Leo Strauss, Mansfield has habitually deprecated the “contextual” scholarship of historians and philologists, for he believes it flattens intellectual history and obscures the innovative quality of a thinker like Machiavelli. But showing how Machiavelli made use of contemporary Scholastic terminology in order to reject Scholasticism hardly reduces him to his context. Rather it confirms him as more serious and more original than is sometimes imagined.

Another Straussian bequest is the belief that Machiavelli took numerology seriously. Was Machiavelli especially attached to the number “13,” multiples of which Mansfield claims to discover in conspicuous places in the Florentine’s works? The Prince does indeed have 26 chapters (p. 32). Yet in the relatively numerous manuscript versions that circulated during Machiavelli’s lifetime, the chapters were not numbered. (I thank Jérémie Barthas for confirming my observation). Only in the printed editions that began to appear in 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death, did the numbers 1–26 appear.

Farther yet off track was Mansfield’s “discovery,” announced in 1973 and here repeated (p. 32), of multiples of 13 in the chapters of the Florentine Histories (a text he translated and published with Laura Banfield). Mansfield asserts that Machiavelli divided the work’s 286 chapters (22 × 13) evenly between the first four (11 × 13) and the last four books (11 × 13). He points also to the 39 chapters (3 × 13) that comprise book I of the Histories. And yet, while recently studying the manuscripts and early printed editions, this reviewer noticed that there were no smaller chapters, only eight “books.” In fact, the numbered chapters of the Histories were introduced for convenience in citation by a nineteenth-century editor.

Disdain for context leads easily to oversights, treacherous speculations, and various forms of disappointment. And yet Mansfield is a skilled close reader and an engaging writer, always eager to provoke thoughts out of season. Thus the volume contains several jewels. I count among them a finely crafted interpretation of Machiavelli’s comedy, The Mandragola; a perceptive essay that compares Machiavelli with his humanist predecessor, Leonardo Bruni; and a 100-page essay on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, interpreted as a response to Machiavelli, that might have been published alone as a small book.

Mansfield notes that when he was composing his concluding chapter—the chapter that suggests a coup de main from within the government to restore vigor and honor to the democratic polity—he was working from notes left by his late wife, Delba Winthrop. A contrary reading might point out that the passage Mansfield and/or Winthrop rely upon, which appears at the end of the third part of volume 2 of Democracy, regards specifically military affairs and the democratic polity’s survival in wartime, and it precedes the general conclusions of the fourth part. Surely Tocqueville would recognize that a coup de main conducted in peacetime, even one intended to invigorate democracy, risks plunging the polity into that more direct despotism that Tocqueville abhorred.