Simon MacMichael's translation of Corrado Vivanti's intellectual biography is a clear and readable précis of Machiavlli's writings, presented chronologically from 1498 when he began his career as secretary to the Florentine chancery to his final fruitless efforts to liberate his homeland from foreign barbarians. General readers will find Vivanti's Machiavelli an illuminating exhibition of the source of Machiavelli's ideas in the turbulent times in which he lived. Vivanti follows the notable footsteps of Pasquale Villari, “Machiavelli's leading biographer” (161), and Roberto Ridolphi, the “greatest biographer” of Machiavelli and Guiccardini (170).

Political theorists will learn more from Vivanti's account of Machiavelli's activities in the chancery, his diplomatic missions, his Cagione dell'Ordinanaza and attempts to reform the Florentine militia, his political struggles before and after the return of the Medici, his Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence than they will from his account of The Prince, Discourses on Livy, The Art of War, or The History of Florence. Vivanti does not attempt to break new ground in his interpretation of Machiavelli's major works. Nor does he often relate one work to another. Vivanti limits himself to providing the plot of the comedy Mandragola and does not connect the ideas in his comedy to his political ideas as many political theorists have done.

Vivanti presents himself as a scholar and a historian, not a political theorist. While he has favorable comments for Maurizio Viroli's Machiavelli's God, Vivanti distances himself from Viroli's central proposition that Machiavelli's God is Christian and capable of uniting Christians in a patriotic republic. Moreover, he strongly deprecates interpretations of Machiavelli that hold him to have had a model of republicanism applicable in all times and places, and holds J. G. A. Pocock and his followers culpable for thinking a transhistorical model of republicanism can illuminate political practices from Machiavelli's day to ours (xiii). The political principle running throughout Machiavelli's works is that political practices must accord with the dictates of the times (20, 38–40); indeed, “the sole principle governing his judgment … was the necessity to adapt to the times” (xi). Vivanti praises Machiavelli's “relativism” (xvii): “in political life, an absolute norm cannot be in force because of continuous changes, which need to be evaluated to establish a government capable of keeping the state apparatus secure” (xvii).

Although Vivanti's Machiavelli was opposed to absolute norms, since practical judgments about the merits and demerits of republican and monarchical regimes must be relative to the times, Vivanti makes clear that Machiavelli valued liberty and civilization “in terms that are absolute” (113). At a time when Ivan the Terrible, Henry VII, Louis XI, and Ferdinand of Aragon united Russia, England, France, and Spain by suppressing the territorial nobilities of these countries, and Cesare Borgia ordered the Romagna by similar methods while the Florentine republic could not bring order to Tuscany, “a kingly hand” (xv, 117) is essential for fundamental change in the condition of Florence and Italy.

Vivanti shares Machiavelli's patriotism and endorses Machiavelli's view (163) that a love of the homeland is an unchanging feature of human nature. However, Vivanti does not clarify whether the homeland Machiavelli loved more than his soul was the city of Florence or the nation of Italy. It is odd that Vivanti's chapter on The History of Florence, entitled “Things Done by Florentines,” which bypasses Machiavelli's account of other Italian city-states, concludes as follows: “Precisely because the issue of Italian liberty was the inspiring impulse behind the entire work, his representation of the past places before us the first example of a national history” (167). Certainly, Vivanti would not like us to conclude that republican regimes and city-states are things of the past, and monarchies and nation-states are things of the future.

In Vivanti's typology, monarchies and hierarchy are inexorably linked, while republics and equality are essentially bound together. In both Machiavelli's Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence and his History of Florence, both commissioned by the Medici pope Leo X, Machiavelli asserts the basic fault of the city is that Florence is neither a republic nor a monarchy. Vivanti attributes to Machiavelli Lodovici Alammani's suggestion that Florentines should adapt courtly dress to signify the transition from republican to Medici rule (140–41). However, there is no reason to think that Machiavelli thought nobles had to become courtiers or else be reduced to civic equality. Vivanti ignores Machiavelli's account in The History of Florence of the many positive attributes of Venice's mercantile aristocracy, and the martial qualities it displayed in the Venetian navy (before it employed mercenary armies in ill-fated land-based conflicts). Machiavelli deprecated the outcome of plebeian victories in Florentine class struggles that undermined the continued military role of the nobility in Florence's army. Machiavelli was well aware of the vital role of patricians and knights in Rome's army and government. Vivanti does not consider republican Rome to have been aristocratic but he does note that “in Rome a more complex social articulation was reached, whereas Florence was brought to ‘a striking equality,’ … a leveling, thus extinguishing every ‘ability in arms and boldness of spirit,’ such that the Florentine people ‘grew always weaker and more despicable’” (154).

Vivanti's typology of egalitarian republics and hierarchical monarchies is congenial to his compatriot, the egalitarian republican Maurizio Viroli, who asserts on the back cover of Niccolò Machiavelli that Vivanti's “treatment of Machiavelli's republicanism is probably the finest that exists.” However, Vivanti's typology may be as ahistorical as the republican followers of Pocock he criticizes. Indeed, it derives from Norberto Bobbio's differentiation of a liberal tradition from Locke to Kant, where the state protects the natural rights to liberty and property, from the democratic tradition from Rousseau to Hegel, in which natural rights are suspended for the civic rights one acquires as a member of a specific community (193–94, 217). Vivanti criticizes Giovanni Gentile for interpreting the Rousseau-to-Hegel tradition as undemocratic as well as illiberal.

Gentile's error derives from espousing Jacob Burkhardt's view of the art of politics (stato) as aesthetic creation, a view which is repeatedly criticized by Vivanti (ix, 21–22, 197, 253). Nor is Friedrich Meinecke's interpretation of Machiavelli as an advocate of raison d’état or an amoral Realpolitik that justifies any methods of ensuring the security of the state (97–100, 119, 239) acceptable to Vivanti, particularly as Meinecke's interpretation of Machiavellian politics was espoused by the great liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce. Vivanti rarely cites non-Italian interpretations of Machiavelli, and seems to criticize Burkhardt, Meinecke, and Pocock because they have misled an Italian tradition of Machiavelli scholarship. Vivanti may be understood to follow Machiavelli in a gentle scholarly form of the exhortation to rid Italy of foreign barbarians.

Meinecke was wrong because Machiavelli did not want to secure any kind of state whatsoever but only one that secured, or enabled the development of, liberty, equality, and civility (112–14). Far from being morally neutral techniques, Machiavellian politics, according to Vivanti, are educative, a democratic form of Plato's and Aristotle's aim of developing virtue through political engagement. Machiavelli's Discourses can be read as an institutio populi, the long-term education of a people to make them as worthy of a state as the Romans were (118). Vivanti does not attempt to render consistent Machiavelli's insistence on an unchanging human nature and enduring aspirations for liberty, equality, and civility with his claims of Machiavelli's historical relativism or the injunction to adapt to the times. This admirable work, which criticizes unhistorical theories of republicanism while adding to them, has not definitively established that a strictly historical approach to the interpretation of Machiavelli's texts is the only valid way to read these texts.