Machiavelli's Legacy: 'The Prince' After Five Hundred Years ed. by Timothy Fuller (review)

This stunning collection of essays, carefully edited by Timothy Fuller, might be slim, but it is perfectly formed. Its two-hundred-odd pages evince a conversation on the topic of Niccolò Machiavelli's enduring and complicated legacy, some five hundred years after the composition of his best-known, though frequently misconstrued, chef d'oeuvre, The Prince, produced while exiled from his beloved Florence. It is a conversation not only between established scholars of Machiavelli, but also between political theorists, Americanists, and scholars of international relations, lending the collection a diversity of points of view and approaches.

Fuller poses a series of questions that have confronted and confounded Machiavelli's readers for five centuries. Is he a 'teacher of moral evil'? Does he provide us with a sober and detached view of the actualities of human conduct? Does he advocate absolute princely power, or is he a defender of republican government? Is The Prince a handbook for rulers, or is it instead a satire on princely rule intended to warn the reader about princes? Does he call for the foundation of a new order, a vision of what we now recognise as the 'modern state'? Does his discussion of Fortuna indicate that human ingenuity will always be defeated by historical contingency, or is there the possibility that human choice and action might create a new order to restore the lost greatness of Roman antiquity in a new form? Did Machiavelli write The Prince in the hope that he might be released from his exile and welcomed into the employ of Florence's Medici government? Was it written for the 'attentive' reader who would discern its much larger purpose? The volume's eight contributors all respond to these questions, and raise other interesting issues, in a variety of well-argued ways.

Among the most notable, Harvey C. Mansfield summarises the controversies surrounding the interpretation of Machiavelli's thought, positioning himself within these and guiding the reader through an examination of Machiavelli's legacy. Mansfield argues that, for Machiavelli, the 'human whole' is all there is, that he was in possession of the 'effectual truth', and he recognised that there were competing legacies within the Western tradition (pp. 3, 14). Mansfield persuades us that Machiavelli sought to create princes who would be 'knowers of the world', by which he meant this world rather than the next world of Christian tradition (pp. 13–14, 16).

In his contribution, Maurizio Viroli presents an interpretation of Machiavelli's prince that is quite at odds with Mansfield's. Pointing to a considerable amount of internal evidence in defence of his position, Viroli argues that Machiavelli envisaged The Prince to be an oration of the 'Redeemer'. By this he meant not Christ the Redeemer, but rather a political redeemer who could be the saviour of a diminished Italy, then unable to protect itself in the face of foreign invasion and political hegemony. For Viroli, the theme of redeemer is the golden thread weaving together Machiavelli's thought in The Prince, even as he acknowledges that his is not a widely accepted interpretation of Machiavelli's line of thinking.

Catherine Heidt Zuckert outlines, in her chapter, her case for believing that the true novelty of Machiavelli's 'effectual truth' resides in what she terms his 'democratic bias', which was underwritten by his scepticism 'of the goody-goody character' of previous political thought (p. 57). She reminds us that, for Machiavelli, 'every city is characterised by a fundamental conflict between those who want to rule and those who do not want to be ruled' (p.57). Machiavelli disagreed with Aristotle's views on political order, arguing to the contrary that it does not develop naturally and organically, but is constructed by man. According to Zuckert, Machiavelli redefined the virtue of a leader, counselling that it resides in the discovery and implementation of new ways of satisfying his subjects' desire...