Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom
ERICA BENNER

The author of this new study of Niccolò Machiavelli’s life, times and thought, Erica Benner, teaches at Yale University. In her preface, she draws our attention to what every close reader of Machiavelli immediately spots: namely, that it is very difficult to say with any certainty what political philosophy he is advocating. Indeed, the very word, “philosophy” is probably inappropriate to describe his unsystematic (albeit thought-provoking) examinations of public life.

Machiavelli’s multifaceted nature also explains how and why he has been appropriated down the centuries for such disparate ends and by such disparate actors. Few can have taken to heart the lesson from Chapter III of The Prince more conscientiously than Stalin (who had his own copy): “The injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.” Yet elsewhere we read, “[a prince] should endeavour to show in his actions greatness, courage, gravity and fortitude.” While Machiavelli’s exhortation to leaders to make themselves feared rather than loved has been much commented upon, his warnings against making oneself hated have received much less publicity. Cardinal Pole, no fan of our Florentine, had already noticed less than 30 years after publication of The Prince that unsophisticated readers might well get the wrong end of the stick – Thomas Cromwell for one.