Machiavelli.

Maurizio Viroli. Machiavelli.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. xi + 247 pp. $16.95. ISBN: 0-19-878089-3.

Maurizio Viroli places Machiavelli in the tradition of classical republicanism going back through the Florentine humanists to Cicero and Livy, and he demonstrates effectively how Machiavelli's works are imbued with the language of that tradition, especially from the late Middle Ages on. Viroli's republican Machiavelli espoused the "vivere civile," "civil life," a political ideal that could only be realized in a republic, where people could participate in politics while subjecting themselves willingly to the rule of law because of their love of country and desire to serve the common good. The means enabling their political participation was rhetoric, an art central to the Roman republic and the republican tradition, and, Viroli insists, to Machiavelli's world view and his works. Consequently, if one recognizes Machiavelli's embrace of rhetoric, Viroli concludes that the notion of Machiavelli the scientist, the father of political science, must be rejected. Not surprisingly, the central chapter in Viroli's boo k offers a detailed analysis of The Prince as a classical oration.

Although Viroli's claim for Machiavelli's republicanism seems sound, his book has many problems. When he analyses The Prince as an oration, for instance, arguing for the unity of the work on that basis, he says that the dedicatory letter is its exordium, and the final chapter, which has seemed to many inconsistent with what precedes it, its peroration. However, Viroli does not demonstrate that the rest of The Prince follows the sequence of the classical oration -- perhaps because it simply does not do so. Even if it did, however, would that really prove that there is no gap between the last chapter of the work and the first twenty-five? For even if The Prince were an oration, that would not prove that the prince of the first twenty-five chapters, whose sole goal is to control his state, is consistent with the prince who becomes Italy's redeemer in chapter 26. Moreover, Viroli downplays or ignores Machiavelli's obsession with power. Viroli recognizes that Machiavelli views the world from below, from the angle of his poverty, exclusion, and suffering, but he fails to see how Machiavelli's feelings also made him scorn the timid, cowardly mass of humanity and identify with the powerful, with princes such as Cesare Borgia and Castruccio Castracani who shamelessly deceived and manipulated others. Viroli also ignores the strain of misogyny in Machiavelli's works that is related to his obsession with power, as in his famous declaration that since fortune is a woman, the best way to manage her is to beat her into submission. Basically, Viroli's Machiavelli is a fairly simple figure and an unthreatening, bland one as well. His Machiavelli is a devoted family man despite his actual encounters with prostitutes, his mistress, and his ironic comment that the prince should never touch his subjects' goods or women, a comment equating women with furniture. Finally, although Viroli recognizes Machiavelli's antagonism to Christianity, he makes the "pagan" Roman religion Machiavelli preferred appear fairly innocuous by ignoring its use of terror to induce obedience.

Every writer on Machiavelli runs the risk of repeating what is fairly well known --something true of Viroli's arguments about Machiavelli's republicanism and rhetorical world view. Nor is Viroli's rejection of the notion of Machiavelli the scientist particularly new, for it has been effectively refuted many times since Leonard Olschki's Machiavelli the Scientist appeared in 1945. Although Viroli clearly has some acquaintance with the secondary literature on Machiavelli, he seems unaware of such scholars as Ezio Raimondi and Franco Fido, not to mention the present reviewer, whose work would have enriched his own. Finally, despite his sensitivity to Machiavelli's language, Viroli is sometimes remarkably tone-deaf, as when he presents Machiavelli's letters about his trip to Carpi, a politically unimportant, and hence degrading, mission to find a preacher for the Medici, simply as evidence of his patriotism, ignoring the anger, frustration, and malice in his saying he will find them a preacher, but one to suit h is own tastes, one like Frate Alberto, the rascally trickster and seducer in Boccaccio's Decameron. In short, despite its many virtues, Viroli's Machiavelli finally does not satisfy, for it fails to do justice to the real complexity and difficulty of irs subject.