Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince: New Interdisciplinary Essays.

This collection of new essays on Machiavelli's The Prince is the fifth volume of the Manchester Texts in Culture series, which, challenging the traditional concept of individual authorship, intends to stimulate "critical awareness of the complex relations" between seminal texts and cultures. This book, with a synoptic introduction by Martin Coyle, consists of seven chapters that focus on the multiple cultural meanings of The Prince from various interdisciplinary perspectives, including feminist and deconstructive criticism.

The first essay by Brian Richardson deals with the problem of the influence of The Price on its early Italian readers. He rightly points out the fact that, in spite of their private fascination with Machiavelli, in public they could not dare to approve his doctrine (36). This ambiguity of reception, which was particularly well revealed in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers of the Ragion di Stato, is one of the most important and continuing characteristics of Machiavellianism.

Janet Coleman examines what Machiavelli means by history and his understanding of the past as exemplary. Coleman emphasizes the medieval distinctions of Machiavelli's idea of history. According to her, Machiavelli's quest for historical laws based on fixed human nature is not new and follows the medieval Aristotelian way. This medievalism, however, seems to me somewhat overstated. Although she may assert that "there is no historicism" (51) in him, Machiavelli - in the sense that he regards history as a secular flux ruled by fortune and describes the republic in terms of the vita activa - can be understood in the stream of a Renaissance kind of historicism. He is an ancient, and so might be a modernist rather than a medievalist.

The ensuing three essays by John Parkin, John M. Najemy, and Andrew Mousley are all concerned with Machiavelli's use of language. Parkin approaches The Prince in the aspect of rhetorical strategy. He attempts to show that The Prince reveals "an intention less to present reality scientifically than to equip a political figure with a set of categories with which to approach and argue about the problems facing him" (73-74). In brief, Machiavelli's point does not lie in the logic and the objectivity of facts, but in the persuasion of and the dialog with a would-be prince.

For Mousley, however, Machiavelli as the author of a literary text is "an unreliable narrator" (170) and his persuasive force is weak. While in the dedicatory letter of The Prince he explicates the rejection of rhetorical ornaments and the presentation of the essentials of statecraft, his text is, Mousley asserts, full of various and often contradictory methods through which no prince could succeed in mastering ever-changing circumstances.

John Najemy's subject is the relationship in The Prince between verita effetuale and imaginazione. He considers Machiavelli's discussions of virtu from the standpoint of Renaissance linguistic epistemology. Machiavelli, Najemy insists, claims to know "the real meanings" of the alleged 'virtues' and 'vices' by seeing" beyond the misleading appearances of conventional speech to the actual effects of a given mode of conduct" (102). Such "a fantasy of autonomy" (Hanna Pitkin's term) stands against the "historical linguistics" of Renaissance humanism, especially as presented by Lorenzo Valla (93). Interesting to me is Najemy's suggestion that Machiavelli's understanding of language implicitly contains the contention of grasping the purposes and intentions behind the words (97). This attitude characteristically appears in the Baroque Tacitist writers who maintain that the core problem of political and historical writings lies in revealing the hidden motives of the prince and the truth of things often called arcana imperii, not in pursuing the rhetorical eloquence as the Ciceronians do. In this sense, Machiavelli can be connected with seventeenth-century Tacitism which is, I think, an important subject that could throw new light on the interpretation of Renaissance humanism.

Maggie Gunsberg and Maureen Ramsay investigate Machiavelli's position on the means-end relationship from the angles of feminist criticism and political theory respectively. Gunsberg views The Prince as a narrative which is divided into the main story of the prince-as-hero and sub-stories illustrating the success and failure of the protagonist. This ideology of end-orientation is equipped with "stereotypical masculine values" such as "action, conquest and domination in the public arena," inherent in Western culture (125). Gunsberg's discontent ultimately centers around the fact that The Prince works "to exclude open-ended possibility in favor of the predetermined certainty of dominant, stereotypical values" (146).

Ramsay's well-balanced essay aims to set proper limits to the popular idea that Machiavelli is the author of the doctrine that "the end justifies the means." For Ramsay, Machiavelli in The Prince never disregards conventional morality as such, but merely is concerned with those qualities that rulers must have to establish and maintain order and stability. She rightly reaffirms that Machiavelli's contributions to political thought are both his discussion of "actual political situations with the aim of formulating rules for political conduct" (184) and his suggestion that "expediency is not just a feature of abnormal situations but is generally the norm of political activity" (187).

The "present-minded" tendency appearing in a few essays in this book might make a "past-minded" historian feel somewhat unhappy. However, it is surely pleasant for all students of Machiavelli to hear so many various-colored voices in the same place.

CHA-SEOP KWAK Pusan National University, Korea