Contemporary Authors

• Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995
• Machiavelli's Ethics Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2009
• Machiavelli's Prince: A New Reading Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 2013
• Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World W. W. Norton & Company (New York, NY), 2017

1. Be like the fox : Machiavelli in his world LCCN 2017000694 Type of material Book Personal name Benner, Erica, author. Main title Be like the fox : Machiavelli in his world / Erica Benner. Edition First American Edition. Published/Produced New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2017. Projected pub date 1705 Description pages cm ISBN 9780393609721 (hardcover) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. Machiavelli's ethics LCCN 2009002603 Type of material Book Personal name Benner, Erica. Main title Machiavelli's ethics / Erica Benner. Published/Created Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2009. Description xv, 527 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780691141763 (hardcover : alk. paper) 9780691141770 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 220240 CALL NUMBER B785.M24 B46 2009 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2015 206214 CALL NUMBER B785.M24 B46 2009 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Machiavelli's prince : a new reading LCCN 2013387792 Type of material Book Personal name Benner, Erica, author. Main title Machiavelli's prince : a new reading / Erica Benner. Published/Produced Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013. Description lv, 343 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780199653638 (hbk.) 0199653631 (hbk.) Shelf Location FLM2014 053140 CALL NUMBER JC143.M4 B39 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 4. Really existing nationalisms : a post-communist view from Marx and Engels LCCN 95020276 Type of material Book Personal name Benner, Erica. Main title Really existing nationalisms : a post-communist view from Marx and Engels / Erica Benner. Published/Created Oxford : Clarendon Press ; Oxford : New York : Oxford University Press, 1995. Description viii, 266 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0198279590 Links Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0603/95020276-d.html CALL NUMBER HX550.N3 B47 1995 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER HX550.N3 B47 1995 FT MEADE Copy 3 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Tulane - http://murphy.tulane.edu/people/erica-benner

  ERICA BENNER
  2004-2005 CEPA FACULTY FELLOW
  Erica Benner was born in Japan and educated there and in the U.K. In 1985 she received her B.A. in Political Science from Tulane University. She went on to do an M. Phil. (1987) and D.Phil. (1993) in Political Theory and International Relations at Oxford University. She taught at the Institute of Philosophy, Warsaw University from 1993-95, and was University Lecturer at Oxford (1995-97) and at the London School of Economics (1997-2002).

  For the past three years, her research has been based in Berlin and her teaching at the Central European University in Budapest. She has held a Humboldt Fellowship at the Free University in Berlin (2001-2), serves as Senior Executive Advisor of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, and is on the International Advisory Board of the journal Nations and Nationalism.

  She is the author of a book, Really Existing Nationalisms (Oxford University Press, 1995), and other studies in the ethics and intellectual history of nationalism.

  Dr. Benner is presently working on a two-volume study on the history of ethical arguments about nation-building and national self-determination.

• Yale - erica.benner@yale.edu

  Home » People » Erica Benner
  Erica Benner
  Erica Benner's picture
  Fellow in Political Philosophy
  erica.benner@yale.edu

  Bio

  Erica Benner works on political philosophy and ethics. She has special interests in the ethics of nationalism and international ethics; language, rhetoric, and problems of political spin; the idea of self-legislation; and the nature and moral consequences of thinking, thoughtlessness, and ignorance. Her work engages with ancient and early modern philosophy and history, especially Thucydides, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Kant.

  She is the author of the monographs Really Existing Nationalisms (Oxford 1995), Machiavelli’s Ethics (Princeton 2009), and Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading (Oxford 2013). Her new book, Be Like the Fox: Conversations with Machiavelli (Penguin Allen Lane), will be published in November 2016. She has written widely on the ethics and intellectual origins of nationalism, including and essays in the Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Philosophy, the Oxford Handbook on Nationalism, and Nationalisms in Japan.

  Benner taught for many years at Oxford and the London School of Economics. She was a long-term visiting professor at the Institute of Philosophy at Warsaw University and at the Central European University in Budapest, and a Humboldt research fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. She was born and raised in Tokyo.

  Interviews:

  The Ethical Machiavelli. An interview by Richard Marshall, 3: AM Magazine
  For Office Hours, click here.

• 3:AM Magazine - http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-ethical-machiavelli/

  :: article
  the ethical machiavelli
  Erica Benner interviewed by Richard Marshall.

  Erica Benner is the cool, calm and reconsidering political philosopher who thinks much of the the time about Machiavelli, about how he’s been misrepresented, about how we shouldn’t take him at face-value, about how we should note the irony, his use of the Greeks, the dialogic quality of ‘The Prince’, about not being esoteric in her approach, about why Machiavelli adopted the rhetorical strategy he did, about his ethics of self-legislation, about his being a rule-of-law man, about his republicanism and about rereading him as a critic of amoral realpolitik. Time to think again…

  3:AM: What made you become a philosopher?

  Erica Benner: Lots of things made me start asking primitive versions of philosophical questions. In preschool I was fond of a mangy little tree in our back garden and invested it with all sorts of friendly properties. One day I realised that my parents and sister must see this tree quite differently, which made me spend lots of time wondering what, if anything, was the real tree apart from our different perspectives. Having one language spoken at home and another, unrelated one at kindergarten, on the streets, and on television was a constant reality check. Growing up in an overcrowded city made me think about how people can share, or fail to share, limited physical and social space. And being surrounded by moderately religious Christians got my sceptical juices flowing early on, making me wonder: how can anyone know God exists? How can someone be both human and God?

  I’m not sure any of this made me a philosopher – I’ve always been associated with politics rather than philosophy departments, so good guild professionals might disown me – but it got me interested in philosophy. The first philosopher I tried to read was Plato, at around 15, when I also learned a little ancient Greek. But I always suspected that I wouldn’t really appreciate him until my 40s, which turned out to be right. I read Hegel’s Philosophy of History a year or so later and didn’t understand much, but liked the feeling that my mind was getting a good workout.

  3:AM: You’ve written extensively about Machiavelli. Your take is revisionary isn’t it in that you say he’s not what we’ve been led to suppose he is – the quintessence of amoral realpolitik. He’s an individualist deontological ethicist and this is the foundation for a political ethics. So how come few people recognized the irony?

  EB: Lots of early readers did. Up to the second half of 18th century some of Machiavelli’s most intelligent readers – philosophers like Francis Bacon and Spinoza and Rousseau – read him as a thinker who wanted to uphold high moral standards. They thought he wrote ironically to expose the cynical methods politicians use to seize power, while only seeming to recommend them. Which doesn’t mean they thought he was writing pure satire, a send-up of political corruption. He had constructive aims too: to train people to see through plausible-sounding excuses and good appearances in politics, and think harder about the spiralling consequences of actions that seem good at the time.

  Even his worst critics doubted that Machiavelli could be taken at face value. In one of the first reactions to the Prince on record, Cardinal Reginald Pole declares that its devil’s-spawn author can’t seriously be recommending deception and oath-breaking and the like, since any prince who does these things will make swarms of enemies and self-destruct. To Pole, what later generations would call Machiavellian realism looked utterly unrealistic. Then during the Napoleonic Wars, amoral realist readings started to drive out rival interpretations. German philosophers like Fichte and Hegel invoked Machiavelli as an early champion of national unification, if necessary by means of blood and iron. Italian nationalists of the left and right soon followed. Since then, almost everyone has read Machiavelli through some sort of national-ends-justify-amoral-means prism. Some scholars stress his otherwise moral republicanism. Others insist that he was indifferent to any moral good other than that of personal or collective survival. But it’s become very, very hard to question the ‘realpolitik in the last instance’ reading.

  Nowadays this reading appeals to people for lots of reasons. It sounds bold and sexily subversive to anyone who’s sceptical about all sorts of ‘traditional’ moralities. It’s more fun to teach (or take) university courses on political philosophy from Plato to Nato if you can throw an amoral Machiavelli into the mix, challenging all previous political ethics. And then there are his texts. Machiavelli provides a wealth of quotable quotes that can easily be worked up into a theory of realpolitik. Since men generally are ‘ungrateful, fickle pretenders and dissemblers, and evaders of danger,’ for example, princes have to know ‘how not to be good,’ or they’ll fall prey to unscrupulous others. If you focus on jump-off-page statements like these and take them for the essence of Machiavelli’s thought, it seems fair enough to assume that he’s some sort of amoral ‘realist.’

  3:AM: What are the key missed background elements that help us understand the irony?

  EB: First you have to suspect that there is extensive irony in a text, then try to understand what’s being expressed through it. For me, this was a long process. Until about a decade ago, I too read and taught Machiavelli in the more usual way. I’d highlight all the eye-catching ‘Machiavellian’ phrases and race through the rest. When something seemed unclear or puzzling, I’d assume this was due to my ignorance about his historical examples.

  I began to suspect that more was going on while trying to draft a short chapter on Machiavelli in a (as yet unfinished – got side-tracked) book on the ethics of self-determination. The harder I tried to pin down his general message, the more confused I got. For every cynical, textbook Machiavellian argument I underlined, I’d see two or three other arguments that clashed with it. I’d triple-highlight a tough-talking statement about ends justifying amoral means, feeling sure that this must be Machiavelli’s ethical bottom line. Then a few lines on, there’d be an example showing the opposite: that amoral means tend to ruin good ends. Near the end of the Discourses I read that when the safety of one’s country is at stake, one should put aside all considerations of just and unjust and do whatever is needed for salvation. But earlier chapters had described how early Rome was almost wiped off the map as a direct consequence of unjustly violating its agreements with an enemy. It only bounced back when the whole city ‘returned to the limits’ of justice and the law of nations (and yes, Machiavelli uses all those words in his account).

  Most people who notice the inconsistencies give the more ‘realist’ statements more weight, assuming that they must represent Machiavelli’s basic position. I tried doing this for a while, but gave up. The cynical arguments might be louder and more alluringly unconventional. But as arguments, they’re much weaker. The reasons Machiavelli presents for them are often illogical, confused, or superficial. Sometimes it sounds like he’s parodying cheap rhetorical sleights-of-hand: classical sophistry. He makes a much stronger case for observing justice with friends and enemies, sticking with allies through good and bad fortune, and for putting the rule of law before the wills of men.

  The real giveaway is his examples. Machiavelli might lavish words of praise on states or leaders who follow amoral maxims. Yet if you look closely at his accounts of their specific actions, you can see that they’re heading for political disaster. For example, he seems to praise the Romans for expanding their empire by two-faced means. But he also comments – more subtly – that their policies sparked hatred and furious resistance, soon leading the republic to self-combust and turn its empire into a deadening military despotism.

  To show how his irony works, I set out some of his ironic techniques at the beginning of my new book on the Prince. Machiavelli didn’t invent these techniques. They’re very ancient, and would have been familiar to lots of his well-read contemporaries – which helps explain why some of them recognised the ironies more easily than we do today. One technique is what I’ve just described: to set up an ironic contrast between good words and less good deeds. Readers who notice the tension have to choose what to believe: the dubious deeds laid out for them to judge for themselves, or the voice that noisily, perhaps unreasonably, praises them? Ancient writers used this technique to train readers to see through misleading political spin. Machiavelli gives it his own creative twists.

  3:AM: You argue that the ancient Greeks were a kind of template for what he was writing. So which Greeks, and what difference did they make?

  EB: The original inspirations for most of his methods of writing are Greek, though Machiavelli also encountered them through Hellenophile Roman writers. Sallust, Virgil, Ovid, Plautus, Livy, and Tacitus all took Greek poets and historians as their models in some respects. In trying to track down Machiavelli’s ancient sources, I did the obvious and took cues from his own direct references. For some reason, not many scholars do this. Some treat Cicero or Seneca or Quintillian as important sources, though Machiavelli doesn’t say much about them. But they sidestep Xenophon and Plutarch, whom he mentions often and very interestingly.

  I started by picking up parallel Greek-English copies of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Hiero, two of the very few works Machiavelli names in any of his writings. And then there was light. At first and even second glance, Xenophon seems to praise the king-turned-despot Cyrus to the skies. But he sets up the same kinds of tensions between good words and problematic deeds I’d noticed in Machiavelli. Plutarch talks about other classic writing techniques I’d also noticed in Machiavelli and Xenophon. Both of them repeatedly use certain words in an ambiguous way. For example, when Machiavelli says that someone was ‘fortunate,’ ‘happy,’ ‘great,’ or ‘astute,’ we tend to take these as words of praise. But if you study all his uses of these words, a pattern emerges: they usually signal some sort of problem, or a subtle criticism. Happiness and greatness don’t entail safety, and usually come before a fall. Astuteness isn’t far-thinking prudence but merely cunning opportunism.

  Machiavelli also mentions Thucydides by name in the Discourses, and has a number of passages that strongly evoke Aristotle, Plato, and Polybius. What difference did any of these ancient writers make? Well, they made a big difference for my reading: if I hadn’t checked some of Machiavelli’s ancient sources and noticed the stylistic similarities, I’d have been much less confident about arguing that he writes ironically. And it’s not just the dissimulative style that’s similar. The structure and content of his ethical judgements are also close to those found in several Greek historical and philosophical works. I wouldn’t want to make sweeping generalisations here, but make specific comparisons in my two Machiavelli books.

  3:AM: In your new book on ‘The Prince’ you suggest that it has a dialogic quality. Can you say something about this?

  EB: Most people today read the Prince as a treatise where the author sets out his own best arguments in a straightforward way. But inconsistent arguments of uneven quality, constant shifts between aggressively strident and moderate tones, and other stylistic oddities create the impression that the book isn’t a univocal treatise at all. Instead, it seems to imitate different voices that express very different opinions – not all of them, perhaps, the author’s. By keeping us in doubt about which voice conveys his own views, Machiavelli prods readers to judge his examples and commentaries for themselves.

  He refers to several of The Prince’s chapters as ‘discourses’ (discorsi). The word suggests that they’re structured as conversations with readers, not lectures delivered from an authorial pedestal. I read the whole book as a series of mind-teasing discussion pieces. What readers take from reading discourses depends on their own aims. If you’re an ambitious young man in a hurry, or an overworked professor who has to teach a segment on Machiavelli in a Plato-to-Nato course, you’ll probably do as I did: skim the text, seize on the most attention-grabbing statements and shocker examples, and not worry too much about the subtle warning signs.

  It’s worth remembering that Machiavelli was brilliant dramatist, not just a student of politics. In his own lifetime he became famous not as a political writer – the Prince and Discourses were only published after he died in 1527 – but for his play Mandragola, a blistering satire of corrupt morals in Florence. Plays depict different actions and opinions and let the audience judge them; it can be hard to say what playwrights think about their own characters. Plato and Plutarch write about how some people who read risqué poetry or hear shocking things on stage accuse the authors of peddling bad morals. But this isn’t always fair, since it’s the audience’s responsibility to judge what they see, and good drama and literature and philosophy challenge them to exercise their own judgement. Some of Machiavelli’s early defenders made the same argument about the Prince.

  3:AM: So can you give an example of when Machiavelli is sounding amoral and seems to be justifying cruelty and deceit and explain why he’s doing that and what you think is really going on?

  EB: Machiavelli seems to praise the deceitful and violent Cesare Borgia more warmly than anyone else he mentions in the Prince. He says things like ‘I cannot think how to reproach him,’ ‘I would hold him up to be imitated by any prince who comes to power by fortune and others’ arms,’ and says Borgia laid ‘good foundations’ for his power with the help of some pretty appalling betrayals and murders.

  But the long chapter describing Borgia’s career is packed with insinuations that compromise the praise. Machiavelli might not reproach him outright, but he classifies him as a prototype of a prince who depends on fortune and ‘the arms of others,’ not on virtù and his own arms. As the beginning of the chapter makes clear, fortune-dependent princes are much the inferior sort. They rise to power quickly using money and borrowed forces, which Machiavelli calls ‘two very inconstant and unreliable things’ – then crash just as fast, as Cesare did when his father the Pope died. Machiavelli says that Cesare ‘only’ failed because of this cruel stroke of fortune. But his long narration of Cesare’s deeds is anything but a story of near-success. It’s a series of increasingly desperate ploys to hold on to the state his father handed him on a platter, always using money and ‘the arms of others’ which somehow never seem to bring him security. And then comes the crowning irony: when his father dies, Cesare falls ‘only’ because he backed the wrong man to be the next Pope. After all his supposedly promising efforts to stand on his own two virtuous feet, he still depends on the Papacy to shore him up.

  The ironies aren’t at all obvious; the whole chapter is a masterpiece of literary dissimulation. But once you start to notice them, the effect is very funny. Why does he write this way? Mostly to test readers’ powers of observation and political judgement. Machiavelli produces the ironic effect by a glaring contrast between his good words about Cesare – which on close scrutiny aren’t really all that good – and his detailed account of what the fortunate young man actually did, which quietly exposes the flaws. Machiavelli helps readers spot the ironies by opening the chapter with a discussion of the concrete methods (money and others’ arms) people use when they rely on fortune, where he explains why these methods invariably fail in the end. If readers use their own brains and apply these general observations to the particulars, they’ll find it hard to believe the voice that keeps piping up against so much evidence, saying: Cesare was well on his way to building a firm new state that depended only on his own arms and virtù! He was almost independent, and then cruel Fortuna killed his father and made him pick the wrong man as his new papal protector, who destroyed those nearly solid foundations at a stroke!

  3:AM: One of the things that people have noted about your approach is the esoteric hermeneutical approach you adopt. Can you say something about this approach, which might seem to a skeptic to be a way of reading into a text things that aren’t there. After all, you do argue that Machiavelli is hiding deeper truths below the surface – is it overwhelmingly clear that the esoteric approach is the right one rather than one that distorts?

  EB: I’d never describe my approach as ‘esoteric’, though some critics do. I don’t think you can usefully distinguish between inner and outer meanings in Machiavelli’s texts, with one altogether false surface ‘hiding’ crystal clear truths. The texts are ambiguous. They present different facets at the same time. Some readers might not notice the ambiguities because they assume they’re reading a simple treatise. So they look for lines of argument that can somehow fit their expectations, and discount the rest. But that doesn’t mean they’ve correctly identified the outer ‘surface,’ while whatever jars with their reading must be ‘hidden,’ or merely imagined by readers who claim to detect signs of irony.

  As I’ve just said with the example of Borgia, Machiavelli gives us plenty of clues right up front. He sets out general standards that anyone can apply to evaluate the deeds he describes. He uses certain words in a patterned way, so that people who make the effort to trace the patterns might start wondering whether Machiavelli’s apparent praise isn’t problematic. There’s nothing occult about these ironic techniques or others I set out in my book. Nor does recognizing them suddenly end all debates about how to read ambiguous passages, or about the content of Machiavelli’s teachings. Far from it.

  Do ‘straight’ treatise-like readings carry less danger of distortion than ironic ones? I guess people might think so who don’t think the Prince and Discourses are full of ambiguities, inconsistent statements, and moral judgements that undermine the more famous amoral assertions. But if one does notice these features, surely any reading that brings them to the forefront and tries to explain them is more illuminating than one that plays down the tensions.

  3:AM: Ross J. Corbett in his review liked the book but thought that the code words for unlocking the text were faulty in some respects – how do you respond to his worries?

  EB: I enjoyed his review and found him a good sparring partner. But I thought he reduced the code words to a much blunter interpretive instrument than I intended. What I call normatively coded words aren’t cryptic: they’re not a magic key meant to unlock a true covert meaning beneath a more obvious surface. And my list of fortune- and virtù-linked words isn’t supposed to save anyone the work of interpreting specific, ambiguous passages. It merely summarises broad patterns of usage that occur throughout the Prince. The book tries to explain how the words work in particular places, since their normative senses don’t always strike one immediately. Contra Corbett’s expectations, they’re not simple markers trumpeting praise or blame. There are different kinds and degrees of fortune- or virtù dependence that Machiavelli wants readers to track.

  Corbett protests, for example, that though my list gives ‘prince’ as a negative word in contrast to the positive ‘republic,’ I see Philopoemen – whom Machiavelli calls ‘prince of the Achaeans’ – as one of his positive exemplars. This criticism ignores everything I say about how Machiavelli treats some ways of ordering principality as close to his idea of a virtuous republic, others as more remote. Sometimes a so-called principality or prince is subordinated to the laws and orders of a republic, thus emptying the name ‘prince’ of most of its usual meaning. As I say in the book, Philopoemen was an elected military leader, not a permanent or hereditary ruler. In the Discourses, I note in chapter 1, Machiavelli occasionally calls a republic’s elected leaders ‘princes’ in an extremely weakened sense, since they’re subject to the republic. The general pattern still holds: ‘prince’ is an inferior, more fortune-dependent sort of rule than republic. But some princes have more republican features that make them depend less on fortune. Some so-called republics – like Florence under the Medici ‘princes’ in Machiavelli’s youth and later life – have so many princely features that the name of republic rings hollow. These gradations pose no problem for my argument unless you expect the coded words to paint everything in black and white.

  I argue that ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ are always an antithetical pair for Machiavelli. Ordinario signals a positive judgment meaning ‘within or supporting good orders,’ estraordinario the opposite. Corbett picks out some apparent exceptions and doubts whether they fit these normative patterns. When Machiavelli says that mediocre mercenaries ‘ruin you in ordinary way,’ Corbett claims that ‘ordinary’ here can’t possibly have a positive sense, since to ruin something is bad. Look again. Machiavelli says: excellent captains ruin you ‘extraordinarily’ by overthrowing your established political orders. Poor-quality mercenaries ruin you ‘in the ordinary way’ – without attacking your political orders, but simply by being reluctant and lazy fighters. Obviously it’s bad to be ruined either way, but worse to be ruined extraordinarily: better have a bad hired captain who doesn’t stage a full-fledged military coup than a good one who does. Ordinary is positive here, if only comparatively, and not in the laudatory way Corbett demands.

  Machiavelli calls the desire to acquire, and the ‘necessity to offend’ when you become a new prince, ‘natural and ordinary.’ Corbett insists that ‘ordinary’ can’t be normative here, since acquisitive desires and the necessity to offend aren’t obviously compatible with good orders. Again, look again. The desires and necessity aren’t normative in the sense of ‘praiseworthy.’ They’re just part of human nature or the natural order of things. But as such, Machiavelli thinks they need to be taken into account –as normative – by anyone who wants to found lasting political orders. A political founder who ignores human beings’ natural desire to acquire will fail to regulate this desire in ways that support rather than undermine good orders. A new prince who thinks he can get away with not offending anyone will also fail to set up firm foundations. Here Machiavelli’s ‘ordinary’ human desires and drives have positive normative implications for political order, while ‘extraordinary’ desires, conditions, or miracles tend to undercut it. Corbett misses these philosophical dimensions of the ordinary/extraordinary distinction, though I repeatedly stress them.

  3:AM: Why did Machiavelli adopt the rhetorical strategy he did? Is it similar to the kind of things we find in Shakespeare, Giordano Bruno, the metaphysical poets etc, Michelangelo et al – that writing practice at that time was full of secret codings because, frankly, it was too dangerous to be straight?

  EB: Partly. When Machiavelli wrote the Prince and Discourses, the popular republic he’d served as a high-level civil servant and diplomat for 14 years – his whole working life – had just been toppled by a coup d’etat. The princely Medici family were reinstalled as heads of state, and Machiavelli was thrown out of his political posts, then arrested and tortured on suspicion of conspiring against the new leaders. If – as my book argues – he wrote the Prince as a roundabout way of showing that republics last longer and have better defences than principalities, he had to be careful about saying this under the new princely regime.

  But I agree with earlier readers who thought his irony was also an educational strategy.
  There’s a long tradition of critical ironists – historians, playwrights, poets, even philosophers – depicting political leaders who use decent words to cloak far less decent realities. The ironist mimics the politicians’ skewed values, excusing what deserves to be condemned, omitting or belittling what should be praised. This kind of irony challenges readers to spot what’s wrong with the picture. It trains them to see through political spin and corrupted moral standards that might seem realistic now, but bring big trouble down the road.

  3:AM: So can you outline what Machiavelli’s ethical stance is?

  EB: In Machiavelli’s Ethics I call it an ethics of self-legislation. It’s developed more in the Discourses and Florentine Histories than in the Prince, so I don’t say much about it in my new book. His basic premise is that human beings have no choice but to establish their own laws and social institutions through their own, terribly flawed powers of reasoning. They shouldn’t expect help from nature or God, but have to exercise their free will – another very small power, but all we have – to impose decent human orders and keep them in good health. Human beings make their institutions and are capable of regulating them. It’s our responsibility if things go wrong, in the world at large or in whatever country we happen to inhabit. We can’t just blame fortune or foreigners or the global economy, since all of these can be managed by intelligent foresight and sensitive policies.

  Machiavelli dislikes passive fatalism, but he also dislikes overreaching control-freakery. He sets a high value on capacities for free agency, which enables human beings to conceive and build human orders, even under severe constraints. But there are better and worse ways to use this freedom, and the best ‘orderers’ aren’t superman founders who impose whatever form they like on society. They recognise that nature sets limits on anyone’s ideals and desires, including their own. They understand that people are often selfish and untrustworthy, and take this into account when designing institutions for common life. And they realise that most people don’t want to be dominated, so they’re more likely to uphold institutions that they willingly accept than those forced on them.

  The desires to live free and secure are among Machiavelli’s most basic human ‘realities.’
  So an ethics of self-legislation calls for strict limits on each person’s actions, in view of other peoples’ ordinario and reasonable desires for freedom and security. Machiavelli constantly urges his readers to think about other people’s reactions, and to take a fairly generous view of what others can reasonably demand of you. He sees straight through excuses for actions that aim to take more than one’s fair share of power or property or territory. His examples show that respect for others’ desires for freedom and security and fair treatment is a basic condition for one’s own safety and freedom.

  3:AM: Is Machiavelli supposing a certain conception of individual here tied up with the possibility of human freedom and agency?

  EB: I read Machiavelli as a strict rule-of-law man. He thinks any adequate conception of the public good or common safety has to be grounded in the rule of law, and the primary purpose of the laws is to protect individual freedoms. In a memorable passage in the Discourses II.2, he says that collective safety and flourishing depend on individual freedoms to procreate, dispose of their inheritance, work, and acquire as each sees fit – always within limits that respect other peoples’ reasonable uses of the same freedoms.

  Machiavelli stresses individual as well as broadly human responsibility for dealing with life’s hardships. In the Prince’s Dedication he calls himself the victim of an ‘extraordinary and malignant fortune,’ having been cast into the political wilderness after the Medici coup. But instead of raging against his bad luck or his enemies, he tries to engage with them – and escape from his woes – by writing a book based on his long experience and reading. A virtuous individual, as Machiavelli no doubt thought he was, can do everything right, but still be thrown down by his city’s collective misfortune or imprudence. However tough things get, though, individuals can always exercise the tiny sliver of freedom left them to improve their lot. In the Prince Machiavelli says that empirical evidence often makes us doubt that we have free will, yet our minds still tell us to act as if we have a little, even in the worst pinch. And if we do, and use our presumed freedom intelligently, we just might find a way out.

  3:AM: Does a certain conception of republican politics come from this which requires a political ethics rooted in his individual ethical stance, and which also results in principles of justice?

  EB: There’s a common view that Machiavelli puts the ethical claims of individual citizens second to those of the republic or city. I disagree. It’s true that Machiavelli thinks of political freedom, libertà, as a complex, ordered condition that calls for limits on every individual’s private freedoms. But the basic reason for setting such limits isn’t to protect or promote the common good; it’s the ethical imperative to protect the equal freedom of each citizen. A republic that fails to do this will be unstable and insecure, and that’s clearly a big problem for Machiavelli – but the instability arises from people perceiving an injustice and reacting against it. If injustice is the basic cause of disorders, you might want to avoid it, even if your initial motive for avoiding it is the desire to preserve order rather than a moral concern to do justice.

  I’ll give an example or two. Speaking of punitive justice, Machiavelli says that individuals shouldn’t be denied a proper trial or the right of appeal according to the laws, even if they pose a serious threat to the republic. When in Rome someone charged with serious political crimes was denied an appeal, even though ‘his criminal life merited every punishment, nonetheless,’ Machiavelli says, ‘it was hardly a civil thing to violate the laws’ and set up ‘a wicked example’ that corrupted Rome’s good orders. For ‘if one sets up a habit of breaking the orders’ and ignoring the individual’s claims for the sake of collective safety or some other, greater good, ‘then later, under that colouring, they are broken for ill.’ (Discourses I.45, I.34).

  Speaking of distributive justice, Machiavelli is deeply hostile to patrician elites who claimed that their members were more qualified to govern republics than non-elite men. He insists that qualifications for office should depend on demonstrated personal merit, not accidents of birth. By the same token, his republican justice forbids persecuting or penalizing individuals just because they are upper class. If the more ‘popular’ party in a republic goes too far in this respect, refusing to share authority even with worthy men from elite backgrounds, these men will have reasonable cause for complaint and work night and day to destabilise the republic. When people are punished or rewarded for their group affiliations instead of their individual deeds and qualities, the rule of law will be undermined – and when that happens, the republic’s ruin is only a matter of time.

  3:AM: A result of your reading is to deny that Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ is a handbook for modern amoral politics. The moral stance and justice are embedded and at its heart. So is Machiavelli not relevant to the contemporary scene in the way supposed?

  EB: Not if he’s taken as a defender of modern amoral realpolitik. But he’s very relevant as one of its most penetrating (and entertaining) critics.

  3:AM: And for those of us here at 3:AM wanting to go further into your philosophical world, are there five books you could recommend?

  EB: These days I don’t have much time to read recent books – I’m trying to finish very different kind of Machiavelli book now for a non-academic audience – so I re-read old ones. Apart from Machiavelli, of course, Plato’s Laws or any other Platonic dialogue; Thucydides’ perpetually amazing histories; Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics; Hobbes’ de Cive and/or Leviathan, preferably read together to see what he changed; Rousseau’s Second Discourse. Is that five? I love reading Kant and Hegel as well, but wouldn’t recommend them to everyone without knowing their tastes. Too bad people don’t write books like these any more. They just get better and more relevant with age.

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• Vox - https://www.vox.com/2017/7/24/15913826/machiavelli-donald-trump-democracy-america-erica-benner

  What Machiavelli can teach us about Trump and the decline of liberal democracy
  The infamous philosopher had a lot to say about why democracies fall.
  Updated by Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Jul 24, 2017, 12:10pm EDT
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  “I’d like to teach them the way to hell, so they can steer clear of it.”

  The infamous Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli wrote those words in 1526, near the end of his life. He was warning citizens of the 16th-century Republic of Florence not to be duped by cunning leaders.

  Machiavelli’s most famous book, The Prince, is widely viewed as an instruction manual for tyrants, and it kind of is. But there’s more to Machiavelli than that. He taught rulers how to govern more ruthlessly, yes — but at the same time, he also showed the ruled how they were being led.

  He was, in other words, giving both sides the handbook.

  Machiavelli also had plenty to say about things that matter today. He wrote about why democracies get sick and die, about the dangers of inequality and partisanship, and even about why appearance and perception matter far more than truth and facts.

  Erica Benner, a professor of political philosophy at Yale, writes about all of this in her new book Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World. I spoke to her recently about Machiavelli’s legacy and what he might teach us about Trump and the decline of liberal democracies around the world.

  “When you look at societies like America and Britain and various other liberal democracies,” she told me, “you see the kinds of cracks that Machiavelli warned about — and it ought to trouble us.”

  You can read our full conversation below.

  Sean Illing
  Even by people who’ve never read him, Machiavelli’s known as the great teacher of amorality. Is that reputation earned?

  Erica Benner
  It’s deserved in the sense that when you read him quickly, especially in translation, it looks like he’s teaching you to be evil, to do whatever it takes to get and keep power, even if that means doing what people think is wrong. But there’s a lot more to him than that. To see it, though, you have to read between the lines and notice all the twists and turns and nuances.

  Sean Illing
  His most famous book is The Prince. What’s it about and why should people read it today?

  Erica Benner
  It’s about how ambitious individuals who want to get and hold on to political power can do that. It appears to be an advice book that goes against all the usual advice books for leaders, which tells them to be just and honorable. Machiavelli turns all that upside down and says, “You’ve got to be willing to be ferocious and cold and underhanded if you want to get ahead in a world like ours.”

  Sean Illing
  But there’s a downside to that kind of ruthlessness, no?

  Erica Benner
  Absolutely. He’s actually showing how these tactics will get you into trouble if you read this book naively and take it at face value. For the more perceptive, it’s clear that he’s dropping all kinds of hints about why this won’t work in the long run, though it will certainly work in the short term.

  “BUT AT THE END OF THE DAY, IT’S UP TO US, IT’S UP TO CITIZENS, TO SEE THROUGH THESE MANIPULATIONS.”
  Sean Illing
  The Prince is also a warning of sorts to citizens. What’s the message?

  Erica Benner
  He’s trying to show ordinary citizens the ways that ambitious people get to power, and how those people may appear to be solutions to problems but in the end only make things worse. He tells the people, if you indulge a politician who promises to fix everything if only you give up a little more power, you will suffer far more down the line.

  Sean Illing
  Machiavelli was among the first to popularize this notion that perceptions matter more than reality, that a cunning leader should bend the truth to his or her will. I wonder what he would think of phrases like “post-truth” and “alternative facts.”

  Erica Benner
  I think he would say, “Nothing new.” This has been going on since humans started doing politics. But he thinks that citizens are responsible more than politicians. Yeah, you can sit there and say, “Look at Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin,” or whoever it might be, and point out how they lie here and there and how that gives them an advantage or allows them to exploit fears. But at the end of the day, it’s up to us, it’s up to citizens, to see through these manipulations.

  One thing Machiavelli tries to do is to get citizens to see through the tricks that politicians use to get one over on them and to manipulate them into submission and a more uncritical stance. If he were alive today, I suppose he’d repeat all of these warnings and probably say, “I told you so.”

  Sean Illing
  But Machiavelli had little faith in the average person’s capacity to notice that they were being duped. He knew that the pusher of alternative facts would find an audience among those who wanted what he said to be true, even if it obviously wasn’t.

  Erica Benner
  If somebody wants to set themselves up as a savior in troubled times, he will always find people to support him, and he’ll find it easier to acquire that support if he plays the sorts of games Machiavelli describes in The Prince — namely, using deception in order to exploit people for political gain. But yes, he had no illusions about the credulity of the average citizen.

  Still, he insists that only the people can defend themselves against this kind of manipulation. He simply warned them that if they failed to do so, if they unwittingly gave themselves over to a lying prince, they’d eventually find themselves under the yoke of an absolute leader. And once that happens, it’s too late — freedom has already been forfeited.

  “WHEN YOU LOOK AT SOCIETIES LIKE AMERICA AND BRITAIN AND VARIOUS OTHER LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES, YOU SEE THE KINDS OF CRACKS THAT MACHIAVELLI WARNED ABOUT — AND IT OUGHT TO TROUBLE US.”
  Sean Illing
  All of this ties into Machiavelli’s ideas about why democracies get sick and decline, which are maybe his most important ideas and surely the most relevant today.

  Erica Benner
  Yeah, I think you’re right. The key question for Machiavelli, apart from all the philosophical questions about human nature, is how to defend democracy or a republic. He thinks democracy is the best form of government, and he’s always asking why some last longer than others.

  He sees two big problems at the root of democracies. One is partisanship, and by that he doesn’t necessarily mean organized political parties but rather a society that ends up divided into parts or teams or camps. When people start to see themselves as rivals to the death, as groups with divergent interests and visions of society with no compatibility, you can’t sustain a democracy. Civil conflict was a central concern of his for that reason.

  When you look at societies like America and Britain and various other liberal democracies, you see the kinds of cracks that Machiavelli warned about — and it ought to trouble us.

  Sean Illing
  His concerns about partisanship were tied to another contemporary issue: inequality. How were these linked and what were his warnings about inequalities in a democracy?

  Erica Benner
  You know your Machiavelli! He wasn’t a strict egalitarian. He doesn’t think the best societies are communist, where all property is held in common, but he did think that an excess of inequality would destroy a democracy because it would destroy any sense of a shared project or a shared commitment to common values and institutions.

  When you get grotesque inequalities of the sort we see today in the US, democracy gets sick. People stop talking to each other, stop caring about the other’s concerns; divisions deepen as access to resources becomes more and more unequal. He wrote constantly that you have to maintain a reasonable balance of social opportunities and welfare or democratic institutions will collapse.

  “DON’T TAKE YOUR INSTITUTIONS FOR GRANTED. DON’T TAKE YOUR LAWS FOR GRANTED. DON’T TAKE ORDER FOR GRANTED. IF YOU DO, YOU’LL LOSE YOUR DEMOCRACY.”
  Sean Illing
  He was a historian, so what nations or principalities or republics did he point to as examples of these lessons? And do you see a lot of parallels today?

  Erica Benner
  Well, Rome was the main one. He paid close attention to the fall of the Roman Republic, and he thought the decline of Rome was propelled by partisanship and inequalities. The parties in Rome that ended up going into civil war correlated roughly with the rich and the poor; it was class warfare.

  He faced exactly these problems in his own home city, which had a very long, proud tradition of trying to be a fairly egalitarian republic, but over time was drawn into conflict by these sorts of internal divisions. As the rich get richer, they try to gain more power, and the more political power they gain, the richer they become. At the same time, the poor get poorer. What you get, ultimately, is civil conflict.

  He saw this happening in Florence, wrote about how it happened in Rome, and thought future democracies would die if they failed to learn these lessons.

  Sean Illing
  In what ways are the people responsible for keeping their democracies in good health?

  Erica Benner
  Lots of ways. The citizenry in Machiavelli’s time didn’t involve as many individuals as it does today, but his lessons are no less relevant. He thought the first responsibility was to sharpen your senses and notice the ways in which power is abused and the ways in which leaders overstep and stealthily strip away freedoms and standards.

  You have to pay attention when leaders start making arguments designed to pit one group of citizens against another, when they claim they need more power and have to limit the courts, when they start undermining the rule of law for the sake of expediency.

  The key thing for Machiavelli was always to value the rule of law — that’s the key thing for citizens to do. Which is why they have to be careful about who they put into power. Democracies are never entirely stable, and once the rule of law is subverted, it’s very difficult to get it back. All it takes is one authoritarian or one dictatorial party to undermine every norm that sustains democratic life.

  Sean Illing
  A lot of people see Donald Trump’s indifference to the rule of law as precisely this sort of threat.

  Erica Benner
  For good reason. Trump’s attempts to weaken the rule of law early in his presidency are pretty brazen. So far, the law and the institutions that prop it up have looked robust. But Machiavelli would say this is not something that you can count on.

  Great institutions don’t protect themselves. In the case of the US and Trump’s early assaults on the rule of law, it wasn’t the laws that protected themselves. It was individuals and people who put their foot down and said, “No, this thing you’re trying to do, we will not authorize it.”

  Sean Illing
  So what would Machiavelli’s advice to democratic citizens be today?

  Erica Benner
  Don’t take your institutions for granted. Don’t take your laws for granted. Don’t take order for granted. If you do, you’ll lose your democracy.

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Print Marked Items
Benner, Erica: BE LIKE THE FOX
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Benner, Erica BE LIKE THE FOX Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 5, 9 ISBN: 978-0-393-60972-1
A new look at an old book--and the philosopher/diplomat who wrote it.Everyone in school learned Machiavelli's
(1469-1527) famous advice, set forth in The Prince, to those in power: the ends justify the means. Benner follows up
on her previous Machiavelli's Prince: A New Reading (2014), which argued for an entirely new way of interpreting the
book, with this timely, dramatic, and comprehensive life of the Florentine, drawing on his poems, plays, letters,
diplomatic dispatches, and his many friendships. This is a very personal biography. Benner invites us right into
Machiavelli's world, his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, quoting him extensively on a wide variety of topics. The author
begins with a helpful, four-page dramatis personae, and she tells Machiavelli's story in lively, almost novelistic prose.
A person says something "coldly," while another speaks "quietly." Some readers may be put off by this methodology--
too much creative writing and less historical scholarship--but Benner knows her subject well, and she wants us to know
him well, too. The well-educated Machiavelli worked in the government, then as a diplomat, and later as the leader of
the Florentine militia. Life at this time in Florence was strewn with political and religious land mines. A wrong step on
the toes of a certain prince, Medici family member, or cleric could get you thrown into prison, as Machiavelli was in
1513, for conspiracy against the Medici. He denied it and was tortured for nearly two weeks by having both shoulders
dislocated. After he was freed, he wrote his famous treatise, published after his death. Benner posits a reading that has
been put forth before but never in such detail: that Machiavelli's "true intention in The Prince was to expose the
perversities of princely rule." In support of that argument, she provides an eye-opening, captivating portrait. Benner
succeeds at what every biographer tries to do: she brings her subject to life for her readers.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Benner, Erica: BE LIKE THE FOX." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911739&it=r&asid=5f57d740468ae7ca3d51db80fd93e111.
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Mach the Knife
Ian Thomson
Spectator.
333.9839 (Mar. 25, 2017): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli's Lifelong Quest for Freedom
by Erica Benner
Allen Lane, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 360
The business of banking (from the Italian word banco, meaning 'counter') was essentially Italian in origin. The Medici
bank, founded in Florence in 1397, operated like a prototype mafia consortium: it rubbed out rivals and spread
tentacles into what Niccolo Machiavelli called the alti luoghi ('high places') of local power interests. Undoubtedly,
Medici money was at its most arrogant under the dictatorship of the merchant-poet Lorenzo de' Medici, whose
supremacy was dramatically challenged in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478. Amid a fury of dagger blows in Florence's
cathedral (of all places) Lorenzo narrowly escaped assassination by bravos in the pay of the rival Pazzi family. In
retribution, 70 presumed conspirators were publicly torn alive from groin to neck. In mobster parlance, this was a
'balancing of accounts'.
Machiavelli, born in Medicean Florence in 1469, was perhaps not quite the devious schemer of popular imagination.
As a man of some political scruple he was appalled by the irreverence shown by the Pazzi plotters. The signal for the
attack came just as the priest had raised the host at High Mass; Lorenzo managed to barricade himself behind the
bronze sacristy doors, but his younger brother Giuliano died under knife thrusts. The murder in the cathedral served
only to consolidate Lorenzo's popularity as a Florentine strongman. Under torture, the ringleaders confessed allegiance
to the slyly watchful Pope Sixtus IV, who favoured the Pazzi over the Medici as bankers to the Holy See.
In her new biography of Machiavelli, Erica Benner asks how the city that gave us Botticelli and Cellini could have
been so appallingly violent. Certainly the Victorians who toured the Uffizi with copies of Walter Pater did not concern
themselves much with the city's blood-soaked past (preferring to bask in the romantic aura of Mr and Mrs Robert
Browning). Yet, as Machiavelli knew too well, the intellectual energy of Renaissance Florence was not confined to
painting and literature; quite as much money and thought went into the art of political 'double-speak' and 'currying
favour' (Benner has a weakness for cliche) with bankers, popes and princeling-diplomats.
Written in the historic present ('Niccolo ambles out to the piazza', 'Niccolo offers a modest bow'), the biography
provides a colourful picture of Renaissance Florence in Machiavelli's day. The Tuscan city was then officially a
republic; however, the Medici manipulated politics and alliances to extend their power in monarchic fashion.
Machiavelli soon found himself himself embroiled in the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola's hellfire preaching
against the Medici's perceived financial and sexual outrages.
According to Benner, Machiavelli was not a supporter of Savonarola's 'Christian-flagellant' vows to purify Florence,
but a Savonarolan part of him agreed that Florence had become a virtual police state. Savonarola, Ferrara-born, was
especially exercised by Florence's reputation as a sodomitical hotbed. Much of the greatest art partronised by the
Medici (for instance, the blatant musculature of Michelangelo's 'David') was unabashedly homoerotic. In 1497,
however, Savonarola was excommunicated and burned in Florence as a heretic after he sought to challenge the
authority of papal Rome. Conveniently for Machiavelli, the Medici had by now been forced into exile.
It was as deputy chancellor of the popular new Florentine republic that Machiavelli made his name. Appointed to the
position in 1498, he carried out diplomatic missions for the post-Medici Signoria (city government), including one to
Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. As a diplomat, he learned much about the manipulation of power and how
best to counter an autocratic Medici revival. However, the liberty of Florence came to an end 14 years later, in 1512,
when Machiavelli was arrested and tortured after the Medici family returned. Soon into his imprisonment, by a
miracle, Pope Julius II died and his successor Pope Leo X, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, declared a general amnesty
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for all political prisoners. Afterwards, Machiavelli began to work for the reinstated Medici, writing not only his 1532
political treatise The Prince (opportunistically dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici), but also a series of books on the
nature of republics and some enduringly funny satirical plays.
Benner, with two academic books on Machiavelli to her name already, has written a most unusual life of the Tuscan
thinker-diplomat. Using dialogue freely reconstructed from primary sources, she builds a novelettish picture of love
and political intrigue amid merchants of menace and high finance. At times the prose is subJean Plaidy in its breathy
overtones ('he curls up under the sheets on one side, timid and bashful as a virgin wife on her wedding night'); at
others, it tries rather too hard to be reader-friendly:
Our great Florentine profiteers are shocked
when no one trusts their republic of skinflints,
men who'd do anything to dodge long-term
commitments to save a few ducats.
Benner, a Yale-educated political theorist, nevertheless makes a decent case for Machiavelli as being less
'Machiavellian' than The Prince might suggest. He was, apparently, an ironist, whose views were kept hidden for
reasons of political circumspection. 'If sometimes I do happen to tell the truth,' he wrote, 'I hide it among so many lies
that it is hard to find.'
All the same, very little that Benner says actually disputes Machiavelli's reputation as a Renaissance-era pragmatist and
testa dura (hard head). The title Be Like the Fox, after all, refers to his advice to be foxlike in politics and thus avoid
entrapment. Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.
Caption: The burning of Savonarola (detail)
GETTY IMAGES
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Thomson, Ian. "Mach the Knife." Spectator, 25 Mar. 2017, p. 34+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA498486069&it=r&asid=faa20648c6d241f6c48383c45f57c421.
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Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World
Bryce Christensen
Booklist.
113.15 (Apr. 1, 2017): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World.
By Erica Benner.
May 2017. 384p. Norton, $27.95 (9780393609721). 320.1092.
A half-millennium after Cardinal Reginald Pole denounced The Prince as a book "stink[ing] of Satan's every
wickedness," millions still share the churchman's view hook's author as an unprincipled counselor to powerful,
justifying any cruelty, any mendacity, that offers political advantage. But in that notorious author--Niccolo
Machiavelli--Benner sees a man actually committed to moral principles that sustain a democratic republic. Schooled
by brutal contemporary realities that once sent him to prison and exposed him to torture, this ethical thinker learns a
new craftiness. Deploying the same creative skills he uses to depict diverse characters in his literary art (in, for
instance, his allegorical poem The Golden Ass and his sharply satiric play The Mandrake), the Florentine writer learns
to slyly embed his own convictions in an interplay of voices, even in his personal correspondence and his published
political analyses, such as Discourses on Livy and, yes, The Prince. Guided by Benner, readers penetrate the benign
deception in the Florentine author's authorial ventriloquism and so learn to recognize the subtle but profoundly humane
implications of his most famous work, ignored by centuries of readers deaf to the irony undercutting its amoral
recommendations. A persuasive challenge to the received opinion of a Renaissance titan.--Bryce Christensen
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 4. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491487792&it=r&asid=f521addf6830e62da0f1442c7d694cca.
Accessed 19 Oct. 2017.
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Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World
Publishers Weekly.
264.10 (Mar. 6, 2017): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World
Erica Benner. Norton, $27.95 (384p) ISBN 9780-393-60972-1
Benner (Machiavelli's Prince: A New Reading) successfully rehabilitates the image of the highly quotable and oftmaligned
Machiavelli, portraying him as an accessible voice of reason even when his fortunes sank during the heights
of Medici influence. Historians have spent centuries debating whether to take Machiavelli at face value in The Prince,
or whether to read him instead as employing irony aimed at the ruling Medicis. Benner stands firmly in the latter camp,
calling Machiavelli's infamous volume a "masterwork" of irony. Here she expertly blends Machiavelli's words from
letters, diaries, and other writings with striking passages from The Prince to prove her point. Benner includes useful
information on deciphering the likeliest meanings behind his words; while Machiavelli's unsentimental, harsh
assertions may garner attention, she reveals how further inspection of surrounding passages and popular writing
techniques of the time suggests that the voice employed is a false voice used to warn against the very methods it touts.
Benner contextualizes Renaissance Florence and the life of the Machiavelli family, though Machiavelli's suffering
under torture and Pico della Mirandola's complicated relationship with Savonarola receive only cursory treatment.
Ideal as a companion to The Prince in university courses, Benner's work places readers in Machiavelli's daily life and
recreates his world for academic and casual readers alike. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 50+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484973675&it=r&asid=50a171ad911549b799ac4d9d018cdcfe.
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Briefly Noted
Macy Halford
The New Yorker.
93.17 (June 19, 2017): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast
Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
Be Like the Fox, by Erica Benner (Norton). Machiavelli's "The Prince" is famous for its cool espousal of political
expediency, but for fifteen years before Machiavelli wrote it, in 1513, he championed popular republicanism, working
tirelessly, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to prevent Florence from returning to Medici rule. In this tightly composed
narrative of Machiavelli's life and thought, Benner argues that "The Prince" is a work of secret subversion, using irony
and beguilement to advance a staunchly republican message. Anchoring her study in contemporary styles of discourseFlorentines
were known for "self-protective, ambiguous speech"-Benner produces a gripping portrait of a brilliant
political thinker, who understood the dangers of authoritarianism and looked for ways to curb them even though
independent speech had become impossible.
Chaos and Culture, by Victoria Newhouse (Monacelli). In 2006, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation set out to build a
grand cultural center for Athens. Then the country slipped into economic disaster. So this account of the project, which
was designed by Renzo Piano, is also a sweeping tale of national identity and artistic anxiety. Newhouse ably balances
discussion of details-Piano's abstract, balletic sketches are reproduced here along with handsome aerial photographs of
the site-with the drama of the financial stakes and personalities involved. As the foundation tries to hold the
government to its promises, archeological excavations uncover the remains of ancient prisoners, and seismic tremors
threaten-and sometimes miraculously realign-walls.
The Night Ocean, by Paul La Farge (Penguin). La Farge's fourth novel is a playfully disorienting tour through the
biography of the horror master H. P. Lovecraft, as well as a portrait of a number of men, both fictional and real, who
try to decode his life and work. A Lovecraft aficionado attempting to understand the nature of Lovecraft's relationship
with a much younger man finds an account of their sex life in a mysteriously annotated book-the "Erotonomicon"-that
purports to contain Lovecraft's diaries. La Farge has great fun constructing texts with contradictory information about
the young man, the most entertaining of which involves William S. Burroughs, the strangest Lovecraftian of all.
There Your Heart Lies, by Mary Gordon (Pantheon). When a young woman breaks with her wealthy East Coast
Catholic family to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, she arrives with little beyond "the vague ideas of a
privileged girl." This novel toggles between her years in Spain, bringing up a child she has with a Spanish doctor, and
the memories she shares, in her nineties, back in America, with a granddaughter. The latter scenes lack the
eventfulness of the Spanish ones, which are full of rich details, such as the scent of oranges on a hospital worker who
has scavenged for food in the street. The novel's preoccupations are the tension between faith and doctrine, and the
justification of atrocity in the name of religion.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Halford, Macy. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 19 June 2017, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495832914&it=r&asid=c1bc59a3d8a296418f871574c278c71e.
Accessed 19 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495832914

"Benner, Erica: BE LIKE THE FOX." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911739&it=r. Accessed 19 Oct. 2017. Thomson, Ian. "Mach the Knife." Spectator, 25 Mar. 2017, p. 34+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA498486069&it=r. Accessed 19 Oct. 2017. Christensen, Bryce. "Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2017, p. 4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491487792&it=r. Accessed 19 Oct. 2017. "Be like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 50+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484973675&it=r. Accessed 19 Oct. 2017. Halford, Macy. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 19 June 2017, p. 64. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA495832914&it=r. Accessed 19 Oct. 2017.

• Open Letters Monthly
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  Book Review: Be Like the Fox
  By Open Letters Monthly (May 18, 2017) No Comment
  Be Like the Fox:

  Machiavelli in His World

  by Erica Benner

  WW Norton, 2017

  When historian Garrett Mattingly wasn’t calling infamous Renaissance writer Niccolò Machiavelli “a drab little servant of a third-rate state,” he was lamenting that Machiavelli is one of the most misunderstood figures in all of history. That was nearly 60 years ago. Sebastian De Grazia, in his surreal and brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning 1989 biography Machiavelli in Hell, urged his readers that Machiavelli, like his Renaissance peers Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonorotti, was great enough to be known only by his first name, “simply Niccolò” – and lamenting to those same readers that Machiavelli is a drastically misunderstood figure in need of rediscovery. Even back in 1933, Ralph Roeder was lamenting the same thing in his magnificent and best-selling book Man of the Renaissance. When it comes to pitching books, there’s a solid tradition of perpetually describing Machiavelli as misunderstood and in need of redemption.

  And that tradition is as old as it possibly could be, since Machiavelli himself initiated it as soon as he lost his state office in the Florentine government in 1512. He was imprisoned and briefly tortured by the Medici in 1513, then retired to his country estate, where he dreamed and yearned to be back in the flow of power, and where he filled his spare time in writing The Prince, the little tract that would go on not only to forever overshadow all the other things he wrote (including some of the best, most lively letters of the entire Italian Renaissance) but also turn his name into an adjective and himself into a byword for cold-blooded state treachery and pragmatism raised to the level – or sunk to the depth – of amorality.

  Machiavelli scholar Erica Benner seeks to contradict that easy picture, to complicate and enhance it – to, you guessed it, redeem the man by pointing out how misunderstood he is.

  She does an excellent job on both counts, and she manages it mainly in two ways. First, she adopts a looser biographical style than, say, Christopher Celenza’s 2015 book Machiavelli: A Portrait or similar books. She tells her story in an unadorned present tense, which keeps the narrative moving briskly along, and she takes liberal detours inside the minds of her main characters, especially Machiavelli himself. And she takes the risk of reconstituting spoken dialogue from time to time – always to good, almost novelistic effect, but jarring nevertheless in a work of serious biography. When Machiavelli goes on a diplomatic mission to Milan to meet Caterina Sforza (“a fully fledged prince, a ruler with a regal title who has the power to make, bend, and break laws almost at will”), Benner narrates it like we’re watching a newsreel:

  … Niccolò ambles out to the piazza, where rows of vendors stand hawking pictures of their local celebrity. Men scurry about the square cordoning off the edges. Some kind of spectacle is about to begin. A crowd gathers behind the barrier. Then a flourish of trumpets and a quick-march roll of drums, and hundreds of men burst into the piazza. Five hundred of Caterina’s best infantrymen put on a fine show, displaying their weapons, marching and turning in perfect step. Their plumed commander, it seems, is a Naldi, one of the clan the Florentines suspect of troublemaking around their borders. They are about to go north to Milan to help defend Duke Ludovico, together with fifty crossbowmen who perform an equally impressive muster. To Niccolò’s untrained eye, they look like top-notch, disciplined troops. Later, he asks around and hears that Caterina herself oversees their training and command. It seems Countess Sforza Riario is a close student of military arts, not just a fierce fighter; she understands the need for careful training, for order. By themselves, ferocity and stubbornness get you only so far.

  The second way Benner keeps her book nimbly dancing along is by consistently being a fantastic reader of Machiavelli’s very varied literary output. Benner wrote Machiavelli’s Prince and also Machiavelli’s Ethics – she’s as well-versed in this author’s writing style and writing mind as readers could ask of any biographer, and it shows every time she writes about the man’s works instead of the man himself:

  The second half [of his Florentine Histories] is a masterpiece of subtle, sotto voce criticism of the present Medici rulers’ forebears, in the style of ancient historians who could not write freely about the emperors. While giving Cosimo and Lorenzo due credit for their merits, Machiavelli shows how their family grew great by cultivating networks of friends with lavish lending and spending, and by straining the laws to the breaking point. His histories are not partisan: they don’t pretend that Florence’s early years as a republic were a golden age of liberty and justice, or blame the Medici for stealing the government from the people. They hold up a brutally honest mirror to all Florentines.

  Be Like the Fox is likewise brutally honest in its appraisals of all the people in Machiavelli’s life, from princes to popes … all the people except one, that is: like most people who’ve written about Machiavelli in the last century or more, Benner a very visible fund of affection for the man, a waiting warmth of sympathy for the horrible turns his life took right when another man might have been readying himself for the joys of comfortable retirement. This fund of affection is perfectly natural; the combination of Machiavelli’s uniformly beautiful writing style and the unassuming friendliness of the famous Santi di Tito portrait – plus all those amazing, gregarious, thoroughly alive letters – makes Machiavelli an immensely human and empathetic figure. Someone we want to know and hope to like – even if that might lead to the occasional misunderstanding.

• New York Journal of Books
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  Word count: 825

  Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World

  Image of Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli In His World
  Author(s):
  Erica Benner
  Release Date:
  May 8, 2017
  Publisher/Imprint:
  W. W. Norton & Company
  Pages:
  384
  Buy on Amazon

  Reviewed by:
  Francis P. Sempa
  In his 1943 classic, The Machiavellians, the political philosopher James Burnham praised Niccolo Machiavelli for writing truthfully and unsentimentally about the way political leaders gain and use power.

  Burnham examined Machiavelli’s major writings, including The Prince, The Art of War, History of Florence, and especially Discourses on Livy, and found in them “an intense and dominant passion for the truth.” “No prejudice, no weighty tradition, no authority, no emotional twist,” Burnham wrote, “is enough to lead [Machiavelli] to temper his inquiry into the truth.”

  Burnham also depicted Machiavelli as a champion of freedom and liberty. Erica Benner, in her latest book on Machiavelli, Be Like a Fox, takes a similar unconventional view of the great Florentine writer and politician.

  This is Benner’s third book on Machiavelli, and her focus here is on his consistent efforts as both a writer and government official to promote republicanism and independence for Florence in the midst of political rivalry among the Italian city-states and great power rivalry in Europe.

  Florence in the early 16th century was rocked by domestic insurrection, civil war, and foreign aggression. France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal States, and the Medici family were among the key actors affecting Florence’s politics and destiny.

  Benner notes that Machiavelli was first and foremost a patriot who was “devoted to the salvation of . . . Florence and . . . Italy.” He sought to strengthen Florence and ultimately unify Italy to ensure liberty and independence for its citizens.

  Machiavelli at times served as a military administrator for Florence. He oversaw military reorganization and reform with the goal of forming a well-trained and devoted civilian militia.

  He understood, Benner writes, that “military reforms need to go hand in hand with social and political ones.” Florence needed a strong army to maintain its independence. Machiavelli once wrote, “[T]he foundations of any state are arms and justice.” This experience informed his views in The Art of War.

  He also served Florence as a diplomat, meeting and negotiating with French and Spanish leaders, officials of other Italian principalities, and the Vatican. Benner gleans from Machiavelli’s writings, especially his Discourse on Pisa, “a philosophy of peacemaking.”

  Machiavelli’s advice to Florence’s leaders included: “Do not take what you cannot hold;” “peace is faithful where men are willingly pacified;” “victories are never secure without justice;” “[do not] lose the opportunity of having a certain good through hoping to have an uncertain better;” and “the duty of a prudent man is constantly to consider what may harm him and to foresee problems in the distance.”

  “Machiavellian” has become a synonym for ruthless, amoral, and deceptive political practices. To be sure, some of his writings—especially The Prince—provide ammunition for his detractors. But contrary to this conventional view, Machiavelli demonstrated “a steely determination to change the corrupt world he lived in.” He “never stopped trying to form a republic,” Benner writes, “that had better chances of lasting and thriving than the one he had served.”

  Like Burnham, Benner believes that Machiavelli “never wanted to sever politics from morality. He simply wanted to put morality on firmer, purely human foundations.”

  Benner wherever possible uses Machiavelli’s own words—letters, diaries, poems, and books—to tell this story. She admits, however, to transgressing the usual “biographical conventions” by reconstructing dialogues based on letters and diaries that mention accounts of conversations. She also admits to occasionally condensing or paraphrasing original sources.

  Equally problematic is the author’s use of italics instead of quotation marks for “most” of Machiavelli’s original words, and her use of quotation marks for paraphrased quotes.

  Benner, like Burnham before her, believes that Machiavelli’s works “carry warning lessons for all times.” “[Machiavelli] treats history,” she writes, “as a medicine used to purge its readers of arrogance, naivety about human nature, and the fatalistic belief that the course of human affairs cannot be regulated by our intelligence, but has to be left to nature or to God.”

  Francis P. Sempa's most recent book is Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier's Journey through the Second World War. He he has also contributed to other books as well as written numerous articles and book reviews on foreign policy and historical topics for leading publications. Mr. Sempa is Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. The views reported in this review are those of the reviewer and not those of the U.S. government.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/books/review/be-like-the-fox-machiavelli-biography-erica-benner.html
  Word count: 1733

  BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION

  Machiavelli: Good Guy or Bad? This Biography Argues for the Former
  By EDMUND FAWCETTJUNE 16, 2017
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  Legend and counterlegend: Machiavelli in an anonymous 17th-century portrait. Credit Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images
  BE LIKE THE FOX
  Machiavelli In His World
  By Erica Benner
  360 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

  It is January 1506. Niccolò Machiavelli is out in the Tuscan countryside recruiting for a Florentine militia. Like other Italian cities caught in the Franco-Spanish struggle for Italy, Florence is an underdefended pawn. Time presses, and Machiavelli’s efforts are not going well. A reluctant peasant worries that if he gives his name for soldiering, the city will dun him for taxes. Others refuse to parade with recruits from the village next door. As old enemies, they explain, the neighbors are more of a nuisance than any remote foreign army could be. When Machiavelli’s superiors in the city government complain of his slow progress, he answers that they should try it themselves.

  Vivid episodes like that dot Erica Benner’s erudite and engaging life of Machiavelli (1469-1527), a leading bad boy of political ideas. Hidden by legend and counterlegend, he is hard to get into view. Like the moralist Nietzsche, who also spun off disconcerting and misquotable epigrams, Machiavelli is at once overfamiliar and obscure.

  Except to specialists, he is known chiefly for a single short book, “The Prince,” which purported to advise new, that is nonhereditary, rulers how to stay in power. Printed five years after his death, though known before in manuscript, it divided opinion across Europe, especially among the vast majority who knew it only by repute. “The Prince” implied that stable government depended more on force and manipulation than on good conduct and divinely sanctioned law. It asked with unseemly zeal how far in politics the writ of morality ran.

  The little book ensured Machiavelli an afterlife in which author and reputation blurred into a single object of obloquy or celebration, depending on where you stood. Detractors took him for a preacher of villainy and a menace to godly order, defenders for a civic-minded patriot and protodemocrat, especially if “The Prince” was read, as defenders thought it should be read, together with his other political writings. Modern scholarship has added layers of interpretive subtlety but never quite escaped the pull of that polar contrast: Machiavelli, good guy or bad?

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  Among Machiavelli specialists, Benner is squarely in the good-guy camp. She takes him, as in previous books like “Machiavelli’s Ethics,” for an enemy of autocratic rule who in “The Prince” hid his lifelong belief in the people’s will and rule by law. Happily for nonspecialist readers, “Be Like the Fox” presumes rather than argues scholastically for that approach to Machiavelli, which is at least as old as Rousseau. Benner’s book is a life-and-times biography, not an interpretive work. It recounts the up-and-down career of a tricky personality in stormy times.

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  Machiavelli’s was a fascinating if tangled story. He was a city functionary, foreign envoy, political exile, student of military tactics and author of much apart from “The Prince.” In shrewd, at times mocking, dispatches, which served him later as raw material, he described the popes, kings, emperors and military captains he met. Besides “The Discourses,” his study of republican or non-princely government, he wrote a history of Florence, a treatise on warfare and a constitutional proposal for the city. He composed poems, satires and fine comic plays, notably “The Mandrake,” which Voltaire praised for its anticlericalism and which still delights lovers of bawdy farce.

  He left several hundred letters, which Benner makes good use of in sketching a mercurial character. Those to friends are by turns crude, sublime, mocking, sincere, self-pitying and proud. Family letters — he had six children, a wife and mistresses — suggest an attentive father and affectionate if difficult husband. Without dwelling on the point, Benner makes plain the coarseness and brutality of the time, especially toward women and the weak.

  Machiavelli’s father, Bernardo, was a lawyer with debts that barred him from office and that may have passed down to the son. The family lived off rents from small lands outside Florence. At age 7, young Machiavelli began to learn Latin, although his chief works were in Italian. For Greek classics he relied on translations. He was schooled, that is, not as a humanist man of letters but as a future official.

  His father’s diary, the main source for Machiavelli’s youth, stops when the boy is 18. For 10 years, nothing is known of what he did or thought. Still, it is not foolish to think that the political upheavals and foreign wars that now swept over Florence confirmed his deep-rooted conviction that fortune was mutable and that circumstances always shifted.

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  Florentine government was a volatile mixture. The city was a republic under elected office-holders, albeit with a limited franchise. In practice, the Medici clan controlled city offices with “munificence” (bribes), for which it raided the family bank and which helped it survive assaults from rival oligarchs and recurrent popular unrest. By the 1490s, the bank was dead in the water, civic support had crumbled and the Medici were reliant on foreign whim. They were tossed out in the turmoil of a French invasion (1494) but later reinstalled amid further warfare (1512).

  In the intervening 18 years, Florence was a precarious republic. Machiavelli now made his entry into public life, but only after the fall and execution of Savonarola, a puritanical friar who dominated the republic’s first years. In 1498, Machiavelli won appointment as supervisor of Florence’s diplomatic office and secretary to its military committee. Both were responsible posts, although it irked him as a commoner to be denied ambassadorial rank. He was sensitive as well about Florence’s lowly status. In France, to his chagrin, patronizing officials called the city “Mr. Nothing.”

  That sense of powerlessness confirmed a second conviction: the need for self-reliance, particularly in warfare. Despite patrician opposition to arming the people, in 1505 he persuaded Florence’s military committee to form a militia. On his recruitment trip, Machiavelli somehow found enough peasants to parade 400 militiamen through Florence’s main square.

  His militia was a valiant dream. In 1512, Spanish mercenaries made matchwood of Tuscan defenses, the republic fell and the Medici returned. Suspected as an anti-Medicean, Machiavelli was in due course arrested, tried under torture and imprisoned. He was soon freed in an amnesty when a Medici became pope, but his government career was over. He lived in the country, writing, ruminating and begging friends with connections to ask the Medici on his behalf for a post. Although deaf to pleas from an ex-republican, they encouraged his writing, asked him for constitutional ideas and in time threw him the sop of a few minor missions.

  Machiavelli never abandoned hope of returning to serve the city he loved. When in 1527 fortune turned again and the Medici fell, he put in for a government post but lost to an old Savonarola man. He died soon after, having received, but not it seems called for, a priest.

  “Be Like the Fox” is not detached, archival history but a remarkable work of imaginative engagement backed by scholarly learning. Benner brings Machiavelli alive by weaving his words and those of his contemporaries into the narrative as a playwright might. (His words appear in italics, which takes getting used to.) She does not disguise her admiration for Machiavelli and his ideas as she understands them. Nor does she hide personal flaws and intellectual inconsistencies that point to opposite conclusions, although a less committed writer might have brought them out with more force.

  The jacket copy misleadingly presents Benner as salvaging Machiavelli’s thoughts and opinions from demonization, as if they needed rescue. If anyone is keeping count, his historical defenders have probably outnumbered the calumniators. There are ample reasons besides age-old reputational disputes to be intrigued by this elusive figure with his enigmatic smile. Among them are the fortunes and misfortunes of a tumultuous life, which Benner tells with verve. Despite its odd typography, “Be Like the Fox” can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in the craft of politics and the life of ideas.

  Edmund Fawcett is updating his “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” and writing a companion history of the political right.

  A version of this review appears in print on June 18, 2017, on Page BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Princely Provocateur. Today's Paper|Subscribe

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  Be Like a Fox by Erica Benner review – was Machiavelli really not Machiavellian?
  The Prince was meant ironically, and its author was really a nice guy, argues this compulsively readable study
  Good-hearted? … Machiavelli. Photograph: De Agostini/Getty Images
  Good-hearted? … Machiavelli. Photograph: De Agostini/Getty Images
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  Terry Eagleton
  Wednesday 15 March 2017 05.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.38 EDT
  One has grown used to reading the kind of revisionist history in which the Renaissance was a myth, the Reformation never happened and the great Irish famine was a spot of food shortage. Britain blundered into ruling India by a series of unfortunate oversights, and Attila the Hun was by no means as bad as he has been painted.

  Have we got Machiavelli all wrong?
  Read more
  It was inevitable, then, that someone would come up with a book arguing that Machiavelli was not Machiavellian. In one sense, to be sure, we have known this all along. The renowned 16th-century diplomat and politician was a staunch republican and reformer who denounced corruption in high places and detested tyrants, which was not the best recipe for a quiet life in the Florence of the Medici family. As a humanist in the mould of Livy and Cicero, he urged his fellow citizens to question conventional wisdom and take nothing on authority. Rulers were not to be deceived by false glory, and high birth was by no means a guarantee of virtue. The public good took precedence over private interests and political sectarianism. You should treat your enemies justly, uphold the rule of law and show respect to others, if only to win them over to your side.

  Yet Machiavelli was writing at a time when this ancient humanist heritage was running up against the more sceptical vision of the modern age. If he thought despots were despicable, it was not because he believed that people could be trusted to run their own lives. On the contrary, his drastically low estimate of their abilities is typical of political conservatism. Conservatives tend to believe that human beings are flawed, limited creatures who need to be strictly disciplined if anything useful is to be squeezed out of them. Liberals, by contrast, place their faith in the more generous instincts of humanity, which will flourish if only they are allowed free rein.

  There is no doubt about which camp the author of The Prince belongs to. We are entering an era of realpolitik, suspicious of grand ideals and noble motives; and what is striking about Machiavelli’s work is that this disenchanted view of politics is now becoming part of political philosophy itself. Thinking should be based on how men and women are, not how one would wish them to be. Princes should govern virtuously if they can, but if they can achieve their ends only by fraud, treachery and cruelty, then so be it. If necessary they should break their oaths, cheat their allies and assassinate their rivals. It is a stunning deviation from the classical tradition.

  Erica Benner’s lively, compulsively readable biography finds this kind of stuff a problem. She sees Machiavelli not only as non-Machiavellian but as a good-hearted, Gary Lineker-type guy. This is revisionism with a vengeance. Hardly a word of rebuke for this admirer of the bloodstained Cesare Borgia passes Benner’s lips. She adopts a now-fashionable biographical mode, in which it is obligatory to refer to your subject by his or her first name and invent gestures or snatches of dialogue that make them seem more human. The mildly patronising assumption that the reader will be bored by history unless it is brought alive in this pseudo-fictional way lurks behind many a recent piece of life-writing. As a result, criticism gives way to empathy.

  Hardly a word of rebuke passes Benner’s lips – this is revisionism with a vengeance
  Despite her remarkably charitable treatment of “Niccolo”, Benner does not overdo the fake dialogue and dreamed-up scenarios. There are a few clunky moments in this respect – “‘I think,’ [his mother] Bartolommea says in low tones so their children can’t hear, ‘that Nencia might be pregnant.’” On the whole, though, the book avoids too much fictional embroidery, not least because 16th-century Florentine history is dramatic enough in its own right. There are some fascinating accounts of conspiracies and intrigues, political trouble-making and diplomatic trouble-shooting, fanatical friars and military disasters.

  So what of the Machiavelli who advocates force and fraud? Most of this inconvenient stuff is to be found in The Prince, and in Benner’s view is meant to be ironic. The book is dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici, and commends, tongue in cheek, just the kind of unsavoury conduct that is likely to bring him and his kind low. There are problems with this explanation. For one thing, the biography has been seen as a kind of job application by its author for a post as political counsellor to the Medici, and even Benner has to admit that the family could hardly be expected to look benevolently on a man who advised them to act as villains, however much they did so anyway. For another thing, some of the discreditable attitudes of The Prince can be found elsewhere in Machiavelli’s writing, not least the view that the end justifies the means.

  Demonising Machiavelli does no justice to the complexity of his life and work, though idealising him isn’t the answer either. Even so, Be Like the Fox is a valuable demolition-and-salvage job, fluently written and unshowily erudite. One awaits Martin Luther: Servant of the Pope with a certain sense of fatality.

  • Terry Eagleton’s Materialism is published by Yale. Be Like the Fox is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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  NAME
  Niccolò Machiavelli
  OCCUPATION
  Writer, Diplomat
  BIRTH DATE
  May 3, 1469
  DEATH DATE
  June 21, 1527
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  Florence, Italy
  PLACE OF DEATH
  Florence, Italy
  AKA
  Machiavelli
  Niccolò di Bernardo
  Niccolò Machiavelli
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  "Father of Modern Political Theory"
  FULL NAME
  Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
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  EARLY LIFE AND DIPLOMATIC CAREER
  AUTHORING 'THE PRINCE'
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  Italian diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli is best known for writing The Prince, a handbook for unscrupulous politicians that inspired the term "Machiavellian" and established its author as the "father of modern political theory."
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  “Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”
  —Niccolò Machiavelli
  Synopsis

  Born on May 3, 1469, in Florence, Italy, Niccolò Machiavelli was a diplomat for 14 years in Italy's Florentine Republic during the Medici family's exile. When the Medici family returned to power in 1512, Machiavelli was dismissed and briefly jailed. He then wrote The Prince, a handbook for politicians on the use of ruthless, self-serving cunning, inspiring the term "Machiavellian" and establishing Machiavelli as the "father of modern political theory." He also wrote several poems and plays. He died on June 21, 1527, in Florence, Italy.

  Early Life and Diplomatic Career

  Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy, on May 3, 1469—a time when Italy was divided into four rival city-states and, thusly, was at the mercy of stronger governments throughout the rest of Europe.

  The young Niccolò Machiavelli became a diplomat after the temporary fall of Florence's ruling Medici family in 1494. He served in that position for 14 years in Italy's Florentine Republic during the Medici family's exile, during which time he earned a reputation for deviousness, enjoying shocking his associates by appearing more shameless than he truly was.

  After his involvement in an unsuccessful attempt to organize a Florentine militia against the return of the Medici family to power in 1512 became known, Machiavelli was tortured, jailed and banished from an active role in political life.

  Authoring 'The Prince'

  Though it was initially a dark period for his career, Machiavelli's time away from politics gave him the opportunity to read Roman history and to write political treatises, most notably The Prince. The main theme of this short work about monarchal rule and survival is man's capacity for determining his own destiny in opposition to the power of fate, which has been interpreted as the political philosophy that one may resort to any means in order to establish and preserve total authority. The work has been regarded as a handbook for politicians on the use of ruthless, self-serving cunning, and inspired the term "Machiavellian." While many believe that the book's title character, "the prince," was based upon the infamous Cesare Borgia, some scholars consider it a satire.

  Pope Clement VIII condemned The Prince for its endorsement of rule by deceit and fear. One excerpt from the book reads: "Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved."

  In addition to The Prince, Machiavelli wrote the treatise On the Art of War (1521), among others, and several poems and plays, including 1524's satirical The Mandrake.

  Later Years and Legacy

  In his later years, Niccolò Machiavelli resided in a small village just outside of Florence. He died in the city on June 21, 1527. His tomb is in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, which, ironically, he had been banned from entering during the last years of his life. Today, Machiavelli is regarded as the "father of modern political theory."

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