Thoughts on Machiavelli

by Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss argued that the most visible fact about Machiavelli's doctrine is also the most useful Machiavelli seems to be a teacher of wickedness. Strauss sought to incorporate this idea in his interpretation without permitting it to overwhelm or exhaust his exegesis of The Prince and the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy . "We are in sympathy," he writes, "with the simple opinion about Machiavelli [namely, the wickedness of his teaching], not only because it is wholesome, but above all because a failure to take that opinion seriously prevents one from doing justice to what is truly admirable in the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech." This critique of the founder of modern political philosophy by this prominent twentieth-century scholar is an essential text for students of both authors.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Political Science, Academic

348 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Leo Strauss was a 20th century German-American scholar of political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
Trained in the neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss authored books on Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes, and articles on Maimonides and Al-Farabi. In the late 1930s, his research focused on the texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and encouraging the application of those ideas to contemporary political theory.

Reviews

[Katie]

I haven't had such a strongly negative reaction to a book in a very long time, so please take the one-star review in light of that. I don't think this is a worthless book by any means - it's fascinating - but I also really disliked it and think it's deeply misguided. On the Goodreads system I'm not really sure what else to give it.

What a person thinks of Machiavelli tells you far more about that person than it ever will tell you about Machiavelli. He's a diverse enough writer that you can a case for nearly any characterization you'd like, depending on where you'd like to put your emphases. Because of this, if any historian or political scientist tells you that they're the first one to truly understand Machiavelli, they probably have an agenda.

Leo Strauss thinks he understands Machiavelli, and he declares in his first two pages that Machiavelli is "a teacher of evil." It's a fascinating argument, for sure, but I found it to be extremely off putting. In broad strokes, Strauss argues that Machiavelli ushered in the destructiveness of modernity by severing the traditional ties between biblical theology/natural law and morality, and by orienting philosophy towards freedom rather than the traditional aim of virtue. It's perhaps most succinctly summarized by Strauss when he writes that "A stupendous contraction of the horizon appears to Machiavelli and his successors as a wondrous enlargement of the horizon... the new philosophy takes its bearing by how men lives as distinguished from how men ought to live... It understands man in the light of the sub-human rather than of the super-human." Machiavelli's greatest sin, according to Strauss is a radical lowering of expectations. Rather than trumpeting the primacy of moral virtue, Machiavelli's ends-justify-the-means ideology opened the door to a wash of relativism and a justification for rampant self-interest.

It's rhetorically powerful, but it's also rather arrogant and a hugely selective reading of his sources(and of modernity). Strauss clearly dislikes modern values and has pinned all of his complaints on Machiavelli. He justifies this by a slightly crazy reading of The Prince and Discourses on Livy that assumes his works are filled with hidden messages and deeply buried concordances. A slight contradiction is never a mistake or a sign of ambivalent thinking - instead, it's a sign of a hidden and often nefarious message. Strauss fills his work with conspiracy theories and numerology and then flatly declares that if anyone disagrees with him it's because they're "heirs of Machiavelli" and thus are hopelessly blinded to the truth by the propaganda of modernity. It's very arrogant and frustrating to read.

Don't read this is you'd like to learn about Machiavelli. It's very interesting, though, as a piece of 20th century cultural criticism.

[Brad Lyerla]

If you are not a serious student of Machiavelli or Leo Strauss, then THOUGHTS ON MACHIAVELLI is not for you. Because I am neither, I do not feel qualified to rate this meandering and ponderous, but sometimes brilliant, tome and I will not attempt to do so on GoodReads.

I do have a few thoughts of my own to share about Strauss’ THOUGHTS. The first has to do with Strauss’ idea of American exceptionalism. That America is exceptional is an idea that was hijacked early in the first George W. Bush administration by jingoists and warmongers who promoted unilateral American warfare in the middle east. It was repeated so often during that time that, for many of us, the notion took on the character of a punchline to an old and tired joke.

But it was not a new idea. And it was not an unserious idea either. The founders of the United States aspired to do something new, and different. Abraham Lincoln thought that winning the war with the South would demonstrate to the world that the founder’s aspirations were not in vain. His Gettysburg Address had only one point, and that was it.

In his introduction to THOUGHTS ON MACHIAVELLI, Leo Strauss offered a nuance about American exceptionalism that struck me as clarifying. He said, “At least to the extent that American reality is inseparable from the American aspiration, one cannot understand Americanism without understanding Machiavellianism which is its opposite.” (p. 14) By this, I understand Strauss to be saying that while America’s many and often profound failures must not be ignored, neither should its aspirations. It is the nobility of its aspirations that makes the United States anti-Machiavellian and political philosophers would be wise to take that seriously. Somehow, the founders of the United States, even as they created a new state that was then the epitome of modernism, aspired to avoid the greatest wickedness of modernity, namely, Machiavellianism.

My second comment is related. It is that Strauss readily admits that Machiavelli teaches wickedness. But oddly, he does not seem to care about that as much as I would have expected. It puzzled me for a long while as I read THOUGHTS. Then it came to me. Strauss cares about wickedness and, in his unique and mischievous way, is prepared to call it out for what it is when he sees it. But more importantly to him is that Machiavelli is doing philosophy and he initiated new ways for philosophers to think about the human condition. Strauss thinks that students of philosophy should regard Machiavelli as one of the most consequential philosophers in the western tradition and they must study his philosophy with thoroughness and exactness. To belabor the wickedness, might miss the point.

[James]

This book is incredible. If you're on the lookout for an interpretation of Machiavelli that is absolutely unverifiable and seems obsessed with kabbalic numerology, look no further. I know you're out there.

[Andrew]

At some point in the future I'll reread this book with the diligence that Straussian scholars claim is necessary to appreciate this work. For now, a few quotes I liked will have to suffice:

"Choice, wise or honorable choice, is the prerogative of the prudent and the strong, of individuals and societies which are animated by ambition or love of glory. For since there is no perfect good, to choose means at best to choose a good mixed with evil. To choose means therefore in all cases to take a risk and to trust in one's power to keep under control the evil which goes with the good chosen. The weak lack that trust; they never choose well unless other men compel them to choose well. Not the strong but only the weak operate well by virtue of that necessity which stems from compulsion, fear or hunger."

"But the large majority are poor judges of virtue, especially in its higher forms. They judge by success and they admire men who merely had good luck or low cunning. They are overawed by power. They are moved by appearance rather than reality. They are more impressed by the spectacular than by the solid: they are not concerned with the wisdom of their favorites."

"Philosophy transcends the city, and the worth of the city depends ultimately on its openness, or deference, to philosophy. Yet the city cannot fulfill its function if it is not closed to philosophy as well as open to it; the city is necessarily the cave. The city understood in its closedness to philosophy is the demos in the philosophic sense, i.e., the totality of the citizens who are incapable or unwilling to defer to philosophy... Machiavelli's philosophizing on the other hand remains on the whole within the limits set by the city qua closed to philosophy... He achieves the decisive turn toward that notion of philosophy according to which its purpose is to relieve man's estate or to increase man's power or to guide man toward the rational society, the bond and the end of which is enlightened self-interest or the comfortable self-preservation of each of its members. The cave becomes 'the substance.' By supplying all men with the goods which they desire, by being the obvious benefactress of all men, philosophy (or science) ceases to be suspect or alien."

"Yet in looking forward to the extreme consequences of Machiavelli's action, we must not forget the fact that for Machiavelli himself the domination of necessity remains the indispensable condition of every great achievement and in particular of his own: the transition or the jump from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom will be the inglorious death of the very possibility of human excellence."

"The classics... knew that one cannot be distrustful of political or social change without being distrustful of technological change. Therefore they did not favor the encouragement of inventions, except perhaps in tyrannies, i.e., in regimes the change of which is manifestly desirable. They demanded the strict moral-political supervision of inventions; the good and wise city will determine which inventions are to be made use of and which are to be suppressed."

[Gitta]

I found this book remarkably frustrating. I hardly feel the urge to fling a book across the room whenever I read academic works. This book is so simplistic and extremely black and white. Leo Strauss, clearly an individual who sees religion - he himself was of Jewish descent - as the cement that holds society together. That prevents people from striving after their own ambitions. Machiavelli's advice, which to Strauss is synonymous to the individual Niccolò Machiavelli is, therefore, condemned as 'immoral and irreligious' and is labelled 'the teacher of evil'.

J.G.A. Pocock, Philip Pettit and Maurizio Viroli have opened up the Machiavellian debate by studying his republicanism. Though some have argued that they overlook the unscrupulous politics of Machiavelli's The Prince, at least they offer more solid interpretations than Strauss, who simply seems to condemn Machiavelli for not having voiced a concern for morality in The Prince. All in all, Strauss's thoughts are exactly that, thoughts, unsubstantiated and subjective to his personal view of the individual and his/her role in society.
Moreover, Strauss argues that if we do not share his view of Machiavelli's irreligious, immoral and evil teachings, that is because we have been brought up by it and thus blind to Machiavelli's true colours. In my opinion, any critic who feels the need to make such bold ideological statements, claiming that "immoral" individuals are thus Machiavellian, should be placed on the bottom shelf collecting dust. Criticism should be objective and not have a judgmental and overbearing tone towards its readers.

Yes, if a leader today would adopt the lessons of The Prince one would be shocked and appalled. But that is today. A time where most people do not have to worry about their city being invaded and pillaged by soldiers. A time where people can use the law to find retribution and only the state is allowed to exert violent behaviour. But did Machiavelli promote this advice or merely offer it? This is what is interesting about The Prince. This is why scholars still bother to study his works (take note of the plural: an informed decision cannot be made without reading his other works). And bringing along your strong personal sense of morality is not going to further the discussion, academically.

[John Warner]

from this extraordinarily fertile but somewhat inconclusive set of reflections on Machiavelli, I glean three broad arguments: (1) machiavelli is a systematic and comprehensive thinker--a Philosopher who presents a comprehensive teaching--not an opportunistic and muddleheaded ideologist, (2) machiavelli's comprehensive teaching is not only unChristian, but radically and pervasively antiChristian, and (3) machiavelli presents his radical and antiChristian teaching using methods of indirection and deception.

to call this book ambiguous is to understate the matter--its haphazard appearance is certainly deliberate, and may well be intended to reflect the evidently unsystematic character of Machiavelli's work. i confess that i threw this book down in frustration more than half a dozen times, only to come back to it again after machiavelli confused me. this might be the most maddening and obscure of Strauss' books, and that is saying something. it is probably also among his best, and that is also saying something.

[noblethumos]

Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli, first published in 1958, is one of the most influential and controversial interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought in twentieth-century intellectual history. Strauss approaches Machiavelli not primarily as a detached historian of politics or as a pragmatic adviser to rulers, but as a revolutionary thinker whose writings inaugurated a fundamental transformation in Western political philosophy. The central claim of the book is that Machiavelli represents a decisive rupture with the classical and Christian traditions of political thought. Strauss therefore interprets The Prince and the Discourses on Livy as parts of a deliberate philosophical project: the replacement of a politics oriented toward virtue and the common good with a politics grounded in necessity, power, acquisition, and the mastery of fortune.


Strauss’s interpretation is deliberately provocative because it challenges the conventional tendency to regard Machiavelli as merely a realist who recognized the unpleasant facts of political life. For Strauss, Machiavelli does not simply describe the world as it is. He seeks to alter the intellectual foundations upon which political life is understood. The significance of Machiavelli consequently lies not only in his particular recommendations to princes and republics but in his attempt to redefine the relationship between morality, politics, and political necessity.


The fundamental interpretive thesis of Thoughts on Machiavelli is that Machiavelli must be understood in relation to the classical tradition represented most importantly by Plato, Aristotle, and the classical historians. Strauss argues that classical political philosophy conceived political life in terms of the question of the best regime and the cultivation of human excellence. Politics could not be separated entirely from morality because the purpose of political association was connected with a conception of human flourishing.


Machiavelli, according to Strauss, reverses this relationship. Rather than beginning with an ideal standard of political virtue and asking how political institutions might approximate it, Machiavelli begins from the conditions of political necessity. The political actor must be prepared to act against conventional morality when circumstances require it. Cruelty, deception, violence, and political manipulation are not necessarily signs of political failure; under certain circumstances, they become instruments of successful political action.


This transformation is encapsulated in Machiavelli’s notorious teaching that a ruler must learn “how not to be good.” Strauss regards this not as an incidental piece of advice but as a statement of enormous philosophical significance. Machiavelli transforms the traditional question of how political power should be subordinated to virtue into the question of how virtue itself can be subordinated to political necessity.


The result is a fundamental reorientation of political philosophy. Instead of asking how politics can be made genuinely good, Machiavelli asks what kinds of conduct are necessary for political success. Strauss therefore sees Machiavelli as the originator of a new form of political science, one concerned less with the ideal than with the effective.


One of the most important dimensions of Strauss’s interpretation concerns Machiavelli’s treatment of evil. Strauss rejects interpretations that reduce Machiavellian politics to simple cynicism. Machiavelli is not merely saying that political leaders sometimes behave badly. Rather, he presents evil as potentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of political order.


Strauss pays particular attention to Machiavelli’s discussion of founders. Political founding frequently requires extraordinary violence because existing political arrangements must be destroyed before new institutions can be created. The founder consequently occupies an ambiguous moral position: the political order that later generations regard as legitimate may itself originate in acts that conventional morality condemns.


This argument creates a profound tension between political legitimacy and moral legitimacy. If political communities are founded through violence, deception, and coercion, then their subsequent claims to justice may conceal an original act of illegitimacy. Strauss interprets Machiavelli as deliberately exposing this tension.


The problem is especially visible in Machiavelli’s treatment of figures such as Romulus and Cesare Borgia. The founder must possess the capacity to employ violence decisively while simultaneously establishing institutions capable of transforming force into durable political authority. Strauss consequently distinguishes between ordinary wickedness and politically productive wickedness. Machiavelli’s innovation lies in recognizing that conduct traditionally regarded as morally vicious can become politically constructive.


Another major theme in Thoughts on Machiavelli is the relationship between virtù and fortune. Machiavelli’s virtù does not correspond neatly to the classical virtue of moral excellence. It refers instead to qualities such as boldness, intelligence, flexibility, energy, courage, and the capacity to exploit political circumstances.


Fortune represents the unpredictable element of human affairs. Political success cannot be guaranteed by rational planning alone because circumstances continually change. The successful political actor must therefore possess the flexibility to respond to contingency.


Strauss interprets this teaching as part of Machiavelli’s broader attempt to transform the traditional understanding of nature and necessity. Rather than accepting human limitations as permanent features of the political condition, Machiavelli seeks a greater degree of mastery over circumstances. Political intelligence becomes an instrument for overcoming fortune.


This emphasis on mastery is significant because it connects Machiavelli’s political thought to the emergence of modernity more generally. Strauss sees in Machiavelli the beginnings of a project that later modern thinkers would develop in different directions: the attempt to make human beings increasingly capable of controlling the conditions of their existence.


Strauss’s treatment of The Prince and the Discourses on Livy is particularly important because he refuses to regard them as simply contradictory works. The Prince is conventionally understood as a handbook for rulers, while the Discourses are often regarded as a defence of republican government. Strauss instead searches for the deeper unity between the two.


For Strauss, Machiavelli’s republicanism does not restore the classical conception of virtuous political life. The republic itself depends upon political conflict, ambition, military power, and institutional arrangements capable of directing human passions toward collective purposes. The distinction between monarchy and republic is therefore less fundamental than it might initially appear.


Both forms of government depend upon the successful manipulation of political necessity. The prince and the republican legislator confront essentially the same fundamental problem: how to establish and preserve political order in a world characterized by conflict, ambition, instability, and fortune.


Strauss therefore interprets Machiavelli’s republicanism as compatible with his broader revolutionary project. The republic is valuable not because it embodies an ideal of moral perfection but because it can generate strength, liberty, military power, and political expansion.


Perhaps Strauss’s most consequential claim is that Machiavelli should be regarded as the founder of modern political philosophy. The significance of Machiavelli is therefore not exhausted by his influence upon later political leaders. His deeper importance lies in changing the fundamental premises of political inquiry.


According to Strauss, earlier political philosophy was concerned with the relationship between political life and human perfection. Modern political philosophy increasingly becomes concerned with security, acquisition, prosperity, power, and technological mastery. Machiavelli occupies the critical point at which this transformation begins.


Strauss famously associates Machiavelli with a lowering of the goal of politics. Instead of expecting human beings to conform to a demanding conception of virtue, Machiavelli starts from ordinary human appetites and seeks to construct political institutions capable of harnessing them. The political order is consequently adapted to human beings as they actually are rather than to an idealized conception of how they ought to be.


This movement has both advantages and dangers. It makes political thought more attentive to historical reality, but it also threatens to detach politics from moral judgment. Strauss’s critique is therefore not simply that Machiavelli advocates immoral conduct. His deeper concern is that Machiavelli creates an intellectual framework in which the traditional distinction between right and wrong can be subordinated to political effectiveness.


The methodological character of Thoughts on Machiavelli is almost as significant as its substantive argument. Strauss reads Machiavelli with extraordinary attention to textual details, repetitions, apparent inconsistencies, silences, and deliberate rhetorical choices. He assumes that Machiavelli’s texts contain layers of meaning that cannot be exhausted by straightforward readings.


This approach reflects Strauss’s broader theory of esoteric writing. According to Strauss, philosophers writing under conditions of political or religious persecution may conceal controversial teachings beneath an apparently conventional surface. A careful reader must therefore examine not only what an author explicitly states but also the structure, omissions, contradictions, and rhetorical peculiarities of the text.


Strauss applies this method systematically to Machiavelli. He often treats seemingly minor textual details as clues to Machiavelli’s deeper intentions. This produces interpretations that are intellectually stimulating but also highly contestable. Critics may reasonably question whether Strauss sometimes attributes excessive intentionality to Machiavelli and whether every textual irregularity should be regarded as evidence of hidden philosophical meaning.


Nevertheless, the method produces an important methodological lesson: political texts should not always be treated as transparent statements of doctrine. Machiavelli’s rhetorical strategies, his use of classical examples, and his deliberate provocations are essential components of his political philosophy.


The intellectual significance of Thoughts on Machiavelli extends beyond its interpretation of Machiavelli himself. Strauss uses Machiavelli to formulate a larger critique of modernity. The Machiavellian transformation becomes the first stage in a historical movement leading toward modern rationalism, political science, liberalism, and ultimately the technological conception of human mastery.


Strauss’s argument is consequently neither purely historical nor purely exegetical. He is using Machiavelli as a lens through which to examine the foundations of modern Western civilization. The book asks whether modern political philosophy gained realism at the cost of wisdom.


This is what gives the book its enduring philosophical force. Strauss does not simply invite readers to admire or condemn Machiavelli. He forces them to confront the possibility that modern political thought has been founded upon a deliberate rejection of older moral and philosophical standards.


The strengths of Thoughts on Machiavelli are considerable. Strauss possesses an exceptional ability to identify philosophical problems beneath apparently practical political arguments. His insistence that Machiavelli represents a fundamental transformation rather than merely a new political style remains enormously influential. The book also demonstrates how questions concerning political power, morality, religion, and human nature are inseparable from one another.


Strauss is particularly persuasive in showing that Machiavelli cannot be adequately understood simply as a political realist. Machiavelli does not merely report that rulers commit immoral acts; he systematically investigates the political conditions under which such acts become necessary or advantageous. The distinction is crucial.


Yet Strauss’s interpretation also has limitations. His emphasis upon Machiavelli as the singular founder of modernity can appear overly schematic. The transition from medieval and classical political thought to modernity was neither instantaneous nor attributable to one thinker. Renaissance humanism, Christianity, Roman law, republican traditions, the development of the state, economic change, and transformations in scientific thought all contributed to the emergence of modern political consciousness.


Furthermore, Strauss’s esoteric reading can sometimes become difficult to falsify. If explicit statements are interpreted as deliberately misleading and contradictions are treated as evidence of hidden doctrines, the interpreter acquires considerable freedom to reconstruct the author’s intentions. This makes Strauss’s readings intellectually powerful but methodologically controversial.


There is also a danger that Strauss’s emphasis on Machiavelli’s revolutionary character obscures elements of continuity with classical political thought. Machiavelli remained deeply engaged with Roman history and classical authors, and his republicanism cannot simply be reduced to a modern doctrine of power. His political thought contains both rupture and continuity, and the balance between them remains a matter of legitimate scholarly dispute.


Thoughts on Machiavelli is ultimately much more than a commentary on a Renaissance political thinker. It is a meditation on the origins, character, and consequences of modernity. Strauss presents Machiavelli as the thinker who decisively transformed political philosophy by subordinating traditional moral ideals to political necessity and by replacing the search for the best political order with an analysis of how political power can actually be acquired and maintained.


The book’s central achievement is to recover the philosophical radicalism of Machiavelli. Behind the practical advice of The Prince and the republican analyses of the Discourses Strauss discovers a sustained assault upon inherited assumptions about virtue, morality, religion, and political legitimacy. Machiavelli emerges not simply as the theorist of raison d’état but as a thinker who sought to redefine the very purposes of political philosophy.


Whether Strauss is correct to identify Machiavelli as the decisive founder of modern political philosophy remains debatable. His interpretation is often too unified, too intentional, and too sweeping to be accepted without qualification. Yet precisely because it forces these questions into the foreground, Thoughts on Machiavelli remains indispensable. Its enduring significance lies in the challenge it poses to the reader: if modern politics has achieved greater realism, effectiveness, and mastery by abandoning the classical conception of virtue, what has been gained—and what has been lost—in the process?

GPT

[Dio Mavroyannis]

As far as an analysis of Machiavelli goes, this is probably the best thing out there. I feel like I have a much more comprehensive view of the relationship between the works. Sometimes the analysis seems a bit silly, counting the number of contemporary to ancient examples just seems like overkill. So the book is definitely longer than it needs to be but it needs to be present right next to the prince and the discourses. Someone should come along at some point and be able to condense this book into about 50 pages, perhaps combine it with other Machiavelli analysis to make a 100-page book that is easier to quickly scan for information.

[Tacodisc]

The challenges of this work lay in its depth of analysis at the level of the concerning texts’ structure. The meaning and significance of Machiavelli’s work within the broader tradition of modern political philosophy — abstractions that Strauss never deals with so directly — are embedded within the organizational contours of the writer’s craft that most readers might pass up as irrelevant or even undetected.

These lectures, conducted at the University of Chicago in 1958, possess a pedagogical objective. Note the unusual choice of words in central lectures: Intention — what does Machiavelli intend? Not, by contrast, what he says or writes, but rather the uncovering of his intentionality more than his explicit argumentation requires a new way or reading a work in order to uncover political and philosophical positions that remain hidden or unsaid without a proper accounting.

Strauss is one of the great readers in any tradition; his method of relentlessly calling attention to the subtle details of authorial decision-making that shape a work can strike a reader the way hearing a strange language might a traveller to a new world. Treading through the four lectures requires a great deal of patience, but every frustration of sorting through Strauss’s microscopic categorization of each section of the main works — The Prince and The Discourses on Livy — returns its reward. What are we to make of Strauss’s idiosyncratic grouping of sections of text — “the Tacitus subsection” — or the variety of voices that emerge in the interstices between Livy and Livy’s characters; between Machiavelli who speaks and Machiavelli who makes his point without speaking?

It can seem as though Strauss wants to convince us that someone or something is in the room with us that everyone agrees isn’t: a hallucinated Machiavelli. In speaking about Livy and the wisdom of the ancients, the Florentine is in fact speaking about a critical relationship to the biblical tradition. In not saying a thing, he means that thing with the most severity. We are told that he is at the origins of the Enlightenment, but perhaps he is better read as an Obfuscation. Commonly called the philosopher of wickedness, his ultimate aim is to find and promote the great models of virtue.

I will be spending the next few weeks thinking through these complexities that one might call Strauss’s twofold Machiavelli.

[Amelia]

ugh this guy

[George Moody]

This book is incredible. Immensely frustrating, even infuriating, yet despite long stretches of fussy pedantry it is also filled with moments of lapidary insight.

The book gives us a great mind, obsessively over-reading Machiavelli. Tiny discrepancies n interpretation or use of classical material across Machiavelli’s corpus are built into hugely significant signs to secret inner meanings; inner meaning sometimes only available through following the numerological patterns they point to, which finally reveal his cryptic blasphemies.

This is Straus’s belief in the need for esoteric reading run riot. I don’t doubt the basic truth that some texts conceal hidden meanings, or that this was a somewhat common way of writing pre-modernity. Yet here deep and painstakingly close reading, exacting attention to details and Strauss’s erudition and intellectual firepower are all deployed to wrest… nothing that new from Machiavelli’s work. In its outline Strauss’s view of Machiavelli is one of the two standard opinions – Machiavelli as amoral realist – turned up a few notches to present him as actively diabolical. Beyond this though, it is not clear what Strauss is trying to say about Machiavelli’s work here; there seems to be little actual argument.

And yet. Strauss has given a level of attention to his study of Machiavelli that I find fantastic – truly, hard to believe. While a lot of what this care turns up see like unexceptional errors and inconsistencies to me, it does also give him some deep, if fragmentary and isolated, insights. As an example – late in the book, so recently read – he is able to give a full account of Machiavelli’s use of Aristotle and other classical philosophers across his work, tying them together to give, to me at least, far greater clarity to Machiavelli’s cosmology and its constitutive connection to his morality than I feel I could ever have achieved myself.

I can’t recommend this book. I hated it a lot of the time I was reading it, even though I was strangely gripped to continue. I am glad I read it though –partly for some of the insights into Machiavelli’s work, but mainly for sharing in the experience of Strauss’s obsessive close reading.

[David McGrogan]

This is a monumental scholarly achievement - thoroughly admirable for its ambition and depth. Nobody else in the 20th century wrote work of this brilliance and density or profundity of thought, let alone the 21st. Does he push the argument too far? Yes, unless perhaps Machiavelli is Strauss's stand-in for modern political philosophy as such. But it is still a virtuoso performance (if at times relentless and repetitive).

[Hooman]

A masterclass in exegesis and how to read philosophy. I would revisit it when I have read Machiavelli's Discourses.
Really great insights in how new modes and orders are established and how they have fratricide in their beginning. also I know more about renaissance now.

[Anton Sack]

Yeah so Strauss is pro Machiavelli/modernity and anyone telling you otherwise is reading this book wrong.

[Mark Singer]

(Originally reviewed in 2018, and revised in 2022)
What began as yet another book in my study of the Florentine Secretary evolved into an eleven month hate-read. To say that I found this book frustrating is an understatement, and I had to read it all the way through twice before I was convinced that I was finished. Along the way, I did side research on Leo Strauss. This is the first book of his that I have ever read, and may be the last.
Strauss is convinced that Machiavelli wrote on two levels: one for the causal reader, and another for the true seeker of knowledge. In shirt, esoteric versus exoteric. To further that argument, Strauss goes into great detail about how Machiavelli would deliberately select the number of a chapter in Discourses on purpose to relay his true meaning; etc. To me, this almost seems like the kabbalistic belief in "Gematria", where each and every letter in biblical writings had a mystical meaning. I'm not convinced.
Strauss also has an annoying tendency to repeat and restate an argument again and again.
Feel free to convince me that I am wrong.

[Sam Snideman]

Strauss bangs away on Machiavelli for about three hundred pages. It's a good read, especially if you are either a Straussian or a devotee of Machiavelli. I come away from reading this book with no less an affection for Machiavelli; a finger-puppet I own of Machiavelli provided me with much sagacious advice in graduate school.

[mwr]

Strauss always makes good on his promise to demonstrate the folly of insisting that everything has a meaning, but you can't read this book without realizing how poorly you read Machiavelli the first time. There are a few nice observations, though.

[Jordan]

I think Strauss gets important aspects of Machivelli wrong. Someday I'll write a book about it. Today is not that day.

[Tyler]

Blah! Felt like you'd have to do a devotional read to like this book. very little of interest to me here. Probably Depok Chopra's favorite bookon Machiavelli.

[Nathan Albright]

It is not to be wondered that Leo Strauss has, as a political philosopher, been subject to a great deal of popular disdain. He fully earned his bad reputation as a corrupter of philosophy, and yet at the same time he remains a philosopher worthy of study, if only because as we have to deal with snakes in the grass that it is worthwhile to read the writings of someone who may be readily and openly admitted to be such a snake in the grass himself. One cannot read this book and the author's praise of the prudence and autonomy of Machiavelli's thought without seeing Leo Strauss as a similar sort of person himself, someone who studied the ways of the heathen and the thought of early modern political philosophers in order to oppose both contemporary political thinking as well as to oppose biblical morality [1]. In at least one passage, the author wishes the reader to grand the autonomy of political science as a discipline. And yet this autonomy cannot be granted. The claims of God are universal, and claim lordship over every aspect of existence. Since the author, and his subject, desired to rebel against God's laws and ways and desired to set themselves up as authorities and receive glory and honor for themselves that properly belonged to God, they were open rebels to biblical law, and open scoffers of biblical religion, something this book has in large quantity. It therefore goes without saying that both Strauss and Machiavelli end up being wicked, as a matter of course, because they confuse the lower paths of life and power as being the ultimate areas of life. Woe be to those who call good evil and evil good.

The depth of material in this book may be judged from the fact that some 300 pages of close type are only comprised of four chapters, and that there are no section headings to indicate a change in thought. We are dealing with a great commentary here, and one that makes few concessions to its readers, and little elucidation of the author's own serpentine way of thought. Throughout the book, the reader is in considerable doubt as to whether the author is more interested in expressing Machiavelli's thought through erudite analysis or seeking to convey his own under the cover of discussing Machiavelli. The first chapter of the book examines the two-fold character of Machiavelli's political thought in that it appears to be contrary between the Prince and the Discourses on the first ten books of Livy. The next two chapters then look at the intentions of Machiavelli in both works, and how they ultimately serve the same end, even if the emphasis is different based on different arguments and a different intended audience. The fourth and final chapter, which takes up about 120 pages of material, looks at the core of Machiavelli's teaching, spending a lot of time on Machiavelli's radical and ungodly views on moral virtue.

In reading this book, one becomes aware that the popular disdain for Machiavelli is justified. People who know only a little bit about Machiavelli are content to know that his viewpoints are evil, while those who pretend that he was not evil have to engage in a great deal of dishonest sophistry in order to present him as good, the same sort of sophistry that Machiavelli himself engaged in to avoid meeting with an ignominious end. And yet when reading this book, one cannot help but be convinced that Leo Strauss, like Machiavelli, could justly be considered a deliberate corrupter of the political virtue of the youth. For just as Machiavelli wrote to the young in order to encourage them to become harsher and less virtuous in order to overthrow the accepted ways of their day and time, so too Leo Strauss and his disciples engaged in the same sort of corrupting practice to encourage neoconservatism and the replacement of the virtuous behavior of the state with the use of the naked power of government in order to seek after violence, overthrow the electoral verdicts of the people of other nations, and engage in ferocious conflict within and without the state, without a belief in that virtue that alone prepares mankind for eternal life and that alone makes authority legitimate in the eyes of the public.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...