“On the contrary: he has been conscripted into service by adherents of varying political outlooks eager to unfurl his banner over their causes. That Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Rousseau should have found in Machiavelli a spokesman for political liberty; that nineteenth-century Italian patriots regarded him as an impassioned advocate of Italian unification; that Bolsheviks hailed him as a Marxist-Leninist outrider; that a late twentieth-century feminist academic found in his writings anxieties about the female threat to male power--these and other interpretations suggest that Machiavelli's thought is strangely malleable to any number of diametrically opposing ideologies and approaches.”