Redeeming The Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli 'S Masterpiece. Maurizio Viroli

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Redeeming The Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece.

Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xiv þ 190 pp. $26.95.
Occasioned by the 500th anniversary of the first draft of Machiavelli’s Prince, this
extended essay expands themes first treated in the author’s 2010 volume Machiavelli’s
God. The claim explicit in the book’s title is that the essay redeems The Prince from
previous interpretations that have variously read it as a guide for republicans, as an
argument for the radical separation of politics from ethics, and as an anti-Christian tract.
By figuring Machiavelli as a prophet of political emancipation, Viroli claims that the
correct interpretation of the text is to read it as a salvific invocation for an Italian
redeemer in the image of Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus. Much of the argument necessarily
focuses on chapter 6 concerning new principalities acquired by personal virtue and arms
and on the much-discussed final “Exhortation,” where the deliverers of the peoples of
Israel, Persia, and Athens are proffered as examples worthy of imitation by the house of
the Medici. In foregrounding the emotive force of the text, Viroli treats the work as an
extended oration designed to move and inspire the much-needed redeemer who will
deliver contemporary Italy from the barbarians. Consequently, Viroli devotes a whole
chapter to an examination of the tension between Machiavelli’s political realism and his
status as a political visionary and prophet.
In terms of the status and dating of the “Exhortation,” Viroli comes down firmly in
the camp that sees it as an integral part of the original draft rather than a later addition
when rededicating the work to Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici. In the absence of an
autograph text or any new archival evidence, however, it is doubtful this particular debate
will end, as plausible arguments exist on both sides. A similar lack of concrete
information regarding the text’s presentation and early reception also problematizes an
evaluation of its oratorical efficacy. While its debt to classical rhetorical forms of
argumentation and structure is well known, The Prince was clearly not intended for
publication or public reading, the essential attributes of prophetic oratory. As Rubinstein
observed, it is less the deliverance, or common good, of a people that occupies
Machiavelli’s thoughts than the particular good of the “new Prince” (read “tyrant”) and
the necessity of learning how to hold on to power, “mantenere lo stato.” In this context
religion is forwarded as an ideal tool given its political instrumentality, as evidenced in
the heavy irony of chapter 11 on ecclesiastical principalities.
What Viroli’s reading denies is the radical otherness of Machiavelli’s political
vision, his uncoupling of virtue from politics, and his critique of what Hankins has
recently termed the virtue politics of Italian humanism. It also simplifies the very
complex voicing strategies employed by Machiavelli in all his works, the subtle
layering of allusions, insinuations, and parody. In the process Machiavelli is
unwittingly aligned with another disempowered prophet he himself much derided,
Girolamo Savonarola, and much of the force in his political message is lost. While the
700 R EN AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y V O L U ME L X I X , N O . 2
book’s dust jacket announces a “startling new interpretation” of Machiavelli’s text, the
essay in fact revives a much older school of interpretation that championed Machiavelli
as a prophet of Italian unification and emancipation. Viroli’s redemption of a previous
critical tradition is apparent in the opening quotation from Francesco De Sanctis that
implicitly aligns Machiavelli with the other Renaissance prophets appropriated by the
Risorgimento: Giordano Bruno and Savonarola (and one might add Dante). Such
redemptive sentiments also infused the work of Villari and Tommasini, the classic
nineteenth-century biographers of Machiavelli. The most striking chapter is the final
one, which provides a critical survey of the reception of The Prince as a tract on political
redemption from Cardano to Gramsci, although it seems to somewhat undermine the
earlier claim of interpretational innovation.
What is not in doubt is that Machiavelli saw The Prince as the possible means of his
own political redemption. That it failed is a reminder of the conditioning circumstances
of its composition that Machiavelli, the virtuoso political analyst, was unable to
overcome. On reflection, it is probably fair to claim that not even he could have
prophesied the subsequent critical fortuna of his “little work,” which remains as
provocative and resistant to hermeneutical closure as ever.
STEPHEN J. MILNER, University of Manchester

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REVIEWS 699

Redeeming The Prince: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece.

STEPHEN J. MILNER, University of Manchester

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