Book Review: Machiavelli’s Politics, by Catherine H. Zuckert

• Date: 01 December 2018
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718779003
• Author: Michelle Clarke
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 991

Machiavelli’s Politics, by Catherine H. Zuckert. Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 2017, 500 pp, US$45.00, ISBN 9780226434803

Reviewed by: Michelle Clarke, Department of Government, Dartmouth College,

Hanover, NH

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718779003

In Chapter 6 of The Prince, Machiavelli characterizes virtù as the art of rec-

ognizing and seizing opportunities. Catherine Zuckert’s new book does just

that. Published amidst a flurry of quincentennial anniversaries, Machiavelli’s

Politics revisits the bulk of Machiavelli’s corpus in order to develop a fully

comprehensive interpretation of it. To those who would like to know what

exactly we are celebrating when we mark the passage of five hundred years

since Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Mandragola, the Discourses, The Life of

Castruccio Castracani, the Art of War, Clizia, and the Florentine Histories,

Zuckert posits that we are commemorating the advent of an entirely new

political orientation, one focused primarily on advancing the safety and pros-

perity of ordinary people. Machiavelli’s Politics proceeds from the convic-

tion that Machiavelli himself intended to reconstitute political thought in this

way, and it sets out to recover how he accomplished this goal across such a

diverse array of writings.

Consistent with Machiavelli’s own declaration that The Prince and

Discourses contain everything he knows, Zuckert concentrates much of her

attention on these two most important works, tracing out the philosophical

foundations on which, she claims, Machiavelli hoped a new form of politi-

cal practice might someday be built—if not immediately, then by future

audiences more inclined to undertake this kind of project than their actual

dedicatees. But even as Zuckert defends the theoretical primacy of The

Prince and the Discourses, she makes a compelling case for the view that

Machiavelli’s secondary works contain significant, independent contribu-

tions of their own. While it may be true that Mandragola, the Art of War,

the Life, Clizia, and even the Histories constitute a second tier of

Machiavelli’s thinking, Zuckert holds that it is nevertheless a mistake to

treat them as lacking in either serious philosophical content or political

intent. It is here, in these later works, she argues, that Machiavelli “showed

more specifically how his broad analysis applied to the lives of his contem-

poraries, in private as well as in public” and “made the philosophical foun-

dations of his project clearer” by “emphasiz[ing] a particular theme or

partial application of his more comprehensive understanding—to make it

both more palatable and more easily understood” (279–80). Thus, Zuckert