Prudence and the Prince.

• Author: Baumann, Fred E.
• Position: The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now - Book Review

Carnes Lord, The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2003) 275 pp., $26.

UPDATES OF Machiavelli's Prince are not unknown. Dick Morris's recent New Prince (Renaissance, 1999) is a low but representative example of the genre, in which a self-advertised tough guy shows you how important it is to be tough and invokes Old Nick as his patron devil. Carnes Lord's Modern Prince, by contrast, is a book of great value to the serious student.

Machiavelli said of the original Prince that it was the sum of the understanding he had acquired over the years. The same may be true for Lord's, reflecting his impressive career both as political theorist (a translator of Aristotle's Politics) and leading national security policymaker (on the Reagan NSC and in the first Bush Administration). As Lord suggests in a footnote, his book can be understood as arising from Harvey Mansfield's Taming the Prince (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), as it traces, through modern thought and practice, the institutionalization of the Machiavellian insight that everything, even domestic policy, is war--the move from the prince-executioner to "the Executive Branch." To oversimplify, Lord's plain message is that the taming has gone too far, that leaders can do a lot more than they think they can, and had better begin to realize it. In this, one might think that he is echoing Max Weber's fear of routinization and bureaucratization. That would be partly true, but mostly misleading.

For Lord neither seeks to return to Machiavelli simply nor in some breathlessly Nietzschean voluntarist or "charismatic" way. His own roots are in Aristotle and the traditional political science that Machiavelli both revolted against but still shared, and which knew important things that the taming of the prince, for all its virtues, perhaps necessarily had to forget. The commonality is that both knew and took seriously the reality of politics that is lived beneath the level of institutions and the rules of the game. As such, this book, combined perhaps with James Ceaser's Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), provides the best introduction to the practical side of that traditional political science.

It is useful to know Machiavelli's Prince when reading Lord. There are, for instance, instructive correspondences of chapter topics. Chapter 11, which Machiavelli uses to describe the despised ecclesiastical state, Lord devotes to a critique of contemporary...