Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli's Lifelong Quest for Freedom

This book was absolutely brilliant - I loved how the author put Machiavelli's actions and writings into perspectives and drew out extra depth from his work. The book also works as a standalone history of Florence in the period of his life, providing a well paced and accessible account of the republic, Savonarola and the return of the Medici. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Erica Benner fascinatingly reinterprets Machiavelli from the familiar characterisation of an advocate of cynical manipulative pragmatic power seeking, to a politician dedicated to the ideals of a republic. Her text is very readable, almost a gripping informative novel about 15/16th century Italian politics. Benner claims Machiavelli favoured leadership by virtue supported by military might, which elicits democratic approval, contrasted to leadership by chance event relying on external unreliable military support (p157-159). However, Machiavelli’s criterion for this judgment still appears to be pragmatic success, rather than the intrinsic principle of virtue per se. A more profound ethical philosophy would need to examine the interaction between virtue, power, and the demos. Machiavelli himself is implicated in the inhumane siege of Pisa, which questions his definition of virtue and his commitment to it. He seems to have failed to implement his own advice, suffering banishment and leaving his family impoverished at his death. In contemporary politics, it is unnerving how easily democracy can fail to deliver virtue, and how it can also morph into dynasties, exemplified in the Bush and Clinton families in the USA, and the increasingly presidential style of government of UK Prime Ministers. We should heed Machiavelli’s advice that ‘if you choose princes, expect them or their progeny to start seizing more powers than you gave willingly gave them, until they become tyrants’ (p316).

The idea behind this book is good: reconstruct Machiavelli's life through the steps of his diplomatic and political career, heavily relying on his pithy writing. Unfortunately, the book fails to evoke the historical context, neglecting so many questions - think what the Renaissance meant, how it arose, etc. - that I was disappointed on every single page with the level of detail, the superficiality of perspective as I saw it, and the glib interpretations I disagreed with. What you get instead is just a bare bones biography with a lot of tendentious speculation. She makes him out to be a staunch advocate of republicanism and perhaps even a determined precursor of the Enlightenment, but there are many alternative interpretations that can be argued with great force. I see him as a cynical, if brilliant, writer and courtier who placed himself in the middle of the great political developments and crises of his time, who switched loyalties in accordance with the adjective that will forever define him. He may have been the idealist that Benner portrays him as, but I see that as the wishful thinking of a specialist. We simply do not know if his brutal advice in The Prince is ironic subterfuge to hide his republican sympathies (her interpretation) or not. In addition, though I am only an amateur historian, I found myself disagreeing so often with her encapsulations of complex events and her generalizations that I came to distrust her judgment. (For example, she mentions the opening of the ranks of the Roman army to lower-class citizens as supporting Machiavelli's efforts to build a popular militia in support of the Florentine republic. However, that plebian army led directly to the Roman civil war - the troops became loyal to generals like Caesar and Marius, not the republic, which flatly contradicts her thesis.) Could she be that mediocre? Possibly. That being said, there were many biographical and historical details that interested me - it just that they were directly related to Machiavelli's career and bio rather than to the amazing context around him, when the world was changing in fundamental ways and in which he was a vital player. This is personal, but I found the book a slog to read, written in a style that is so difficult to read quickly that I took more time with it than I would have liked. Benner is, I think, an academic who is over-reaching, trying to write a best seller when she should stick to her specialty. I cannot recommend this book for the subject. There must be better treatments.

With Erica Benner's book, Be Like the Fox, Machiavellianism is dead. Hail Machiavelli. The distorters of Machiavelli, such as Leo Strauss, can now be buried. It was Strauss who wrote "On Machiavelli" wherein he said: "...we shall later try to prove that Machiavelli's teaching is immoral and irreligious". It is through Erica Benner's book we read that Machiavelli wrote: "We are deceived by lust, involved in transgressions, and enmeshed in the snares of sin and find ourselves in the hands of the Devil. Here, to get out of it, we must resort to penitence and cry out with David: "Have mercy on me of God! and with St. Peter weep bitterly, for all the fault we have committed feel shame". But the above isn't what American moviemakers, novelists, academics and pop philosophers want to hear.

This is a gripping, wonderfully insightful book about a man who fought hard to save his republic – and helps us think about how to save ours. It is both a fascinating and dramatic “life and times” of Machiavelli and a study of how republics get corrupted and fall apart. There are lots of superb Machiavelli quotes woven into the story, and many of them relate very well to politics in the present. Machiavelli comes across as a hilarious and creative guy who wrote poems and satirical plays that were a big hit with his contemporaries. There are other interesting characters in the book, and Benner is very good at describing Machiavelli’s relationships with family and friends, based on their letters or diaries. I especially liked his father Bernardo and his wife Marietta, who complained that her husband was always away on diplomatic missions. It would make a great TV series about politics. Highly recommended.