Book Review

Reginald Pole, the sixteenth-century inventor of anti-Machiavellism, would be proud of this book, or at least of the image of Machiavelli and his works that the author constructs. Vickie Sullivan's Machiavelli is a strong candidate for the least sympathetic ever—virulently antireligious, a believer not only in the general efficacy of force and fraud but also specifically in their utility against the people whom he allegedly "loved," and a deceiver on a grand scale. About the only aspect of the poor man that remains even moderately appealing is his rooted belief in the republic. Not, of course, that scholars should base their assessments in personal predilections, but Sullivan's Machiavelli is, on his face, almost so terrible as to tax belief. Nevertheless, Machiavelli, on Sullivan's showing or just about anyone else's, was out to shock. It is almost certain that Sulllivan's attempt to recapture how he did that will have the same effect. That said, it will also likely receive some pretty stiff criticism from historians of political thought, nearly all of whom come in for more than a few discrete thumps.	1
Sullivan's thesis is fairly straightforward. Machiavelli so despised Christianity for its enervation of contemporary republics that he set out to replace it with a completely new world (not just Italian) order. Along the way, pagan Rome, judged guilty of having created the conditions that made Christianity's triumph possible, also had to go. That left only the third Rome of Sullivan's title, the one that Machiavelli "perverted" (or, more tamely put, imagined) into existence. If nothing else, Sullivan succeeds in demonstrating that Machiavelli had a very clear agenda and anyone from Livy to Christ who got in the way would be dealt with summarily. Yet even here there is a sting in the tail. Machiavelli's supreme value was allegedly human liberty, synonymous with the vivere civile of the republic, but he would become such a strong believer in necessity as to preclude any domain for liberty. Thus Machiavelli, like his rude mountain men heroes (at least according to Sullivan) unleashed his own metaphorical deluge that not merely transvalued Christian values but obliterated them in the name of an impossibility. He becomes at best a prophet of violence almost for its own sake.	2
This is strong stuff and against the grain of nearly all prevailing interpretation. Does it fly? That depends in part on a consideration of Sullivan's method. Not for nothing does one of the jacket blurbs label the book "political philosophy." The problem of how to reconcile the apparent kowtowing to monarchy of The Prince with the pronounced republicanism of The Discourses has given scholars fits almost from the moment Machiavelli wrote the two works and remains a legitimate topic of discussion. But Sullivan is after a synthetic Machiavelli and to that end regularly "blenderizes" his works, although she manages to keep a pretty sharp focus on the Discourses alone; she usually cites them in the Mansfield/Tarcov translation. Demanding synthesis from any Renaissance thinker is a dangerous methodological premise, as is overlooking the importance of rhetorical occasion. This central shortcoming is of a piece with Sullivan's general approach to historical context, which is usually to ignore it. This causes most serious difficulties in her discussion of imitation, which misrepresents not only humanist notions but Machiavelli's own new idea. For neither was imitation thought of as slavish replication. This point could have come—among many possible sources—from a study Sullivan cites once, Victoria Kahn's Machiavellian Rhetoric (which, to be fair, came out only shortly before Sullivan's book), nor does she absorb its fundamental argument that Machiavelli's ideas cannot be separated from the means by which he expressed them. Rather than reading Machiavelli's works rhetorically, Sullivan prefers to put her own questions to his texts and too often for comfort derives her own answers.	3
Despite this perhaps discipline-based reservation, there is still a great deal that is valuable in Sullivan's argument, if not always in her readings (a dichotomy perfectly in keeping with her method). As an example of the second in the service of the first, although she is probably correct that Machiavelli gradually modified his view of Numa Pompilius into an almost entirely negative one with large consequences not only for his notion of the function of religion in Rome but also for Christianity both then and in his own day (Savonarola may be the big loser), in the course of this demonstration Sullivan invents content for Discourses 1.21 (116) and misunderstands Machiavelli's point about the Samnite appeal to religion in 1.12. He did not mean to deprecate any appeal to the supernatural because the Samnites lost to the Romans but rather to underscore the power of the revival of ancient Samnite ritual such that it could inspire the repeatedly beaten Samnites to one more effort, albeit a losing one. By reducing religion to cult, as Machiavelli may appear to have done, Sullivan distorts or at least minimizes his appeal for the restoration of Christianity to its original principles, principles that in Machiavelli's view would have removed it from the secular sphere where it had no business while yet leaving it a vibrant force in the individual. These two points may seem contradictory; if so, a number of Machiavelli's contemporaries missed the problem.	4
It is too bad that Sullivan let herself slip into ahistorical modes of analysis because her ingrained tendency to think dialectically, or at least in terms of immanent critique, produces a number of insights. She might even have solved the problem of prince and republic by the contention that the republic was to be full of princelings, all of whom together would quickly cut down anyone who threatened to overawe them and become a tyrant. One wonders (to adopt one of Sullivan's favorite phrases) about this Animal Farm Machiavelli, though.	5
Thomas F. Mayer Augustana College

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