Be Like the Fox

Starred review from March 6, 2017
Benner (Machiavelli’s Prince: A New Reading) successfully rehabilitates the image of the highly quotable and oft-maligned Machiavelli, portraying him as an accessible voice of reason even when his fortunes sank during the heights of Medici influence. Historians have spent centuries debating whether to take Machiavelli at face value in The Prince, or whether to read him instead as employing irony aimed at the ruling Medicis. Benner stands firmly in the latter camp, calling Machiavelli’s infamous volume a “masterwork” of irony. Here she expertly blends Machiavelli’s words from letters, diaries, and other writings with striking passages from The Prince to prove her point. Benner includes useful information on deciphering the likeliest meanings behind his words; while Machiavelli’s unsentimental, harsh assertions may garner attention, she reveals how further inspection of surrounding passages and popular writing techniques of the time suggests that the voice employed is a false voice used to warn against the very methods it touts. Benner contextualizes Renaissance Florence and the life of the Machiavelli family, though Machiavelli’s suffering under torture and Pico della Mirandola’s complicated relationship with Savonarola receive only cursory treatment. Ideal as a companion to The Prince in university courses, Benner’s work places readers in Machiavelli’s daily life and recreates his world for academic and casual readers alike.

March 1, 2017
A new look at an old book--and the philosopher/diplomat who wrote it.Everyone in school learned Machiavelli's (1469-1527) famous advice, set forth in The Prince, to those in power: the ends justify the means. Benner follows up on her previous Machiavelli's Prince: A New Reading (2014), which argued for an entirely new way of interpreting the book, with this timely, dramatic, and comprehensive life of the Florentine, drawing on his poems, plays, letters, diplomatic dispatches, and his many friendships. This is a very personal biography. Benner invites us right into Machiavelli's world, his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, quoting him extensively on a wide variety of topics. The author begins with a helpful, four-page dramatis personae, and she tells Machiavelli's story in lively, almost novelistic prose. A person says something "coldly," while another speaks "quietly." Some readers may be put off by this methodology--too much creative writing and less historical scholarship--but Benner knows her subject well, and she wants us to know him well, too. The well-educated Machiavelli worked in the government, then as a diplomat, and later as the leader of the Florentine militia. Life at this time in Florence was strewn with political and religious land mines. A wrong step on the toes of a certain prince, Medici family member, or cleric could get you thrown into prison, as Machiavelli was in 1513, for conspiracy against the Medici. He denied it and was tortured for nearly two weeks by having both shoulders dislocated. After he was freed, he wrote his famous treatise, published after his death. Benner posits a reading that has been put forth before but never in such detail: that Machiavelli's "true intention in The Prince was to expose the perversities of princely rule." In support of that argument, she provides an eye-opening, captivating portrait. Benner succeeds at what every biographer tries to do: she brings her subject to life for her readers.

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Starred review from April 1, 2017
A half-millennium after Cardinal Reginald Pole denounced The Prince as a book stinking of Satan's every wickedness, millions still share the churchman's view of the book's author as an unprincipled counselor to the powerful, justifying any cruelty, any mendacity, that offers political advantage. But in that notorious authorNiccolo MachiavelliBenner sees a man actually committed to moral principles that sustain a democratic republic. Schooled by brutal contemporary realities that once sent him to prison and exposed him to torture, this ethical thinker learns a new craftiness. Deploying the same creative skills he uses to depict diverse characters in his literary art (in, for instance, his allegorical poem The Golden Ass and his sharply satiric play The Mandrake), the Florentine writer learns to slyly embed his own convictions in an interplay of voices, even in his personal correspondence and his published political analyses, such as Discourses on Livy and, yes, The Prince. Guided by Benner, readers penetrate the benign deception in the Florentine author's authorial ventriloquism and so learn to recognize the subtle but profoundly humane implications of his most famous work, ignored by centuries of readers deaf to the irony undercutting its amoral recommendations. A persuasive challenge to the received opinion of a Renaissance titan.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)