Machiavelli by Patrick Boucheron has a Nice Cover I Guess

“Machiavellianism is what stands between us and Machiavelli. It gives manifest shape to what is evil in politics, it is the hideous face of all that one would like to disavow, but it’s hard to close one’s eyes to it. It is also a mask behind which the man, Niccolò Machiavelli, who was born in Florence in 1469 and died there in 1527, disappears” (19)

This book has a fabulous cover, and that is about the only good part of it.

Just look at it: a fuzzy, black-and-white portrait of Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, obscured by a terrace of red scribbles that, behind the learned writer’s head, suggest a bloody crown. There is no title, but everything about the cover’s design screams “biography.”

So how in heck is Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People what to Fear not a biography?

Well, what is a biography anyway? What is the state? What is the people? In this book, french author Patrick Boucheron answers none of these questions and less.

Machiavelli is definitely supposed to be a biography that advocates for the relevance of the titular philosopher, but it fails to stay on one topic for long enough to state a thesis or offer compelling information. Nor does it succeed as sketch of Machiavelli’s times, though it occasionally pontificates on the Medici family and the Hapsburg-Valois wars. It is not even a particularly effective overview of Renaissance political writing, because it never stays on the same topic for more than three pages.

The most accurate description of the book might come from its review of Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten Book of Titus Livius:

“If The Prince was taut, focused and cutting, the Discourses teems with ideas, which it sets forth ramblingly. Its editors were hard put to bring coherence to this shifting mass, which seems buffeted by history, or rather by Machiavelli’s energetic attempt to derive from the materials of history a practical art of freedom” (106)

But Boucheron’s work, which is only 150 pages, is not guided by as clever a mind as Machiavelli’s. It grabs the reader by the hand and takes them…somewhere, possibly in Italy. Just as one starts to learn about Savonarola or Machiavelli’s career as a playwright, Machiavelli disappears down a new path. It is neither easy-to-follow nor scholarly. The translation, conducted by Willard Wood, is competent. In fact, most of the people who worked on this book are competant⁠—just not the author.

If you have a cursory interest in Machiavelli’s world, I recommend flipping through the book and observing the many artworks inserted to pad out the page length. They at least, offer some glimpse of the Renaissance. The rest of the book, sadly, is a flimsy cash-grab with an admittedly-enticing cover.