Niccolo's Smile, What Would Machiavelli Do? and Machiavelli on Modern Leadership

Greetings, Sarah,

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Ah, manipulation behind a deceptively gentle facade. You've seen through my essential M.O. I do appreciate your leading off; I finished an article for my actual employer, and now on to the books.

I agree with the way you've cast these three. Let me do a complementary job of suggesting what is surprising, strong, and disappointing about each of them--and then point toward the question that may have occurred to some members of the vast "Book Club" audience, namely whether the political strategist of 16^th-century Florence has anything to say about the political morass of 21^st-century Florida.

Stanley Bing's book, What Would Machiavelli Do?, is the easiest to categorize: It is an embarrassment. I am sorry to say this, because I have met and liked the author--the head PR guy for a big broadcast company who writes under a pseudonym. More important, he has a column in Fortune, and on Machiavellian grounds I am sorry to generate yet another enemy with a regular outlet.

Nonetheless, for our readers' sake, it's worth issuing a warning. The book is a one-joke enterprise that might have supported a column but doesn't hold up through even this very thin book. The joke involves turning around the familiar "What would Jesus do?" motto of the last decade and--ho ho!--coming up with a manual of how to be a jerk. "If you have any hope of attaining true power, reach deep for the most abhorrent, offensive parts of your personality and give them some air! ... Watch people reel back when you put your hand over their faces and push real hard."

Of the many limitations to this as the basis of a book, the one most relevant to our discussion is that, as you point out, it has nothing to do with Machiavelli. "What would Stalin Do?" "What would Donald Trump Do?" "What would Robert Novak Do?"--these would all fit the actual turning-Jesus-on-his-head concept better than Machiavelli does. (From this point on, "NM" = Niccolo Machiavelli.) I suspect that two calculations lie behind the choice of NM rather than, say, Novak as the name in the catchphrase: that the audience wouldn't know enough about "The Prince" or other NM writings to recognize the mismatch. And that a name from the realm of quality lit would add a veneer like that of other recent successful business books, which apply the wisdom of Sun Tzu or Clausewitz to modern corporate challenges.

Michael Ledeen's book is straightforwardly in the recent publishing category I'm referring to--works that look to the classics for guidance about the Internet age. I liked this book a lot--even though, as you say, roughly one-third by tonnage is WSJ ed-page read-alike material about the weakness of modern America, especially its Democrats. My objection to this is not its perspective but its familiarity. (For similar reasons, I was sorry to see Ledeen devote several pages to the utterly familiar story of how the young Bill Gates got IBM to use DOS as the operating system for its personal computer rather than Digital Research's CP/M. This is meant to show the importance of "Fortune," ie good luck, in the rise and fall of empires. Ledeen's main addition to the established story is his new spelling of the name of Gates' unlucky counterpart at Digital, Gary Kildall, who appears repeatedly as Gary "Kindall." There's a related theme here, for discussion another day, about how the Internet has affected research. Kildall's name is indeed misspelled "Kindall" on a few Web sites; Ledeen obviously had not previously heard of Kildall or Digital, and unluckily relied on the wrong hit from a Web search engine for the entire anecdote. Thus in an age of otherwise homogenized culture, the Net permits some surprising variations in previously standardized data--spellings, dates, the exact form of quotations, all of which can now be found in hybrid form. Maybe the real lesson is that writers should stick to material they know about first-hand.)

But I digress. The strength of Ledeen's book is that it lays out clearly and engagingly an interpretation of NM's writings and then asks what they show about contemporary life. The big theme here could not be more different from that of Stanley Bing's book. NM, as Ledeen presents him, is fundamentally a moralist, and his version of leadership relies on what we now think of as battlefield virtues. That is, military leaders ultimately depend on moral authority over their troops--the soldiers have to respect them to be willing to risk their lives. Military leaders also must be willing to do tactical evil--killing people, blowing things up--for the long-run national good.

Yes, there are obvious complications to this version of morality--for example, the relationship between "national good" and "good" in the usual sense or the paradox that republics need quasi-dictatorial leaders at time of crisis but shouldn't have them otherwise. What makes the book worthwhile is that Ledeen not only makes clear NM's attention to the complexities but also enjoys exploring them himself. I have a dozen or two illustrative quotes I was going to plug in here, but I'll save them for later.

Now, the real surprise, and the potential segue to Leon County and other now-despair-inducing place names. (Hey, you're in England, maybe you've escaped some of this? At least the Fox Network and Hardball?) Like you, I found the title Niccolo's Smile somewhat odd. It's based on the biographer Maurizio Viroli's main conceit for the book, which is that NM had a stoic's ability to look with calmness on the carnage, upheaval, and personal misfortune all around him. The biography is certainly effective in conveying the carnage and upheaval. When I heard the words "Renaissance Florence," I had not heretofore thought of the monk Savanarola being burned to death in the Piazza della Signoria or NM himself being tortured to find out if he had plotted against the Medici rulers. Both Viroli and Ledeen make clear that NM was concerned with the ingredients of public order because he had seen what disorder was like.

But the stronger image that comes through the biography is of a completely modern character: the political adviser without a patron. In his late 20s, NM was named the secretary to the councils that governed Florence. For him that was the brief golden age. The Medicis came back; the Republic fell; he was exiled and imprisoned; and for the rest of his life, he wondered how to get back in the game. The picture is of Richard Holbrooke during a long Republican era, James Baker if there had never been a Bush family. And it was during this period that he thought with such clarity about how to hold onto power.

So what would he think about Florida? One of his maxims, we learn, is that when conflict is inevitable, it pays to strike first. Thus we have Katherine "take these ballots from my view" Harris. Another is that when unpleasant steps are necessary, it is best to take them fast. Thus, perhaps, George W. Bush's "mock Oval Office" photo with Dick Cheney a day after the election and his "the election was fun, but it's over" speech last Sunday night. But finally NM emphasizes the importance of the moral legitimacy in governing. And ... hey, I see that my time is up; I'll have to wait till tomorrow to figure out who that applies to. Or maybe you have an answer?

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Who was Machiavelli, and what advice would he give Bush and Gore? This week, our critics examine Maurizio Viroli's , a biography of Machiavelli, as well as Stanley Bing's What Would Machiavelli Do? and Michael Ledeen's Machiavelli on Modern Leadership.

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