Incomparable Introduction

Abstract

Incomparable Introduction David Armstrong (bio) Machiavelli: A Life Beyond Ideology. Paul Oppenheimer. Continuum. http://www.continuumbooks.com. 368 pages; cloth, $29.95; eBook, $33.87. Paul Oppenheimer, a leading American poet, is also a broad-based scholar of European intellectual history. His new book on Machiavelli's life and thought will not disappoint readers of his fine earlier studies, Rubens: A Portrait (2002), and Evil and the Demonic: A Study of Monstrous Behavior (1996). There are many books and an enormous secondary literature, which Oppenheimer has studied with profit, on Machiavelli's life and works. What's special about this one? It's for the same new generation of readers that needs a vision "beyond ideology" from its writers as well—meaning "without invisible but intrusive moral judgments on characters' or subjects' moral behavior by an author who is assumed to be their moral superior merely because it's now centuries later and s/he and the readers of today share the moral superiority of modernity as a matter of course." It's for the kind of reader who can appreciate Simon Schama's 1992 redoing of the famous Parkman murder of 1849, Dead Certainties, or Hilary Mantel's unprejudiced look into the mind and motives of such an "amoral" Renaissance man as Thomas Cromwell, until now a stage villain of the Henry VIII saga in Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring out the Bodies (2012). Such readers will also thoroughly enjoy the way in which Paul Oppenheimer looks without the ideology of simple moral judgments both into Machiavelli's life—into events full of terror or comedy or both that he witnessed, into the texture of the world he saw and felt—to give us an equally non-ideological judgment of his writings and his thought. Of course, "beyond ideology" means also that Machiavelli himself was beyond simple moral judgments because of the shaping influences of his life and times, and that his readers also should be. Isaiah Berlin's famous essay in The New York Review of Books, "The Question of Machiavelli" (1971), reviews over "a score" (as Berlin says) of interpretations that have been given for the flat contradiction between the republican "ideology" of the Discourses (1531) and the willingness to contemplate the realities of a tyrant's self-interest in The Prince (1532). Is The Prince a satire on tyrants or a veiled cautionary tale on how to deal with them? That's been the solution of those who wanted a Machiavelli with moral "integrity." So perhaps Machiavelli was an anguished humanist, even a good Christian, lamenting the evil of a world in which such rulers were necessary? Or perhaps he was a great Italian patriot whose visions of another Cesare Borgia, who this time would succeed in uniting his country against its enemies, led him to unchain such a figure of all ordinary restraints? Hilary Mantel's Cromwell and Wolsey are not without similar motives in their indulgence of the vices of Henry VIII as ruler. Berlin came to the conclusion that Machiavelli was instead (though not literally on the Devil's side, a popular explanation in his own day) one of the greatest and most unsettling opponents of the long-assumed Western "ideology" of moral monism, the idea that there is discovery either by philosophy or religion of some one morality and shape essential to the good life, and by which all a human beings' actions can be judged. Machiavelli "caused men to become aware of the necessity of making agonizing choices between incompatible alternatives...in public and private life...by relegating much uncriticized traditional morality to the realm of utopia." And, as Berlin makes clear, Machiavelli did not himself feel much personal anguish about these conclusions, any more than Hilary Mantel's Cromwell (who has already—in the 1530s—read "Machiavel," since he follows current Italian literature on both chess and politics by unpublished manuscripts) or the more enlightened characters in the Game of Thrones series (1996-2011). Oppenheimer's Machiavelli is exactly Berlin's but presented with the vision of a poet capable of set pieces of vivid recreation in prose reminding one of Gibbon's, and certainly comparable to Schama's or...