This study of the formation of Machiavelli's republican imperialism concludes with great political questions: “Machiavelli had created a power destined to put an end to centuries of backwardness, obscurantism, and oppression. By tearing asunder veils of political and religious illusion, uprooting and devouring all that comes in its way or opposes its principles and interests, [Machiavelli's modernity] has transformed, and is in the process of transforming, the lives of millions of people. Is it a destructive or benevolent force? A new form of imperialism, disguised as democracy and globalization, while in reality relying on naked, shameless, and brutal exploitation? Or is it a liberator that will bring justice and benefit to mankind? Perhaps it is too early to say. What is beyond doubt, though, is that the aim of this power is to conquer the world, and to do so in the name of liberty” (p. 290).

Surprisingly, Mikael Hörnqvist does not think his painstaking mastery of Machiavelli's writings in their historical context can shed light on these vital questions. Hence, he raises them only at the end. His paradoxical thesis is that these tremendous, world-shaping consequences of Machiavelli's thought were essentially invisible to Machiavelli because he was in the grip of a noble political passion, a great but unrequited love for his native city. His thoughts were dedicated exclusively to the aggrandizement and strengthening of Florence; insofar as he sensed the universal “creative” potential of his political science, he was apprehensive that another prince or people might use it to keep Florence down.

Hörnqvist invites us, by compelling himself, to interpret all of Machiavelli's writings from an exclusively Florentine republican perspective. A brief review cannot do justice to the comprehensive erudition, the remarkable finesse, and collegial civility of his work. Instead, let me highlight the deep ambivalence about republican empire that informs Hörnqvist's account of Machiavelli as political man and as scientist.

Hörnqvist's Machiavelli is a serious citizen in Aristotle's sense, a Florentine republican citizen. The author reads Machiavelli's major writings as rhetorical artifacts, showing how they reflect Machiavelli's solicitude for Florence, his desire to succour, nurture, and form his city. Machiavelli the political man is for Hörnqvist the homo rhetoricus: everything he writes is thus a persuasive speech-deed meant to serve Florence. Hörnqvist's primary task is to demonstrate that this holds for The Prince, through a sustained reading of Chapters 15 through 19. To appreciate the teaching of these crucial chapters, he contends, we must read them dramatically, in their original historical context, very narrowly conceived. We must become the reader to whom The Prince was dedicated, the Medici prince for whom it was designed, to gauge the effect of its rhetoric upon this one recipient. Because Machiavelli intended it to be read from this perspective, we must adopt the same perspective to understand Machiavelli's intention.

That intention becomes fully clear only in Chapter 19. Read properly, Hörnqvist finds, it teaches what Aristotle taught tyrants in his Politics: the only way for the Medici to secure their place in Florence is to convert the city from a tyranny into a republic in which the king, the few, and the many share authority. Aristotle's classical republican framework is the effectual truth of Machiavelli's serious citizenship: His intention as an author was to accomplish what a serious (Aristotelian) citizen would intend under Florence's circumstances. Hörnqvist thus distinguishes categorically between Machiavelli's original intention (Florentine, political, republican) and his original thinking: He holds that Machiavelli's doctrines were radically anti-Aristotelian and modern, but they became consequential only later, when cut loose from their anchor in Machiavelli's concern for “his beloved Florence.”

The Prince is merely the preface to the Discourses on Livy, according to Hörnqvist. Yet even were he persuaded to convert his tyranny into a Machiavellian mixed republic, the Medici prince who first received The Prince might well ask whether such a republic is truly superior to tyranny. Is it not merely the self-aggrandizing tyranny of many, rather than one? Hörnqvist's strong emphasis on the anti-Aristotelian thrust of Machiavelli's revolutionary teaching must thus lead one to ask how the republican empire he seeks for Florence differs from a classical or Christian mixed regime. How is Machiavelli's revolt against Aristotle's Politics and Ethics exhibited in the new Florentine Rome, his imperial, world-acquiring republic? Is his dynamic new Florentine order less repugnant than the principalities discussed in The Prince, or more? Hörnqvist does not say, but his reasons foreshadow the querulous conclusion quoted here.

The “effectual truth” of republican imperialism, as Hörnqvist understands it, is a combination of cruel oppressions and real benefits. Since the mix must vary according to circumstances, he cannot be sure of the proportion of each. However, judging from Machiavelli's account, we may say they are mixed in Machiavellian “death benefits.” Your father is killed by the tyrant or conquering republic; if you cooperate with those who killed him, you get his estate. Thus, the modern mode of acquiring makes you a party to your father's execution. Hörnqvist does not explore how this pathos of monstrous self-incrimination transforms men into moderns, nor the part it plays in Machiavelli's effort to diminish the hold of Aristotelian ethics, and of Christian “illusions,” on free peoples who seek empire on his novel terms. Reading Hörnqvist, one might think that Machiavelli's beloved Florence had nothing to lose by becoming a world-acquiring republic, whereas his conclusion strongly implies that Florence had much to lose—as do we all.

Machiavelli and Empire consists chiefly of close readings of six chapters of The Prince. This interpretation is meant, however, to advance an argument about Machiavelli's account of liberty and (republican) empire in his Discourses. Here Hörnqvist's ambition outruns his subject. One can learn much from his study of The Prince because he develops an account of that book as a whole centered on the Medici prince to whom Machiavelli dedicated it; and he treats chapters that illuminate the architecture of the whole book. In his treatment of the Discourses, by contrast, the few chapters he has chosen bear on Florence, but they do not afford a comparable account of that book as an intelligible whole. Hörnqvist does not supply the guidance readers will require to understand what Machiavelli teaches about liberty and empire in the Discourses, perhaps his most difficult book.

Thus, the connection is problematic between Hörnqvist's study and his conclusion, quoted here. He gives us no idea how he reached that conclusion, how the Discourses could create such a prodigious “power,” or what part The Prince played in the unfolding of the Machiavellian modes and orders of modernity. Above all, the author leaves us in no position to assess whether (or to what degree) Machiavelli's feelings for Florence clouded his vision of the imperious modern world that he contends Machiavelli's thought created.

Hörnqvist has given the most searching attention to Chapters III, V, XVI–XIX, and XXV of The Prince, as they bear on Florence; every student of Machiavelli should find this engaging and careful study of Machiavelli's most widely read book highly thought provoking and worthwhile.