The liberal democratic state has a problem with violence, according to Yves Winter. Even as it rejects violence out of hand as an unappealing and politically unproductive way of negotiating conflict, it relies nevertheless on the “capacity and periodic deployment of overwhelming forms of repressive violence” (p. 1). Moreover, this contradiction between what liberal democracies say and what they do has been absorbed into contemporary political theory, which has vacillated uneasily between normative theorizing about violence, generally in support of state violence, and indulging its own fantasies about the triviality and eradicability of violence. The result is a literature that is politically and theoretically warped: politically, in its complicity with the ongoing exploitation and subjugation of the poor; theoretically, in its blindness to the possibility that violence is an appropriate, educative, and even pleasurable response by the poor to their oppression.

In this provocative and immensely rewarding new book, Winter proposes to repair these defects through a close study of Niccolò Machiavelli. Violence is a recurrent theme in the existing scholarship on Machiavelli, and in this regard Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence is treading on familiar ground. But instead of focusing narrowly on a single permutation of the theme—empire, civil conflict, the citizen-soldier, or executions—Winter aims to produce the first systematic treatment of political violence across Machiavelli’s corpus (p. 9). For Winter, this means two things: first, identifying the basic conceptual categories into which Machiavelli’s innumerable references to violence in the Prince, Discourses, and Florentine Histories can be sorted and analyzed; and second, using these groupings to refine our understanding of the relevant concepts. The author’s proposed “taxonomy of violent modes” (p. 31) is tripartite—spectacle, force, and cruelty—with each of these types explored separately in the first three chapters. The next three address “formations [of violence] that exemplify these modes” (p. 31), namely, beginnings, institutions, and tumults.

The title of the book derives from Machiavelli’s frequent use of the term ordini, which Winter leverages to talk about the dual character of violence, as something that is both “constitutive” of political order and itself “organized, sequenced, and coordinated” (pp. 1–2). These are the primary dimensions along which Winter analyzes the six aforementioned “modes” and “formations” of violence. Although keen to stress that violence can take many shapes and that “attempts to theorize violence by subsuming its forms under a single conceptual umbrella are likely to disappoint” (p. 2), Winter finds Machiavelli’s treatment of violence to be unified by several key characteristics: Whatever its discrete mode or formation, violence is always theorized by Machiavelli in an embodied, materialist, conflictual, historicist, strategic, and “de-moralize[d]” way (p. 2).

While the book opens with an extended discussion of four ways in which contemporary political theory has “depoliticized” violence (pp. 3–7), it finds considerable intellectual nourishment in the writings of political theorists like Étienne Balibar, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Bonnie Honig, Jacques Derrida, Jeffrey Green, and Frantz Fanon. For this reason, it is perhaps fairer to say that Winter is dissatisfied with the way that violence has been theorized within a particular style of philosophy—specifically the analytic tradition, epitomized in the book’s conclusion by Robert Nozick. It is here especially that Winter sees violence being evaporated from discussions of power and conceptual substitutions (i.e., “coercion”) being made that not only distort our understanding of how violence operates, but also distract us from a range of important questions that might otherwise be asked about it.

Winter is surely onto something here. But it would be useful to hear more about why these problems are concentrated on the analytic side of things, given the book’s own framing as an exercise in conceptual analysis. Is the “mystification” (p. 193) afoot in the analytic tradition the product of unforced errors, and so correctable from within the very same theoretical apparatus? Or is mystification the inevitable precipitate of attempting to comprehend violence analytically, given the underlying assumptions of that enterprise? At times the book leans in the first direction, suggesting through its many references to concepts, typologies, taxonomies, systematicity, and analysis that it intends to make common cause with analytic philosophy. And yet its critiques of Nozick and others cluster tightly around the idea that violence cannot be fully understood from within dominant paradigms of logic and rationality.

The sense that Winter is using Machiavelli to develop an encompassing critique of analytic philosophy is further strengthened by the fact that, as it turns out, there is nothing particularly methodical about his approach to the Florentine: The book does not offer a comprehensive survey of Machiavelli’s references to violence, for example, or justify organizing his thinking about violence into the above six categories instead of others. Instead, it undertakes the more creative, and arguably more challenging, task of using Machiavelli to effect the philosophical recovery of what analytic treatments of violence have trouble processing: bodily experience, irreducible plurality, logical indeterminacy, and poetic meaning.

Winter’s sensitivity to the layered and often uncertain meanings attached to violence in Machiavelli’s work breathes life back into its characters and events. For all the rigidity suggested by talk about the “mechanisms” and “protocols” that discipline violence, the author uncovers in familiar episodes like Cesare Borgia’s execution of Remirro a play between actor and audience that cannot be entirely routinized, instrumentalized, or mastered. Highlighting the theatricality of the scene, he draws out the way in which Machiavelli—following Borgia himself—uses ambiguity to convert the spectacle into a “detective story” (p. 32) in which readers must “piece together the rationale behind Remirro’s execution” (p. 46). In this way, Winter contends, Machiavelli turns Remirro’s execution into a “pedagogical moment” similar to others from the era, whereby Florentines were taught “how to read and interpret public practices of violence” and thus helped “to become better readers of the political world” more generally (p. 51).

This seems right to me, but I was left wondering about the forms of knowledge and judgment that Machiavelli hoped these stories would teach. For Winter, the primary interpretive questions raised by Borgia’s performance concern its uncertain status as an act of revenge, sacrifice, and/or justice (pp. 47–50, 53–57). But why would Machiavelli think it essential that people have the ability to make these determinations—as opposed to others, like whether the action (or actor) in question promotes freedom or oppression? Being able to read events accurately as either freeing or oppressing would seem on its face to be critical to popular politics as Machiavelli understands it, and a skill that Borgia put to the test in his interactions with the Romagnols. Moreover, Winter’s own willingness to read Borgia as an authentic “champion of the people” (p. 45) despite the enormous wealth and family privilege that underwrote his power, and the indisputably princely ambitions that his actions were meant to serve (both of which Machiavelli stresses throughout Chapter 7), only underscores how tricky these distinctions can be. And yet Winter only briefly connects Machiavelli’s popular pedagogy with liberty, even as he defines “political literacy” with being able to judge political situations accurately and respond to them appropriately (pp. 25–26, 197). As Machiavelli himself stresses in Discourses 1.53, competency in the art of distinguishing between true and false species of the good is no easy thing; all too often, superficial gains are enough to reconcile the people with their own disempowerment. So how does Machiavelli use scenes like Remirro’s execution to develop these skills, whereby even “satisfying” forms of violence by figures like Borgia can be recognized as inaugurating new and more stable forms of domination?

The violence associated with Cesare Borgia casts a long shadow in Orders, and Winter’s willingness to describe him as advancing a kind of popular politics anticipates what is possibly his most controversial argument: that Machiavelli believes republican liberty to be compatible with, and even invigorated by, violent forms of class conflict. Traditionally, Machiavelli’s defense of tumult has been regarded as highly qualified—not an endorsement of conflict in all its forms, but only conflict akin to the explosive but relatively bloodless confrontations between patricians and plebeians in the early Roman Republic (see especially D 1.4). And yet Winter discerns in Machiavelli an approving view of violence when it is used by the people to deprive grandi of excessive wealth and privilege. What counts as “too much” inequality is left somewhat murky, and I was puzzled by some of the evidence offered in support of this interpretation.

For example, Winter argues that Machiavelli “clarifies the limits of virtuous and nonviolent conflicts” (p. 149) in Discourses 1.37 by implicitly critiquing Tiberius Gracchus for not being “prepared for violent altercations” or “calling on armed support” during his ill-fated push for a new Agrarian Law in 133 bce. But surely Machiavelli knew that Tiberius did both (Appian, B Civ. 1.12, 1.15; Plutarch, Ti. Gracch. 16, 19). Likewise, Winter’s analysis of the Ciompi Rebellion, intended to show that Machiavelli supports a kind of “plebeian politics” whereby freedom is claimed by politically and economically marginalized classes through the violent “overthrow of their oppressors” (p. 191), sidelines Machiavelli’s extraordinary praise for Michele de Lando, the “sagacious and prudent” popular leader who finally checked the “arrogance” of the plebs (who, Machiavelli says, attached themselves to the rebellion only after it was first set in motion by upper guildsmen frustrated with elite partisan wrangling over laws concerning eligibility for public office). If Michele had not forced the plebs to abandon their political demands and put an end to their violent provocations, Machiavelli states, “the republic would have lost its freedom altogether and fallen under a greater tyranny than that of the duke of Athens” (FH 3.17).

As with any truly original work, Orders of Violence accomplishes far more than a single review can hope to capture. For me, the most exciting dimension of Orders is the challenge it issues to those of us who have yet to fully reckon with Machiavelli’s egalitarianism. If freedom requires some kind of equality, as Machiavelli avers (D 1.17, 1.37, 1.55), does it follow that all forms of equality-promoting violence are good for liberty? Winter reads him as being closer to a “yes” than I do, but I do not feel as easy in my “no” as I did before reading this book.