John P. McCormick has written a book worthy of its inspiration. Like Machiavelli himself, McCormick writes in a fashion that rejects received wisdom, pulls no punches, and sheds remarkable new light on familiar themes. Although his Machiavelli loses none of the edge of the Florentine often portrayed as the “teacher of evil,” he is also a democrat and an egalitarian—and perhaps even the singular canonical figure most needed in an era where concentrated wealth and autocratic impulses threaten to overwhelm the people.

The book’s primary thesis will be familiar to readers of McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011): “Machiavelli believed that the common people must act as the ultimate arbiters of political reality” (p. 207) and that they serve as a vicious opponent of those “whom he considered pusillanimous propagandists for the enduring power elite” (p. 214). It is fair to say that, in his earlier volume, McCormick fundamentally altered debates about Machiavelli’s political theory and its place in the development of Western political thought. Anyone working on or even teaching Machiavelli today has been compelled by McCormick’s arguments to reconsider fundamentals.

Although Reading Machiavelli clearly evolves from themes first developed in Machiavellian Democracy, it also provides an opportunity to cover important new ground in his engagements with Rousseau, Strauss, and Skinner, as well as with the increasingly topical concern of economic inequality. But virtually all the arguments here are variations on the paradigm-shifting theme established in the earlier volume. As such, it represents an invaluable extension of McCormick’s democratic Machiavelli.

The first chapter, “The Passion of Duke Valentino,” is perhaps the boldest. McCormick rereads The Prince with a careful eye to the character of Cesare Borgia, whom McCormick distinguishes as two separate characters—Borgia and the “Duke Valentino”—following Machiavelli. As McCormick argues, Machiavelli’s Borgia “earns the title ‘duke’ in the eyes of the people” (p. 23) with bold measures meant to vindicate the people. Although it is impossible to explore this rich chapter’s details here, it suffices to note that McCormick portrays Machiavelli’s Borgia as assuming a Christ role in the service of his people, albeit via somewhat un-Christlike means such as having his guests strangled at their “last supper” (p. 26). It was Borgia’s great Christian flaw, however, on this reading, that he ultimately suffered his downfall because he “believes in forgiveness” (p. 37).

The second chapter addresses Machiavelli on economic inequality—and immediately becomes the most important essay written in English addressing the Florentine diplomat’s engagement with this pressing contemporary issue. Of course, in important respects, as McCormick reminds us, economic inequality was not a new problem at all for Machiavelli. It was a serious concern in the Roman Republic, as manifested in the crisis that led to the assassination of the Brothers Gracchi. The brothers were, of course, murdered shortly after proposing the Agrarian Laws, which placed limits on wealth and promised to redistribute property from the elite to the plebeians. Machiavelli’s reading of this affair is admittedly complex, as McCormick notes. Despite his strong egalitarian impulses, he worries about the consequences of confiscating property “without provoking them [the rich] into uncivil behavior” (p. 57). This being noted, McCormick reveals a pattern in Machiavelli’s efforts of identifying the difficulties posed by material inequality, such as political corruption, the undermining of virtue, and the like. Under conditions of significant inequality, the nobles “value material good much more than they do their reputation and prestige, their honor and their dignity” (p. 59). This is ultimately inconsistent with the successful maintenance of Machiavellian democracy.

The third chapter addresses Machiavelli’s so-called conservative turn in the Florentine Histories, in which many scholars, as McCormick notes, find him to have become “more critical of common peoples and more admiring of elites” (p. 69). McCormick admits that Machiavelli indeed uses the kind of language that could lead some to draw such conclusions. Yet he draws a distinction between some of Machiavelli’s words and the actual unfolding of Florentine history (e.g., p. 83) to argue that Machiavelli uses a kind of elliptical, or what McCormick calls “literary-rhetorical,” writing strategy—condemning the plebs in words but then revealing plebeian wisdom in their actions.

Chapter 4 engages Rousseau’s celebrated interpretation of Machiavelli as an “honest man and a good citizen.” In doing so, however, McCormick argues that Rousseau would have done well to have absorbed Machiavelli’s egalitarianism more thoroughly. He constructs an account of the Genevan based largely on the frequently overlooked fourth book of the Social Contract, largely inspired by Rousseau’s admiration for Roman institutions. There he finds that Rousseau is, in fact, “no democrat” (p. 113). McCormick’s Rousseau is instead drawn to the Roman Republic’s most aristocratic institutions, especially the comitia centuriata (p. 122), in which votes were weighted by wealth. For McCormick, “Rousseau distrusts the poor more than he loathes poverty” (p. 127). By contrast, his Machiavelli advocates pitting poor classes against wealthy ones in order to keep the latter in check.

The remainder of the book is dedicated to twentieth-century interpretations that have in various ways depicted Machiavelli as unsympathetic to the people. In Chapter 5, McCormick engages Strauss’s Machiavelli, which emphasizes “the defects of the common people” (p. 144). And in Chapter 6, he confronts the Cambridge historians, J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, who have downplayed Machiavelli’s anti-elitism in favor of a republicanism more reminiscent of Guicciardini than Machiavelli. McCormick addresses these influential interpreters by drawing patient and steady attention to Machiavelli’s own words, revealing a consistently democratic and egalitarian thinker.

There is no doubt that many readers will quibble with McCormick’s readings: such is the nature of books like this that define themselves in opposition to established interpretive camps with many adherents. I have my own questions about his interpretation of Rousseau as an elitist. For example, although McCormick observes that, in the operations of the government, Machiavelli acknowledges “individuals or small bodies of individuals, not multitudes . . . best exercise such authority” (p. 154) all the while remaining a true democrat, he rebukes Rousseau for making the same point in his rejection of democratic government (pp. 112–13; see Social Contract, 3.3), emphatically concluding, “Rousseau is no democrat” (p. 113). For this and a few other reasons, some Rousseau scholars will be tempted to challenge McCormick’s reading. I do not doubt that others will similarly resist arguments elsewhere in the book.

But there can be no mistake: this book cements McCormick’s status as someone who will have fundamentally and perhaps permanently altered scholarly debate about Machiavelli. This achievement is entirely deserved through the hard work of painstaking textual readings, historical contextualization, and an inspired capacity for charting his own interpretive course. Without beating his readers over the head, he makes an historical figure speak to pressing contemporary issues. As such, the book exemplifies the vitality and indispensability of continued work in the history of political thought. Thinkers like Machiavelli are not always exactly who we thought they were, and getting them right, in the end, really matters for understanding not only their time but also ours.