This fascinating book represents the distillation of a lifetime of scholarly thought on Machiavelli. The author is Prof. Harvey C. Mansfield of Harvard University, the pre-eminent American political philosopher of our lifetime. He is now 93 years old.
In 1996 he published a landmark book, Machiavelli’s Virtue. Together with this new book, Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth, we have at our disposal in a total of 650 pages what is surely the most insightful look into the meaning of Machiavelli’s life.
Before reading the new book, I read the 1996 one. I’ll begin this review with a few comments on that book from 29 years ago. The focus of that book, virtue, is, shall we say, warped by Machiavelli into something quite appalling.
“When Machiavelli praises virtue, it would seem necessary to make the ability to do evil a part of virtue… Machiavelli’s notion of virtue, which welcomes the vices, must continue to coexist with the old notion, which is repelled by them. The truth about virtue is that most people cannot accept the truth about virtue.”
How this affects politics, which is what Machiavelli is noted for, is quite stark. “In Aristotle, virtue is shown in politics; in Machiavelli it is defined there. The consequence is that he is forced to abandon justice as a virtue…On this major point he was not a man of his times but an innovator against both the Renaissance and the ancients.” He would, however, feel right at home in the moral vacuum of 2025. You know what I mean.
It is a widely-believed falsehood that Machiavelli said “the end justifies the means.” Mansfield goes a step further on this road to perdition. Machiavelli, writes Mansfield, “said worse: that the end makes the means honourable, and that moral men believe this.” Even in 1996, Mansfield stated “From his political science we can learn the effectual truth not so much of the politics of his time as of ours.”
From this 1996 springboard of thought on ‘effectual truth,’ we can leap forward to the present, where this key concept is explored in a book of its own.
The new book takes its title directly from what Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, the notorious book of 1532. He promises to “go directly to the effectual truth of the thing rather than to its imagination.” The phrase ‘effectual truth’ occurs just once in all of his writing, and nowhere else in any other writings of the Renaissance.
Machiavelli admitted he was a “doctor of the art” of lying. “For some time now,” Machiavelli admitted in a letter of 1521, “I have never said what I believe or never believe what I said, and if indeed I sometimes tell the truth, I hide it behind so many lies that it is hard to find.” (remind you of an elected political leader in 2025?) Mansfield makes the obvious but disturbing conclusion: Machiavelli’s “enterprise is the making of the modern world.”
The just-quoted admission by Machiavelli appears in the very same paragraph as his invocation of ‘effectual truth.’ “Machiavelli’s ‘effectual truth of the thing’ means that to understand a thing, you must look at it politically. Politics is the human whole, and the human whole is all there is.”
In essence, Mansfield says in the first chapter of his book, “The effectual truth Machiavelli set forth to his army of followers is the fundamental proposition that builds and maintains the modern world.” That he was able to do this fully five centuries ago surely makes The Prince one of the most influential books of all time! “Machiavelli is famous for his infamy,” Mansfield writes, “but his importance is almost universally underestimated…A guide with foresight is just what Machiavelli is, if one adds that he made the future to which he guides us.”
One shivers with the consequences of this prescience, far beyond that of anyone else. Politics often descends to war. This month, PM Keir Starmer stated “Britain must be ready for war.” For Machiavelli, fraud in managing war is glorious. “Machiavelli’s use of fraud,” writes Mansfield, “is the highest degree of his glory.”
Directing his gaze directly at ‘effectual truth’ may be too much for some to handle. “A man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good,” Machiavelli divines. Mansfield translates this as meaning a man “must have the outlook of a prince, a wary prince. And that is the outlook of effectual truth.”
This leads Mansfield to an ineluctable conclusion.
“The world according to Machiavelli is the world of sense…Knowing that world requires learning how not to be good, for which a new concept is needed. In replacing the whole of intelligible nature with the world of sense, he discovered the world of fact underneath the reason of things. In doing so he laid the foundation for modern philosophy.”
How Machiavelli’s ‘effectual truth’ collided with the work of Montesquieu in the 18th century is a key element of Mansfield’s book. “What Montesquieu presents as passion dominating the philosopher’s thought Machiavelli presents as a bad choice that will bring ruin to anyone who consults what should be rather than what is.”
Ultimately there was a critical problem with Machiavelli’s work. His “mistake,” writes the author, “was to surrender the defense of liberty to the satisfaction of worldly necessities. In wishing to dispense with rule by the invisible and to concentrate on the visible, he endangered the free will liberty requires and thereby undermined the very virtue he wanted to support…Machiavelli wanted to revive the honour of the world, but he went about it the wrong way.”
There is much to consider in these pages, much that requires deep thought. For anyone brave enough to confront the ‘effectual truth’ of the modern world, grasping the meaning inherent in Mansfield’s book will make things much more understandable, and infinitely more terrifying.
Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World is by Cambridge University Press. It lists for $105 (hardback) or $34.99 (softcover)
For additional reading, Mansfield also edited Machiavelli’s The Prince (2nd edition, 1998). It was published by Univ. of Chicago Press.
Image: posthumous Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, done before 1600. Public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Art is held at Vecchia Cancelleria.