Books: Power Politician

ACCENT ON POWER—Valeriu Marcu—Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

Few people know much about Machiavelli except that he sired the sinister adjective Machiavellian. Even those who know a little more differ widely about him. Some, like Ralph Roeder (The Man of the Renaissance), consider Machiavelli an Italian patriot and his Prince a kind of Mein Kampf of Italy’s struggle for unity. Others, like Author Valeriu Marcu, consider Machiavelli a single-track political mind whose curious obsession with the pure mechanics of power is his first-class ticket to genius.

Even the Prince does not really settle these differences, since Machiavelli planted his ideas so diplomatically that readers expecting something diabolic in the book are sometimes disappointed. But since it came off the Vatican presses in 1532, politicians of all shades have found the Prince such a helpful manual of power, how to get and how to keep it, that it has shared their admiration with only one other book, von Clausewitz’s On War. Napoleon called it “the only readable political book.” Lenin told his Bolsheviks to read the Prince “as an antidote to stupidity.”

Six years after Columbus discovered America, Niccolo Machiavelli, younger son of an impoverished middle-class family of Florence, became a clerk in its government. For 14 years he sorted ambassadors’ reports, paid secret agents, inspected fortresses and accounts. Sometimes the Signory sent Machiavelli on diplomatic missions. At the Vatican he began his firsthand study of power politics under such masters as Pope Alexander Borgia and his alleged son Cesare. Cesare Borgia was Machiavelli’s model for the Prince.

When the Medici returned to Florence, 43-year-old Machiavelli was dismissed. He wept. “All that I have any knowledge of,” he wrote, “is the State.” He was jailed and tortured. Freed, he retired to his tiny farm, but farming exasperated the most coldly efficient political brain of his century. In 1513 Machiavelli took time out from manuring his fields and in a few months finished the Prince. “Necessity . . . impelled the dedication” to Lorenzo Medici. Lorenzo did not open the book, though he ordered a lackey to take Machiavelli two bottles of wine.