The Machiavellian Moment by J.G.A. Pocock

“Interest in Machiavelli always revives in the course of history when the storm clouds are gathering, because he is a man to philosophise in heavy weather,” says Mr Boucheron. Mr Machiavelli’s ideas, or at least those attributed to him, often re-emerge in wider public discourse at specific times, Mr Pocock’s “Machiavellian moments”. His book aims to “lift the mask of the monster”. But Mr Boucheron thinks that perhaps the word says more about his enemies’ attempts to discredit him than it does about the thoughts of the man himself. Indeed, Collins Dictionary defines “Machiavellian” as “cunning, amoral and opportunist”. Mr Machiavelli’s name is now shorthand for a calculated, underhand form of politics. “Within 50 years of Machiavelli’s death, The Prince had taken its place on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books as a work of the devil,” says Mr Boucheron. The definition of a Renaissance man, working in numerous roles, his most influential work, The Prince, wasn’t published until five years after his death, in 1532.

“And today, we are undeniably living through another Machiavellian moment, again bringing the Florentine author close to the core of American reality.”ĭespite spending much of his political career in lowly positions and then living in exile, 16th-century diplomat, philosopher, writer and historian Mr Niccolò Machiavelli’s reputation extends to the present day. “American historians have since associated Machiavelli’s name with that form of political crisis,” argues Mr Patrick Boucheron, medieval historian and author of Machiavelli: The Art Of Teaching People What To Fear.

However, the parallels between this account of the embryonic US and the country at the time of Mr Pocock’s writing, ravaged by the fallout of the Vietnam conflict and the Watergate scandal, were obvious. The Machiavellian Moment took the ideas of Renaissance Italy and transposed them to the new country that emerged out of the American Revolution. In 1975, political thinker Mr JGA Pocock published a book that seemed to define the contemporary mood.

The Machiavellian Moment by J.G.A. Pocock