The Straussian Machiavelli?
The American Conservative · R · trust 38/100
Michael Anton’s new book on the early modern political theorist has much to recommend it, dubious gematria aside.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Michael Anton, Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy (New York City and London: Encounter Books, 2026) 451+XVI pp.
Reading Michael Anton’s book of well-wrought essays is like eavesdropping on a private conversation. A deeply committed Straussian, Anton addresses others of his persuasion, among them Tom West, Harvey Mansfield, Leo Paul de Alvarez, and the tutelary spirit of the movement’s founder, Leo Strauss (1899–1973). Although the central theme of this anthology seems to be a proper reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses , Anton also incorporates into his analyses other political thinkers (or, as the Straussians refer to them, “political philosophers”). Montesquieu, Plato, Xenophon, and the authors of the Federalist papers are only a few of the political thinkers whom Anton investigates in his sweeping examination of political thought.
The arguments are sometimes hard to follow because what is assumed throughout the essays is that the reader is an initiate who shares the writer’s hermeneutic assumptions and those of the readers he’s addressing. The number of times certain terms appear in Machiavelli’s work, the numerical arrangement of chapters in The Prince and Discourses , and the absence or presence of certain classical figures in these works are all given a significance that someone outside of the Straussian persuasion may never have perceived or cared to notice.
For example, Anton devotes an entire chapter to “spiritual warfare” in The Prince where we are told this work’s concealed purpose is to wage nonphysical warfare against Christianity. According to Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli , The Prince is intended to produce both obvious and veiled “propaganda” against Christian ethics and authority. The fact that Machiavelli compares the pope and sultan as religious leaders who hold political power and territories is meant to teach us about the evils of religious rule.
Anton then goes on to relate this discussion to the building of an army and the recruiting of mercenaries in a thematic leap that leaves me midair. In Chapter 19, returning to the sultanate, Machiavelli uses “the religiously tinged ‘lord’ as opposed to the more usual ‘prince.’” For Anton this change of title and its repetition has huge significance: “This density of usage is rare in the book and reminiscent of Chapter 4 where ‘lord’ is used seven times, the most in any chapter. Machiavelli indicates that a surreptitious religious theme connects these passages.” Anton continues his speculation about this in the footnotes.
Such research conclusions are not to be dismissed out of hand. But it’s also entirely possible that “the density of usage” to which Anton refers is accidental or, if it contains a hidden meaning, that its meaning is different from the one Anton assigns to it. It’s also not the last word about a particular interpretation that Strauss or Mansfield offered it somewhere in their corpus, even if that fact also doesn’t prove the reading is wrong. On page 11 we learn that “mercenary” appears 11 times in Chapter 12 and 20 times in The Prince overall, plus one instance of the synonym condottiere . Moreover, “eleven is the number Machiavelli associates with religion and spiritual warfare.” “Mercenaries” must then in some sense be connected to “spiritual warfare.”
Anton may be on to something here, but may also be presenting us with pure conjecture. Even more likely, however, he may be addressing other adepts who understand his classical allusions, elliptical references, and arcane numerical analysis. He may in fact be writing explicitly for these elect when he enters the realm of political philosophy.
Lest I be accused of hiding my hand, let me admit that I authored a book harshly critical of the Straussian practice of reading too much into “political philosophical” texts, particularly the search for hidden meanings and the application of a form of numerology that sometimes seems arbitrary. For those who care to read my perhaps excessively harsh views on these subjects, I recommend Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and having done so, I shall pass on to other less divisive topics.
Despite my stated exegetical reservations, there is much in Anton’s essays that shows dazzling insight. His interpretation of Chapters 3 through 5 in The Prince , which deal with Machiavelli’s views on conquest, is an eye-opener for anyone who believes that Machiavelli was an uncomplicated Italian patriot. Like Strauss, Anton documents the degree of moral cynicism one can detect in his subject’s expressions of admiration for ruthless conquerors; and he clearly shows that Machiavelli’s fascination with successful tyrants vastly outweighs his fondness for the project of a unified Italy.
A discussion that especially interests me as someone who has written on Strauss is the effort made by his followers to mitigate his harsh judgment of Machiavelli as “a teacher of evil.” Machiavelli was also, not incidentally, viewed by Strauss as a precursor of intellectual modernity, which, despite what Strauss regarded as a lowering of the moral horizons of philosophy, led to such good things as natural right and constitutional democracies. Strauss therefore posited waves of modernity leading from such relative blessings as scientific materialism and social contract theory to such problematic departures from classical philosophy as Burke’s historicism and Nietzsche’s dabbling with nihilism. Still, Machiavelli and Hobbes, according to Strauss, led the revolution in thought that resulted in happier modernist developments, and therefore Anton and his teacher Tom West have attempted to demonstrate that the later Strauss changed his earlier uncompromisingly negative interpretations of Machiavelli as…
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