The Machiavellian Moment : Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

Rating:
Summary: Well worth the time invested in reading!
Review: Pocock has written a profoundly exhaustive study of Florentine republican theory in the time of Machiavelli, the Republic, and the Medici restoration. He painstakingly makes his argument that the roots of Machiavelli's thought are to be found more in the metaphysical world view of Thomism than in the teleological taxonomy of Aristotle. He goes on to argue that the aim of Machiavelli, and contemporaries such as Guicciardini, is the attainment of stability in secular time through the proper extension of civic rights. He then goes on to claim that this aim is followed by the architects of Eighteenth Century Anglo-American republicanism. This strong intepretation of Anglo-American republicanism may understate the impact of, for example, the Miltonian view of individual capacity for moral and political reasoning. However, it certainly is expounded well enough here to hold its own in any debate. In passing, Pocock makes liberal use of untranslated Italian text. While this is useful to the Renaissance specialist, it would be helpful had he included translations for those of us who bring no Italian to the table.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant but Nebulous
Review: This book has become a classic of historiography of political thought. However, getting through this enormous work and following the argument from 15th century Italy to 18th century America makes for very difficult reading. It is also quite hard to sum up exactly what is the characteristic of republican thought that he is studying (much of this criticism was made by historian Jack Hexter in a review).

Rating:
Summary: Machiavelli?
Review: This book is a masterful testament to man's ability to become immersed in the importance of the force of history. After reading Pocock, there is no way to deny that this same historical force eclipses everyone in its path. It will be years before speaking or writing about Machiavelli apart from his historical moment will be possible. Any student of Machiavelli should avoid Mr. Pocock's book for this very reason.

Rating:
Summary: Birth and growth of the modern republic-- in a nutshell
Review: This is the best book that I have found to date that traces the development of the theory of the modern "res public" from Machiavelli and the Florentine city-state, to the Glorious revolution in 17th century England, to the foundation of the American republic.
The Machiavellian moment comes when the founders of a state realize that "virtue" can be dependent upon "contingency" at some point in the life of every government, and that the res public is the best method known to humans to manage both to the benefit of the citizens/body politic; "virtue" refers to the energy that the humanist writers of the period demanded of any honest citizen, in the vita activa; contingency is the weakness that enters into any human-created activity, given the incomplete nature of our knowledge.
This book is clearly written, and not difficult to digest if you come to it with some preliminary understanding, say, from quentin skinner's foundations of modern political thought.

I am finishing richard tuck's philosophy and government 1572-1651 which purports to analyze the development of the period's political thought up to Hobbes' publication of Leviathan in 1651, but it just isn't as rich or satisfying a work as this.

If you want to know why Machiavelli is so important, and understand his influence on the two greatest exemplars of republican thought since his time, this is without a doubt the book to read.