The Rope and the Chains: Machiavelli's Early Thought and its Transformations by Cary J. Nederman (review)

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• The Rope and the Chains: Machiavelli's Early Thought and its Transformations by Cary J. Nederman
• Zita Eva Rohr

Nederman, Cary J., The Rope and the Chains: Machiavelli's Early Thought and its Transformations, New York, Lexington Books, 2023; hardback; pp. 168; R.R.P. US $95.00; ISBN 9781793617248.

'Another book about Machiavelli? Really?' (p. ix) is Cary J. Nederman's opening quip to this brief, very readable exploration of how Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli 'became' Machiavelli. This interests Nederman because, in his view, while there has been so much written about Machiavelli, significant lacunae exist concerning a particular body of his important and substantial writings. According to Nederman, Machiavelli's pre-1513 writing and thought remain largely unexplored, investigated, and not even acknowledged by most authors of secondary literature and biographies of this most singular of Renaissance political practitioners and thinkers. Nederman's central thesis rests upon a substantial analytical comparison of Machiavelli's writings ante res perditas and post res perditas, and how a comparison of these demonstrates his journey from ignorance to comprehension via a very steep learning curve and hard-won self-education based upon bitter experience, study, and close personal observation of the mechanisms of politics and the machinations of political players of both sexes—the foundations of his intellectual toolbox. Nederman observes moreover that 'Machiavelli's signal contributions to political theory may be conceived of as serious self-criticism of his own faulty naivete in the years before his downfall' (p. 134). His political theory and granular understanding of human nature did not spring fully formed from their progenitor sometime in mid-1513 but instead represented the hard-earned harvest of his pre-1513 thought, lived sociopolitical experience, and gimlet-eyed observations. For Nederman, The Prince, commenced very soon after his release from prison and the work for which Machiavelli is best known, marks his definitive 'transformation from politico to author' (p. 3).

Having assured the Medici regime that he posed no direct threat to their reasserted ascendancy, Machiavelli was eventually liberated during a general amnesty about a month after his arrest. He refers to this time as one of 'disgrace', observing to his friend Francesco Vettori that 'Fate has done everything to cause [End Page 331] me this abuse' (p. 2). Despite this, Machiavelli managed to move on, focusing on his intellectual pursuits with greater determination to produce the works for which he would become most famous. The whole experience of his vertiginous downfall, and the part played in it by Fortuna/Fate, was a watershed moment for Machiavelli, informing the subsequent development and ripening of his political theory and his 'warts and all' understanding of human nature in all its vices and virtues. This transformation, as Nederman ably demonstrates, can be unpicked and tracked by attending closely not only to his post res perditas writings but more importantly to those of his lesser-studied ante res perditas period.

Nederman commences his study with an informative introductory chapter, 'The Rope and the Chains', providing the reader with a brief yet essential sketch of the circumstances and significance of Machiavelli's arrest and incarceration. He then moves on, outlining his 'Method of Inquiry', concluding with 'The Path Forward' offering the reader a concise roadmap of the direction taken by the five interconnected chapters that make up his study.

Chapter 1, 'Before Virtù', discusses how Machiavellian virtù—'a morally unrestrained range of personal qualities essential to leaders, and most especially to a prince who seeks to achieve great things', parts company with earlier pagan and Christian concepts of virtue that conflated 'moral goodness with the effective use of power' (p. 15). This moral flexibility, or ethical adaptability, characterising the virtuoso prince imagined by Machiavelli, chimes with the earlier understanding of a proven virtuoso prince, Louis XI of France (d. 1483), whose advice manual, Le Rosier des guerres, dedicated to his adolescent son the dauphin Charles, should be appreciated both for what it is not and what it claims to be, embodying as it does a decent accounting of the audacious indecencies demanded by political necessity.

Chapter 2, 'The Road to Vivere Libero', examines how Machiavelli believed that the endgame of political...