Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy

Extract

Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy. Edited by Paul A. Rahe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 388p. $75.00.

This collection of original essays by a distinguished team of political theorists and historians may well be, as John McCormick proclaims on the book's dust jacket, “the best and most accessible source for the ‘Straussian’ perspective on Machiavelli's influence over modern political thought.” But unfortunately, no explicit effort is made in Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy (hereafter MLRL) to review the fundamental principles of Leo Strauss's hermeneutical strategy or even his basic “thoughts on Machiavelli.” Indeed, Strauss's name is only mentioned once (p. lvi) in passing in the text, and his perspective, while it fundamentally guides the plot of the book, is so muted, so submerged, so “esoteric” that one needs to be something of a Straussian to detect it.