John Adams was unique among the Founding Fathers in that he actually read and took seriously Machiavelli's ideas. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, Adams quoted extensively from Machiavelli and he openly acknowledged an intellectual debt to the Florentine statesman. Adams praised Machiavelli for having been “the first” to have “revived the ancient politics” and he insisted that the “world” was much indebted to Machiavelli for “the revival of reason in matters of government.” What could Adams have meant by these extraordinary statements? The following article examines the Machiavellian ideas and principles Adams incorporated into his political thought as well as those that he rejected. Drawing upon evidence found in an unpublished fragment, Part one argues that the political epistemology that Adams employed in the Defence can be traced to Machiavelli's new modes and orders. Part two presents Adams's critique of Machiavelli's constitutionalism.

Many important scholars have seen significant similarities in the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and Niccolo Machiavelli, but the only two references to Machiavelli in Hamilton's papers suggest deep misgivings about the kinds of politics we now call Machiavellian. This essay attempts to clarify Hamilton's ambiguous relation to the sage Florentine by focussing on the problem of waging war effectively and remaining free at the same time in the thought of both statesmen. Although Hamilton understood at least as well as Machiavelli the necessity of dynamic virtù in princes and civic virtue in free citizens, he sought to establish a new order of the ages, a republican empire, which would supply an effectual moral alternative to the genuine Machiavellian regimes of his day.

On the face of it, there would seem to be little evidence suggesting that the political science of Thomas Jefferson owed much, if anything, to the speculation of Niccolò Machiavelli. The Virginian appears to have mentioned the Florentine by name but once, and he did so in a manner conveying his disdain for the author of The Prince. And yet, as I try to show in this article, Jefferson's commitment to limited government, his advocacy of a politics of distrust, his eager embrace of a species of populism, his ultimate understanding of the executive power, and the intention guiding the comprehensive legislative program that he devised for Virginia make sense only when understood in terms of the new science of republican politics articulated by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy.

This article challenges the received view that Woodrow Wilson provided the intellectual foundation for the subsequent expansion of the executive power of the presidency, by examining how Wilson arrived at his later presidentially centered account of American politics in Constitutional Government. Its focus is a memo that Wilson wrote in December 1885 while preparing an essay on “The Modern Democratic State.” Wilson's objectives in using the executive were determined in large measure by a conception of modern democratic opinion leadership that he had worked out before he entered public life. He correctly sensed that executive power, with its decisionistic bias, posed a serious problem for constitutional self-government. By making it subserve opinion leadership, Wilson meant to remove executive action from the apex of modern constitutional government and thus subordinate executive power to deliberative politics.

This article explores the theme of love and the political in the thought of Hannah Arendt by examining her attitude toward such kinds of love as eros, philia, agape, cupiditas, caritas, compassio, fraternitas. Arendt generally regards love as unpolitical because of its inherent inclination to exclude the outside world. But she has shown a sustained interest in the relationship between love and the political. Arendt's concern for love is dictated by her search for a new, public, and artificial vinculum—or bond. This public bond, what Arendt calls amor mundi, is basically grounded in the notion of political friendship. I argue that amor mundi would be of more relevance, if it included not only political friendship but an element of eros as the craving for the durable world as well as two strands of agape—love of forgiveness and an enlarged neighborly love.