It seems that in every decade of his distinguished career in Harvard’s Government Department, Harvey C. Mansfield opens up a new vista on some vast topic—the origins and nature of party government, original versus contemporary liberalism, modernity, executive power, manliness—only to turn his attentions to something else.

The exception, the one subject to which he has repeatedly returned, is Niccolò Machiavelli. His study of the “Florentine secretary” (as the political philosopher and practitioner liked to identify himself on the title pages of his books) has produced three translations—The Prince (1985; second edition, 1998), the Florentine Histories (with Laura F. Banfield, 1988), and the Discourses on Livy (with Nathan Tarcov, 1996)—as well as three book-length interpretive studies: Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders (1979), Machiavelli’s Virtue (1996), and now, Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth. The only better guide to Machiavelli’s thought than this trilogy is the book that inspired and informs it, Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958). Its nearest peer is Leo Paul de Alvarez’s The Machiavellian Enterprise (1999). Far be it from me to recommend ignoring all the other Machiavelli scholarship out there. But if one were to stick with just these, there is enough wisdom