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 here for a lifetime of reflection.

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There are two great themes to Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth. The first presents the Florentine as the originator of a new conception of truth, which would soon become the foundation of modern science. The second—presented through a reconsideration primarily of the Baron de Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws) and secondarily of Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America, which Mansfield co-translated with his late wife, Delba Winthrop)—delves into that revolution’s consequences, particularly the negative ones, and explores whether these have been, or could be, overcome.

That first theme is, to be sure, a bold claim. After all, non-Straussian scholars don’t credit Machiavelli with being much of an innovator, and most Straussians—who take Machiavelli’s professed novelty at face value—believe him to be the founder of modern political, not natural, science. The latter honor they assign to René Descartes or perhaps Francis Bacon, but in any case not to Machiavelli, in whose works Mansfield himself admits “there are no laws of nature, no experiments, no elaborated scientific method.”

The “effectual truth” (verità effetuale) of the book’s title, Mansfield shows, is not merely Machiavelli’s most important phrase but his coinage—even the word “effectual” appears to be his invention, a brand-new term created to introduce an all-new doctrine. The phrase itself appears only one time in all of Machiavelli’s writings (“to concentrate its power,” Mansfield arrestingly observes), in The Prince’s short 15th chapter, on whose mere 456 words Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth may be said to be an extended commentary.

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In Mansfield’s telling, “effectual truth” has at least three meanings. First, Machiavelli believes the truths he presents are truer than the alleged truths of the ancients because not tainted by abstractions, unrealistic hopes, or naïve wishful thinking. The example I like to give to students is from the half-forgotten 1986 comedy Back to School, in which a hardened (and non-college-educated) businessman played by Rodney Dangerfield explains to a tweedy, bow-tied econ professor that widgets aren’t real and that making a buck in the concrete jungle requires flexibility, compromise, and corner-cutting. The professor can see only supply intersecting with demand, price regulating scarcity, actors behaving rationally and markets efficiently, but the real economy’s effectual truth is error, miscalculation, credit crunches, bubbles, overproduction, underproduction, inefficiency, corruption, bribes, graft, grift, shakedowns, goldbricking, insider trading, cupidity, and much dismal else.

Second, Machiavelli’s truth is intended to have an effect, or effects, in the real world. Whereas the classical teaching sought mainly to illustrate permanent problems, Machiavelli means to solve problems. Whereas classical philosophy accumulated knowledge primarily for the benefit of the knowers, Machiavelli’s new philosophy will use its knowledge to benefit everyone. Whereas the classical teaching culminated in “imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth,” as he puts it in that same chapter 15, Machiavelli’s teaching draws upon and will produce real republics.

Third and most important, Machiavelli judges that the truest truth of a thing or idea is in its effect(s). There is no gap between aspiration and reality, theory and practice, essence and instantiation; the former are reducible to the latter, or simply do not exist. Endless examples could be offered, and Mansfield gives many, but the most important for his thesis—and Machiavelli’s justification for his revolution—is that the effectual truth of the classical teachings on transcendent ideas turned out to be universal religion; of the best regime, the primacy of the other world; and of rule by philosophers, rule by priests.

It is from this insight, or assertion—depending whether or not one accepts what Machiavelli is selling—that modern natural science emerges. The heart of Mansfield’s argument is that

the main idea of our science is contained in [Machiavelli’s] effectual truth. Truth is seen as causing an effect, intended or not, not as stating the end of a thing or a being and a form to aid the achievement of the end: there is in humans no human nature with inherent inclinations to the good, nor soul to guide them to that end. In Aristotelian terms, efficient cause is the only cause, replacing final and formal cause; the result is to confine efficient cause to matter and combine it with material cause. Here, in germ if not in sum, is modern science.

Mansfield terms the necessary second step, implicit in the assertion of effectual truth, “the discovery of fact”—that is, fact as distinguished from other, earlier conceptions of truth. He points to a mostly overlooked (though not by him; see Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders) chapter in the Discourses (III 39) in which Machiavelli speaks insistently of “firm science” (ferma scienza), the only time the latter word is used in either The Prince or the Discourses. This chapter pairs with Prince 14, both of which recommend to captains the obvious, and thus unnecessary, advice to study and come to understand topography, in part because getting to know one site allows one to understand any site, and the nature of all sites. Here is the power of inductive reasoning to answer human necessities, along with recommended modes of using it for that purpose. (I doubt it is an accident that the word “science” appears exactly 169, or 13 x 13, times in Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth. Thirteen is the number Machiavelli associates with himself and with his enterprise to conquer, or at least tame, Fortuna. “Firm science” is the most potent means of doing so.)

Mansfield indicates that Machiavelli probably did not set out to found modern natural science as we know it. Nonetheless, as the Secretary himself insists, intent may be what one wants, but effect is what one gets. Machiavelli’s epistemological revolution, combined with his expansive reassessment of man’s ability to master nature and his hearty exhortation to do just that, likely made this particular effect inevitable. Because on Machiavelli’s own terms outcomes trump intent, we may say that the effectual truth of his teaching is modern natural science.

It is reasonable to suppose that Machiavelli would not have welcomed this expansion (or is it fulfillment?) of his doctrine. While he definitely urged men to be more assertive in their confrontation with nature (not to mention with each other), he located man’s worth in the successful overcoming of those obstacles the world throws at him. If the overcoming were to become too easy, even as a result of man’s own effort and ingenuity—even as a direct consequence of following Machiavelli’s advice—humanity would become (to borrow his own language) contemptible, effeminate, and pusillanimous. Machiavelli wants the great men his works pave the way for to do the great things he recommends. In The Prince’s sixth chapter he famously likens such men to prudent archers whom he exhorts to aim high. Later thinkers looked to his intended effect and found in science more reliable means. As Mansfield explains:

With science one can predict the effect instead of having to adjust for it prudently. Stubborn but appreciable facts replace the shock of Machiavellianism. Machiavelli’s aggressive princely virtue is first transformed into the honest bourgeois predictability of self-interest and then gradually forgotten along with the utility of vice. Honest good comes dependably from self-interest—with no need for the prudent archer to gauge the right proportion of good that makes one hated with evil that makes one feared.

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This monumental modification to a doctrine that had already ushered in epochal change points to one of the biggest questions raised by Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Is philosophy—or should it be—mostly descriptive, a primarily analytical exercise that seeks truth but is content to accept the world as it is? Or should philosophy try to use its hard-won insights to improve what it finds?

Mansfield leaves no doubt that Machiavelli and nearly all his successors chose the latter path, while their philosophic predecessors encouraged a taboo against philosophy getting too directly involved in human affairs. This is not to suggest that the ancients took a completely “hands-off” approach. It is to say, however, that they sharply circumscribed whatever reformist impulses they may have felt and communicated their misgivings to subsequent readers in terms calculated to induce reticence.

In Machiavelli’s judgment, this reluctance, combined with certain doctrinal mistakes, led humanity into a dead end, the escape from which required philosophy’s—that is, his—direct intervention. Leo Strauss memorably turned the tables, all but declaring Machiavelli’s fix to be the real dead end. In a chapter entitled “Leo Strauss on The Prince”—an indispensable aid to understanding Strauss’s formidable book—Mansfield shows once again that he largely agrees with his former teacher’s analysis. Still, because he knows that understanding must precede acceptance or rejection, in the rest of the book Mansfield is mostly content to elaborate Machiavelli’s case for his revolution as accurately as possible.

Other questions raised, if only by implication, in Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth include: To what extent are modernity’s baleful effects a result of Machiavelli’s self-conscious political innovations versus his merely implied, but arguably much more consequential, scientific revolution? Is it possible to retain all or most of the benefits of the latter while discarding or overcoming the drawbacks of the former? If not, what would overcoming the whole package require or entail?

***

If Mansfield answers any of these questions, he does so through a painstaking account of Montesquieu’s attempted “cure” for Machiavellianism. This treatment, which Mansfield understatedly calls “an outsized chapter in this book,” is entirely original and constitutes a book unto itself. It joins a growing list of scholarly reconsiderations of Montesquieu from David Lowenthal, Thomas Pangle, Diana Schaub, and Vickie Sullivan, all of whom Mansfield liberally cites.

One reason a book whose title names another thinker devotes well over a third of its total length to Montesquieu is because, in Mansfield’s telling, Montesquieu is not merely a disciple of Machiavelli but a willing, even enthusiastic, one. And since “Machiavelli’s effectual truth includes his own influence or effect on the modern world, especially on the philosophers who followed him in constructing it,” then we must study those thinkers to understand modernity not merely as Machiavelli conceived it, but as it actually turned out.

Mansfield’s 97 pages on Montesquieu, along with a much shorter subsequent chapter on Tocqueville (the initial draft of which was completed by his late wife), mostly present a detailed account of the two Frenchmen’s attempted corrections of Machiavelli. Montesquieu “adopts Machiavelli’s fundamental principle of effectual truth, but makes it less dramatic, less outrageous, less devilish, by eliminating the invigorating violations of morality that Machiavelli thought necessary,” while “Tocqueville’s startling Machiavellianism” was intended “to claim mastery over America’s democratic revolution.”

Montesquieu is today given his due as, if not necessarily the inventor of the separation of powers, certainly its greatest proponent and as such a key influence on the American Founders (he is cited by name twelve times in The Federalist). Beyond this, he is often overlooked as a transitional figure in the history of political philosophy, more of a milestone or waystation than a thinker to be studied for permanent insights.

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Which is a shame. for one thing, it seems to me that the most important dynamic of our time is the mass comingling of peoples who, until very recently, were separated by all but impassable oceans, deserts, mountain ranges, etc. With the partial exception of Aristotle’s brief comments on the differences between Greeks and Persians, no thinker in the history of political philosophy has ever presented a systematic study of the world’s various populations, their differences, and how compatible (or not, as the case may be) they are with one another. Montesquieu’s extensive considerations in The Spirit of the Laws on the effects of climate on character and governance come the closest and might even be intended as a proxy for such a discussion. Even if not, these passages, carefully studied, could yield valuable insights on what to expect in our now-aborning new world.

Mansfield examines Montesquieu’s treatment of climate at some length, to show that it is (at least in part) an exoteric screen for deeper concerns—namely, a reassessment of Machiavelli’s and his initial successors’ downgrading of nature, and also a proxy for “climate of opinion” which differs not only from region to region but from one epoch to another. While I don’t doubt that Mansfield is right about this, I personally would have appreciated a little more explication of the surface.

But the more important, if not necessarily more pressing, reason to study Montesquieu is that he really is the best of the moderns—perhaps not the most original or profound, but certainly the soberest and most decent, responsible, careful, and comprehensive. If philosophic modernity isn’t, or needn’t be, as bad as Strauss describes it at its worst, it is Montesquieu’s version we should look to for inspiration and guidance.

***

In Mansfield’s account, Montesquieu’s surface rejection of Machiavelli—“one has begun to be cured of Machiavellianism” (Spirit of the Laws, XXI 20)—masks underlying agreement with, and acceptance of, fundamental Machiavellian principle. Montesquieu trumpets his departures and hides the continuity partly for Machiavellian reasons: no true Machiavellian ever openly admits to agreeing with Machiavelli.

For Montesquieu, Machiavelli was right that prior philosophy and religion were tyrants that had to be overthrown. He may even have been right that recourse to evil was temporally necessary. But at most, Machiavelli’s harsh medicine was needed to awaken the patient from his torpor. Two centuries on, the need for shock therapy had passed. What Montesquieu calls “great strokes of authority” can now, he judges, only bolster despotism. Machiavelli’s revolution had overthrown one tyrant—rigid adherence to Scripture and/or Aristotle—only to replace it with another: the prince and his spectacular executions. Above all, Machiavelli was wrong not to see that the permanent solution to the problem posed by necessity is commerce. For his part, Tocqueville’s concern was to restore a place for honor, which the effectual truth of Machiavelli’s modernity had suppressed or diverted into ignoble channels, but to do so in a way consistent with ascendant democracy, which Tocqueville did not see giving way any time soon.

Throughout these chapters, Mansfield makes frequent references to Montesquieu’s (and Tocqueville’s) “using,” “adopting,” “declaring,” “making,” “substituting,” “carrying out,” “legislating,” “demoting,” “downgrading,” “dismissing,” “elevating,” “guiding,” “promoting,” “opposing,” “asserting,” “conquering,” “changing,” “refashioning,” “leading,” “improving,” “proposing,” “changing,” “refashioning,” “lowering,” and the like—transitive verbs redolent of human willfulness. This points back to a question raised earlier, or rather several questions: To what extent are Montesquieu and Tocqueville merely describing what they see (or think they see) versus trying to mold the world into what they think it ought to be? Are their “corrections” primarily intended as a restoration, a realignment of political practice with fixed nature, or do they amount to a more ambitious reordering of the human realm? And to what extent is the latter even possible? Or put another way, just how malleable are the world and man to the manipulations of even the most brilliant minds?

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I don’t think Mansfield leaves much doubt that for all their professed moderation, Montesquieu and Tocqueville, no less than Machiavelli, see themselves as shaping the human world at least as much as describing it. Perhaps in this, above all, does Montesquieu, despite his very real rejection of Machiavelli’s more outrageous pronouncements, remain within Machiavelli’s horizon. In this, is not Montesquieu every bit as immoderate as Machiavelli? For the former’s moderation consists in rejecting the latter’s impish recommendations to lie and kill, not at all in rejecting his sweeping attempts to remake the world.

But just how possible or plausible is that remaking—not just Montesquieu’s attempt, but anyone’s, including Machiavelli’s? A single example, though one of particular importance, must suffice to illustrate the difficulty.

Mansfield follows Strauss in pointing out that Machiavelli never mentions the soul in either The Prince or the Discourses, the two books which the Florentine says contain “everything he knows.” This omission, Mansfield writes, is “a consequence of adopting necessity as first principle…. The specifically human faculty of choice was demoted to a necessity common to all life, and political science willingly submitted to the laws of modern natural science.” Montesquieu, who speaks often of the soul, sees this demotion as a problem and proposes a fix: “He shows that without adopting the soul he can get the advantages in liberty of choice promised by the soul. He can save the specialness of man in nature without having to ascend to the realm of metaphysics beyond nature.”

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Rejecting any “higher metaphysics” may be said to be the core of Machiavelli’s project, and Montesquieu’s emphatic endorsement of that rejection, more than any other factor, places him firmly in Machiavelli’s camp; that is to say, firmly within the horizon of modernity, which he does not attempt to transcend or escape but to improve. Men are of course free to write what they want, but do they really have the power to “demote” and “forget” or find other ways around the soul? Or is the soul an element of a reality that is independent of man’s will—a reality one feature of which, we might point out, is the freedom of writers to commit monumental errors such as denying the soul? In brief, are the arguments of Machiavelli and Montesquieu (plus a host of others in between and after), however ingenious, enough to alter reality or the universe? Or does “the whole” remain the same—remain itself, beyond man’s power to change, especially with mere words? And is not the downgrading or denial of the soul, and the concomitant rejection of all higher metaphysics, of formal and final causes, at the heart of what went so wrong with modernity? Because one thing words are more than capable of doing is altering what men think or believe about the world and thus how they behave in it. In Strauss’s, and Mansfield’s, account, it is in this all-important respect that modernity has turned out to be, as we say today, “problematic.” And I would add, not claiming to speak for them but consistent with my understanding of them, its later manifestations catastrophic.

Whatever genuine problems Machiavelli (and Montesquieu, and Tocqueville, and all the moderns) identified in Christianity, their successful war against it—which took various forms ranging from attempts at reform to appropriation to outright denunciation—resulted in a diminishment of man. Their cure, thought to be so necessary, turned out to be (much) worse than the disease. One wonders if this outcome was inevitable. In several places—the last paragraphs of Thoughts on Machiavelli, the essays “What Is Political Philosophy” and “Three Waves of Modernity,” and in Natural Right and History (1953) as a whole—Strauss seems to argue that it was.

But the question of inevitability only raises others: Was Machiavelli’s initial epoch-making break with the classical and Biblical traditions—and therefore Montesquieu’s acceptance of it—actually justified, or was it a mistake? If a mistake, was the error foreseeable, or perhaps excusable by the extreme exigencies of the time? If justified, were those excesses which had been necessary in the moment easily discardable later? Or did the whole project require substantial revision—and was that revision successfully accomplished?

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Mansfield gives ample material for reflection on all of these questions while explicitly answering none of them. His art of writing is distinctive. Each sentence is, or seems, clear enough on its own. But somehow the whole—whether paragraphs, sections, chapters—remains elusive. There is a great deal of humor in this book, most of it wry. Mansfield’s jokes are veiled partly in order to preserve the outward dignity of academic convention but also, I venture, to make the reader work to find them. Once one realizes this, it makes sense to apply to him the same judgment he once applied to Machiavelli: no paragraph of Mansfield’s has been understood until you have found something funny in it. If you are not in more or less constant amusement when reading him, you should consider yourself bewildered.

This points to another reason for Mansfield’s caginess. He is not unaware of his stature within academia, among public intellectuals, and with conservatives. He therefore knows that some (many!) are tempted to treat his every word as settled truth and forego their own hard thinking. Hence in his responsibility, he explores more than he explains and leaves much to be pondered. Mansfield emulates his mentor Strauss by forcing his reader to undertake the irreplaceable—and rewarding—labor of reasoned investigation that is the foundation of philosophy.

Some answers, however, he indicates between the lines. Before venturing to assert what a few of those might be, let Mansfield himself explain the nature of this kind of writing:

A hint always has an innocent explanation; that is what makes it a hint. If one wants to go through life ignoring hints one will meet many perils and miss many delights. But it is not reasonable to demand that a hint be falsifiable, for the test of falsifiability is what a hint wants to avoid. One who hints seeks a reaction from those hinted to, as opposed to a demand for…definite proof.

In other words, what I am about to say might be wrong.

***

I believe Mansfield does view modernity—that is to say, modern philosophy’s downgrading of metaphysics, its denial of formal and final causes for the human things, and its transformation of philosophy into a ruler-servant—to have been a mistake. He does after all declare that “Machiavelli’s effectual truth is a grand simplification of human behavior, reducing the reasons, both various and disputed, which men imagine and allege for their actions to subrational causes summed up as ‘necessity.’” That does not sound to me like praise or even agreement.

Modernity was a mistake because it has been bad for the soul of man: one might say that the effectual truth of modernity is Friedrich Nietzsche’s contemptible last man. But more important, it’s just not true. The core assertions modernity makes about ontology and metaphysics do not reflect the way things—especially men—actually are. That the mistake was foreseeable is evidenced by the fact that it was foreseen some two millennia ago, and thus avoided for many centuries.

Machiavelli is nonetheless worthy of study not merely for his historical importance but because he really is the fons et origo of modernity. And while it might not be true that to understand anything one must know its origins, it is certainly true of a philosophic teaching. In Machiavelli, and only in Machiavelli, can we see not just the beginnings of modernity—the best case for it that has ever been or ever could be made—we also see the confrontation with what it replaced. From that unique vantage point, we are able simultaneously to look forward and backward. We can see not only where we are, not only how we got here, not only even what we have gained, but also the outlines of what we have lost. That outline is to be sure distorted—deliberately so, by Machiavelli—but in an ironic twist that he may even have intended, in comparing the distortion to the original, we are able to see the latter more clearly.

As to modernity itself, if it were capable of being fixed from within—that is to say, without altering its fundamental premises—then Montesquieu would have fixed it. His effort to do so is, and probably always will be, the best and most comprehensive ever attempted. That his solution didn’t work may diminish its value, but only a little. So long as we remain within the horizon of modernity, he will remain our best philosophic guide for how best to understand and navigate it. (The best political guides remain, of course, the American Founders, who thought so highly of his work.)

There is no obvious or easy way out of political modernity, which is not simply Machiavelli’s creation but also has roots in the circumstances against which Machiavelli fought. He changed his time into our time, but he could not eliminate the changes that necessitated (or so he thought) his change; all he could do was respond to them. Absent a cataclysm about which he could speculate but his writings could not induce, there was no going back.

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But it is possible to transcend philosophical modernity, and Mansfield’s great teacher Strauss showed the way, if only for a few intrepid souls, one at a time. A larger question is whether that transcendence or escape can be “scaled up,” expanded from retail to wholesale. Mansfield says explicitly that Strauss did not try because his primary concern was to protect and transmit philosophy to those few capable of it, and because he refused to say or do anything that might be misused to become the basis of an ideology, or worse, a mass movement, both of which are antithetical to philosophy as originally meant.

But a mass movement is exactly what modernity is, and was intended to be. It is hard to see how overcoming it can be accomplished with anything less than another mass movement. Yet it is equally hard to see how those things most needful to restore what modernity discarded or diminished can be translated into a mass movement.

All of which is to reiterate what you already knew: there is no easy or obvious way out of our present predicament. Mansfield, who is far closer to Strauss than to Machiavelli, doesn’t propose one—not even, I don’t think, between the lines. In Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth he is content to tell us what modernity is, how and why it came to be, and how some have tried to correct its errors and excesses.

That is surely more than enough for one book. As noted, while this theme forms the recurring core of Harvey Mansfield’s career, it does not come close to exhausting his scholarship. He says he plans three more books: one on modern political philosophy, from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, based on his celebrated Harvard survey course; one on formal political parties (a modern phenomenon); and one on Jonathan Swift (a man of modern times who rejected modernity). I look forward to studying all three.